"I told you all to stay back!"
Returning to the main hold with Horatio tight on her heels, Cordira maintained a firm grip on her blaster at her side, quickly inspecting the evidence her son had found as Jake and Ethan stepped away from it, alarmed expressions on their faces.
"Wil is gone?" Liaa's voice shook with worry as she glanced between Horatio and Cordira, but Cordira didn't have the heart to answer her. The small pool of blood on the floor beside the loading ramp was still bright red and hadn't yet dried, so she reasoned that it hadn't been long since they'd left, and the meager amount allowed her to hold out hope that it hadn't come from a grievous wound.
"How long were you away?"
"An hour," Horatio answered angrily, clearly already blaming himself for what had happened.
"Where would Baxer have taken him?"
"I don't know," Horatio growled, running his hand through his hair. "The man was...deranged, unhinged. He made no sense. He was telling us my history, but he...he was fixated on Wil."
Taking in as many clues and details as she could, Cordira pressed Horatio. "'Fixated'? Why? What do you mean?"
"He stared at him, constantly. Kept calling him 'Kaz', my father's name. He must have told Wil a dozen times that he looked like him. Over and over, like it was something new he'd thought of each time he'd said it."
Repeating herself, she emphasized every word. "Where would Baxer have taken him?"
"I don't know!" Horatio's fists clenched at his sides, his expression as frantic as he sounded. "He never said anything about where he lives, where he came from, where he was before he found us here! I knew he was trouble, I knew we should have demanded more out of him - "
"Breazhe, 'oratio," Liaa attempted to calm him, stroking his face. "Try to zhink. Anyzhing 'e said, even zhe smallest zhing..."
Racking his brain to recall anything that would help, Horatio stared hard at the floor. "He told us about the first time they met," he began to recite aloud, stringing his words together without pause for breath, "about my father's favorite droid, about how my mother had been killed and how my father couldn't handle it and how Baxer hadn't been there when my father had died and how Recero and I had been taken and how he - "
Dropping his words mid-thought, Horatio's expression fell as his gaze became unfocused. He had realized something.
"...my father's shop. Baxer said he had...kept it up...so Recero and I would recognize it, if we ever came back." Looking to Cordira once more, Horatio spoke with confidence. "Coruscant."
Agreeing, Cordira nodded. "If Baxer believes that Wil is Kasimir, then he'd want to show his friend the hard work he's done preserving their previous life."
Moving swiftly with purpose, Horatio silently returned to the Shadow Nova's cockpit and began to prepare her for flight, leaving Cordira behind to send the others away. "You three stay here until you're cleared to leave with your new ship, then you are to go home. I don't want you coming to Coruscant."
"Cordira," Liaa pled earnestly, "let us 'elp you."
But she shook her head, denying her. "I'll let you know as soon as we find him."
"Mom...is Uncle Wil going to be okay?"
The worried look in Jake's eyes could have completely broken her resolve, but she hardened herself, managing to nod as she brushed her thumb across his cheek. "We'll find him, I promise."
She shared a wordless goodbye with her husband, her expression communicating far more than careful words in the presence of their son ever could. Though Ethan was clearly reluctant to leave her, he eventually nodded, leading Jake away with a firm hand on his shoulder.
"Be careful, Cordira."
Liaa, too, nearly refused to leave but followed after Ethan just as the Shadow Nova's engines roared to life, sounding far stronger than they were with the echo of the landing bay around them. Cordira brought the loading ramp up as the ship lifted from the ground, and they were practically back in space just as it sealed shut, quickly leaving Corellia far behind.
Only a fraction of the time into their jump to Coruscant, Horatio's anxiety was quickly besting him. He wanted nothing more than to pace the floor, to rap his fingers on the idle console, to bounce his leg repeatedly, anything to expel his nervous energy and keep his mind off the worst outcome for his abducted son. His copilot Cordira Natiyr sat wordlessly and unnecessarily beside him, but he didn't dare tell her to leave. He knew how much Wil meant to her and she to him, as the two had practically grown up together as siblings, and Cordira had even begun teaching Wil some useful Force skills recently.
His racing mind, however, denied him any respite, and it instead began to focus on her. How could she sit there so quietly? Wasn't she worried about Wil, too? What kind of plan did she have to rescue him? Wil had clearly been injured and would need treatment, so was she as good of a Force Healer as her father was? Would her mother have already chastised him for leaving Wil alone with an obviously unstable man?
No, he mused, shaking his head, voicing his next thought aloud though he hadn't fully intended to.
"Your mother would have asked me a thousand questions by now."
"Well," she answered with slight surprise as she gently cleared her throat, "...contrary to our shared appearance, we are actually quite dissimilar."
In any other setting, he would have allowed the conversation to drop entirely, but for some reason, he found himself continuing. "Yeah, how does that work?"
"How does what work?"
"You're a clone of her, aren't you?"
Their gazes met, and she seemed to study him pensively a moment before responding. "An altered clone, yes."
"Altered, how? Why?"
She took in a slow breath as she returned to the swirling blue vortex ahead of them. "Now that is a loaded question."
Afraid he had offended her, he looked to the floor. "...I'm sorry."
"It's alright," she shrugged, unbothered. "It's something I've had to come to terms with, and it's made my story...unique, despite being a clone." She paused a moment more before continuing, gathering her thoughts. "We're still not completely sure about the 'how' - the Tarthos, Darkmyres, and Nerezzas weren't linked to the Kaminoans that we know of, and most of that research was destroyed by the Empire, anyway. We do know, however, that I was their only success, which is why they came back for me, to continue their research, and they nearly destroyed Paneau to do it.
"As for the 'why', well...that goes back to my mother and her siblings. My grandfather Morden Tarthos was obsessed with creating an army of Dark Jedi to take the place of the Emperor and Vader after their defeat over Endor, but his children and the children of the other two families weren't quite strong enough. He wanted loyal, powerful warriors that he could control, without question. But when my mother was turned against him, when she left the Huxnel and became a Jedi, his plans fell apart. He enlisted the Darkmyres to begin their experiments, and he kidnapped my mother to be one of their subjects as punishment for her defection."
"She was the most powerful of the Tarthos children, I remember that much," he added thoughtfully, having heard of her strength in his early days with the Huxnel. He was assigned to be her partner less than a week later. "If there was anyone he wanted duplicated and molded to his designs from the beginning, it would've been her."
Cordira nodded. "The thing is, the Force doesn't take kindly to being manipulated against its will. Every living being has a unique signature in the Force, until it is cloned. Then those exact same signatures resonate at the same frequency, and just as two like magnets do when faced together, they begin to repel each other. If their power in the Force is strong enough, as it would have been in a Jedi like my mother...one can't flourish while the other lives."
Understanding her unsaid words, he slowly nodded. "...the clones weren't surviving."
She nodded again, her voice soft. "I was their eleventh attempt. They gave me a few select genes from...another Force sensitive, and it was just enough to make our signatures slightly different. That small difference allowed me to live, even though I still nearly killed my mother before I'd been born."
Despite the weight of her final sentence, Horatio instead fixated on her hesitance just a moment before. "Who did those genes come from?"
She stared hard at the console in front of her, color draining from her face as she sat motionless for a long, tense moment. He watched the flash of her throat as she swallowed before speaking, her words hardly audible.
"...they came from Lucien Darkmyre...the man Deilia sacrificed herself to kill, to protect me."
His initial reaction was shock, but the longer it sat with him, the more it made sense. Of course they would have pulled from what they had on hand; their experiments were illegal under the New Republic, so they operated in complete secret. And having only seen the Darkmyres a few fleeting times while working for the Huxnel wouldn't have solidified their appearance in his mind, but it finally connected. The Darkmyres' fire red hair and hauntingly pale eyes were what visibly set Cordira apart from her mother, but for so long, Horatio had only seen the face of his former partner.
"I'm sorry."
Cordira's apology snapped him back to the present, and it took him a second to realize what she had expected to have upset him. He shook his head to dismiss her concern, having lived with the guilt of his decision for decades.
"I'm the one who should be apologizing to you. If I hadn't left her, if I had stayed and helped her...then maybe she could have survived to stop Lucidia, too."
Still, Cordira appeared sympathetic to his feelings, if she hadn't sensed them through the Force outright. "Maybe."
A generous silence settled between them for a few tender minutes, an unspoken understanding they'd shared once before. His anxious heart sought another topic, though, another distraction, another interruption...
"Horatio... I know you're only asking about me to keep your mind off Wil."
She truly was a clone of her mother, able to read him like a holobook.
"But I think Wil is going to be okay."
He couldn't meet her gaze. "How do you know?"
She hesitated barely a moment. "A feeling. I can sense that he's still alive. I know he is. And I believe that he is capable of handling just about anything. Not out of hubris that I have trained him perfectly, but...just by the nature of who he is. Whatever Baxer's done to him, wherever they are...Wil will be okay."
As much as he appreciated her assurances, he couldn't share her optimism. It was his fault that his son was now at the mercy of a madman, and he could only hope that they would be able to locate him before Wil's time ran out.