Welcome to Chapter 42! In this chapter we pick up with Ry Kyver again, who we last saw briefly from Varda's point of view in chapter 38, but whose last point-of-view scene was back in chapter 33. We will take a jump back in time (relative to the last chapter) and rejoin her in the hospital on Yemer. Her Force skills are all but gone, the disc carrying her proprietary data is broken, and in the midst of her despair, she begins to have a series of unusual dreams.

Chapter 42: The Many Paths of Dreams

13 BBY – 11 months – 28 days

With a gentle rocking motion, the waves lapped against the sides of the small wooden rowboat, its gold-tan grain darkened silver-grey with long use. Resting the well-worn oars across the edges of the boat, she looked up into the clear sky and let one hand dangle in the sparkling water, savouring the cool touch and breathing deep the scent of pines borne across the water.

As the clean water coaxed the grime from her fingers and the fresh air lifted the stench of machine oil, the annoyance and frustration of working on the starship melted away. She closed her eyes. It was pure bliss: warm sun, soft breeze, cool water.

And then a jolt shot through her nerves: indistinct but unmistakable, a voice shouting for the shore. The old woman was calling her. She yelled back, then sat for just a second longer before she sighed, grabbed the oars and started rowing. She put her whole upper body into the motion, breathing hard.

Too hard. Something was wrong with the sound of that breathing...and some awful little insect was making the strangest noise...

Ry fought to remain in dream-state and lost to the beep beep beep of the alert on the bed of the patient next to her. She scowled and dug her knuckles into her eyes, wishing she could block out the sound of the deformed child's mechanical breath as easily as she shut out the brightness of the skylight overhead.

Beep beep beep! Ry turned her head to look. The child in the next bed was glassy-eyed and looked somehow too stiff. An unexpected wave of guilt and sadness washed over Ry before she hardened herself against it. In her mind, she had put up a wall to shut out everything that belonged to her prior life, and she didn't need the past reaching ugly arms into the future to drag her into despair.

Dr. Unayat came running in, looking worried. One look at the child and she gave a low moan. "You don't have long to go now," she said, taking the child's hand.

Ry looked away. A minute or so later, there was the click of a switch and the breathing machine stopped.

That was new. Ry looked over in time to see the doctor closing the child's lizard-eyes. "Yet shall the Light be Unbroken," the doctor said softly.

Feeling vaguely nauseous, Ry scowled, lay back against her pillow and closed her eyes. Dead Zone or no Dead Zone, she was not going to feel guilty about this. She heard Dr. Unayat give a weary sigh and then there was the sound of the child's bed being wheeled out.

Determined not to think about it, Ry turned her thoughts back to her dreams. It was an old habit, combing through dreams for patterns and bits of meaning.

This last dream was like others she'd had over the last couple of days since she learned that the disc carrying her hard-won data was broken – a fact she was stashing safely behind that wall in her mind.

Like many of the other dreams, there was the lake, the boat, the old woman, the starship she was fixing on the far side of the lake, the relief at heading home and leaving mechanical things behind, moments of tarrying along the way to enjoy a moment of quiet. Various permutations of the same thing.

That was one set of dreams she'd been having. It was weird that she would dream stuff like that, but some of the other dreams were weirder: dreams where all she did was stand in a tangle of plants, barely discernible as a garden, and watch rain form beads of water on leaves as the light turned from day to dusk. Or dreams about nothing more than twining a soft green vine around a trellis of tall reeds and stopping to notice the way the fine white fuzz on the leaves caught the sunlight and edged the plant in gold. Those dreams were surreally lush, like some kind of artsy nature holovid.

What baffled Ry was where her subconscious was pulling any of these vivid images from. In the past, she had often dreamed of water, but it was always dark water, deep water. The old woman looked like a teacher she'd once had back in the Temple, why she'd remember her now Ry couldn't fathom. And the recurring setting of the place with the lake and the wreck and the garden just made no sense. She'd never spent time anywhere like that before.

As vivid and surreal as they were, Ry was pretty sure these dreams weren't Force visions. There was no sense of doom or destiny about them, no answers to questions or questions to be answered. Just images, no, not just images: there was sound and touch and even smell in these dreams, far more multi-sensory than she'd ever experienced before.

Trying to sit all the way up so that she could reach her glass of water, Ry was painfully reminded of sore ribs and a woozy feeling in her head. How much longer was she going to be stuck in the dry dun walls and dull green curtains of this makeshift hospital? She gulped the slightly bitter water and wondered where they were getting water from in a desert like this.

Brought back to reality, Ry noticed again all around her the little noises of the hospital: the soft hum and occasional beeping of various medical equipment, the voice of a patient talking with Dr. Gunma somewhere down the hall. Yet what she noticed the most was the silence left where the child's ventilator used to be. Shifting uncomfortably, Ry twiddled with the IV tube snaking into her arm until a twist too hard gave her a little jolt of pain. She gave a rough sigh and screwed her eyes shut.

There was nothing in her life that gave Ry any desire to be in reality. Weird as the dreams might be, if her subconscious wanted to distract her from the mess that was her real life, she was happy to take it. All the dreams shared one thing: she felt young, she felt healthy in a way that she hadn't felt in years. For every moment she could get of that, she was grateful.

A fleshy thwack, and heavy body met sleek black floor. The Fifth Brother of the Inquisitors groaned, hacked, and groaned again, but could not rise. Vader, one hand outstretched in the air above, held him to the ground.

"What do you mean she got away?"

"Lord Vader, we can still track her," he managed, still gasping for breath after being thrown down from Vader's choke-hold. "We have her transponder codes and everything we need to identify her starship."

"That may be of some minimal use." Vader released the Inquisitor and watched him peel himself off the slightly reflective floor of Vader's private space aboard the Imperial Star Destroyer.

"We can use the data to set up an alert throughout Imperial space," the Fifth Brother said, looking hesitantly for Vader's approval.

Vader considered this. He wanted Ahsoka caught, but was not about to risk such a broad-scale attempt; it might come too easily to his master's attention. "Leave that to me," he said sternly. "I want the information on a disc, and erased from the memory of your starship. You will speak of this to no one."

"I will return with the information shortly." The Fifth Brother bowed, then hurried out, limping.

Vader watched the Inquisitor leave and then began to pace the broad room. The news the Inquisitor had brought him was both hopeful and maddening. To be so close and yet so far from catching Ahsoka...

The Inquisitors he had deployed to Takodana were supposed to have been looking for reasons why Ry Kyver might have gone there first after she defected, and whether there might be some Force-related connection. Now he had bigger and more important questions: why was Ahsoka there? Did she have a prior relationship with the older Jedi the Inquisitors encountered, or was there a third factor that drew them both to that place? Did her reasons for visiting Takodana have any connection to what drew Ry? There was a Darkside nexus nearby, but it couldn't be that, unless Ahsoka had adopted greater flexibility in her relationship to the Force – which would itself be an asset, Vader thought. If he watched that part of the planet, he wondered, might Ahsoka return?

For a moment, just a moment, Vader felt a sudden but familiar welling up of regret: if only he had walked away from the Jedi Order when she did. The slow clip, clip, clip of his boots against the smooth floor paused as the thought engulfed him.

Then he clenched his gloved fist so hard that joints popped in his mechanical hand. He hated Ahsoka for that, hated her for walking away. She had abandoned him.

Resuming his slow walk back and forth, back and forth across the all-but-empty room, Vader hardened his will: one way or another, he would find her. Either she would make atonement by joining his cause and helping him, or she would die.

Sensing an approaching presence, Vader drew himself up and faced the door. With a wave of his hand, it whisked open, revealing a somewhat frightened Fifth Brother.

"Lord Vader, the information you requested." He handed Vader a slim black memory stick.

Vader took it without so much as a nod of thanks. "It may be that she has reason to return to Takodana," he said. "See to it that you and two others of your order are there when that happens, and this time, I want her captured, alive. You will report on this errand to no one except for me."

The Inquisitor's pale grey complexion blanched. He bowed and then left without saying anything.

Left on his own again, Vader strode to a cabinet built into one of the chamber's sleek black walls. There he opened a drawer and took out a datapad. It was all black except for a grey LCD screen, thick and heavy unlike the slim devices issued to Imperial officers. This was one he had built himself. He did not for a moment trust that his digital activities were wholly free from scrutiny via the Imperial network, and so he had made this, a bare-bones model able to store and process information but with no capacity to connect to the network. He inserted the memory stick.

The transponder code was a string of data that only a computer connected to the correct receptor would understand, but the starship's registration details coaxed a little smile that forced his face against the inner edges of his mask: she was flying a converted shuttle. In a civilian starship, which, in its original design, carried no weapons and was barely capable of a leap to hyperspace, she had outgunned and outmanoeuvred his own Inquisitors. He wondered whether she'd done the upgrade on the shuttle herself. He hoped so. He hoped she was still using what she'd learned from him. Although he wouldn't bring himself to admit it, his earlier all-or-nothing intentions toward Ahsoka softened, if only a little.

Vader was still staring down at the black block letters on the grey screen – his most tangible link to his former padawan – when the alert sounded at his comm. Looking at the digits displayed in the comm's tiny screen, he rolled his eyes but opened the commlink with the press of a button.

"Lord Vader, we are approaching Hutt Space. We expect to arrive in fifteen minutes." It was the terse and somewhat nervous voice of the starship's commanding officer.

"Tell your men to prepare my ship," Vader said, and closed the link. He took the datapad with him as he exited his chamber and strode down the hall to the hanger where his TIE fighter awaited him. He did not hurry. It was just as well for Imperial officers to have to wait at attention, shaking in their boots as he passed. But even if the halls were empty, he would still have taken his time.

Vader had no desire to carry out the Emperor's present orders. The Hutts had declined to send the customary greetings to his master for Empire Day, and so the Emperor had dispatched Vader to remind them who held the greater power. It was a stupid errand. The Hutts would say what they needed to say to make him leave and then go on doing as they pleased. As much could be accomplished by sending the Inquisitors or an Imperial officer. It was just the Emperor's cruel but subtle way of reminding Vader that he was not his own.

Vader hated him for that. He hated him with a hatred that burned like the phantom pain in his limbs.

Somehow, someday, he promised himself, he would destroy his master. He would destroy him, and he would be free. Maybe Ahsoka would help him, maybe she wouldn't, but he would not give up until it was accomplished.

Nearing the hangar, Vader was seized with a vivid fantasy: once he'd taken off in his TIE fighter, he would neither complete his assignment nor return to the Imperial Star Destroyer. He would make the quickest leap to hyperspace that he could calculate and lose all pursuit, then go looking for Ahsoka. First on Takodana, then wherever the Force took him.

A passing detachment of stormtroopers got knocked out of formation by a blast of Force-power as Vader crushed that thought. It was stupid. Deserting his post would never work. The Emperor would find him again; he knew that, and shuddered. What was more, he had to serve his master long enough, stay close to him long enough, to find his chance at destroying him.

The mechanism regulating his breath did not allow him to sigh in frustration – that itself was a grating reminder that even his body was not his own – but he ground his teeth as hard as his mask would let him. After the Hutts were dealt with, his master was still demanding the recovery of the data Ry Kyver deleted from her account in the Imperial network. Vader had left a computer hacker, the one he'd picked up on Takodana, chained to a computer terminal until she accomplished the work, but he was in no hurry for his master to get what he wanted. Vader reminded himself to comb any recovered data for bits that might be useful to him, and for bits that might be better "lost" before they reached his master.

Then he reached the hangar where his TIE sat waiting, and it was time to go deal with the Hutts.

13 BBY – 11 months – 27 days

Opening the little door to the black metal biomass burner, she was greeted by a welcome burst of dry heat. Carefully, she added two logs to the inferno and shut the door again, before readjusting the scratchy blanket that she wore in lieu of clothing. Her own clothes were in a rain-soaked heap on the floor. She disentangled the pants and tunic and started hanging them to dry on a makeshift clothesline while the pouring rain sounded a soft roar around the hut and the old woman nattered about why she should have wrung the wet clothes out somewhere outdoors first.

When her patched, beige-gone-grey wardrobe was firmly clipped to the short clothesline, she noticed a black line on the back of the tunic and picked off a strand of hair. Holding it up in the lamplight, she smiled. It stood straight and supple, like the reeds by the lake...

Ry opened her eyes to darkness, blinked, shook her head and blinked again. The soft roar of rain continued, despite her waking. Slowly it turned to a heavy drumming, then a steady patter, before it stopped completely. Rain, in the desert!

Ry was surprised, and then not surprised. No wonder she had dreamed of rain instead of sun this time. Dreams were like that, pulling in bits of subliminal sensory perception, sorting through pieces of memory or subconscious striving, and visualizing the result to the sleeper, along with a heavy dose of complete fabrication.

Ry stared up at the skylight. The clouds were thinning, catching the red light of an unseen moon. The hospital was quiet now, mostly, except for the soft whirr of medical equipment and a steady rhythmic wheezing coming from the next room, the Yemerian version of snoring.

The vivid dreams no longer seemed strange to Ry. It made sense. She'd had weird, surreal dreams born of stress as a teenager, after being assigned to the AgriCorps. Everything that had happened to her over the last few weeks was solidly worse than being assigned to the AgriCorps, and so it was only natural that her subconscious was looking for somewhere else to go besides reality.

It was weird, though, Ry thought, that of all people to appear in her dreams, a science teacher from her days as a Jedi youngling would show up. But that was who Ry had gradually realized the old woman in the dreams actually was, Knight Varda Wahi, though Ry found herself thinking of her just as Varda in the dreams. It was pretty trippy, actually, she thought: somehow her brain had managed to fabricate an image of the teacher true to the passage of time, greying and wrinkled, a couple of decades older than Ry remembered her in real life.

Ry wondered what had happened to Varda. She was probably dead now, which was a pity. Ry had been a bit snarky back in Varda's classes, a real smart-Alec, always trying to trip Varda up or show that she knew more than the other younglings, but she respected the human Jedi for being stern without seeming unsettled by her youthful misbehaviour.

That was real-Varda. Dream-Varda was a teacher, too, but she seemed to be also a friend and even a surrogate mother, if a severe one at times. But then her dream-self was younger too, more in need of this role. Perhaps that was what her subconscious was trying to sort out. Her life as she knew it was over. It was time to start over, like being a teenager all over again. Perhaps that was what she needed: a teacher, a friend, a mother to help guide her way. Maybe her subconscious wasn't just escaping, it was giving her exactly what she needed. Ry kind of loved herself for that. She was looking out for herself, subconsciously, she thought.

Ry watched the clouds unfurl in the reddish moonlight and then give way to clear sky. The rain had washed the desert haze from the air, and instead of orange-tinted stars, these shone clear blue-white. Three bright ones formed a perfect triangle above her. The sudden beauty of it almost hurt, taking Ry's breath away. For the first time in a long time, Ry forgot to mind being awake.

It was only in waking again that Ry realized she'd fallen back asleep, this time without dreaming. Dark sky had given way to a soft blue-green. Outside, the Siluans began their rhythmic Morning Chant. How did it not drive them crazy to do the same thing every day? Ry wondered.

Back in a bad mood, Ry flicked a stray piece of hair from the breast pocket of her hospital gown. It landed on her arm. She was about to flick it again when something niggled in her mind. She picked up the hair.

Something in that nutrient mix Dr. Unayat kept adjusting must have been working, because, in the less-than-twenty days since Ry had hacked her hair short back on Takodana, it had grown nearly three centimetres, the fastest she'd ever seen. She twirled the stray strand of hair between her fingers. It sprawled, twisting over itself in big chunky kinks.

That's when she remembered: in the dreams, her hair was straight. That was just plain weird. It made sense that her subconscious was trying to help her start over, but did it have to give her different hair? She was fine with her hair the way it was.

Not long after the Chant finished, Ry heard footsteps in the hall and then Dr. Gunma poked his head in. Ry was a bit surprised; he usually started his rounds at the other end of the hall.

"I'm guessing you might be bored," Dr. Gunma said as he walked up to Ry's bedside. In one hand, he held a slim flat box inside a beige drawstring bag.

Ry scowled. Dr. Unayat had said the same thing a day or two ago and offered her some knitting supplies. No matter how bored she was, there was no way on the face of the planet that Ry Kyver was going to knit.

"I don't have much to offer," Dr. Gunma said sheepishly, "but maybe you'd like something to read." The doctor opened the bag and pulled out a grey electronic device, slim and light enough to be portable but far more clunky than the average datapad. There was a solar panel on one side and a screen on the other.

"Hey, that's mine!" Ry reflectively reached for it but then realized that what she was doing was utterly ridiculous. She quickly withdrew her hands and folded her arms across her chest, ashamed and sullen.

Dr. Gunma gave her a sideways look. "I've had this since my undergraduate days," he said, "but you're welcome to borrow it while you're here if you like."

Ry took the device without saying thanks. Dr. Gunma placed the bag for it on her bedside table and left.

She did not notice him go. The digital file reader felt so familiar: the boxy shape, the weight of it in her hands. She ran her fingers across the smooth solar panel on the back. Cool to the touch, it evoked a wave of nostalgia. She remembered a rainy day, holding it up to catch the dim light as rain fell around the hut...

With one hand Ry smacked her forehead as if to knock the thought out of herself. That memory wasn't real. That was out of the dream-world. I am not going crazy, Ry promised herself. She had been spending too much time in the world of her dreams. It was time to think about something else.

Ry pressed the round button in the center of the space below the screen and waited for the device to boot up. She wondered what Dr. Gunma had been reading on here. It would be hilarious if a monk like him was reading smut in his spare time. As soon as the welcome screen appeared with green letters on a dark grey screen, Ry hit the center key again for the main menu and then pulled up the list of recent files. The top entry was a document titled #121 – 150. It opened in the middle of the file, at the top of a page: 142: In life let us say, Yet shall the Light be Unbroken. In death let us also say, Yet shall the Light be Unbroken.

Siluan texts. Ry might normally have rolled her eyes, but the phrase evoked a moment she didn't want to think about right now. Quickly, she navigated back to the main menu and selected the table of contents, then from that the list of books.

Comparative Avian and Reptilian Physiology

Environmental Toxicology of Desert Environments

Insectoid Surgical Procedures

Pathology and Epidemiology of Sclerora Viruses

Her eyes started to glaze over. Dr. Gunma probably had every single textbook from his medical studies in here.

Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry I – IV

Ry let the scroll key hover over that one. That was her specialty, back in the AgriCorps. She kind of missed the mental stimulation of solving problems like that, but the connection to her past life was not something she wanted to deal with.

Down the list, Ry went. At the end was a long series of numbered files, all Siluan texts. She started at the top again before screwing her eyes shut in frustration. She was not going to read Siluan texts. She was too sick of being in hospital to read anything medical.

But failure to return to sleep soon sent Ry back to the DFR. A little more poking, and she discovered some audio files: talks by Siluan elders, mostly, but there was some music in there too. Yemerian folk-pop was not exactly to her taste, but she found a pair of wired earbuds in the drawstring bag and soon found that the intricate drumbeats did help kill the waking hours.

With her eyes closed and music turned up, Ry was surprised to feel a hand touch her arm. There was Dr. Unayat, saying something she couldn't hear. Ry gave her a blank look, and Dr. Unayat motioned for her to take out the earbuds.

"How are you feeling?" the doctor asked.

Ry scowled and shrugged. The doctor made a note on her datapad.

"Stick out your tongue."

Ry obliged, still scowling.

"Better than before. Now show me your fingernails."

Ry turned up her palms and curled her fingers. Dr. Unayat clicked her tongue and tapped a white spot on the nail of Ry's left middle finger. "You need a little more zinc," she said, and adjusted a dial on the IV machine after making another note on her datapad. "We will get you started on solid food today. That will help with your recovery."

"If you really wanted to help me, you could give me more sedatives," Ry challenged Dr. Unayat. This never worked, but she liked the way it riled the Twi'lek doctor.

It was the doctor's turn to scowl. "You don't need more sedatives," she said sternly.

"I'm awake, that means I need more sedatives," Ry drawled.

Dr. Unayat didn't answer this time. She just pressed her lips together and set about changing the dressing that held Ry's IV tube in place.

Ry, who had been watching the doctor's lilac hands at work, wasn't sure why she suddenly looked up, but just as she glanced past the doctor to the slightly open curtain to the hallway, she gasped.

Maybe it was the slightly hunched shape of the shoulders or the uneven lilt to her walk, but Ry felt she would have known that figure anywhere. It was hard to tell details; the light in the hallway was dimmer than in her cubicle, but Ry was sure she saw a humanoid figure, brown with greying hair, who stopped and looked through the gap in the curtain before abruptly moving on.

"Wait, who is that?" Ry demanded.

"Another patient," Dr. Unayat said. "Never mind."

"She looks like someone I know!" Ry insisted.

"I doubt it. Now get some rest."

"Tell her I want to talk to her," Ry pressed.

"What you need is rest," the doctor said implacably.

Growling, Ry shoved the earbuds back in and turned the music up louder than before, frustrated at being stuck here like this, angry at having embarrassed herself with a silly outburst again. Why did she have to keep on doing things like that? It was just that she could have sworn that Varda, dream-Varda not real-Varda, had just walked past her cubicle.

It gave her a shifty, sideways feeling: recognition born of deep familiarity, yet absolute certainty that it was impossible. Her mind was playing tricks on her, Ry decided. So much for her subconscious having her best interest at heart.

Ry gripped her skull with both hands and pressed hard, willing her subconscious to do only what she wanted it to do.

Then she realized what she was doing was stupid. That was the whole point of a subconscious: it does whatever it wants. Huffing out a long sigh, Ry turned up the volume on her music yet again and put one arm over her eyes to block out the skylight.

She kind of wished Varda, dream-Varda, really had come to the hospital. She could use the company, even if she was just going to scold her.

Three days of Empire Day celebrations, three days of watching puppets come and go: hundreds of moffs and admirals bowing low before his dais and thousands of stormtroopers marching in formation through the streets of Coruscant. Speeches and toasts to the glory of his Empire. Technicians scurrying to project his image on millions of massive screens throughout the galaxy, to be watched by billions and trillions of sentient subjects.

Yet all that would be so utterly banal and meaningless if not for the delightfully grim irony that twisted the Emperor's lips in a thin smile: they did not know they were all puppets and this was all just another act in a play. At the end of the previous act he had destroyed the Republic and the Separatists and the Jedi; at the end of this act, he would destroy the Empire with its loyalists and rebels also. On and on, one act after another, until he achieved his desire, until he alone existed, all-powerful, all-sufficient unto himself, needing nothing and no one.

But in the present act, one puppet was missing, one puppet whose role in the plot was required for this act to reach its intended climax. Vader might hold the greater power, but Ry had the ability to manipulate life. She was the one he had chosen as his tool to discover the secret Darth Plagueis had refused to tell him: the means to manipulate the midichlorians themselves and so sustain unending life. He promised himself he would achieve this, even as he wearied from day after day of the pomp required to act out his own part in this play; one day he would be able to create the body of his choosing and live forever in whatever form he wished.

To reach that end, he was willing to be patient, but not infinitely patient. If Ry failed him, he would seek another path, but that could take decades longer. First, he would do all in his power to find her. If she had indeed found the secret, as he prophesied she would, she would be made to share it. If not, then it was Vader's turn to have his way with her.

Alone in his throne room again at last, the Emperor drew the holocron to himself and let it hang faintly luminous in the dark air before him. It was an unusual artifact, neither Sith tetrahedron nor Jedi cube, but a dodecahedron, designed in ancient days, before holocrons were made to respond to one side of the Force only, though its revelations would depend on the user's allegiance.

Spreading his fingers in the air, the Emperor caused the holocron to dissociate into twelve pieces, spreading outwards with a thin thread of eerie green light connecting them until they formed an oval a little taller and a little wider than himself. He narrowed his eyes at the matt blackness, darker even that the darkness of his throne room, willing the holocron to do his will. Slowly, as if taking its time, a string of text appeared, just a poison-green blur at first but gradually resolving into flowing cursive text that read: Doors to the World Between Worlds.

This title faded as in the same way that it had come, and was replaced by a body of prose in the same font. The Emperor merely skimmed this; it concerned the nature of these in-between places through which one could reach other points on the space-time continuum, or even alternate realities and parallel universes; the differences between the transfer of energy and the transfer of matter through these so-called doors and the dangers of violating certain limitations.

With wave after wave of his hand, the Emperor dismissed this. Little of it was unknown to him. Not perhaps in as many words, but he had long intuited, since his earliest years exploring the Force that reality, as known to most people, was only one side of a great tapestry. The Force conferred the ability for a select few to turn that tapestry over and follow threads that seemed to be lost but continued unseen, linking seemingly disparate points in space and time.

At last, after some thousands of words of text he would not be bothered to read, there appeared a list.

The Emperor smiled. That was what he was looking for. His own native ability to navigate that tapestry of space and time was not yielding any knowledge of Ry Kyver's whereabouts, but perhaps if he dropped his tapestry metaphor and passed through one of these "doors" he might experience fuller access to all the Force could tell him.

The list was long and it was not after the standard order of arebesh: Sanej, Lothal, Hynestia... A little exploration showed that touching any item on the list opened a long block of text concerning the nature and history of the site, along with its coordinates. It was in fact more information than he had expected. Waving his bony hand to scroll down and down, he focused on sensing, not analyzing, which would be the best one to begin with.

He reached the end of the hundreds-long list. The final entry read: Everywhere and Nowhere.

Anticipation quickened his pulse, and he touched the words with the tip of his index finger. The whole list rippled, faded and there was a subtle shift in the blackness of the oval, becoming less a matte black and more the black of dark open space. There was the faintest movement of air, not towards him but away from him, as if a door had opened on a thinner atmosphere.

He reached out a hand to explore whether some portal had indeed opened and indeed, his hand was able to reach beyond the plane of the luminescent oval, into a place slightly cooler than the one he was in.

Somewhat stiffly, he rose and stepped off his throne and through the portal.

The dim gleam of his throne room did not follow him. For a moment, he stood in pitch blackness, a slight pressure at his feet suggesting an unseen surface beneath him and letting him know that gravity did indeed impart an up and down to this place, but not so strongly as it did on Coruscant. The air, devoid of movement, was cool but not cold, dry yet not stale, smelling slightly of freshly cut stone. He could hear nothing, and the silence held the quality of boundless space.

He took a step forward; the Force, he knew, favoured the bold. At once letters appeared before him, luminous green as before, but scrawled in hasty handwriting by an unseen hand: Enter, but be advised to seek knowledge only. The transfer of matter and energy through these Doors may have unexpected effects.

"I am aware of that," the Emperor said tersely. He had heard as much from Darth Plagueis, that in his old Master's experience with these "worlds between worlds," it would be in his best interest to find Ry, interrogate her, and return her via the door she came through. It would not be hard for him to put her into a trance so that she would be obliged to remain in place until he sent someone to fetch her.

The letters only burned more brightly. In a flush of impatience, the Emperor brushed them aside with one hand. It felt for a moment like brushing aside cobwebs, and then they were gone.

At his feet, fine white lines appeared, tracing a path straight ahead. He looked all throughout the spacious dark, more such lines were forming: crossing each other at right angles, arching up or under each other in the perfect curve of semi-circles and half-ellipses. Some paths seemed to go on forever. Others ended in an oval archway, traced in the same white lines. Indeed, when he looked back, he could see one such archway behind him, his empty throne awaiting his return on the other side.

He strode forward with purpose now, his steps making no sound but leaving ripples on the black surface of the path. It was easy to move, and he felt his body to be younger and stronger in this nowhere-yet-everywhere place.

Up and over, down and under along the paths, from time to time he glimpsed scenes through an archway: ancient Mandalorians with laser-canons blazing, war ships raining down electric fire; clone troops and droids from his own manufactured war marching in formation. The old Jedi Master Yoda sitting beside a twisted tree – he looked older than the Emperor had last seen him, and so perhaps this was an image from the present. He would come back for the old troll later. The whole warp and weft of space and time, past and present and even future, it was all here. He smiled. A new vista of knowledge and power lay open before him.

Yet some archways remained dark and yielded nothing at all. None of them showed any sign of Ry. He decided firmer action was needed, and stopped in his tracks. The ripples on the surface of the path died away and only the eternal white lines of the edges remained.

"Where is Ry Kyver?" the Emperor demanded into the expanse of the holocron. His voice did not echo.

Across the immense space of paths and walkways arching and dipping over and beneath and around him, a few portals flickered, one near, one far, one dimly distant, and then went black. He strode quickly to the nearest one. "Where is Ry Kvyer?" he demanded. The portal flickered with an indiscernible image again before going dark. He reached out his hand, yet what looked like open space under the archway was as solid as a stone wall. He commanded it again and again, but each time, nothing.

He ran his gaze over the thousands of portals further in the distance, but could not longer tell which ones had responded to his earlier request. No command or request or manipulation of the Force would cause any of the dark portals to distinguish themselves again.

Disgusted, the Emperor turned to go back to his own portal. Perhaps if he read the holocron's contents in more detail, he might gain some new insight for finding Ry in this place.

He was walking back when a portal to his right, lit up and caught his eye: it showed a young woman, eyes flashing as she gripped the arm of a boy who was doing his best to hit her. He knew this image. Turning to face it, he walked closer and began to hear voices through the archway. "Let me go!" the boy yelled. "Not until you do as I say!" the woman hissed back.

The Emperor smiled. He remembered that day clearly: the anger that burned in his young chest as his mother twisted his arm, forcing his will to bend to hers. He made a promise to himself that day, that one day he would grab her by the throat, and squeeze and squeeze. She would beg him to release her and he would not, not until her life extinguished. That was why he smiled, because he had kept his promise. He still remembered the way her neck felt, convulsing for breath as he held her in Force-grip.

With that, the Emperor had an idea: he had found a portal to his own past life, and his life most certainly intersected with Ry's. Of course, the last time he had seen her was quite some time ago. Yet might it be that if he could pull her out of the past, her present self would be the one to follow into this space beyond space and time? He would have to consider this. It would not necessarily do to change the past by bringing a former day's Ry Kyver out of it. He would also need to find a way to speed through the images of his own life and not be stuck watching an irrelevant fifty years' worth of other material.

"Holocron, I will return to this portal. Mark my path here."

The archway around the portal glowed faint green, and when the Emperor turned to go, he looked back and saw that the path behind him was traced in an intricate pattern of white dots.

Your changes have been saved, the holocron's flowing script informed him as he reached his own portal and stepped back onto his throne.

The twelve pieces of the holocron still formed the oval gateway to darkness before him. With one hand, he drew them back together to re-form the dodecahedron, then spreading his fingers, he opened it again. Again, there was the title: Doors to the World Between Worlds. It faded, and was replaced by the same long text of explanations and instructions. This time, Emperor decided to read more carefully. Ry Kyver was out there, and somehow, he was going to find her.

BBY 13 – 11 months – 24 days

Atmosphere whistled sharply against the battered hull. She forced herself to breathe the fear out, breathe the fear out, breathe the fear out...but fear gripped her all the same.

For one split second there was the crack of timbers, and then the solid thud of impact nearly ripped mind from body. Dislodged debris rained down with a clatter, and then all was silent.

The silence was worse.

She sat, catatonic, for how long she didn't know. Then with a sudden urge, she struggled out of safety straps that tried to grab her arms and legs. Stumbling into the cockpit, she found the pilot – her new friend – face down on the control panel. One touch of his shoulder told her he was dead.

Heart pounding, Ry mentally clawed her way out of the dream and into waking. She sat up and looked around her: the blinds were drawn over the skylight but around the edges showed the grey Yemerian rainy-season sky. The dun walls and dull green curtains of her dim hospital cell were reassuringly banal all around her. She ran her hands over the textured weave of the hospital blanket and breathed deep the smell of alcohol-based disinfectant, reassuring herself that she was here, reminding herself that it was just a dream, the crash wasn't real.

Real or not, grounding herself in the waking world did not make her feel less shaken. She was a good pilot, good enough to fly through the debris field surrounding the dead planet Yalith and come out unscathed. Being a helpless passenger as the starship crashed...even without the pilot's death, that image alone was both terrifying and humiliating.

There was a grim sort of symbolism to it, perhaps: given her present state it was not hard to imagine why her subconscious would conjure up images of crashing, powerless to prevent it. That was the thread that had been weaving through her dreams over the last couple of days: failure, powerlessness.

In another dream a day or so before, she had dreamed she was back in the creche, a Jedi youngling just beginning her training. There was an exercise all the younglings had to do: taking a coloured handkerchief and making it float in the air. Later, they'd practice using the Force to tie it in knots or wrap it around a stick.

Ry was good at that exercise, back when she was a kid. She could remember being one of the first in her clan to get her red handkerchief in the air, and looking smugly around at her crechemates struggling with the exercise.

Not so in the dream. In the dream, she tried and failed and failed again, and her face burned with a child's hot shame. The symbolism was obvious: she'd lost her Force skills. She was like a child, back at square one, and not a particularly adept child either.

She'd been trying so hard to block all that out. Why did her subconscious have to go and rub it in her face?

Ry reached for the DFR, shoved in the earbuds, and turned up the music. Lying back, she waited for the melodic sound to do its work. A few days prior, she had discovered more than just Yemerian folk-pop in Dr. Gunma's music files. Ithorian wind sonatas were more to her taste, and they had a meditative effect that allowed her to slip away from reality.

Almost slip away. Alongside the rise and fall of the music, Ry could hear two things: rain drumming on the skylight and the Siluan monastics beginning their noonday chant. She shifted uncomfortably and turned up the volume.

It was hard to hate the Siluans the way she once had. They were caring for her at a time when showing up at a state-run hospital could mean the wrong people would find out who she was. But she still didn't trust them, or rather, she didn't trust the effect she was beginning to suspect they were having on her.

More than once, Siluan figures with their monastic robes and stone amulets had appeared in her dreams. The dream she just woke up from was case in point. It started out as a dream of being assigned to the AgriCorps, but not the way it had happened in reality. In reality, she was called to a meeting of the Council for Reassignment along with two other younglings, furious because she knew what was coming as an old Zabrak Jedi master with a whispery voice and a long grey beard gave a long, patronizing speech about what great work the AgriCorps did. She remembered wanting to knock the horns off his head one by one.

No, in the dream she was walking down the halls of the Temple alone to a tall blue door and behind the door was a slim Kaminoan Jedi she didn't know. The patronizing talk was the same, but what was different was that a Siluan monastic was there: a round little human the same shade of brown as his robe, who protested that she was only to go if she was willing. In the dream, she followed him to his starship and off they went into space. Then the starship crashed and he was dead.

Ry tried to breathe evenly and focus on the flow of the music, hoping to tune out this train of thought, but the part of her mind that wanted to have reasons and explanations was an itch hard not to scratch. Was it symbolic, perhaps? It was that damned Siluan witch-hunt that landed her here in the wreck she'd made of her life. But it didn't make sense that in the dream she genuinely felt she liked the pilot who died in the crash, just like in a dream she'd had of talking to Ava Kirrin in a dark garden, glad for his reassuring presence. It didn't make sense that she'd feel that way in her dreams. It was as if the Siluans were somehow reaching into her mind and establishing a presence there.

As she ran through the dreams in her mind, searching for connections and clues to either prove or disprove this hypothesis, something odd occurred to her: the vague sense of connection. Somehow it felt like that starship from the crash was the same one that she visited so often in the dreams of the lake and the old woman. It was a trippy feeling, one that made her stomach feel like electricity, and not in a good way. Soon she was swallowing back nausea. It didn't help that the solid food they'd started her on just seemed to sit in her stomach. Some kind of wafers. She was pretty sure they were made of ground-up insects.

As quickly as she could with her sore ribs, Ry sat up to reach for her glass of water. The water was a lot better now, with the rainy season replacing the somewhat chalky well-water. Soon her stomach was feeling better.

As she took a final sip she caught the eye of Dr. Unayat, who was entering the curtained-off room with a look of purpose. The Noonday Chant must be over, Ry decided, and pulled out her earbuds.

To Ry's relief, the doctor did not ask her to stick out her tongue. "There is good news!" the doctor said brightly. "We've had a visit from our friend the smuggler."

Ry snickered and then coughed, choking on her water. She wasn't sure which was more bizarre, the fact that non-possessive monastics were friends with smugglers or the way Dr. Unayat's accent made the word smuggler sound like smawgler.

The middle-aged Twilek flinched slightly and scowled. Ry, still coughing, gave herself an inner kick in the pants. The woman was trying to help her; maybe she could try to be less of a jerk.

"So what's the good news?" Ry asked.

"They brought us some bacta, the real bacta."

Ry took a minute to register the implications of this.

"We have a lot of patients to put through, but I think we can have you in the bacta tank within a couple of days," Dr. Unayat said, awkwardly trying to escape her accent and quickly falling back into it. "During the war, I worked in a clinic that used bacta immersion along with certain intravenous nutrient serums to accelerate healing. The technique is somewhat experimental, but I've seen patients worse than you recover completely with it."

"Oh, wow, that would be great!" Ry said, with the first real smile and honest burst of gratitude she'd had in a long time.

"Our main goal will be to eradicate the last of your bacterial infection. Once that is gone, you will be able to leave the hospital. Your ribs will take a bit longer, but the bacta should finish healing your shrapnel wound and your ribs will begin to heal more quickly also."

"Sounds good to me," Ry said.

The doctor scanned Ry's face. "You have a lot of tension, even in your sleep," she said. "I think we will put you under sedation while you are in the bacta tank. It will help to release your body from your mind. The stress of your thoughts is holding you back from getting better completely."

Ry tensed and scowled at that. She didn't like being so readable.

"I thought you liked being unconscious," Dr. Unayat said.

There was a twist to her lips and a flicker in her eyes that told Ry the doctor was trying to be funny. It was kind of pathetic, Ry thought, and rolled her eyes. "Anyways," she said, "let me know when it's time to go in."

13 BBY – 11 months – 22 days

When Ry's turn came and she was wheeled down the hall to the makeshift bacta tank, pain still throbbing from the infected wound in her right thigh, her head still swimming, it was with a deep sense of foreboding. She told herself it was just because she didn't know what was supposed to happen when she got better and finally left the hospital.

But when she came to the shallow dugout in the earthen floor, lined with a waterproof tarp and filled with bacta-like liquid crystal, she stared into the fifty-centimetre depth as if the bottom held some ominous hidden portal.

"It's clean, don't worry," Dr. Unayat said dryly, when she saw the look on Ry's face.

Ry rolled her eyes and didn't respond. However primitive the setup might be, she'd take it if it meant getting better sooner. She pushed herself up out of the wheelchair and tried to stand on her feet.

"Careful now!" Dr. Unayat cautioned, reaching out to steady her patient. Ry wobbled dangerously before accepting the outstretched hand.

The doctor steadied Ry as she stepped out of her hospital slippers and shed her hospital gown, shivering slightly as she submitted to have her IV tube reattached to the stubby base the medical staff had left in her arm. Last of all, the doctor passed her an oxygen mask. "We would like to keep you in the tank for two rotations, under sedation, but we will monitor your condition to determine the best time to bring you out. I will use the lowest possible dose of sedative at first and so you may still experience some awareness, especially at first," Dr. Unayat explained.

"Right," Ry said tersely, then lifted the mask over her face. Each breath felt smooth and artificially pure after the mix of dry desert air and hospital antiseptic.

With Dr. Unayat's help, she stepped into the tank. She'd been in bacta before. This felt somehow more viscous than she remembered, but she welcomed its silky touch.

Yet by the time she was sitting down in the thick liquid, Ry found she had to take a few deep breaths before she could lie back and allow herself to be submerged in the fluid. Perhaps what she feared was the sedative. Where was her mind going to go in all that time? She resolved to remain in control even as the flow of drugs through her IV blurred her awareness.

She stood on the stone hill;

stars sang in the dark purple sky.

Thistle-down borne on the breeze

caught the light of the crescent moon.

The moon was setting,

dropping down behind the dark woods.

Walking in the garden, she heard:

swoosh of wings.

She turned.

There stood the night-bird, dark wings folded,

round white face lifted to look into hers.

The bird beckoned.

Down the hill,

down into the dark woods.

She felt her way among the branches,

deeper into the forest.

There she found fungi,

mushroom-caps in the leaf-mould,

gleaming phosphorescent.

She stooped to look:

insects explored their glowing gills.

Without warning,

fear filled her;

she knew not why. She

tried to run,

But bushes blocked the dark path,

There was no way;

the path was lost.

Then crack!

A twig snapped.

A haunting laugh

ran chill through her veins.

Heart pounding, Ry became just aware enough to know that she was dreaming, yet her limbs and even her mind felt heavy, immovable despite her sudden urge to wake up, to get out of this dream at all costs. She tried to wrestle her mind away, but still she was trapped in her dream-body, which shivered more from fear than from cold.

The light of the lamp the stranger lit

flooded the forest,

harsh and unwelcome.

Sunken eyes and wavy hair,

haggard yet not old,

the stranger cackled when she caught sight of her.

She knew, without being told,

this was the monster they were talking about.

This was the killer even Ava Kirrin feared.

She turned to run,

run anywhere, but

she can't move.

No, no, no!

Held fast in Force-grip,

she fought to get free,

fought like fury,

fury and hate rising like a storm within her.

In the midst of the dream, Ry knew that for some good reason she couldn't remember, she couldn't move her real body. Yet she could feel the muscles of her dream-body go tense and wire-tight, kicking, biting, screaming to get out. And her real mind wanted out of the dream. She knew, in unspoken dream-logic, what was going to happen, yet she couldn't seem to either wake up or turn her thoughts away.

A reprieve in that death-grip, unexpected.

She still can't move, but

she can breathe.

She breathes and finds

one prick of light

shines through her darkness:

her core is yet unshaken.

A spark awakens,

she sees a way.

(

There is only

just

enough

time.

)

She knows she'll die, but

she will not die in utter darkness

if she does but one thing.

That one thing:

she wills it

with every fibre of her being, and

the spark within her

becomes a star

going supernova.

It would have been like watching a holo-vid if she wasn't so totally within her dream-body. It was completely surreal.

Then pain came,

wrenching bone from bone,

mind from body,

twisting, shattering.

Pain was all she knew,

until awareness dissolved

into oblivion.

Ry screwed her eyes shut. She was sure they were screwed shut and yet the white brightness behind her eyes remained. She was almost giddy with relief for a second before the pit of her stomach became all vertigo and dissonance.

But that stomach-feel was not in the body that had died. She was simply watching as that bright nothingness resolved into images: a twisted body seen from above: skinny, clothed in rumpled grey, black hair dishevelled.

Then, in the dream, her point of view changed. She was not watching from above. She was standing on the ground in a circle of lamplight in the dark forest, walking over matted leaves to the crumpled human form and kicking at it with her boot. That's when Ry realized: she was in the body of the stranger.

Ry fought to wake up. She wanted it more than anything, but she couldn't.

BBY 13 – 11 months – 19 days

It was a calculated risk. The only other biological beings on site were asleep in the lifepod outside the entrance to the mine, and the excavation droids were lined up beside an empty shipping container, awaiting activation. During her earlier scouting, Ahsoka had watched as a full container was picked up by a cargo freighter and replaced by this empty one. She did not think that there would be any further traffic to or from this nameless moon again until the shipping container was full of its mystery cargo and ready to collect.

And so she hovered at the entrance to the mine, jetpack suspending her against the moon's low gravity, then let herself descend slowly into the darkness of the three-metre-wide shaft. All she could smell was the artificial oxygen that fed through her life-support mask, donned for the thin atmosphere, but against her face and arms and lekku she could feel a slight upward draft of warm air, the same temperature as the air behind and above her, suggesting that the mine had other entrances and exits besides this one.

Down she went, along the slope of the tunnel, looking back from time to time at the opening she'd left behind. It was only when she could no longer see the starry sky that Ahsoka stopped and ventured to turn on her small flashlight.

She had almost expected to find a control room, but instead the yellow beam illumined only porous grey stone walls, not unlike the material she had seen on the moon's surface. Around her was a wide passageway that continued at a slight slope downwards. That was somewhat disappointing. She would have liked a computer she could check for logs and files that would give her a better idea of what these mining contractors were up to on behalf of their Imperial contact. But there might be other evidence she could still collect. She adjusted her jetpack for a cautious but slightly higher speed of forward movement, and on she went.

Ahead, the passageway flattened out. The air remained warm with a slight breeze and the walls never altered from that rough grey stone, recently blasted, she could tell, to make way for the tunnel. But the space in the tunnel gradually gathered a tense energy that Ahsoka initially had trouble distinguishing from her own. Yet the further she went, the more clearly it sang out in her mind, high and shrill, with greater fear and greater sadness than she herself felt.

Then up ahead was a sharp end to the broad passageway: a gaping darkness that extended further down and further across than her small light could reach. Even though the closed space made Ahsoka feel uncomfortably pressed and caged, she was instinctively drawn to that place and her heart beat faster as she accelerated her jet pack to bring her more quickly to the edge.

In the beam of her flashlight a deep, wide cave opened up below and before her with a beauty that caught her breath one moment and had her feeling angry and betrayed the next. She had wondered what exactly the mining contractor meant in the message she'd intercepted, in which they told the head of Imperial weapons development that they had found a new vein of crystal. Except for a dark jagged slice where the crystals had been cut away, the whole floor of the cave sparkled with sharp blue crystals, every one of them singing the pain of betrayal into the Force.

The only other place she'd seen kyber crystals growing like this was Ilum. It had sickened and saddened her when she learned that Ilum had been gutted, but it made sense that the Emperor who destroyed the Jedi would destroy their sacred sites also. This place was different, just an airless moon with no signs that the Jedi ever knew of it. This wasn't about desecrating a sacred site. It was a mining operation, plain and simple.

Why did they want to mine kyber crystals? she wondered. Even if they recruited every Force-sensitive left in the galaxy, they wouldn't need that many lightsabres. No, it wasn't for lightsabres, at least not for small ones. She shuddered at the thought of what the Sith lords might come up with.

Ahsoka made her way across the cave, never far from the surface, stopping from time to time to touch smooth surfaces and hard edges of the kybers. Kybers weren't like other crystals. They held memories, personalities even, and the Force sparked in each one. Something in them knew that they shouldn't be taken, not like this.

For a long while, Ahsoka just let herself float there in the cave. Part of her wanted to gather up all the crystals and take them with her. That was impossible. Part of her wanted to lie in wait for whatever cargo vessel came to pick them up, and then blast it out of the sky. That was inadvisable. Her goal was not to kill civilians, nor to risk retribution for the attack falling on an uninvolved suspect.

Making her way back out of the cave, she did the one thing she could do: on the bottom of the workers' lifepod, she planted a recording device that would pick up any signals sent to or from the site. Not much good that would do, part of her said, but it could be one more piece in the picture she was gradually building of Imperial operations. She added a tracking beacon to the shipping container for good measure.

The sky above was full of sharp bright stars and the dark side of the pock-marked moon gleamed faintly red in the light of the nearby planet as Ahsoka made her way back to her starship.

R7-A7, her astromech, beeped a greeting and then a question on her return.

She shrugged. "More questions, mostly," she said. "Let's head for Yemer."

Ahsoka selected the destination from a list on the starship's computer, then double-checked her timetable. She winced. This detour to follow up on the intercepted intelligence regarding the mining operation had put her slightly off schedule for her return to Yemer. But it was a calculated risk. She didn't think Ry was likely to cause the kind of harm Varda feared, and based on what she'd seen when she scouted out the Siluan hospital, Ry likely wouldn't be out for a few days yet and the journey to Yemer would only take about twenty hours. If anything did go differently, she had her drone in the area, programmed to follow Ry and keep track of her position until Ahsoka could get there.

Yet Ahsoka found herself anxious to get to Yemer quickly, lest the plan to capture Ry should fail. Whatever side Ry was on now, she knew things Ahsoka might not find out any other way: insider secrets of Imperial governance, or some insight into the Sith lord's counsels. Maybe, if she was lucky, Ry knew what they were planning to do with all that kyber crystal.

But whether she did or not, information was information. The rebellion, if it could be called that, was still only a disconnected assortment of idealistic do-gooders and small-time terrorists. She needed every scrap of information she could get to know what exactly the Sith and their Empire were up to, and where the weak points lay for a more coordinated effort to exploit.

Lights out and transponder off, only the barest necessary engine function running, Ahsoka and her droid made their way slowly up from the moon, barely detectable in case anyone was watching, until they had a clear path for the leap to hyperspace.

There were two possibilities, as Ry saw it, or three rather.

One was that she was out of her mind. Dreaming that girl's death from the girl's point of view was so far beyond anything she would usually consider to be part of her normal self, that it could only come from some form of insanity. Yet as bad as things were, Ry didn't think she was that screwed up.

Another possibility was that the Siluans, with all their evening and morning chants and yet-shall-the-Light-be-unbroken, were bending the Force around them and after so long in the hospital, it was starting to get to her. That was conceivable. Her first reason for striking out against the Siluans came from experiences she had back in her AgriCorps days. She had a technique for bleeding life out of one organism to enhance the vigour of another – for example, killing a bird to get fatter heads of grain. It was a Darkside technique, faster and more effective than Lightside methods for getting the same result, but it didn't work when she was at any of the AgriCorps stations where Siluans collaborated with the Jedi. So she knew that even if they couldn't use the Force as such, they still could influence the balance of Light and Dark around them.

In her vulnerable state of mind, all but stripped of her Force powers, Ry wouldn't put it past the Siluans to affect her mind in a way that would produce such a disturbing dream. They wouldn't do it deliberately, perhaps, but the vibe of the dream was the sort of thing that would come from them, that willingness to see another person's point of view, that intention to choose Light even in the teeth of death.

Trying to destroy the Siluans hadn't panned out so well for her and she wasn't going to go that route now that they had helped her, but she wanted to get away from them, far away, somewhere where she could be alone and separate out what belonged to her own mind versus what was affecting her from outside.

Ava Gerges powered down the speeder and folded his spidery hands in his lap.

Ry, who had been silent for the hour-long drive between the hospital and Ava Gerges' place, sat rooted to the passenger seat, staring ahead without really seeing the twisted grey clouds on the horizon. It was all just too screwed up: her power was gone, her position was gone, her data was gone and now that she was out of hospital she had nowhere to go, nowhere except Ava Gerges' place.

He sighed. "I don't get the sense that you want to talk right now," he said dryly, "but you're welcome to join me for lunch if you like. Are you hungry?"

Ry shrugged.

Ava Gerges got up from the driver's seat and extracted his long frame from the low vehicle. Ry didn't budge.

"The guest room is ready for you if you'd rather take a rest," he said gently, pointing with a long spindly arm to the earthen mound next to his.

Still, Ry said nothing.

Ava Gerges let his arm fall to his side. He waited, watching the wind ruffle Ry's frizzy hair around her catatonic face. He looked up at the sky, grey clouds still dropping no rain. "Let yourself in when you're ready," he said, and went inside.

Midday darkened as heavier clouds moved across the sky. There was a third possibility. The dream could have been real, or rather, it could have been a memory.

Things like that could happen, Ry knew. She herself had experienced the energies of the ancient Sith, still present eons later on the dead planet Yalith. It made her queasy to think of it now, but she knew that something of the Sith still remained there; because they had willed it, they had made it so.

In her final moments, that girl had willed something with all her might, willed it with a strength Ry would not have thought possible for a Siluan. It was unthinkable, yet that girl had gathered up whatever Light she had within her, and she had willed, knowingly, to share it with Ry Kyver.

Ry knew the girl she'd been in the dream had meant it as a gift, not a weapon; though, Ry thought bitterly, sarcastically, in a sense she was really only trying to save some last piece of herself. In the dream, that is.

But if it was real, if the girl really had targeted her final energies like that, it could be that what had happened to Ry wasn't just the Force severance that came with the cancelling out of opposing energies. It could be that something of that girl, that essence within her that she had willed to share, had stuck with Ry the way the energies of the ancient Sith stuck to Yalith. And if something of that girl had stuck with Ry, embedding itself in the part of the Force that Ry carried with her, that could even explain those weird vivid dreams: those too could be drawn from the girl's memories.

It made more sense than Ry wanted it to make. Besides the gut-level sense of continuity, of the dreams all somehow being disjointed pieces of the same story, the very body she had in those dreams was not her own body. It wasn't just younger, it was smaller and skinnier. Her hair in the dreams was dead straight black, instead of her own kinky-curly dark brown. In other words, she dreamed she was in the body she left mangled in the forest back on Iwaki.

Ry shook her head hard. That was way too screwed up. Possible, yes, but so screwed up that she would rather think she was crazy.

Struck by a sudden desire to get away, to be anywhere but here and inside any space of mind but her current one, Ry seized an impulse: she lifted one long leg over the control box that sat between the driver's and the passenger's seats, then hoisted herself up and over it to sit behind the steering console. The controls weren't entirely familiar, but it wasn't hard to guess: one button to power on the anti-grav, a lever to release the safety brake, and another lever to thrust the vehicle into motion.

Ry had no real idea where she was going, but with a twist of the steering console she swung the speeder around and powered off, swerving through the hummocky ground until she reached the open spaces of the desert plain and sped off toward the horizon.

Hearing the sound of the motor, Ava Gerges came out and watched her go, one long hand shading his eyes from the sky's silver-grey light. "I wondered if that might happen," he said softly, stoically, then disappeared back through his wicker door, coming out again a minute later with a cloth-wrapped bundle.

Looking up to the sky, he gave a long high whistle. Soon a speck overhead darted downwards, and a huge dark bird swooped down, flapping and then folding his long wings as he landed on Ava Gerges' thin shoulder, talons gripping into the worn cloth of his black cassock. The lanky monk held out a morsel for the bird to eat and then scratched him under the chin.

"Ruhk, I wonder if you could keep an eye on her, and give her this," he held up the bundle.

In his curved beak, the bird took the bundle, then spread his broad wings. Ava Gerges staggered a little as the bird pushed off from his shoulder. With a whoosh of wings, he flew away.

Rubbing the spot where the bird had landed, Ava Gerges watched him disappear into the grey sky, taking the westward route he'd seen Ry go.

He did not see that something else had also followed Ry: no bigger than a locust, it flew after the speeder, electronic eyes locked on its target, as Ahsoka's drone did exactly what she'd programmed it to do.

Endnote: My handling of Vader in this chapter was influenced by the Double Agent Vader series by Fialleril, available on Archive of Our Own. Do look it up! It's some of the best fanfiction I've ever read.