EPILOGUE: FLOATING HOME

ASAJJ

She was tired. Weak. Her legs shook when she walked more than a dozen paces. Her vision was cloudy. Her nails were soft, the skin beneath them tender. She lay alone in the sleeping cell of the duracrete bunker, curled up like a child on her bare pallet. She slept twelve or thirteen hours a day in the dim lighting of the claustrophobic shelter. The pallet, the pantry with its recycled water tank and its shelves of freeze-dried meals, the tiny refresher unit, and the tank. It had disgorged her just three days ago, spilling her out onto the cold steel floor a mile below a nameless stretch of sand-floored canyon.

She had seen the outside on the vidcams. Tatooine, she thought. Sometimes womp rats swarmed around the cams, sniffing and gnawing. Once she saw a file of Tuskens passing, walking carefully in one another's footprints. She remembered a name. A'Sharad Hett. Limbs tangled in the heat of a bantha-hide tent. Sweat standing out on his forehead. The stark lines of his old tattoos.

She remembered things. Fragmented chunks of lives she'd lived and lost. They melded together like soft clay, twisting round and round until the hard edges began to blur. She remembered a fighter crash on Dantooine, a man who had killed her in a temple where water ran down stone walls in the dark. The man had come again and broken her a second time, crushing her throat with a look and a gesture. I hate him, she thought dully.

Moments later she thought, I don't care.

She remembered the Count. He had found her, trained her, made love to her. She remembered the rasp of his unshaven cheek against her thigh. She remembered the feel of his eyes on her, the grandeur of him in the Force. He had been like an ancient tree, like the pounding tide. He had guided her into the wildernesses of her own power and showed her the monster waiting to avenge herself on the soft underbelly of a brutal galaxy.

She had spent twelve years on the streets. Long before her life splintered, before she awoke again and again behind new eyes, she had been a vrelt clinging by her teeth to the gristle of an unloving world. She had forgotten the name of her homeworld, but not the backwater town where her parents had abandoned her in a garbage-choked alleyway. On her second night outside the tank she had traced its streets on the back of her hand with a pen she'd found in the pantry. It had smudged and run when she'd showered in the refresher.

In the sleeping cell there was a little holoscreen that showed the vidcams' readouts. The interface had a message recorded by Dooku, a little blinking indicator at the corner of the screen. She hadn't watched it yet. Each day she woke late, ate tasteless porridge, drank a nutrient solution laced with a cocktail of drugs, and laid on her pallet until sleep came again. She dreamed of a man with a fleshless arm, a talon of bone and sinew reaching for her throat. His eyes were dying stars, his mouth a pit behind the walls of rotten teeth.

There was a hatch in the pantry. It was a round airlock set in the low durasteel ceiling, its locking wheel well-oiled. Each day she looked at it while she ate at the cramped, tiny table. It led to the surface, she knew. I'm too weak to climb a ladder, she told herself. It wasn't true, though. She was stronger every day. Her thoughts were clearer, her memories fuller.

She remembered poor, sad Jango Fett. Confused man, hiding his wounds like a wild animal. Dooku and Palpatine had mauled his memory, blending drugs, surgery, and manipulation through the Force until his psyche, and the psyches of his half-dozen clones, had shattered utterly. He had been, for a little while, a complacent sap, just enough of his warrior grit left to make him rugged for the cameras. It had come back, though, or Palpatine had sniffed it coming back, and then they had given whatever iteration of the Mandalorian the chop and rolled out a new clone in his place.

Dooku did it to himself, she realized one day. He hid me so that even Palpatine wouldn't know. Not for me, though. Not him.

The message would reveal the truth. Perhaps, she thought, he had given her the gift of one last clone without expectation. When she looked at the blinking light, though, she knew he hadn't. It would be a list of names, a series of targets intended as the recipients of Dooku's real last bequests. Blood. Fire. Death. Or maybe there were other clones out there, hidden in the corners of the rim. Clones of her. Clones of him. She thought about listening to it, about seeing his face one last time.

She crawled back to her pallet and lay staring at the screen.

That night she did not dream of Skywalker.

She walked beside her master on the blasted soil of Korriban, throne-world of the Lords of the Sith. Great temples lined the valley. Mountains reared above them on either side, the horns of some great dragon rising up from poisoned rock. The planet had been the bastion of the Sith Empire at its glorious height, the jewel of sorcerer-tyrants like Marka Ragnos and Naga Sadow. Now it was a stone in the void, and its days were done. Dooku walked ahead of her, robed in black, his face bare but lost in shadow. He looked back and his voice was as she remembered it.

"These are the masters of the earth and the void," he had said, gesturing out at the valley an its temples. "These are the kings of the quick and the dead."

Beyond him, at the valley's end, lay the open desert. Behind them was its twin in sallow grey. Statuary hands half-buried in the shifting sand. Grit blowing in the wind, the keening wind, and before the last and greatest of the vast temple-mausoleums, a gnarled immensity of rock that clawed for the sky's belly with its spires and towers, stood two vast and trunkless legs of stone.

Nothing besides remained of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare.

The lone and level sands stretched far away.