A/N: People have been asking me about how I plan to end this thing. Relax, guys, and trust me. I've got something cool planned. Have I led you astray so far?

They fly to Corellia.

How many people have fought the Empire? Dozens—hundreds—most of them, Juno thinks, have ended up dead or hunted. None of them have been successful.

Although that is a fairly useless observation to make. Of course none of them have been successful; the Empire is still in power, isn't it?

How many people have fought Darth Vader? He used to be a Jedi once, and he'd turned on them and killed them—

Juno does not know of enough examples to make up a suitably large sample size; still, the anecdotal evidence is worrying. She is afraid. She does not trust Vader; she doesn't see why Galen does, either—after all, he too has been betrayed, and in far worse a way than she. And still Galen seems blind to the patterns of death and betrayal laid out before him which seem so clear to her eyes—

They fly to Corellia. Messages come in on the communications console, intercepted from ships all across the galaxy; everywhere people are marveling at the destruction of the construction yard on Raxus Prime. There are stories flying about of a new Jedi, young and powerful, someone who can serve as a beacon of hope to dissidents of the Empire.

Hope. People were always looking for heroes, Juno thinks dispassionately. They never seem to want to consider the statistics—they see the outliers, the courageous and the brilliant, and forget entirely that the intelligence quotient curve is normalized to have a mean at one hundred. Even when the mean is considered things like standard deviation go flying out the window completely. Juno has heard a theory that the human mind is not designed to properly analyze statistics. She believes it—based on anecdotal evidence, ironically enough, as she is hardly a biologist.

Outliers are anomalies. They don't last long, which worries Juno because Galen is an outlier if anyone is.

She takes them out of hyperspace as they approach the system. Galen comes to join her in the cockpit, looking tense and elated all at once; "How long?" he asks her.

"Another hour," she tells him, and swings around to look up at him. "Are you certain about this?"

"Yes," he says. "Of course."

He does not smile. He so rarely smiles, and Juno thinks wryly of outliers again as she fires up the sub-light engines and engages the stealth systems. "Are you ready?" she asks him.

"Yes," he says again.

She sets him down on Corellia when they arrive, him and Kota and PROXY, and they disappear into the swirling snow on the chilly planet as she pulls the ship back into orbit. She keeps an ear on the meeting progressing below from Galen's comlink; they are discussing ships and troop strategies, and she smiles at the excitement she hears in Galen's voice—

There is a blip on her radar screen.

Then another.

And another.

Fourteen Imperial ships drop their stealth cloaking on Corellia's surface.

Juno's heart stops. She grabs for her comlink; "Eclipse to Starkiller," she says, frantically maneuvering the Rogue Shadow back down for a landing. "Imperial ships approaching; I repeat, Imperial ships approaching. Do you copy?"

There is silence on the other end. Their connection has been lost. Juno tries Kota's connection, then PROXY's; none of them are answering.

The sensors inform her that there is shooting occurring down at the surface. Imperial ships. Where had they come from? Why are they here? How could they possibly know—

Galen—

She will not think it. She will not. Juno presses her lips together and brings the ship down as quickly as she can, tracing Galen's signal as she goes. Where is he? That can't be right; he's two hundred meters above elevation—no, he is falling—

She makes the roughest landing of her career, crashing down on the hard frozen ground and skidding haphazardly to a stop. The loading ramp has not fully opened yet but she is rushing down it anyway, her boots sliding on the snowy ground and her hand on her blaster; there is a crumpled figure at the bottom of the nearby cliff, and she ignores the freezing winds and runs.

There is a pulse beneath her fingertips (outlier, she thinks again) and he draws in a ragged breath and opens his eyes. "Juno—" he breathes.

"The ship," she says. "Can you walk?"

Stupid question—he has just fallen off a cliff—but as it turns out the answer is yes, and they limp back to the Rogue Shadow as quickly as they can. Juno is almost afraid to ask what happened.

But he tells her anyway, without prompting.

"Vader lied," he says, sinking down into the co-pilot's chair.

Of course Vader lied; Vader always lies, doesn't he? It is probable that he was lying—

But she hadn't figured it out, either, so she should not be blaming Galen who is more innocent than she. "Kota—"

"Captured. We can't stay here."

She nods. The Rogue Shadow lifts off; she brings it out in a weaving circle behind the Imperial ships, cloaked all the while, and—because she does not know where else to go—sets the coordinates for Nar Shadda. "We jump to Nar Shadaa in twenty-four minutes," Juno says crisply. Then, when her comlink floats out of her pocket and drifts lazily across the cockpit, despite the artificial gravity of the ship—

"Galen?" He is leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, his face set in tense lines. "What are you doing?"

"Meditating," he says, not opening his eyes. "Jedi can sometimes have visions of the future—"

It isn't just her comlink, it's is every unattached thing in the cockpit—electromagnetism, Juno thinks absently, because what else could have such a strong pull?—"Is it working?" she inquires.

"I don't know," Galen says wryly. "I've never tried being a Jedi before."

She takes this as her cue to be silent.

His eyes, when he opens them again, and fever-bright and gazing at something far beyond her seeing. "A space station," he murmurs, the objects slowly settling to the floor again. "A massive space station—Juno, the coordinates—"