by Chuck Wendig
The air changes. Someone is here.
She looks up, embarrassed, a blushing bloom rising to her normally pale cheeks. There stands Auxi. Her face stark.
The vote failed again. She can see it.
“Now what?” Mon says weakly, desperately.
“We finish the war,” Auxi answers.
“What?”
“The vote passed, Mon. The vote passed.”
In the deep shadows of a moonless night, deeper shadows gather. Beyond them wait the low slopes of the Karatokai Mountains. Ahead of them is a narrow valley, in which there sits an outpost that has changed hands many times over the centuries: Once a Republic outpost, it fell to the Empire when Imperial reign ruled over Devaron, and now yet again it has returned to the hands of the revivified Republic.
Here the jungle is noisy. Flocks of gold-feathered taka-tey roost in the vine-tangle above, chirruping and cack-cack-cacking. A thousand different insects hum and chatter in a cacophonous choir. Something kilometers away bellows, calling to another of its kind in the opposite direction.
But the shadows remain silent and still.
They are patient. They are waiting.
Down in the valley, the outpost is lit by bold beams from spotlights, beams that capture the slippery, sliding night mists. A flurry of activity sees ships landing and unloading supplies. The New Republic is establishing outposts new and old across the planet’s surface. They bring people. They bring food and potable water. They have diplomats, liaisons, scientists, and of course soldiers.
They are invaders.
This is a sacred place. A hundred klicks from here is an old Jedi temple. It is not the only place on this planet strong in the Force. The shadows cannot feel this themselves, for they are not conduits for the Force, but merely slaves to it. (As are all living things. All are caught in the river of power that is the Force, trapped by its currents. Only those who wield the dark side of the Force are capable of changing those currents; they are riverbreakers. They do not surrender to fate. They are its foes.)
The shadows are Acolytes of the Beyond. Here wait two dozen of them, though they are only one cell among many across the galaxy. Though they grow restive, they know to wait. They mustn’t disappoint their masters.
Kiza, a young Pantoran woman from Coronet City on Corellia, faces a wave of sudden doubt. She stands among people who are not her friends, not exactly, but who are her cohorts: Yiz, Lalu, Korbus, and her fellow Corellian, a friend and sometimes lover, Remi. She’s not at all like Remi, though she pretends to be. He, like her, like all of them, has had the dreams. He’s received the visions of the darkness: dreams of Sith, both ancient and recently living, plaguing his nights. And he loves it. He loves being a part of something. The darkness hasn’t taken him—he has given himself to it.
Kiza pretends to be the same. But she’s not so sure. She’s angry, that much she knows. As a street rat in the worst parts of Coronet City, she has a lot of rage divvied up among an unholy host of those who have made her life harder: the peace officers that hassled her, the chits-and-debits office that chased her for every last debt against her family’s accounts, the highborn Corellians who would stare down their noses at a lowborn gutter girl like her. When the dreams started, and when the man came to recruit her, the Acolytes seemed an easy fit. She had anger to spare, and she was told that her anger was purifying—it was a virtue, the man told her, a necessary vice. It was anger that shaped the galaxy. It was rage that fueled the engines of change. It made sense. It felt like home.
She started low in the order, as they all did. She tagged walls with the Vader mask sigil and the warning: VADER LIVES. She stole credits and tithed them to the cause. While others were slicing into the HoloNet or attacking security forces, she was still scouting locations for dead-drops or safe meets. Then came Remi. He had this perfect mix of confidence and injury—like a monster who had been tamed, a fire whose flame was both brutal and beautiful. He was young. He was angry. He was gorgeous.
That’s when he told her what they needed her to do next. She would get a job inside the P&S station. Kiza would work with the peace officers. They had rigged up new papers for her, new thumbprint scans, a new digital history. Gone was Kiza the street rat. Here was Kiza the doll with good breeding, the dame from the secretary pool.
Then came the night when the Acolytes attacked the city. A distraction so she and Remi could steal something from the archives underneath the station: a relic from a fallen Sith.
A lightsaber.
That lightsaber now hangs at Remi’s belt. Since that night, Remi has grown more egotistical. He ignites the blade sometimes and stares into it, his mouth moving as if he’s whispering to it. Other lightsabers, they’ve sacrificed to the Sith beyond—those who have died and who wait beyond the veil and whose orders the Acolytes follow. (Those ancient specters are the ones who give them the dreams, after all.) But now they’ve begun to keep the lightsabers. They have those and other artifacts, and only the most esteemed of the Acolytes are allowed to hold, use, and keep them.
Tonight they move beyond the collection of relics. Tonight they attack. Not just here. The strikes will take place across the galaxy. This is the first attack, and as such it is a small one: In various systems, the Acolytes have gathered on different worlds to slaughter enclaves and outposts of the New Republic. They do not have the number or the power to achieve bigger, not yet. But they will. This is just the start.
And Kiza is afraid.
She doesn’t know if this is who she is.
She doesn’t know if she’s as strong as Remi.
She doesn’t know if the visions she’s experienced were even real.
Kiza thinks, If I go ahead with it, if I go on this attack, I’ll just stay in the background. I’ll make it look like I’m doing something. Like I’m participating. Maybe I’ll hit somebody. Or throw a detonator and blow up a shuttle. The anger she’s felt for so long curdles and goes sour. It turns to fear. Puzzlingly, it is that fear of which she is afraid. If she runs—if she seizes the fear and lets it guide her—they’ll come for her. Remi won’t let her escape. He’ll find her tonight. Or in a week. Or in a year. Remi does not tolerate things that disappoint him.
As she works diligently to still her heart—a new shadow joins them. This shadow, blacker than all the others.
It is their master. It is Yupe Tashu.
The Acolytes bow to him. They gabble their glee at seeing him again after so long. He is not their only master. He is one of many (though their living masters number far fewer than their dead ones), but he is the closest they have to the Sith Empire created around Sidious and Vader. They paw at him, and he adores it, his crevasse-lined face tilting back with pleasure.
Kiza does not join them. She’s too afraid to do anything, even to move. It’s as if she’s a stack of little rocks and if she moves, all of who she is will crumble apart and collapse.
Tashu begins giving them their weapons. They were to wait for him here. He says they are special. They receive artifacts and relics from the ancient departed Sith. To some, he hands dark robes. To others, he gives glowing red crystals around gut-leather cords.
Then he turns to Kiza.
He hands her a mask.
The mask is burnished bronze. The smooth metal is peppered with tiny, hammered divots. The eyes are black glass. There is no nose or mouth—though where the mouth should be is a line of black rivets.
“The mask of Viceroy Exim Panshard,” he says, giggling. “A mask made of meteoric metal and containing the screams of a hundred innocents slaughtered for the viceroy’s pleasure. Masks have power. Some are worn in the grave. Others worn in life. This, like the others in my collection, has gathered the darkness of the living Force! Wear it. You are anointed, Kiza of Corellia.”
“I…”
The others stare at her. Some, in awe. Others balefully.
Remi’s gaze is poisonous. He says, suddenly: “I should have that.” And he reaches for the mask—
; Tashu snaps at him. Literally. His mouth opens and closes on open air, the half-broken teeth clacking together as Remi’s hand recoils. “You do not deny the wishes of the venerable specters,” Tashu hisses.
“I…”
“Also, the lady needs a weapon. Does she not?” Tashu’s eyes twinkle with a special kind of madness as he reaches down and snatches the lightsaber hilt from Remi’s belt. He places it gingerly in her hand.
It throbs with power. She knows not to turn it on—not yet. Its red glow could give them away. But its potential thrums against her palm. And as she lifts her chin and lets the mask rest upon her face, she feels a wonderful darkness sweep over her. It is a consumptive void and with great hunger it chews into her fear and swallows it in great, greedy gobbets. With the fear gone, her anger emerges anew. It springs forth like a living thing inside her. A vicious creature hatches within her heart.
Time moves strangely. She blinks and it has begun. She’s there, now, at the outpost. I’m not alone, she thinks. The others are here. They have their mundane weapons: clubs and machine shop blades and ugly chop-axes, all painted the red of blood, the red of Sith. Republic fools scream and flee. One comes toward her and the red blade extends from its hilt in her hand—she can feel its vibration up through her elbow, all the way across the bridge of her shoulders and into her very teeth. A swipe of the blade cuts one scream short. Another takes the legs out from under a fleeing woman. Hate pulses in her. Her heart beats so hard, it feels as if it’ll shatter her breastbone in twain.
Kiza moves with little precision. She swings and swipes with the blade. The Force does not move through her, but the weapon is still unlike anything else she’s ever seen—it cuts through flesh, bone, metal. The light leaves streaks of itself burning across her vision. It thrills her.
Then she’s down. Something slams into her. Her head snaps against the ground. New Republic scum! Anger not entirely her own threads up through her like braiding vines, and as she rolls over she sees it’s not a Republic soldier at all.
It’s Remi.
His face is pale and struck with fury. As he yells at her, spit flecks from his mouth. “You aren’t worthy. That’s mine. Everything you have been given, I gave you! You weak stripling! You coward! You thief.”
Her hand is empty. The lightsaber hilt is gone. She paws at the ground, kicking at him with clumsy feet as he descends upon her. Remi’s long-fingered hands find her neck and close around it. He’s weeping and laughing as his grip tightens. She gags trying to get air. Her own hand bats at the wet grass, finding no lightsaber. Above them is the darkness of the outpost landing platform, and she hears the screams and yells of the Acolytes and their victims. Someone falls off the edge and lands nearby—thud.
Everything starts to go black.
Her eyelids flutter.
Then she finds it. Her fingers close around cold metal.
It happens fast, but feels slow. She jams the unignited blade against Remi’s temple. His eyes are round and suddenly afraid.
The red blade spears through his skull. His eyelids strain open. The eyes themselves cook and go red before burning to cinder.
He drops.
Kiza stands, adjusting her mask.
Then she lets the anger take her anew, and she resumes her assault. Soon, the outpost falls. Soon, the Acolytes claim triumph.
War is coming.
Leia sits and tries not to think about it. She doesn’t turn on the HoloNet. She doesn’t go to her balcony on Chandrila and look up in the sky to see the fleet gathering in orbit. Instead, she sits on a chair in the room that will very soon serve as the nursery to her son. The cradle sits nearby. Next to it is the sanctuary tree, the one given to her by the little Ewok, Wicket. She’s never been able to feel the tree—the so-called serpent’s puzzle—with the Force, but she can see with her eyes that the burnished golden bark shines with health, and every day the twining branches sport new scarlet leaves.
But her baby boy? Him she can effortlessly feel inside her. Not just the way that all mothers can feel the living creature within, but she can feel him with the invisible hands of the Force: With it she senses the margins of his burgeoning mind, she knows his mood, she can tell that he’s healthy. He is less a human-shaped thing and more a pulsing, living band of light. Light that sometimes dims, that sometimes is thrust through with a vein of darkness. She tells herself that it’s normal—Luke said to her, Leia, we all have that. He explained that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow.
Right now her son is upset, tumbling inside her as if he can’t get comfortable. His light, flickering with the dark. She centers herself and concentrates. The walls of the room fall away. Everything is white and then it’s black. Then she’s in the calm, airless void. As Leia finds her peace, so does her son. He stops turning…
Then he gets the hiccups.
Hic. Hic. Hic.
She sighs and it brings her out of it. But she laughs, too. Because the hiccups tickle her. They’re like little bubbles inside—a curious effervescence like nothing Leia has ever felt before.
My son is alive. The future is bright.
That bright future casts dark shadows, though, and now war is again on the horizon. Not a new war—no, the same war they’ve been fighting all this time. A war that began as a rebellion and soon transformed into a proper struggle between the Empire and the Republic. Now, she hopes, this will finish it. The future is bright, yes, but only if this goes well. Only if the Empire burns out in a searing flash, gone to ash.
Han comes home not long after, and he finds her there in the room. He tells her only a little about what happened on Nakadia, but it’s enough for her to know that he had a hand in making things right.
“That’s what you’re good at,” she tells him, reaching up to meet him as he stoops down. “Making things right.”
She kisses his cheek. He looks aw-shucks embarrassed.
“It’s happening,” he says. “Jakku.”
“I know.”
“It’s gonna be one helluva battle. It might get bad.”
“I know that, too.”
He chews his lip. “It feels weird, doesn’t it?”
“Not being there, you mean.”
“Yeah. You, me, Luke. Chewie. The Falcon. Those two walking talking garbage cans. It feels weird we’re not part of it.”
“We’ve got our own adventure.” She pats her belly.
“End of an era,” he says.
“And the start of a new one.”
The baby turns inside her again, troubled by something she cannot feel and cannot yet understand.
—
War is coming.
And hopefully soon after, it ends. Sinjir cares little for the vagaries of war—he tells himself he has no investment in whether the New Republic wins or loses even as he feels himself looking forward to the demise of the Empire he once served. Rather, he needs the war because that is the only way he fears he’ll ever get to see Jas and Norra again.
“Ow,” Conder says, wincing. “You’re not paying attention to what you’re doing again.”
“I’m paying attention perfectly,” Sinjir says, screwing a small plug of absorbent fiber-cloth into Conder’s nose. The slicer winces and pulls away.
“Your mind is wandering like a child at a toy market.”
Sinjir shrugs. “Fine, yes, perhaps. Sorry. I’m more used to causing pain than soothing it.” He winds another bit of cloth into the other nostril.
The two of them are back on Chandrila. Solo brought them home. They toyed with staying on Nakadia for a time, but Conder frowned at the notion, saying that the pastoral planet made Chandrila look like Coruscant. It’s all just…crops, he said at the time, and Sinjir was inclined to agree.
Now Sinjir works to mend the slicer’s abused face. Bacta, gauze, fiber-cloth, and a good old-fashioned needle-and-thread. The worst hit was the last one Conder took—the one they heard over the comlink.
“I must commend you again,” Sinjir says. “A tra
nsceiver tooth? Genius. And I never knew.” That’s how Conder broadcast to them—using his tongue to slowly, arduously flip to their comlink channel. The broadcast ended when that Herglic thug whapped him in the face.
“A man must keep his secrets.”
“Not me. I have none. I am done with secrets.”
“Somehow, I doubt that, Sin.”
Conder’s gentle eyes twinkle. Sinjir admires the man. His drive. His capability. After rescuing the slicer from the warehouse, they had to move fast—the good news was, as suspected, that the Black Sun and Red Key thugs had hacked a line to the datapads of their five senators. The line was encrypted, though, which is where Conder came in. The slicer did as the name suggested, slicing through algorithms like a man with a blade cutting ribbons. In only a few minutes, Conder—beaten, woozy, caked in his own blood—stole access to the senators’ datapads.
And from there, they delivered the messages.
Sinjir’s initial idea was to threaten them. But Sinjir also knew that threats created fear and fear made people act a certain way. It’s one thing to have someone bound to a chair; there, you control the fear. You wield it like a weapon. But those senators were in the wind. A fight-or-flight response could’ve had them doing any number of unpredictable things—turning themselves in, running for the exits, or even voting as the syndicates demanded they vote in the hope it would save them.
No, instead Sinjir said to make them an offer—an offer braided into the threat. He had Conder send a missive telling them they would be given pardons if they voted with the chancellor. And further, they told Nim Tar that his child was safe and Sorka that her prize jerba was rescued. (That latter bit was a necessary lie. Sorka will soon learn that the syndicates already sold her prize animal on the butchers’ black market.)
And with that, they did it.
They solved the plot. They got the votes. The final battle is coming.
Conder says: “You’re worried.”
“Am I that obvious?”
