So glad to hear I didn't lose you all! Here's a chapter just a touch early because happy day off to me :)

Chapter 9: The Hidden Path

"That is the last job I'm doing with you, Rossan."

Korkie deposited the four thousand credits into the smuggler's awaiting hand.

"No hard feelings. I'm grateful that you took those families to safety. But I can't afford to pay you like this for every job."

Despite Korkie's placating words, the man's expression soured.

"What do you mean that's our last job? I've got a big exchange planned along the Rimma Trade Route and I'll need you-"

"You heard me, Rossan. I can't afford to pay you."

Korkie waited, hands in his pockets, for the protest.

"But you made that four thousand easy!" Rossan wailed. "Of course you can afford to pay me, you could afford-"

"I'd like to think I was born into this shitty age of galactic history to do something other than make quick credits cheating at the casinos," Korkie told him. "I know that's not your philosophy, but it's mine."

Rossan seethed but seemed to have run out of words in the face of Korkie's conflicting – and in his mind, surely absurd – worldview.

"Besides," Korkie went on. "In a job like this, I need to trust my partner. You changed the terms of our deal while there were four vulnerable families hiding in your ship because you knew I had no choice but to appease you. You played well for yourself, Rossan, but I'm not interested in playing again."

Korkie waved in subdued farewell and turned on his heel to return to make his way back to his ship. He felt Rossan's anger swell and then break forth through the Force.

"And where are you going to find a smuggler you can trust, huh?" he demanded. "Where are you going to find the elusive charitable smuggler? Because I've sure as hell never met one."

Korkie, halfway up his ship's ramp, turned to face Rossan once more.

"You're completely right, Rossan. I'm not going to work with smugglers anymore."

"You can't move refugees in that ship."

"I know, Rossan. Thank you."

"Then what are you going to do, huh?"

Korkie chuckled.

"You're very interested, for someone who doesn't care about refugees."

Rossan scowled.

"I care about our business partnership."

"Which doesn't exist anymore, I'm afraid," Korkie told him. "I'm going to find some people who care, Rossan, and we're going to do this properly."

And he left the smuggler cursing in his wake.

A baby boy was born above an engine shop on Sharlissia, on the carpeted floor in the home of an ageing mechanic who had seen his lost daughters in the tangled hair of the children sleeping with their parents on the street. He came into the world red and bawling as his sisters clutched each other in awe. His father rubbed him clean of blood and vernix with a towel sourced from the workshop downstairs. It was stained with engine grease and his parents would reflect fondly on this moment years from now and blame it for his lifelong obsession with speeder-racing.

"What are you going to call him?" asked Lillee.

Saria sat back on her blood-slicked thighs and wiped her hair from her forehead.

"I think, my darling, in all the recent excitement…"

She accepted the infant from her husband and brought him to her breast. She had not yet even delivered the placenta.

"I think we forgot to decide."

This seemed to be the answer Lillee was hoping for. She gave a gap-toothed grin.

"I have an idea."

"Do you, my love?"

Lillee shuffled cautiously forward to admire her baby brother as he latched and began to feed.

"Can we call him Ben?"

Korkie's mother inadvertently had taught him, despite her determined intentions to demonstrate the opposite, that it was much harder to implement change in practice than in principle. And yet like the infamous pacifist, Korkie dug in his heels and stuck to his word. He discarded the comm that Rossan kept calling him on and alone followed the Second Sister to Dantooine with no better plan than that the Force might show him the way. There had to be someone decent left in this galaxy, right? Someone who would help the persecuted without thought of their own gain? But Korkie had seen poverty all over the galaxy in his travels, poverty greater than there ever had been in the age of the Republic, and understood why that person was hard to find.

Dantooine, the home of peaceful farmers, boasted few ships of smuggling proportions. In a hurried perusal of local stocks, Korkie concluded that none of them were feasibly stealable, none of them had charitable owners, and with the Second Sister looming ever-closer in her pursuit of the chosen few, he figured it was time to change tack. Forget this defensive business of refugee smuggling. He'd face the hunter herself. She looked, Korkie consoled himself, as he prepared to face a Darksider for the first time since Darth Maul with his father at his side, barely older than he was.

The Second Sister followed the usual, cowardly, script. Korkie bunkered down within an enormous blba tree and watched the scenes play out in the grassland below him. Imperial soldiers in their stiff uniforms knocking on doors and demanding identification. Korkie knew where the Force-sensitives were hiding before the officers did. The garden beds surrounding the hut were newly planted, the speeder a metropolitan rather than agrarian design. They had fled already. Been prepared to start anew on this sparsely populated planet. And still, they would be found. Korkie's felt his mother's rage inside him, felt his jaw and shoulders tighten. It just wasn't fair.

A man answered the door. Showed his identification, had it approved, then thanked the soldiers and tried to close the door again. Oh, kriff. It made Korkie's chest ache. To watch the soldiers resist the closing door and watch the man throw out his arms, fill the doorway with his body. To watch him give himself up entirely for the woman he hoped to protect.

But his body was not enough and they pushed past him, incapacitated him before he could strike a single desperate blow. And from deep within the house they dragged out a woman, who had perhaps been paralysed in her indecision - to choose, in that horrible moment, to hide or flee.

She was a small woman and no trained soldier, dragged out by the arms, an officer at each side. The man clawed his way to his knees and then to his feet and yelled himself hoarse behind her, as he struggled against the stormtroopers who turned to hold him by fistfuls of his shirt. The Second Sister stood perfectly still and watched him. Korkie heard her silent satisfaction.

Let him yell. Let everybody know. Let every last sentient know that the age of the Jedi is over.

But there was something else, shielded even within her own mind.

She hides like a coward. The Jedi are cowards. I have known Jedi and the Jedi are cowards. I have known cowards who-

And nothing. A wall of pain and anger.

Korkie cast off two of his favourite gas detonators – purchased in the Corellian underworld, inhalational anaesthetic only, Duchess Satine approved – and leapt from the blba tree.

Kawlan Roken tasted the sickly sweetness of the gas in the air and knew that he had only seconds left. He pushed through the arms of the bewildered stormtroopers and charged forwards. To Relya. He had to reach Relya. He did not know what he would do once he reached Relya and it did not matter. He had to reach her.

One step. Two steps. The armoured hands of the troopers on his shoulders.

Relya turned to look at him. Her lips parted to say something. Kawlan extended his hand.

I love you.

I have always loved you.

I will love you forever.

But there was no time and somehow no air to say anything.

Kawlan felt the strength fade from his legs and he crashed down into darkness.

The gas detonators had the drawback, of course, of anaesthetising his rescue targets alongside the pistol-wielding Imperial officers. Korkie disarmed the two helmeted stormtroopers with a sweeping arc of Siri Tachi's sapphire blade and Force-shoved them into the hut before turning to face his final, and true, opponent. The Second Sister's face was hidden behind her dark steel helmet but Korkie felt her cruel smile.

"Such tricks! But you are not a Jedi, youngling."

They began the slow dance that Korkie had come to know in the cage fights of Corellia, 'sabers rather than fists extended towards each other.

"You'd know, wouldn't you?" Korkie probed. "You were a Jedi yourself, not so long ago."

The Second Sister hissed her displeasure and Korkie knew he had hit his mark. She launched herself towards him with a flurry of 'saber strikes that rattled Korkie's wrists. It had been too kriffing long since he'd sparred with this blade. But his footwork, at least, was still sound, and his tongue sharper than ever.

"You know this isn't right," he pressed. "This peaceful farmer is no enemy of yours. Who asked you to do this dirty work? Who are you trying to impress?"

The Second Sister laughed.

"You mistake me. I do this work gladly, child. I have no love for the Jedi."

Korkie found himself forced backwards until the body of the slumbering Force-sensitive woman was at his heels. The Second Sister's 'saber-work was quicker than Bo-Katan's by far. Was she quicker than Obi Wan had been? Korkie could not quite remember. He did not think that his father had ever sparred with him at full capacity.

"The Jedi raised you!" Korkie panted.

His opponent scoffed.

"The Jedi betrayed me."

With a flurry of clashing blades, Korkie won a few precious steps of ground away from the body, before finding himself ducking shariply beneath the sweeping red 'saber.

"The Emperor took you," he pressed. "Isn't that right? He did this to you."

The Second Sister snarled as she landed a blow that glanced Korkie's shoulder. His Peace Corps coat would need a new patch.

"Don't pretend to know my story, youngling."

Korkie was pressed backwards once more.

"My Master gave me up to the Emperor," she growled. "And that is all you need to know of the fake heroes who called themselves Jedi!"

With this pronouncement, with this torrential flow of grief and anger into the Force, Korkie was knocked further backwards still, over the body of the defenceless woman. The Second Sister did not care for theatrics. She severed the woman's head cleanly from her body and stalked onwards to Korkie, blade raised.

Trilla Suduri's dark-hooded Master might not have been pleased with her for pausing as she did, when she had the boy stunned and for a moment defenceless before her. But she did not pause out of weakness or pity. She paused because she knew that pain, that glorious pain flooding through the Force between them, and knew that it ought to be acknowledged. Savoured. She knew that this was the first time. That the boy had failed before but never like this. That he had hated himself before but never like this. And she had been taught, by her new Master, that feelings like these were precious.

"You have failed, child," she purred. "As you will always fail, trying to meet the Dark Side with your feeble Light."

The boy's eyes darted, traitorously, to the broken body between them. Trilla knew that wave of melancholy so well. It had made her weak, too, before it had made her strong. She had seen her creche-mates slain at her own feet. She had seen her teachers fail to save them.

Too weak, too weak, too weak. Light is weakness. I am strength.

"Do not mistake me for a victim of the Empire," she went on, locking 'sabers with the boy once more. "I am its willing servant."

Korkie felt sick to his stomach. His heart felt like it might have fractured in his chest. He'd played it wrong; he'd done it all wrong, and he was locked in a battle he could not win with a dead woman at his feet. The woman he had come to protect. The woman who had needed him. He wanted to throw down his weapon and weep but there was no time. The Second Sister was advancing once more, and the sleeping officers and the man collapsed between them were beginning to stir.

"And would you have me join you, if you disarmed me now?"

Korkie was no longer speaking with the intention to unbalance his opponent. Hoarse-voiced, he spoke straight from his bleeding heart. He was wounded. He was angry. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and yell in her face. He was everything a Jedi should never be.

"Would you take me to him?" he demanded. "Have me suffered what you suffered? Become what you have become?"

His blinked the sweat from his eyes.

"Is that your blasted answer to all this kriffing pain?"

But in his anger he had perhaps found a way to reach her; he had inadvertently spoken the language that was now her own. Korkie felt a confusion amongst her own anger, a welling sadness – a flicker of mercy – even as the Second Sister began to gain ground again, driving him back towards the hut.

"I will be kind, youngling," she gritted out, "and I will kill you instead."

And Korkie's anger somehow collapsed within him, as burning logs crumble to coals. Despite it all, he found a desperate smile.

"Then I think there is some good in you yet."

He felt the furious conflict within her and knew that she was not seeing him; she was overcome by the rioting pain and fury within herself. She was deadly, 'saber swinging with ever greater ferocity, but blind.

Korkie leapt backwards onto the nearby speeder and abandoned his lightsaber for the blaster at his belt. The Second Sister dodged his blaster fire with ease but launched towards him a fraction of a second too late. Korkie ignited the engine, hauled the waking farmer into the vehicle beside him and gunned it towards the hill.

The overconfident Imperial retinue had left their transports outside the village and approached on foot. The Second Sister let out a furious cry as Korkie disappeared across the plains towards his waiting ship. Her anger was a cacophony in the Force around them but it would not give her the power to run after them. She cast a miserable figure, helmet in hand, inky hair spilling down her back, standing over that broken body.

Kawlan woke in some bizarre windstorm that he soon recognised as his beloved speeder breaking its recommended velocity limit.

"Relya!"

But he knew as soon as the name escaped his lips that the worst had happened; it hit him with a strange certainty. There was a blonde-haired stranger beside him and it was perhaps the guilt on his ashen face that gave it away.

"I'm so sorry."

The stranger brought the speeder to a jolting stop beside an aged ship.

"I'm Ben. That Inquisitor will be following and I need to get off the planet as fast as possible. I don't know if she wants you too. You're welcome to come with me. But there's no time to talk until we're away."

The young man had already lowered the ramp and was halfway up it by the time Kawlan found his voice and the strength in his limbs again.

"I'm coming."

For without Relya, there was nothing for him on Dantooine. This was the peaceful, forgotten planet that should have been safe. Where they were going to live a mundane life together. Where the Empire could not touch them.

"I don't have much in the way of a homeworld," Ben told him, as they ascended into the ship and he strapped himself in behind the controls. "We'll go…"

They lifted off the ground as his fingers flicked over the map.

"Not Mygeeto, not Serndipal…"

He frowned at the map.

"Bastion will do, I think. Is that okay with you?"

Kawlan gave a miserable shrug. He had lived his whole life on Yaga Minor and had never intended to travel the galaxy. The journey to Dantooine alone had seemed so enormous. And now, this stranger, who looked younger every time Kawlan beheld him, would take him further still from home. Ship shuddering, they burst through the thick atmosphere and soon were enveloped in the silence of space.

"What happened to her?"

The words fell, heavily, from Kawlan's lips. The youth grimaced.

"She died. I'm sorry."

"I know that," Kawlan admonished him.

Ben checked the radars, clear of Imperial aircrafts, and eased them into hyperspace.

"The Inquisitor killed her," he answered conservatively.

"How?"

Why did it matter? Kawlan didn't know why he asked that horrible question except that perhaps it was the only way to truly believe it. When the gas detonators had sent him to sleep his wife had been alive and looking at him and when he woke she was gone forever.

"She cut her head from her body," Ben murmured.

The galaxy suddenly seemed very strange and cold and it wasn't the sensation of hyperspace. Kawlan pressed at his eyes as his body began to shake. The young man's voice beside him was a distant babble.

"I'm so sorry. I tried to fight her. But she was too strong for me. She pushed me back and Relya's body was between us and I couldn't protect her anymore."

Kawlan breathed heavily through the pressing tears, lifting his face from his hands.

"You shouldn't have put us all to sleep."

Ben nodded, jaw tight.

"I knew I couldn't fight all of them. I thought that if I took out all the others I could match her alone. But I got it wrong."

He, too, was pushing back tears.

"I'm sorry," he rambled on. "I'm fifteen-standard and I'm not a real Jedi and-"

His voice cracked, then.

"Kriff, I'm sorry. I shouldn't be the one crying."

Fifteen-standard. The words gifted Kawlan some clarity, then. The galaxy was imploding but the boy beside him was fifteen-standard and had tried to save Relya's life. He reached a clumsy arm to Ben's shoulder.

"Thank you for trying."

The boy mumbled some bitter adage beneath his breath and swiped at his tears with the heel of his hand.

"Look. I'll take you wherever you want to go. Then I should leave you. The Second Sister will probably be hunting me. I know that it looks like we've lost them for now, but…"

"Are you going to go into hiding?"

"No," the boy gritted out, determined against the still-pressing tears. "I want to get it right. Find a proper way to get Force-sensitives to safety. I've tried working with smugglers but they're untrustworthy and I've tried fighting but I'm not strong enough yet. I need to find people who are- who are good-"

His voice stumbled and fractured over that impossible word.

"I need to make some sort of network-"

"Take me to Yaga Minor, please."

Ben blinked his surprise at Kawlan's sudden request.

"Okay," he acquiesced, eventually, changing the navigator settings. "Is that your home?"

"Yeah."

The first home that he and Relya had known together. The sadness swelled within him once more and he allowed his own tears to fall.

"There are good people there," Kawlan managed, between heaving breaths. "We can… we can make a start."

Ben frowned in faint confusion.

"We can…"

"A network," Kawlan repeated. "We had friends who got us off Yaga Minor to Dantooine. It didn't work this time. But… but if we keep trying, if we reach wider…"

Ben gaped first in an absent sort of shock, and then flushed with guilt.

"No, it's not your job, not today. You just lost your wife and I can't be here asking you to help me-"

"You lost someone too, didn't you?"

The boy swiped at the last of his tears.

"I mean, yeah, but… ages ago."

"And it'll hurt me for ages too," Kawlan muttered. "But we have to start now. They must be killing people every day."

Jaw clenched, Ben nodded.

"We need to start now," Kawlan repeated. "We need to build a path. It's not just about taking one family to one planet. We need a whole network of hidden paths so that Force-sensitives can start anew and be safe."

This time, Ben nodded with greater confidence.

"Yes. You're right."

He rubbed a hand over his tear-stained face.

"I'll take you to Yaga Minor. We can start there, with your friends. And then I'll see if I can…"

He trailed off with a grimace.

"I've been travelling alone since the Republic died. But I think it's time to find some friends of mine, too."

A new nemesis and a new ally. And a beautiful new baby on Sharlissia.

Next chapter, Korkie and Kawlan get to work on the Hidden Path. Korkie embarks on a rather ambitious journey to hunt down a friend who is particularly high on the Empire's wanted list.

xx - S.