The ysalimir was just barely large enough to stretch its neck out along the wooden frame and rest its chin on Thrawn's shoulder. It blinked at Ezra from there, its eyes wide and its tongue occasionally darting out of its mouth as it stared sideways at him.

"Walk in front of me," Ezra said, suddenly stepping to the side and coming to a halt. Thrawn gave him a strange look but didn't stop walking; he moved up from beside Ezra to take the lead without pause. The ysalimir turned its head until it physically couldn't follow Ezra with its eyes anymore, and then, finally, Ezra fell into step.

"I hate the way that thing looks at me," he said.

Without glancing back, Thrawn said, "You have a way with animals."

That was a statement, not a question, so Ezra kept his opinion to himself and just rolled his eyes. It was too early in the morning to let himself be drawn into a conversation with Thrawn, and definitely too early for a staring contest with a Force-resistant lizard; bad enough that they were on this trek in the first place. They'd spent the night before moving their shelters closer to the river again, now that the storm had passed and the floodwaters were starting to recede; Ezra had only just slipped into the truly deep, refreshing stage of sleep when Thrawn woke him again, insisting they travel to the ruins.

Even now, Ezra mostly wished he hadn't come. He'd wanted to see the ruins ever since he'd caught that first glimpse of them in Thrawn's memories — but there was never a good reason to be up and about before the sun, in his opinion, even if it meant finally seeing the ruins up close and personal. Nonetheless, he followed Thrawn over the forest floor, circumventing the Chimaera by at least a kilometer as the birds gradually came awake and started rustling in the trees.

It was strange to hear them and know they were out there, but not feel them through the Force. He had the ysalimir to thank for that; it hung onto a light wooden frame that Thrawn wore around his shoulders like a backpack, bouncing just a little bit with every step Thrawn took.

"The ysalimiri are particularly thick up ahead," Thrawn said without looking back at Ezra. He parted the long grass before him, holding onto a thorny branch so that Ezra could step past without being pricked. Ezra ducked through the underbrush and stopped in the nearest clear spot, making flinty eye contact with the ysalimir until Thrawn stepped ahead of him again.

"It was a city center once," Thrawn continued. "The land surrounding the ruins was once a garden; the vegetables grown there attracted moles and the soil contains trace nutrients which continue to do so today. I suspect this is why the ysalimiri congregate there; the trees are particularly healthy, with many of them containing the flammable sap we discovered early on."

"Many of them? Like there's multiple sap-trees out here?" Ezra asked. He stepped over a tree branch recently severed from its trunk by the storm and then paused, eyes narrowing. When he crouched down for a closer look, Thrawn came to a stop ahead of him and turned to watch. "There's sap on this branch right here," Ezra said in wonder, touching the half-dried substance with his fingertips.

"Yes," said Thrawn, adjusting the wooden frame around his shoulders.

"But…" Ezra brought his hand up, sniffing the trace of sap on his fingers. It smelled similar to the fuel he'd put in the Phantom back with Ghost Crew, but with a slightly fetid odor underneath like rotten leaves, and had the same orange tint and gritty-gummy texture as the sap he and Thrawn used to start fires. "But the sap we use is almost impossible to find," Ezra said slowly, thinking out loud. He wiped his hands clean on the grass before him, but didn't stand up. "I mean, we have to search for ages to find that stuff."

Thrawn simply stared at him, either not catching Ezra's drift or refusing to acknowledge it. The silence made Ezra feel like a not-too-bright student stumbling through an incorrect equation in front of his whole class.

"Look, here's what I mean," he said, pushing to his feet. He put his hands on his hips and scowled as he thought it through; recognizing that this conversation wasn't going to end anytime soon, Thrawn turned to face him more fully, planting his feet and placing his thumbs beneath the biosupport rack to take some of the weight off his shoulders. "Every time we run out of sap, it takes me days to find a new tree," Ezra said. "There's only one that we've found so far within a kilometer of our camp, and then there's two I found farther south."

"We should consider ourselves lucky, then," said Thrawn evenly, his eyes shifting down to the sap-coated break on the branch. "We now have another source."

"That's not the point," said Ezra. "Don't you think it's an awfully big coincidence that we happen to stumble across this branch just as we're talking about sap?"

"Yes," said Thrawn.

"No," said Ezra. "Dude, you never say 'yes' when someone asks if you think something's an 'awful big coincidence.' The answer is never yes."

"I do think it was a coincidence," said Thrawn. He glanced sideways at the tree next to him, his eyes tracking up through the branches — searching, Ezra assumed, for the broken branch's origin point. "What do you suppose happened?" Thrawn asked. "If it wasn't a coincidence."

Ezra only frowned. Any solution he could come up with brought with it vague implications that there were other people on this planet with them — somebody who could have, for some nebulous reason, severed the branch intentionally and then somehow maneuvered it into position just as Ezra and Thrawn were discussing the flammable sap. Obviously, that hadn't happened, and there wasn't any reasonable motivation for someone to do that, either — or at least, not that Ezra could come up with.

He stared at the branch a moment longer, unwilling to admit defeat. The whole time, Thrawn watched him, waiting for Ezra to speak.

"Perhaps you are missing some information," Thrawn said finally. "As I said earlier, these trees are particularly thick around the ruins."

"Yeah, about that," said Ezra, his head shooting up. "Did you miss the part where I just said it takes me days to find sap when we run out? How long have you known about the whole kriffing forest of sap-trees next to the ruins?"

The ysalimir's tongue flicked out, brushing the bare skin of Thrawn's neck. He twitched his shoulder up, gently jostling the ysalimir until it stopped licking him.

"That is some of the information you were missing," he admitted. "First, yes, there is a source of sap-trees here. But second, the trees near our base did not 'run dry,' as I led you to believe. They are still producing standard amounts of sap."

He said this without a hint of shame or sheepishness. Ezra stared at Thrawn for a long moment, his mouth set in a firm line. He wasn't sure if he was shocked more by the sixty-day lie or by the audacity with which Thrawn confessed to it.

"The trees didn't run dry?" he repeated.

"No," said Thrawn. He looked down at the broken branch. With his foot, he turned it over and exposed the sap-covered wound to the light.

"So it was all a wild bantha chase?" Ezra asked.

"Pardon?" said Thrawn, glancing up with a frown

"You just sent me off looking for trees to get rid of me?" Ezra said. Thrawn crouched down, collecting the branch from the ground and setting it upright against the tree.

"No, not solely for that reason," he said. "It was also to test your skills with the Force."

Ezra opened his mouth to call krayt-spit, but Thrawn wasn't finished.

"As you've said, the Force is in all living things, yes?" he asked. "As such, I believed you could identify sap-trees using the Force, and I needed some way to confirm my hypothesis. You located trees south of camp fairly quickly; you did not locate any trees north of camp, where the ysalimiri presence is particularly thick. There is not quite enough evidence to confirm my hypothesis, however, as you only ever found two."

Ezra shook his head, his lip curled in disgust. He couldn't muster up any words.

"You're angry," Thrawn noted.

"What, did you think there was a statute of limitations on being a dick?" Ezra said. "You thought if you just waited a month or two to tell me, I wouldn't care?"

Thrawn eyed him without saying anything in response. He wrapped his hands around the shoulder straps of the wooden frame, adjusting it a little. "I still recommend you visit the ruins today," he said blandly.

Ezra threw back his head in exasperation and started walking. "I'm not going to turn back now just because you're an asshole," he said as he passed Thrawn. "I know you're an asshole. This is just another new development in a long series of dick moves. It doesn't change a thing."

Thrawn fell into step next to him, this time walking on Ezra's right side so that the ysalimir couldn't make aggressive eye contact with him. Ezra couldn't tell if this was a deliberate move — a subtle apology, maybe — or not.

"You're not going to like the next development," Thrawn admitted.

Ezra's steps faltered. He shot a wary look Thrawn's way, but couldn't read the other man's face.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"The ruins," Thrawn said.

"They are inhabited?" Ezra exclaimed, his mind jumping immediately to the most outrageous conclusion. He looked behind him at the broken branch. "You mean there really are people here?"

"No," said Thrawn, rocking his head from side to side. "I didn't say that. Still, I suspect this next development will require some … persuasion."

For a long moment, they walked in silence, Ezra squinting at Thrawn and Thrawn refusing to look back at him.

"Okay…" said Ezra when it became clear Thrawn wasn't going to speak. "So start persuading, then."

Visibly hesitant, Thrawn shook his head as much as he could with the ysalimir resting against his neck. "You will understand in a moment," he said. "When we arrive."

If it wasn't for the ysalimir, Ezra would have considered this a challenge to find the answers in Thrawn's mind. He shelved his questions for now, keeping his eyes on the trees as they walked. It wasn't long before he spotted his first wild ysalimir sitting on a high branch above them — and it was so much larger than the infant on Thrawn's shoulder that for a moment Ezra's heart stopped and he couldn't be sure what he was looking at. His mind jumped back to the broken branch, to his brief flash of relief mixed with trepidation when he thought the planet might be occupied. Then he realized he wasn't looking at a sentient alien at all, only a giant lizard.

Well, a Force-resistant giant lizard. With fur.

They became more common after that. Ysalimiri were visible every few meters, and the closer they got to the ruins, the more they saw. Soon, Ezra could make out multiple ysalimiri per tree — and as Thrawn had noted earlier, it seemed like many of the trees were sap-trees, with leaves shaped like four-pronged spikes just like those on the broken branch Ezra had stumbled over earlier.

And then, as they wove through the thick undergrowth and what seemed like a veritable wall of saplings, the ruins abruptly came into view. Ezra hesitated, his pace slowing as they walked nearer to the crumbling walls; there was nothing out of the ordinary that he could see, but Thrawn's earlier warning had him on high alert, his eyes flicking from one end of the ruins to the next as he tried to figure out what he was supposed to be outraged about. Engravings covered the ancient walls of the ruins, so scarred with time that Ezra could barely make them out. He hesitated at the entrance, running his hand over an illustration carved into the stone — a musteline creature in long robes, with a long, cylindrical weapon or staff of some sort clutched in its furry paw.

Thrawn, meanwhile, quickened his pace instead, slipping the wooden frame off his back and leaving it propped up against an old stone wall. He stepped gracefully over moss-covered stones that had come loose from the structure years ago, disappearing into the more intact sections of the ruins.

"Through here," he called.

Shaking himself, Ezra followed. He rounded a low, crumbling wall and ducked into an alcove, where the floor was cracked but still in place and the walls and ceiling had both been repaired to a certain degree — likely by Thrawn in an effort to make the ruins functional as a shelter. Thrawn sat inside, waiting for Ezra on a stone shelf — or perhaps an altar — with his arms crossed over his chest. All around him on the flat slab of stone were pieces of debris from the Chimaera: vibroblades and blasters, tools and soldering kits, comlinks and loops of microfilament, power cells and heating coils. All of it in pristine condition.

And beside him, fully constructed and blinking as it searched for a signal, was a high-power transmitter.