Kasen was telling him how terrible an idea it had been when he woke up.

"You idiot. Did you see what just happened there? We had to fish you out of the ocean with a magnet. An InterGalactic Ore Combine Ore-Tex 785 Magnetic Crane. That costs money."

The idea that Kasen had said 'we' floated through Maul's groggy brain even before he got surprised that the miner was still around. There were other people in the room, three of them, wearing overalls and goggles. He groaned.

"What do you remember?" said an old woman's voice. When Maul focused, he could see that one of the people wearing goggles was an elderly, orange-skinned Nikto. She held herself authoritatively, with squared shoulders and a level gaze, and judging by her age and the yellow badge on her coverall, she probably was.

Maul sat up before he bothered answering her.

"I left you. I fell into the sea."

More importantly, I came to Orsis to find my past.

Nearly drowning had knocked that certainty into him. He was here because he needed to find something, or learn something, or resolve something. The fact that he didn't know what it was or whether it was a physical or mental thing frightened him, but he was used to fear. He could swim in fear more easily than he could swim in the ocean.

He remembered drowning.

The water had still been blue, the sun filtering far, far down, so that he had been able to see the bubbles kicked up by his arms as he flailed, clawing at the expanse of water as he tried to get back to the surface. He could kick his legs, but they seemed to get heavier and heavier as the metal pieces kept dragging him down. It had taken far too long. For a few minutes, he had been able to sustain his blood-oxygen count simply by slowing his heart rate and brain, falling into something that was half meditation and half unconsciousness, swirling the Force around at the edge of his through just so that he remembered it was there when he began to forget everything else. His lungs tensed up, painfully spasmed, and seized.

Drowning had been worse than being rebuilt by the Nightsisters.

But, then as now, he had been resurrected.

"We've treated you for lack of oxygen," the Nikto woman said. "You're lucky your friend came back for you."

Maul glanced at Kasen without moving his head.

"Are you a Jedi or something?" Kasen said, sounding shocked. "The way you moved that water..."

The Nikto looked between them, waiting for some kind of response. Maul didn't want to give one until he knew what exactly Kasen had told her about their arrival.

He recognized the logos on the miners' coveralls now too: InterGalactic Ore. Kasen had set down a nest of her enemies - or at least a nest of people she resented - when she had seen that Maul had sank into the sea and not come back up.

Maul sighed and sat up. He still felt groggy and weak. He had been relying on other people far too much lately, though. When he stood, his legs were steady. Some of the miners moved back on limbs that looked shakier than his.

'I have come here to visit this site," Maul said. "Do not obstruct my plan."

The Nikto was taken aback. "Your friend said you were pretty single-minded about getting here. Can you tell me why?"

Maul flashed her a disdainful look.

"This is a preparatory outpost. We don't do any mining. But you're liable to fall down a hole or be eaten by something."

Maul didn't even shrug. The two miners let him pass them, out into a short white hallway in a prefab building that probably served as the InterGalactic agents' medical center. Behind him, though, he heard the Nikto and Kasen arguing.

Maul kept going.

Outside, he saw Kasen's ship on a small round landing pad, and short cleared paths between the prefab buildings. The landing pad was the only paved area. The metal chunks he had seen from the sky were indeed droids, one of them inactive now and one of them seemingly slowly sniffing the ground with a round metal detector pad.

His legs did not seem to be compromised by their stint in the water. He snarled at himself, wishing for one of the first times that he still had his organic legs. It was funny how he had more to worry about than the fact that parts of his body had been replaced.

The water had done something to his lungs too: his breathing felt shallow, but not debilitating. He walked into the jungle, brushing wide-leaved plants away and reaching out with the Force to sense any predators before they arrived. The voices he could hear behind him prickled just like they did in the Force. Would Kasen leave? Maul would have to deal with that later.

His fists curled almost automatically. He hadn't had a straight fight in too long.

Very soon, even the jungle didn't fight back any more. Leaves with sharp edges smacked him and let off exotic, cloying smells when their edges split. The ground was rocky, and trip-wired with thick vines and knee-high clumps of grass that were almost solid. Maul raised his arms like he was going to box someone. The jungle ended soon, though, spitting him out onto a gentle slope of black dirt that lead to a severe cliff at the edge of the ocean.

His boots crunched on the dirt, the tiny brown-black rocks at the edge of the slope down to the sea. This could have been the same place where he went swimming with Kilindi Motoko, or where the instructors took a whole group of trainees out past the continental shelf and told them about how to face their fears. (Perspective, that was the answer. Look at how big the sea is, how much of it is going about its own business as opposed to furthering your problem. Perspective and lots and lots of kicking.)

He knew that it was really a completely different section of coast, though, perhaps not even connected geographically. It could be a different sea. Maul did not know. He hadn't known how to fly spaceships when he went to the Orsis training facility as a teenager. He had known how to drive speeders, and how to read space navigational charts, but had not yet put the two skills together.

Kilindi Motoko. The name brought up a host of sense-memories: the smell of the dirt outside the trainees' barracks, perhaps the same pushed up from the sea next to him; the rusty color of her tunic, the faces of his other friends.

Their blood, too, the whites of their eyes when he killed them, but those scenes were associated with smells as of fire, and now he was by the sea.

Why did the jungle not grow at this outcropping, he wondered? He kicked at the surface of the dirt with his toe and felt bedrock underneath. Small chips of dirt fell away, revealing quartzy silver and tan underneath. That explained it. The overhang of the cliff was likely smattered with lichen. Life found a place for itself, no matter its nature.

Then he noticed the square blocks of paving stone under his feet. This wasn't bedrock: it was a floor. He remembered the hunks of grass in the jungle, which might actually have been grass that grew over the remains of a wall. The ground around the mining outpost did look clear, even though only the landing pad was paved.

Maybe this was the academy. It had had a long time to overgrow. Maybe he hadn't been crazy to think that the curve of the beach, even changed as it was by tides and storms, looked familiar.

Kilindi had been one of his first allies, before Savage, before Kasen. She had helped to guarantee some of his victories.

Maybe if he went to the Nautolan people he would find a direction. Kilindi had been pragmatic and fierce. Her family might be similar.

(He had no sense of recompense, of approaching the people whose daughter he had killed in order to apologize for that action. Instead, he worked to find what was best for himself. He had killed her impartially, after all. He did not regret following that order. Now, perhaps, he would have judged the merits or problems of preserving an ally's life over that of his Master. Savage, for example. Maul would rather that his brother had not been killed. Savage had brought him direction, had brought him, however unintentionally, a new people - the Nightsisters, the Mandalorians - to fight.

And Maul did not feel any attachment to Dathomir. Those were Savage's people, not his own. Mother Talzin had simply been a resting place for Maul. Then, after Lotho Minor, he had been in no place to have a say in things, and she, knowing that, had treated him like an animal. He did not hate her for that.

He turned and went back to the jungle.

When he got back, Kasen and the Nikto were calling for him. "Hey! You!"

"What's his name?" the Nikto asked.

"I didn't ask! Hey! You! Jedi"

As soon as Maul emerged from the foliage, they waved. Neither of them moved closer, though, and Maul could sense suspicion from both of them. Suspicion was a shaky emotion to detect, layered as it was with simpler ones like anger and loyalty. Suspicion, though, could be easily detected if you thought of it as betrayal turned inside out.

Maul marched up to the two beings. "I am no Jedi."

"You certainly answered to it.

Maul snarled. "There are more kinds of being in the galaxy than you understand. I need to go to Glee Anselm."

"Where have you been?"

Maul inclined his head toward the desert.

Kasen skipped that gesture and replied again to what Maul had said in the first place. Her eyes went wide. "I'm not sure if 'but you just kriffing got here' is an appropriate sentiment right now, but that's what I'm telling you, barve."

"I need to go to Glee Anselm," Maul repeated, using almost the same inflection. Now that he had decided on it it was almost as good as having orders.

"I helped you because I thought it's what Ralima would want me to do. But that's different from becoming your taxi service. I don't have the credits to go all the way across the galaxy," Kasen said. She glanced at the other woman.

"What is your name?" Maul asked her.

"Riet Soo-Ubo," she said. "Site Supervisor. And you are?"

He paused. "Maul."

"Oh. Of course," Kasen said. "Did you wear a lot of black in primary school?"

Maul bared his teeth, but Kasen seemed to have reached the point of no return when it came to taking him seriously. "Riet," Maul said. "You will pay Kasen to go there."

"To Glee Anselm?" Kasen said, and quickly shut up when the Nikto started speaking.

"Why? Glee Anselm is swampy. All of it. There's no mining to be done there."

Kasen shook her head.

"Do you have a ship?" Maul said.

"We take speeders to the city further along the coast," Riet said dismissively.

Maul looked at Kasen.

The human backed away, raising her hands. "Listen, you jumped out of my ship. I saved you once. Glee Anselm is on the other side of the galaxy, and this whole thing is getting a little...weird."

"And Ralima?"

Kasen sighed and lowered her hands, but only to cross them over her chest. She was clearly struggling with his own beliefs, but that was of less interest to Maul than whether he could get this ship now or another one later.

As soon as he stepped toward Kasen, he sensed that Riet had begun to see him as a threat. No more a threat than a bar room brawler, but that was because she did not know what he was a Sith. He glanced aside at her and saw her leathery skinned pulled into a frown. Like Zabraks, Nikro had small horns, but he felt no more biological loyalty to her than he did to Kasen.

The miners had taken his blaster from him. It was probably still in that prefab medical shelter.

He charged forward.

"It is not easy to lose someone."

Chancellor Palpatine was facing the wide windows of his office when Anakin came in, his back toward the Jedi. Anakin shuffled like the legendary dead.

The war had not finally caught up to him. Anakin could feel that. This other thing that had been lurking behind him had.

He should have known. Precognition - wasn't that one of the traits of the Jedi? Didn't Yoda dictate what his legions of students could and could not do based on what visions he had in his tiny, slatted meditation room? Anakin should have been able to see that this was coming. The injustice of the fact that he couldn't made him curl his hands, flesh-hand and durasteel hand, into fists.

He should have been able to see that Ahsoka was leaving.

He looked up at Palpatine like Anakin had been chastised by his words of solidarity. If the two men were closer, Anakin would have had to look down on the top of the leader of the free galaxy's balding head. As it was, Anakin stood at the base of three velvet-carpeted stairs and looked up toward the chancellor like Palpatine was the god-statue at the head of the temple.

Anakin could still see Ahsoka leaving, her back and her shoulders so thin and familiar, once alien-looking head-tails lying limp against her body, out into a world that killed and enslaved people. He could still sense her distress, but also the terrible, mature calm of her decision. He could still sense Barriss' anger, her lashing out against the council that had raised her. He had spoken to both Obi-Wan and Luminara briefly, but his mind had fogged so that he could only hear the Jedi platitudes that the other Masters may or may not have actually been saying. Maybe they could have been comforting to someone raised in the Temple. (But, Anakin thought, fighting himself - Ahsoka was also raised in the Temple, and the platitudes had meant nothing to her either.)

He stumbled up the stairs like he was more tired than the war had ever made him.

"It is difficult," Palpatine repeated.

"Do you know?" Anakin turned livid, glaring. For a moment even Palpatine seemed like an enemy, his friendliness an affront.

"No." Palpatine turned around. The sun was setting behind him, nearly gone. It had swallowed up Ahsoka but now the lights of Palpatine's office was driving it back. Red light edged Palpatine's face.

Anakin hesitated over the plush chairs. "Why are you even here? It's late. Sir."

"The trial, Anakin. The same reason you are here."

"Oh." That stunned him even if it should have been obvious. He brushed at the chair with his finger just to feel the soft strands of the fibers.

"I am sorry, Anakin." Palpatine moved closed, walking gingerly across the room. He almost seemed afraid, and now his frailty was, instead of an affront, a comfort to Anakin. Anakin had to be strong for this man. Therefore, he could also be strong for himself.

(Even though he would never see Ahsoka again. He would never hear her voice except unexpectedly, maybe, one day when he had almost forgotten it. And he would never quite think of the Jedi the same way again, not after Barriss had so completely snapped and fallen in with the dark side. If she could do that, if she could draw such conclusions, was the Temple safe? Did its philosophy work?)

"I know," Anakin said. He pressed a palm against his face, originally intending to lean on his elbow against the chair but then just burying his face in his own hand, feeling the warmth. "I, just don't understand. How could she be so - The council made her go. They were testing her, but she couldn't see that. And she shouldn't have! They tricked her! But they were going to let her back!"

Palpatine sat down opposite him. "You've got it, Anakin. It is not your fault, nor Ahsoka's. The council forced her to this."

Anakin looked up. "Do you think so?"

"They did not intend to, perhaps. They did not intend for this, specific, outcome. But nevertheless..."

Palpatine let that sentiment sit in the air between them. Anakin shook his head, reaching out to the Force for calm. The calmness was there, but it didn't seem to touch all parts of him. A part was still angry, still hurt. And even the heart of the Force held something hot and beating and bloody, something curling out from inside flame. Something with eyes.

The Force had, for Anakin, always been a dragon at the heart of a star's dying supernova. Right now, it was buried deep beneath all the emotions he had accumulated around Ahsoka, resentment, alienation, and patronizing teachings leading, over the five years of her apprenticeship, to respect, teamwork, and friendship.

Anakin sighed, and curled his fist.

"I just don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"Did you speak to Master Kenobi?"

"He doesn't understand," Anakin said, then reconsidered. Obi-Wan had not lost an apprentice, no. He, like many Jedi - like Anakin, he presumed - would only have one. But Obi-Wan had tried. He had made consoling noises, had recited the list of things Jedi as a unit did to comfort themselves - mantras, meditation, beautiful gardens hidden inside the Jedi Temple. "I mean, he tried," Anakin said. "He always tries."

"What do you want from me?" Palpatine asked. Instead of an expression of exasperation and defeat it was instead a powerful plea: Palpatine, Anakin knew was offering him anything it was in the chancellor's power to give to him.

But Anakin didn't know. He shook his head.

Palpatine looked around, as if finding an idea in the thin air. "Tomorrow. We'll go to the opera. I was not planning on having a guest, but they will save a seat. What do you think of Mon Calamari opera?"

"I...was not aware...of that."

"The star of the show is Mali Dabool. Very talented. They swim in a suspended bubble."

"That seems like...a waste of an awful lot of water, sir."

Palpatine chuckled. "You can decide whenever you like. The seat will be yours."

Anakin stood up, feeling dissatisfied with this conversation. The quiet had helped him, but Palpatine's words had just stirred up more thoughts. Had the council been wrong? Anakin did not doubt that they might be. Was Ahsoka wrong? She had been quiet toward him. She had actively run away and jumped off a ledge instead of talking to him. Anakin didn't know enough of what had happened while she was missing from the Temple to put together an accurate picture. Clones had chased her as if she was a criminal.

That meant that he was just left with his anger.

"Thank you, sir. I'll think about that."

"Please do."

Anakin felt Palpatine watching him as he walked out. He did not want to go back to his room in the Temple, with Ahsoka's attached suite empty, but he knew that it would be dangerous to go to Padme's suite at this time of night: there were not many air cabs around the temple, no traffic he could use as cover, no formal event in which he could at least look at her and find some solace in just the existence of her brown eyes and calm words.

It would be a challenge to get out without being detected, though. That would be a way for him to fight without hurting anyone.

Anakin Skywalker took a skycar back to the Jedi Temple. He went to the the Temple's central elevator and rode it down as far as he could, and then found the service elevator and also rode that.

Darth Maul hit Kasen with a roundhouse punch, swinging far enough out that it almost unbalanced Maul himself. Kasen did not take advantage of that, though, and a bruise blossomed fast on her face as she doubled over. As soon as Maul straightened up from the punch, Riet was right behind him. She had a hammer in her hand, small but metal-tipped. It looked heavy. She swung, and the head of the hammer almost hit Kasen as Maul moved to the left, leaving Riet facing his right shoulder. He backhanded her with a closed fist, and she reeled back but did not drop the hammer. Maul walked toward Kasen's ship, slowly. When Riet and Kasen started to follow him he picked the Nikto up with the Force and tossed her at the human. Both of them landed in a pile meters away, groaning and wounded. Maul could feel Kasen's shock.

Riet shouted into a commlink that she held in a shaking hand while she was still on the ground. It was possible, from the way her leg was cocked, that she had broken her leg or her knee. Maul kept walking. He broke into a run when he sensed the panic beginning to spread around the facility as the other miners realized something was wrong. The sky was still a clear blue. It was hard to imagine that this was the same location as the Orsis Academy he had attended, but Maul felt the same as he left. The Academy had been more ruined than this.

He reached the ship just as beings in uniforms similar to Riet's were emerging out of the prefab buildings, stumbling and uncoordinated. He did not immediately see any weapon more sophisticated than a hammer, although one miner held a silver box that Maul did not recognize but might be a sonic tool designed to shake rock to its constituent pieces.

He jumped to the ship in one Force-assisted leap and felt the fear in the group increase.

Fear is my ally.

The ship was locked, as Maul had known that it would be. He snarled and balled his hands into fists, wishing he could break in without compromising the life support. A ship this small, this old, this model, whatever had dictated how the back half of it worked, had not put in an air lock.

Instead, there was a security panel on the outside designed to receive a four-digit code. He didn't recognize the model, but there was a panel on the back. Maul popped it off.

A blaster whined, and Maul turned around to see a miner holding what looked like Maul's own weapon that he had stolen from his would be-jailer. Maul reached out his hand, summoned the Force, and grabbed the gun and the man's wrist at the same time.

The wrist broke and the blaster flew toward him. It smacked into his hand, but as soon as he grabbed it he knew he didn't really want it. He was done with this sneaking, done with running. He had no time limit.

He put the blaster back in his belt.

A miner ran around the corner of a building toward him, holding that silver weapon he had seen earlier. He had been right to think that it was a sonic device of some kind. The miner, a fat-faced, red-skinned male Twi'lek with his short lekku held behind him and tied together with thick straps, screamed as he pointed the box toward the escapee. Maul immediately felt his ears start ringing and his muscles loosen. He felt suddenly, rapidly ill. When he tried to walk forward toward the box, the queasiness continued and his eyelids grew heavier over shaking vision.

He summoned the Force again. Immediately the world gained clarity. Maul turned the machine around in its wielder's hands and pointed it toward his face.

He screamed, and Maul could see blood vessels in his face breaking, turning his face first pink and then bruise-dark red. The spasms of the Twi'lek's arms eventually knocked the device away by themselves, and it lay in the dirt while the man backed up, looking at his own hands as if he was seeing horrible visions while blood leaked from under his eyes.

More people were emerging now, crowding Maul. A klaxon started ringing.

All this to stop one man from leaving a mine, Maul thought. The fight at the Academy was better. Those children were trained. And unlike Kasen, they did not hesitate.

Maul turned to the left just in time to see Riet swing the hammer down toward him. She was shorter than him, but not by much, with a muscular build in even her neck and her hands. He caught her forearm on his and pushed back. She aimed a punch, which he caught and twisted, nearly exposing the back of her neck as the weight of the hammer dragged her down.

When she reared up again it was to aim a more controlled jab with the hammer head at his stomach. Now it looked like she had fought with the weapon before instead of just broken rock with it, but Maul had been in enough fights to know that, especially among non-Force users, it was hard to tell whether any one had experience or not. Force users tended to move in proscribed ways passed down from master to student to student again, and even if they operated under vastly different schools or philosophies he would recognize a stance there, a kick here, a recovery there. Riet could have been a professional martial artist or could have never hit anyone before in her life. He would never know.

He stepped neatly to turn at right angles to her, swiveling his feet. The Nikto reacted quickly and swung again with the hammer, but she had swung wild and wasn't even close enough to force him to move backward.

When she swung again he grabbed her wrist with one hand and punched her in the side of the head with the other. She kicked out, hit his knee, and shouted as her foot jolted against his metal leg. She was wearing durasteel-tipped boots, though: the metals rang against each other, injuring Riet less than Maul wound have hoped.

Instead she hit back, one punch glancing off his arm, the other striking his chest and hurting. He grabbed the hammer. For a moment they struggled: she was strong, with a low center of gravity. She would be hard to unbalance.

He hit her again. The light in her eyes just kept getting flintier.

The hammer had a pike on the opposite end, for smashing rocks. He hooked a chunk of her clothing with the pike and then felt it tear into her stomach. Now Riet gasped, pushed away, jerked once like a fish on a line. She fell away bleeding. Maul held the bloodied hammer up and pulled his blaster with the other hand when he sensed more people coming around the side of the buildings.

One of them had brought a vehicle, a two-legged robot with the pilot squished tightly inside. Maul threw the hammer, backed its flight with the Force. It broke through the cockpit and into the driver's skull.

He shot twice with the blaster in no particular direction, just to get the other miners to back up, before returning to the casing of the security pad. He tossed the casing aside and tore out the wires inside the pad that his Master had taught him about.

A light on the door glowed green, and the ramp began descending.

Judging by Kasen's lack of security measures here, the bridge wouldn't pose much of a challenge either. Maul had stepped one foot inside the ship when Kasen emerged from behind a building.

The mech was still stomping forward, the corpse hanging limp in the chair.

"I did you a favor!" Kasen yelled.

"Maybe the reason you aren't a good businesswoman is that you think people will return your favors," Maul said, and gestured with the Force. He flung Kasen against the side of the mech, stunning her.

The mech plodded toward her while the human lifted herself up off of the ground and groaned, her eyes fixed with sudden horror upon Riet's body. She seemed fixated on it for a moment. Maul used that moment to step further inside the ship and find the button to close the door from the inside. He watched the mech plod slowly toward the disoriented Kasen. The human had almost fainted. Her eyes were very while, the irises trying to hide behind her brows even as Kasen lolled, arms swaying, trying fruitlessly to motivate her flagging brain to get up and move toward the mining camp's fallen leader.

The mech was striding thoughtlessly across the ground. The pilot must have fallen, or gotten his death grip on, the forward yoke. Kasen would be crushed if she didn't snap out of her shock. Maul thought, for just a moment, about helping her.

A miner did. A Meerian woman dashed across the open space, seemingly unarmed, and shoved her arms under Kasen's. She dragged her out of the way while the ship's ramp closed and Maul headed for the bridge, quick, not a glance for the statue of the reptilian goddess.

The ship was, as he had predicted, easy to launch even without Kasen's presence. The security, like the display console and the rest of the ship, was outdated. Maul sat down and was able to start the engines almost immediately. There should have been a warm-up sequence, he knew - he was breaking all the rules of flying by taking off fast. But he could set down again just as fast, thousands of miles away, and do the preflight list then before plotting his final course for Glee Anselm.

The miners didn't seem to have any heavier defenses than the mech, because nothing struck the side of the ship as the engines turned on and revved up. Maul saw a few people move furtively between the prefab buildings, and could tell that a group had gathered behind the medical center, but now they were frightened. They were scouts, some of them were probably used to a board room, and the others had never expected to be using their pickaxes as weapons. They were cowed now. Riet had been the one with the most fight in her.

He wondered whether she would live.

The horizon tipped as he lifted off. The sky was still blue, the ocean calm, only the jungle giving any hint of the darkness that had once taken place at the training academy for child soldiers. Inside the jungle the shadows were deep and the colors fungal. It surprised Maul that more of them hadn't stretched exploratory tendrils and spores toward the prefab buildings already. Maybe they had.

As the ship hummed around him and he began to head toward cruising altitude, a great sense of peace came over him. Finally, he had freedom again.