A warning for you dear readers: there's some not-so-pleasant violence in the middle parts of this chapter. Skip if you prefer - it's not plot-crucial, just getting to know our villains a bit more.

Chapter 19: Caged

The exiled Jedi who Kawlan had never truly expected to meet – he'd perhaps unfairly assumed his young companion was afflicted by some grand delusion of friendship – had arrived on Yaga Minor shortly after Empire Day and promised to Kawlan that Ben would arrive, healthy and well, in the coming days. Nonetheless it was a great relief to see the teenager emerge from yet another scavenged ship with all his limbs intact. His eyes seemed brighter, even, or perhaps it was an illusion cast by the new bronze in his cheeks. He'd been somewhere with better sun than grey Yaga Minor.

"Welcome back!"

Kawlan abandoned his work at the map console as he rose to greet him.

"I can't believe it. You were actually onto something with your 'good feeling'."

"You of so little faith, Kawlan," Ben tutted. "I take it Mace turned up, then?"

"Three days ago," Kawlan affirmed. "And he's already got about five different scouting trips lined up. He's got all sorts of ideas. Talking about planets that aren't even on the maps anymore."

"Huh."

"Yeah. All this Jedi talk. Did you know that planets could be strong in the Force?"

The teenager gave a hapless shrug, at which Kawlan nodded his vehement agreement.

"I'm sticking with Mapuzo and Jabiim for now," he declared.

Ben gave a thoughtful nod.

"You two have been very productive without me."

"Don't feel left out. Now with the three of us, things are going to pick up even faster."

"Good. They need to."

Ben cast his knapsack, with the new addition of a battered breastplate strapped to the back of it, onto the floor and crouched to appreciate Kawlan's latest annotations of their galactic map.

"Looks good," he mused. "What's this? Daiyu?"

"Yeah. I've got a new contact out there I'm evaluating."

Ben nodded, eyes still scanning the map.

"I heard you got into some trouble on Ryloth," Kawlan ventured.

At this, Korkie stood back from the map with a sigh.

"It was very messy," he recounted, with a grimace. "And I was useless. If Mace and the Faulties hadn't found us…"

He pressed his fingers against his forehead.

"The Free Ryloth Movement… well, it's not destroyed. But it won't be truly active again for several years."

Kawlan had hoped, desperately, that it wasn't true. That it was a gross exaggeration, Imperial propaganda. The Free Ryloth Movement had been the strongest force of rebellion in the whole galaxy. But Mace had told him the same, and there was a deep sadness about Ben that finally made the understanding sink heavily in.

"Cham Syndulla survived?"

"Yes, and his daughter. So the cause will live on. But they're almost starting from scratch again."

"They used it as a big propaganda point on Empire Day."

Ben rolled his eyes.

"I don't suppose they publicised that we blew up a Star Destroyer?"

Kawlan gave a double-take.

"You blew up a Star Destroyer?"

"I didn't," Ben clarified. "The Free Ryloth Movement did. As I said, I was completely useless."

"Mace said you held off Grievous," Kawlan countered. "Twice."

The adolescent grumbled his disapproval and shook his head.

"That's not true. Mace saved my life the first time and the Free Ryloth Movement the second," he muttered. "What else did Mace say about me?"

There was a defensive edge to his question that Kawlan could not quite understand.

"Nothing, Ben, really. He said you'd gone to have a well-earned rest visiting your brother on Mon Gazza."

Ben looked somewhat mollified at this.

"Whatever secrets you have, Ben," Kawlan went on. "Whether you're a Jedi or anything else… you know they're safe with me, right?"

Ben met Kawlan's gaze with an effortful smile.

"Yeah. Of course. I trust you, Kawlan."

He reached out an arm, gave Kawlan a perhaps apologetic squeeze across his shoulders.

"Where is Mace, anyway? Off to his secret planets already?"

"No. Just getting lunch. He'll be back soon."

The teenager brightened at the mention of food.

"Ah. That's wonderful news."

He managed a more earnest smile, now.

"I'm excited to get back to work."

Korkie could tell that he'd worried Kawlan and he felt bad. It was beyond him to properly explain himself to his ally. It wasn't a matter of distrust; Korkie trusted Kawlan completely. It was a problem, he could grudgingly admit, entirely within himself. Korkie did not want to be Korkaran Kryze; it was much simpler to be Ben. For although he sat with Kawlan and Mace, making plans for scouting trips and tunnel excavations and next week's refugee run into Mapuzo over lunch, he was plagued still by a gnawing sense of inadequacy.

His beskar'gam, left behind on Tatooine. Hera, her eyes bright with tears, who had asked him to stay with her. Isval, who'd died because he couldn't defeat Grievous himself. And his homeworld, impossibly distant, overrun by the Empire with no surviving resistance.

Ben was doing alright for the galaxy. But Korkaran Kryze surely should have been doing so much more.

Trilla felt the heat of the aligning suns of the planet Byss strike her with tangible force and absorb into her black armour, pressing close to her skin in an unwanted embrace. Ah, well. Better here than Arkanis. She swiped down the visor of her helmet to shield the glare from her eyes and took a breath of mercifully cooled air through her re-breather, then, detecting a huddle of ventilation shafts indicating a subterranean village, waved her soldiers forward.

They advanced across the hard-packed sand within the protective haze of her shields. The Jedi Eeth Koth had fled to the planet some time in the last standard year; she had tracked him here, finally, from where she had lost him on Serndipal. He was, apparently, an idiot. Certainly, it was foolish as a fugitive to take a wife, but it was unforgivable, Trilla thought, to conceive a child. A few credits worth of contraception would have saved Trilla a great deal of unpleasantness and work on Arkanis. She was a better assassin than teacher of younglings.

Nonetheless, it was the task that had been handed to her and it was the task that would be done.

"Cover the exits, soldiers."

The settlement was, at least in all available documentation, an isolated compound. Another piece of evidence proving Koth's idiocy. If one was stupid enough to marry and stupid enough to conceive a child and stupid enough still to hide underground, one would surely think to ensure a good escape route. But Trilla supposed it would not make any difference. She had plans in place to deal with any undocumented tunnels.

"Tenth, you know your route?"

"Yes, Second Sister."

The Emperor, presumably quietly pleased with the marked animosity between them, had mandated several joint operations between Trilla and the Tenth Brother since she had severed his hand. Their mutual determination to be more ruthless than the other made for mostly successful missions but was compromising at times.

"The child is the first priority, then Koth."

"I attended the briefing, Sister."

With storm troopers positioned at each of the four hatches leading down into the underground village, Trilla lifted one and the Tenth Brother the other, and they descended in distant parallel into the cool darkness.

There was a moment of brief blindness – like her vision had become during her torture, when her body had finally relented and she had known for a joyous moment that she was going to lose consciousness – before her helmet adjusted to the low light. Trilla found the first of the doorways and rapped against it with armoured knuckles. A move that had become as familiar as the Jedi bow that had once punctuated her days.

"Imperial Inquisitorius. Open up."

Trilla barged into the home of an Abyssin female who watched her with a singular, widened eye. But there was no sense of guilt in the Force, only bewilderment, and nowhere to hide a fugitive in the single room dwelling. Trilla swept out as quickly as she had entered and strode to the next door. On the other side of the settlement, the Tenth Brother would be doing the same.

Door after door and yet no trace. Trilla's voice became edged with irritation. The Tenth Brother had been the one to find their last target and she had no desire to make a habit of being his assistant.

"Imperial Inquisitorius. Open the door."

Trilla overturned a storage container with a frustrated tug in the Force, spilling thousands of food kernels across the floor of another Abyssin family but revealing no infant. She slammed shut the door in the face of their disapproving clicks. Another door. Another door. And then, emerged from another fruitless search to crash solidly into the Tenth Brother.

"What are you doing here? Have you forgotten your route?"

The Tenth Brother glared down at her.

"I've completed my route, Sister. We've met midway."

"And no trace?"

"No trace."

Trilla cursed beneath her breath.

"Did you forget to shield, Tenth? Why in the hells aren't they home?"

"You know I didn't," the Tenth Brother retorted. "Are you sure they weren't tipped off? I told you that we shouldn't have refuelled so close by, I bet they-"

Trilla gave an effortful breath and closed her eyes, reaching out into the Force.

"They've not escaped, Tenth. They're close. They're hiding."

She snapped her eyes open.

"You missed them on your way through, I'd wager."

"Bantha-shit."

"Can't you sense it?" Trilla pressed, unclipping her 'saber from her belt. "The baby."

That faint, panging distress in the Force.

"They've split up," Trilla murmured. "He can't shield for them all. He's-"

The realisation struck Trilla only moments before the physical blow of Eeth Koth leaping down from an unmapped space above the tunnel. There was a chaotic clashing of 'sabers in the dim light; she and the Tenth Brother had been standing too close together to safely coordinate an attack. But with the rattle of a kick in her chest and the non-fatal glance of a lightsaber against her armour, Trilla staggered back and found her space.

"Bold move, Koth."

The Tenth Brother, too, had steadied in his stance now. Eeth Koth, who had needed and failed to strike a fatal blow in that moment of surprise, looked at them and knew that he was done. But there was a wildness in the zabrak's eyes that Trilla had never seen in the Temple. The lost Jedi was shining in the Force with unbridled, desperate love.

And the narrow tunnel was illuminated once more with flashing reds and blue moving in swift, blurring arcs, punctuated by the staccato of blaster fire. The Tenth Brother had engaged Koth with a reckless fury; Trilla ducked beneath her ally's overreaching swipe but straightened in time to slice through the blaster that Koth wielded in his non-preferred hand.

"Can you handle this, Tenth?" she asked. "If there's an unmapped space up there, there might be another exit."

The zabrak tried to take advantage of Trilla's distraction but she held him firmly at bay. He was taller than her, older than her. He'd sat the Trials she'd not yet been ready for when the Temple had burned. But he was weakened by love, by the fear that burned so brightly for his wife and child, while Trilla's resolve was cold and hard.

"You go. I'll take him."

The Tenth Brother's easy compliance, Trilla realised, as she leapt upwards into the cramped second tunnel, was probably only because the space above them was far too small to accommodate his hulking frame. She could barely stand, blast it. But there was no need to move fast. She closed her eyes and homed in on her prey once more. As she stalked into the darkness, she heard Eeth Koth's broken wail. Tender-hearted idiot.

Trilla was prepared for the spray of blaster bolts illuminating the path before her. Koth's wife was Force-blind, unable to shield, her fear quavering in the Force just as her hand must have quavered as it launched those wayward projectiles. Trilla deflected them lazily, stalking ever closer, until the woman abandoned her attempt at self-defence; Trilla heard her clumsy footsteps, heard the brush of her clothes against the roof of the tunnel, as she turned to run.

But running was impossible in this darkness, beneath this low ceiling. Trilla could feel the faint warmth of the earth's surface upon her back. There was the crying of an infant and the panting, jagged tears of its mother. They stumbled onwards in this slow-motion chase until Trilla reached out – not with her 'saber but with her free hand – and grasped the woman by her shirt.

"Careful, now. Let's not accidentally hurt the baby."

She forcibly turned the zabrak to face her, slicing the blaster to pieces in the same fluid movement. In the dim red light cast by her lightsaber, Trilla made out wide eyes and glistening tears. There was the faint outline of the swaddled infant pressed against her mother's chest.

"Give her to me and you can live."

The zabrak shook her head, her mouth gaping with horror.

"No."

Her voice was hoarse and her breaths ragged.

"I would die a thousand times for her. I-"

"I'm afraid you are of no use to me," Trilla informed her coolly. "Dead or alive."

The baby wailed and her mother pressed her head close against her chest. She launched an untrained punch at Trilla's head that Trilla met with her own armoured forearm. The zabrak gave a wail of pain and fury as she sank, unbalanced, to her knees. She bowed her head over her infant, enveloped her with her body, her final defence, and sobbed.

Kriff's sakes. Trilla didn't have the appetite for this.

She guided her lightsaber, swift but delicate, to sever the zabrak's right arm at the elbow.

"Don't make me take the other."

She wrenched the mother's remaining arm from the baby and heard the crack of bones beneath her iron grip. The zabrak screamed. A horrible, guttural sound. She was not screaming, Trilla did not think, for her fractured forearm that hung limp, now, by her side. She screamed for the baby she could no longer hold.

Trilla cut the infant from the cloth that tied her to her mother and extinguished her 'saber.

"You will live," Trilla told her. "To tell the story of what happens to those who ally themselves with enemies of the Empire."

The tunnel echoed with cries; the high-pitched wail of the infant and the quaking sobs of her mother. Trilla turned and began the cramped journey back to the underground settlement.

"I loved him!"

Trilla did not turn back. She did not care for the zabrak's theatrics.

"He was not my ally. I loved him!"

Were these semantics supposed to interest her?

"Malia, my baby."

The zabrak's words were almost incomprehensible amidst her sobs.

"You will always be my baby. You will always be good."

Trilla made it, finally, to the exit point of the hidden tunnel. She dropped down into the proper walkway, bracing the infant against her chest.

"No," Trilla muttered, despite herself. "She won't."

The Tenth Brother beheld the body of his former classmate with faint disdain. How foolishly Eeth Koth had cast his allegiance in this new galactic order. The Tenth Brother had once enjoyed sparring with Koth in the dojo; the same age and same height, they had been a good match. Today, his 'saber strokes had been as brisk as ever but his focus had crumpled and broken with the sound of his wife's screams in the hidden space above their heads. The Jedi Order had been right about one thing – attachment was downfall. But some emotions, the Tenth Brother knew now, granted a strength that no Jedi could ever match.

He greeted his ally with a smirk.

"You look positively maternal."

The Second Sister, who had lifted her visor to cool her flushed cheeks, scowled in return.

"You want to carry her?"

"Why?" the Tenth Brother asked lightly, as they strode through the scattered crowd of gaping Abyssins back towards an exit point. "Is the crying upsetting you?"

Her expression darkened.

"No."

The Second Sister snatched a towel from an overhanging clothesline and used it to fasten the crying infant to her chest. No local dared complain about the requisition.

"A baby sling? Adorable. You're a natural."

"You're not funny, Tenth."

She led the climb up the ladder and out back into the scorching heat. She waved her hand in beckoning to the assembled stormtroopers as they marched back to their waiting ship.

"What do you do with the babies on Arkanis anyway?" the Tenth Brother asked.

Project Harvester was another field in which the Emperor gave his apparently favourite Inquisitor far more access than she deserved. The Tenth Brother had never gone further than the great double doors of the Academy, depositing his latest stolen prize through a small window into the arms of the waiting nanny droids.

"Nothing like what we went through."

The Second Sister had placed her visor back over her eyes in the glare of the sun. The modulation of her voice through the helmet gave nothing away.

"Why not?"

"No need."

They strode onwards and the Tenth Brother assumed that the Second Sister had tired of the conversation. He was surprised when she spoke again.

"Babies are easy," she muttered. "The nanny droids manage them. Feed them and change them but nothing else. No sentient interaction, no emotion. That way they don't learn any empathy."

The Tenth Brother considered this, surprised.

"How elegant."

The Second Sister made a non-committal noise of agreement.

"It's much easier to stunt empathy than to unlearn it. Far less resource-intensive."

The Tenth Brother was aware then of the innumerable scars beneath his armour and wondered what resources might have been employed in the Second Sister's re-education.

"It was not so difficult to unlearn," he challenged.

Her shields were as opaque and as deliberate as the helmet encasing her skull.

"No, Tenth," she agreed icily. "It was not difficult at all."

Each week that passed became busier than the last: more contacts, more freighters, and more Force-sensitives smuggled to relative safety. Korkie transported gap-toothed children and gaunt-faced adults. Twi'leks and Mirialans and Mon Calamari. A Force-sensitive infant and her Force-blind father and the memory of a Jedi mother slaughtered at the hands of the Inquisitors to save them both. And with each week there were more hands on deck: Korkie rode refugee routes sometimes beside Kawlan but other times beside Cody or Trapper or Boil, who had returned grim-faced from Lothal, where their efforts had made only a small dent in the enormous Imperial naval base and where the Empire's newly-constructed mines turned the rivers to poison. Kix set up a mobile medical clinic, providing everything from routine childhood vaccinations – when he could get his hands on the precious antigen vials – to contraceptive implants and the splinting of long-broken bones.

The only member of the Hidden Path with whom Korkie seldom shared a cockpit was Mace Windu. Mace's presence on Yaga Minor, too, became progressively infrequent. On the increasingly rare occasions on which they were both on-planet, Mace would spar with him within the cramped confines of the garage in which they prepared and repaired their refugee ships, the only place in which they could safely wield their lightsabers without being seen. They would spar for hours and fall, each time, to the same conclusion: Mace would beat him resoundingly, tell him that he would grant him a week to recover, and disappear once more. Korkie couldn't begrudge his departures. He had already done a great deal for the Hidden Path and the former Jedi Master presumably had more important matters to attend to than the training of a wayward Force-sensitive with a belt of inherited weapons. Although what he was attending to, exactly, was something of a mystery.

But there was always another ship to be loaded and another fleet of Force-sensitives to transport to safety. Everyone seemed to remind Korkie of someone he knew. A pregnant Padme, a well-armed Bo-Katan and a gadget-obsessed young Anakin. Each Force-blind mother, fiercely clutching the child that had endangered her, was his own. He focused on his task as best he could, and contented himself with hoping that Mace would find something useful on all those missions he didn't tell him anything about.

Kawlan watched the teenager and experienced soldier dance back and forth across the garage, arms folded across his chest. They became a better match for each other with each session sparred. Ben – or Korkie, which Kawlan had gathered from Windu and Faulties was his real name, but one he was apparently reluctant to assume – learned fast. Frighteningly fast. Kawlan watched the somersaults and twisting parries, the 'saber strikes and opportune kicks. The teenager was capable of learning anything, it seemed, but patience.

It had been obvious from the first moment that Kawlan had met Ben-Korkie that the boy was restless, evading memories and history with all the agility he demonstrated in the increasingly high-speed sparring. The Hidden Path was growing wider in its reach all of the time and there was no shortage of work to be done. But the restlessness was beginning to show in the boy again. He sparred in an arena that must have felt like a cage. He flew more or less the same route each week and came back to the same home on Yaga Minor at the end of each run. And it was not, Kawlan understood, the place that Korkie wanted to call home.

Kawlan watched as Korkie, who had backed his opponent against the far wall, brought down his black sword in a motion that should have disarmed him; Mace Windu, of course, was no average opponent and evaded the strike with uncanny agility. The sword fell instead upon their workbench, pushed against the wall in their efforts to transform garage into dojo.

"You know the penalty for property damage. That's my round."

Korkie threw his head back and groaned, 'sabers hanging dejectedly at his sides.

"But I had you there! That was the start of a good sequence, I could have-"

"What you did," Mace corrected him, "was bisect our workbench. Which is the second item you've damaged this week."

The flushed teenager trooped towards the garage sink and stuck his mouth directly under the tap. The former Jedi continued in his lecture.

"Part of sparring in a constrained environment is about learning control. Suppose you were fighting a duel surrounded by innocent civilians, or dangerous canisters of explosive gas."

"Yeah, alright," Korkie grumbled.

For a sixteen-standard-year-old, Kawlan thought the boy was really rather gracious. But he supposed Jedi were held to higher standards.

"I'm going to get us some dinner," Kawlan called across the dojo. "You want to come with me? Cool off?"

With a questioning gaze first at Windu, who gave an approving nod, Korkie clipped his weapons at his belt and trotted after Kawlan.

"I'm starving," he professed, as they emerged from the shuttered garage into the bustling streets, illuminated by the flare of the setting sun. "Can we go to the market in tenth sector?"

Kawlan chuckled and led the way. The teenager had originally turned his crooked nose up at the "foul-smelling, flea-ridden" district of Yaga Minor but had been won over by the native Yagai's traditional spiced dindra, sold still-sizzling from the hotplates and directly onto the street.

They were accosted, naturally, upon their arrival in the tenth sector by a red-eyed, rake-thin human wearing the creased blue overalls ubiquitous to ship-workers on the planet.

"You got any smokes?"

Kawlan shook his head.

"No, sorry."

"You don't want any smokes," Korkie added, in the same emphatic tone that so easily befuddled the stormtroopers who came to inspect their ships.

"I don't wany any smokes," the man repeated vaguely.

"Indeed," Korkie affirmed. "You don't want any smokes. You're going to quit before you develop lung cancer."

The man nodded with greater certainty this time.

"I don't want any smokes. I'm going to quit before I develop lung cancer."

"Good for you!"

Korkie gave him a pat on the back and led Kawlan onwards towards the dindra vendors.

"What happened to free will?" Kawlan asked.

Korkie tutted.

"It's called public health, Kawlan."

"Is it?"

Korkie ignored the question as he reached up into the ship-window of a travelling vendor and paid for their dindra. But Kawlan would not be distracted.

"I worry for your non-existent childhood," he informed his young companion, as they joined the queue waiting for their food. "You're already a grumpy old man advocating smoking cessation to passing strangers."

Korkie laughed.

"I had a beautiful childhood, Kawlan. It was my adolescence that I skipped."

"You can't skip that."

"No?"

"No."

Korkie rolled his eyes.

"I've got rather more important things to do than be an adolescent, no?"

"Sure you do," Kawlan conceded. "But if you wait until this horrible galaxy is back to normal before you let yourself have any fun, your adolescence will commence when you've gone grey."

"I have fun buying dindras with you."

"Don't try to flatter me. You need to have real fun."

"Real fun?"

Korkie stepped forward to accept their steaming – and perhaps faintly smoking – food from the ship's second window.

"What is this very important real fun that I'm supposed to be partaking in?"

Kawlan pondered this as they elbowed their way back out through the crowd.

"Well," he reasoned. "Although technically helping my parents to put food on the table, I spent most of my adolescence chasing girls."

Korkie looked at him with great scepticism.

"That doesn't sound important."

"It is!" Kawlan protested. "Really. You learn a lot about yourself. And you have fun."

"I don't think so," Korkie countered, tearing off and juggling a piece of the hot spiced pancake in his hands. "I tried it once, I promise. On Kalarba. Stolen drinks and lots of kissing. It wasn't all that good."

Sufficiently cooled, Korkie tossed the dindra scrap into his mouth.

"Fine," Kawlan conceded. "That's alright. But you need to find some fun somewhere before you go grey. What did you like to do for fun before all of this mess? Sport? The limi league is starting up again."

Korkie snickered, apparently at the thought of himself playing in the limi league, before sobering and pondering the question.

"For fun," he mused, as though this were an entirely alien concept. "Well… I suppose I liked to dance."

I couldn't resist the death sticks parallel. The Kryze-Kenobi family truly are champions of public health.

Next chapter is one of my very favourite chapters I've written for this story. I know that we have a plot to advance, but Kawlan is right. You can't skip your adolescence. Korkie is going dancing.

As an aside: 10000 points to anyone who figures out Mace's secret mission.

xx - S.