Chapter 44: Daybreak - Part I

11 BBY – 13 months – 18 days

XB058397.1 Rodian Z1 Midicholorian identifier region, complete seq

TCTAGAATTTGAAAGATTTTCTTTTTCCTTGGGGTTGGGGGGGGGGGTTATTGACAGTCTCTTAAAAAACCTCGTGTGGATGATCTCCCCTAGATACTTTTCTCATTGCAGGACTGAGAAAAAAAATACTAAGGCTTCCTCTAGGTTTCTCTCAAAGCAGCAAGGGTGACGAGGGGGTCCTTTTTTAACCCAACCCCGAAAATCCACTCCTACGGGGGAGTCTAATGTCACCGTCCGAGTTGAATCCTAGAATTTTCTGATAGCACCATTTTTACTAGCTAAAAATCCTTTTTTTTTCCTTCCCTTCAGTTCATCAAGATTTTGAAGCTCTAGCCGCATTACGCATTATA...

Vader closed yet another file in frustration. He knew they were DNA sequences; he'd had at least that much science education, despite the rather ad hoc nature of his training under Obi-Wan. Still, it rattled him that Ry Kyver had command of things he only just barely recognized.

With the recovery of Ry's deleted data complete, Vader was determined to comb through her entire four hundred gigabytes worth of files before handing the information over to his master.

At least the three-hour trip from Mustafar to Coruscant gave him time to finish skimming the last of it. He was in his TIE fighter en route to report to the Emperor, who was expecting Vader to hand over the full contents of the data that Ry Kyver had attempted to delete from her directory in the Imperial network.

Vader, would, of course, appear to comply. He would bow, face to the ground, holding out the asked-for disc, saying Yes, my master, I have obtained her deleted data. But he would do it savouring the tang of blood in his mouth, knowing that as much as he hated the painstaking work of scanning file by file, he had done it with an eye to destroying the man who had destroyed everything for him.

Not that he expected Ry Kyver's files to hold any definitive weapon for doing that. No, this was a one-man guerrilla war, one in which he would take every little secret strike he could. He had done this sort of thing before, crushing the data cube that held the Jedi Order's most recent list of prospective Force-adepts rather than handing it over to the Emperor. Now, he was determined that his master would not learn anything from Ry Kyver's files that could help him either prolong his life or bolster his power. And so Vader was asking himself: what was in Ry Kyver's files that he would rather his master didn't get? What was in there that he would like to know that his master had access to? What was in there that he could use for himself?

He had been expecting to find details of the midichlorian project. He didn't quite bargain for just how impenetrable the data would be.

The folder titled Midichlorian qPCR Analysis Protocol proved to be largely filled with DNA sequences from every known sentient and non-sentient species in the galaxy, along with a series of simple computer scripts instructing an unspecified machine to run its cycle at certain durations and temperatures. Another folder, Midichlorian Experimental Results, held thousands of documents, each labelled with a number, date and species name, showing a graph with an upward-sloping curve and axes labelled in units he didn't recognize, followed by a terse report of temperatures and incubation times.

Vader didn't know how to know whether it mattered that his master saw this or not. Perhaps, he hoped viciously as he navigated back to the main folder, it would be as unintelligible to the old man as it was to him. That would serve Palpatine right.

Vader felt a vague itch on what was left of his skin, a physiological manifestation of something unpleasant sensed subconsciously through the Force. Microseconds later, an alert beeped on his nav-computer: destination approaching in thirty minutes. Coruscant. He hated the place, its hustle and bustle, its reminder of the times he'd been there with Pa...

He bit down hard on the tip of his swollen tongue so that the sharp physical pain would drive out the thought of her. Then, he went back to his work of revenge and continued looking through the files.

It didn't matter if he didn't understand everything, Vader told himself; he could still use that Force-given hunch to decide what to delete and what to retain when he handed over the files.

The last folder to check was titled Imperial Agriculture Program. Again, thousands of files, but with much wordier names. He selected first the largest one, Imperial Agriculture Program Policy Framework, internal version. Scrolling through the hologram of never-ending text, his eyes glazed over at sections detailing yield targets in the trillions of tonnes per standard year, and lists of smaller agro-chemical dealers targetted for acquisition by the massive Imperial crown corporation, Imperial AgSystems. More political, there were lists of sectors where agricultural production was to be stamped out, ensuring their dependence on an external, and Imperially-controlled, food supply. Far more understandable, but just as useless to him as the scientific files. He was about to close the document when a heading caught his eye: Agricultural Drone Network and Imperial Security.

With distorted time-space still writhing past his viewports, a second alert beeped to signal fifteen minutes left of hypertravel. Vader shut it off, and read on: farmers had long been using small robotic units, not so computationally complex or versatile as droids but still highly programmable, to patrol agricultural production areas from the ground or from the air. They usually transmitted their data to either an on-farm computer or cloud-based digital storage for ag-droids to review, coded with location coordinates derived from a local positioning satellite. Ry's development was a simple extension of this system: the Imperial Agricultural Program encouraged – or sometimes required – these satellites to also be connected to the broader Imperial network, ostensively to gather crop performance data for research purposes.

But there was another provision, explicitly intended but not publicly stated: via the network, drones could be remotely programmed to watch for certain types of activities and individuals, and then covertly report if, when and where they were seen.

Vader read the section again. The last location Ahsoka was known to have resided for any length of time was an agricultural moon called Raada. That was a few years ago now, and from what limited information he had been able to gather, she was more of a spacer at this point, tied to no one location. But it still sparked an idea.

He rearranged the files according to file type but did not see any that could possibly contain computer coding of the kind required to implement the drone surveillance program. No wonder, he thought, and inside the cage of his metal casing his chest swelled a little; he'd seen Ry's very simple computer scripts in her other folders and knew she was not capable of anything that sophisticated. He, however, was. It would not take much to write a subroutine which he could seamlessly insert into whatever programming a third party had written and implemented to remotely instruct the ag-drones to gather intelligence. That subroutine would report to his comm directly. It would tell him if any sign was seen of Ahsoka. He'd throw in biometrics for others listed in the Jedi database, for good measure, and as a cover in case something slipped and his master found out.

All he would need was access to the actual computer codes that IMAg was using to interface with the drone network. He had any number of ways he could go about getting access to that.

Satisfied, Vader copied Ry's files to a new disc, which he would soon hand in to his master. The lengthy Imperial Agriculture Program policy files, all those hundreds of experimental reports with their incomprehensible graphs...Vader paused when he came to the folder titled Midichlorian qPCR Analysis Protocol. He remembered Qi Gon taking a blood sample and passing it to Obi-Wan. That blood sample tore apart his whole life. He wasn't clear that Ry's method of midichlorian analysis was different from the one the Jedi Order used, but he didn't remember seeing anything about blood samples in there, so perhaps she was using a different way. At any rate, if his master already knew about it, there was no harm in deleting the files. If he didn't, then it was information he'd just as soon withhold from the Emperor.

The disc was just barely ejecting from the computer when a third alert beeped the imminent exit from hyperspace and Coruscant came into view, all dark red-black, lined with concentric circles of orange city lights as the local sun caught the edge of the planet's atmosphere in a crescent gleam of blue. He was on the wrong side of the planet and decided to take a slow way around before meeting his master. That would give him time to assemble his thoughts into what his master would expect to see within his mind, giving him no reason to pry into the many things Vader did not intend to tell him.


When something cool and wet touched her lips, Ry looked up to see a shadowy figure stoop over her, one hand lifting a cup to her mouth. In swift self-defence, she screamed and pushed the arm and cup away.

There was a splash and the cup rattled dully to the floor. The figure gave a long sigh and stooped to pick it up, but Ry was already scrambling to her feet, wobbling and then taking a fall as her rubbery legs buckled under her.

"What happened to you? Are you badly hurt?" The voice, plaintive with concern, was slightly high-pitched yet somehow masculine.

Ry rose shakily to her feet and stood with one hand braced against an earthen wall. Her other hand felt for her lightsabre. It wasn't there. She felt for her knife. It wasn't there. She looked frantically around the room: yellow light flickered off rounded walls, pale dun except for a row of small round windows black with outer darkness.

"Please, sit down. You aren't well." Her unexpected companion, a full head taller than she was, stood in front of Ry, looking at her with concern. She looked warily up into his oval face, flickering lamplight casting sharp shadows around his sunken brown eyes and long craggy nose. "Don't touch me!" she snarled, one hand raised to strike him...then registered that it was Ava Gerges.

Ava Gerges! Of all the bizarre places in the galaxy Ry could have ended up...she sank back to the floor with a maniacal laugh. "It brought me back here! Back here!" she babbled and laughed again, half relieved and half bitter at the ridiculous irony.

Ava Gerges crouched down on the floor in front of her, the edges of his cassock pooling at his feet as he wrapped long spindly around his knees. "What happened to you?" he asked again.

What happened? Ry's laugh had already changed to a sob. Her head swam as the images came flooding back: that awful place of unending white lines and infinite black darkness, the Emperor's piercing yellow eyes boring into her, the stench of his breath full in her face as his fingernails dug into her wrists.

"I can't let him find me! I have to hide, I have to hide!" she babbled, looking frantically around the oval room, but from the low bed at one end to the biofuel burner at the other, there was no place to hide. She sob-laughed again. Did it matter? How could a person ever hide from a master of the Force who could open a portal to that otherworld at any moment?

"Who do you need to hide from?" Ava Gerges' voice now carried a worried edge.

Ry didn't answer. She closed her eyes, leaned back against the wall and pulled her knees up against her chest, trying to flatten her heaving sobs into level breaths. If only she could make herself small, perfectly and completely small in the Force, maybe he wouldn't find her.

When Ava Gerges laid a palm on her forehead, Ry felt an almost instant warmth and peace flow through her but it was gone as sharply as he pulled back. She opened her eyes to see Ava Gerges with both hands clapped over his mouth, eyes wide with fear. He stood up quickly and backed away.

"Did he follow you here?" the old Siluan's voice was suddenly low and grating.

"I don't know...I don't know! I went through the portal and I didn't see him anymore but..."

Ava Gerges started pacing. "You have put us all in great danger. If this Sith Lord comes here..."

"It wasn't my fault!"

The old monk turned to face her, long arms folded across his skinny chest. "Can you truly say you did nothing to draw his attention? Nothing?"

"I was minding my own business!" Ry insisted but the awful realization dawned all the same: her kyber crystal. She felt for it in her pocket and was half relieved to find that it wasn't there. But if tapping into her old powers had made it easier for the Sith Lord to find her, then it really was goodbye to whatever was left of her Force abilities. Ry tried to think through things clearly: could it be that she was safe as long as she didn't try to use the Force?

"If this Sith Lord has learned to walk through the walls of space and time, our only hope is to..." Ava Gerges shot Ry an accusing glance, but then sighed and shook his head. "I am sorry," he said, face in his hands. "This is not the way. Please, I need some time to gather myself." He went and sat cross-legged on the floor beside his low bed, head bowed.

Paying him no further attention, Ry pushed her sore muscles into crawling around the room as she blew out the oil lamps. As irrational as she knew it was, she felt some modicum of security in simply being out of sight.

With the lamps out, stars quickly shone through the little round windows. Ry balled herself up next to the biofuel burner, doing her best to get out of view. She tried to make sense of what had happened, and of what might happen. On one hand, it could be that using her kyber crystal made her more visible to the Sith Lord's search for her in the Force. Without the crystal, maybe she was safe. But she didn't feel safe. It could also be that once found, he would find her more easily again, crystal or no crystal. She couldn't tell whether it was Force-sense or just plain fear that made her feel like he was lurking nearby.

Ry wracked her brains, trying to remember if she'd ever come across anything about that otherworld in the esoteric holocrons the Chacellor-who-became-Emperor used to lend her. She knew, from her readings, that such places theoretically existed, or at least, that there was a place-between-places, another dimension, that could be experienced as pathways and portals to specific points in space and time. But how long the Emperor had known how to go there she didn't know. He'd never spoken to her about it. She wondered now just how much he simply chose not to tell her, and of what he had preferred that she remain ignorant.

She went back to trying to make herself small, hoping desperately that her careless conversation with Ava Gerges hadn't already drawn attention. She focused on making her breath a soundless, even rhythm. I am not here, she willed the Force around her to say. I am not here. There is only dust, only dust.

Time lingered with maddening indifference, and Ry grew so half-crazy with tension that she almost wished the Emperor would find her and get it over with. But gradually a grey twilight grew around her and she heard Ava Gerges stir. There was a sharp crack, then a soft slow hiss and the smell of smoke, and then a warm yellow glow enveloped the room. Blinking her heavy eyelids, Ry looked up to see him looking down at her, holding a re-lit lamp with one hand and shielding it with the other.

"Do you still want your old life back?" he asked, as if there were nothing unusual about the question.

Ry gaped. "What?!"

"I said, do you still want your old life back?"

Ry laughed bitterly. "I can't get it back now, so it doesn't matter."

"It matters a great deal," Ava Gerges said calmly, shifting the lamp to his other hand. "That is why I am asking, do you still want your old life back?"

Ry almost wanted to get up and strangle him. The Emperor had learned how to walk through loopholes in the rules of space and time and for all she knew fine white lines would appear forming a doorway back to the awful nowhere-place and he'd reach through and pull her back there. She got away the first time, but she didn't want to count on a second.

"You want to get away from him." With the yellow lamplight flickering across his craggy face, Ava Gerges raised his eyebrows with an and-so-therefore look.

Whatever that was supposed to mean. "Yeah, no kidding!" Ry shot back.

"The problem is that it will not suffice to hide physically. You will need to make yourself such that he can't find you in the Force either, that is, you need to become a person he will not expect you to be. We have a ritual which I believe can help, but to do it, you will need to let go of being what and who you have been up to this point."

Still aching with the strain of flight and fear, Ry leaned her head back against the wall behind her, shifting her weight from side to side, looking for flaws in his logic. "That's not how Force-signatures work," she said.

Ava Gerges lowered his lanky frame to the floor and sat cross-legged next to Ry. "Then how do they work?"

Ry scowled and glanced past the biofuel burner to the row of round windows, then kept her voice down. "It's who you are. You can't change it."

Ava Gerges shrugged. "I suppose there is a component that is given, as it were, by our DNA, but you know yourself that DNA expression can change quite drastically over time. I worked as a psychologist for over a hundred years. I've seen people change so much, psychologically speaking, that you'd barely recognize them, for better or for worse. Not just their space of mind, but their demeanour, their entire aura was in some cases completely unlike what they'd been before."

Ry let that idea sit a minute. He was conflating a lot of ideas, she thought: aura, Force-signature, space of mind...they were related, but necessarily the same. Then she thought of something else. "So is that how you hide, then?" The question came out before she'd had time to decide whether to ask.

"Hide...from you, you mean?" Ava Gerges asked tentatively, almost nervously.

Silence was Ry's answer; she figured he should be able to figure that out himself.

Ava Gerges gave a weary sigh. "Maybe. Maybe not," he said. "Siluans don't set out to hide. But we also don't seek power the way either the Sith or the Jedi do; perhaps that has something to do with it. No, I wasn't thinking of it that way. I was just thinking that our rituals might help you because your Sith Lord is expecting you to be someone who wants his kind of power and who is actively open to the Dark Side of the Force. When he's searching for you through the Force, that's probably the sort of energy he's looking for."

That intrigued Ry. If there was a way to trick the Emperor, instead of trying so hard to be small in the Force... "What's the ritual?" she asked.

"It's two rituals, actually. In one, you renounce the Sith. In the other, you acknowledge everything, whether big or small, that you have ever done that takes part in the Dark Side, and any evil that is within you, and you submit it for healing. That is why I was asking whether you still want your old life back, because if you do, the rituals won't work."

Ry sighed hard through her nose and buried her face against her bent knees. That sounded a bit more intense than she'd thought. She had no grand visions of becoming the perfect Lightsider. But to escape the terror of the Emperor's presence, rejecting a life she couldn't go back to anyways seemed a small price to pay.

"I'll take the ritual," she said, looking up again.

Cradling the oil lamp in both hands, Ava Gerges studied Ry in its flickering light as if weighing the sincerity of her response, then sighed. "We will have to wait for sunrise and do it at the time of the Morning Chant. I will gather the things we need and write down the words so that you can follow your part. You will also need to do some preparation." He got up and walked over to the low table near the windows. After pulling a few things out from under the table, he lit a second lamp and handed it to Ry, then passed her a small sheet of rough paper and a slender stylus. "For the second ritual, you will need to write down the things you will acknowledge."

Ry looked down at the ten-by-fifteen-centimetre sheets, barely bigger than the flat of her hand. "What do I do if I run out of paper?" she drawled, just sarcastic enough to make it a challenge.

"Very funny," Ava Gerges deadpanned. "Then get some more from the box under there." He pointed to the low table. "But paper is a bit of trouble to make, so write small and use both sides. You can group repetitive things together, if you like."

"I'll need some privacy," Ry told him.

"As you wish." Ava Gerges gestured for her to use whatever part of his small living space she liked. "I need to gather some things outside," he said, then put down his lamp and went out, snicking the little wicker door shut behind him.

Ry shifted to a cross-legged pose, still wedged next to the biofuel burner, with her back to the wall. By the soft lamplight, she examined the graphite tip of the stylus, then fingered the edges of the stiff beige paper and touched the slightly raised dark fibres that crisscrossed its surface, before glancing at the windows again. The Emperor had neither looked through the windows nor opened a portal to this place yet, but either imagination or intuition still said he was nearby. She suddenly wished Ava Gerges was still in the house; she felt exposed, sitting there alone.

Quickly Ry started to write, her block letters angular and barely legible. The hiss of the stylus on paper filled the silence around her, providing an unexpected comfort.

As she wrote, Ry tried to be clinical, uninvolved, and matter-of-fact. She was sure that if she didn't hang on to that detachment, what she was writing could unravel her. It was all there, from the free rein she gave to her adolescent arrogance to the day she traded the lives of her fellow Jedi for the Emperor's confidence in her loyalty; from dead songbirds to dead Siluans; from her alliance with the spirits of ancient Sith to a young woman's form left crumpled on the forest floor of the planet Iwaki.

She tried to write as if it were something from a life that wasn't hers, yet as she wrote, an uncomfortable thought was growing within her: she had made a monster of herself.

There was a time when she had thought that giving up on basic morality was a fair price to pay to seize the chance the Emperor offered her to be something. Yet having paid that price, there she was just a few minutes ago, hiding in some primitive hovel and trying to make the Force around her say, there is only dust, I am nothing.

Hand cramping up, Ry paused to stretch her fingers. Things could have been so much simpler. In all those days of lying in the hospital trying not to think about the past and yet thinking about it all the same, it was plain to see that at certain key junctures, she could have taken a different path. Perhaps it was too late to say No when Palpatine asked her for the list of AgriCorps Jedi to exterminate, but what if she had insisted on her original plan to leave the AgriCorps and go to study on Alderaan instead? Ry highly doubted she ever would have denied herself the chance to play with Darkside power; but left to her own devices, she might have been, perhaps, a merely ambidextrous user of the Force. At least, she wouldn't have left this kind of carnage in her wake.

True, the Jedi Purge would still have driven her into some form of hiding, but away from the Order as such she probably would have had time to figure out some way to hide, if only by creating a plausible alias. She could still be something then. As it was now, the only people who wanted what she had become were people she was trying to get away from.

Ry felt suddenly wistful for what it could have been like to have nothing in her past that she needed to hide. Somehow, that unexpected longing scared her. Bracing herself once again to stay clinical in her approach to her past, Ry told herself that she was only making this list in hopes that the ritual would get the Emperor off her tail.

After shaking the cramp out of hand, Ry resumed writing with a vengeance, not noticing that in the row of round windows, dusk was brightening towards dawn. Outside, a bird began to sing.


Outside the grand doors to the Imperial throne room, Vader waited a long time.

The two Red Guards stood stiffly, evidently uncomfortable with his presence. This ability to unnerve people was one of the few pleasures Vader's mechanical form afforded him, but he did not savour it long this time. Something far more pertinent had his attention: from the time he entered the Imperial Palace, Vader was sharply aware that the Force held a conspicuous lack of his master's presence.

Not that he had any real desire to see the old man. At first, wild hope even stirred within him; if his master had finally taken his explorations of the Dark Side too far and been utterly consumed, that could be quite convenient. But Vader doubted it. The Emperor was powerful enough to handle energies that would shatter a weaker Force-adept and wise enough to build new techniques gradually.

The possibility that bothered Vader was that if his master had indeed advanced far enough in his esoteric studies, he might have become able to translocate himself across space, if not also transpose himself across time. The ability to make surprise visits – to Mustafar, or others of Vader's haunts - would make it far more difficult for Vader to keep anything hidden from his master, and there was much he wished to hide.

Yet whatever his master's Force-absence might mean, Vader had an errand to complete. The disc bearing Ry Kyver's recovered data was not one he wished to leave with the Red Guards, nor did Vader want to be obliged to return to deliver the item in person, and so when an hour's wait yielded no sign of the Emperor, Vader brushed the guards aside and let himself into the throne room, nothing he hadn't done before when dropping off sensitive items in his master's absence.

Vader's first surprise was the crunch of his boots on the coarse grit that lay scattered on the sleek black floor. Then he looked from the empty throne to a black-robed figure lying amidst scattered fragments of what might be black stone, face and hands gleaming pale in the pallid, sourceless light of the Imperial throne room. There was his master lying on his back, eyes closed, mouth half open, arms splayed out on either side of him.

Vader walked slowly closer. There was just the slightest rise and fall of the old man's chest to show that he hadn't stopped breathing. The sound of Vader's own respirator filled the silence of the chamber as he stood, considering: his master was physically alive, yet somehow absent in the Force.

Maybe this was his big chance. The crackle of energy still lingering in the air told Vader that his master had attempted something drastic with the Force and evidently, it had not gone as expected. With the Emperor Force-absent and unresponsive, all it might take was a twist of Vader's clenched hands in the air to break the Sith Lord's neck. Or if he brought his boot down hard enough, he could savour the crunch as he cracked the old man's skull.

Yet Vader made no move. Having so long studied the secrets of the Sith, would the death of his body really release the Emperor's spirit to simply dissipate into the broader Force, or would the miasma of his energies rise up to choke his vengeful apprentice? Vader didn't mind the thought of death if he could be sure of taking the old man down with him, but there was the chance that if the Emperor had indeed discovered the art of transferring his energies to another body, he might simply take up Vader's form and Vader's every hope of revenge would be lost. He shifted his weight, unwilling either to seize the chance or let it go.

The Emperor's bloodshot eyes fluttered open, and he grimaced as he fixed Vader with his yellow glare.

Vader quickly sank down on one knee and bowed his head, feigning deference as his master scrambled awkwardly to his feet.

There was the sound of footsteps ascending the dias, and then from the throne the Emperor spoke. "Well, Vader," he snapped, "why are you here?"

Vader ground his teeth but held his tongue; he was obeying a summons issued days ago, but this was not the time to answer back.

Instead, he rose, walked a few paces towards the Imperial throne and knelt again, holding a slim digital storage box out to his master in one hand. "The files Ms. Kyver deleted have been recovered," he said.

The Emperor pulled the device roughly from Vader's outstretched hand. When Vader ventured to look up, his master was still glaring at him.

"Vader, you will go immediately and summon the Third Sister."

The Emperor's words were perfectly clear, but it still took Vader a minute to compute what his master had said; it did not seem connected in any way to Ry Kyver's data. Besides, the Inquisitorium was Vader's domain and his master rarely interfered with its management.

"Vader, did you hear me?"

"Yes, master."

"Then go do it."

Vader bowed to the ground, then rose quickly and went out, with the grit on the sleek throneroom floor still crunching beneath his boots.


With stomach tight and a surreal sense that it was not her own feet touching the ground, Ry followed Ava Gerges along a narrow path through the desert scrub to a bare circle in the sand beside a tall branching cactus. She gripped the three sheets of rough beige paper and he held a short wooden stick in one hand and a long wooden tube in the other.

The sky was scarlet where the unrisen sun caught the underside of low clouds, but the horizon itself was clear. Soon a sliver of shining gold crested above the low hills far standing along the skyline, far in the distance. Ava Gerges struck the long tube with the stick once, producing a solemn woody bong. Again and again twelve times he struck until the sun's gold disc slipped free of the horizon. Then he put the tube and the stick down, resting them against the tall spiny cactus beside him.

"Now, let us begin," he said, and raised his long slender hands to the sky.

Ry had heard the Morning Chant what felt like a thousand times before, muffled by the thick hospital walls and sometimes also by her own hands over her ears.

Now Ava Gerges' voice rang out soft but clear, a little nasal but still melodic, and the words echoed the memory Ry had unwillingly stored of them:

Come receive the dawn,

standing with hearts open

to receive Light from the light of day,

having passed through night

unbroken by it.

Shine in our hearts, O sacred Light.

Make us live, make us love in the way of peace.

Ry shifted from foot to foot, waiting for it to be over, and looked behind her more than once, but so far neither the Emperor nor any otherworldly portal appeared. Silently, she started counting slowly to one thousand; back in the hospital, that was about how long it took for the Chant to be over. When she had time years later to think about what she was feeling then, she realized that she didn't hate the Chant the way she once did, but she was anxious to get the ritual done, anxious in case it didn't work, and anxious for what it would mean if it did.

When at last Ava Gerges fell silent and let his hands fall to his sides, the sun was nearly at the edge of the clouds, warm against Ry's face.

"For the first ritual, you must first turn your back to the sun," Ava Gerges said.

Ry turned, and Ava Gerges turned also, standing beside her. From a pocket of his cassock, he produced a small grey slate bearing a few lines written in white chalk.

"After I speak, please read your response from the slate," he said.

Ry looked down at the short phrases marked in Ava Gerges' flowing cursive. There was a time when she would have laughed in his face if he'd asked her to read them aloud, but now she checked each line carefully so that she would be ready to say her part.

Ava Gerges cleared his throat. Ry swallowed hard.

"Do you renounce the Sith and all their works and all their ways and all their pride?" Ava Gerges half spoke, half chanted.

"I do renounce them," Ry deadpanned, reading from the slate.

"Do you renounce the Sith and all their works and all their ways and all their pride?"

"I do renounce them," Ry said, with more energy this time.

"Have you renounced the Sith and all their works and all their ways and all their pride?"

"I have renounced them," Ry said with finality.

"Then spit out their ways and turn your back on it." Ava Gerges pointed to the ground in front of them.

It took Ry a minute to realize he was serious, but she spat hard on the sandy ground, then followed Ava Gerges' prompting to turn and face the sun.

At that point, Ry was feeling pretty good. The ritual was easy than she thought. It even felt good. After all, the Emperor had used her. The way things had turned out, she could have done better without him.

"Now speak, bringing your Darkness to Light, hiding nothing, that all may be healed."

When Ry looked confused Ava Gerges gently took the slate from her and gestured to the lists she held beneath it. Looking down at the first page, she squinted at her awkward handwriting and turned slightly so that the sun lit up the paper instead of getting in her eyes. The letters looked somehow angry, scrawled in angular graphite strokes across the paper made of reeds.

"It's OK, just start reading and it will get easier," Ava Gerges said gently when Ry couldn't seem to begin.

With that Ry began to read aloud: the life she'd taken back on Iwaki, the day she sold out her fellow Jedi, her witch-hunt for the Siluans.

It was not long before her hands were shaking and her voice was coming out low and gravelly, as if forced reluctantly from someplace deep underground.

This ritual was turning out way harder than she'd thought. Renouncing the Sith wasn't actually that hard; her alliance with the Sith Emperor was a means to an end, not a desire in and of itself, and after meeting him in that half-real place of paths and portals, she no longer believed he'd ever had her best interest at heart. He deserved to be renounced, and so did Vader.

But all those things she'd written down, that was her. That was hearing herself say out loud just how much of a monster she'd made of herself, and all for nothing.

Ava Gerges waited patiently as Ry fumbled and mumbled her way through the list, but she almost forgot he was there, it took so much effort to get the words out. But she knew she had to do this, or at least, she had to do something so that when the Sith Lord went sifting through the energies of the Force, the person he thought she was would not be there. If renouncing her own past was what it took do to that, then so be it.

At last, Ry came to the end of the last page. "Is there anything else?" Ava Gerges asked when the pause grew long.

Feeling numb and distant, Ry shook her head.

She watched as Ava Gerges produced a little metal box from his pocket, out of which came a sharp-edged grey stone, a metal rod and a few scraps of black cloth. Bending down, he arranged a few twigs and bits of frayed old twine on the sandy ground and laid two pieces of the black cloth on top. Then, right over this tinder, he struck the metal rod sharply against the rock several times, and sparks began to fly.

When one caught the black cloth and formed a glowing orange dot, the elder cupped his hands around the tiny spark and blew softly on it, adding bits of tinder as the circle expanded, turned smoky and then burst into flame. With the small fire burning smoothly, he stood up.

"If that is all, then commit your words to the flame," he said.

Like watching someone else on a holovid, Ry bent down and fed each piece of paper to the hungry little fire, then stood and watched as her list curled and crumbled into ash.

"Now, please face me," Ava Gerges said. When she did, he put the cool palm of his right hand to her forehead and spoke in that half-chanting way again.

"May all that is broken be healed, and may your Darkness be turned to Light."

If bright lightening could cleave from one end of her mind from the other, that is what it felt like. Ry fell over backwards, which she only fully realized when Ava Gerges reached out a hand and helped her, still dazed, back to her feet.

"You have died a kind of death today," Ava Gerges was telling her. "Embrace that! Out of death can come new life."

Too disoriented to listen, Ry followed Ava Gerges back to the earthen mound that was his home, barely hearing what he was saying about being open to new possibilities and transformations.

He stopped both walking and talking just outside his little wicker door. "Would you like something to eat, or do you prefer to rest? The guesthouse is ready if you want it," he pointed with one long skinny arm to another mound nearby. "Or, I can set out some breakfast."

"I'll rest," Ry mumbled, and Ava Gerges showed her to the cool shady space inside the other mound. When he was gone, Ry sat down on the beige bedspread and closed her eyes.

Alone at last, one tear leaked out and then another. Soon Ry was sobbing quietly into her hands, her mouth forming the shape of screams she didn't let it utter.

To say that she cried because she felt guilt or regret would not be wholly untrue; the blunt acknowledgement she'd just made of exactly what sort of person she'd become did in fact terrify her. But more than guilt or sorrow, Ry cried and cried because she felt lost. Having renounced her whole past and seeing no future for who she was going to be, Ry knew at last that she really was nothing, and that scared her more than anything.


Perched atop the speeder, the massive carrion bird flapped its two-metre wingspan, then folded its dark pinions. It eyed Ahsoka as if determining whether she was likely to die soon and whether she'd make a good meal when she did. When the Togruta widened her stance and put one hand on her blaster, the vulture-like creature took off, bearing a cloth-wrapped bundle in its talons.

As Ahsoka watched the bird's dark form disappear into the cloudy morning sky, it occurred to her that she should have tried to Force-connect with it. Animal connection wasn't her strongest Force ability, but the attempt might still have yielded some information, and at this point, anything was better than nothing. Her mission to retrieve Ry Kyver from Yemer was not going well.

Soon after she came out of hyperspace at the rocky desert planet, Ahsoka's comm pinged an alert: her tracking drone was following Ry as the human target exited the hospital and travelled away from it. Given that the message, unable to reach Ahsoka's comm while in hyperspace, had been initiated nineteen hours earlier, Ahsoka had been well aware that Ry might elude her, but she had trusted the drone to do its work.

And it had, until something went wrong. The twenty-centimetre-long unit was sitting there, right beside a big splat of bird shit, on top of a grey cargo speeder with solar panels covering its long roof and short nose, haphazardly parked in the middle of the desert.

Ahsoka checked her comm again, knowing what it said but still not believing it. The drone had followed Ry up to this point, and then stopped. The problem was, both her infrared detector and a cursory glance through the windows told Ahsoka that Ry wasn't inside.

Around Ahsoka, the air was far more moist that on her last visit. She had noticed, as she crept furtively towards the speeder, that the ground was damp; there had probably been a rainstorm. That could have kept the drone from following Ry, but a storm bad enough to mess with the drone should have been too much for most humanoids as well.

Warily, Ahsoka circled the speeder again, checking for footprints a second time, but there were none besides her own. Perhaps the rain had washed them out, or perhaps a Force-assisted jump could have carried Ry far enough away that she would leave no tracks nearby. But even a leap like that shouldn't have been too much for the drone to follow.

It was as if Ry had simply disappeared; there was no feel of the Dark Jedi in the Force anywhere nearby.

Yet against the banal backdrop of stuff-being-alive energy that Ahsoka usually associated with wild places like this, she had a growing sense of something that gave her stomach a queazy, electric sort of feeling. It felt like something big but brief had happened here, a sudden pulse of strong Darkside energy too recent to have fully dissipated into the surroundings.

It made Ahsoka wonder if someone else hadn't gotten here first. If Imperial officials had bounty hunters on the search for Ry, it only made sense that the Sith lords would send out their Inquisitorium as well. Ahsoka looked behind and around her at that thought, a double-check for her own safety, but then remembered: if someone else had subdued Ry and made off with her, the drone, which was evidently unharmed by any such encounter, should have followed them. Besides, there was no sign of battle: no blaster-marks or lightsabre scars on the speeder or on the ground nearby, and no feel of clashing energies in the Force either. Just one single will, calculating and cold. A flash of power strong enough to...

With a cold feeling creeping up her spine, it occurred to Ahsoka that Ry might be far more powerful than she'd imagined: if the Dark Jedi had used the Force to translocate herself out of the speeder, she could be anywhere now. Translocation was a rare skill, but there was no telling what Sith training had given the former AgriCorps Jedi.

Still, it didn't make sense. When Ahsoka had snuck into the hospital on her last visit, the hunch she got from seeing Ry Kyver lying there in the hospital bed was that Ry was a person of no particularly great strength in the Force. The Force around her was a jumble of feelings: anger, fear, frustration, sorrow and loss all jostled behind a veil of paradoxical calm determination and quiet inner strength. Nowhere in that tangled mix was the power to transcend the laws of space itself.

Yet perhaps seeing Ry in the weakness of physical ill-health had deceived her, Ahsoka thought. She didn't like that thought. If that sickening energy around the speeder had come from Ry, then seeking out the Dark Jedi could be more dangerous than Ahsoka had expected.

With a sudden urge to ground herself in the purely physical, Ahsoka gave the speeder's dusty side-wall a sharp kick before jumping back to see what would happen. Nothing. That was what happened.

She felt a bit silly for doing that, but it somehow broke down her last wall of hesitation. She pulled on a pair of gloves - just in case Ry came back, and just in case she happened to be psychometric - and then opened the passenger-side door. She had hoped there might be an on-board computer with a travel log, at least, but there was no such thing in the vehicle. Next, she opened the rear hatch and climbed into the hold.

As the morning light streamed into the dull interior, a flash of red caught Ahsoka's eye. She felt its power even before she stooped to pick it up. A kyber crystal! Ahsoka let it rest in her palm, slightly lighter than it looked, gleaming rich scarlet. It was almost beautiful, if not for the rage and pain that burned within it.

But why in the whole wide galaxy would anyone leave a kyber crystal lying around like that? Ahsoka couldn't help but wonder...a Dark Jedi who defected from her high-level position in the Empire, did Ry leave the crystal behind on purpose, maybe planning a new path? But then why not just bleed it back, if she was powerful enough to disappear without alerting the drone?

Ahsoka sighed and shook her head. She was going in circles, and the kyber crystal was calling to her to join it in its self-important fury. She gave it a firm No, then put it in the pocket of her blaster-proof vest. She would decide what to do with it later.

The rest of the cargo hold held nothing of interest. There was a toolbox fixed to the floor - only a few plain old wrenches and a flashlight and a water bottle in there - and a basket with a few items of clothing, seemingly handspun from some sort of natural fibre.

Back outside, Ahsoka scanned the horizon again. In one direction, the flat desert plain, sparsely covered with brush and cacti, ended a hundred or so kilometres away in a rocky ridge; everywhere else, it seemed to go on forever. There really wasn't anywhere to go around here, yet Ry Kyver was nowhere to be seen, and Ahsoka's exploration of the speeder had only raised more questions.

But then where was Ry? It was possible that she escaped the drone while braving a storm the drone didn't dare to venture out in, but the motion of opening and closing the door should have nudged the drone to scan the area to pick up the trail as soon as the storm was over.

Or maybe the drone malfunctioned.

With a gruff sigh, Ahsoka picked it up and decided to leave. Not abandoning stealth just yet, she quietly made her way back to the speeder-bike she'd left in the bushes a safe distance away. She rode straight back to her starship, a two-hour trip that gave her plenty of time to think through her next move.

She was not about to go back and tell Varda she'd let Ry go, not yet. And she wasn't prepared to give up on a potential informant just yet either. She still had a few tricks up her sleeve and a few days before she had to be anywhere else. Back at her starship, she had several more aerial reconnaissance units. She could load them with Ry's biometrics, obtained from a bounty-hunter friend, then set them loose to do their work. She, too, would continue to search the area. If Ry had escaped by merely physical means, there was still some hope of finding her. If by the Force, then all bets were off.