The sky lightened from the deep black of night to a menacing grey by morning, and it never got lighter from there. At noon, the air was almost as cold as it had been in winter when they first crashed, but the rain at least had died down to nothing more than a drizzle. It was then that Thrawn and Ezra emerged from their shelters, with Thrawn still clad in his damp trousers from the day before, his oth'ola endzali shining a dull silver against the blue of his chest; his eyes swept over Ezra and the too-big shirt he'd taken without comment.
"You, uh, you left some stuff in my room," Ezra said, pointing over his shoulder at the shelter. "You want to switch out before it gets worse?"
"No," said Thrawn. He was scanning the trees around them, paying particular attention to a natural-looking nearby shelf made up of thin slabs of rock. "We can transfer our belongings later," Thrawn said distractedly. "Right now we should construct a fireplace protected from the rain; something more substantial than the weather canopy — can you lift those slabs?"
Briefly, Ezra wondered if that was some sort of trick question. He'd spent hours yesterday transporting their shelters and woodshed over a thousand meters through untamed woods, and Thrawn wanted to know if he could lift a few thin slabs of rock? But Thrawn seemed to be genuinely asking; there was a calculating look in his eyes, and Ezra remembered the memories they'd gone over last night and felt his gut twist.
He reached out with the Force; the rocks trembled in his grasp and then rose, hovering several meters in the air. Thrawn nodded, silently directing Ezra to move the stones closer to the shelters.
So apparently, he was trying to see how frequently Ezra could use the Force before exhaustion set in — and luckily, he had a valid excuse to do so, since it wasn't like they had time to build a pulley and lever system. Still, it both rankled and embarrassed Ezra; the two feelings mixed together and sank deep into his stomach, becoming something more akin to shame. This he buried as far down as he could, determined to ignore it.
They worked in silence for the most part, Thrawn adjusting the slabs by hand as Ezra lay them down where he was directed to. The new fireplace was unsteady but workable, the walls kept standing mostly through the clever placement of other rocks. They got the fire going quickly, throwing fish from their transported stores onto the spits.
The rain picked up while they waited for the fish to cook. Ezra retreated to the entrance of his shelter, standing under the weather canopy while Thrawn — already shirtless and not entirely dried out from the night before — stayed where he was. After a moment, glancing up at the still-darkening sky, Ezra decided to swap their belongings before things got worse.
He placed the boxes of clothes and scrap parts in Thrawn's shelter, ultra-cognizant of the holoprojector as he moved. The rain thudded loudly against the roof of Thrawn's hut, like it had picked up again just in the short time it took Ezra to move from one door to the next. He rooted around for his own things and stood there a moment with the open box in his hands, trying to figure out if he could move them now without getting every single item of clothing soaked.
He was still standing there puzzling it out when the door opened and Thrawn ducked through, carrying the spits in his hands. He kicked the door shut behind him and leaned against it for a moment, palming water out of his eyes. Wordlessly, he handed Ezra one of the fish — still steaming from the fire — and walked past him, folding himself onto the thin woven mattress on the floor. He didn't bother to dry off first, Ezra noticed with distaste.
Thrawn held the spit away from his body, using his free hand to wipe the remaining rainwater off his face. There were streaks of dirt on his arms and hands from their work with the fireplace; one small blot of soot left a discolored spot under his eye, probably transferred there when he wiped the water off his face with dirty hands. It was difficult to see the man before him as the same Grand Admiral Ezra had fought so desperately.
"Stay a moment," Thrawn said evenly. He leaned far to the side, holding the spit up and away while he reached for a nearby wooden box. With one hand, he lifted an orderly pile of rough-hewn plates and utensils, balancing it on his palm. Ezra floated one of the forks to himself, using it to push the fish off of his spit.
He didn't particularly feel like going out into the rain, especially now that it was pouring, but he wasn't exactly thrilled about being cooped up inside with Thrawn, either. He sat down on one of the nearby boxes, this one full of nets, and angled his body toward the window and away from Thrawn as he ate.
"You stationed a ship in high orbit over Lothal," Thrawn said without preamble, "and from there signaled the purrgils. Is that correct?"
Ezra blinked, the fish going dry in his mouth. He thumped his chest to make it go down, suddenly regretting that he'd left his canteen in his own shelter. "Uh, yeah," he said eventually, his shoulders hunched and his voice rasping. "Why?"
Although he'd retrieved enough utensils for both of them, Thrawn didn't seem interested in using them. He picked the fish apart with his fingers but didn't eat any of it, his eyes thoughtful and distant. Without glancing at Ezra directly, he held his canteen out for the Jedi to use.
"A flock of purrgils just outside the planet's atmosphere would surely draw attention from any nearby civilizations," Thrawn said, apparently thinking out loud. "But I believe that may be counterproductive to our goals; the purrgils would almost certainly kidnap any would-be rescuers, just as they kidnapped us. Assuming, of course, that they are hyperspace-capable and therefore equipped with the proper fuel. That may be technically a victory in the long run if our rescuers happen to be Grysks, but it would do nothing to fulfill our short-term goal of escaping this planet. Still, to build a high-power transmitter is much simpler than to build a spacecraft from scratch, particularly when we have been unable to salvage a single functional or reparable hyperdrive or navigation system."
He rested his chin on his hands, absently stroking a scrape on his jaw from the night before as he thought it through. "Without knowing the location of other planets in the vicinity," he said, "it will be difficult to know where precisely to place our transmitter — but the north side of this forest seems a good choice."
Ezra sat up a little straighter, his nose wrinkling. "The north side?" he said, certain Thrawn must have misspoken.
"We do not want the purrgils taking our potential rescuers into hyperspace," Thrawn reminded him. "As such it seems wise to base our signal where we know they have previously lost control."
Ezra's gut twisted. "We'd cause more crashes," he said. Thrawn shook his head once, without hesitation.
"I don't think so. They are intelligent creatures; if we summon the same purrgils which brought us here, they will certainly remember where they lost control. And if we summon different purrgils, which is more likely, you must remember that this time, they will be here first, before any ships arrive — and as such, they will be unable to establish control over the ships in the first place, meaning our rescuers or enemies will never come into any danger." His eyes flickered up to Ezra thoughtfully. "How well can you control the purrgils?"
Ezra grimaced, averting his eyes.
"I see," said Thrawn.
"Well, I'm not hopeless," said Ezra, suddenly feeling defensive. "I just — it's not like doing a simple mind trick, you know? I can maybe convince them to go in a certain direction, but I can't tell them to, you know, bring me to Naboo or anything like that."
Thrawn gave another absent nod. He seemed to notice his picked-apart fish for the first time and glanced around for his fork, finally taking a small bite. It had to be cold by now, Ezra thought; he wrapped his arms around himself and edged closer to the window. They'd covered it up the night before with a tightly-woven canopy, but it was simple enough to untie one corner and peek outside; rain poured down in sheets, needling off the ground with massive vertical splashes.
"What are you thinking?" Ezra asked. His own voice sounded odd to his ears — peculiarly serious and hushed. "Use the purrgils to drag ships into that dead zone — or whatever it is — so that it crashes and other ships come to the rescue? I mean, let's say we lure some ships here just because they see the purrgils, right? If they don't fly over the dead zone on their own, how do we even make them land? And besides that, if they do fly over that zone, then they're gonna crash and the ship will be useless to us anyway."
Thrawn gave him an odd look. "The dead zone disables purrgils, not ships," he said. "Without some other unpredictable contributing factor, I see no reason why a rescuer should not simply continue flying. Remember, we cannot predict who will respond to our signal; we should assume anyone arriving here is a potential ally until they show otherwise."
"The dead zone disables purrgils?" Ezra repeated. "How the hell do you know that?"
This time, the look Thrawn threw him was vaguely exasperated. He set his fish aside and leaned forward, dragging the box of spare parts toward him. "This comlink," he said, digging through the box and placing the comm in Ezra's hand, "still searches for a signal in the so-called dead zone, although its range is too weak to lock onto anything out here. The holoprojector — which uses a compact version of the same power cells installed on an Imperial Star Destroyer or a TIE Defender — still functions flawlessly. This anti-resonance plate—" He extricated a dull-grey sheet of misshapen metal. "—still functions as well. There is nothing in the dead zone which interferes with an Imperial Star Destroyer's communications array, shields, or power. As such, the problem was not with the Chimaera; it was with the purrgils."
There was an unmistakable challenge in Thrawn's tone — a fierce streak of pride in his ship that Ezra wasn't interested in arguing with. He took a closer look at the anti-resonance plate and felt it humming against his hand. When he passed it back to Thrawn, he was biting his lip, deep in thought.
"Something dark?" Ezra suggested. "Some sort of Sith artefact on the planet's surface, maybe — it could have spooked them so bad that they fled."
"Remember they lingered less than five hundred meters away," Thrawn said, tucking the anti-resonance plate back into the box.
"Mourning their dead, maybe," Ezra said. "Remember, one of the purrgils was crushed beneath the ship."
He caught a subtle flicker of unidentifiable emotion from Thrawn's mind. When Ezra looked closer, he felt a strange sensation — like the channel between them was widening. Like he was being wordlessly invited in. He took a step farther into Thrawn's mind, experienced a brief sense-memory: His limbs exhausted and heavy after a long week with practically zero sleep and as much hard labor as any man could do — his foot snagging on a piece of debris hidden beneath the snow — his hands coming down on what looks like a log in the darkness, only for the skin of the log to give way, leaving him wrist-deep in rotting purrgil meat, congealed blood and animal fat splattering up against his face, the smell affecting him so badly that for a moment he's dizzy from it, thinks he might faint.
This wasn't territory Ezra wanted to re-tread. He pulled away from Thrawn's mind and gazed out the window at the rain, pretending to be unaffected.
Thrawn's eyes were burning into him.
"For now," he said, "I believe we should build a high-power transmitter; with your Force bolstering its signal, we have a fair chance of reaching somebody, though we don't know yet who. But before then…"
His eyes swiveled, following Ezra's gaze — looking out the window at the rain.
"...we must first weather the storm," he said.
With enough preserved food to last them through the rain and no other chores to tend to, Ezra and Thrawn spent the next several days focused entirely on training. It was a miserable time for Ezra; he imagined it was even more so for Thrawn.
For some reason, Thrawn's training-induced headaches were back. Ezra noticed the signs the first day, but he didn't know for sure what was wrong until the second — there was a subtle line between Thrawn's eyebrows, a stiff cant to his head, a sort of tension across his shoulders every time they trained. Once, after Ezra pulled out from a particularly mundane memory of Thrawn as a lieutenant — scrubbing the deck of some puny Imperial cruiser, of all things — he caught Thrawn taking a sharp breath, clutching the oth'ola endzali around his neck as if by reflex.
The thing was, all the signs that Ezra picked up on were only outward signs. He was in Thrawn's mind for hours that day, sometimes sitting in the same shelter, sometimes separated by thin walls and a sheet of rain — and never once did he pick up on pain signals inside Thrawn's brain. It was like he'd suddenly, inexplicably taken three huge steps back. The subtle flickers of emotion across Thrawn's mind were gone again, like Ezra had never uncovered them in the first place, and it seemed like the other man's memories and physical sensations grew more and more remote each time Ezra looked inside.
Was it their discussion of the purrgils that had changed things? Ezra couldn't suss out any reason why it should be; if anything, discussing their strategy like that — discussing the Grysks, making plans for the future — should have made things easier, not pulled up a barricade between them. Ezra couldn't figure it out, and Thrawn certainly wasn't about to bring it up; he seemed determined not to acknowledge the signal loss.
On the second day, Thrawn gave him a specific assignment to complete:
"Look into my mind," he said over breakfast, "and find the name of my aide."
For a moment, this sentence simply didn't make any sense to Ezra. It took him a moment to parse it out. "Your aide?" he said. "Like an assistant?"
Thrawn, for some inexplicable reason, looked faintly annoyed at that comment. Rather than directly answer Ezra's question, he visibly controlled his irritation and said, quite patiently, "Are you unsure of the definition?"
"No," said Ezra, resisting the urge to roll his eyes — but only because Thrawn had clearly just done the same thing. "Forget it. So you want me to just, what, root through your mind until I find this guy's name?"
"Yes," said Thrawn. He was sitting on a closed box in Ezra's shelter, arms folded over his chest, hair wet from the short walk over.
"You were a Grand Admiral, though," said Ezra. "You must've had like twenty aides!"
Thrawn shrugged slightly, running his thumb along the scabbed line of a cut on his forehead. "Find the correct one."
Ezra sighed through his nose. "What's even the point of this?"
The look Thrawn gave him was one of sharp rebuke. "You've forgotten the tactical uses of mind-reading?"
Exasperated, Ezra shook his head. "I don't see the point in reading your mind for the name of some random assistant! What possible good does that do me?"
"You will think of a few potential uses," said Thrawn, "if you apply yourself."
Ezra glared at him — though he didn't really expect a glare to have much effect. Thrawn just met his eyes steadily, like he always did. After a long silence where it became clear Ezra wasn't going to guess, Thrawn said, without a change in tone, "Let's assume I am your enemy."
Ezra gave him a dry look at that and got a faintly sheepish nod in response.
"For example," Thrawn continued, "let's say you have captured an enemy ship. My uniform identifies me as the commanding officer, so you interrogate me first — but I am an alien, and you have difficulty reading my mind, yes? You could interrogate each of my officers in turn, hoping to assemble through them the information you could extract from me. Or you could be more efficient — what I know, my aide knows. Military officers are not likely to reveal personal connections or individual responsibilities to an enemy, but if you can read my mind just enough to extract the name and face of my aide, you can interrogate them instead, saving precious time in the process. In my case this would be particularly helpful, as I am—"
His face spasmed, a movement so quick that Ezra almost missed it.
"—was the only alien officer aboard my ship," Thrawn finished, his mouth twisting. He touched the scab on his forehead again, running the edge of his thumbnail alongside it. If it hurt or itched, Ezra couldn't tell; he got no indication of it from Thrawn's mind.
"My aide was human, and as you are also human, it is likely his mind would be simpler for you to read," Thrawn said. "Even on an all-alien ship, it is generally true — generally, but it depends on the military culture — that commanding officers have stronger minds than their aides, although it is also true that every strong mind must start at the bottom rung of the ladder and work its way up. In any case, it will be easier for you to find the information you need in an aide's mind rather than the commanding officer's."
Ezra sat down on his bed, arms crossed. He had to admit — begrudgingly — it made some sense, though only if he were in a time crunch in this hypothetical situation. Otherwise, there was no reason he couldn't interrogate everyone.
Other than lack of talent, he thought with a wince. It was still a struggle to read thoughts from Thrawn's mind, unless Thrawn blatantly invited him in and translated memories to Basic for him, or if he was asleep — so it was a little silly to pretend Ezra was capable of reading anybody's mind well enough to find tactically vital information.
Still, if Thrawn was willing to pretend, Ezra wasn't going to stop him. He closed his eyes and settled back into a comfortable position, letting the Force open up his mind. The channel formed slowly, painstakingly, with more effort than it had taken in several days — like something had changed between them, making this even more difficult than before.
Twenty minutes passed with nothing but the sound of the rain and faint movements from Thrawn as he rifled through boxes and shifted in place. The connection wavered, straining and twisting, nothing getting through. As time passed, Ezra's mind drifted, seeking the connection on autopilot while his thoughts went elsewhere.
With his eyes closed, he heard the faint scratch of a knife on wood and inexplicably thought of the Chimaera; a sharp pang went through his chest, photos from Kana Pyrondi's holoprojector dashing through the channel and searing into his brain cells. He sat up abruptly, eyes popping open, and immediately knew the connection had been lost.
Across from him, Thrawn's head was down, his eyes fixed on a small piece of wood he was whittling into the shape of a four-legged animal — apparently he'd run out of useful chores he could do inside while it rained. He glanced up at Ezra, completely expressionless, and Ezra hesitated. Suddenly he couldn't tell for sure if those images of Pyrondi had come from him or from Thrawn; had it been his own memories that had flooded the channel and distracted him so much?
Casting his eyes down again, Thrawn pressed his thumb against the blade and chipped down at the rough-hewn little beast, forming the sharp angle of its neck. "Try again," he said.
Ezra frowned at him, eyes lingering over the half-carved wooden block. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Trying to make Dejarik pieces or something? There's no lizard in Dejarik."
"Concentrate," said Thrawn, flicking a wood chip Ezra's way. "You've lost the connection; I can feel that you've drifted away."
He used the knife to gesture to his temple, but Ezra was already waving his hand dismissively. "I got it, I got it. I just lost the signal, okay?" Eyes closed, he reached out to the Force until he caught the thin, gossamer lines of Thrawn's mind. "...aaaand we got it," Ezra mumbled, his voice coming from very far away.
The vast network of Thrawn's mind seemed like nothing more than a few flickering nodes in a dark hall; everywhere he looked, Ezra caught glimpses of ciphers and impenetrable equations, but nothing more. He pictured himself as a physical body taking tentative, small steps into the void, his feet coming down on utter darkness, searching for a vine he could grab hold of and use to pull himself forward until he found an access point — a single coherent thought — anything at all.
In the darkness like this, Thrawn's mind seemed horribly familiar, and it didn't take Ezra long at all to figure out what it reminded him of — it looked just like the World Between Worlds. The only difference was that here, the paths were muted, the doorways darkened and leading nowhere except the past. There was nothing here Ezra could change. He could only observe.
And that was only if he could find a memory to observe in the first place.
He held his hand out ahead of him, palm down and fingers curled, and in time he started to imagine he could feel something — something light, like the brush of a spiderweb — against his skin. He closed his fingers around it gently, feared for a moment that it might have evaporated because he moved too soon. Then he felt it lingering there, a strand of consciousness within his grasp.
Now if he could only figure out how to read it. Why was this sometimes so easy, so intuitive, and other times so difficult? Had Thrawn really been spoon-feeding him memories this whole time?
Or did it have something to do with him — with those pictures on Pyrondi's holoprojector, with that memory he'd seen of himself abandoning the Chimaera before it crashed, with his new knowledge of the Death Star and the image he had in his mind of Kanan, engulfed by the fire?
He turned his hands over carefully, examining the thread lying against his palm. It shimmered the same silver-blue as Thrawn's oth'ola endzali, standing out stark against the utter blackness all around him. It was beautiful — or at least intriguing — but the longer Ezra stared at it, the more frustrated he got. What the hell was he supposed to do with this? He kept following it, one foot after the other with the thread sliding between his hands, but it led him nowhere — only farther into the dark. He tried to open it up, to peel back the outside layer to see what was inside, but the thread was too nebulous to pull apart; he couldn't even be sure it was a thought. Maybe what he'd caught was just some sort of Force-manifestation of a synapse firing inside Thrawn's brain.
Well, so what if it is? Ezra wondered. Maybe that was all he was doing when he read Thrawn's mind — using the Force to pick apart those chemical signals, translating them into a format his own mind could understand. But why wasn't it working now?
He squeezed the thread in his hands and watched it disintegrate. A moment later, so abruptly it gave him whiplash, he was back in the shelter and Thrawn was sitting across from him, drawing back from his whittling knife in a flinch. A line of blood welled up on the web of skin between Thrawn's forefinger and thumb; he stared at it a moment before standing and unfastening the window cover, sticking his injured hand out into the rain.
As if he felt Ezra's eyes on him, he said, "The knife slipped."
Ezra glanced back at the little wooden lizard. It was still rough, but he must have spent a long time in Thrawn's mind; the entire body had now been sketched out from head to tail. Thrawn's blood had soaked into the wood, leaving a small discolored stain that was already closer to brown than red.
"I couldn't see anything," he told Thrawn.
"Yes," said Thrawn, pulling back from the window and drying his hand on a nearby rag. The bleeding had stopped already; he didn't bother to bandage it before re-taking his seat. "I noticed."
"You noticed?" Ezra repeated, his eyebrows furrowing. "How?"
For a moment, Thrawn was silent. As Ezra's eyes tracked over him, he noticed a little wrinkle across the bridge of Thrawn's nose, a muscle jumping in his jaw — signs of tension he'd grown to recognize over the past fifty-four days.
"I typically relive the same memories you access as you are accessing them," Thrawn said eventually, examining the bloodstain on his whittling project. He brushed his thumb over it, but the stain remained unchanged. "Just now, I relived nothing, nor did I have any peculiar or overwhelming thoughts. I assumed you were having little success."
True enough, Ezra thought with a scowl. He shook his arms out, trying to force some energy into himself despite the enervating downpour outside. Thrawn glanced at him briefly and then bent his head again, already back to his carving, waiting for Ezra to get on with it.
With a deep breath, Ezra jumped in.
