Welcome to chapter 22! A quick content warning before we begin: this chapter includes mildly graphic references to self-harm.
The Way of a Siluan, Chapter 22: The View from Yalith
BBY 14, year 5 of Imperial rule, more or less concurrent with the latter part of chapter 21
The cold water was a welcome shock. There was hot water too, of course, in the little grey-walled institutional lavatory down the hall from her office on the top floor of the IMAg headquarters on Ukio, but the sting of the cold water suited her mood better. With each splash of cold water, Ry Kyver could feel the thick layer of make-up on her face and neck and arms slowly dissolve away into nothing.
When she felt the last of it gone, Ry felt for the tap, turned it off and then groped for her towel. When she had scrubbed her face dry, she opened her eyes to the mirror. Her skin was sallow grey again now. Her native mulatto complexion had long since forsaken her, and it took that thick layer of make-up to make her look normal enough to assure farmers and agri-business leaders alike that IMAg had their best interests at heart.
Ry glared at her grey self in the mirror and then realized why her eyes itched so much. She peeled the dark brown contact lenses out of her eyes and then looked at her reflection again, yellow iris glaring back at yellow irises, dark purple bags under her eyes.
Ry Kyver used to like looking at her reflection in the mirror. Even under the too-bright washroom lights, she used to look good standing there in black jeans and a black sports bra. But now the curves of her waist were broken by angular hip bones jutting out above her belt, and though the iron grip of her sports bra forced her breasts not to sag, it did nothing to hide the ribs that protruded under her rough grey skin. Her hair was more grey now than it ought to be at thirty-six, but that at least was very nearly still the same dark wavy hair of the Kyvers of Mandalore. But Mandalore was a bitter memory. Ry quickly pulled her shirt back on and then slammed her hand against the control panel on the wall. The washroom lights went dark and the door swished open.
Ry stormed out into the hallway. "I hate makeup!" she griped bitterly to the zip-all no-one who was there to hear. It was 0200 h local time, and not a single light was on in the building, only the orange glow of the exterior lights coming through the window at the end of the hall sent a long shadow striding ahead of her. Hating make-up didn't mean she could choose not to wear it. Her public role as Minister of Agriculture required her to look like a normal human being, and ever since the massacre at the monastery on Yemer four years ago, that was impossible without dark brown contact lenses and pale brown skin-paint.
Is it worth it? a little voice asked her as she clipped down the dark hallway in her black leather boots.
Ry crushed that thought like it was some little buzzing insect, but that didn't stop another thought from gnawing at her like a little maggot from within.
You have yet to destroy that One.
Vader's voice taunted her, haunted her.
If you fail to destroy that One, she will unmake all you have accomplished.
Whatever accomplishment Ry reported to Vader, whether she hunted down the last of the Siluan monks on Marfa or got a new crop variety ready for the Imperial Agriculture Program ahead of schedule, that was all he said.
"He's just trying to intimidate you," Nathan told her. "He's a bully. Ignore him."
But she couldn't ignore him. The Emperor required her to report to Vader, and in the rare audiences she was granted with the Emperor, the Emperor said the same thing. Even though it felt like a blasphemy against herself to think that one of those blasted Siluans could possibly have anything on her, she could not doubt, because in her own dark meditations she too sensed it. But sensing that that One was out there didn't mean she could find her.
Ry stopped in her tracks, there in the hallway half-way to her office. She did that sometimes now, not knowing why, tension frozen into her arms and shoulders as her mind raced, trapped inside an unending circle: until she destroyed that One, she sensed, she would not be able to complete the other project the Emperor had assigned her, yet without the results of that project, she didn't see how she would find the insight to track down that One. Her thoughts circled frantically until at last, in desperation, her mind leapt to a wild hope: escape.
"No!" she hissed at herself and shook her head so hard that she felt like it rattled her brain. Jerking herself out of her trance, she pushed herself forward down the hall. She didn't come this far to escape. She would prove that she was worthy to be more than a second-rank Jedi relegated to the AgriCorps, worthy to be more than a dinky little Minister of Agriculture, worthy to do more than bow and scrape to a shrivelled old man and his mechanical monstrosity of an apprentice.
Hope, or lack thereof, for proving herself sat in an incubator in a little room adjacent the main laboratory on the second floor. Even though Ry had hours of office work waiting for her at her desk, she walked past her office and turned to the elevator and pressed the button to go down.
It wasn't until she reached that little room with the incubator that she turned on the sickly yellow light of the UV-free lamp she used in that room. By its light, she checked the computer. She saw no reason to expect that she would find what she wanted there, but compulsively she checked anyway. The latest quantitative DNA analysis readout displayed on the screen showed exactly what it showed hundreds of other times: no change whatsoever to the midi-chlorian levels in any of her cell cultures. And this was experimental iteration number 665.
Ry knew that she had the quantitative DNA protocol down too well to second-guess the results on the screen, but as if under some compulsion to torment herself she went to check the incubator anyways. Opening the lid, she stared down at the gleaming grid of petri dishes. She could sense life in each of them, but none of that particular hum of energy that they would hold if especially sensitive to the Force.
The Emperor never told her why he wanted midi-chlorian-enhanced cell cultures, but she began to suspect. Channelling the Dark Side of the Force was like being a wire conducting more electrical current than it was designed to handle, and his body, too, was burning out. She'd seen him: powerful in his person but shrunken, shrivelled in body. He would need a way to renew himself, and the ability to custom-design Force-adept biological tissues for a cybernetic body would allow him not only to live forever but to live in the body of his choosing.
Succeeding to provide him with that possibility would, Ry thought, make her extremely valuable, irreplaceable even. That, more than anything, was what she really wanted. And she too would need a new body one day. But in the meantime, she had a simpler, more elegant plan, if only she could make it work.
Reaching down into the incubator, Ry drew out a petri-dish and opened it, looking for a moment at the perfectly round, smooth white bacterial colonies on the surface of the translucent brown nutrient agar. This was a culture of Lactobacter acidophilus, one of many bacterial species that live as endosymbionts of humans and other mammals. The research literature was full of scientific studies showing that these endosymbionts can influence not only digestion and immunity, but also mood, libido, ability to focus, even personality. Ry hypothesized that their midi-chlorian levels could also play a role in modulating their host's Force-sensitivity. She didn't have proof yet, not the solid scientific proof that comes from multiple replicates of a positive result, but she did have anecdotal evidence.
Once, one beautiful once a year ago, she succeeded to induce elevated midi-chlorian levels in ten of those cultures. Introducing a sample of the altered cells to her body was as simple as taking a capsule. It took a few hours to feel the effect, but before long it felt like some huge curtain had been opened in her mind. She could see things through the Force she couldn't see before. High on her new power, in one short week she hunted down the scattered Siluan hermits of Ryloth, even though they previously eluded her in the complicated system of caves and canyons that marked the planet's stark landscape. And then the effect wore off. Both she and her cell cultures went back to normal, and she never replicated the result again. What was more, that One was not among the dead on Ryloth.
Now she felt a low, smouldering anger at those smug white bacterial colonies. She should be capable of doing this, capable of making them obey her. But no. The memory of her one success taunted her now, holding out just enough hope that maybe, just maybe if she could do it again, she would see through the Force clearly enough to find that One. Yet those recalcitrant little cells sat there, reminding her that she was failing again and again. Disgusted, she spat into the open petri-dish.
The computer beeped. In blocky green letters, the screen displayed a new message from her secretarial droid: at 0300 h, Vader was coming. He wanted a report on her progress. In person. Ry glanced at the chronometer on the wall. It was 0230 h.
Ry drew her pocket-knife from her belt and scraped the cell culture, contaminated now anyways, into the bio-waste and then hucked the petri-dish in the garbage. There was no sink in that little room, but she felt her way through the dark of the main laboratory to the tap at the nearest lab bench. Under the hiss of cold water, she ran her fingers back and forth against the smooth flats of the blade, feeling until the gel of the nutrient agar was all washed away. Knife clean, she turned off the tap and touched a finger to the blade's sharp edge.
Without quite knowing why, Ry drew the blade hard across the end of her middle finger, then stood and listened to the slow plink, plink, plink of blood dripping into the stainless steel sink.
# # #
"She doubts," he said over his rasping breath.
"She doubts? Vader, you doubt."
Sitting in his personal starship en route to meet with Ry Kyver on Ukio, Vader regarded the hologram of his master coldly and let a full three cycles of his breathing apparatus pass before he answered. "I do not doubt," he said "that she intends to succeed. I only question whether she will, as does she."
"Your impatience does you credit, Vader, but I am not ready to dispense with her yet. She has yet to destroy that One."
"No doubt I can destroy them both."
"No, Vader," the Emperor said, and even in the hologram, Vader could see him press his lips together. "You are still young in the ways of the Dark Side. You do not yet see as I see. That One is yin to Ms. Kyver's yang. In destroying that One she will acquire the energies of that One and make them her own. Then she will be complete. Then she will be able to do that which I have asked of her."
Vader narrowed his eyes behind his mask and flexed his prosthetic fingers inside his black glove. The Emperor had not told him why he wanted Ry Kyver to create cell lines with enhanced midi-chlorian levels, but Vader could guess. Midi-chlorian-enhanced cell lines, with their capacity for heightened Force sensitivity, could be used to custom-design the biological component of a new cybernetic body of his master's choosing. The Emperor would need this before long. Ever since he was first disfigured while blasting the Jedi Master Mace Windu with Force lightning, the Sith lord's body was slowly burning out and shrivelling more and more as the years went by.
This did not bother Vader. When the time came to make himself master, it would be just as well if the current Emperor had only strength in the Force and not strength of body. For Vader's part, after being hacked to pieces and then scorched in the lava flows of Mustafar, his body had suffered little further change, and so the results of the midi-chlorian project were, as far as he was concerned, both unattainable by Ry Kyver and irrelevant to himself. His own goal for Ry Kyver was to be rid of her as soon as possible. The Sith do not share power well; Vader resented his master's regard for 'Ms. Kyver' and found her arrogance infuriating.
"Yet if she should fail..." he let his words trail off in a hiss of breath. His master had said himself that 'that One' would unmake Ry Kyver's work – the Imperial Agriculture Program, the decimation of the Siluans – if allowed to remain. Vader, for his part, doubted that a mere Siluan could hold that sort of power, but it was still a point he could lean on to wear his master down, to persuade him to be done with Ry Kyver now, not later.
"She will not fail, Vader," the Emperor said. "Her pride depends on it. She will succeed, or she will destroy herself in trying."
Vader stared at the streaky hologram figure of his hooded master and did not answer. She herself says the Siluans are hard to find even through the Force, he thought, and his master caught the essence of his feeling.
"No Vader, that One will be found. That One was long hidden but has now emerged, and in the same stroke a great boon will be granted Ms. Kyver for finding her."
Vader let the sound of his breath fill the air around him in his starship as he considered this. He did not have his master's flair for prophecy, but his own Force-sense told him that not all would go as his master foretold. The Emperor could sense this doubt in him, even over the hologram.
"You doubt, Vader, but you will soon see. What I have foreseen will soon come to pass. I wholly expect that within three days or less Ms. Kyver will both find that One and destroy her."
Behind his black mask, what was left of Vader's lips curled into a smile. He did not yet dare to defy his master by taking Ry Kyver out without his permission, but he could still mess with her, and those words his master just spoke would make for excellent ammunition when they met.
"Don't be too harsh with her, Vader," the Emperor said. "I yet require her cooperation."
Through what was left of Vader's body ran a little quiver, the grim vestige of a laugh. "As you wish," he said, then bowed, and his master ended the transmission.
# # #
At 0300 h, Ry went down to meet Darth Vader in the courtyard outside the IMAg headquarters. The courtyard lamp made a circle of garish light from within which neither the stars nor anything in the surrounding darkness could be seen. There, she bowed to him, trembling, bending down on her knees and touching her forehead to the ground.
"All this time and yet that One remains," he said before she could even rise.
Ry quickly got to her feet, eyes smouldering. "I've destroyed all their monasteries, I've tracked down every Siluan known anywhere, and any premonition I had of their presence, I followed throughout the galaxy. Even in my dreams, I roam the galaxy, searching, but I need more time." Her voice, which had started out slow and scraping rock bottom, gathered energy as she spoke until her words came with a force that would have cowed her subordinates, but Vader was unmoved. He paused, allowing her to feel the menace of his breath until she was the one who shrank back into herself.
"That One was long hidden but has now emerged. Have you not sensed it?" he said. His whole manner was calm, cool, measured.
Ry folded her arms across her chest and glared at him with more than the usual hate, but didn't answer. From this Vader knew that she did not sense it; he didn't sense the emergence of the Emperor's prophesied One either, but that was not the point.
"And so the Emperor expects you to find and destroy that One within three days," he said.
"That's impossible," Ry said quietly.
"Then perhaps you are aware," Vader said, "that the Imperial Agriculture Program is now capable of running without you."
In the warm Ukio night, Ry felt suddenly cold. "I will find a way," she said, but she couldn't keep her voice from shaking.
"That remains to be seen," Vader said, and with that thought, he left her there.
# # #
Juggling an armload of stuff – a box of crop samples, his datapad, and whatnot – Nathan Xeres used his elbow to push the button on the control panel to open the door of the lab. It was only 0600 h, so he was surprised to see the door open and the light on in the little side-room that housed that project Ry was so obsessed with finishing for the Emperor. On his way by, he poked his head in.
"Ry, you're here early," he said, but then stopped in his tracks. Ry was standing there, leaning against the lab bench near the computer. A stack of petri dishes stood on the lab bench beside her, one of them open. She didn't seem to see him. She stared down, eyes dead, arms hanging at her sides.
"Ry, are you OK?" Nathan tried to keep his voice steady, but pain spiked through him when he noticed the fresh knife-marks crisscrossing up and down her forearms.
It was not until he was right there, peering into her ashen face, that she snapped out of her trance and quickly pulled down her sleeves. She glared at him.
"Ry," he said gently, "you look really rough. I can handle stuff here. Please, just go home and get some sleep."
Ry laughed in his face. "Sleep?" she said. "The Dark Side never sleeps." She ended with a grim cackle, her eyes darting rapidly around the room, unable to truly look him in the eye.
Sometimes Nathan wished Ry would let him hold her. Not as a lover – he and Tifini were happy together – but as a friend. He wished she'd let him help her find a way beyond that storm she always seemed to have inside her, the same way she'd helped him find himself as a Force-user years ago. He sighed and shifted the armload of crop samples and other stuff he was carrying.
As he did so, Ry noticed something nestled carefully on top of the stack: a red and gold tetrahedron, ten centimetres on each side. "What are you doing with the holocron?" she snapped. "It should be in my desk!"
"Which is why," Nathan said pointedly, "I was going to go put it back. If you remember correctly, you gave me a rather long list of locations to scout out for those Siluans of yours, and you said that I should check the Sith holocron for relevant information."
Ry did remember, now that he reminded her, but wasn't going to let him know that. "And did you find anything on there?" she asked as if she expected the answer to be no.
"I did. I was finally able to find a way into the Hokto system."
"But that's a no-fly zone."
"I'm aware of that," Nathan said through gritted teeth. "The debris field in the system is cyclic, and once every three to five years there's a gap big enough for a small starship to get through. Lucky for you, I found a simulation of the debris field on the holocron, and caught the right time to get through." Nathan braced himself for Ry to ask what he found there, but she didn't.
Ry narrowed her eyes at him. "You got into the Hokto system?"
"Yes, you asked me to check out Hokto System Planetary Object 325...remember?" As he said this, Nathan saw a manic light flicker in her yellow eyes. He could almost see her mind gearing up for a mental leap to hyperspace.
"Yalith is in the Hokto system," she said.
"Yalith?"
"Hokto System Planetary Object 743," she said quickly, squaring her shoulders with her usual moxie now. "It's on the holocron, if you ever care to look it up. The Siluans tried to make a paradise there, but the Sith found it and obliterated them. They turned the whole planet into bare rock."
Nathan raised an eyebrow at this. "OK, that's brutal. So?"
"I'm going there now." She grabbed her black denim jacket from the bench beside her and brushed past him on her way to the door.
"No! That's a bad idea," Nathan said quickly, and she looked back over her shoulder at him. "It was tight enough when I got through a few days ago, and the opening's getting narrower," he said. "It would take a real hotshot of a pilot to get through there now."
"I am a real hotshot of a pilot," she snapped and stormed out.
# # #
It was 1300 h back on Ukio when Ry Kyver landed her personal starship on a rocky outcrop of the dead planet Yalith. By the skin of her teeth, she had made it through the debris field in one piece. Stepping out into the harsh, dry air, she breathed deep and looked around: no sky to speak of, only a red-black haze behind bare, rocky hills. Dust and fumes in the air gave the few visible stars a lurid orange cast, and the air smelled vaguely of crushed rock and sulphur. The uneven ground before her was strewn with old bones, bits of broken armour and the burnt-out hilts of light-sabres.
By the dull light of the orange stars, Ry selected a human skull, jawless and hollow-eyed, from among the relics on the ground and using the Force she brought it to hang before her, facing her at eye level. With a soft hiss of pain, she gingerly rolled up her sleeves. Back on Ukio, she hadn't known why she obeyed the dark will that told her to put a knife to her flesh, only that she needed the sense of release it brought her. Now she gave her wounds new meaning: they were her badge of honour, her sign that she was worthy of what she came to Yalith to ask for, her proof that she would stop at nothing.
Baring her lacerated forearms, Ry stretched out her hands, palms up, toward the skull of the ancient Sith lord. "Where is that One? Show me," she demanded. Her voice scraped through the air, low and harsh, but that suited her just fine.
Out of the still air, a thin wind began to blow. Ry screwed her eyes shut against the onslaught of dust and grit that came with it. The dry, dusty air grated against her lungs, but she forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply to being her meditation.
After some time, there was a sound, not heard audibly, but a sensation in the brain, of the sharp ping of a single bell. Opening her eyes, Ry found herself within the skull. She could feel the dry bone of it press against her scalp and form a rigid mask against her face. Through the empty eye sockets, Ry blinked out at the broken, rocky landscape, and found that it swam and blurred before her eyes. But as her vision cleared again, she saw the planet Yalith, not as it was now, but as it had been. She watched as the ancient Siluans – mostly Twi'leks, but many of other species, all wearing the same stone Siluan amulet around their necks - worked from dawn til dusk to turn a desert planet into a place of green fields and lush gardens, and she listened as the strange, haunting chant of their prayers rose and fell around them. But as she watched, blight came and took their work; and after the blight, fire; and after the fire, Sith lords, many in those days before the Rule of Two, howled as they hounded the Siluans to the ground. And after the last of the Siluans had fallen or fled, the Sith lords turned to hack one another in their unsated zeal for malice, until they too were no more. Ry continued to watch, unmoved, until at last the air itself all but forsook the desecration of the planet. Then she found herself looking out again at a dead world from within an old, dry skull.
Slowly, another vision formed, and dark, hazy sky grew sharply black, strewn with a million white stars. Even as in her sleepless dreams, all the star-systems were laid out before her. But now from within the skull of that ancient Sith lord she sensed what before had been obscure: the remnant on Yemer (I'll get them later), the many on Alderaan (damn Senator Organa! He hid them from me!). Still she searched until she sensed what she came to find. She could see it with crystal clarity: under a purple night sky, a stone house stood on a hillside. At the foot of the hill grew a thick forest. That One was there, down among the trees, or would be when Ry got there.
She didn't know the planet's name. She didn't need to. With knowing beyond knowing she knew its coordinates as clearly as she knew her own name.
The vision broke. Ry found herself again on the bleak, blank world of Yalith, with a skull suspended before her. Taking it in both hands, she kissed it, and then crushed it, letting the fragments fall to the ground. All but one. One she took between her teeth to savour as she set out for her next destination.