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Padawan learner Barriss Offee scuffed her heel idly against the duracrete.

She was being patient. Really! She was the picture of decorum, or at least she hoped she was. Her hands were folded politely in her lap, and she was doing her best not to fidget or sigh or check the time. She had only been a padawan for a few short months; it wouldn’t do for Master Luminara to think she was rude.

It had been almost two hours, though.

Her feelings weren’t hurt. Barriss understood completely; this was clearly a delicate conversation. Whatever her master—she grinned and kicked her feet again, still not used to being able to think that to herself. Whatever her master needed to do in this spaceport, there were any number of reasons it might be best for her nine-year-old padawan to wait on a bench outside.

So, Barriss would be patient. It wasn’t as if there was nothing to entertain herself with; a Coruscanti spaceport had plenty of distractions. She’d spent a solid half-hour engrossed with watching the massive interstellar cargo freighter being docked at the industrial port across the divide, tiny powerful tugships swarming over it like flies until the maglocks were safely fastened.

Her rear end was starting to hurt a bit from sitting on the bench.

After a minute, Barriss decided that it would be better to fidget with something deliberately than let herself appear restless. She looked around and called a rusty bolt to her hand—heavier than she’d anticipated, big enough to fill her palm, but light as a feather with the Force. It was perfect for control exercises, and she began carefully tossing it in the air—from one hand to the other, without ever touching skin—while she watched the never-ending flow of speeders overhead.

The new diamond tattoos on each cheek had finally stopped itching.

Many Mirialan Jedi held to the traditional format: one mark per memorialized event. Master Unduli, from what she understood, was one such traditionalist. But Barriss had begged for symmetry since she was a youngling; she hated the way it looked, seeing her markings lopsided and off-kilter in the mirror. 

Despite Barriss's anxiety about breaking with tradition, her new master hadn’t judged her for vanity. In fact, she’d approved. Smiling softly, with Barriss's chin held in one hand and a slim black needle in the other, she’d expressed appreciation for the philosophy behind it. 

We are eternally a work in progress, she’d acknowledged, keeping a careful eye on Barriss's breathing as the needle worked. But if the effect makes you feel unbalanced —incomplete, rather than open to future opportunities—then it is the wrong approach to take. Yes, we will always continue to grow and learn. But we must also remember that we are enough as we are. Complete, whole and entire. The decision is a very personal one, Barriss. I think you have chosen well.

She might have said it just to spare her new apprentice’s feelings, but Barriss knew she hadn’t been. The Force had wrapped around her with the words, golden truth like sunlight. And besides—to mark her bond with her padawan, Master Luminara had broken with her own tradition and used a symmetrical pair of diamonds.

Barriss wiggled slightly with happiness, yelped, and just barely managed to catch the bolt before it landed on her foot.

She made a face. If she was going to let her mind wander, it might be a good idea to just work on simple rotations instead of—

“What are you doing?”

Barriss blinked.

The voice was a newcomer—a ragged-looking togruta girl, of an age with Barriss, maybe a year or two younger. The girl was small and thin and looked underfed on top of that; she had rust-colored skin with striking white marks, and stubby little montrals. She wore mismatched spacer’s clothing—some items several sizes too big for her, some too small, all either torn or inexpertly mended—and was sitting cross-legged on top of a fuel canister clearly marked VOLATILE FUMES. DO NOT SIT/STAND/CLIMB.

“Um,” said Barriss. Then, remembering her manners, she stood and dipped a brief curtsy. “Padawan learner Barriss Offee. I’m here attending my master.”

The togruta grinned. “I’m Ahsoka. What are you doing?”

She gestured; Barriss followed the motion and looked down at the rusty bolt she was holding. “Oh! I was…training. Practicing my use of the Force.”

The girl, Ahsoka, gestured impatiently toward the bolt again. “Can I see?”

Barriss laughed, hoping it wouldn’t come across as unkind. “There’s nothing special about it,” she explained. “I’m a Jedi, we use—”

Before she had even finished her sentence, the bolt flew lightly out of her hand; Ahsoka caught it, tossing it once to feel the weight, before casually levitating the hunk of rust above her hand. As Barriss stared, gobsmacked, the other girl laughed and repeated Barriss's controlled toss—launching the bolt a few feet in the air, then using the Force to arrest its momentum above her other hand.

“You’re bored, huh?” Ahsoka concluded. “I was wondering what was weird out here! I was supposed to be sorting all the tools in the hold again, but I sensed something new so I came to check it out. It must have been your Jedi stuff!”

She tossed the bolt back. It struck Barriss full in the stomach; she was too stunned to care.

“You,” she stammered. “You—used the Force?”

“So did you,” Ahsoka pointed out. “Why’s it only weird when I do it? This is so cool! I’ve never met anyone else who can do magic!”

“It’s not magic,” said Barriss reflexively. “It’s the Force, it connects all living— you’re Force-sensitive! But how are—who trained you? Where…how…”

She trailed off in wonder. Ahsoka, relaxed on top of her explosive perch, had picked up a piece of discarded flexsteel cable and was casually separating and re-twining the individual strands with the Force.

Barriss swallowed and finished her thought. “How did you learn that?”

“Figured it out.” Ahsoka’s tone was smugly superior. “I didn’t have a Jedi Temple to teach me. Everyone pulls their own weight on our ship, so I had to learn it myself.”

“Why didn’t the Jedi find you?! You’re strong in the Force, anyone can sense that. If you can do this much without training, you should have been brought to the Temple years ago!”

Ahsoka gave a nonchalant little shrug. “Guess I wasn’t good enough for them.”

Something didn’t feel right about that answer. The Force didn’t like it, rejected it—but it also didn’t feel like Ahsoka was lying, and Barriss didn’t know her well enough to pry.

“...Our loss,” she said, quietly, instead.

At least that seemed like the right answer. Ahsoka brightened, big teal eyes happy again. “Yeah,” she said. “I was too much trouble for my parents, and the Jedi didn’t want me, so my master took me in as long as I can be useful. I’m super lucky.”

That…didn’t sound right. Barriss didn’t like that phrasing at all. Ahsoka looked even younger than she was—and Barriss might be a padawan now, but she was self-aware enough to recognize that she was still a child. No child should be told such things, treated like a burden. And why would anyone who wasn’t a Jedi have a…

“Who’s, um.” She smiled, encouraging, tried to make the question lighthearted. “Who’s your master? Mine is Jedi Master Luminara Unduli. She’s Mirialan, like me.”

The sharing didn’t break the ice the way she’d hoped. Ahsoka didn’t look angry or defensive, but she didn’t answer, either. The little togruta just wrinkled her nose and said, “I’m not supposed to talk about her. She’s no fun, anyway. But…”

Barriss sat forward. “But?”

Ahsoka, acting casual but acting very badly, slid off the explosive canister—thank the Force—and began sauntering over to Barriss's bench, hands clasped behind her back.

“Well,” she said, pretending to think about. “I guess, if you really want to know…I could tell you my master’s name… but…”

For the life of her Barriss could not tell where this was going. “But…?”

“But…” Ahsoka suddenly flashed her a sharp-toothed grin. “You’ll have to catch me first!”

She lurched forward, slapped Barriss on the arm, and took off running.

“Wh— Ahsoka! Come back!”

There was a pause; then a pair of montrals poked out from around the corner of the building, followed by a broad smile.

“What?” Ahsoka teased. “Are all Jedi bad at tag, or is it just you?”

Barriss rolled her eyes and jumped to her feet—then hesitated. Glanced over her shoulder. She didn’t… think Master Unduli would be angry, or at least not exactly. But she had told Barriss to wait on the bench…

“Aw, come on.” Ahsoka rolled her eyes. “We’re not gonna leave the spaceport! I promise!”

“Well…” That was good enough, Barriss thought. She would hear her master if she was called for. “All right, but that’s not fair! You have a head start!”

“You’re a Jedi padawan! I’m evening the playing field! Unless you want me to tell all the spacers that Jedi are cowards who back down from a fair fight—”

“Ready or not,” Barriss interrupted with a laugh, and then the door opened with a pneumatic hiss.

Master Unduli straightened her sleeves and gave an apologetic smile. “Barriss. My apologies, padawan—as it happens, I just spent twice as long as I anticipated in order to coax a contact into finally admitting that their informant is not due until tomorrow. I will make sure you bring something to read tomorrow afternoon; thank you for your patience.”

“It was no trouble, Master!” Barriss half-turned, intending to introduce her new friend—only to find that Ahsoka had vanished. “I was…um…”

“Quite.” Master Luminara, misunderstanding her floundering, gave a wry smile and patted her shoulder. “Take heart, Barriss; it is possible, if unlikely, that we may yet make progress on this case before the heat-death of our galaxy.”

Barriss giggled.

Master Luminara tipped her a sparkling wink, then turned. “Come, then. The day needn’t be a total loss; I’ll take you to dinner.”

“Yes, Master.” But she couldn’t help hesitating, glancing over her shoulder. This time, Ahsoka peeked out from behind a stack of crates; she cast a wary glance at Master Unduli’s back, but waved at Barriss regardless. Barriss waved her fingers back, mouthed tomorrow? and got a grin and a thumbs-up in return.

Satisfied, she ran to catch up with her master.

“...seven, six, five, four, three, two, one! Ready or not, here I come!”

Barriss bit her lip to stifle her own giggle. 

Hide-and-seek wasn’t a very common game at the Temple; the Force generally made it a bit of a letdown for anyone but the youngest crechelings. But it had been surprisingly fun with Ahsoka—and this time Barriss had gotten very clever. She’d used the Force to leap up under the overhang of a maintenance building, and braced herself there. She’d be visible from directly underneath, but in the meantime…

She held her breath as Ahsoka’s feet crossed through her vision, then away. After a few moments they crossed back, as if confused. She swayed, like an anooba trying to locate a scent, then snapped her fingers and rushed off. 

A moment later there was a dull thud—the sound of someone very small landing on the roof of a spaceport outbuilding. 

Barriss listened as Ahsoka’s footsteps crisscrossed the rooftop, searching for the presence in the Force she knew was there, but couldn’t see. With the sun at this angle, she could watch her new friend’s shadow on the landing pad as she dropped to her knees and peered over the edge, then scratched her head in confusion.

She eventually dropped off the edge of the building, peering around with her hands on her hips. In a few seconds, she was bound to look up. But if Barriss acted first…

It was too tempting.

“Boo,” she said politely.

Ahsoka leapt a foot in the air before craning her neck back and giving a delighted, fang-filled laugh. Barriss grinned back, swung her legs down, and dropped to the weathered duracrete to be met by a friendly—she hoped—punch in the gut.

“You win!” exclaimed Ahsoka, flopping down in the shade. “I am so never gonna beat that without leaving the spaceport.”

Barriss gathered her skirt and folded her knees under her, settling comfortably next to Ahsoka. “I could ask my master for permission to leave,” she offered.

Ahsoka shook her head immediately. “No Jedi,” she said, like it was a learned response. Then, “They’d cause trouble. I mean, maybe not yours, but—she’s still a grown-up, you know? She’d tell someone, and they’d cause trouble. Rogue Force-users get locked up.”

Barriss still didn’t think that sounded right—she knew there were other Force traditions out in the galaxy—but it was Ahsoka’s choice.

“Besides,” Ahsoka continued. “Even if you’re allowed to leave, there’s totally no way Aurra would ever let me—”

Her eyes blew wide.

“My master,” she hastily corrected. “There’s no way my master would—you can’t tell anyone I told you, okay? She’ll get so angry, you can’t tell anyone I accidentally said her name—”

“I won’t,” Barriss promised. Too quickly, she knew she might regret it, but— “I won’t. I’ll forget I even heard it. Okay?”

Ahsoka swallowed. “Okay. I, um. Okay. Thanks.”

Barriss's comlink beeped. She checked it, and Ahsoka’s face fell even further.

“I guess you have to go now?”

“Not yet.” Barriss couldn’t help but smile at the way Ahsoka lit up. “She says she’ll be out in half an hour. We’re trying to track down an artifact that was illegally imported by a wealthy businessman in the city, but we can’t figure out who it is or where he lives. So she has to be discreet.”

“You guys have laser swords,” Ahsoka pointed out.

Barriss sucked air through her teeth and tucked a lock of hair back under her cowl. “That…probably makes us stand out a little, yes. Lunch?”

Ahsoka’s pupils dilated like a tooka as Barriss pulled out her nutrient bar and snapped it in half, offering her the larger portion. “You sure?”

“Take it.” Barriss watched happily as the other girl snatched it up and bit off the end. She thought Ahsoka probably didn’t eat enough. Though she would have shared anyway, of course, she wasn’t rude. “Naturally I hope my master’s investigation bears fruit soon; but I’ll miss you when we stop coming to the spaceport. It’s…hard for me to make friends, sometimes.”

“Tha’s cuz y’re no fun,” mumbled Ahsoka, in a friendly manner, around a mouthful of nutrient bar. She swallowed with difficulty and elbowed Barriss in the ribs, grinning, to take any sting out of it. “That’s okay, though. You’re really nice under all the prissy Jedi stuff! I’ve never made a real friend before either.”

“I could…” Barriss wasn’t sure this was allowed, but it felt right. “I could give you my comm frequency? That way, when you’re on Coruscant…”

“Oh! I already got it.” Ahsoka smirked and waved her own comlink. “I sliced it when your master pinged you. You gotta keep up, Jedi.”

Barriss glared at her, but there was no real anger behind it. And not just because she was a Jedi. 

“That was not polite .” She handed over the second half of her nutrient bar anyway. “Well. Next time, we can—”

“AHSOKA!”

“Aw, kriff.” Ahsoka’s shoulders hunched nearly up to her montrals. “I gotta go...”

“You don’t have to,” said Barriss. “You can stay with us, you can—”

“Ahsoka, get your ass inside! Now! ”

“I’ll be okay.” Ahsoka made a face. “Really. I have to go back now though, she sounds really mad.”

“If I have to come out there and get you—!”

Ahsoka shoved the rest of the meal bar in her mouth and scrambled around the building. Barriss, peering cautiously around the corner, saw her rush up to a tall, white-skinned woman in red leathers and wave. The woman rolled her eyes and pointed sharply up a gangway; when Ahsoka slumped and started up the ramp, the woman grabbed her by the shirt collar like scruffing a kitten and all but threw her into the ship.

Feeling cold and suddenly hungry, Barriss hugged her knees and waited for her master to come back.

Ahsoka lay in her bunk and waited.

She was almost bouncing with excitement, and really glad that no one else on Aurra’s crew could use the Force or they’d know something was up. She could mask from Aurra—she’d had ten years to learn that—but not everyone at once. Thankfully, she wouldn’t have to rely on the Force. Ahsoka was smart. Too smart to rush, that was for sure.

It was just—they hadn’t been back to Coruscant in over a year . All of Aurra’s bounties had been delivered to other planets.

But they were back now, and sticking around for a few days to resupply. Aurra had been a real hardass lately about leaving the ship, but Ahsoka was smarter than her boss thought she was. So she lay quietly in her bunk and listened—with her montrals, but also with the Force—as slowly everyone but Castas on watch in the cockpit fell asleep.

She waited fifteen more minutes to be sure; Aurra was nasty and woke up for anything. Then she rolled out of her bunk, used the Force to lift the cover off a maintenance hatch, and wriggled into the crawlspace.

(What? She couldn’t lower the gangway. That would wake up literally everyone. Hell—opening the door to the ‘fresher woke Aurra up half the time, and if Ahsoka let her get pissed off once, she’d definitely be primed to sense Ahsoka leaving.) 

Crawlspace to the engine room, then spike the hydraulic system. It bled off pressure to the gangway hatch, but silently, without any loud decompression. Ahsoka put her shoulder into the ramp, and managed to squeeze out through a foot-wide gap near the top. 

A gentle push nudged the limp ramp back until it was mostly seamless. She’d rip out the computer spike when she got back, restore pressure to the system, and nobody would ever need to know.

Then she walked to the edge of the landing platform, closed her eyes, and fell.

She caught herself with the Force, sure, rolling onto the roof of the rising transport without even any time to get vertigo. But it was, like, way less dramatic when you put it that way.

She transport-hopped her way to the surface—one last tuck-and-roll, and she was on top of an automated alarm beacon at the lip of the access column, scanning the skyline.

There it was—the Jedi Temple, blotting out everything around it. Perfect. She called on the Force, let it bolster her momentum as she leapt to the nearest rooftop, and fired off a comm ping.

She tried to pretend she wasn’t worried. Seconds turned to minutes, and she tried harder.

Maybe Barriss was busy, or sleeping, or offworld. Maybe this would just be the time she didn’t answer. She wasn’t stupid; she had to have figured out by now that Ahsoka was a criminal. A bad one, even. Aurra Sing didn’t exactly care who she hurt on the way to her money, and Ahsoka—

Couldn’t leave. Where would she even…? Who would take her? And Aurra would track her down. She already called Ahsoka a bad investment— You cost more in keep than you’ve ever made me, brat —and she’d do way worse if Ahsoka abandoned her.

It was getting more dangerous to move around in the Core, too. Ahsoka would be twelve or thirteen soon—or was already, it wasn’t like Aurra would throw a party even if she knew Ahsoka’s birthday, which she didn’t—and that was old enough to start being a threat. Hondo had taken her aside last time they were on Florrum to warn her, kindly, that she needed to be more careful now; local goons were gonna stop looking the other way just because she was a kid. And—

Her comm pinged twice. A lifelong signal: On my way.

About a hundred pounds dropped off her shoulders as she grinned into the starless night sky.

Ahsoka whipped around the corner of an apartment building, boots scrabbling at the wet pavement. 

She slid, caught herself. Made it to the end of the street, vaulted the barrier and dropped to the next level down—another residential street that, even on Coruscant, was quiet at this hour local sector time. She stuck the landing, diffusing some of the impact into the Force; then pivoted on her back foot and ran. 

A faint scraping noise was her only warning. She’d been distracted, tracking the footsteps behind her—

The massive, overflowing garbage tip screeched directly into her path with barely a few feet to spare.

Swearing like a Hutt, Ahsoka leaped on instinct. With no time to aim or think, the jump was way too high. She had to run with it— allowed the momentum rather than fighting it. Instead of splattering against the tower complex like a bug on a viewscreen she caught herself, landing against a windowsill…not lightly, but under controlled power.

Hondo would be proud of her. Aurra would at least have approved, probably.

But she had bled off too much speed. If she dropped back to street level it was all over—both alleyways were dead ends—

Up.

She kicked off the wall, across the alleyway—the building kitty-corner to this one had a rickety fire escape, and she was able to grab one of the supports and brace her feet against the wall that way. She swung, called on the Force to boost herself, and sprang back across, higher this time, another windowsill. She could hear telltale scraping below her—boots on metal, a pursuit, but she was opening the gap. She let that encourage her as she repeated the pattern, climbing up—seven stories, then nine, thirteen, twenty-seven, and then she made one final scrambling leap for the roof.

There wasn’t space to come in gently from above—the roof only had about three feet of clearance, a crawlspace for maintenance. Above that was the solid ferrocrete underside of the next level up. Ahsoka flung herself ungracefully at the wall, striking the lip with her chest; the crawlspace was choked with wires, pipes, tubing, and garbage, but she was able to haul herself over the lip and worm into the narrow gaps.

Yay, she thought as something sticky dripped down her neck. Victory.

It was just possible to cross the roof if she shimmied sideways, rolled under a cluster of wires, and army-crawled between two insulated tubes. She squeezed through the final gap, lowered herself over the side of the building, and checked her distance.

On the side she’d climbed up, the tower had thirty-two floors. On this side, it was a three-story drop to the street.

She hit the ground at a dead sprint.

This was so not sustainable. She was starting to pant, and attracting attention. She needed—there! A big, bright, one-sided neon sign, a few levels up from the street. One last Force-assisted jump and she’d nestled herself behind it, tucked into the deep shadow. Anyone looking up would be blinded by the neon. It was the perfect hiding place.

For a few minutes she sat there, wheezing for breath, heart rate just barely beginning to settle. Maybe this time she’d actually made it.

“Tag,” said Barriss, breathlessly, from a few inches away. “You’re it.”

Ahsoka just groaned; Barriss dropped down from where she’d been hanging off the edge of the sign, settling onto the ledge with her, and held out a canteen that Ahsoka gratefully accepted. After a few long gulps, she leaned over to bump shoulders with her friend and made a face.

“Thanks for—Ewww, why are you all wet?”

Barriss shot her a dirty look. “For your information, I had to sneak out of the Temple through an air conditioning vent.”

“Seriously?” Ahsoka gave a wide grin. “Fucking wizard.”

With a hastily-stifled yelp of laughter, Barriss clapped both hands over her mouth. “You—” She giggled. “You don’t think you’re a little old to be saying wizard?”

“You tell me,” drawled Ahsoka. “Aren’t we a little old for hide-and-go-seek?”

“I was reading,” Barriss pointed out with a prim little toss of her head. “I distinctly remember getting a comm with coordinates and the message ‘Give me a head start and I can beat you’.”

Ahsoka rubbed the back of her neck. “You, um. You can always tell me if you’re busy.”

“Too busy to see you?” said Barriss lightly. “Never.”

Ahsoka leaned into her for real this time. “You’re my best friend, Barriss.”

A soft smile. “Same.”

They sat there for a long time, passing the canteen back and forth, watching speeders streak by overhead and making up stories about random passers-by on the street. It couldn’t last forever, though. Eventually, Barriss's comm went off.

They both winced, and Barriss sighed.

“I should go,” she admitted. “I’m…going to be off-planet for a while.”

“Jedi stuff?”

Barriss's lips twitched. “You could say that. My master thinks I’m old enough now to start going on real field missions, potential combat missions—though of course we hope any violence can be kept to a minimum.”

“Aw, c’mon.” Ahsoka shoved her. “What’s the point of a laser sword if you never use it? Kidding! I’m kidding. I hope no one gets hurt too.”

Barriss kept her reproachful glare up for a few seconds, then shook her head and let it go.

“There have been attacks on isolated colonies,” she explained. “Mass disappearances. Rumors of Zygerrian slavers making moves. It’s a big responsibility, the Council trusts Master Unduli to be thorough. I’m going to learn a lot.”

“That’s great,” said Ahsoka. Then, feeling like she hadn’t put much enthusiasm into it, she tried again. “Really! You’re, like, saving people. That’s what being a Jedi is all about, right? You’ll do awesome.”

“Keep pinging me,” said Barriss. “I mean it. You’re my best friend, Ahsoka. I’ll see you again.”

The speeder’s engine whirred angrily as Ahsoka swung it around into an express lane. Piece of junk. It hadn’t even been a high-G turn. Such was the price of dipping out on your team one time too many, she guessed; but it wasn’t like Aurra had ever given her a real cut anyway. 

Maybe it was time to go her own way; by anyone’s measure, that last job had wiped out any of Ahsoka’s debts to her master. Even for when she’d gotten sick as a baby.

Whatever. Aurra was gonna kick her ass when she went back— if she went back—but that was Future Ahsoka’s problem. Tonight she had a jury-rigged lemon and a Coruscanti address, and she locked the coordinates and approach vector into the speeder’s autonav. That done, she leaned back and kicked her heels up on the dash.

Her comm trilled again. Ahsoka rolled her eyes, shoved her comlink into the speeder’s holocall socket, and fixed the projection with her most unimpressed look.

Before the holo had even fully materialized, the out-of-focus figure spread its arms in enthusiastic welcome.

“Ahsoka! My increasingly un-small friend!”

“We’re not friends, Hondo.”

“Are we not? Unkind, very unkind. Do you know, I remember when you could barely walk. Bumping into my knees, chewing on boots! Pulling credit chits out of pockets with the Force! Truly remarkable. A prodigy.”

“Aurra taught me to do that,” Ahsoka pointed out.

“And you learned beautifully! Now. It is very funny that you should mention her…”

Ahsoka pulled her feet off the dashboard and sat up, disgusted. “Did she seriously get you to call from Florrum just to make me go back to the ship?”

“Ah.” Hondo’s eyes darted. “No! No no, of course not.” A pause. “Maybe.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be some big-shot pirate lord?! Tell her I’m busy! And stop running errands for your ex, Hondo, it’s pathetic.”

“Errands!” He clasped a hand over his heart. “The nerve! The cheek! The accuracy! I never have been so insulted. Is it so very difficult to believe that Hondo Ohnaka simply has a soft spot for his favorite not-so-very-small crewmate and worries about her?”

“That depends.” Ahsoka glared at him. “Do you mean me, or Aurra?”

“Ha! Haha! This is very funny. Aurra Sing is not my crew and if I claimed she ever had been, she would, ah.” He sniffed. “Kill me slowly. Ahsoka…”

She groaned. “What do you want, Hondo?”

He gestured around him in indignation. “What—what does Hondo want? I have told you what Hondo wants! I only want to know you are safe. I like you, Ahsoka. You would be very expensive to replace!”

“Three hundred twenty-seven thousand on the black market,” muttered Ahsoka, who’d grown up knowing that number as well as she knew her own name. “Look, I’m fine, all right? I’m just—I need to talk to someone.”

“Hmm.” Hondo fixed her with a suspicious look. “This, I knew. But what I am wondering now is: Why would you trade away such a very nice bottle of Chandrillan whiskey in exchange for such dry, non-alcoholic groundside coordinates? My good friend Dex makes an excellent kaadu stew, I know, but I suspect…you want information. Perhaps about your mysterious past…?”

Ahsoka rolled her eyes. “I know everything I need to know about my ‘mysterious past’,” she mocked. “I just need him to find me a comm frequency, all right? Tell my master I’ll be back by 0800.”

Hondo sighed. It was…less performative than usual.

“Mmm,” he said. “Your Jedi friend.”

“None of your business,” Ahsoka snapped, which was as good as a confirmation.

Heaving another understated sigh, Hondo rubbed his forehead. “Ahsoka…”

“Wow, would you look at that, you’re breaking up, sorry—”

“Fine! Fine, fine.” He held up his hands. “But—small one—”

“I thought I wasn’t so small anymore?”

“This is true. And when you last saw this Jedi,” he reminded her, “You were small. Small, cute… nonthreatening. All I am saying, is…seven years, this is a long time. People do change, you know, Ahsoka. They do change.”

“Not Barriss.” Ahsoka looked away. “You don’t know her.”

“Ah, but I know the Jedi,” he emphasized. “Listen to Hondo, please. You made a friend! This is good. But…a Jedi youngling, a very small thief, these can be friends. A padawan and a bounty hunter the size of a noodle, even, yes, these can be friends! But this Barriss…Seven years, she has spent training, preparing. Fighting corruption, stopping hardened criminals! Bringing light to the galaxy! Only now, you are criminals.”

“I know, but—” Ahsoka clenched one fist. “That won’t matter to her. It’s not like I’m planning to rob a bank right in front of her, and I don’t…hurt people, the way the others do, she knows that. She trusts me. We understand each other, okay? She wouldn’t turn on me like that.”

“No, no. Jedi do not betray. But what betrayal would be worse, hmm? Does she feel fondness still, for the small feral creature Aurra continually dropped on my doorstep even when I did not want it at all? Of course! But a Jedi Knight…” He shook his head. For the first time in her life, Hondo looked tired. “All I say is…be careful. Small one. The Jedi may love their friends, true, true. But choose a friend over their duty? That is a different thing. I do not…want to see you hurt. I have seen that enough.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Ahsoka rolled her eyes, but—ugh. The problem was, she knew he was telling the truth. She didn’t even need the Force for that much. 

Hondo complained now, but—he’d always made her feel like his favorite person in the world, at the time. Back when she’d been little, too small to be anything but a burden, when she’d cried too easily and Aurra had been the scariest person in the world, Hondo had been the safest. Like, he definitely shouldn’t have been trusted with a kid even when he was sober, but—he’d been nice to her. Talked to her softly when he caught her crying, instead of mocking her into silence. Made her laugh, gave her a taste of whiskey way too young to make sure she hated alcohol for the rest of her life, annoyed Aurra until she bought Ahsoka new shoes just to shut him up. That kind of thing.

“I know,” she said again. This time she meant it. “Look, I’ll be careful, all right? If this Dex guy even has her frequency, I’ll wait until after dark when the rest of the Temple is sound asleep.”

“Ahsoka? Is…that you?”

Ahsoka spun on her heel, heart racing—the voice hadn’t come from the direction she was expecting. She’d been staring anxiously at the monolith of the Temple, watching for any sign of movement—she hadn’t expected Barriss to drop in, silent as a shadow, from the other side of the building.

She hadn’t expected…

When they’d met—when they’d both been almost babies , seven-ish and nine and stupid with it, giggling and tripping over their feet as they chased and tackled each other in circles like a dingy, run-down mid-level spaceport was their own little world…well. It had been simpler in a lot of ways, back then. Ahsoka had been an undercity scraprat—scrawny and scabby-kneed, more a pile of rags than a girl. And Barriss had been a wide-eyed, round-faced package of anxiety drowning in layers of flowing black skirts that she was clearly still getting used to.

They’d grown up a little, together, but—they’d still been kids when they last said goodbye, without knowing how long it would be until they were on the same planet again. Ahsoka realized now that in her mind’s eye, she’d been expecting…well, something close to the skinny, nervous girl she remembered. A toothpick in formal robes, worrying her long fingers together as she tried not to relax too much.

She hadn’t expected…

She hadn’t expected a Knight.

It was hard to put into words. Barriss moved differently, now. More fluid, more centered; confident without being brash. Like she felt every step before she took it. She had new tattoos; a trio of diamonds in a chevron between her eyes, the wings of her existing cheekbone markings extended. And she… felt different, in the Force, a resonance it was impossible to mistake.

Dex’s voice—and his annoying, too-knowing, faux-casual delivery—crashed through Ahsoka’s mind again.

Well, now, he’d said, slowly, rubbing his chin with one massive hand. I don’t make a habit of giving out Jedi information, you know; but let’s see. For Hondo’s little girl? ….Maybe. Maybe. Hmm. Do you know, it’s possible I just might remember a Jedi by that description, after all. Mirialan. Nice girl… Little shy, little nervous... Unduli’s apprentice, I think. Young, about your age…Smart… And then a pause, before he glanced over with his meaty eyebrows raised, all innocence. Pretty.

Yeah, whatever, shut up, Dex—

Yes, okay? Barriss looked good. All traditional floor-length darks, like her master. She’d traded her old cape for a Jedi robe in deep charcoal, with layers of pale grey under a deep navy tunic; and in the ever-present light of a Coruscant midnight, illuminated by the glow of a city the size of a planet, Ahsoka could make out the glint of warm coppers and silver.

She forced herself to swallow.

“Hey,” she said.

Barriss's lips twitched. Just for a second, they could have been twelve again.

She gave a faint, choked half-laugh. “Ahsoka.” It was…warm, sweet, but not comfortable. “You look well. Stars, but you’ve grown.”

“You used to be taller than me,” Ahsoka agreed with a pathetic attempt at a grin.

“Still an excellent slicer, I see.” Barriss's smile was small, hesitant, but real. “How did you find my new comm frequency?”

“Trade secret.” Ahsoka winked. It certainly sounded more impressive than I bribed a guy for a letter of introduction to a different guy who works with a third guy who works with your mom. “How did you get behind me?”

Barriss raised her eyebrows, just barely, and the hint of a smirk ghosted across her face. “Trade secret.” 

Silence threatened to swallow them both up again. A decade-long gulf was yawning between them. Ten years in which Aurra, who apparently hadn’t been as clueless as Ahsoka’d thought, had circled back out into Hutt space to blood her ‘apprentice’ there. Far away from Republic scrutiny—and far away from the kind of proper spaceport where a slippery, defiant togruta kid had any chance of escaping easily. 

Aurra’d only gotten her head out of her ass about slipping the leash once Ahsoka got too big to scruff for it—plus, she’d been able to cycle through to Hondo’s crew for a few jobs, gotten Aurra used to loosening her grip every so often. And now that they’d finally been forced to go to ground on Coruscant again…

Well, she’d had to try, didn’t she? The perimeter alarms Aurra’d installed weren’t even very good. It was basically permission to leave.

“It’s…it’s really good to see you again.” The words felt flat. Good didn’t cover it—seeing Barriss again was coming home, Ahsoka had gone ten years without seeing her first and only real friend. But it also wasn’t…completely right. Her stomach was tight and hot and sick, twisting her in knots. She felt like she’d swallowed a rathtar. “I…” I thought about you every day. “I’ve really missed you.”

“I’m very, very glad to know you’re safe.” That much, Barriss was able to say without hesitating. She finally closed the gap between them, soft hands taking Ahsoka’s fingers between her own and squeezing tight. For a few moments everything was perfect, and then those big dark eyes slid away—glancing around at the skylanes above and below them, the bright floodlights illuminating the nearby balconies and street-levels. Her smile faltered; it rallied, but it still looked brittle. “But you…you know you shouldn’t be here. You took a terrible risk in coming out into the open this way.”

“Coruscant security doesn’t scare me.” 

“This isn’t a game, Ahsoka.” Barriss's grip tightened. “The Banking Clan has powerful, powerful interests. They will not take a strike on a credit transport lightly, and…Aurra Sing…”

“Aurra doesn’t scare me either,” said Ahsoka, deliberately misunderstanding her concern. “C’mon, I just work for her because she raised me. She bought me on the black market, she’s not my mom.”

Barriss's jaw tightened. “She’s a murderer.”

Ahsoka felt her spine stiffen, anger surging in the Force around her. A bulb exploded in a nearby billboard. She almost snapped something rude, but—she didn’t want to fight, not with Barriss, not like this. It was a completely fair thing for a Jedi to say; she was just…defensive because it was true.

She glared across the street, toward a flickering lamp on an elevated walkway, until she trusted herself to keep her emotions under control.

“I’ve killed a lot of people,” Ahsoka said slowly, fist clenched but taking care to keep her voice calm. “All of them were trying to kill or capture me first.”

Which wasn’t to say those were the only people who ever died. The ones who were unarmed, or tried to surrender—well. Killing them was more Aurra’s thing. Not that Ahsoka had ever tried to stop her; Aurra smacked her around for being ‘soft’ often enough without sticking her neck out for people her master was definitely just going to kill anyway. Barriss wasn’t stupid, she could read between the lines. 

If she was going to blame Ahsoka for her master’s actions, then—then fine. Then screw her, right? It mattered to Ahsoka, anyway—her reputation, the kind of bounty hunter she’d become. The difference between doing the job, and…uh, what Fett called ‘extracurriculars’.

After a long pause, Barriss sighed. But her shoulders relaxed a bit.

“I believe you,” she murmured. “I really do. And it’s…it’s wonderful, to see you.”

“A little risk is worth it,” said Ahsoka, finally letting herself smile. “You’re still my best friend, you know.”

There was another gentle squeeze of her hands. Ahsoka, whose heart had just begun to soar at her forgiveness, felt a cold rush of dread. Barriss didn’t… project, in the Force; her emotions were locked tighter than a Trade Federation vault. But Ahsoka could sense her overwhelming regret, a gray wash of grief, and suddenly she didn’t think she wanted to hear what came next. 

“Ahsoka…” Barriss took a deep breath. Her eyes were sad. “Those days are in the past. I’m—I’m a Jedi Knight. You should go, before the Guard realize you’re here.”

“Barriss—”

“Don’t. Please, don’t make this harder than it already is. You mean so much to me, but…I have responsibilities now. A duty to uphold…”

Against her will, Ahsoka felt her attention…shift. A twitch, something in the Force, tugging her focus away from her friend and…somewhere, somewhere off to the side. Across the gap, where a group of Coruscant police were taking advantage of the same surveillance blind spot she’d identified to blatantly slack off on their patrol route. They were tucked up out of the wind, helmets set aside, chatting over cheap caf.

Glancing around idly. Starting to look twice. One or two starting to thumb open datapads, as if out of a sudden passing curiosity…

“I’m sorry,” Barriss continued. Ahsoka was increasingly certain the Force was telling her to run, but—she couldn’t just leave, she had to at least say goodbye— “I am glad. That you contacted me. I am glad I got to speak with you again, to know you’re safe and…”

Too late.

Even from the other side of the skylane, Ahsoka could tell that the glow from the cops’ datapads was tinged faintly orange. Their carefree slouching had turned to trying-too-hard, faux-casual leaning that conveniently freed their blaster hands; all but one of them had slowly put their helmets back on, and—one had a finger to his earpiece, she’d been here too long—

“I have to go,” she breathed, interrupting whatever sincere apology Barriss had been in the middle of—interrupting the sound of her own breaking heart—and turned—

“Hey! Freeze!”

The click of a blaster powering up—

Ahsoka reached for the Force, yanked Barriss almost off her feet—into the cops’ firing line, which felt like a betrayal but Barriss had a lightsaber and the Coruscant Security Force would never fire on a Jedi—and ran.

It all happened too fast.

There was a single blaster bolt. The shot went wild, up into open air— who trained you? If you have to pull a shot you pull it down, scorched duracrete is better than hitting a civilian a half-mile off —as the flustered security forces tried to respond without shooting through Jedi robes.

Ahsoka was already gone—dropped off the side of the building, breaking line of sight and trusting the Force to catch her at the bottom. For a long moment Barriss stood frozen. That could be the end of it. The squad had been startled, their suspect had fled. It might be nothing but a single-paragraph write-up in the local precinct office…

Blue lights flared on the level below. Then red and white, from the skylane above them; on a nearby rooftop a domed camera droid lit up in CSF colors and gunned its high-speed antigrav, painting its quarry with a floodlight, and Barriss's lightsaber snapped to life as she started to run.

She wasn’t certain why, or after what—whether she was chasing or following, racing to take Ahsoka down or trying to reach her before the Coruscant Security Force could get in a lucky shot. At least she cared whether this mid-rank Outer Rim criminal lived or died.

It wouldn’t even have to be a killing bolt, she thought, dread knotting her stomach. Ahsoka was nearly as prone to aerobatics as Luminara; even now Barriss could see her in the distance, kicking off a lamppost to run along a wall before springing clear into the dark sky. 

If the trigger-happy CSF managed to stun her in the air…

Not that Ahsoka was making it easy for them. She used the Force in a way Barriss had never seen from anyone else. It was alarming at times, off-putting even. Flares of twisting, visceral emotion—anger and hurt and fear— flung debris into the paths of pursuing foot units. Or sent security speeders fishtailing, reeling from a sudden yank that functioned less like the Force-pulls of Barriss's childhood and more like if an invisible steel cable had been grappled to the front bumper and suddenly snapped taut.

It was no longer a question of whether or not Barriss wanted Ahsoka arrested; it took everything she had to keep up at all. 

Ahsoka…Ahsoka knew her trade. She whiplashed around corners, let the CSF string themselves out before abruptly arresting a long graceful leap with a violent surge of raw energy that ripped the paint off a ferrocrete support column but successfully sent her flying back, along the exact reverse of her original trajectory.

Using her own backlash to her advantage —it would have been inspired if it weren’t so incredibly dangerous, such borderline heresy.

The floodlight droid careened into the column and exploded. Barriss herself had to bleed off momentum with a few short jumps, searching rapidly with all her senses until she was able to find Ahsoka in the Force again.

The foot security was hopelessly outmatched. Airspeeders wailed as they pulled high-G turns in pursuit; this time not all the shots fired in Ahsoka’s direction were the wobbling blue rings of a stun blast. Barriss, heart pounding, had to deflect a stray red bolt away from her own back as they raced along the trestle arm of a moving hovercrane, the struts groaning beneath her feet.

This is madness, she thought as she followed Ahsoka at a headlong sprint into a fifty-foot gap across a thousand-foot drop. The Force surged around her; she hit a catwalk and rolled, came to her feet running. This can’t last much longer, someone is going to get hurt—

The Force whispered a warning. Even then, she had only a split second to react as the chains supporting the catwalk were ripped away.

Shrieking metal dropped into the void, clanging off the sides of one of Coruscant’s mythical bottomless chasms, throwing sparks and breaking glass along the way, and Barriss—

—dropped with it—

— reached, panic whiting her vision, blocking out her grip on the Force for the near-fatal span of a heartbeat before it welled up inside her again. Like a hand on her back, like her master’s voice; it reached back, caught her, pulled. Her chest slammed into the half-rusted remains of what had once been a security fence, two and a half levels down; but that was all she needed. 

She dug her fingers between the holes of the grate, heaved herself up until she could roll onto the roof of an abandoned power transfer station, and fought to keep breathing through the thundering heart in her throat.

Above her—she couldn’t help but watch—a tiny orange figure sprang from one rooftop to another, police vehicles wobbling frantically in pursuit, and the whole group vanished onto a higher level. Barriss, shaking so badly she could barely support her own weight, pushed herself to her feet. She stumbled, at first; then, taking a steadying breath, she leaped from the power station to the roof of a nearby administration office, then across to a water tower. She was about to gather herself for a larger leap through the gap where the police pursuit had vanished, when…

A shiver. A familiar tug, gentle this time. She deactivated her lightsaber and looked—really looked—at her surroundings.

An enclosed tunnel like most of the Coruscant underbelly. Above, the higher level opened up for a few hundred yards to make room for landing bays and open balconies. That path turned sharply, rising into a cramped, dangerous, automated-industrial district. It was the perfect place to lose a pursuer, an absolutely logical destination. So why…

Finally, Barriss's gaze fell on a dark patch in the side of a nearby office complex, near street level. Black-on-black, invisible in the dark. It was one side of an air circulation duct, designed to draw oxygen from higher to lower levels. Which meant there must be another opening, higher up, on the other side of the structure…

She dropped from the water tower, landed in a crouch, and looked Ahsoka straight in the eye.

The echo, unspoken, was deafening between them. Tag. You’re it.

Barriss was—she was shaking with adrenaline, breathing ragged as much from the chase as from the near miss at the ravine. Ahsoka’s reckless, impulsive flight had nearly killed her, and she felt a deeply personal anger smoldering below her fear. But Barriss Offee was a Jedi. That shakiness was fading, the anger was something she could recognize and allow to pass through her, whereas Ahsoka—

Ahsoka was terrified.

She howled with fear in the Force, half-mad from it. She was alone, huddled in a ventilation duct, pupils blown wide, hyperventilating, trembling like a tooka kit in the rain. She didn’t even try to run when Barriss made eye contact; she just lay there unblinking, pressing back into the metal chute, near-hysterical tears beginning to burn at the corners of her eyes.

Barriss took a breath and released her emotions slowly, bleeding them into the Force.

“Ahsoka,” she began, trying for calm. “I’m…”

The words died in her throat.

I’m not going to hurt you was a lie. She meant every word, but it was a lie all the same, because she was going to hand Ahsoka over to the Coruscant Security Force and that was not something Ahsoka would come back from. 

If she were anyone else, maybe. She was an accomplice to terrible things, but bounty hunters were not generally held responsible for the actions of teammates in Republic courts; Barriss might very well have been able to push for leniency, in light of her victimization as a child. But Ahsoka wasn’t just a bounty hunter, wasn’t just Aurra Sing’s kidnapped ward.

Ahsoka was strong in the Force and self-trained, demonstrably willing and able to use it in combat and to evade Republic justice.

The police sirens were circling back.

Rogue users of the Force did not go to prison. They did not get to work off a debt to society by entering supervised Republic service for an agreed-upon task or term of years. 

“Ahsoka,” she whispered again. “I can’t…I don’t want to see you locked up like that, I don’t want you sent to the Citadel—!”

Because she would be. She would have to be, even if the Jedi tried to help her; and why would they, how could they justify it? It would be the Citadel, or high-security isolation, or worse. Terrible devices had been created, over the millenia, to hold that which the Force itself wanted free.

Blue and red lights flickered between the slats of the level-divide. They would be around the corner in seconds.

“I’ll—” Barriss's racing mind would have to make itself up later. “Just—just this once. I’ll let you go this one time.”

Ahsoka didn’t give any sign of comprehension—Barriss wasn’t even sure she could hear her—but there was no time to repeat herself. She gathered the Force around her and sprang to a fire escape, and from there to the roof, pressing against the duracrete and trying to take a calming breath.

If she waited any longer she would second-guess herself.

Her lightsaber blazed in her hand, a beacon in the dark; Barriss took a running leap, high and slow, across the busy skylane. She felt as well as saw the CSF pursuit change focus; they peeled off from scanning the street level, falling in behind the on-site Jedi like any competent security force.

Barriss ran —taking hairpin corners to break line-of-sight, racing as fast as she could in the wrong direction, trying to stay close enough to the police to keep their attention but not so close that they realized she was alone. She didn’t have to maintain the deception forever—a few minutes, just long enough that when she ‘lost the trail’ they would be far enough away for Ahsoka to have vanished into a crowd.

If her conscience twinged, it did so faintly. 

She did feel a slight discomfort at the idea of falsifying a report to the Order. Every Jedi understood that sometimes deception and subterfuge were necessary in the field to keep a situation safe; lying after the fact, to other Jedi, was something else entirely. But for all that Barriss had been raised and trained to honesty…as she felt Ahsoka’s familiar presence stir behind her and begin to flee, she was still certain she’d done the right thing. 

She took one last flashy, aerobatic leap, rolled with the landing, and came to rest near the edge of an empty rooftop landing pad. She kept her lightsaber blazing as she peered into the dropoff, scanning for nothing, making a bit of a show of the whole thing. The CSF speeders slowed and fell into a halfhearted circling pattern over her head.

“Suspect has fled,” confirmed the patrol—open comm channel, the Jedi close-range frequency included as a courtesy. “Appears to have moved deeper into the undercity. All units return to patrol.”

Barriss smiled quietly.

The Council had its policies about apprehending users of the dark side, policies Barriss agreed with wholeheartedly; and just from being near Ahsoka, it was obvious she fueled her power with emotions of every kind, from anger to love and back again. But Ahsoka wasn’t…she did not serve the light but she wasn’t truly Dark, either. There was no cruelty in her despite the cruelty she had endured, and while she was an accomplice to—to terrible things, murder the least of it, Aurra Sing tortured people—she was also a victim, unable to leave safely, trying to survive. 

She deserved one chance to become more than what her master dictated.

For a few precious seconds, Barriss was buoyed by that certainty.

Her commlink beeped.

“This is Jedi Master Luminara Unduli,” her master’s voice said calmly. “I have visual contact. Moving to intercept.”

A hydraulic press slammed down, and Ahsoka cringed.

The industrial sector was a round-the-clock cacophony. It was worth it for the quick escape, but yeesh. These kinds of district-wide production fields were run almost entirely by simple droids, too, so the corporations didn’t even have to worry about damaging their workers’ hearing. Or, uh, anything else about their workers—there was a lot of molten metal around here and no safety rails.

She needed to keep moving.

There weren’t many guards to worry about, but monitoring droids still swooped around the facility at regular intervals. Thankfully, dodging cameras and guard rotations had been Ahsoka’s bread and butter since she was five.

She became a shadow—sticking to the dark corners, timing her breaths to the deafening machinery. Constant motion was less suspicious than sudden movements. She jumped between catwalks, waited for the whir of a patrol droid to pass; snagged the casing of a passing magna-clamp as it swung by, rode it for a minute, then dropped to a pile of compressed-scrap cubes and from there to the payload on a dormant auto-crane. She slid, feet-first, into the maw of one of its reinforced ferrocrete tubes—if there was anything she’d learned from years of crawling through ventilation ducts, it was to never go headfirst into anything with a downward slope. Get stuck like that and you could die before you got free.

Above, a heavy-duty railcrawler blew through the facility. The entire system clanged and shrieked with the force. It had to be going, what, a hundred miles an hour—dozens and dozens of groaning freight cars full to bursting with heavy metal ingots. Hundreds of thousands of tons, accelerated to that speed? The raw power shook the entire sector.

The roar of its passing echoed along the inside of the pipe. It reverberated and reverberated and reverberated, as Ahsoka clutched her montrals and tried not to scream—

And then it was gone. Spitting out blood and hoping she hadn’t managed to clench her jaw hard enough to crack a tooth, Ahsoka slid out of the pipe as fast as she dared. Hit the ground, used the momentum and the Force to springboard up a series of support scaffolds. 

Pistons the size of starships worked at a speed too fast to follow. She blinked sweat from her eyes as she used the glow of the smelting ovens to hide, skirting the wall behind sheets of liquid steel; anyone, even a camera droid, who looked in her direction would be blinded by the white-hot metal. Not a prayer of seeing anything else nearby, and heat sensors would obviously be useless.

Ahsoka was still….shaky. She’d been chased before but never caught, never pinned down like that, and she—she should have hated knowing she owed Barriss now. Aurra would never let her hear the end of it for owing anything to anyone . But she couldn’t even try. She was—so, so grateful. 

She shoved her hands under her arms to hide, even from herself, how hard she was trembling, then hauled herself onto a bucket lift to ride to the higher levels. Hopped off halfway up; there was a shadowy catwalk, and her best bet was probably to follow that for a while until she found a gap between machines and could vanish properly into the lower levels.

Even in the middle of the industrial district, surrounded by the thunder of engines and the rhythmic planet-shaking boom of hydraulics, the shriek of metal on metal, the sizzling of melted slag and the heat-roar of furnace doors—

Even in the middle of all of that, the snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber was unmistakable.

For the second time that night, Barriss was running without knowing why.

Even if she could get there in time— in time for what? —she couldn’t begin to think what she would do then. Fight Ahsoka? Fight Luminara? The latter was unthinkable, surely, her soul recoiled from the very thought; but the former was wrong, she knew it was wrong…

In the distance, she could just barely make out a flash of brilliant, glowing emerald.

She ran faster.

Of course Ahsoka ran.

What? She wasn’t stupid. What kind of idiot would stand her ground against an armed Jedi Master? The moment she heard that lightsaber go off, she turned and kriffing booked it.

You know. For all the good that did her.

Everything that made the industrial district ideal for losing a pursuit—the cramped, dangerous surroundings, the noise, the confusing layout—was suddenly working against her. Those things only helped if you had a head start; the Jedi had dropped almost on top of her. Without room to get clear, Ahsoka’s clever hiding ground was just a bog-standard death trap.

She took a running leap to the top of a control tower; the Jedi followed like they’d known what she was planning all along—which was, firstly, very likely, and secondly, annoying—and touched down barely a meter behind her.

“Halt, pirate!”

Ahsoka had only heard that voice a few times, and most of them had been over a commlink. She still cringed; she didn’t exactly speak to enough Jedi to start mixing them up. Great. Just—just great. A fight with Barriss’s old mentor was exactly what she needed tonight.

(Hey, at least the only real friend she’d ever had already didn’t want anything to do with her, right? Somehow that thought did not make her feel any better.)

She spared a glance over her shoulder—that was definitely Luminara Unduli, and it was a good thing the Jedi were merciful because if Luminara wanted her dead Ahsoka would be in three pieces already—and called back, “Not likely!”

No time for a running start; she dropped off the edge of the tower, fell a level and a half, and completely fumbled her landing. Somehow she’d expected the conveyer belt to be solid. But the moment she hit it the rumbling metal slats sagged, twisted, threw sparks off the guiderails as she stumbled helplessly. What had to be hundreds of pounds of scrap metal wobbled and slid; an entire engine block rolled lazily into the dip and Ahsoka reeled backwards before she could catch her balance, avoiding a broken leg by the skin of her teeth but throwing herself even more off-kilter—

Unduli landed better; she kicked off the side of the tower and rolled instead of trying to stick the landing, dispersing the impact more evenly. She didn’t even come all the way to her feet; weight balanced in a perfect three-point contact, she flung her hand out just as Ahsoka’s heel slipped into empty air. She felt the exact moment her center of gravity tipped past saving, felt herself fall out of control, felt the searing heat of the too-close crucible vats—

Then there was a rough invisible shove, an impact with no source; it knocked her off her trajectory and sent her careening back across the conveyor belt. Stumbling, flailing, heart pounding, mildly singed—but alive.

Unduli’s eyes, when Ahsoka met them for a split second, were nearly as wide as her own—the quickly-fading echo of what could almost have been fear.

Luminara rose to her feet, lightsaber held to the side. Panting slightly, she ordered, “Surrender.”

Barriss’s ribs were lines of fire in her chest as she took one last Force-assisted jump, skidding to a halt on a debris-strewn duracrete base. There was no ‘floor’ in this district, not really—the industrial sectors covered hundreds of interlacing levels over several kilometers—but it was as close to solid ground as she was going to get.

She was spent, exhausted. And increasingly certain that the nameless growing dread in the center of her chest was more than just her own fear.

Ahsoka fought back the urge to cry, or scream, or throw up. 

She was a lot of things. She’d…been complicit in a lot of things, things she’d always just assumed she couldn’t stop but maybe should have tried to. But like hell was Ahsoka going to let the Republic—the Jedi, whatever, everyone knew they were the same damn thing— like hell was Ahsoka going to quietly roll over and let the Republic drag her off to some nightmare dungeon over credits. Money the Banking Clan wouldn’t even miss!

If it had been over something serious —if it’d been an assassination or something, a kidnapping—if Luminara Unduli had been here to take her in because Aurra was getting involved in slave-trading again—Ahsoka would have surrendered.

If it had been anything but that stupid cash transport job, maybe none of it would have happened.

Barriss could, just barely, make out her master’s dark figure through the smoke and steam, high above her.

She cast around desperately for some way to reach them. The maintenance-access ladder would take too long; the inspection elevator should have been the best option but the car had completely rusted through and would have been nonfunctional even if there was power running to the shaft, which there wasn’t.

That was a blatant violation of Coruscant’s industrial safety regulations, but for once Barriss couldn’t stop to care. 

Her frantic racing gaze fell on a clunky, slow-moving chain lift, hauling buckets of salvaged transparisteel to be melted down separately from the rest of the slag. It was better than nothing; it would have to do.

The Force was howling around her, a certainty that she needed to move faster. She could feel the weight of the compulsion, formless but building, a terrible implacable danger; something had been set in motion, something with the terrible inertia of fate, something that once begun could not be stopped—

Unduli was calm, and that was somehow worse than Aurra’s cold rage had ever been. 

“Stand down,” she commanded again.

Setting her jaw, Ahsoka looked at the woman who had just saved her life and snarled, “I can’t.”

The Force surged at her command. It was pathetic —weak, unfocused, she couldn’t summon any real hatred behind the throw. Unduli raised a hand instinctively to defend herself, but Ahsoka wasn’t aiming for her. The scrap on the conveyor belt flung itself out in an aimless wave; razor-blades of twisted duralium shredded Unduli’s long robes, shrapnel tearing at her exposed face and hands, but Ahsoka didn’t have time to apologize as the Jedi cried out in pain.

It was a dirty trick, but it had gotten her a split-second head start. She called a dangling chain to her hand and swung out over the gap— don’t look down don’t look down don’t look down —to a rickety scaffold that she could feel starting to collapse just from her weight. 

From there up again to another conveyor—Unduli wasn’t following, but Ahsoka could sense her racing on her flank, finding a different route, there wasn’t time to see what the Jedi had come up with—and across, spotting her landing in the air like a complete idiot. No safe route, but a fifteen-story hydraulic press was just beginning to raise. She picked up speed, grasped at the Force, and slid —a heartbeat of complete pants-wetting mortal terror oh this was a huge mistake I am never doing this again it was very stupid of me to do this I should not have done this —and she was clear—

BOOM .

The impact brushed so close the force of the displaced air nearly shattered her montrals. Her momentum carried her gracelessly over the edge; she hit another shitty scaffold, crashed through it, dropped. Managed to right herself just enough to seize the edge of something, it didn’t matter what; her fingers caught the extreme edge of a maintenance ring and she somehow managed to hold on, heaving herself over the edge.

The whole hydraulic tower was shaking—how did it not crack itself in half?—but Ahsoka’s balance was the least of her problems. 

Unduli dropped from a higher level and landed across from her on the ring platform, eyes hard and a lightsaber between them.

Barriss leapt—sloppy, her technique was gone —from the bucket lift to an inactive conveyor belt.

From there across to a trestle tower, bracing herself on massive durasteel beams. She could see Ahsoka and her master above her, a whirl of dark robes on a dizzyingly thin maintenance ring. 

Still uncertain of exactly what she intended to do when she reached them, she gathered herself for the next leap—and lurched violently, nearly losing her grip on the trestle. She overbalanced, grabbed a support beam and clung tight.

The entire facility was shaking. What—

Unduli still wasn’t going for the killshot.

Which, like, Ahsoka was grateful—but only a little, because striking to disable sounded nice in theory but it looked a lot like scrambling around a rickety metal grate in the middle of a hellscape of twisted metal while a green lady tried to cut her fucking arms off.

She backpedaled wildly, felt her heel slip over the edge again, salvaged her balance but only just. There were no handholds; the column was all smooth metal and the platform was less than a meter across and Unduli had a lightsaber, even if she was reluctant to use it on an unarmed opponent she had a lightsaber, she wouldn’t even have to cut anything off, all she had to do was put that thing to Ahsoka’s throat and it was all over.

In order to jump clear again she just needed enough room to turn her back—but she wasn’t going to get it, Unduli was a liquid blur and a solid wall at the same time, all Ahsoka could do was try to keep up, keep dodging, keep dodging but there was nowhere to dodge to —

Fear would lead to the Dark—Barriss knew she could not be ruled by it.

But that black dread was coiled around her throat now, choking her, blotting out the sun.

The danger was here, it could not be turned aside, it screamed in the back of her mind—a dark comet, impossible to slow or redirect, impossible to stop—

Ahsoka spun around the shaking column; Luminara spun in mirror image, saber flashing, and Ahsoka stumbled at exactly the wrong moment.

She fell hard on one elbow. She managed, with a ragged scramble, to just barely catch herself before tumbling off the tower, but that laser sword swept to rest against her chest and surrender was worse than death no matter how kindly the Jedi might mean it—

She had to get to them now, it might already be too late, but Barriss couldn’t even keep her legs under her; the entire trestle felt like it was shaking itself apart, jostled violently by the incomprehensible momentum of—

Of a high-speed—

The Force in its mercy went silent around her.

Raw panic condensed into a hard, solid lance of power as Ahsoka flung her hand up.

A single overwhelming thought—AWAY—

Unduli checked herself mid-turn, sensing the last-ditch attack. The twin throws clashed between them, locking horns, jostling, strain building like tectonic plates; but the counter had come too late and half-focused whereas Ahsoka was fighting for her life—

The tension ratcheted too hard, too fast, raw power against raw power, uncontrolled—and then the faultline, and the slip —

The backlash would have taken a lesser Jedi off their feet. Luminara was able to master it, just barely, bleeding the wild energy into a controlled midair flip as she was knocked back onto a nearby trestle track—

Luminara Unduli landed lightly, with all the grace of a Jedi Master, directly in the path of the oncoming railfreighter.

Everything…everything had happened so fast. 

And then stopped so fast. The shaking was over as suddenly as it had begun; the vibrations took longer to fade, ringing through her skull. Still, after a moment Ahsoka was able to push herself, unsteady, to her knees.

The galaxy felt…silent. Stillness, not quiet. Like it was holding its breath.

The hydraulic tower shuddered again. The planet-cracking impact felt distant. Muted.

Everything had…she’d been reacting, just reacting, there hadn’t been a plan. Her world had narrowed down to lightning-flashes, snap decisions…her whole wild flight, everything since meeting Barriss by the Jedi Temple a thousand years ago, it all felt like a blur. Just a rapid-fire haze of adrenaline. And then, abruptly, jarringly, everything was so still…

She hadn’t…

She hadn’t meant for…she hadn’t seen it…

Her heart pounded, sluggish, deafening, in her swimming head. The rusted grate of the maintenance ring dug into her palms. She peered over the side, fighting vertigo and the urge to vomit.

She recognized Barriss's smoke-shrouded form with a dull lack of surprise. 

Barriss moved through the drifts of scrap that covered the factory floor slowly, stumbling over her own feet, swaying like she was in a trance. She knelt, or her knees gave out; Ahsoka thought with a sick rush of horror that she might have found her master’s body but that…wasn’t possible, not at those speeds, there wouldn’t be anything left after...

Something—an echo in the Force, the deteriorating remnants of what had once been a bond, maybe, or Ahsoka’s own horror-saturated imagination—made her fingers curl around an invisible grip. She felt, or imagined she felt, the tacky slickness of blood; tasted or imagined she could taste iron.

Far below her, a spark. A strobe-burst of formless light. Then, finally, flickering and unstable, the jagged line of an emerald lightsaber stuttered to life.

Far below her, quietly: The creeping, terrible sensation of something cold beginning to crystalize. Over once-safe footing, the beginnings of black ice. 

Barriss lifted her head too slowly. From this distance, through the rising fumes, Ahsoka couldn’t see her face.

She fled anyway.

Vengeance was not the Jedi way.

Barriss Offee wrapped that truth around her like a cloak, and found it cold comfort.

Darkness dragged heavy at her heels. She nearly stumbled with the weight of it, an anchor gouging furrows in the hall as she walked; chained to her heart, or maybe the broken lightsaber in her sleeve that she hadn’t—should have—mentioned to the Council in her debrief. That darkness had surged in her before, kneeling in the dirt with Luminara’s blood cooling on her hands, watching— Ahsoka —vanish into the night. She’d felt it, lead lining her ribs, crushing and cold. 

It would have been so easy to fling that weight like a net, tangle her in icy shadow, rip her from the air—dig the razor barbs of her grief into the girl—tear at her mind with it, keelhaul her over the shards of Barriss's own shattered heart—

It would have been so easy.

Vengeance was not— Jedi didn't—

Luminara wouldn’t want—

Her fingers spasmed. The sonic sanitizer would not have left any trace; Barriss knew this. Knew it intimately, in fact—how many surgeries had she assisted in? Those sanitizers were nearly enough on their own to meet sterility requirements. She was wearing fresh clothes; she had taken a full-body sonic cleanse and then spent nearly an hour sobbing brokenly under a scalding water-pressure shower. Sensing and ignoring the presence of other Jedi nearby, drawn by the Force and her grief but hesitant to intrude on her.

Why, then, did everything still reek of blood?

“Come on,” Ahsoka muttered. “Come on, pick up…pick up…”

It was the hardest thing in the world not to run. She had no idea where she even was; she’d sprinted away-and-down in a blind panic for hours, only stopping when she physically couldn’t go any longer. This deep in the underbelly there was no natural light to speak of—but people were starting to fill the passageways, so it must be local morning in whatever passed for a day/night cycle down here.

Which meant she had to avoid drawing any attention. Keep her head down without making a show of it, keep pace with the crowd; stay out of transport vehicles or any other enclosed space where anyone would have long stretches of time to look around; avoid looking rushed but also walk with purpose so it didn’t look like she was just wandering. Ahsoka wasn’t just in a database somewhere anymore; her own face flashed at her from every display board on the planet, wearing a digitally enhanced scowl. When she’d only been a mid-rank bounty hunter she could afford to move pretty openly, as long as she avoided cops. Now—

Now she’d killed a Jedi.

“Pick up,” she breathed. She’d snatched a hooded cloak from a machine in an empty laundromat in passing; it was still damp and whoever owned it used a floral detergent that reeked, but it was better than nothing. “Pick up, come on —”

Finally, finally, the comm connected. 

“Well well.” Aurra didn’t even bother answering with holo. “Look who it is.”

“Aurra, I fucked up.” Ahsoka didn’t bother hiding the desperation in her own voice. She hated Aurra seeing her scared, but her pride could survive groveling if it meant the rest of her survived too. “I need a pickup, I fucked up really bad—”

A short, incredulous laugh. “Yeah, no kidding. Your ugly face is on every vidscreen from here to the Mid-Rim. You cannot be serious right now.”

“Aurra—!” She swallowed her panic. “I’m not being followed, okay? I’ll come to you, just—just send me the coordinates and if I’m caught you can say you were planning to turn me in—”

“You’re awfully quick to say that,” Aurra countered. “Assuming I won’t turn you in. Now that you bring it up? That would have been the smart move.”

She was—she was bluffing, probably. Almost definitely. Turning in other bounty hunters for a quick buck was bad business. She wouldn’t lose Guild protection because Ahsoka wasn’t independently licensed (like, as if, right? Aurra had Guild-registered her as an indentured crewmate before she even bothered finding out what infant togruta ate ), but it would still tank her name.

A little backstabbing was fine, improved your reputation even; nobody cared whether Cad Bane had friends. But that Guild registration was a double-edged sword. You could cut ties with a crewmate who screwed up badly enough, sure. But going turncoat on a contracted teammate, to appease the Republic, was hard to spin as anything but weak.

Aurra was still talking. “As for sending you our coordinates…well. That’s an awfully incriminating move to ask of someone you’re so certain you can survive without. I don’t think it would help you much, anyway.”

“What do you want?” Ahsoka snapped. “A, what, an apology? For hurting your feelings—?” She bit her tongue; Aurra was enjoying this too much. “Look, I know I was stupid to run off, okay? It won’t happen again, I mean it this time, just tell me where—”

“Oh, honey, we hit orbit five minutes ago.” She could hear Aurra’s smirk, the knife-edged one she only wore right before a killshot. “Congrats on that last job, brat. I’ve officially recouped my investment.”

“Aurra.” She swallowed, head spinning, frantic. “It was an accident, I didn’t mean for—Aurra, please—”

A theatrical sigh.

“Fine, fine. You’ve appealed to my tender maternal instincts,” she drawled. “You want coordinates? Here.”

Numbers scrolled, rapid-fire, on Ahsoka’s holo. They were planetary, at least. She didn’t know where she was in relation to them, but she could find out. “What is this?”

A harsh laugh. “Your cut. You should be thanking me—I bought you a ship! One with a hyperdrive, even! Mind you, there’s no maneuvering thrusters or energy cells, the steering’s shot, the hull doesn’t pressurize, and the sublight engine has a duralium two-by-six through the middle. But I’m sure that won’t be a problem for the ungrateful little gundark who spent her whole life ripping up my floorboards and crawling around in my walls.”

Ahsoka, for a shining moment, seized on that thin hope. Then reality struck her in the face. “They’ll find me by the next rotation if I start looking for ship parts, I don’t have time to—”

“Argue with me? No, you don’t.” Aurra’s mocking lilt vanished. “You want my protection? There it is. Survive long enough to find me again, and I’ll consider taking you back. Better get a move on.”

The others were…the others were very kind.

Master Kenobi especially. He and Luminara were, had been, close. Barriss almost didn’t need the Force to feel his mourning echoing her own—the stunned, blindsided grief, the instinctive rejection, a conviction that there must have been some mistake. Master Ti, as well. Council members both. There could be no greater compliment to Luminara Unduli’s memory than the genuine sense of loss that had washed over them both at the news. 

Anakin Skywalker, Knighted at the start of the war— prematurely Knighted, Luminara had thought, but he wore it well—was an unexpected comfort. Barriss knew him only by reputation; but he spoke frankly and thoughtfully of Luminara’s good humor, her understated playful teasing, in a way no one could have done without knowing her. It was…a better balm, certainly, than any of Yoda’s maxims.

And Depa Billaba’s young shadow, who had not known Luminara in the slightest, was nonetheless refusing to leave Barriss alone. Caleb’s presence was not unwelcome, a blaze of golden concern in the Force that was bright and loud enough to be a distraction but too sincere to resent. He’d spent the entire thirty-six hours since Barriss returned to the Temple hovering unsubtly behind bookcases, occasionally vanishing only to return radiating worry and dragging Master Billaba by the indulgent hand. 

Their bond in the Force already burned so brightly that the collective Jedi Order had gotten tired of pretending he wasn’t her padawan, and sent pointed looks at Master Billaba behind his back until she had finally given in and formally apprenticed the boy. They shed the light like a pair of binary suns. It was charming. Pure.

Agony—

She was glad for them. Truly. Barriss remembered, too well, the comfort of that kind of certainty. For all her anxious demeanor as a youngling, Barriss had not been so insecure as to doubt the clear will of the Force; there had never been any question, even in the creche, of which Master would train her someday.

She had hoped…she had hoped, someday, when she was ready for an apprentice in her turn…

Well.

The others were very kind. They were warm and compassionate and gentle, and the Order was a credit to itself, and Barriss was going to scream if she spent another minute wrapped in lambswool.

She needed…space. She needed to process this away from the hovering Jedi. She didn’t want to be soothed; she wanted to grieve.

It certainly wasn’t the kind of venue where Barriss Offee would normally find herself. It was dark and oddly-shaped—the kind of space that was the inevitable result of purchasing a certain range of cubic meters sight-unseen from the Coruscant construction authority, then simply welding bulkheads around the existing structures to get the greatest possible shine for your credits. 

There was no name for the place. The walls were covered in a scuffed, unpolished plastoid with a vague attempt at a printed wood-grain pattern. It was somehow more tacky than if they’d simply left them the same bare durasteel as the floors and ceiling, uneven bolts and weld marks included. There was a bar, for a given value of the word. There was a sign indicating refresher facilities…presumably, also for only a given value of the word. From what Barriss could see from glancing around the knobbly corner, the owner appeared to have pried a prefabricated econo-fresher from a downed Republic troop shuttle and soldered it to the wall.

But it wasn’t deafening—a proper sound system was, clearly, an investment too far—and while there was smoke in the air it didn’t have the sharp tang of spice. And if Barriss trusted nothing else, her safety here would never be in question.

The mood as she entered was already subdued. For a moment, save for the tinny off-tune music playing over the bar, the place went silent. Barriss froze. Before she could think of anything to say, or else turn tail and run, someone in the back cleared his throat. There was a visible jolt; then the dozen and change identical patrons pointedly lowered their eyes and returned to their quiet conversation, making a considerate show of paying no attention to her without going so far as to turn their backs and shut her out completely.

Ever loyal, the 41st. It almost made her smile.

The man who’d cleared his throat looked up from a back corner, toasting her with a crude metal mug. “Commander.”

Her near-smile turned brittle. She palmed a random assortment of credits and dropped them blindly on the bar in passing—hopefully they were in small denominations, but she wouldn’t begrudge Buzz the extra cash if it came down to it—and settled into the chair he kicked out for her. “I was never in the military, Gree.”

Normally he argued with her. Barriss was not, in any way that mattered, a veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic. Left shattered after the bloodbath of First Geonosis she had remained in the Temple, a healer who couldn’t heal, until the terrible pall of darkness over the Jedi had eased and then lifted as Chancellor Organa finally negotiated an end to the war. Gree had served with Luminara for that terrible year and a half where Barriss could not bear to stand at her master’s side. But he alone maintained that it didn’t make any difference. She was in the system as an officer, she’d done good work back home; a career-ending injury to the mind was no different than anywhere else, and you didn’t strip a soldier of her rank as punishment for being wounded. Just not done, sir.

It was…a kindness. For all that Barriss struggled to hide her revulsion at that period in time where Jedi adorned themselves with military titles, she recognized that clones had a unique and vibrant culture in which this rank she had not earned was the highest kindness they could give. She took the gift in the spirit it was intended. 

Normally. Tonight…stars, she was so tired. She didn’t think she could bear it.

Gree didn’t know her, not really. But evidently his time with Luminara was familiarity enough, because whatever he read on her face, his eyes softened.

“Mmm,” he said, in lieu of any bracing speeches. “Well, whether you like it or not, sir—I think you’re one of us tonight.”

It would have caused less pain if Gree had simply backhanded her across the face.

“I think…” she rasped. “I think you would change your mind, Commander. If you knew the truth.”

A mug appeared in front of her. She opened her mouth to refuse it—alcohol, grief, and the Force were poor bedfellows—but then noticed the steam. The familiar tingle of the scent. It was a warm blend of ginger and golden spices…with a powerful, slow-building aromatic kick distinctly stronger than most people were expecting from a cup of tea. Barriss had once watched in fascination for over an hour as Master Sember Vey, eyes watering more profusely with every polite refill, tried and failed to find a discreet way to dump her tea into a nearby plant.

Luminara’s personal blend. Of course the 41st remembered it, even after all these years.

She couldn’t accept their kindness. Their comfort. Didn’t deserve it.

“Aw, kid,” murmured Gree.

“It’s my fault,” Barriss told him, and burst into tears.

She wasn’t certain, ultimately, how she got the story out. Even trying to communicate who Ahsoka was proved difficult; they had always kept their friendship private, secret, keeping Ahsoka’s identity shielded from the authorities. That betrayal—of the Republic, of the Code, of her master’s trust —loomed over her, mocking, threatening to crush her with the enormity of what she had done.

Barriss was sure that whatever broken, hysterical explanation she managed to choke out must have been completely incomprehensible. But Gree just sat there, dark eyes sharp and serious, giving an occasional nod. Every so often he tapped her mug to remind her not to let her tea go cold.

After what felt like a brief eternity, Barriss fell silent. The nameless, hole-in-the-wall clone dive was utterly soundless; even the tinny music had been turned off at some point. She could feel their eyes on her.

“Right,” said Gree, with terrible slowness. Barriss flinched as if from a gunshot. “Lemme get this straight. You’ve known this girl since you were basically a youngling. She got in bad trouble, and you showed her mercy, gave her a chance to shape up.”

“I know, I know, I was so stupid —”

“Wouldn’t’a done it myself, sir.” Gree shrugged. “But I’m not a Jedi. Don’t much like bounty hunters or mercs, when it comes down to it—bad discipline breeds bad trouble, get their backs up and those types always show an ugly side. Still. Security mindset’s my job; mercy’s yours. If you’re hoping we’ll yell at you for it, Commander, find another bar.”

“My mercy killed your General,” snapped Barriss.

There. There, finally, was the shift—the energy in the bar turning sour as the clones’ suppressed anger began to break through their concern. 

“Really,” said one of the men—Jek, she thought. “‘Cause the way I see it…some ugly Hutt-space scrap rat killed the General. One who claimed to be your friend.”

“You showed her mercy,” Gree emphasized. “And this is how she repaid you.”

That—

That was true. The words crystalized something in her, clicked it into alignment. It hurt —like setting a bone. It quieted some of Barriss's howling guilt. Her mind had been a maelstrom since she felt her master die; wailing in circles with nothing to cling to, unable to breathe, drawn inexorably deeper with every repetition: If she had simply taken Ahsoka into custody when she had the chance, their duel would not have happened and Luminara would not have died.

But Barriss had sensed the freighter coming. She’d felt the swell of fear-laced power, felt her master’s light rise to meet it and fail. She could not escape her own culpability, she would not try, she had made her choice unforced; but Ahsoka had pushed her, which meant—

The howling whitewater of her misery eased just enough to let her break the surface. Fury surged up, cold and clear, in its place.

Gree watched her face for several long moments, then nodded.

“So,” he said in a low growl. “What’re we gonna do about that, sir?”

The sharp steel edge of her heart knew the answer. But—

“Revenge,” she managed, barely able to remember the words let alone the sentiment behind them—but she knew it was important. “Revenge is not the Jedi way.”

She expected indignation, or maybe a retort—she was, after all, the only Jedi in the room. Instead, Gree just shrugged.

“Who said anything about revenge?” he asked. “Have some faith, Commander. Me and the boys are just proposing we go out and…bring a dangerous rogue bounty hunter to justice.” A pause. “Figured you might want in.”

The offer hung between them in the ringing silence. Her fingers clenched around a rough metal cup of rapidly cooling tea.

Finally she looked up, and rasped, “I know where to start.”

Having a plan helped.

Not, like, much, but it was enough to cut through Ahsoka’s mindless panic. At least this way when the Republic caught up to her they’d find her working, not curled up and helpless.

The so-called ship Aurra’d bought her—insulted her with, more like—was even worse than she’d expected. The only indication it had ever been able to fly was the faint stencil of the word Twilight on its hull; whoever’d owned this thing had clearly intended to abandon it for scrap about twenty years ago and never gotten around to it. Every inch was rusted, half the wiring was burned-out or missing entirely; none of the internal electronics functioned outside of the bare-essential core functions. So basically, she had life support and a navicomputer but no, like, lights.

That was fine. She needed to get off Coruscant more than she needed lights.

Thankfully, steering had actually been in better shape than Aurra realized. Once Ahsoka pried a few panels loose, jabbed a few rodents with an electrospanner, and ripped out all their nesting materials, the controls powered right up.

One down.

She was trying to prioritize. Triage. It was—ugh, she hated having to admit this—something she’d learned from Aurra. Don’t fuck around setting anything up that you won’t be able to use when you get to it. There was no point fixing the pressure hull, for example, if she couldn’t take off, and thrusters would just kill her instantly if she fired them up without being able to steer first. 

So: Controls, then in-atmosphere maneuvering thrusters. That way she could at least move the ship around Coruscant; throw off pursuit long enough to, maybe, fix the absolutely turbofucked sublight engines and repressurize at least part of the hull.

With no credits, no time to get a job, and the entire Republic hunting for her? She hadn’t been wrong when she told Aurra that rebuilding a starship wasn’t a viable escape plan. But it was the only one she had. Even if she could beg or scam her way offworld with another ship…the only kind of pilot skeevy enough to take on someone as desperate and wanted as she was, especially a teenage girl alone, was skeevy enough to do anything. The rustbucket was safer.

So far, so good. She’d fixed everything wrong with the positioning thrusters. She’d fixed everything wrong with the positioning thrusters that she could see, anyway; none of it meant anything without working power cells.

Technically, going this long without acquiring the power cells was a violation of Aurra’s rule; but whatever her master might believe, Ahsoka wasn’t actually stupid. With her own Wanted listing flashing from every flat surface, the riskiest thing she could possibly do was interact with other people. If something went south while getting the cells, she needed to be able to slot them into Twilight on the fly and move.

So far, so good. She’d found a local mechanic’s shop—small, disorganized, and understaffed, exactly the opposite of the kind of place she’d normally go. But in this case, her needs were different. 

Small—which meant a poor selection of parts for over-the-counter sale, which meant no internal security cameras and less risk of any other customers coming in unscheduled. Disorganized, so they spent a lot of time looking around and checking inventory and Ahsoka had plenty of cover for checking sightlines. Understaffed—so the sole employee was frazzled, distracted, and unlikely to pay too close attention to any one customer in particular.

The very pretty sole employee. It had taken the better part of an hour and all of her remaining credits; but by flirting outrageously, fixing a glitchy droid free of charge, and discreetly using the Force to change the channel on the shop vidscreen every time a breaking news segment started to play, Ahsoka managed to walk out with six ‘guaranteed like-new’ power cells and a scribbled comm frequency that she was absolutely never going to use.

Once she got these power cells installed, she could relocate to a different part of Coruscant and then she might just have a chance. But she wasn’t back yet.

Aurra’d at least had the decency to find her a pile of discreet scrap metal. If she’d had to hang around even the smallest spaceport in the galaxy, Ahsoka would have been arrested two rotations ago; the alleged starship Twilight was tucked in a dark back-alley space between two levels in the deep undercity. Probably where someone had parked it, been unable to get a spark the next morning, and written the junk heap off as a loss rather than bother with a salvage fee.

Honestly, it was mystery how Aurra had even been able to find it there, let alone track down an owner.

Ahsoka snorted as she slid down a maintenance ladder. As if. Aurra would have acted through an agent—contacted some random sleemo who owed her a favor, given them a handful of credits and instructions to find the shittiest vessel on Coruscant and send her the title. Ahsoka hadn’t actually checked the licensing information beyond confirming that the ownership scandocs were legit—or at least, they passed surface-level forgery checks. Ahsoka wasn’t about to risk drawing attention to it by pinging the central database to confirm anything. 

Knowing Aurra she’d probably bought the ship ages ago, just in case she ever wanted to abandon Ahsoka in the Core to…to prove a… point…

She wasn’t certain what made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

Maybe she’d heard something, something faint enough to only register subconsciously. The click of a safety, or the shifting of plasteel armor. Maybe it was the Force. Maybe it was just…too quiet.

But there was… something… something about the way the miles of steel and duracrete above her head suddenly seemed to close in on her. The way between one step and the next, her breathing suddenly felt too loud. Something about the completely ordinary street-level passage… The high barred windows stretching up into oblivion all around her, the myriad notches and uneven storefronts. The way the flickering neon lights made it look like there was movement in every shadow—the knowledge that the effect would also serve to camouflage actual movement as yet another optical illusion.

But something… Ahsoka slowed down, searching her instincts, trying to figure out why she was suddenly filled with an overwhelming, blood-and-bone conviction that there was something deadly about this normal, empty street. There weren’t even any—

There weren’t even any side alleys to hide in or—

—or escape down —

Ahsoka lurched sideways in the exact moment the sniper fired.

She didn’t see the blast hit—she recognized but barely registered, by the faint metallic waver of the impact, that it had been a stun shot. Didn’t have time to be relieved. Three more stun blasts from three different angles. She flung herself flat on the— ugh, Coruscant pedway, ew, ew ew ew —and let them fly over her head, then rolled on pure instinct to avoid two more.

It bought her—in addition to what would probably turn into at least three rare skin infections—about half a second. She was halfway to her feet before a chorus of telltale beeps made her drop again, rolling onto her back and flinging her palms out in blind panic.

A dozen droidpoppers flew wildly in every direction. Nonlethals, again? Or they were meant to be—twelve times the power to drop a B2 in its tracks would absolutely fry her organs on impact. And what was the point anyway, that was a stupid waste of money, what kind of bounty hunter would toss around fiddly specialist tech like that and what was their fucking damage —

No time to stick around and ask. The next round of stun shots was a coordinated volley. She dodged straight up, leaping to grip a streetlamp that had been knocked offline by the EMP. Something whispered to her almost too late— DROP IT —and she obeyed without conscious thought as another sniper shot took her in what would have been center mass. As it was, the wavering blue ring broke into pieces against her arm; she fumbled her landing, off-balance and half-numb, and only barely managed to flop one-handed into a nearby garbage tip before the next volley hit.

No way was she gonna climb out. Sheltered from stunners for a brief moment, she took a centering breath—bad idea, the smell made her retch and wasted precious seconds—and used the Force to wrench the trash tip onto its side. 

She barely made it; four dull plinks told her even more droidpoppers had bounced off the container as it fell, and that meant she and her precious energy cells could still be in range. Gagging and spitting up bile, she rolled with the garbage.

The EMP blast caught her, just barely—enough to make her taste her own eyeballs, but not enough to do more than hurt. Plus, now she had a tiny amount of cover. She could get out of the killbox, if she could just get to her feet fast enough to—

Ahsoka felt, as much as heard, the liquid-fire rush of an igniting lightsaber.

She didn’t need the Force to know what she would find when she looked up.

“Surrender now.” Barriss put the tip of her blade to Ahsoka’s jaw. “I will not ask you again.”

That explained the ambush. That explained…everything. The casual use of expensive military surplus—she would have laughed if it was funny—of military EMPs, the crossfire, the precision, the sheer number of combatants. It explained the nonlethals, too—bounty hunters who could afford that kind of hardware didn’t care about civilian casualties. Clone troopers did.

And if Barriss had a clone squadron back there, Ahsoka was doomed the moment she stood up. From here, crouched on one knee and trying not to heave from the rotting garbage, the metal trash container would serve as cover from anything but heavy blaster bolts. If she moved, if she did anything but raise her hands to surrender…

“It was an accident.” The words escaped Ahsoka’s chest against her will. “Barriss, I’m sorry about Luminara, it was an accident, I didn’t mean—”

“Put your hands behind your head,” she ordered. Ahsoka pretended not to hear her voice waver. “Please, Ahsoka. Don’t make me kill you.”

Ahsoka swallowed and pushed herself slowly up on one knee. “Barriss, I didn’t mean to—”

A full-power sniper bolt punched through the garbage tip, inches from her right montral. 

Ahsoka froze dead. Barriss didn’t even blink.

She meant it. That realization curdled in her stomach. And the worst part was that it wasn’t…a surprise. There had never been any chance of talking Barriss down, not from this. But she wasn’t going out this way; she wouldn’t rot in the Citadel. Not for a bloodless robbery, not over an accident. Not when Unduli attacked her first.

“What happened to not wanting to see me locked up?”

Barriss narrowed her eyes. “I’ve reconsidered.”

“Reconsider this,” Ahsoka spat, and the Force surged in her blood to slam Barriss Offee into reinforced duracrete with three days of fear and betrayal lending it power.

The narrow passage exploded with cobalt killing bolts, but Ahsoka was already moving. The impact had knocked Barriss’s lightsaber out of her hand, and Ahsoka made a dive for it; but the reflexes of a Knight were nothing to sneeze at. Barriss called her weapon to her hand and clawed her way to her feet; Ahsoka, who knew perfectly well that she had milliseconds before a clone trooper got a bead on her, did the extremely stupid thing and rolled toward the armed Jedi, dodging an off-balance swipe and coming up with a length of slimy pipe in one hand.

It was worth roughly fuckall as an answer to a lightsaber, but it got Barriss to stop and assess for a split second—and the roll put her between Ahsoka and the clones.

The sniper took advantage of the slight pause, but the Force wasn’t with him; Ahsoka took a half-step to the side and he didn’t try again. The bolt impacted the wet duracrete, leaving behind a burned crater.

Anger started to burn in Ahsoka’s belly.

“No more stun blasts, huh?” she snarled.

“You had your chance.” Barriss's eyes hardened. “I made a mistake letting you go, and a good woman died for it. I will not make that mistake again.”

“I didn’t mean to kill her!”

Barriss's lightsaber moved from a guard into what even Ahsoka could recognize as a ready position.

“This is not revenge, Ahsoka.” Her voice was cold. “You’re too dangerous to set free on the galaxy. Your accidents are exactly why rogue Force-users are a threat. Stand down!”

Ahsoka tossed back, “Make me.”

Barriss lunged. Ahsoka swung her stupid useless pipe. Barriss altered her swing instinctively to intercept, bisecting it neatly; and Ahsoka sidestepped, twisted, and drove home the razor-sharp red-hot point of it just below Barriss’s ribs.

There was a gasped cry of pain that Ahsoka refused to care about. She used momentum and the Force to shove her friend-turned-enemy between the shoulder blades; the clones checked instinctively as Barriss stumbled, bleeding, into the crossfire.

It was all the cover Ahsoka was going to get.

Running away was suicide. If nothing else, she’d lead them straight to the Twilight; the anonymity of her ship was her only hope of surviving. But that was also the direction they’d been expecting her to go. They’d have clear sightlines for almost five hundred meters, she’d never make it. Instead she stuck to Barriss like a buzz droid, darting through the killbox at her side while she reeled and clutched her ribs. It was chaos, she could feel the Force gathering to shove her away again—but then she was through, making a break for it back the way she came.

She’d never once beaten Barriss at hide-and-seek. 

No time to think about it. Ahsoka sent a manhole cover flying, slid down the ladder for a solid thirty seconds, and ran.

“Sir,” Jek whispered. “You sure you’re—”

“I’m fine,” said Barriss.

It was only a partial lie. She was bleeding sluggishly, wincing at every slight stretch. She’d swapped her lightsaber to her off hand in order to keep pressure on the stab wound. But it wasn’t as deep as Jek likely assumed. A flesh wound, nothing more; painful but unlikely, assuming she got access to antibiotics in the next twenty-four hours, to be deadly. Jedi robes were more resilient than they looked, and the loose-fitting layers of Mirialan traditionals had saved her. 

“If you’re sure,” said Jek, sounding distinctly unsure himself. “I just—”

“Cut the chatter,” said Gree, not unkindly. “We trust your judgment, Commander. Something changes, let us know.”

Barriss acknowledged it with her best approximation of a polite nod. This needed…she needed to see this through. To see it finished. Pain could not be allowed to stop her.

The physical pain was negligible, anyway. Nothing, compared to the agonizing void of her master’s absence.

She shook herself. Focus.

“Where are we?” she murmured. Lifting her saber to cast the light wider revealed very little. Ahsoka had led them in a wide, wobbly parabolic sweep through the undercity; she seemed to be doing her best to circle back around toward a point, but there was too much margin of error in her vague path for Barriss to triangulate that point and set up an ambush. Not yet. 

It wouldn’t matter. Ahsoka was moving slowly, now. She wasn’t racing anymore; slinking quietly between patches of cover, trying to disrupt her trail. Ahsoka was good, she always had been. But she had to be tiring, and even she couldn’t keep moving forever.

Gree’s searchlight passed slowly over piles of debris, strewn along the floor of the abandoned sewer level they’d tracked their prey into. Nothing moved except the shadows.

Nothing moved. Not even the frantic skittering of disturbed insects and vermin. Interesting, that—the previous four chambers had been crawling with such creatures, jostled into motion by the light and noise. Yet this one was silent. Almost as if they had already been scattered. Almost as if it had happened recently.

The Force whispered: There.

Barriss reached out. Silently, using two fingers and trying not to breathe, she lifted the barrel of Gree’s weapon and drew it around, toward a suspiciously silent corner—

Shrapnel flew across the chamber as the scrap pile exploded. Ahsoka burst from cover, her fear spiking sour in the Force; Gree barely got his shot off before having to shield his face, and the rest of the squadron’s fire went wild. Ahsoka managed a leap-and-scramble up to a connecting pipe with Gree firing after her, and Barriss hauled the nearest trooper to his feet and rushed to pursue.

The pipe was old and poorly-maintained, following a jagged twisting path. Barriss slipped, catching herself instinctively with her right hand, and nearly screamed as the jolt ripped open the stab wound in her side. But then Gree’s hand slipped under her good elbow, lifting her back to her feet. She sprinted toward the mouth of the pipe, saber raised as a guard against ambush, and skidded to a stop on the grime-encrusted rim.

The pipe opened into a massive duracrete structure—a stormwater cistern, or what was left of one. Defunct now, certainly. Entire sections had collapsed; the cavernous space was filled with chunks of its own masonry, the smell of mold, and the roar of water.

No sign of Ahsoka.

“Fan out,” Gree ordered his men. “She can’t have gone far.”

“Watch your footing,” added Barriss. “This entire vault is unsound.”

“Copy that, sir.”

While Gree and his men waded cautiously into the cistern, Barriss gathered the Force around her and leaped. One of the largest bits of debris was the wreckage of an ancient shipping container; wedged among what had to be centuries of detritus, it jutted far enough above the rest to serve as a useful vantage point.

And Barriss needed to be able to see. Something was… she had a bad feeling.

High above them, a long-forgotten floodwater drainage pipe had snapped in two. Foul whitewater surged from the breach, sending deafening echoes into the dark. Gree, she noticed, was directing his men well clear of the waterfall. Good—after years of that kind of sustained wear, the splashdown point would be hideously compromised. 

They were being cautious. They were avoiding the dangerous area. So why…

Something was wrong.

Barriss was so certain that something was wrong—so tersely aware of the hideous danger a plunge pool would represent in these conditions, so attentive and focused on its boundaries—that she didn’t sense the dianoga until it was far too late.

“Watch out!”

Gree’s warning rang out oddly muffled in the vast space. Blasterfire echoed and redoubled off the walls, but even as Barriss turned she could sense that his aim had been just slightly off—in the confusion of an unfamiliar debris field, in the dark, aiming for something as ill-defined as a tentacle, how could it have been otherwise—

The dianoga squealed in pain. The tendril that had wrapped itself stealthily around Jek’s midsection—singed, but not severed—rather than releasing, tightened —

His vocoder was broadcasting in the clear. The electronic distortion altered the sound of a thick, wet, choked-off scream as blood splattered over his comm pickup—but not enough. Not nearly enough.

There was no time to react. The tentacle unfurled itself with a contemptuous flick, Jek’s broken body flung into the dark to be retrieved later. For a brief moment—caught between the faint glow of Barriss's lightsaber and the wild flickering lights of clone headlamps, silhouetted by frantic blasterfire—the sheer size of the limb revealed itself, and Barriss's mind went blank.

That wasn’t…possible, that was madness, dianoga didn’t grow that large—

The tentacle struck again. Two more troopers—Barriss didn’t know them by name, had never served with them, couldn’t recognize their markings in the dark, but they’d come down here for her, in Luminara’s memory, and she didn’t even know their names—cried out as its massive weight crushed them. Rusted debris and heavy wreckage collapsed around them, pinning them under two feet of filthy water and several tons of unstable weight. 

One trooper gave a single gurgling cry and fell silent. The other kept screaming.

“Fall back!” bellowed Gree. He opened fire, brave but doomed, barely dodging the next devastating overhead blow. “Spread out! Grenades on my mark!”

“Don’t!” Barriss winced as her own voice cracked, too high, too weak in the open space. “Ignore the tendrils, find the body! Look for its eye!”

She wasn’t sure if any of them could hear her. Gree, explosive already primed, was racing forward—

The next tentacle whipped sideways. It caught him in the chest and sent him flying; Barriss flung out a hand and pulled, and even the Force barely slowed him enough to save his life. It couldn’t spare him a brutal, bruising impact with the cistern wall. His blaster flew out of his grip, clanging off into the debris. Half a second later, his own electric grenade detonated between his feet.

A dianoga—especially an unspeakably ancient dianoga like this one, half-mad from isolation and the king of its domain—could fight on a half-dozen fronts at the same time. Barriss's troopers—her master’s men, the only friends she had left—were screaming everywhere in the dark, dying around her. But Gree was alive and helpless, immobile in black sludge, paralyzed by his own weapon, and Barriss—

Could not guard all of them at once. Had to make a choice. 

A mud-colored tendril reared back, a lance of flesh that would pulverize the Commander on impact, and struck faster than anything that massive had any right to move. Barriss was faster.

Just barely.

Sapphire light blazed in the dark. Barriss had time to register the sensation of piercing relief and hot blood, gushing across her face; then the tendril she’d just severed whiplashed and knocked her off her feet, flailing wildly in its death throes. 

The limb alone outweighed her at least three times over; she never had a chance. She went off her feet in an instant, bounced off a rusted-out starship engine block, and was only barely able to close her mouth and eyes before she went under.

The water that closed over her head was viscous; more slime than fluid, slippery and thick, and it reeked of rot. She writhed, stomach heaving—her throat flooded with bile but she forced herself to swallow, if she opened her mouth down here she would never stop vomiting, she would drown convulsing with it, retching her guts out—

The Force slipped from her grasp as if it, too, were coated with sewer grime—she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stand, couldn’t tell up from down through her panic—

She refused to die like this —

Her nails dug into the mucous-slick surface of the tentacle. It was pinning her to something disgusting, but something disgusting and solid. She couldn’t get her feet under her but she wedged her shoulder against the submerged wreckage, used the leverage and shoved.

The wound in her side—oh, stars, she had an open wound —ripped wider still, and she broke the surface screaming.

Somewhere in the dark, Ahsoka Tano stumbled to a halt.

Ahsoka was lost.

She’d never been this deep before. Not in this part of Coruscant—not in any part of Coruscant. She was navigating entirely by the compass in her comm unit, trying to loop her way back to a sector she could recognize. Up and down didn’t matter, she could worry about verticality later. 

There were six precious, miraculously-undamaged power cells in her knapsack. It would take less than ten minutes to install them on the Twilight; she didn’t need much of a head start. She just had to…

She just had to lose the Jedi.

It was easier, if she thought of it like that. Lose the Jedi. Ditch the tail and go home. As if running back to Aurra had ever been going home. It was still easier if she thought of it that way, if she didn’t let herself think that it was Barriss —just a Jedi Knight, not her friend, not anymore.

She hadn’t known the cistern would be here. She hadn’t known where that tunnel connected when she scrambled into it. She hadn’t known—she didn’t expect there to be—

She hadn’t even sensed the dianoga.

She didn’t know it would be there. She couldn’t have known it would be there. She hadn’t led them to it on purpose.

This wasn’t—it wasn’t her fault—

“Get back—” Barriss gasped. “Back in the tunnels! It won’t follow us out of the water—!”

It was a thin hope. Dianoga were semi-amphibious; a specimen this big could survive more than long enough to pursue and kill them. It was all the hope they had. Barriss couldn’t—

Barriss couldn’t fight like this. Not in these conditions, not badly injured and exhausted, not unable to use her saber hand. Not while simultaneously trying to protect and coordinate clone troopers with no battlefield experience to aid her. Not—

Not—alone. Not without her master.

The Council had made a mistake. They’d made a mistake, she’d been knighted too early, a true Jedi wouldn’t have failed this badly—

The troopers didn’t respond to her order. She would be stunned if a single one of them had been able to hear her.

Another tendril lashed out. She slashed—sloppy, sloppy, younglings could do better—and managed to duck under it. Behind her Gree was stirring faintly, sprawled over a deadly lattice of rusted industrial droid bodies, trying and failing to get to his feet. He couldn’t run; she wouldn’t leave him. She chose to die, at least, with that much honor.

Another strike, black-on-black in the lightless cistern. She dodged badly, flailing, blind. Half of the troopers’ headlamps had been smashed, half of those remaining were merely bulbs burning sightlessly around a corpse, discarded in the distance; one still glowed unseeing beneath the water, where its owner had drowned screaming while Barriss fought to save her own life. 

The Force was sour with her own despair, her world narrowed to what little she could see by the burning stripe of her lightsaber. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe from the pain and the stench, could barely move. She couldn’t last—

The next whistling blow landed directly over the hole in her side.

Pain shot through her like lightning. Her fingers jerked open of their own accord, nerveless and numb from the impact; her lightsaber vanished and went dark. The tentacle wrapped around her midsection and she had seen this kill, borne witness, not like that not like this —she knew better but reached for the Force anyway, pushing back as the wet muscle seized in a sharp vicious motion as if to pop her— 

It was fear, raw animal terror, it was the furthest thing from meditation it was a howling wail in the Force and it could not be sustained. Some tiny part of her knew she needed her lightsaber back to survive this—needed to call it to her, now —but every muscle trembled with the effort of holding the dianoga at bay. If her focus slipped for even an instant…

She felt the Force surge anyway. Felt the whisper as that tiny precious shard of living kyber responded. As it flew through the air, singing sweetly— away from her—?

Blue fire blazed in living light, the dianoga shrieked, and the tentacle around Barriss's chest released her with prejudice. She collapsed to her knees, shaking, clutching her side, and blinked tears of panic from her eyes in a desperate attempt to figure out what—

Ahsoka’s profile—familiar, always, even in near-total darkness—punched what little breath she still had out of her.

Ahsoka Tano had never held a lightsaber in her life. It showed; she wielded the weapon at arm’s length, inexpert and inelegant, swinging it like a club. But her aim had been true. The dianoga was reeling, backpedaling wildly enough to expose its saw-toothed underside, a burning gash sliced through its mantle. Finally, Barriss could see its bulbous central eye emerging from the water. All its attention was on Ahsoka now, hissing and roaring, and Ahsoka no longer had the element of surprise on her side.

She bared sharp teeth and hissed right back, swung Barriss's lightsaber again, and this time it actually snatched its probing tentacle away; Ahsoka had hurt it, and now it was not merely angry but afraid.

Ahsoka spun the hilt in her hand and lunged.

It had to be pure adrenaline. Barriss had been right—Ahsoka was exhausted. Close up it was clear even in blurry flashes that she was pale and clammy, footwork heavy and uncoordinated. She dodged and weaved, swinging wildly, driving for the eyestalk. It was brave, noble, reckless.

Undeserved. She’d been free…

It ended quickly. It had to.

The dianoga tried another devastating overhead slam; Ahsoka, acting on untrained reflex, met the attack with an upward stab instead of a cutting slice. It saved her life; the tentacle flinched back from the killing blow as it impaled itself on the blade. But the motion ripped Barriss's lightsaber from Ahsoka’s hands. Unarmed, she was forced to scramble backward and tripped over—something, there were ten thousand options, she might just have slipped on a patch of mold—

Rearing fully out of the water, the dianoga gave a gutteral roar. The sound echoed and redoubled off the cistern walls; the wounded tentacle coiled and flexed, hard, and Barriss felt her saber casing shatter in its grip. Ahsoka scrambled back as it sloughed itself over the rubble in pursuit, teeth flashing in what little light existed. Ahsoka pressed back into a chunk of collapsed ceiling, hands balled into fists.

She pulled —

Barriss hadn’t felt the tethers Ahsoka had been setting up in the Force, the connection she’d been forming to her surroundings as she danced around the creature. Those connections showed themselves now. It started with that abandoned shipping container, creaking over agonizingly slowly; but then gravity took hold, Ahsoka coaxing a mountain of rebar and mildewed engine blocks into tumbling just so—

Too late, the dianoga turned to see its death. The mountain collapsed on top of it, piercing its hide in five hundred places, fifty tons of rotten duracrete and ferrosteel crushing its body to pulp. Ahsoka let go her hold on the Force and rolled .

She wasn’t going to make it—

It seemed to take an eon for the cacophony to fade. But when finally the only noise in the cistern was once again the roar of falling water, the death Barriss was searching for in the Force never came.

Somewhere in the dark, a shuddering breath. A splash, a pause. Then, rasping, a whispered, “Kriffing hell.”

Barriss made a choked noise that was not a laugh. Ahsoka’s wheezing was ragged, too loud in the echoing space; Barriss could feel phantom tremors through the Force as adrenaline and exhaustion washed along their bond. For a long moment they stood there, listening to one another breathe. Sensing their own hesitation. Neither of them able to speak. There was too much to be said, and no words in any language to say it…

Gree’s headlamp snapped live with jarring, brutal suddenness.

“You…” His breathing was labored, but the whir of his salvaged weapon charging was perfectly clear. “You’re under arrest. In the name—of the Republic .”

Pinned under that blinding white light, Barriss could see the agonized despair etch itself into every line of Ahsoka’s face.

She moved without thinking.

Gree had set his weapon to stun—he had seen enough that she knew it without looking, knew it even without the Force. He would not shoot to kill, not after that rescue. That it would be a stun blast…didn’t matter. It was almost worse. Was a lifetime of isolation and suffering fair recompense for a single terrible mistake? Was a lifetime of isolation and suffering fair recompense for anything? And if any Jedi could answer yes to that question, could there be hope left for the Order?

Gree’s finger was on the trigger when she stepped between them.

“Commander Offee—!”

Barriss's eyes watered. She forced herself not to look away. From here—from this end of the barrel—Gree was a faceless entity. Nothing but plastoid armor and a deadly blaster, bathed in searing impersonal light.

She’d rattled him. But after a moment, he shook himself. 

“Sir,” he told her. “Commander Offee, get out of the way. That’s an order, sir.”

Quietly, she said, “I’m not a soldier, Gree.”

His armor clicked as he settled himself more firmly. “Sir,” he said. “This is a stun blast, and you’re unarmed. I will shoot through you. Don’t make me do it.”

Barriss…stilled. Felt something fall away, a weight she hadn’t realized was pulling her off-balance, dragging her off from center. She reached into her left sleeve.

“Get out of the way, sir!”

Barriss tried to find his eyes through the helmet, behind the floodlights. Slowly, she moved into a guard position and breathed.

Weak and ragged, wavering, uncertain but pure, Luminara Unduli’s lightsaber bloomed between them.

He wasn’t going to listen.

Ahsoka knew that. Knew it in her bones. She’d felt it too many times before. The clone commander hated her too much. She could feel his fury, his grief, the red-black vengeance in a cold boil in the Force between them.

He was going to shoot.

There were…worse ways to die than this.

She’d almost made it. If Ahsoka could have called on the Force again…but she was spent. She could feel the power cells humming quietly at her back. They would have gotten her across the planet, and with space to breathe she would have had a chance. She’d made it that far. She could be proud of that much. At least…at least it had been her choice. At least feeling Barriss fade to black-ice silence in the Force wouldn’t be her last memory. At least she’d gotten one last fight. At least Aurra wouldn’t get a chance to say I told you so …

There was something wrong with Unduli’s lightsaber. The blade jumped like firelight, with a weird electric crackle every few seconds. Its new master held it quietly, a guard and not a dueling stance, angled across her body where she stood over Ahsoka. It wouldn’t…do any good. Not against that kind of single-minded determination. But she wasn’t moving.

The clone sighed, long and regretful, distorted and fuzzy through his helmet mic.

And then…stiff, hesitant, impossible …he lowered the blaster.

“Come on, boys.” For the first time, Ahsoka thought a clone sounded old. “Let’s…pack it in.” A pause. Then: “General’s orders.”

Barriss’s hand spasmed in what looked like pain. The damaged lightsaber lowered as well, but didn’t deactivate.

The clones were sounding off, gathering the helmets of the fallen. It was a low background buzz as Ahsoka struggled in the scrap heap, pushing up on shaking arms until she could sway vaguely upright.

Barriss hesitated, took a deep breath, and followed the clones without looking back.

Ahsoka let her.

There wasn’t anything she could say. In the eyes of the Republic she was still a murderer, a Jedi-killer. But—but in the Outer Rim, it would give her a reputation. However unearned. Maybe even enough of a reputation to shake loose of Aurra’s shadow. If she could make it.

The power cells shifted against her back, warm and stable. She could make it. 

It was going…it was going to be hard. It was going to be hard and painful and she was going to have to live with it forever. Coruscant was the first place that had felt like freedom, and she could never come back here. Never. The Republic wouldn’t give her another chance. But she could find her way back to the Twilight, now. She didn’t have to use it to go crawling back to Aurra. Maybe, someday, she could build a life.

She stumbled up the shipping container, spotting the distance in the dark rather than trust the Force when she was this exhausted. In the harsh shadow of the clone troopers’ headlamps she couldn’t…quite…

The light shifted, just enough. She couldn’t see all of the cistern, but she could just barely make out a safe drop to the other side.

Something, a whisper, made her turn back.

Barriss was waiting, her stuttering lightsaber raised to throw the beam a little further. After a long moment, faintly visible across the shadowy gap, she gave a tired smile.

Ahsoka swallowed, gave her a nod, and tried to smile back. Then, blinking rapidly, she turned, braced, and fell into the drop. 

Barriss held the light until Ahsoka was long since clear.