by Claudia Gray
Carefully he noted the positions of every other person assigned to the Vessel—Reath and Dez on the station with Leox, Orla in the mess, Affie resting in her bunk, Geode apparently in charge of the bridge—before seeking a place of quiet and privacy. He found it in the very back of the ship, in front of a sealed-off cargo container. (Interesting that the Vessel crew would apologize so often for the smallness of their makeshift quarters while still reserving so much space for cargo they hadn’t even mentioned.) Cohmac laid down his heavy blanket, folded into a kind of meditation mat, then knelt on it.
I behold the world within myself, he thought. I behold the world without myself.
The mantra had helped soothe him for many years; he liked the balance of it. But it had become too literal, now, to serve as a mantra.
I am a Jedi. I have always been one. It is my identity, one I have never sought to change.
But the Order does not answer the questions that linger within me. The questions only grow over time.
Darkness abides upon this station. It is…too familiar to me now. But the shape it takes here is different and unsettling. Consciousness without a corporeal being. What created this? How did the dark side take form in this place?
How does the dark side take form anywhere? Sometimes I think we, the Jedi, must be somehow to blame. We who refuse to look at the Force in full, to examine the darkness as well as the light. If the dark side were not so alien to them, Cohmac suspected, they would more readily understand the nature of the idols.
How can we split the Force in two? How can we justify such an act of violence—and it is violence, such a dividing, even the darkness divided from the light.
Affie gave Leox all the credit for getting their fellow refugees to calm down. But she had to admit, the Jedi were quick to give everyone a common goal—namely penetrating the lower rings of the station. That goal happened to neatly match her own.
They’d accepted her report on the upper rings easily enough, which was fine because her report was true. It was not, however, the whole truth. Affie was keeping the smugglers’ code, and her thoughts about it, to herself for the time being.
It makes zero sense for this to be a regular Byne Guild portal, she reasoned as she prepared to head down to the lower rings with the rest of the volunteers: Reath, Nan, Dez, and a long-limbed Mizi who, like all Mizi, preferred to be nameless to strangers. It’s out of the way, and it doesn’t have any obvious advantages. But what if there’s a secret society within the Guild, one that’s operating behind Scover’s back? They could be skimming off the top, stealing small amounts of cargo or money, falsifying records to hide it from management. The preprogrammed location could’ve been downloaded from another ship, one that’s in on it.
She didn’t have to ask whether Leox was in on it; he would never.
As angry as that theory made Affie, it was by far the most plausible she’d come up with. Scover wouldn’t hide something like this from her, so somebody had to be hiding things from Scover.
Her chest swelled with pride as she imagined finding the proof, presenting it to Scover, hearing her say, Well done, Daughter—
“All right,” said Dez Rydan, bringing her back to the present. The scouting party stood around him near the entrance to the lower ring. They all wore their own versions of utility gear, except for the Jedi, whose workaday garb seemed good for all occasions. “We can’t get any specific readings on what might be down there—only that it’s not solid metal. If it’s storage, there may be items of use to us…which will be equally shared among the entire group. As long as everyone understands that, and accepts the risks, let’s get started.”
“Should you do this?” Reath quietly asked Nan, who barely came up to the Mizi’s waist.
“I’m fine,” Nan retorted. She showed no signs of trauma from the kidnapping attempt; Affie wasn’t sure she could be equally cool under those circumstances. “Besides…Hague can’t climb. One of us should be here. So it’s got to be me.”
“You take good care of him,” Reath said.
Nan smiled. “He returns the favor.”
Enough Flirtation Theater. Affie refocused her attention on the tunnels that led to the lower rings.
Unlike all the other tunnels, these showed signs of damage from their long years of disuse. While the outer structure remained intact, vines and roots from the arboretum had grown down through them, turning what had been clear passageways into thick, thorny mazes deep in shadow. It wasn’t anything Affie couldn’t have explored on her own; she’d have preferred it that way, in case more of the smugglers’ code was written down there. However, the twisty tunnels were ominous enough that she could see the upside of having company along for the trip.
Dez took the lead, lowering himself through the tunnel. Its gravity was on the fritz, which meant the pull was coming from the rings below. Luckily the craggy roots served as a makeshift ladder. Affie gripped on tightly as she lowered herself down.
For a few seconds, she was surrounded by both tree roots and a vast field of stars—a contrast that delighted her in its strangeness. No time to linger and enjoy it, though: the Mizi above her was in a hurry to descend, so much so that he was cutting away vines to clear his path even farther.
She heard the beeps and whines of a droid. Glancing upward, she saw an 8-T scooting along, its treads gripping the outer wall of the tunnel. Huh, she thought, those things are thorough.
A snap echoed through the tunnel, and Reath made a sound of discomfort. Peering down, Affie could see that his foot had gone straight through a slender root. No big deal.
Or so Affie thought, until the 8-T whirred past her toward Reath, then hit him with an electric shock.
“Ow!” Reath shook his hand as though it stung. “What the—”
The Mizi yelped in pain. Affie looked up to see another 8-T extending pincers toward the Mizi, snapping at his fingers. Farther up the tunnel, at least three more 8-Ts were descending toward them.
She could hardly believe it, but there was no other explanation. “We’re being attacked!”
“What are they doing?” Affie yelped, trying to swat back one of the 8-Ts. It didn’t matter; another two were swarming in to take its place. “I thought these droids were gardeners!”
Reath readjusted his grip on the roots and steadied his balance. “They are. But…I guess that means they attack threats to the garden.”
“We did just cause some damage,” Dez pointed out as he swung himself up through the snarl of vines to a place just below Reath. “I can see why they’d feel endangered.”
Nan’s round cheeks were flushed; both her arms were wrapped around the nearest thick root, but her legs dangled—because the pincers of an 8-T were snapping beneath her feet, keeping her from finding a steady perch. “Are we going to keep talking about droid feelings, or can you stop these stupid things?”
“Stay calm,” Reath said.
Which wasn’t generally a helpful thing to say, at least not to someone currently hanging by her arms with swarms of attacking robots on the way. But it kept everybody quiet for a moment, giving Reath a chance to think and center himself in the Force.
It also gave the 8-Ts a chance to assemble. Dozens of them were traveling down the tunnel’s curved walls, their magnetic treads gripping so well that they might as well have been speeding along a flat surface. Although their dark bodies didn’t show up well against the blackness of space, he could see them swarming by the way they blotted out the stars. Their tiny pruning claws, which not that long before had been cute, clicked and clacked ominously. Affie yelped as one of them clipped off the end of her long, braided hair. If those pincers could slice through thick vines or slender tree branches, they’d cut through flesh and bone, too.
Whatever long-ago zealot gardener had programmed these droids had done too good a job.
“Okay,” Affie said, huffing as she pulled herself into a more secure position within the labyrinth of vines. “This shouldn’t be a problem. You Jedi can fly, rig
ht? So just fly us out of here already.”
Dez shook his head. “We can’t fly. Some of us can levitate—”
“Same difference!” Affie insisted.
“—but it’s a complicated thing to do, and difficult under stressful situations,” Dez finished, as though she hadn’t spoken.
Affie made a face. “So you’re telling me you can only fly when you don’t need to? What good is that, exactly?”
Reath couldn’t help thinking she had a point.
Far beneath them, in the lower rings themselves, a strange light flickered—purplish, brilliant. “What was that?” he asked.
“Looks like some kind of an energy field,” Dez speculated. “There’s something interesting down there—whatever it might be.”
“Let’s figure that out once we’re safe from the attack of the killer gardeners—” Affie’s words were cut short with a yelp. “Oww. This vine has spines or something—it scraped me!”
“We have bigger problems,” Nan said, seemingly through gritted teeth, “than a scrape.”
Dez said, “Everyone stay calm until I get to Nan, all right?”
The safest place to move was in the direct center of the tunnel, but it was also the place with the fewest roots or vines to balance on. Anywhere safe to stand was also well within the 8-Ts’ range.
Dez nimbly climbed past Reath to the place where Nan and the Mizi clung to their feeble handholds. The 8-Ts swarmed closer with each of his steps, but he never paused or even stopped smiling. Reaching out one hand, Dez summoned two of the vines from above, which writhed their way down into his waiting palm. Then he tossed one to the Mizi and bent to gather Nan under his arm. “Follow me with Affie, okay, Reath?”
“Got it!” Reath called back.
Dez nodded to the Mizi, and on an unspoken count between them, they began to climb. The Mizi managed so well that Reath realized Dez was controlling their ascent. It was much easier to use the Force to help boost someone already climbing than to simply levitate them into thin air.
So Reath began working his way toward Affie—but so did the 8-Ts. The full swarm had reached them. Affie winced as the droids crawled like beetles to the bend of the root that provided her fragile hold on the wall.
“I can’t believe I’m going to be taken out by severed astromech heads,” she said, grabbing for her blaster, “but at least I’m taking a few with me before I—”
“Affie, no!” The idea came to Reath in a rush. “Don’t shoot the droids. Shoot the tree roots below us.”
“The tree is not my problem!”
“But it will be the Aytees’ problem! See?”
Understanding dawned. Affie half turned and fired downward, at the lowest root she could possibly target. Her blaster ignited a small fire, which then set some moss ablaze.
Small as the first flames were, it took only those wisps of smoke to set off the 8-Ts’ alarms. The blinking blue lights along their bases turned red and they all rotated as one, swirling to get as close to the tree as possible. As Reath had suspected, protecting the plants from fire took precedence over every other job an 8-T had—including pursuing vandals who’d intruded into the tunnels.
While the droids sprayed small jets of water over the moss, easily dousing the fire, Reath was able to reach Affie, who had already grabbed a vine. He expected her to climb up to the arboretum level without him, but instead she reached out for help, which Reath was glad to give. As she clung to his shoulders, Affie said, slightly winded, “I still think you should’ve let me shoot one.”
“Next time.”
Her grip slipped, and he managed to lower her before she fell. Reath expected her to laugh off her clumsiness and to right herself immediately. Instead, Affie staggered sideways, gripping one wrist. “I feel weird. That scrape—from the vine—”
“It hurts that much?” Reath frowned. “Let me see it.”
She started to hold out her hand, then slumped against the nearby wall and slid down to the floor. The mark on her wrist was already raised and livid, and streaks spread through it in ominous shades of purple and black.
Poison.
Orla paced through the center of the arboretum globe. At the moment, every other being docked at the Amaxine station had somewhere else to be, whether that was their own ships or the station’s lower ring. This gave her a chance to study the strange idols they’d found on board.
Unease rippled through her as she approached the statues, that ominous sense of warning emanating from them as surely as light from a flame. Maybe understanding what they were looking at would help determine exactly what this vague warning meant.
She stood face to face with the humanoid queen, the first of the idols to turn up. To Orla’s amusement, she realized that they resembled each other somewhat—strong cheekbones, thick brows, proud bearing. However, the stark simplicity of Orla’s white robes contrasted with the ornately carved and jeweled raiment of this long-ago ruler.
Although Orla wasn’t the scholar Cohmac Vitus was, she had her own gifts to bring to this analysis. Her connection to the Force was instinctive, almost primal; she trusted it to steer her. Sometimes preexisting knowledge stood in the way of discovery—putting boundaries on thought. This, she suspected, might be one of those times. With all his learning, Cohmac had studied these idols already and found only intriguing clues, no truths.
Let’s give instinct a try.
Orla stared at the dark red jewel that sat topmost in the idol’s crown. She let her mind fall into a kind of trance—not full meditation but a deep concentration that allowed random thoughts to rise to the surface. The practice gave the subconscious a chance to be heard.
A queen. Mighty and defiant. That much seemed inarguable.
Well. Mighty was inarguable. Why had defiant come to mind?
When are we defiant? When we are opposed.
Orla studied the queen’s lifted chin, comparing it to the rest of her bearing. The queen’s hands did not hold weapons; instead, a kind of scimitar lay at her feet. She had been forged not with her arms held high in some kind of salute or bearing plundered treasure; her arms remained at her sides, with coiled bracelets around each wrist.
Bracelets, Orla asked herself in a flash of insight, or chains?
It suddenly seemed so clear to her that she was shocked she hadn’t seen it before. The idols didn’t represent leaders or gods.
They represented the vanquished, representatives of the forces (civilizations? planets?) who’d been conquered by whoever built the statues.
“So,” she muttered, “who the hell were they?”
Zeitooine had taught Dez a lot about poisons. The Zeit royalty were made up of treacherous houses, forever attempting to assassinate one another by elaborate means such as powders added to wineglasses or venoms smeared on pillowcases. Dez recognized the black streaks spreading across Affie’s skin even before she’d fully passed out.
“Come on,” he said, scooping her up in his arms. “A medpac will take care of this—but we’ve got to get it right away.”
Dez raced for the Vessel. Reath ran so fast he passed them, which was good; he could get the medpac ready. Already Affie’s skin had turned sallow, and the color had drained from her lips.
“I’ve got it!” Reath reached the airlock mere seconds before Dez would’ve run through it with Affie. Instead he kneeled down, bracing the girl. Within moments, Reath dashed back out with a medpac in hand.
Right behind him was Leox Gyasi. “Whoa, whoa, what’s wrong with Little Bit?”
“Nothing this won’t fix.” Dez pressed the antitox booster against her skin; that hiss and click had rarely been more welcome. Sure enough, after only a few moments, the dark streaks on her skin began fading, and Affie’s breaths deepened. Leox dropped to his knees in relief and put one hand on Affie’s head.
She stirred, opening her eyes. “What was that?”
“A vine scraped you,” Dez said. “Apparently it was poisonous.”
“Great,” Affie muttere
d. “That’s just what we needed on this station on top of everything else. Something poisonous.”
“The fun never stops.” Leox’s grin could’ve lit up any midnight. “C’mon, girl. Let’s get some Jedha tea in you.”
Dez let Leox take Affie back into the ship. Reath remained behind with him. “We should tag those vines, maybe.”
“I don’t see lots of them around, thankfully.” Dez stretched his arms above his head, grateful to move freely after the confines of the tunnel. “But yeah, that’s not a bad idea.”
Reath hesitated as though there was something he wanted to say to Dez—or maybe more like there was something he definitely didn’t want to say but couldn’t help thinking about.
“Hey,” Dez said gently. “Out with it.”
“Out with what?”
“Out with whatever’s been weighing you down since we met up at the spaceport.”
Reath leaned against one of the nearby trees, studying Dez with a startlingly adult expression. Or not so startling—Reath was nearly of age, even if Dez still thought of him as the youngling excited to have been chosen by Master Jora. Their friendship had to grow along with Reath, into something more equal and more meaningful.
“I can’t believe you chose to come to the frontier,” Reath finally said. “Of all the places you could’ve gone. Even Zeitooine—”
“Zeitooine was endless petty bickering and plotting with next to no action.” Dez rubbed his head, warding off the memories of all the headaches that world had caused him. “At least after the first months, once we’d quieted some of the unrest. Once that was over, I didn’t do anything of real significance. On the frontier there’s a chance to act.”
“I guess I should be more like you,” Reath said. “I know I need to embrace this assignment. Any assignment the Council gives us. But I’m not drawn to action the same way you are.”
Dez confessed what he’d hardly admitted to himself: “Sometimes I think I crave action and excitement too much. It can be dangerous, you know.”
