The Way of a Siluan

by heatherxenia

Three AgriCorps Jedi survive Order 66. One is shipwrecked in a remote forest and begins to learn the ways of a quiet sect of Lightsiders known as the Siluans. Another tries to run a farm but is nearly thwarted by the Imperial Agriculture Program. A third takes the path of a Dark Jedi, masterminds Imperial agriculture policy...and sets out to destroy the Siluans. Part I complete.

45. Daybreak - Part II

Author's note: After reflecting on a reader's comment, I've fleshed out the end of the last scene in Chapter 44. Thanks, Sensey, for the feedback!

Addendum to Chapter 44

13 BBY – 11 months – 18 days

[As related in the last chapter, Ahsoka found the drone she'd left to follow Ry perched on top of an abandoned speeder. She had no way to explain how Ry could have left the speeder without the drone following her.]

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 had about one hundred and seventeen hours before she had to leave the planet. About four days. With so many possibilities for where and how Ry could have disappeared, there was no way Ahsoka could explore all eventualities. She would have to narrow down her options, and focus.

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. Likewise, if some third party had taken Ry with them in a starship, whether willingly or unwillingly, Ry could literally be anywhere in the galaxy.

But if Ry had escaped on foot, or even in some kind of ground-based vehicle, there were two possibilities as Ahsoka saw it. It was only about a day since the drone sent Ahsoka's comm the signal that Ry had left the hospital. She could only go so far in a day's travel. She could be hiding in the desert somewhere not far away. She could perhaps, in a second vehicle, have made it to the capital. It was a city of only local importance, somewhere bounty hunters would not likely go without good reason. Ry could be hiding there.

As Ahsoka swerved around patches of desert scrub under the overcast sky, she held these options in her intuition: the city, the desert, or somewhere off-planet altogether? There was no evidence to guide the choice. Yet somehow, in her bones, Ahsoka felt Ry was still on Yemer. In her gut, she felt Ry was here, in the desert. She made up her mind.

Back at her starship, Ahsoka worked quickly. She pulled a big grey crate out of a compartment in the storage unit behind the cockpit, and unpacked twelve black aerial reconaissance units, each about twenty-five centimetres long and ten centimetres wide and deep, not counting the four propellers that popped out of each upper corner. They were battle-scarred, literally, having come from a military surplus auction, but Ahsoka had retrofitted them to pick up infrared signals and zoom in for a closer look at any life-form of interest. Now, she hooked them up to the computer one by one and input the information she'd acquired from a bounty-hunter friend: Ry's height and relative proportions, her gait, her retina scan. They would scan the area, picking up on any warm-blooded being and then pulling in close to check the target against these parameters and notify Ahsoka's comm with the results.

When the last of the twelve was done, Ahsoka checked her comm to make sure that each unit was transmitting correctly, then with the push of a button, she watched them fly off to patrol the area in search of Ry, starting from the coordinates of the abandoned speeder.

Then Ahsoka went to rummage in her tiny onboard kitchen. Three extra water bottles, a handful of ration packs and a few salty snacks. She put all this into a small backpack, then went to her tiny sleeping quarters for an extra jacket and a blanket, just in case. Then back to the storage unit where she'd started, she added her jetpack, just in case she wanted a quick and easy way to travel. From the cockpit, she grabbed her datapad. She checked her belt: macrobinoculars, blaster fully charged, flashlight. Her slim lightsabres were in pockets of her paramilitary pants, concealed. Her comm was strapped to her wrist; she checked the batteries. It was at full charge.

With everything in place, Ahsoka gulped down a cup of water, sealed her starship, and then set out into the brightening heat of the desert morning. She decided to walk, this time, to better notice what either the physical landscape or the Force had to tell her.

Behind her deft movements and decisive actions, a slight uncertainty haunted Ahsoka. Ry's disappearance might well be wholly unnatural, in which case she would likely never be found. But Ahsoka pushed that thought to the sidelines. She had three days before she had to be anywhere else, and in that time, she was determined to do whatever she could to catch Ry Kyver.

Chapter 45: Daybreak – Part II

~13 BBY – 11 months – 18 days~

When Ry passed through the portal he'd commanded to shut, the Emperor knew that the holocron would malfunction but he hadn't anticipated just how violently it would destabilize.

As she disappeared through the elegant white outline of the door, there was a rumble like stone walls falling, and the doors and paths drawn in fine lines across that endless black space crumbled into dust. His head throbbed, not with the sound but with some pulsating pressure in the air, and he felt himself falling to the pull of a suddenly stronger gravitational field. But before he could summon the Force to stabilize himself and regain his bearings, he felt his very being dissolve and he was unconscious for what seemed in retrospect like an eternity.

When he came to, he was in a different everywhere-yet-nowhere place. The surrounding blackness was the same, but the air was stale and musty despite the infinite space. Instead of elegant arched lines, this one had rectangular doors made of heavy wood, all bearing an ancient type of non-electronic lock requiring a physical key. None of them would open, and instead of pathways linking them, there were steep flights of narrow wooden stairs linking narrow landings.

On and on, up and down the stairs he pushed his tired legs until at last, with aching knees, he found a door that opened for him. When he stepped through it, he found himself on the floor of his own throne room, lying on his back in a wholly undignified manner, with Vader staring down at him.

It was only after Vader left that he realized what had happened to the holocron itself: across the smooth floor lay thousands of tiny shards. The holocron didn't just break; it shattered.

The biggest of the pieces lay near where he had woken up on the floor. Those two were about the size of his thumbnail. The rest, resembling coarse grit, lay scattered across the throne-room, even as far as the door.

The Emperor cursed Ry and cursed her again. This was no small mischief, the shattering of the holocron. There were any number of people besides Ry whom the Emperor had hoped to follow using it, not least of all to double-check what his own apprentice, Vader, was up to during his many long absences.

But the Sith Lord was not without recourse. Reaching out his hand, the Emperor swept his bony fingers across the space before him, and the pieces rose up and flew towards him. He made them stop in a cloud above his head, black flecked with gold, and with a flick of his wrist, he set the cloud to spin like a cyclone.

A few pieces coalesced to form a rock about the size of his thumb and something that looked like a piece of a computer memory cube. The Emperor made the cloud still again and sat, weighing the remaining fragments in his mind. Even with the Force at his command, he sensed that fitting all those tiny pieces together would be a long process.

But he would do it.

With grim determination, the Emperor brought two more of the floating pieces together and then two more again. However much Ry Kyver had set things back, she would not escape. He'd learned far more than she could ever dream from that small encounter in the world-between-worlds.

One thing he'd learned, much to his satisfaction, was that she still feared him. That much was clear from the look of sheer horror she gave him. The other, unsurprising and not at all to his liking, was that she willed to serve him no longer; she simply ran, refusing to cower and beg his understanding like she used to when progress was slower than might be desired.

Yet what disturbed and intrigued the Emperor most was that he'd found it harder to read Ry than he'd expected. It was as if her whole inner energy was veiled. There was an unusual flavour to her presence, like a spice added to mask the taste of other ingredients. It was like encountering a well-known person and not recognizing them because they wore clothes so drastically different from their norm. In Ry's case, the energy that emanated from her was far less powerful, less pointed than her usual. Even though she didn't look calm, the energy around her was calm, meek even. It made her seem physically smaller than she really was, younger almost, in a way that did not match her actual appearance.

He did not think for a moment that this could possibly be who Ry really was at this point. He knew her; she would never choose that. It was simply a cloak that hid her true presence from being perceived in the Force. He will have to consider what this might mean, but at least now he knew more about how that cloak manifested in the Force, what he could expect Ry would look like, so to speak, to the eye of his Force-sense, so that he would know what to search for at a time of deeper attunement to the threads the Force wove through space and time. At the moment, he simply noted that there was something oddly familiar about that energy that Ry wore, as if he ought to recognize it but didn't.

Around and around the Emperor swirled the broken pieces of the holocron. A few more fragments came together, and the Emperor set his jaw. Now he knew what to look for. As soon as he had the holocron working, he would go looking for her again.

---

~13 BBY – 11 months – 18 days to 14 days~

Rat-tat-tat-tat

Ry instinctively scrunched herself into a tight ball.

The wicker door to the guesthouse shook as a quick hand rapped on its outer side, harder this time

"Would you like to join me for dinner?" Ava Gerges' voice came, muffled and tentative. Ry pulled the quilt closer around her and buried her face against her bent knees. He asked again, and when she made no answer, footsteps faded into the distance.

Ry listened to him go and then opened her clenched-shut eyes to the earthen walls and simple wooden furnishings of Ava Gerges' guest room sitting quietly in the dusky half-light.

The dusk faded slowly to darkness and Ry still did not move. Even her breath was too quiet and shallow to draw her own notice; the only sound came from outside, the trill of a thousand insects slightly muted by the thick clay walls. She let the sound fill her senses. It was not pleasant in itself, but it was better than silence.

Whatever that ritual had or hadn't done to hide her from the Emperor, it had torn down the last curtain in her mind that allowed her to ignore her reality: the monstrous past that lay behind her, and the terrifyingly empty future that lay before her. It was too much for her even to be able to think, and so she lay perfectly still, though the darkness seemed to last a lifetime.

But her bladder began demanding its due. She managed to wait until a faint light glowed on the beige walls, then shuffled off to find a primitive sort of commode in the corner. It would have to do.

The room stank after that but Ry didn't really notice. She pulled the thin quilt off the bed and wrapped it around herself, huddled on the floor at the end of the bed with her back to the wall where she could not see the round windows up above her head and no one looking in the windows could possibly see her.

Ava Gerges knocked again and she sat watching the door rattle. He called for her a couple of times and when she made no answer, the door opened slightly and a pair of long hands pushed a big round basket inside, covered in a grey cloth. Ry did not go to look at it, even when the door was closed and she was sure Ava Gerges was gone. Her throat felt dry, and though she could see a flask of something drinkable poking up from under the cloth over the basket, she knew at some liminal level of thought she allowed herself that if she drank, she would have to pee again and if she had to pee she would have to move and if she moved she might start to think and have to face herself again.

Morning dusk brightened to daylight filtered through the small windows, faded again and turned to night filled with the song of the nocturnal insects. Again an eternity of dark, and day grew again, this time with rain pattering loud enough to hear indoors.

Three times the light grew and brightened, then faded to darkness and darkness gave way to dusk yet again. Every morning and every evening Ava Gerges knocked, then reached inside to check the basket, sometimes leaving fresh items, but Ry did not move from her place. Sometimes she dozed, but never for long.

The fourth time that dawn crept into the room, Ry had no idea whether it was the third or fourth or tenth time, but without knowing she:d made a decision to do so, she stood up and let the quilt slough off onto the floor, then walked to the door and pulled the drinking flask out of the basket.

She took one sip and then another. It was cool and tasted somehow of fresh green, a little thicker than water. In one long swig, she finished the rest of the flask, then looked around the room: the ruffled bedsheets, the unused table by the window, the stinking commode still sitting in the alcove by the door. She covered her nose with the neck of her shirt and then realized that she stank too: the sweat of fear, the sweat of exertion and exhaustion from her encounter with the Emperor, turned rank with time.

That was when she formed her first distinct conscious thought in days: This is pathetic.

She leaned her forehead against the cool wall of the room, grounding herself against the tidal wave of despair that she was sure would engulf her the moment she faced the reality of her life square on, but she found that now what she mostly felt was just plain numb. It allowed for a bleak and blunt sort of realism: whatever her past, whatever her future, sitting here with the smell of her own piss was not the answer. Whether to hide from the Emperor or to escape her own miserable state, she was going to have to be a different person. Somehow. She opened the door.

---

~13 BBY – 11 months – 14 days~

A few hairline cracks still scarred the black and gold dodecahedron, but the holocron hung otherwise complete in the dim gloom of the Emperor's throne room, hovering dark above the pale palm of his outstretched hand.

With both hands, he spread his fingers, and the holocron split into twelve pieces. The Emperor was delighted to see the same luminous green thread connect them as they drew apart and formed the same oval gateway as before, framing a matt blackness deeper and darker than the shadows around him.

On the edge of his seat, the Emperor waited. He had succeeded, through long sleepless nights of trial and error, in reassembling the holocron from its many shattered pieces. Now, at any moment, the opening words of the title and menu would appear. First, he would choose again the portal to that everywhere-yet-nowhere world-between-worlds; then he would go searching. First for Ry but for her only. There were many people, many places, many moments both past and present he had yet to stalk through it, and in due time he would study the holocron's other contents also. Many planets, he had read earlier, held these gateways, all listed within the holocron, and he would ensure that they were each brought under his power and his alone. To know the location of each of them, that would be his next work with his recovered treasure.

And so he waited.

But nothing came. Shifting impatiently, the Emperor reached a hand through the oval. The matt blackness took on a slight sheen and rippled like still water troubled by a falling stone. When the ripples cleared, the Emperor saw fine white lines tracing a pathway down from the door before him out into infinite blackness, arching downwards to a crossroads leading to yet other paths and other doors.

He cackled softly. Never mind the shattering the artifact had endured! He had found his portal again. He stood up and stepped through it.

Or at least, he tried to step through it.

He saw nothing to hinder his passage, but it felt like trying to walk through an elastic barrier; it took great effort to maintain his position just inside the door and as soon as he relaxed his effort, he found himself stumbling back against his throne.

The Emperor tried this several times before opting for a different strategy. He stretched out his hands towards the oval opening but did not reach through it, not physically. Instead, he extended his intention alone, reaching out through the Force into that otherworld. To his surprise, on the other side of the portal, he could see blue tendrils of thick vapour curl and stretch out slowly along the path, as if the swirls of hyperspace had been put in time lapse and made a physical extension of his hands.

Interesting, but useless. He tried again, putting more of his power into the effort. The tendrils flared brighter, but there was no other difference.

Frustrated, the Emperor clenched his bony fist and the twelve pieces of the holocron snapped back together. He counted to twenty and then spread his fingers, causing them to dissociate again; perhaps a reboot would teach the holocron to serve his purpose again.

But nothing changed. Several times he tried and tried again, with the same result: no long blocks of text to read, only the oval portal that showed him the world-between-worlds but did not let him enter it. He tried to push his way through more slowly, more patiently, to no avail. He tried blasting through the unseen barrier with Force-lightening, but the lightning only turned into the same curling swirls as his Force-grasp had before.

After closing the holocron for the last time, the Emperor examined it carefully, turning it over and around in his claw-like hands. He ran a finger along a hairline crack. During the reconstruction, he'd sensed a few pieces were missing, but couldn't find them. They didn't seem to affect any of the key components: the data matrix was still there, and the kyber micro-crystal. Was it only a matter of missing pieces, or did the artifact now simply refuse to do his will? He had a swift impulse to dash it against the wall and then blast it with Force-lightening, but he stopped himself. If he broke the ancient artifact again, what little was left of its function might be lost also, and sometime, when he was inclined to be in a calmer state of focus, he might yet explore what information he could gain by accessing the world-between-worlds from that more limited vantage point.

In the meantime, the Sith Lord was not without recourse. He would order his emissaries to explore Sanej and Lothal until they found the gateways located there; given that these were known, they were likely marked by a temple or other such artifice. He would study other holocrons to investigate whether there might be some secret method to fully restore this one, and...he checked that yes, the disc Vader gave him was still near at hand...he would go through Ry's deleted data to determine what she had tried to hide from him and whether it held any clue to finding her and making her pay for this.

Yet for all his strategy, there remained one inconvenient truth: his door to the world-between-worlds was shut, and a window was open for Ry Kyver to evade him.

---

Overhead was a turquoise sky, bleeding into tangerine and then crimson at the horizon. At a distance, Ry could see Ava Gerges standing like a skinny pole beside his tall branching cactus, waiting for the sun. Ry walked through the desert scrub to along the narrow path to the mound where Ava Gerges lived and sat down on the doorstep to wait. Slowly the sun rose, hard on her eyes after four days of huddling in darkness and dim light, but pleasantly warm against her face. It helped speed her thoughts as she threw together a plan.

Ry was used to living with a set of walls in her mind. On one side of those walls, there was herself: smart, savvy, in control. On the other side, there was also herself but it was the self she didn't want to see. All that was left of those old walls had crumbled with Ava Gerges' ritual. But the sheer scope and horror of her past was such that she desperately needed some sort of mental barrier to keep herself from falling back into the catatonic state in which she'd spent the last few days. Although she wasn't aware to put it in as many words, a new set of walls was hastily going up, thinner, with more holes than the old ones, but better than nothing. Above all, those walls consisted of a set of plans she was now throwing together.

When Ava Gerges finally came walking down the narrow path, Ry stood up to meet him, one hand shading her eyes. "Do you have a way to contact Dr. Gunma?" she asked.

Ava Gerges stopped in his tracks a couple metres from Ry, then looked up and scanned the sky. "If need be. How come?"

"I need him to get in touch with Wakeh."

"I'll keep my eyes open. When my messenger is in range, I'll ask."

Ry raised an eyebrow but didn't bother to ask the unspoken details. "When do you think that will be?"

Ave Gerges shrugged his thin shoulders. "Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Rukh has no schedule."

Ry digested this for a moment. She wanted to do what she had in mind sooner rather than later, but her plan could wait. She figured Wakeh probably knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone, with anti-Imperial tendencies. After everything she had done, the least Ry felt she could do would be to spill whatever information she carried about long-term Imperial policy into a voice recorder, pass it to Wakeh, and hope it got to someone who could do some damage with it. Then she'd have a good chat with Dr. Gunma himself. Ry had no real interest in hospital work but she did know what to do in a laboratory. Maybe, she thought, she could help run tests or screen samples with the microscope or something. That was probably the last place of either mind or body that the Emperor would think to look for her, and it would help keep her busy. She could start to prove that she wasn't a monster, at least not anymore. And maybe, if she kept her science skills sharp, somehow, someday she'd get a respectable job somewhere and start her upward climb again.

"In the meantime," Ava Gerges said, bringing Ry back to the present Yemerian morning, "do you want breakfast?"

By way of an answer, Ry just stepped aside from Ava Gerges' doorway and then followed him inside. He motioned for Ry to sit on one of the crochet-covered stools by the low table near the centre of the room and then put out a simple spread: tan-coloured wafers and sticky red jam, with a pitcher of something clear to drink. Ry did not ask what the ingredients were, or even care at this point. She was too hungry. By the time she was finished, she'd crunched down more than her share of the wafers and half the jar of jam and downed almost the whole pitcher of that cool, refreshing drink.

Ava Gerges sat knitting as he waited for her to finish. When she finally sat back with a hand on her full belly, he gave a little nod. "You probably need that," he said.

Ry burped. "Excuse me," she said, after the moment it took to remember her manners.

Ava Gerges made a little wave of his hand as if to say, not to worry. "You'll probably want to rest a while, but perhaps after that, you'd like to make yourself useful?"

"Like how?" Ry said, doubtful by instinct, but she also pricked up her ears. Anything to do would be better than sitting around with too much time to think.

Ava Gerges put his knitting down and got up to fish around among the jar and baskets that sat on the side of the oval room furthest from the windows. He pulled out a slim glass jar with something beige inside.

"You could plant these," he said, holding up the jar so that Ry could see the big beige-coloured seeds soaking in water inside. "You see, my garden is made of several deep hollows, to shelter the plants from the wind. You are young and strong and so climbing down into them should be no trouble for you. Just plant three seeds in the bottom of each hollow until they're all finished."

Ry wrapped her arms around herself and scowled. Her ribs were still a little sore, a lingering legacy of her injury at the slaughterhouse on Arum.

"There are always excuses," Ava Gerges said gently. "Being a different person is usually hard at first."

Ry rolled her eyes. He was trying to be helpful. She rolled her eyes. "Don't," she said, with a warning tone, but got up from her stool and took the jar from him. "Where's the garden and where's the tools?"

Ava Gerges led her around to the back of his house and showed her a patch of desert where a hundred or more hollows marked an otherwise flattish stretch of ground. Each of the hollows was three metres across and half a metre deep at the centre, with sides sloping gently upwards to the edges.

"I didn't count the seeds," Ava Gerges admitted frankly. "So please count how many hollows you're able to plant at three seeds each, and how many are left unplanted."

Ry turned the jar sideways, trying to estimate, trying to decide if it was easier to dump the seeds out and count them first or not. She had an image of them falling on the ground and having to pick them up, and decided not to bother.

Ava Gerges was about to say more when a shout came from behind them, a whirr of clicks and whistles. They both turned. There stood a brown-cloaked lizard-person, a Yemerian, hailing Ava Gerges.

"I'm coming! I'll be there in a minute," Ava Gerges called back, then said to Ry, "That's Cheethwet, a novice of the monastery. We have some things to discuss. Do you mind?" he gestured to the garden.

Ry shrugged and took the little trowel Ava Gerges offered her in one hand and the jar of seeds in the other, grunting as she worked her sluggish feet down to the bottom of the first hollow. She didn't like this kind of work. It reminded her of the AgriCorps: repetitive, mundane, without any real end goal that excited her in any way. But she had to do something other than just sit there not knowing what to do. So she shoved the trowel shove into the damp sandy ground, dropped in a couple of seeds, stomped them in with the toe of her boot, then moved on.

In coming up to the lip of the hollow, Ry looked around for the next one, then counted every hollow in sight and made note of a few landmarks: Ava Gerges' house, another guesthouse, a particularly large cactus with pink spines. There were a hundred and three of them, and she needed to be systematic so that she wouldn't miss any and or do any twice.

As Ry scanned her surroundings, she shivered slightly. Gone somewhere with his guest, Ava Gerges was nowhere in sight. She hadn't expected him to stick around anyways, but she also hadn't anticipated just how alone she'd feel out here, with the thin desert scrub between the hollows providing little cover from the wide-open sky, now turning from pale blue to wavy grey as wisps of clouds gathered into one great mass overhead.

Ry scurried quickly to the next hollow. Somehow she didn't like being out in the open. Around the edges of her mind, the fear that was pushed out by the overwhelm of doing Ava Gerges' ritual crept back and stood as if casting a thick shadow over her. She looked over her shoulder, half expecting to see the Emperor's white hand reach out to pull her back into that other dimension and trap her there, but there was no one.

Down in the second hollow, Ry stabbed the ground with the trowel and burrowed her mind deeper into the fragile sense of security she bought by consenting to admit the evils of her life. She stuffed the seeds into the ground, stamped them roughly in, then looked over her shoulder again. That sense of security felt fragile indeed.

It wasn't that Ry doubted the power of Ava Gerges' ritual. Formally purging her past was too monumental and too mind-bending to have no effect on how she manifested in the Force, Ry was sure. Yet was it enough? Was she evading the Emperor, or was he just watching her and waiting? There was no way to know.

Third hollow, fourth hollow, fifth hollow: Ry pressed on in her work. Back when she was looking for the Siluans, she had spent hours studying esoteric holocrons that related various theories, ancient and modern, for finding people through the Force, and for hiding oneself within it. More than one master, of both Sith and Jedi, wrote of how a radical change in behaviour could make a person far more difficult to find. They described people not as static entities but as contingent probabilities, dependent on their external circumstances, internal disposition, present action and past behaviour. Based on her experience and her reading, Ry didn't buy the idea that she could change her core Force Signature any more than she could change the retina scan that any number of bounty hunters were using to look for her, but she did believe that if she were to radically and unexpectedly alter her circumstances and behaviour, her trajectory could theoretically shift enough to make her unrecognizable in the matrix of possibilities that was the Force.

Six and seven, eight and nine. Or was it ten? Ry stopped to double-check. Number nine. She was planting number nine.

Helping Ava Gerges with his garden, maybe volunteering in the hospital...it was different alright. Yet, less than an hour after forming her new plan, Ry was beginning to wonder whether she could in fact maintain this particular state of being different before she got bored out of her mind. That bothered her. With bounty hunters – and Vader and the Inquisitorium, most likely – on the hunt for her, leaving Yemer didn't seem wise. Not that she had any way to do so. But more than mere lack of excitement, boredom scared her. It was boredom, back in the AgriCorps, that gave her one reason to set out on the path that ultimately led to her alliance with the Emperor. Boredom could yet again betray her to become someone he'd easily find again.

Not in a mood to handle questions without answers, Ry started counting from one to a thousand, first in Basic, then in the little bit of Ryl she'd learned back in the Temple. It worked, for a couple rounds at least. Then she realized she'd lost count of the hollows again. Coming up from what she was pretty sure was the nineteenth or twentieth hollow, Ry realized she'd lost count, and turned to double check how many she'd done so far, counting from the one nearest the house, where she started.

A sharp breeze whistled and hissed in the branches of the wispy broom trees and the thick-set spines of the low-growing cacti that gathered around the edges of the hollows. She felt like they were watching her, waiting for something. This place felt altogether too alive for her liking. She was used to plants that were under her control, plants that did what she told them to do, even down to altering their DNA if she targeted her focus closely enough. Here, she was getting a creepy feeling that they almost had a power all their own, one she had no control over.

Ry quickly ducked her head, and headed down to the bottom of the next hollow — number twenty-one.

Stab, insert, stomp. Ry pushed that you-have-no-power-over-them feeling from her mind, but the aliveness of the desert flora jogged her memory. She remembered reading in those holocrons about a phenomenon called biocrypsis, in which Force users, whether Dark or Light, could wrap themselves in the energies of the biota around them and so hide themselves from other Force users. She paused for a moment. Would the Emperor expect her to do that? What was he looking for when he looked for her, anyways?

Her reluctance to even try to imagine her way into his impenetrable mindspace fought with her need to figure this out and the need to figure it out won. She started with the simple: he would look for her as someone who tapped into the Dark Side of the Force. Was that why he found her just as she was exploring her way back into her Force ability through the kyber crystal? Her thoughts skittered away from the memory as quickly as they touched on it. What else? Seeing herself from someone elses point of view, especially his, felt so intractable.

Ry reminded herself of what did make sense: he wouldn't expect to find her here helping Ava Gerges out with his garden. He wouldn't expect to find her purposely not tapping into whatever Darkside power she had left in her.

Slowly, other ideas crystallized. He wouldn't expect to find her hiding behind the energies of plants she wasn't manipulating in any way.

Ry paused and stretched a crick from her back. She found she liked the idea. It was smart enough and sneaky enough that it might be worth a try, and it might give her a buffer against having to wonder whether she was being different enough to evade the Emperor.

On her way up from the hollow – number twenty-five – Ry stopped at the edge and looked around. She wondered: would any attempt whatsoever to use the Force make her more visible to the Emperor? Maybe, if she just made herself blank, empty, she could let the energies of the plants rush to fill the vacuum, as it were. Ry tucked the trowel under her elbow, pushed a tuft of her steadily re-growing hair from her face, and gave it a try.

The resulting sensation was one of noise. Not audible noise per se, but a feeling that was most nearly like a door suddenly opening on a room buzzing with conversation. But that was only part of it. Her feet tingled with a sense of life and energy awake beneath the ground, and her mind felt like it was growing branches outwards in all directions. Almost frightened, Ry shook her head hard enough to feel like she'd rattled her brain.

She pushed onwards to finish planting as quickly as she could, loudly humming every pop tune she could remember in a partially successful attempt to simply think of nothing. It sort of worked, but not entirely. Once opened, the window on that sensation of noise did not wholly stop. Thirty, forty, fifty hollows. At each once, she shook three of the pearly-beige tear-shaped seeds from the jar and stamped them into the ground, increasingly and reluctantly aware that the seeds themselves had a faint hum to them, like insects buzzing against a bright window, looking for a way in, or a way out.

At the sixty-third hollow, the seeds ran out. By that time, the breeze rustling the desert scrub was turning to a sharp wind and tumultuous rain clouds were gathering on the horizon. With the jar and the trowel, Ry hurried back to the house to report to Ava Gerges. On her way there, something made her turn her head: the big spiky succulent she passed on her way to the door was announcing its presence with a thrum almost akin to Ava Gerges' chanting. Ry turned away and quickened her step.

Ava Gerges met her at the door. "How did the planting go?"

"I did sixty-three," she said flatly, then handed him the trowel and the empty jar. "I think I might stay inside for a while."

"That might be just as well. It looks like it might rain," he said, gesturing with his chin to the outdoors as Ry ducked through the door to get inside.

She stopped in her tracks when she saw a little grey lizard-person sitting on one of the crochet-topped stools, sipping from a little clay teapot.

"I missed the chance to introduce you earlier," Ava Gerges said calmly. "Cheethwet, this is Sen. Sen, this is Cheethwet. Sen," he told the lizard-person, "is staying with me while she sorts some things out. Cheethwet," he told Ry, "is a novice of the monastery, planning to take vows in a few weeks."

The lizard-person raised their cup and gave a nod to Ry, who stared, not sure what to do with this.

"Cheethwet has brought some interesting news," Ava Gerges went on, ignoring Ry's awkwardness. "They've found the bodies of some of our dead, far more than we were able to recover in the past, and we'll be going to the Dead Zone tomorrow to bring them to the ossuary. We could use an extra pair of hands. Might you like to join us?"

Ry's stare turned into seeing-without-seeing. "No!" she said quickly. "I'm not doing that."

Ava Gerges gave her a saddened, concerned look. "As you wish," he said.

"I'm going to take a nap," Ry told him flatly and headed back out, big drops of rain spattering her red shirt. She ran back to the guesthouse where she'd hidden for the past four days. The place stank. She tripped over an empty bottle on her way in through the door, and saw the bedspread not on the bed where she wanted to lie down but jumbled on the floor under the row of windows. Not that she could just lie down and sleep. She was still wearing her same old clothes, the black jeans and red button-up shirt, which felt suddenly dirty and tainted.

Ry was seized by a deep urge to be rid of all this, and threw herself into work as a bulwark against both noisy plants and noisy thoughts of her own past or future. She hauled out the stinking chamber pot, dumped it in the bush a safe distance away and then left it for the combination of rain and solar UV to clean out for her. She opened all the little round windows to air the place out. In the wind and rain outside, she shook dust and bad vibes from the bedspread and put it back on the bed, never minding that it was now a little damp. She stripped out of her clothes, underwear and all. In a basket in the closet, there was a clay jar of some kind of aromatic powder that seemed to be a type of perfume or deodorant; with no way to take a shower, Ry rubbed it onto her body, then set about finding new clothes.

There were several garments hanging in the closet. Some things obviously designed for other species: small robes with short arms for Yemerians, pants with four legs, head-coverings with holes for a Twilek's two head-tails. But there was also a long tunic that hung more or less to her knees with only two sleeves, one on each side, and a pair of loose pants, rather loose at the waist but with a drawstring that would hold them up well enough, and a thin scarf to tie back her awkward hair.

Ry quickly put them on. She was careful, as in days before, not to look too hard at any piece of her skin for long. Her immersion in the bacta tank had leached the Sith grey from her flesh, leaving her skin porcelain white. She hated it. It was her body doing things she didn't like and had no control over.

Yet as Ry put on the new clothes, hand-made in shades of taupe and beige, she did notice her hands as she poked them through the long sleeves. They did not look like her hands, but they did look like human hands, not discoloured by long practice of inhuman behaviour. The change now seemed, if not ideal, a step in the right direction, and Ry held her shoulders a little squarer for it.

Turning to her now-clean room, the first thing Ry saw was her balled-up her black jeans, red shirt and black underwear, the same things she was wearing when the Emperor found her in the world-between-worlds, the same things she was wearing when she killed that girl, carefully washed in between those events by staff at the hospital.

Ry was seized by an irrational but powerful intuition: if she could only be rid of those clothes, she could be rid of all that stank about her past life, not only so she could be free of the Emperor, but so that she could be free to make a fresh start. She picked up the haphazard stinking bundle, holding out from her body in both hands as far as she could, and stuffed it into the little black door of the petite biofuel burner that sat near the door.

She looked around for a lighter, and found none. There was, however, a little wooden box with a dark grey flint and a black metal striker, several small pieces of crumbly black cloth, a leather holder and a wad of unravelled yellow-tan twine. It took several tries. She's seen Ava Gerges do it once, and someone had taught younglings how to start a fire with flint and striker back in the AgriCorps, assuming they'd have no power of pyrogenesis, but Ry hadn't done it herself in more than twenty years. By the time she finally got a spark to seed a little red dot on the black char-cloth, her hands were sore from her grip on the leather holder she'd wrapped around the flint, but she eagerly blew the red dot into an expanding circle and added bits of the unravelled twine. They smoke thick white, then burst into yellow flame. She stuffed it into the biofuel burner.

She didn't dare close the door to the little stove, lest lack of air put out the young flame, but she sat and watched as smoke curled and flame licked around her old clothes. When they were reduced to ash, Ry threw on a cloak from the closet and pulled the hood over her head, then pulled out the ash pan. She shook it to make sure every last bit of burned-up clothing fell inside, then took it out into the wind and rain.

"Be gone! Be gone!" she yelled, and it felt good to get the pent-up feeling out of her body. She cast the ashes to the wind and laughed as she watched the rain dissolve them forever into the ground.

When it was over, Ry noticed she was getting wet. Suddenly very tired, she went back inside.

When she saw her bed all nicely made up, Ry didn't even bother to take off the hooded cloak. She flopped onto the bed. She barely realized she was lying down before she was fast asleep.

---

Ahsoka's search for Ry did not go well.

After finding the empty speeder where her drone said Ry should have been, and then configuring a larger drone fleet to continue the search, she spent the rest of the day exploring the area around the abandoned speeder in ever-widening circles, looking for any sign that Ry had left the speeder on foot: a thread of clothes or a piece of hair caught on a bush, a discarded food wrapper or footprint in the damp sand; but there was nothing. Yet could she have expected more? So much of what looked at first glance like a sandy plain was too rocky to show footprints, if there were any, and the wispy bushes and multi-pronged cacti were often too sparse to catch on Ahsoka's clothes either.

The drones patrolled the same area Ahsoka did. Besides the abandoned speeder, they found no vehicles of any kind, and the only large mammal they found was Ahsoka herself. They did, however, send a number of false alarms. Two coyotes hiding under a bush for a midday snooze sent infrared signals that triggered the search parameters, as did some variety of tiny rodent with a penchant for huddling in groups big enough to trick the drone's algorithm into thinking they'd found a potential human. Ahsoka soon tired of hurrying to investigate.

By the second day, the drones, having started with searching within a day's walk of the speeder, began ranging as far as the hospital a few hundred kilometres away. They identified a human male and a Twilek female; Ahsoka had already seen them, though they didn't see her, when she snuck into the hospital on the first night of her search to check Ry's medical records again. To Ahsoka's chagrin, the records stated only that she had recovered a few days ahead of the original prognosis with the use of a newly-available bacta tank, and was in the care of one Ava Gerges, whoever he might be.

Something occurred to Ahsoka after the furtive hospital visit, and she remotely flew one of her drones overhead to check. To her deep discouragement, her hunch was right: the earthen walls of the hospital, and the way the rooms were set partially underground, meant the her drones were blind to anyone under the roof, except for the few places that held skylights. Ry was not inside the hospital, Ahsoka was sure of that, but where else, she wondered, might her human target be able to hide from the drones' oversight?

On the second and third days of the search, Ahsoka ranged farther afield. She went as far as the craggy mountain range to the north, and as far west as the eerie monastery, now empty in the Dead Zone. She went deep into the desert plains south and east of where she found the speeder. Everywhere she went, she only found ways for Ry to elude her, if she was there at all: networks of caves and caverns in the mountains, abandoned underground burrows in the plains, big enough for a human and deep enough that no drone would sense her.

The local Yemerians, a reptilian species, were few and far between. Ahsoka avoided direct contact with them when she could, and on the only occasion that one of them saw her first, she showed a hologram of Ry and asked if they'd seen her. They clearer understood Basic but either could not or would not speak it, and they were mentally so unreadable that Ahsoka couldn't tell whether their No gestures meant they hadn't seen Ry or simply didn't want to say.

Wherever she went, on every day of the search, every so often Ahsoka stopped and closed her eyes, let the desert wind brush her face and the surface of her montrals, and reached out beyond herself for what the Force could tell her. But wherever she stopped, all she sensed was Ry was here, Ry is here, Ry will be here...

As the search ranged further afield, the drones were less and less helpful, if only because they had to cover a wider area. On more than one occasion, they missed finding Ahsoka herself even when she was in their search region.

One hundred and ten hours into her search, Ahsoka was back at her starship, refilling water bottles and wondering how to spend her final hours before pressing needs called her elsewhere, when an alert came through on her comm.

After three days of false alarms due to rodent packs or bigger-than-usual coyotes, an alert for a potential humanoid did not raise Ahsoka's hopes, but she checked out of due diligence. This one was different. The drone transmitted a grainy image of a lanky human-like creature with neither lekku nor horns or montrals, depicted in shades of red against a dim backdrop in shades of grey. The transmitted data suggested a male Pau'an based on temperature and body proportions. In dimmer oranges a shorter figure stood beside him, Yemerian most likely.

Ahsoka scrolled down to check the data feed, then opened the drone's coordinates on a map. The maybe-Pau'an was only a couple hundred kilometres, as a drone flies, from the hospital, and within a hundred kilometres of the abandoned speeder. This just might be Ava Gerges.

For a minute, Ahsoka gazed out her starship's forward viewport at the endless desert plain, under a

cloudy sky now. Despite her brash words to Varda about possibly speaking with the Siluans about Ry's situation, Ahsoka later had second thoughts. For her own security, she preferred to maintain a shadowy existence, appearing only in places so crowded that no one would notice her or situations so private that only those whom she wished were there. For that reason, she had made no attempt to speak to the human and the Twilek at the hospital. But Ava Gerges, if this was him, might be the last person to see Ry before her disappearance. Ahsoka weighed the option of going to see him. It would mean a break from her usual policy, but the more she held the option in the balance of her intuition, the more she felt she should speak with him. She sent a signal to the drone to keep this new target in sight, then got onto her speeder bike.

When she arrived a few hours later, morning rain had given way to noonday sun, and the tall Pau'an was standing with his long skinny arms raised to the sky, chanting something about light and fullness, with his eyes slightly closed. His Yemerian companion stood beside him, at attention. Ahsoka waited for them to finish.

"Oh," he said when he saw her. "Were you looking for me?"

Ahsoka pressed a button on her comm, and a hologram of Ry Kyver appeared, showing her Sith-pale face framed by dark wavy hair, and yellow eyes burning above sunken cheeks. "I'm actually looking for this person. Have you seen her?"

The Pau'an's face immediately signalled recognition and slight dismay. "Oh, her," he said drily. "She made off with my speeder three days ago."

"What kind of speeder?" Ahsoka asked.

"A big clunky thing. A cargo speeder, with solar panels for recharging the battery."

Ahsoka pulled up a different hologram. "Like this?"

The Pau'an peered at the grainy image. "Yes! Did you find it?"

"It's out in the desert about a hundred kilometres from here."

"Ah. I see."

Ahsoka weighed this answer. He didn't seem too concerned about the speeder, but there was nothing in his manner to say he was lying, and if the Siluans were anything like the Jedi, he had probably been training for decades (centuries?) to attain non-possessiveness. She juggled a few different ideas for where to take the conversation from here, and decided to deal with mere logistics first. "Do you need help to go and get the speeder back?"

He smiled. "Thanks for your offer. If you point me in the right direction, I have a friend who can fly over and spot it and my friend here can take me to pick it up again." The Yemerian nodded in agreement with this last statement.

"Do you have any idea where she was headed?" Ahsoka asked. She was finding this old monk quite affable and couldn't quite decide how she felt about his willingness to talk to her without knowing who she was.

He shrugged. "There isn't really anywhere to go around here, is there? But you say she left the speeder. If she was walking, she couldn't have gone far."

"I imagine not," Ahsoka sidestepped the question in his face about her own search for the missing Dark Jedi. "But can you tell me, where did she steal your speeder from?"

"From here," the monk gestured to the space around them.

Ahsoka raised an eyebrow-marking.

"My fellow monastics tasked me with picking her up from the hospital and caring for her during the last stage of her recovery, but she evidently had other ideas."

"I see," she said tersely. But there was something else she wanted to know. She looked behind her. There were several low mounds, almost like something a giant insect had made. In the images her drones collected, they looked like just another part of the landscape, but now she could see doors and windows that indicated a dwelling. More than one dwelling. "Is it just the two of you here?" she asked.

The old monk gave a rueful smile. "Not nearly as often as I'd like. Over the centuries I've somehow acquired a reputation, and now there's always someone or other from outside looking for help or advice. I let them stay a few days, usually, or as long as they need. We'll see how long this one sticks around," he gestured to one of the mounds.

Ahsoka studied the spot where he'd pointed. While she was en route, her drone had indeed picked up a warm-bodied presence there, but it was not distinguishable from the many coyote dens the same device had detected based on infrared patterns. Now, she tried to discern through the Force whether this was something she needed to check out.

"Can I offer you anything to eat or drink? It's rather hot under the sun," the monk invited, gesturing to another of the mounds nearby.

"No, it's OK." Ahsoka snapped out of her thoughts. "I should be on my way. Thanks for your time."

The Pau'an and his Yemerian companion went into the low door of their little dwelling and Ahsoka swung her leg up over her speeder bike. She took one more look at the second house where the monk's guest was staying, debating whether to see what sort of person was there and whether they might have anything to do with Ry's disappearance.

Just in case, she feigned a drive into the desert and then crept back to peak in the window. A first glance piqued her interest: a long-limbed humanoid figure with feminine curves and slender form lay curled up on a bed beneath the window.

Ahsoka pressed her face to the slightly open window, which was big enough to look through but not big enough to poke her head, montrals and all, in for a better look. She cupped her hands at the sides of her face to better see the dim interior. The way the person was lying in fetal position, it was hard to catch a good look at the face, which showed oval from within the hood pulled over their head, but it didn't really look like Ry. This person's skin gleamed porcelain white in the dim room, neither the Sith grey nor the natural beige-brown of the person Ahsoka had either seen in the hospital or in the images she got from her bounty-hunter friend. They were skinny, yet not gaunt like the Ry she was expecting.

Ahsoka wavered. The information her bounty-hunter friend passed her made it clear that Ry routinely used a disguise to hide her greyed-out appearance, and this could be just another one. Although it felt like he was telling the truth, she wouldn't put it past the monk to lie to protect someone who had come to him for asylum. But the way the Force moved around this person didn't feel quite like the Ry she was looking for.

If Ahsoka was sure it was Ry, she would just sneak in and clap binders onto her wrists and ankles before she knew what was happening, but grabbing the wrong person could compromise Ahsoka's own need to keep a low profile. Yet Ahsoka couldn't rule out the possibility that Ry knew how to disguise herself in the Force.

If only she could have discovered this monk and his human guest a day earlier, if only she had enough time, Ahsoka could have done more scouting herself. Under the circumstances, proxy methods would have to do. She pulled a drone unit from her shoulder bag and examined the hand-sized unit with its tiny propellers on top and data cable port on the bottom. The one she'd planted earlier at the hospital hadn't entirely done its job, but it was better than nothing. She adjusted the settings on the drone via her comm, then planted it inconspicuously in a corner of the little stairwell that led down into the dwelling. When the person inside left, the drone would follow, and find out whether the kind of biometrics a person can't disguise matched what Ahsoka had on file for Ry Kyver.

With the midday sun beating down on her, Ahsoka stole away back to her speeder bike. The noonday heat did not bother Ahsoka. With so much time spent in space, she actually relished the chance to feel solar rays against her skin. But her heart was heavy on the drive back to her starship.

Ahsoka wasn't sure how she would explain Ry's disappearance to Varda. She'd also lost a lead on what could be a unique source of information about internal Imperial operations, yet she couldn't stay here looking for Ry forever. The covert work she did required passing sensitive information around a network of vulnerable informants; if she failed to show up to any of the drop points where data drives and holocubes were waiting for her, the delay could mean intelligence falling into the wrong hands, or informants being found out, and Ahsoka couldn't afford to stay even an hour past her original intentions.

At her starship, Ahsoka secured her speeder bike and prepared for takeoff. She left her drone fleet to patrol the area, but she wondered whether there was any real hope for finding Ry now.

The duns and yellows and browns and thin furze of green that was the desert surface receded into the distance as Ahsoka taxied her starship to the edge of the Yemerian atmosphere. The remaining question was what to tell Varda. She didn't want to say she'd simply let Ry get away, but staying to continue the search was untenable.

The best she could do, Ahsoka decided, would be to avoid meeting Varda altogether. She needed to go back to Nechako to finish setting up the security system she promised Devin, but if she went by night she could do the work while the others were asleep and be gone before they knew she was there. It would mean not working on lightsabre training with Devin, which she had been hoping to do, but the automatic unit she'd picked up for him would be better than nothing to practice with. As for Varda…

I'm continuing to monitor the situation you requested, Ahsoka keyed into a quick message on her comm, then hesitated. I've got things under control. A lie, but one that would keep Varda from getting worried, and there wasn't much the older woman could do anyways, hobbling around with her bad hip.

SEND. Ahsoka released her cryptic message into the network, then made the leap to hyperspace.

I'm doing the best I can, she told herself to soothe her misgivings, but she had a sinking feeling that back on Yemer, something was off. If Ry was up to no good, Ahsoka was powerless to stop it for now.

---

They stood in an open, level place. The sky above was bronze and the ground a dead tan-brown, broken only by the blacked branches of dead bushes and the crumbling skeletons of former cacti. Nearby lay the twisted form of a mummified carrion bird, straggly black feathers still clinging in patches to dried tan skin.

"This place is dead," Ry said aloud, the raspy sound of her voice in the dry air a reassurance that she, at least, was alive. A sudden gust of harsh wind blew grit in her eyes; its fierceness seemed to want to sweep her life away also. She squinted and held up a hand to ward it off.

But Ava Gerges' face was rapt. "No, this place is alive!" he insisted. "Look!"

Ry followed the sweep of his long dark-clad arm as he pointed to his right. Ry took a sharp breath and blinked. The desert was a blaze of colour: fat barrel-cacti were crowned with a blaze of magenta blossoms, supple bushes bore shining green-black leaves and a crowd of sunny daisies bloomed pure gold. Everywhere, a thin furze of grass and wildflowers enlivened the brown sandy soil. The air was rich and heady with the scent of herbs Ry didn't know, and every breath tasted of sweet moisture that spoke of recent rain.

Ry gaped. How could this be? With eloquent gestures, Ava Gerges was talking excitedly about renewed life and the non-linearity of time, but Ry barely heard him. She looked all around at this place that once was dead and now was alive again, and in its life, she felt more alive than she ever had before. A feeling of deep certainty settled over her. It said: This is the most profound thing that has ever happened to me.

Ry blinked up at the dun ceiling. A wave of panic set her heart racing and she sat up in a hurry, half expecting to see Dr. Unayat standing over her with her clipboard, but there were no dull green curtains, no IV drip tube extending from her arm, only the homey surroundings of Ava Gerges' guesthouse.

After giving her head a good shake, Ry lay back down, waiting for sleep to return. It did not. Her eyes wandered lazily around the room again, bathed in the early glow of morning dusk. The dream haunted her with a vaguely wistful feeling, but it nonetheless weirded her out. It was so vivid, so surreal. Like the dreams she'd had in the hospital. Only in this dream she was sure she was in her own body, not someone else's.

Before her mind could go too far down that track, Ry slipped out of bed, leaving the rumpled covers to lie where they were as she rummaged in what was left of Ava Gerges' food basket for some breakfast. There was still a package of those insect wafers and a jar of that red jam, which she turned into little sandwiches, eating at the desk by the small window. As she ate, that sense of the plants outside as having sound and voice moved from the edge of her consciousness to almost her full attention. She wished she could tune it out, but didn't know if she dared. It might, or then again might not, be part of the thin film of protection keeping her from being found by the Emperor.

By the second of the crumbly sandwiches, Ry was getting restless, shifting in her seat and looking behind or around her from time to time. She scowled at her food as she spread jam on the wafers and then put the two halves of the sandwich together. She still felt hungry but it was actually hard to swallow this stuff without anything to drink, and she didn't have water or any of that viscous stuff Ava Gerges liked to serve.

She wished again that she could know for sure: did the Emperor actually know exactly where she was, seen through some esoteric portal in the Force? Was he waiting for some indiscernible moment to seize her, or was she really screened somehow from his unnatural farsight in the Force, whether by her attempt to be different or by her attempt at biocrypsis or by Ava Gerges' ritual or what?

Something behind her made a light thud and Ry jumped, knocking the jam jar over as she stood up and whirled around. The clay jar broke on the floor, leaving a sticky mess but there was only a little lizard crawling under the bed after jumping down from the slightly open window. Still wrapped in the borrowed cloak, Ry went outside.

The sun was just coming up and the sky was clear. Ava Gerges was standing there by the tall cactus with his lizard-person friend, doing the Morning Chant. Ry went straight to Ava Gerges' house, let herself in, and found something to drink. She didn't really want to be there, uninvited, when he came back, so she went back outside.

The old Pau'an and the little brown-cloaked Yemerian both looked surprised to see her there. They were sitting in the two front seats of the cargo speeder parked near his door. The engine was running and they were about to go.

"Oh, there you are!" Ava Gerges said, nonchalant. "Get in! We need to be there and back before the sun gets too hot."

Ry blinked. They were going to the Dead Zone. She didn't want to go to the Dead Zone. But she didn't want to be left here alone either.

"You don't have to if you don't want to, but we're leaving now," the old monastic said, with an offhand gesture.

The casual tone of Ava Gerges' words was perhaps the only thing that made it feel normal for Ry to get into the speeder. Next thing she knew, they were heading out to the desert plain with the newly risen sun at their backs.

As the sun rose and shadows grew shorter, Ry noticed that the plant-noise was harder to notice when they were going high speed. She didn't miss it, but she did shift uncomfortably in her seat. She'd rather it was just her and Ava Gerges, without that lizard-person driving. Any Yemerian made her think uncomfortably of lizard-children lying in hospital beds, with kinked tails and breathing machines. She tried to tell herself that her discomfort was just a mammal's instinctive dislike of reptiles, but she was beginning to have doubts about going to the Dead Zone. She didn't want to think about her role in that, even if it belonged to a past she'd renounced already.

No one spoke as they drove, and Ry took to looking out the side window of the vehicle as it cruised along a vague track in the desert scrub. The desert vegetation was patchier out on the plain than it was around Ava Gerges' place, and abruptly thinned out altogether, giving way to a tan moonscape reminiscent of the living desert only by the blackened skeletons of broom trees and small tumbled piles of dried-out cactus dotted here and there. She pulled the hood of her cloak over her face but soon found that too hot, so she sat with her eyes closed.

She could remember the day she created the Dead Zone. She wasn't here in the desert plain, but in some rocky place when she gave the order to send out the aircraft with the chemical sprays. She could remember the deep meditations she'd undertaken to discern the molecular structures she would need to render a place devoid of all life. Not specifically for the purpose of killing this place, but to kill any place.

Ry remembered the thrill of mastery: what others might take years of experimentation to do, she did in just months because of the insight she gained through the Force. She remembered the thrill of approval; in those days, the Emperor still spoke to her directly instead of going through his henchman Vader. Now it just made her feel sick.

Ry shook herself as if by force to dislodge the undesired thoughts from her head. "Are we there yet?" she demanded roughly.

Ava Gerges, sitting in the passenger's seat just ahead of her, turned his head to give her a questioning look. "You were not so eager to go there yesterday," he said.

Ry folded her arms across her chest and grumbled something barely audible. It occurred to her at that moment that she in fact did not like herself and she hated that.

When the speeder finally stopped, Ava Gerges was about to get out, but his lizard-friend scolded him. "Alright, alright!" he told his friend, then turned to Ry. "Cheethwet insists that we wear these," he said and passed Ry a filtration mask and nitrile gloves.

"I need some space," she told him bluntly but took the gloves and mask.

Ava Gerges shrugged. "As you wish," he said lightly, and got out, along with his friend. "Now, where was it you found it?" he said to the Yemerian, and the two wandered off nearby, leaving Ry to herself.

Sitting still in that dead place, her own heartbeat, her own breath, her own yes-I'm-here presence in the Force felt loud. Ava Gerges and his lizard-friend stood out now too as dim but discernible bundles of energy, but the plant-noise that so weirded her out in the living desert was conspicuously absent here.

Having to face the dun Dead Zone without even the thin walls of the vehicle between her and it felt somehow worse and more monumental than having to name her wrongs on a piece of beige paper. If she stepped outside the vehicle, it would be real. It would be true: she really was a monster who killed places and killed people and who no one in their right mind would give a chance to be anything worth being ever again. Ry closed her eyes and tried to shut it out.

And then she heard the song. It was barely anything she could call music, but it had a cadence to it, a rhythm of give and take, a harmonization of two or three interwoven notes. Ry listened to it, listened to her heart pounding. It was high and eerie like the Ithorian flute sonatas she'd listened to in the hospital. It was as alien to her as the ice-music of Hoth. I am here, I am alive, the song said, but the I was not her own I.

Either she was going crazy, or something was alive in the Dead Zone. To go crazy, for Ry that was too much. Her mind was the one good thing she had left. If only to claim her sanity by knowing what was real and what was not, she stepped out of the vehicle.

Her feet hit the ground and she almost threw up. She remembered this place: the rocky outcropping, the bits of brown dead stuff where the smelly daisies once were. The transport was there, battered by desert storms, but still littered with the bodies of fallen Siluans, mummified taut brown now in the dry climate, weathered robes and cloaks fingered by a passing wind but still clinging to their rigid forms. Ava Gerges, with his back to her, was sprinkling dried herbs on them and chanting a prayer. Not sure what to do, Ry stumbled towards him.

"Ah, there you are," Ava Gerges said when he turned and saw her. The Yemerian looked at Ry, looked at Ava Gerges, looked at Ry, looked at Ava Gerges, as if unsure what was supposed to happen.

"You're just in time," Ava Gerges said, matter-of-fact, as he pulled down his mask to speak. "You are I are closer to the same height that Cheethwet and I, so we can carry the longer bodies and Cheethwet will take the shorter ones."

Had Ava Gerges expressed either pity or censure, Ry might have just gotten back into the speeder, but he made it sound like he was asking nothing more than help moving a table, and so her hands automatically put on the mask and pulled on the gloves and her feet stepped forward to help.

Once she was in motion, she was in motion and inertia alone carried Ry along. They carefully carried the bodies - dried out, too light for normal corpses - and put them one by one in the back of the cargo speeder. As they placed each one down, Ava Gerges stopped to arrange the stone amulet that hung around each one's neck, so that it rested as near as possible over the heart.

Whether due to the sun or recent rain, the patch of ground under the bodies was discoloured, greyer than the tan soil nearby. Ava Gerges motioned for her to step wide of these places; between the masks and the surreal fog in her brain, Ry didn't quite catch his explanation as to why, but she remembered that Siluans had a variety of practices for honouring their dead and complied as well as she could with the request as she stumbled through the surreal task.

And all through this there was the song. She had yet to prove whether it was real or whether it was her own madness. It made the whole macabre experience feel like a particularly messed-up episode of the vivid dreams she had in the hospital.

When they were finished, Ry wasn't sure whether she longed more just to get in the speeder and race off to someplace far away, or whether she would rather take off her mask and lie down in the dirt until the poison had its way with her and she went to join the oblivion of the dead.

Ava Gerges and lizard-person stood beside the speeder, discussing something Ry couldn't quite understand. She felt like she was going to be sick. Tearing off her mask, she walked a short distance away from the speeder and squatted down. She waited for the sick to come but it didn't.

And still, there was that song, unphysical yet as palpable as the sound of the wind.

"What are you?" she croaked. Then she saw it.

Around the edges of those discoloured spots where the bodies had been, there was a sort of texture to the soil, as if something grey grew over top of the sandy yellow-grey-brown dirt. Ry walked over to the nearest patch, then knelt to get a better look.

Slender grey fibres were woven between grains of sand, not a dead grey but a living grey, and as she looked closer, behind the grey was a glint of green.

It was alive.

Ry almost felt her heart stop. She had calculated the chemical application herself. Nothing, nothing should be left alive here, and yet whatever this thing was, fungus or lichen or other such creature, it was alive and it was growing.

For one beautiful surreal moment, she wasn't the horrible Ry Kyver who'd messed up her entire life; she wasn't even aware of herself at all. There was only this unexpected life, catching the late-morning sun with glints of green beneath strands of grey-tan. Just as in the dream she'd had, the words rose up within her: this is the most profound thing that has ever happened to me.

That is when Ry Kyver had a realization: she could dare to hope. It was only a possibility, not a certainty, but a sense of anticipation woke up in her: she just might be able to have everything she needed and even some of what she wanted.

She could be someone the Emperor would never expect her to be.

She could survive life on Yemer as long as she had to without being bored out of her mind.

And, most of all, she could be someone who commanded respect and admiration.

All because of one simple fact: life means DNA. She knew what to do with DNA.

Those little filamentous fungi or lichens or whatever they were – they must carry genes to either break down the toxins or survive in the face of them.

All at once a plan crystallized in her mind: what samples she'd send away to a lab, how she'd analyze the results, how she could splice the right genes into the right organisms.

It would take a long time and a lot of work. She would need a lot of help from the Siluans for access to the supplies she would need, and she might have to publicize the work under a pseudonym – that chaffed – but there was a chance that she could really be something, albeit something she'd never considered being before.

Ry wanted to jump up and dance. She wanted to laugh out loud. She had a future! Her mind was made up: she was going to be the person who defeated the Dead Zone.

---

~ 13 years BBY – 11 months – 13 days ~

Sharp against the dark spring night, the mean little blue flame spat out a sudden flare, and Varda quickly sucked the painful burn-mark on her finger. This was not working.

She had no doubt that she could perform pyrogenesis. She was out of practice, but she'd been doing it since she was in her early twenties. The only question was what sort of fire she could generate, or more specifically, would generate when the time came for Cheethwet's vow-taking ceremony, when the Yemerian formally joined the Siluan monastery.

Ancient rubrics for the ceremony required the presence of two or three Siluan elders; with Ava Gerges being the only one they knew of, that was impossible. But the same rubrics allowed an exception: fire made using the Force alone could stand in for the missing elders.

Varda did not doubt that, when the time came, she could make fire using the Force alone, but she knew all too well that whatever fire she created would be an expression of the energies within her.

Force-created fire almost always started out blue, sometimes green, no matter what energies were poured into it. If those energies partook primarily of the Light side of the Force, the flame would gather fullness gradually, beginning as a small point of liquid light and standing taller and taller until finally it morphed into a normal yellow flame. Darkside flame was different. It leapt up quickly and was quick to spark or flare unexpectedly. It, too, eventually became a mundane fire, borrowing its properties from the material burned and the nature of the air around it, but it left something of a shiver in the air, no matter how brightly it burned.

Varda's fire sparked again, licking greedily at the handful of straw she'd allotted it, until it ran out of fuel and died with a thick trail of smoke snaking upwards. Varda coughed into her sleeve and stamped out the last heat of it, wincing at the pain in her hip. When she was satisfied that no risk of the fire's resurgence was left, she closed the door to her home on the night and went inside. There was no point trying to make fire again tonight; she was only getting more frustrated with each attempt.

It occurred to Varda, as she unwound her scarf and pulled off her coat, that it was highly likely that anyone at the vow-taking ceremony might never seen pyrogenesis before and wouldn't know the difference between Lightside and Darkside fire. They probably wouldn't realize that the slight alternation in the feel of the space around them was affected, for better or for worse, by what sort of energies she put into that flame. But she quickly shook the thought out of her head. Ava Gerges was old enough and been around long enough that he'd probably know; or, he'd perceive her thoughts well enough to understand what was happening. And besides, she would rather fail completely than bring anything unholy to bear on such a sacred occasion.

By the dim light of the lamp above the stove, Varda made her way into the kitchen to put away the jug of water she'd brought with her in case she needed to put a particularly rampant fire out. After pouring it into the hot water machine for the next morning's tea, she turned with a sigh to the clutter that was left on the kitchen table: various Yemerian and Nechakan soil samples, her flimsiplast notes, and her datapad, still open to the most recent of the articles Aggie had recommended for her.

Besides all this, set apart from the items for the soil decontamination project, there was the comm Ahsoka left for her, sitting by itself at the edge of the table. Varda still refused to wear it; she didn't like the way it could suddenly pierce her world with words from outside. She told herself she wasn't going to check it now, but she checked all the same. No follow-up, still just two lines of tiny text:

I'm continuing to monitor the situation you requested

I've got things under control

She scowled at the vague message the same way she'd scowled at it when it first arrived earlier that day. She understood that Ahsoka could only be so specific in a message the might, despite the encryption, be intercepted, but she would rather something like mission accomplished, even if that was all it said. "Under control" could mean, or not mean, so many things. Ahsoka trained during war times and survived not only the war but also the Jedi purge, after all; perhaps "under control" truly meant things were solidly on their way to seeing Ry dealt with to Varda's satisfaction. But Varda was realizing that she didn't actually know the adult Ahsoka very well. The timely rescue, along with Bail Organa's obvious trust in the former padawan, had inspired Varda's complete confidence in Ahsoka's proficiency. But now Varda noted that Ahsoka was young, young enough to be brash and overly optimistic, just like her former Jedi master.

Either way, the message rattled her, if only because it reminded her that Ry still posed no small threat, and not one that Varda herself could wisely engage without either forsaking her new Jedi resolve or wrecking her bag hip. It drove her crazy: surely Ava Gerges knew, yet the Siluans allowed Ry to be present among them. That is what has always maddened Varda about the Siluans: their teachings of love and forgiveness, radical hospitality and radical nonviolence all seemed so beautiful in the abstract, but their insistence on attempting to follow such teachings with a person like Ry Kyver was insanity. Some people were beyond love, and no chance at healing could save them. Yet it also hurt, somehow, to find herself questioning the Elder's judgement.

A motion caught the corner of Varda's eye and she turned, first to see a spider lowering itself from the ceiling and then to notice the clock on the stove. It was almost midnight. She'd been standing there a full twenty minutes, just staring at the comm. Quickly, Varda shut it off and went to brush her teeth.

Once in bed, Varda tossed and turned, unable to sleep. She tried to level out her thoughts with her breathing, but she felt jittery, wondering what evil Ry was up to now.

Two hours past midnight, Varda gave up and went back to the kitchen. She opened an empty cupboard and put everything on the table away: her comm, her datapad, her notes, the soil samples. Merely symbolic, she knew, but at least it put some physical separation between her and one of the many problems Ry had seen fit to create. Beyond the physical, these things really were a manifestation of Ry: the poisoned soil in the sample jars, the statistics loaded into her datapad that spoke of sick children and toxic land.

Cupboard shut, Varda closed her eyes and tried to ground herself. She could only hope that Ry would be safely out of the way when she returned to Yemer in a month or so for Cheethwet's vow-taking ceremony. She could not imagine how she could possibly create an acceptable fire for the ritual if she knew the Dark Jedi was still there.

Varda suddenly felt very tired, yet she knew too well that she was too wired to sleep. In the bathroom, there were some little blue pills that were supposed to help a person sleep. She knew they wouldn't do her stomach any good, but oblivion now was worth a little indigestion in the morning.

Back in bed, it wasn't long before Varda felt her mind begin to dissolve into sleep, but before it did, she had one last conscious thought: deep in her gut, something told Varda that whether Ahsoka succeeded in capturing Ry or not, it would make little difference to her own state of mind. The thought of Ry would haunt Varda, same as ever.

End of Part II

As Part II draw to a close, the fallout of Eo's death has set Ry and Varda on new paths. What happens when those paths inevitably intersect? That story will be told in Part III.