"Does it make you uncomfortable?" Ezra asked.

Across from him, Thrawn sat on the altar in the ruins, surrounded by weapons and technology. He held the transmitter in his hands, toying with the antenna, but his eyes kept straying to the blasters — charged and ready to shoot — at his side. When Ezra spoke, Thrawn's eyes shunted back to the transmitter and stayed there.

"Yes," he said softly, not looking up. "Quite frankly, it does."

Ezra shifted from foot to foot. He could hear the same words — quite frank-quite-it does-frankly-quite frankly-it does — echoed in Thrawn's head on a loop, overlapping each other as Thrawn stewed on his own response, not happy with how he'd said it or the words he'd used. Eventually, he looked up, hands still working on the transmitter automatically. His gaze fell on the full-grown ysalimiri surrounding the ruins, visible from all sides.

"You know I wouldn't attack you," Ezra said. "Right?"

Thrawn opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again without answering. It didn't matter, Ezra could read the answer in his mind even before Thrawn shrugged.

"I trust you," he said. An image swam to the forefront of his mind, and Ezra couldn't help but see it.

"No, you don't," he said, a sour taste in his mouth. "You trust your brother. You're just trying to brainwash yourself into thinking me and him are the same."

The look Thrawn gave him was blank, but Ezra could sense a sort of disappointment and irritation swirling through his mind — as if Ezra had done something wrong or, more likely, missed an important piece of data that Thrawn wanted him to pick up.

"It doesn't matter what my method is," he said to Ezra, "so long as it achieves the proper results. Besides, it is necessary for you to read my mind, isn't it?"

Ezra hesitated, unsure how to answer. "You mean … strategically…?"

"Everything's strategic," said Thrawn crisply. He adjusted the transmitter's casing with deft fingers and slid it back into place with a click. "You must read my mind as an exercise, so we know you are capable of doing so against our enemy when the time comes. But due to the … circumstances of our alliance, you must also be allowed to read my mind even at times when I am not altogether willing. Otherwise, your own doubts and lack of trust will grow until our plan becomes inactionable, anyway."

Ezra frowned; he could feel the ysalimiri blinking at him from the trees. He stared at Thrawn's bowed head, trying to figure him out as he worked on the transmitter — sometimes, it felt like his mind-reading skills didn't help him in this area at all. Thrawn's mind somehow managed to be an open book and yet utterly unreadable at the exact same time.

He was still contemplating it when Thrawn looked up and set the transmitter aside. He eyed the traps they'd prepared, all of them leaning against the crumbling southern wall.

"Go set those as we discussed," he said. His voice was soft. "I need to meditate."

"Meditate?" Ezra glanced over his shoulder at the traps, gut twisting. He knew where to set them, alright — they'd gone over it in detail more than once, until Thrawn was absolutely sure that Ezra wouldn't forget any element of the plan. But if Thrawn wanted him to set the traps now, that meant they would be sending the message soon.

His eyes scanned up, from the traps to the ancient engravings carved into the wall behind them. Those works had been carved with a reverent hand by the beings who'd lived here before he and Thrawn crashed — the beings who had battled the Grysks on the same ground he and Thrawn planned to — who had been slaughtered where they stood, until not a single one of them was left. Their buildings were left to rot; their fields grew over; their artwork faded and crumbled into dust.

And there were millions of them. Millions who went up against the Grysks and lost. Not just two.

In Thrawn's mind, he saw the engravings reflected back at him. The edges of each carving blurred and smoothed; Ezra watched an image knit itself back together out of lines so faded he could barely make them out. He turned to look at Thrawn again, his mouth set into a speculative frown. Thrawn had slipped off the altar and now rested with his back against it on the floor; his head was tipped back, his eyes narrow red slits, his gaze seeing right past Ezra like he wasn't there.

"Okay, you meditate, then," Ezra said, knowing Thrawn wouldn't hear him. "I'll go set the traps."

He didn't even feel a slight ripple of acknowledgement from Thrawn's mind as he walked away.

He recognizes them from his studies. They are the same size, with the same dimensions, as the twin statues once mounted behind his aft bridge office desk. Their scales are a dull yellow, their fur flat and brown; the odor, when he leans closer to them is musky; he can smell the dry dusty scent of dead insects, each carapace caught in the ysalimir's fur to disintegrate beneath the sun.

He examines the one nearest to him. Its talons are sunk deep in the wood, curved directly into the vein of the tree. Not wise to simply pull the ysalimir off, then; he takes Thrass's oth'ola endzali from around his neck and retraces his step back fifteen meters, where he hangs it on a low branch of a tree. If ysalimiri are truly Force-null, and if this nullifying effect is truly an evolutionary defense, then he would do well to purge himself of all traces of the Force before attempting to remove the ysalimir.

He hesitates before going back. He feels naked without the pendant; his thoughts swirl, too fast for him to follow at first, but only for a moment. He catches up quickly, adapts, learns which strands, ideas, and observations to discard so he can stay focused. It takes him only a moment to regain his innate sense of calm and focus without the oth'ola endzali around his neck.

When he walks back to the ysalimiri, his steps are measured and controlled. He climbs onto the branch next to the lowest ysalimir, perches against the trunk of the tree so he can study it with both hands free. Its talons, on closer inspection, appear to be crusted in a substance similar to petrified wood; yet this substance looks to be nothing more than a thin layer, perhaps not rooting the ysalimir to its branch as firmly as it appears to. Perhaps the ysalimir can slough this layer like a snake sheds its skin; perhaps it can be induced to do so even against its will, without harming it.

He sits up slowly, considers his options. When he was five years old, he encountered a branch of coral growing in the ice caves of Rentor, beneath the iceberg's surface, where he wasn't supposed to travel alone. He'd never seen anything like it before; his cousin Kivu'well'aru collected small geologic formations, and she didn't have anything like this on the shelf in her room. She would like this, he decided; she would probably even pay him for it.

He removed a vibroblade from his pocket — a blade he'd been gifted by his elderly neighbor, a secret thank-you for when Thrawn helped balance the old man's debts to the Ufsa Aristocra — and approached the coral sideways. Gingerly, he gripped a narrow offshoot of it, placing the vibroblade at the base several centimeters down. It would make a good sample for Vuwella; nicely-shaped, and a decent length.

But the moment his vibroblade sliced through the coral, everything went wrong.

He was slammed backward, his elbow bouncing off the cave floor with a jarring pain that shot all the way up to his teeth. The vibroblade waved dangerously in his hand as he skidded across the ground, but he was able to keep it pointed up and away from him, avoiding any injury. The piece of severed coral in his other hand was chipped, but otherwise not damaged in the attack.

You hurt me, Thrawn heard someone say. It was a voice in his head, sugared and whispery, unlike anything he'd ever heard from another Chiss. He stood on watery legs, gripping the vibroblade and the piece of coral like lifelines, looking for someone to fight.

There was no one. There was only the coral; its cells seemed to glow in the dim light that filtered through the ice. Invisible fingers prodded at Thrawn's brain as he stared at it, poked through the coils of muscle and little grey cells inside of him. He felt them stroking at his thought process with a touch that was light and almost gentle, and then the fingers paused, poised against what felt to Thrawn like a deep, life-giving vein in his left hemisphere. He held his breath, cold fear trickling into his heart. And then the gentleness was gone. The invisible fingers clawed into his neural pathways and tore them viciously apart.

When his vision came back, he forced himself to his feet and stared at the coral, understanding instinctively that he was a prey animal looking at his predator. There was something wrong with the coral, undeniably, deeply wrong. It couldn't move, it couldn't speak — but it was sentient. It could hurt him.

When he walked away from the ice caves, he opened his mouth to call for help and found that he couldn't remember Cheunh.

It took him weeks to re-learn it, Thrawn remembers now with a rueful smile. The blemish on his academic record nearly cost him a spot at the Academy on Naporar. But a few weeks of muteness at the age of five could be hand-waved away fairly simply, especially when his superiors found out which settlement he was from. They often did the math too quickly, assumed his brief period of muteness was a traumatic response to the attack on Rentor which had left Thrawn and Thrass as orphans — but it wasn't so. His mind, his most precious resource, had been locked away from him, hidden behind complex alien ciphers which it took him weeks to decode.

He takes another look at the ysalimir's claws. It's sessile, just like the coral, but Force-null rather than Force-sensitive. He runs his finger up the ysalimir's bent leg, moving gently, advancing one centimeter at a time.

When he reaches the ysalimir's crooked elbow, he spots a twitch — a muscle jumping beneath the loose skin of its flank. He starts again, from the other leg this time, and sees the same twitch once again. His experiment bears fruit four times over, on each of the ysalimir's legs.

The fifth time, Thrawn doesn't move slowly. He digs his fingers sharply into the pulsepoint hidden beneath the ysalimir's elbow joint, invoking the same twitch, but this time in all four legs at once, and harder than before — and before his eyes, the rocky layer of growth over the ysalimir's claws breaks away.

The talons themselves retract. When he laces his fingers beneath the ysalimir's ribs and lifts it, it comes away from the branch clean and safe.

Alive.

He turns it around, meets its sleepy eyes with his own, and smiles.

Now to find out what you can really do, he says.

The spade is waiting for him when he reaches the Chimaera's wreck, but today he picks it up and keeps walking, relishing the sting of friction where the wood touches his blistered palm. The creel rests heavily against his shoulder blades, lending credence to his foray this far from camp. When the Jedi wakes and goes searching for him, he will find Thrawn with a freshly-killed animal in his back creel, and he won't think to question it for weeks.

Deep in the woods, he carries the spade — past the wreck, past the scars left on the forest floor by the purrgils, and past the splintered trees — to the ruins above which the purrgils lost control.

The ysalimiri are thick here. He fans out, working clockwise until he finds a tree with only one ysalimir in it, high up in the foliage. From here, no other ysalimiri are visible; it's the perfect place for a test. Shrugging off the creel, he hangs it from its strap on a nearby branch and sets to work, carefully upturning the earth a meter or two out from the tree's roots.

It's a great deal like the other traps he's prepared for when the Grysks — or more likely, their slaves — come looking for him. He leans the spade against the tree when he's done and reaches into his tunic; it's the same tunic he wore as a Grand Admiral, the same one he wore during the crash, but it's unrecognizable now. Shortly after landing here — if you can call it that — Thrawn removed his rank plaque and buried it with his crew. That night, he mended each tear in the fabric and dyed the uniform itself black using a mixture of local root vegetables and ash — not out of mourning, he will tell Bridger if he ever bothers to ask, but because black is more practical than white. Especially out here.

From inside his tunic, he removes a small pouch woven from the rags of an Imperial uniform. He crouches down next to the upturned earth and sprinkles a selection of crushed herbs, dried meat, and berries into the dirt. He covers it carefully, ensuring no avians will swoop down and harvest it before it has the chance to lure the creatures he really hopes to come.

Standing, he casts a quick glance around him, cementing the location in his mind, and then shields his eyes to judge the position of the sun. He still has three hours before Bridger wakes; grabbing his spade and hooking the back creel around his shoulders, he heads back to the Chimaera's wreck.

The beast's hoofs are angled downward; he's noticed as much from its footprints. From that simple observation, it's an easy matter to locate the patch of flattened grass where it slept last night, and from there to alter the stones and roots — to dig subtle furrows in the ground — until an inexorable path has formed. With the beast's angled hooves, it will choose the path of least resistance purely by instinct, never knowing that this path has been made inorganically, by Chiss hands, to lure it to the snare.

Bridger would be unsettled, Thrawn thinks, to see how quickly he can catch and kill these beasts. It's a necessary fiction he's maintained throughout their stay here; he can't allow Bridger to know what he really does with his time. Better to let him think it's spent hunting.

Only Bridger doesn't think he's hunting, whispers a voice in his head that sounds horribly similar to Thrass. Bridger thinks he's returning to the Chimaera, scavenging through the wreck, burying the bodies of his men.

And that's too close to the truth for comfort. He isn't one to deny the evidence in front of him, but he prefers to think the Jedi doesn't know. Initially, he spent as much time at the Chimaera as possible, refusing to admit to himself that he'd searched in all the places he physically could, that he'd located all discoverable remains. There's no reason to return there now; his time is better spent tending to the ysalimiri, fixing the technology and weaponry he's salvaged, and perfecting his plans.

Still, he does return there sometimes. At night, when Bridger is sleeping, and Thrawn can't force himself to rest. He picks across the forest floor silently, brings the creel with him to convince himself he has a purpose. But each time, he only lays the creel against the base of a tree and stands there, watching the wreckage of his flagship gleam beneath the moon. When he can't stay awake anymore, he lies on his back in the cold earth upturned by his spade and sleeps amongst the buried bodies of his men.

Bridger has caught him once or twice — not at the gravesite, but in the river in the morning, when Thrawn returns late or Bridger wakes up early. He's seen Thrawn in the water, washing the earth from his skin. If he's put the pieces together — Thrawn hopes he hasn't, hopes it with an urgency and sincerity that's unnatural for him — he hasn't said anything.

Thrawn loads the hoofed beast's carcass into the back creel, then settles on a low branch on the tree. He can see the infrared signature of moles beneath the broken ground; Bridger won't be able to see a thing. If he can sense their presence and catch one nevertheless, it will show that the rumors surrounding ysalimiri are just that — rumors.

But if Bridger fails … if the ysalimiri truly can block the Force…

Thrawn settles back against the tree and waits for Bridger to find him.

Ezra came out of the memories with a shake of the head, taking a moment to remember where he was. Thrawn sat at the fireside not far away, his head bowed over a communicator he was working to repair.

"The Chimaera again," Ezra muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. Over the past two weeks, he'd come to learn that there was nothing he hated more than Thrawn's memories of the Chimaera. He could take just about anything else — any battle, no matter how traumatic, was better than the still-too-fresh wreck. He glanced down at the fresh leather cords in his hands and remembered belatedly how his old laces had snapped earlier that day. With another, more brisk shake of the head, Ezra bent over, looping the cords through the empty eyelets of his boots. He was still leaning over when he felt something change in the air — a tight discomfort in his chest — a shortness of breath — a spike in his heart rate. He frowned, trying to figure out what had changed, and then realized the sensations weren't coming from him at all.

Glancing up, he studied Thrawn's face and found it stoic and unreadable.

"You okay?" said Ezra uncertainly.

Thrawn's eyes shifted his way. "Yes," he said. Then, when Ezra only gave him a doubtful look, he added, "Why?"

Ezra stood up slowly and pressed a hand against his chest, trying to massage the discomfort away. "You don't feel a little breathless?" he asked.

Thrawn's head snapped up and Ezra felt an immediate sharpening of his senses as he shifted into combat mode, scanning the surrounding area for signs of nerve gas.

"No, no," said Ezra, waving his hands. "I'm not feeling breathless. We're not under attack or anything. I'm saying that I can tell you're out of breath — you know — through the Force."

Thrawn's adrenaline spiked and faded. He turned his head slightly and narrowed his eyes at Ezra, who fancied he could now see the shallow ups and downs of Thrawn's chest.

"There's a tight feeling right here," Ezra explained, indicating his own heart. "And your heartbeat is going faster than normal. That's why I asked."

"You can sense all that?" said Thrawn, now sounding a little breathless as well, even as curiosity took over his face. He inhaled deeply — well, deeper than he had a moment before — and looked away. "You're improving quickly."

"Yeah, way to avoid the subject," said Ezra. "So smooth I almost didn't notice."

Thrawn turned away with a slight shake of his head, the curiosity replaced by his usual unreadable expression. When Ezra spoke again, he made an effort to control the tone of his voice.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

For a moment, he thought Thrawn wouldn't answer. Then, slowly, Thrawn lifted a hand and pressed it against his ribs.

"It's the purrgil," he said a little stiffly, not meeting Ezra's eyes. "It bruised my ribs before the crash. Sometimes it affects my breathing. Not often."

There was a long silence. Ezra opened himself up a little more to the Force and felt the shallow expansions of Thrawn's lungs, the rigid feeling of constriction in his chest — and not just in his chest. In his throat, too, which was so tight that Thrawn had to force out every word.

"That's not your ribs, Thrawn," said Ezra. He felt realization and a sense of embarrassment settling over him all at once. "Your ribs are fine. If you were injured, I'd be able to tell."

Thrawn said nothing. He kept his eyes fixed on the communicator he was fiddling with, digging his thumbnail under the casing and popping it out of place.

"You haven't noticed that it always seems to happen when you're thinking about the Chimaera?" Ezra asked.

He felt Thrawn's thoughts fracture, becoming impossible to read. At the same time, Ezra's grasp on physical sensation only got stronger; he felt Thrawn's breath catch in his throat, felt the cold pit of fire aching beneath his ribs.

"Come on, dude," said Ezra softly, approaching Thrawn with his hand outstretched. He could feel Thrawn's instincts telling him to back away, just as he could feel Thrawn fighting to suppress them, allowing Ezra to rest his hand on his arm. The whole struggle happened without the slightest flicker of expression from Thrawn.

"Breathe," Eza told him. He reached out to the Force again, dipping himself as fast as he could into a meditative state. With a link open between his mind and Thrawn's, he did his best to project a feeling of peace and serenity down the line. He let it leak into Thrawn's tense throat muscles, into his chest and lungs, into his ribs.

Gradually, Thrawn's lungs stuttered and then expanded, finally taking a full breath of air. He moved away from Ezra a moment later and continued work on his communicator without so much as glancing up.

"Well, you're welcome," Ezra huffed. "No need to thank me. I only performed instant therapy and cured you completely, that's all."

"Leave me alone," said Thrawn quietly but firmly, with the full weight of command in his voice. "Put the ysalimir back and go."

Ezra eyed him, a million unwise questions and responses popping into his head. After a moment, he trudged over to the ysalimir and picked it up, then jogged back with it, a sense of guilt making each step more rushed than the last. When he'd settled the biosupport rack on the ground near Thrawn — and lost their mental connection completely as a result — he hesitated and said,

"You really don't trust me, do you?"

"Go," said Thrawn calmly, not looking up.

Without the Force, Ezra couldn't read him at all.