by Lou Anders
No, thought Obi-Wan. Not once. Not ever. But just sound confident, he reminded himself. “In this case I’m a fast learner. Where to?”
“Platform one-D.”
Of course, Obi-Wan had no idea where platform 1D was. “I’ll follow you, then.”
With commandos in pursuit and blaster bolts leaving sizzling craters on the sharp-edged buildings and catwalks, Obi-Wan considered every second he didn’t crash or get shot to be a great success.
He even managed a somewhat-controlled landing on the lip of the connecting tunnel to the platform. The commandos were right behind them, firing salvos from their rifles. Obi-Wan deflected blasts with his lightsaber while the Death Watch troopers returned fire.
The tunnel doors opened to the exterior platform, revealing even more intense fighting, both on the platform and in the skies. Explosions shook the deck. The air burned with blaster fire. Through heat and noise, Obi-Wan could make out Maul’s super commandos waging a battle against Death Watch loyalists.
“Maul must really want you dead,” Bo-Katan said, impressed.
No, not dead. Maul wanted him in pain. Almost as badly as Obi-Wan had wanted to hurt him back. “You have no idea,” was all he would say.
Together, they raced for the nearest ship not yet engulfed in flames. Obi-Wan ran partway up the ramp, drawing fire with his blade, but Bo-Katan didn’t follow.
“Aren’t you coming?”
With a blaster in each hand, she never paused squeezing the triggers. “Go back to your Republic and tell them what happened.”
Obi-Wan ducked as a blaster bolt passed within a centimeter of his head. “That would likely lead to a Republic invasion of Mandalore.”
“Yes. And Maul will die. But Mandalore will survive. We always survive. Now go!”
“Bringing war to Mandalore is not what the duchess would have wanted.”
Still firing, and still hitting her targets, Bo-Katan turned to face him. “Satine wanted peace. She wanted to stay out of this war. But she was not a fool. The war has come, and if she were still here, she would do anything to protect her world. I understand that now.”
There was such pain in her eyes. It was a pain Obi-Wan shared. “You’re Satine’s sister, aren’t you?”
She didn’t need words to give him the answer.
Obi-Wan nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
He climbed the rest of the way up the ramp into the ship and left Bo-Katan behind to fight.
But he would be back someday.
He would not forget Satine. Or her dream of better days for Mandalore.
Anakin was waiting for him in the hangar bay when he returned to the Jedi Temple.
Obi-Wan tried to compose a calm and serene expression, but Anakin must have seen through it.
“Master…what happened?”
The words came with struggle. He didn’t want to talk. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But he knew he needed to speak. He knew it was important that Anakin hear it. “I lost someone important to me,” Obi-Wan said. “And I understand anger in a way I never have. I know how difficult it is not to give in to it.”
Anakin held his gaze a long time, struggles of his own evident on his face.
“I have to report to the Council,” Obi-Wan said finally.
“May I come with you, Master?”
Obi-Wan managed a smile. He clapped Anakin on the shoulder. “Yes,” Obi-Wan said. “We’ll do this together.”
SÍDI WAS A GRAY, OUTER RIM PLANETOID that lay cold under a heavy sky and smelled, when the wind blew out of the east, of rotten eggs. The girl had learned, as many small creatures with a talent for survival do, to blend into her environment. Her unusual silver hair made her look like the ghost of a twelve-year-old girl, and she maintained such a level of grime on her face and clothes that she was nearly indistinguishable from the dim, drab walls of her home. Even alone in the narrow passages of her parents’ inn, she crept close to the walls and went about her work hunched over her broom and making about as much noise as the small, armored ash-beetles that were the only other living thing that thrived on Sídi.
Her parents, Rank and Leera, viewed the ash-beetles the way they viewed her, as a nuisance, but she didn’t mind them. Gentle and quiet, they bumbled along not hurting anything or anyone, except maybe the microscopic bugs they fed on, filtered through their bristly teeth. They were sweepers like she was, keeping things as clean as anyone could. And if you bothered to polish their armored sides, as the girl had, they gleamed.
When she was very young, the girl decided to keep one as a pet. She replaced the missing monnok piece from the old dejarik set they had in the common room—not holographic, just a wooden table and clumsy clay pieces that looked only vaguely like the creatures they were meant to represent—but the ash-beetle kept skittering away on its thousand tiny feet, and her next move was always forgotten in her rush to save it from plunging over the side of the board. Even so, she loved it, and fashioned it a tiny leash out of a piece of thread, and took it for walks in the courtyard. But Leera, in one of her foul moods, stumbled outside to yell at her daughter and ground it under her heel. The girl had cried, and Leera had laughed. “Stop that whining. I’ll give you something to cry about. All this over a bug? Huh, come to think of it, that’s a better name for you, little Bug. Now get back inside and make yourself useful.” This had happened such a long time before that she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone her real name if they bothered to ask. Bug it was, and Bug it remained.
The inn’s one real attraction was an abandoned military relay tower, set there and then forgotten when the planetoid proved to be just as useless for a strategic base as it was for anything else. Still, in this sparsely populated part of the Outer Rim, it was the only way to send and receive messages to and from somewhere you might actually want to go. Late at night or early before anyone stirred, Bug would steal to the little room at the top of the relay tower and listen to messages as they came through.
No one officially monitored it anymore; they only checked the recording databanks now and then. Whenever someone came looking to send or receive a comm, her parents charged desperate people a ransom in credits.
Bug had trailed quietly after Rank one day, spying as he punched in the passcode to the tower to take some poor refugees from Balith up there, hoping for good news from their war-torn planet. They received none, though Rank still got plenty of credits out of them. But that day Bug also came away with what she wanted: a way in. Since then, she’d sometimes spent half the night listening to old comm recordings or, if she was lucky, caught new ones as they came in.
Transmissions bounced in from all parts of the galaxy, often scrambled or more static than message, but Bug didn’t care. She sat there by the hour, her back against the wall and her knees tucked up under her chin. On clear nights she could see the whole galaxy of stars out the tower window and imagined they were the planets on the other end of each transmission. Every place sounded exotic to her: she’d heard a strange language that sounded like a bunch of barking out of somewhere in the Mytaranor sector, and a young man’s smooth, musical laugh from a place with an equally musical name, Socorro. These other voices conjured up pictures in her mind of green places, or wet ones, or warm cities full of light and life. It was better than sitting by the fire in the common room for taking the chill out of her bones.
But as the Clone War intensified, so had the transmissions. Most comms now were cries for help in a thousand different languages. The last message she had heard had been the only one to come through on a slow night. Bug had dozed off, waiting, when she was woken by a voice. It startled her in its closeness, as though the woman it belonged to were right there in the room, whispering into her ear between bursts of static. She spoke softly but with a breathless intensity that sounded like a fear Bug was all too familiar with, the fear of being caught: “On Mother’s instructions I’ve placed her in a class three lifepod marked…fought, so I cast a spell of sleep on her and she may resist when she…estimated travel tim
e from Dathomir is…and drop coordinates in the Mid Rim are as foll—” But Bug would not learn what those coordinates were. The transmission was cut short by an explosion, and the mingled screeching sounds of the woman’s screams and metal tearing.
Bug had not returned to the tower since that night. She dreaded sleep. All her dreams were the same: urgent, whispered voices on the edge of hearing until she woke sure that a bomb had gone off and she was about to fall from some great height into an abyss of red flame.
So she worked herself to exhaustion, hoping by the time she fell asleep she would be too tired to dream. Even Leera had nothing to complain about when the floors had been swept four or five times in one day. After that, Bug might sit quietly in a dark corner of the common room and eavesdrop on guests’ conversations or watch them play dejarik until the late hours.
Watching dejarik being played, even played badly, was comforting. Often, once guests wandered off to their quarters for the night, Bug would replay their games for them, playing both sides of the table, trying to understand the strategies they’d used and how they’d failed. She had grown up at the chessboard, she had a good memory for it, and it amused her to “fix” the mistakes lesser players made. It bothered her, still, that missing monnok piece. She’d sigh. Someday.
One night in the common room, her ears pricked up when she overheard Rank mention something about a particularly bloody battle on a planet called Dathomir. He was talking to one of the travelers from a junker of a transport barge that had limped in the week before, in need of fuel and repairs. The people who had disembarked and checked into the inn were not travelers by choice but, as was more and more often the case, refugees from the war. Even Sídi’s thin daylight made them squint after the long, dark hours they’d spent in the ship’s hold. Shell-shocked and ragged, they shoveled their first meals into their mouths, hunched over their plates. They were a desperate bunch.
Except for one: a tall, pale woman dressed in black, with curious red markings on her temples and cheeks that gave her face a narrow, hungry look. She stood apart from the other travelers and took her meals alone in her quarters. The dust of the planet didn’t cling to her cloak like it did to everything else, and sometimes Bug glimpsed a flash of red beneath its dark folds. She would come into the common room now and again, bothering Rank for updates on the repairs or asking when another transport might be expected.
When Bug’s father stalled or began the familiar act of shaking his head as though he were sorry, it was out of his control, these things took time and lots of credits, the old woman stared at him with her yellow eyes, unblinking. Rank’s usual speeches—“Hyperdrives don’t come cheap, you know, especially out here at the dead end of space”—died in his throat. Under her gaze he could only mutter, “Not yet. But soon. Promise,” and scuttle back out to the hangar.
Leera was less easily intimidated during her own run-ins with the woman. “That old mynock wants me to let her into the relay tower to check the comms for free. Can you believe it? I told her she could go straight back to whatever swamp she crawled out of before I let her anywhere near ’em.”
“What news out of Dathomir?” the woman demanded now, looking expectantly at Rank. He took a couple of steps toward the door, but she also took a couple of steps, putting herself between him and escape. Rank sighed, defeated.
“They say the witches are destroyed.” He seemed to take heart at this and puffed out his chest, addressing the guests gathered for dinner in the common room. “By a droid army! Their magic wasn’t all that impressive if it couldn’t save them from a bunch of tin cans, eh?” A couple of people snickered, but the woman in black spoke again, sharply, and their laughter quickly died.
“Have you done battle with a droid army, innkeeper?”
“What would an army want with Sídi?” Rank was defensive. “All’s I’m saying is, you hear things, and those witches outta Dathomir were supposed to be these deadly assassin types, and where are they now?”
“Indeed. It is a question many would be wise to ask themselves: where are they now?” She held Rank’s gaze an uncomfortably long time until she broke the silence abruptly. “But! Your news, like the bread you serve here, is old. The Nightsisters’ fortress fell months ago. Other clans will take it over. There are more witches in that world and this than you know. Find me if you come across any news of Dathomir worth telling, or when your wife comes to her senses and gives me the access I’ve requested.” She scooped up the scrawny black tooka cat that followed her everywhere and stalked off to her quarters; the animal stared malevolently at the innkeeper over the old woman’s shoulder and hissed. Rank shook his head.
“That’s it. Credits or no credits, I’m finishing the repairs on that barge tonight. I want that old woman out of here. She turns my stomach.”
Bug was dismayed. She wanted to know more about the woman in black, and though the very word frightened her, about Dathomir. She knew the woman tended to go for long walks after her evening meal. Bug didn’t understand this. Where was there to go on Sídi? But she always came stalking back, a feeling like anger coming off her in waves, and the green-eyed cat sparking static electricity from its fur, all along its back to the tip of its tail. They were like wild animals in a cage, growing more impatient with each passing day. That Bug understood.
One evening she lurked in the hallway until the old woman went out for one of these walks, her cat scurrying like a small, dense shadow at her feet. She crept to the woman’s room and punched in the override passcode that she used to access all the rooms for cleaning. The door slid open, she stepped inside, and it slid closed behind her. Bug’s plan, if the woman returned, was to pretend to be making the bed or sweeping the floor. But honestly, there was nothing to clean. Like the woman in black, the room was so neat Bug couldn’t find a speck of dust in it. She would hardly know anyone had slept in the bed. The blankets were tucked in tight, and there were no personal items anywhere, except…on a small table on the far side of the room, there was a plain clay bowl, overturned. Bug sighed. She turned it over to clean the spilled remains of whatever slop Leera had served for dinner that night and found, instead, the last thing she would have expected: a perfect, absolutely perfect model of a monnok, poised as if to strike. It was nicer than any of the pieces they had in the common room. No chips, no cracks. It even had the staff! She picked it up and turned it over in her hands. It was a small work of art, and she couldn’t help smiling as she examined it.
With a grinding sound and a sudden snap, the door to the old woman’s room slid open. Bug jumped and, acting on instinct, shoved the dejarik piece in the front pocket of her apron. Head down, she grabbed her broom and began sweeping the already spotless floor. But when she stole a glance at the doorway, no one stood there. A cold sweat dripped down her back, and she shivered. Someone’s just been messing with the keypads again, she thought. Plenty of petty thieves passed through the inn. She walked slowly back to the door and looked carefully, both ways, down the passage. Not a soul, not a sound but her own heart hammering in her ears.
She slipped out, the door sliding shut behind her. She started to walk back to the common room but remembered the monnok. She pulled out the piece for one more look. It really was perfect. Couldn’t she just…borrow it? For one game. Her fingers hovered over the keypad. It had been under that bowl anyway. And who knew when the old woman would be back? She would borrow it, for one perfect game with all the pieces, and slip it back in before it was even missed.
If Bug had been using her head, she would have realized how strange it was: the severely tidy room except for the bowl, and under the bowl, exactly the piece she’d been missing. But her mind was already racing ahead of her, contemplating her next move with the monnok.
The fire in the common room burned low and red, yet Bug was so caught up in her game she hardly noticed. She could have used anything in place of the monnok, and had—the ash-beetle, a spoon, a rock—but she had never played so well or for so long. She was having what, if s
he’d ever used the word in her young life, she would have called “fun.”
Bug was so involved in her game that when the old woman’s black cat jumped onto the dejarik board and scattered the pieces, she had to cover her mouth to stifle a scream. She jumped to her feet and snatched up the monnok, which had landed half in the fire. She looked, worried it was broken or damaged, and for a second she would have sworn the game piece had shrunk in her hand, turned dull and gray, and wore not the monnok’s savage face but her own startled one. She yelped and dropped it like a hot waffle, running her hand down the front of her apron as if she could wipe away the greasy feeling that lingered on her fingertips. She looked around uneasily.
“Where’s your mistress?” she asked the cat. If ever an animal looked like it could talk it was this one.
But of course the cat did not answer. It sat still and perfectly composed in the middle of the dejarik table and watched her with slitted eyes. It began to purr, and its eyes widened. Bug backed away from it.
And right into the woman in black. This time she really did scream.
“Hush! No one’s hurt you. Yet, anyway. You did do a thorough job cleaning my quarters,” the woman said. She moved around the table in two long strides and sat opposite Bug, motioning for her to sit, too. Bug hesitated. With both sets of eyes on her, the gold and the green, she felt trapped. It was easier to obey than try to run. Where would she go?
The cat jumped from the table to the old woman’s lap, where it curled into a little round ball and appeared, immediately, to fall asleep. She stroked its head, and its tail twitched.
“It was a good game you were playing, if a strange one, against yourself. As you can see, Ichor is not so impressed as I. But he has never been one for games with rules. Cats only know two rules: eat and sleep.” The old woman smiled. Bug surprised herself by thinking that it wasn’t such a bad smile. She relaxed and almost smiled back.
She tensed again as the woman reached into the folds of her cloak, but she only drew out the little clay bowl from her room. She set it, upright this time, on the table and pulled out a small vial from yet another hidden pocket. She unstopped the vial and poured its clear contents into the bowl. The liquid hit the clay with a hiss and flashed a series of colors—blue, green, and finally red, which it stayed. Ruddy steam hovered over the bowl like a miniature storm cloud, and Bug could make out letters or shapes glittering on the sides of the vessel, though previously it had appeared smooth and unadorned. She felt she should say something or applaud, like someone who had just been shown a magician’s trick, but as she summoned up the courage, the woman in black finally spoke again.
