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ISBN 978-1-4847-1700-4
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Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Part 1: Lothal
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part 2: To Space and Back
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part 3: Kessel
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Photo Insert
To new hopes
and new beginnings
“You say you are an orphan, without a friend in the world; all the inquiries I have been able to make, confirm the statement. Let me hear your story; where you come from; who brought you up; and how you got into the company in which I found you. Speak the truth, and you shall not be friendless while I live.”
—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Two ghosts haunted the depths of the Outer Rim.
Both were star vessels, converging in space. One was large, nearly corvette-class, and bore a unique design that might be most likened to a manual crossbow. Its wide, circular prow protruded from a rectangular midsection, along which projected an assortment of weaponry, from laser cannons to missile launchers. It would be classified as a gunship, though none of its guns moved as the other vessel crept up to its airlock. It seemed to be nothing more than a derelict drifting in space, its cockpit dark, its hull ruptured by blaster holes, its engines cold, a ghost of its former self.
The docking vessel—a bulky, hexagonal freighter of Corellian origin—was a ghost of another kind. Equipped with baffled engines, energy dampeners, and static jammers, the freighter had been modified to be deliberately hard to detect. Sensors frequently registered it as a solar fluctuation or cosmic radiation rather than a starship.
Its crew called it the Ghost.
Kanan Jarrus stood in the Ghost’s docking tube, surrounded by his four crewmates. All eyes, photoreceptors, and blasters were fixed on the gunship’s airlock. Everyone was on edge, even him.
They had traveled to this remote part of the Rim to converse with the gunship’s captain, on the advice of Cikatro Vizago, a Devaronian crime lord on Lothal with whom both were acquainted. This captain allegedly shared the same anti-Imperial views as the Ghost’s ragtag bunch and was seeking to coordinate efforts in his fight against the Empire. Desiring to take their own struggle beyond the planet Lothal, Kanan and his colleague Hera Syndulla had agreed to meet the captain, so Vizago had arranged it to happen here in deep space.
Unfortunately, given the exterior damage the gunship had taken, it appeared that the Empire—or someone with the appropriate firepower—had arrived there first. This made Kanan and his crewmates wary, since either enemy or ally could be on the other side of the airlock.
“Five, four,” Sabine said, counting down the timer of the detonation charges she’d placed on the airlock. In her Mandalorian armor and helmet, the girl was the most protected of all of them—yet also would be the first one noticed in a potential firefight. Swirls of purple, pink, and orange dappled her helmet and plates, a pattern that would work as camouflage only in a graffiti-covered undercity.
“One,” she said. The charges blew, right on time.
Kanan held his breath and squinted through the smoke. No one appeared in the airlock. The gunship corridor beyond was dark. “Chopper, scan for any life signs.”
The crew’s mechanical member, the barrel-shaped astromech droid C1-10P, grumbled as he rolled forward and rotated his battered orange-and-yellow dome. While most astromech units whistled or tweedled to communicate in place of expensive vocabulators, Chopper favored lower tones. He grunted back an all clear.
“Karabast,” cursed Zeb in his native tongue. The brawny Lasat stooped in the docking tube, the tips of his sharp ears touching the ceiling. He pulled at his chin curtain of beard. “I was hopin’ for some Imps. I could do with a little head bashing right now.”
“Be careful what you wish for, Garazeb Orrelios,” Hera said. “One day it might be your head that’s bashed. Maybe then someone can knock a little sense into you.”
Kanan smirked. Hera always knew how to lighten grave situations. She claimed her sarcasm was a Twi’lek trait, like her ability to communicate solely through the movements of her lekku head-tails. But Kanan had encountered many serious members of her species who had no sense of humor. Her dry wit came from living a life constantly in peril. If you couldn’t look death in the face and laugh a little, she often said, then you were probably already dead.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“I’m as clueless as you,” Hera said. “Everyone could be vaped aboard that ship—or it could be a trap. Perhaps you could—”
Kanan shot her down abruptly. “No.”
Her green head-tails twitched in annoyance. She could be as irritated as she wanted to be, but he wasn’t going to be pressured into doing what she was implying. She didn’t comprehend what that might cost, not just to him, but all of them.
“Well, I’m not going to stand here when I could be redecorating the gunship,” Sabine said, her helmet filtering none of the sass from her voice.
Kanan held her back from going into the airlock first. “Save your art and just hang on to your blasters,” he said. “Hera, Chopper, keep the Ghost warm in case we need a quick getaway. And inform Vizago about what happened to his ‘acquaintances.’”
“Already sent the message,” Hera said, and turned with the droid. She was disappointed in him, he could tell. But she’d get over it, like she always did.
Gesturing Zeb and Sabine to follow, Kanan strode through the dissipating smoke into the airlock. Since the gunship’s emergency lights were out, he activated his glowrod.
What he saw astounded him. The corridor seemed to be constructed not of steel, but wood. And not just any ordinary wood. The wood used here remained in its natural state, without varnish or sanding, as if freshly cut from a tree. Branches and limbs curled out at various angles, forming arches or conduits for hidden wiring. Huge circular knots adorned the walls like gallery portraits. Thick slices of trunk made for bulkheads, while sap served as caulking and glue for the integrated technology. Kanan had never seen such handcrafted beauty.
“I shouldn’t have suggested tagging these walls,” Sabine said. “This is true art.”
“But where are the artists?” Zeb asked, warily sniffing the air.
They turned down the corridor and entered an enormous chamber that housed a lattice of stocky tree limbs. Some branches were bare like wood beams, while others were covered with a clumpy moss. They stretched across the chamber in multiple levels, woven together to form a network so thick Kanan could not see the ceiling.
“Thought I smelled wroshyr wood,” Zeb said.
“You’ve been to the forests of Kashyyyk?” Sabine asked.
“No. But the Wookiees who came to fight the Imperial invasion on Lasan all had weapons whittled from the
wroshyr trees of their home.”
Kanan stroked his goatee. “Interesting. So Vizago’s freedom fighters are Wookiees, and this is—was—their gunship.” He recalled some Wookiees he had known, and how they preferred resting in trees rather than bunks. The branches here must serve as the beds of their sleeping cabin.
“Makes sense the Wookiees would arm themselves and fight back. The Empire took over Kashyyyk, like it did Mandalore,” Sabine said.
“And Lasan,” Zeb snarled.
Kanan put his hand on a limb. The moss crumbled off, dead. No one had slept here in a while, for Wookiees fastidiously maintained their living environments. On the bare limb below, however, he noticed a series of pictographic marks that had been scratched into the bark. “Is this writing?”
Zeb and Sabine went over to look. “Definitely Wookiee,” Zeb said. “I saw similar markings on their weapons. Wish I could read it.”
“It says ‘Kitwarr, son of...Wullffwarro,’ or at least I think so,” Sabine said.
“You can read Wookiee?” Kanan and Zeb asked at once, both surprised.
“A little. Part of the elementary Mandalorian curriculum, along with Huttese, Aqualish, and a dozen other languages,” Sabine said with a shrug. “Can’t speak any Wookiee, though. No human can. We don’t have their throats.”
Zeb traced the markings with a finger. “Wullffwarro. I know that name. He was one of the Republic’s greatest soldiers during the Clone Wars.”
“I remember his name, too. He was always on the holonews, but when the Empire was declared, he suddenly disappeared,” Kanan said, interrupted by what sounded like a cough.
They all quieted and looked about. It was a cough, coming from farther inside the ship. Someone was still alive, probably at the brink of death.
Kanan led the others under the branches toward the source of the sound. They went through an arched portal and came out onto the gunship’s bridge.
Unlike the other pristine sections of the ship, the bridge was a disaster area. The benches before the various stations had been yanked from their moorings. All the technical systems were in pieces, shattered and smashed. Red and green blood smeared the cracked viewport and stained the wroshyr wood trim. A ferocious battle had been fought here, yet oddly, only one body lay among the rubble.
It was not a Wookiee. It was the sworn enemy of all Wookiees.
It was a Trandoshan.
“Slaver,” Zeb roared.
Kanan held Zeb back from strangling the reptilian humanoid. The Trandoshan’s wounds would bring an end to his suffering soon enough. His green flight suit was pitted with palm-sized holes, probably from a Wookiee bowcaster, and he was shedding orange scales faster than he could regenerate them.
Kanan knelt beside him. “Where are the Wookiees?”
One of the Trandoshan’s eyes stayed closed, but the other rolled toward Kanan. His serpentine tongue flicked in and out of his mouth as he rasped his final breaths.
Kanan caught the Trandoshan’s tongue. “Where?”
The Trandoshan gurgled, unable to speak until Kanan released his tongue. The reptilian spat out a last word. “Empire.”
Zeb howled and reached down to pick up the slaver with one hand. “You sold them to the Imps, you savage?”
The Trandoshan couldn’t answer, no matter how hard Zeb shook him. He was already dead.
Kanan touched Zeb’s shoulder. “Calm yourself.”
Zeb steamed, but dropped the slaver’s corpse back on the ground. “We need to find them. We need to save the Wookiees.”
The rangefinder antenna on Sabine’s helmet rotated. “Hera’s heard back from Vizago,” she said, then paused for a few moments. “He’s looking into what happened here. In the meantime, he’s got a job for us. An Imperial supply grab that should be simple and will pay handsomely.”
Kanan frowned. Nothing was simple when it came to Cikatro Vizago and his jobs. “Do I even need to guess where this pickup is?”
Even with the helmet on, everyone could hear the smile in Sabine’s voice. “Where else would it be?”
“Lothal,” Zeb growled.
There was a saying among traders in the Outer Rim that you hadn’t seen the color green until you’d landed in the grasslands of Lothal. Though Ezra Bridger hadn’t been to any other planet—he was only fourteen, after all—he doubted he’d ever dispute that saying. The grass on Lothal had the sheen of gold.
And it was everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Barring the occasional mound and mountain range, vast prairies spanned Lothal’s continents like great seas of golden green.
Ezra gunned his jump bike through one of these seas, racing across the grasslands beyond Capital City. The speed of the ride thrilled him. His hair flapped in front of his eyes, his heart raced, and the mounds whipped past him like he imagined the starlines of hyperspace would.
He took the freeway for a stretch, then got off at the exit for the spaceport. Transports, passenger shuttles, and freighters of all kinds landed on and launched from the berthing bays. One day he, too, would be piloting a ship of his own, hopping from planet to planet, never staying anywhere too long, doing all his trading by himself, a lone operator in the great galaxy.
After parking the bike in a distant lot, he took a speeder bus to the spaceport proper. The place was bustling and getting busier by the day. Humans and nonhumans of a dozen species that Ezra couldn’t name hurried between terminals that offered flights to such glamorous worlds as Corellia, Ryloth, and Imperial Center, where one huge metropolis covered the entire planet. Holographic billboards promoted even more exotic destinations and advertised everything from the latest gardening droids to the local Imperial Academy. The ever-increasing activity was due in no small part to the also ever-increasing military presence of the Empire on Lothal. Flat-winged TIE fighters patrolled the skies while white-armored stormtroopers patrolled the spaceport and city. The added security dulled Lothal’s reputation as a frontier world and lured wealthy Imperial citizens to come and relocate their businesses, start new ventures, or even take a holiday.
It also made Ezra especially vigilant. Being caught for crimes as minor as petty theft could get him locked up in an Imperial prison where he could labor for years unpaid as a slave.
This meant Ezra had to keep a low profile in the more secure areas, like the spaceport. With his backpack strapped around his shoulders, he pretended to be just another traveler as he roamed the crowds, fishing for the perfect mark to pickpocket. Desperate as he was for credits, he prided himself on stealing only from those who appeared more fortunate than he was. On Lothal, the fortunate were usually Imperials. Making off with a comlink or an officer’s rank pin could earn him enough at a pawn shop to pay for a week’s meals.
“Ezra Bridger?” piped a voice behind him. “By the Z’gag, it is you!”
Three tiny hands caught a strap dangling from his backpack and pulled Ezra out of the crowd. A larva-like Ruurian with sixteen limbs, stunted wings, and large multifaceted eyes wormed up before him.
Ezra frowned. “Hello, Slyyth.”
The Ruurian clacked his mandibles, his species’ version of a smile. “What a coincidence! I was just thinking how useful your talents would be for a job I have in mind.”
“You know I don’t work for anyone.”
“Ezra, Ezra,” Slyyth said, brushing his feathery antennae against Ezra’s cheek. “Just let me tell you the details. It’s only a snatch-and-run.”
Ezra stepped back from the antennae in disgust. “Last time you said that, I nearly got caught in an Imperial sting operation. No thanks.”
“But the credits we could make—”
Slyyth erupted into spasms of violent coughs. Woolly hair began to fall off his tubular body, which was blemished by yellow splotches Ezra hadn’t seen before.
“Are you ill?”
“Worse,” Slyyth said. “If I can’t afford another treatment, I might not be slithering on the ground for much longer.”
Ezra didn’t know much about
Ruurians, except that at a certain advanced age they spun a cocoon around themselves, shed their larval forms, and became beautiful chroma-wings. They considered this transformation to be Paradise—a phase during which one’s sole desires were eating, mating, and flying along the banks of Ruuria’s pink rivers. Slyyth, however, found the idea terrifying. He wouldn’t be able to fence stolen goods and make a profit if all he wanted to do was flutter over a riverbank. So for years, he had denied himself from entering the final stage of his biology by using various ointments, taking prescriptions, and getting special treatments.
“Whatever you’re taking is making you sick,” Ezra said.
“Sick is better than gone,” Slyyth said.
“You won’t be gone. You’ll be free to do what all your species do, and you won’t have to worry about making ends meet any longer,” Ezra said. The more he thought about it, the more becoming a chroma-wing really didn’t sound like that bad of a proposition.
“But the credits, the credits. I’ll never be rich—” The Ruurian broke into another series of coughs.
“Good-bye, Slyyth.” Ezra started to walk away.
“It’s a shame,” Slyyth said, managing to get his coughs under control. “You’re an artful little dodger, more talented than any pickpocket I know—including old Slyyth in his prime—but you’re as stubborn as a pupa.” He sighed and his antennae drooped. “Guess I’ll just have to ask Kinsdaw or Tesba if they can snatch the helmets.”
Ezra stopped. “Helmets?”
Slyyth let out a couple of weak coughs. He produced a flimsi in one hand. “According to the manifest I acquired, it’s part of a shipment for the new bucket-heads at the Academy.”
“Stormtrooper helmets?” Now Ezra was intrigued. “Where?”
Slyyth drew to his full height and clacked his mandibles. He wasn’t coughing anymore.
Ezra crept through the spaceport’s access corridors, staying away from random Imperial patrols. He came to the emergency door to bay 49 and used the astromech arm he kept in his backpack to pick the lock. He slipped inside the bay to find Academy cadets unloading cargo from an Imperial transport like labor droids. They carried off crates of foodstuffs, canisters of cleaning solutions, and bags of refurbished stormtrooper armor while the Supply Master, a turgid fellow named Lyste with whom Ezra had had a few run-ins, screamed at them to move faster.
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