Solna felt five threats against Rassi diminish to four and then three. Three assassins was still plenty to end her friend’s life though and Solna wasn’t sure how she was going to stop them all.

Before she could though, they ran out of time.

Not her. Not Rassi. Not even the assassins.

All of them. Everyone in the Silent Enclave had missed that their brief window of safety had closed early.

The Death Shadows were in the camp.

Solna froze.

Just like everyone else.

Still.

Silent.

The instinct of a prey animal when it was caught with only the barest hint of cover, but taken to a supernatural level.

No one breathed. The wind which blew with the Death Shadows arrival carried the sound of no whispers, no creaking bones, and no heartbeats. 

It was an unsustainable state. 

Like one of their dances, there was only so long anyone could hold themselves in perfect stillness and silence. Some few might have the control and determination to go beyond the point of no return and avoid the Death Shadows by carrying themselves into a silent death, but a far larger number were going to break and gasp for breath long before then.

And then things would get loud.

From freeze to flight, people were going to scream. They were going to run. 

And they were going to die anyways.

Solna could feel a creeping miasma in the Xah, the curdled blood stench of lives cut short and a beckoning abyss.

The Lich’s tomb had felt like that. 

Death hadn’t come yet, but the unnatural carnage that awaited them would birth a nexus to the Dark Side which would last until all memory of the Silent Enclave had long since faded from the galaxy.

Rassi stepped forward and Solna bit back the urge to scream.

She could not let Rassi be the first one to fall.

But that wasn’t Rassi’s plan.

Solna saw that and stepped forward with her, raising the crystal she carried which matched the one Rassi held aloft.

“Hey,” Rassi whispered, breaking the silence as effectively as a gong.

“We could use a hand now,” Solna said, every eye in the crowd on her.

From the crystals they carried, a nightmare poured forth. The dead of another world. Captured by cruelty and locked in suffering for an age and more.

Solna knew how it looked to the Silent Enclave. She could see and feel the terror in them rise as a new, more visibly horrifying threat rose from the black clouds that billowed from her hand and Rassi’s. She couldn’t blame them either. The Dead of Praxis Mar did not, for the most part, appear as they had in life, but rather stood as the centuries of torment had shaped them to be.

The Silent Enclave was missing something though.

The spectres before them were a nightmare, but who they were going to be a nightmare for was still an open question.

“There are a lot more of the Shadows here than at the tradeport,” Hendel the skeleton said.

“Can you hold them back? We just need a bit more time,” Rassi asked, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the crowd.

The Death Shadows had drawn back in a wave at the arrival of the Praxis Mar Dead, but like the tide, Solna could feel their presence swelling for a return.

“Don’t know for how long, but yeah, holding out against something horrible isn’t exactly unusual for us,” Hendel said and with a wave of his hands the spectres spread through the crowd breaking the silence with gasps of surprise and cries of fear.

That was all it took to bring the Death Shadows surging back.

The clash between the two, the Shadows and the Dead was not a silent one. Each screamed louder than Solna could have ever imagined was possible and in their own uniquely disquieting manner.

Where the Dead roared with centuries of pent up rage and suffering, the Shadows’ cries rang out from an unfillable well of agony and hunger.

“So what will it be?” Rassi asked, speaking not just to Jolu but the crowd as a whole. “Are you going to let someone here kill me, or are you going to listen?”

Incredibly, Solna felt two of the assassin’s rising to take their shot.

She didn’t want to kill anyone else, but letting Rassi be hurt wasn’t even vaguely a choice.

Come to me, she called to one of the Death Shadows and reached out with the Force, drawing it past the perimeter of the Dead.

With one hand, she caught a blaster bolt an inch from Rassi’s head – or really the Force did. She’d surrendered herself completely to it. The only future she wanted was one where they could be together. Whatever the Force needed from her, it could have.

As for the assassin?

“That one is yours,” she said aloud, pointing to the roof of a nearby shed the assassin had perched on.

The Death Shadow flowed around Solna, touching her face, her shoulder, her arms.

She understood it.

Her heart was not gentle. Or peaceful. She wasn’t willing to turn the Force on a living person, but she did want to see the assassin die.

Had she become something like the people who Expunged the Death Shadow?

Should it take her too?

The Death Shadow wasn’t precisely a sapient being. It was the void where a sapient should have been. What moved it wasn’t a desire from vengeance or rage at what had happened to it. It’s actions were somewhat mechanical in nature, guided only by the echoes of the person it had once been.

“Take me as well, if you need,” Solna said. “But don’t let any of these people hurt her.”

Solna would have been lying is she said the desire for vengeance which the Shadows were lacking didn’t burn bring in her heart, but more important than that, far more important, was that Rassi be protected, and she really would give anything to make sure of that it seemed.

It should have been terrifying, to feel the embrace of death tracing chill lines across her flesh, but there wasn’t any fear in Solna’s heart.

All she felt was proud.

“I don’t think so,” Rassi said, drawing the Death Shadow away from Solna and leaving everyone, even the Death Shadow stunned. “You’re not here for her. And taking anyone how you want to take them won’t fill in what’s missing from you.”

Solna was too slow and too stunned to stop the next blaster bolt. Part of her objected in outraged denial. How could anyone possibly be so stupid as to keep trying to kill a girl who was trying to save everyone?

The attack didn’t quite work out how the last assassin was expecting though.

Solna and Rassi hadn’t come to the Enclave entirely of their own volition. They’d been following the flow of the Force, and Rassi was still quite calmly centered within it.

With a wave of her hand, and a tidal wave of backing from the Force, she batted the blaster bolt away.

That, unfortunately, required releasing the Death Shadow.

Which hadn’t exactly heard the words Rassi had spoken.

It merely sensed someone who was exactly like the ones it hungered for.

The Shadow didn’t cross the distance between Rassi and the assassin. It merely took one step forward and then was beside the assassin.

What happened next was the sort of thing the adults in the crowd shouldn’t have seen, much less the children. Many of them knew the assassin. He’d been a member of the community for fifty years. He’d taught a number of them basic self defense techniques. He’d played Sabbac with others. He’d even won the yearly prize for Garsho Chili for the last five years.

And he’d been an unrepentant murderer.

The cruelty and callousness which lived inside him did not remain there for another instant longer though. Pretty much nothing did when the Death Shadow turned him completely inside out and, while the process started in the blink of an eye, it, sadly for everyone, did not finish that quickly.

From the pile of gore, the Death Shadow arose, larger and screaming louder than ever.

“I’ve got this,” Solna said, with no idea how she was going to hold back the Death Shadow she’d pulled through the ever weakening perimeter of the Praxis Mar Dead. “Tell them what they need to know.”

Rassi began speaking, uninterrupted by assassins at last, and told the gathered crowd about what the expunging rites really were. Her words would have fallen on hardened hearts and unfriendly ears but everyone in the Enclave could feel how the Xah flowed through her. 

Could feel her not as a corrupter of the Xah, but as the voice of the Xah, moving with it and moved by it but without exerting the pressure to move them which they had all grown unconsciously accustomed to whenever an Elder spoke.

When she turned to speaking of how they had been raised to have no defenses so they could be more easily controlled, a wave of denial and outrage arose. 

That was impossible, they couldn’t have been tricked like that! 

The Elders got their positions through experience and oneness with the Xah!

They had defenses! The Xah was their ally. Their ally they were taught never to call on. And which would decide when they lived and died as was natural. As was right!

The Xah which was screaming at them through Rassi to LIVE!

The Xah didn’t want them to die.

So why had the Elders left?

And why couldn’t they be like Rassi?

She wasn’t anything special? She was terrible at being silent! Everyone knew that! She wasn’t anything special, so why was the Xah speaking through her? 

And why wasn’t Honored Jolu speaking at all?

The rock solid denial began to crack under those doubts but the outrage didn’t diminish, it merely began to shift its target.

Which wasn’t an especially good thing from Solna’s point of view since the outrage seemed to be feeding the Death Shadows and driving them into an even  greater degree of frenzy.

It didn’t work out like you hoped, did it? The question wasn’t formed with words. Solna put it together from the empathy she was able to piece together for the Death Shadow.

It didn’t respond with understanding, but it did pause, which was good enough to begin with.

What’s consuming you, the emptiness, it wasn’t filled at all by that was it? She wasn’t blaming or admonishing the Shadow. She wanted to find a path forward for the two of them, because the same abyssal need to hurt people yawned wide in her heart as well.

The Death Shadow did not want empathy though. Or kindness. Or a path forward. It’s nature, all that was left to it, was to destroy.

But Solna had felt its touch. She knew the memories that were lost to it yearned for something more.

For rest. For peace. For justice.

It wanted to leave behind a world where it would never have existed.

What was isn’t what will be. We can learn from what happened. We can see what becomes of our actions. We can do better.

The thoughts called some of the Death Shadows memories back, but with them came the capacity to deny Solna as well.

People don’t learn. They repeat the same mistakes over and over. And what does it matter if they can do better, when what was done is unforgivable?

Everything changes. Even the things we think are forever. Even the worse things. Our power is in carrying the things we love with us, and learning from the things we leave behind.

Solna felt like she was hearing the words as much as speaking them.

Was the Xah speaking through her too? Or had she been thinking about her place and purpose since her old life was lost to her for more reasons than she’d known?

Somewhere in Rassi’s speech, she’d made her points and fallen silent.

So that everyone could watch what Solna was doing.

And could hear what she was saying.

The Death Shadow could not change. It was a crime of the past which could never be left behind.

You don’t need to be bound to the suffering others inflicted on you, Solna said. You don’t need to forgive them, but you can let them go and embrace the new life that’s before you.

Resting her hands on the Death Shadow’s chest, she let the Force flow through her and carry it away to where all the scattered fragments of the person it had once been were waiting for it.

It wasn’t the first time Nix had stood in the wreckage of a starship. If she was feeling honest, it wasn’t even the tenth time she’d stood in the wreckage of a starship that she’d been responsible for. 

All things told though, it wasn’t really so bad. She wouldn’t even need much of a crew to get the broken viewports structurally sound again. Maybe an hour and a couple lifter droids? The rest of the officers lounge was, maybe, a bit worse of a job. The security door was a complete loss, as was all the furniture and the entertainment electronics. Even the comm system was trashed and those could be a devil to route the cabling for on an Imperial ship.

“You don’t have to fix this place up you know,” Ayli said, shaking Nix from her reverie.

“Oh, I know,” Nix said. They’d been talking about not letting the Imperials escape, which Nix was still committed to, when the state of the room had caught her attention.

“Do you need to catch your breath? We’ve probably got a minute or two before they can scramble a combat squad here?” Ayli asked, as she checked Nix over for injuries.

Nix paused for a moment. Had she been injured? A quick internal inventory suggested she was okay, though she knew some hits were easy to overlook.

“I’m good,” she said. “And I don’t think we’ve got that long.”

The Force was oddly muffled – or not so oddly given who their principal opposition was – but Nix was still able to catch the warning it was yelling at her.

With a flick of her left hand, she asked the Force to collapse the ceiling in the hallway which lead past the officer’s lounge. With her right hand she grabbed Ayli and tossed them both to the floor in time to avoid a barrage of blaster fire.

“Oh I really hate those Enclave jerks,” Ayli said, reaching out to drop more of the hallway on the strike team.

“I know they’re here on the Star Destroyer, but I can’t pinpoint them any closer than that,” Nix said. “Probably not in the room with us but I can’t even swear to that.”

“They’re on the bridge,” Ayli said. “That strike team would only have been this close if someone warned the command staff to have them in place, and the only ones who could have sensed us coming are the Elders.”

“We can verify that,” Ravas said.

“Be careful. The Elders knows about you. If the Enclave has any techniques that can hurt you, they’ll be masters of them and they’ll be expecting you to show up,” Nix said, knowing that Ravas and Kelda were both more aware of that than she was.

“We may have a few surprises in store for them too,” Kelda said and sunk through the floor, with Ravas following her a moment a later.

“They’ll send another team soon. We should be elsewhere by then,” Ayli said, looking for any viable exits which were left since the ruin filled hallway didn’t offer much hope of egress.

“There should be a maintenance tunnel underneath the deck,” Nix said. “That would be great if we wanted to sneak up on them.”

“But, of course, we can’t sneak up on the Elders.” Ayli’s grumble showed that she’d grasped the largest problem they faced.

“The good news is I don’t think they’ve worked out the danger they’re in yet,” Nix said, letting her senses expand to take in the ship she was on.

In her mind the schematics of the Star Destroyer flickered into memory, overlaid with the sounds and smells and more distant sensations she was picking up. 

There was the sound of the docking bay, right where she expected it to be and so much farther than she would prefer. 

Far to the rear, the engines hummed with restrained power, the ships reserves being diverted to deflector arrays and its weapon systems. Nix was closer to the engines than the docking bay, which wouldn’t have been her preference and presented some annoying difficulties, but was also perhaps an opportunity in disguise.

“To be fair, if they have anything like a full crew, a Star Destroyer should have enough onboard combat squads that I think we’d have trouble even if the Elders weren’t here.” Ayli had her eyes closed as well but was searching for different things in the Force than Nix was.

“Normally, I’d say we could sneak past them, but maybe this time we want to get their attention and hold it.” Nix didn’t so much have a plan as the germ of an idea and what felt like the tacit reassurance from the Force that it would be with her to help make things work out.

Against a group of more numerous and more experienced Force users, a capital ship full of enemies, and the automated defense systems which Nix knew came standard on Imperial vessels.

Plus the unknown.

That was the real peril.

“I don’t think holding their attention will be a problem,” Ayli said. “For people who don’t like to use the Force, I can feel the Elders twisting the hell out of it.”

“They know better than to try that Expunging nonsense on us,” Nix said. “They don’t have anyone to sacrifice to it and even if they did, Dolon has to know that I’d cram it back down his throat.”

“It doesn’t feel like they’re doing that.” Ayli frowned and concentrated harder. “Whatever it is, they want to kill us, but it’s not a direct attack. It’s something else.”

“Let’s make them work a bit to get to us then,” Nix said. 

From what she could remember the next room over from the officer’s lounge was a supply closet and the room beyond that was where the officer’s living quarters began. The walls between the rooms were solid enough to serve as pressure vessels, but weren’t exactly battle hardened since any explosion which went off inside the Star Destroyer was likely too powerful for even a thick wall to contain.

The Force was not a explosion. It did not have an issue with reducing the two walls to a flying cloud of debris either though.

“You would have been so handy to have around when I was kid,” Ayli said.

“I was a menace as a child. You would have hated me.” Nix smiled at the thought of meeting Ayli years earlier though.

“I’m pretty sure I could never have hated you,” Ayli said.

The first officer’s quarters did not have an Imperial officer in residence. It did however have the officer’s belongings, including a few trophy weapons he’d hung on his wall.

“He left a charged Pogos-12 Blaster Rifle on his wall? I should shoot him just for failing basic Blaster safety,” Ayli said, helping herself to the rifle and one of the pistols which was hanging below it.

“Shame he hadn’t picked up one of those gatling rigs,” Nix said, scoring a pair of blaster pistols for herself. She didn’t recognize the make or model but the trigger and the blasty end of the barrel were obvious enough that she knew she could make them work. “Sali took me a range once to show off her armory. I love the gatling. So little need to aim.”

“She’ll probably be a bit worried about us, won’t she?” Ayli asked, leading Nix out in the only somewhat demolished hallway and trotting forward at a quick walk.

“Probably. We could have Kelda or Ravas let her know what we’re up to.”

“I don’t sense either them at the moment,” Ayli said, pausing well before the next intersection as though listening for something.

“I don’t either. The Elder’s cloak is growing thicker.” Nix wasn’t precisely worried about that but she wasn’t happy with it either. 

“They’re on the bridge,” Ravas said, appearing from behind them a bit more haggard than usual. “We can tell you that much based on the intensity of what they’re doing, but we can’t get in there to pinpoint precisely where they’re standing.”

“Or how many of them are there,” Kelda said, looking similarly fatigued.

“Which means there are definitely a few who are out hunting us on their own,” Nix said.

Whatever else they were, the Silent Enclave was also a training ground for assassins and the Elders were the ones who were the most intimately familiar with that. That their playbook began and ended with “runaway, hide, attack when the target is unaware, then hide again” was more or less a given.

“They won’t be alone,” Ayli said. “Basic operational security. You only send out a single asset when the asset of expendable. None of the Elders think of themselves like that. They’ll have a main group on the bridge focused on blocking out ability to sense anything, and a hit team of at least four out hunting for us.”

“Four?” Nix asked.

“Better to outnumber your foe if possible,” Ravas said. “Ideally, in their view, they’d bring along a pack of apprentices too as cannon fodder to distract you with.”

Nix felt a stabbing jolt from the Force and spun just in time to avoid a slash from a vibroknife with an odd red field around it.

There was an attack coming in from her other side which she could dodge at the expense of bumping into Ayli.

Who was a hair slower than Nix but was shifting away from a blade which was trying to slice her throat open and another which had awful intentions for her right kidney.

Sensing that a stab in her left side wasn’t going to be instantly fatal, Nix focused instead on tossing her first attacker through the nearest wall into one of the other officer quarters.

Fear for Ayli and anger at the (mostly) unprovoked attack made Nix’s fingers tingle with the old, bad lightning. 

But that wasn’t who she wanted to be.

The Force was with her whatever she choose, but that meant it was on her to choose to be better.

Being stabbed wasn’t fun. Especially not when the red field on the vibroblade turned out to be a shock charge that disabled all of Nix’s muscles and left her wide open for a follow up strike.

Ayli fared a little better, managing to dodge the neck strike entirely and avoid the kidney stab through Kelda’s intervention.

Ravas ensured that the followup strike Nix was about to be beheaded by never landed, tossing the assassin away into a pile with the one Nix had pushed.

And then Nix shot them.

It wasn’t exactly hard. Blasters are simple to use and quite accurate at short ranges. Typically they’re quite lethal too, but they do have one unusual drawback.

The Elders demonstrated that by parrying both bolts that Nix shot with their enhanced vibroblades.

Ravas deflected the bolts into the wall, but the point had been made. Random blaster fire was not going to win the battle.

Unless of course it was blaster fire from the opposition.

From around the left and right corners of the intersection two squads of Storm Troopers ran forward and took up firing positions.

Four on two odds had briefly shifted to four on four with Kelda and Ravas joining the fray, but that ratio had flipped against to be closer to twenty on four.

Nix did not like those odds.

Surrendering and playing for time later however was not an option.

The Storm Troopers opened fire and Nix felt Ravas hurl her into the same room the Elders had been tossed into. 

The Elders who were still quite active and getting to their feet.

Through the hole in the wall, Nix could see Ayli and Kelda deflecting the blaster fire with the Force but a lot of bolts were only being slowed for a moment. That was enough for Ayli to dodge them but Nix could see Ayli’s strength draining with each bolt she held back.

This wasn’t a fight they could win, and Nix wasn’t sure if it was one they could even survive.

Rassi shouldn’t have been able to  feel the crowd’s mood shifting. She’d been around ‘loud’ Force users for long enough that her sense of the subtle, shifting currents of the Xah which the Silent Enclave wasn’t quite able to suppress completely should have been lost to her.

The bone deep revulsion which swept over the Enclave in response to Solna saving Rassi’s life was just as hidden as it ever would have been. If anything, the Enclave was being more silent than usual, given the unifying threat of the Death Shadow’s impending arrival. 

So why could Rassi feel not only their disgust and horror at Solna’s use of the Force, but the terror which lay underneath it?

There was too much there to process in between one breath and the next. Too much for Rassi, and too much for Solna.

But Rassi understood.

“It would be best if no one else tried to kill me, I think,” she said in a steady, even voice.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid too. There was fear, and anger, and pain within her, but she was bigger than any of that and strong enough to keep herself open to the world.

After so many years of trying to cram herself into a mold she was never going to fit, and a lifetime of denying the biggest part of herself, Rassi found that the lines she was trespassing beyond had never been for her protection, and beyond them lay the ally she’d been pushing away as hard as she could.

“Leave. You are no longer part of this Enclave,” Honored Jolu said.

And Rassi felt the emotions even Jolu wasn’t able to hide from her.

Fear of a truth long hidden coming to light

Fear of the oncoming tragedy which was inevitable and absolute.

The same long practiced and societally mandated disgust as the rest of the Enclave.

And in a tiny corner, concern for Rassi and Solna, who stood in a unique sort of peril in the midst of the impending apocalypse. That one would have been nice, but it was so small and easily swept aside by other emotions that it was expended in the offer to allow them to leave.

Still, it was oddly comforting that at least one her primary mentors had harbored some love for her.

“No, we’re not,” Rassi said. “And neither are the rest of you. The Enclave ended when the Elders betrayed you.”

Her words weren’t enough to hold back the crowd. They’d never respected her, must less loved her. To them, the loss of her from the numbers was either a relief or of no consequence whatsoever. Under the circumstances, they should have broken free from the gossamer thin social restraints and torn both Rassi and Solna to pieces.

But restraint held.

Not because Rassi was bigger than they were. For all her physical size, she was still only one person, and a child at that.

The Force however was her ally, and no matter how tightly the members of the Silent Enclave closed down their senses, none of them could miss that.

Rassi wasn’t invulnerable, or omnipotent, but in that moment everyone in the Enclave could sense the Xah was moving as fast as a crashing river and that Rassi was the one at the apex of its wave.

“The Elders have gone to seek our allies,” Jolu said. “So that we will not stand alone against the corruption which menaces us.”

Rassi noticed Jolu’s careful word choice. Jolu could have used any number of convenient shadings of the truth, or even outright lies. She could have explicitly branded Rassi and Solna as corrupt – the crowd already unquestionable believed that. Jolu could have dispensed with all of the and simply ordered the crowd to expel Rassi and Solna if that was what she wanted, either via her authority as an ‘Honored’ Elder or through the more typical means of a Xah-assisted command.

“The Elders have gone to hide alone,” Solna said. “The allies they seek are allies for themselves. They know the Death Shadows are here. If they’d meant to defend you they would have stayed.”

Rassi felt another, much more subtle killing intent rising.

From behind a door in a building off to the side of the crowd.

And another from the back of the alleyway they’d come down.

And another from within the crowd.

The older assassination team.

The one which had already lost one member, but that wasn’t why they were hesitating.

They needed the crowd to break in their favor.

Because they were guilty.

Oh so very guilty.

Rassi smiled.

The crowd was going to break, but it was going to break them if she had anything to say about it.

Part of what gave her hope in that regards was that Solna was speaking the truth, and the Enclave knew it. The Elder’s leaving them in their time of deepest need had sent the entire community in denial but it was all too clear what the Elders were doing since there’d been no speeches explaining the plan, and no command to hold out until reinforcements arrived.

The root of the Enclave’s true terror wasn’t the presence of some unwanted children, or even the attack which was sure to come from the Death Shadows. It was that after centuries of the society being shaped into utter dependence on the central figures of their Elders, they had been abandoned.

Rassi had felt the despair Tovos and his crew were drowning in when they believed they’d become ‘Lost’, and a similar lake of misery was washing away the underpinning which everyone, even ‘Honored’ Jolu, had built their lives on.

Rassi knew she could save them from the Death Shadows.

But she couldn’t save them from the change that was to come.

And that was going to be her best revenge.

She didn’t want to kill the people who’d made her life miserable, or even watch them die. She wanted them to live, and understand what they’d done, and do the hard work it would take to become better people. It wasn’t going to be pleasant for them but it was going to be a chance, and that was what they deserved.

“If our doom is inescapable, then it’s better that some part of us is preserved,” Jolu said.

That rallied the Enclave a bit. Rassi could feel a thread of defiance rise in the hearts around her. If the Xah had sealed their fate, the Silent Enclave could still choose how they would meet that fate.

It was noble.

And brave.

And just what they’d been taught to do all their lives.

Accept what someone tells them to do, with no thought of their own. 

Except people are funny. Rassi had developed a capacity for independent thought mostly because she’d had to question every order that was given to her, since she didn’t seem to be able to carry out any of them like people wanted her to. From the swirl of emotions in the Enclave, she wasn’t the only one who was able to think on her own either.

Some, far fewer than was apparent, really believed and shut off all thought. They were the most fragile and terrified of all the Enclave’s people. And the ones Rassi doubted she’d be able to reach. They’d chosen to be what they were willing.

The rest though, the majority of the Enclave in fact? They wanted to live.

A noble, brave end might have seemed better than dying as the terrified victims they actually were, but they were ready to accept a different fate.

All she had to do was make them believe.

Well, make them believe and survive the assassins who had a vested interest in keeping the Enclave docile and ready to sacrifice themselves since the tension coming from the people with a killing intent towards her suggested that they knew the best time to make an escape was when the Elders had taken off and since they’d missed that window they were going to have to settle for the second best option of fleeing while the Death Shadows were busy ripping apart the rest of the Enclave.

How shocking it was that the ‘Defenders of the Enclave’ who’d only been unique in that they took the lives of sapients had managed to lose their empathy for anyone else. Certainly no one could seen that coming.

“The Elders are coming back,” someone in the crowd called out. “They told us they would!”

“Did they?” Rassi asked, the Force carrying her voice into the hearts of everyone present. “What did they say – exactly? Do you remember speaking with them? Or is it just the ghost of a memory? An impression they left you with?”

She waited a moment, letting her words and the truth behind them seek out the cracks in the shields of denial which had been raised against her.

The assassin in the crowd twitched. He’d been taken in by the Elders too, in his heart, despite his head knowing all too well that the Elders would never make it back in time.

Unfortunately for Rassi, that did not awaken a community spirit within him. If anything, it made the killing intents she felt grow sharper and more urgent.

“No. No. I spoke with them?” a woman near the front asked more than asserted.

“Look at those memories,” Solna said. “Are those words you heard through your ears, or through the Xah?”

<The Xah does not lie to you>, Rassi said, reaching out with the Force to speak directly into the minds of the crowd. <But the people who use it can.>

Everyone, even Solna, flinched at that.

There was ‘corrupting the Xah’ with an instant’s reflexive action, and there was using the Force with a sustained intent and a communion with it so deep that no one who’d been raised in the Enclave could ever mistake what Rassi was doing.

It wasn’t the Evil Jedi’s ‘Mind Control’ they’d been warned about. When Rassi spoke to them through the Xah, her words and the Force were in harmony the way few of them had ever been with the Xah in their lives.

“What…what was that?” a children asked.

“You deserve to know the truth,” Rassi said.

“You do not know the truth,” Jolu said, desperation leaking past her shields like in torrents.

And she did have shields.

Rassi had never known that before.

But it made sense. The Elders weren’t the perfect bastions of self control they claimed to be. They didn’t need to be. What they needed was to be secured against the manipulations of the other Elders, and that control in turn allowed them to simply shut off their emotions from the Xah.

“I know why the Death Shadows are coming for us,” Rassi said. “And I know what we’ve done that drives them, and what we did that created them.”

That was the line she shouldn’t have crossed.

At least from the assassin’s point of view.

Five spikes of killing intent snapped from believing they needed to kill her, to knowing they had to do so immediately.

Solna erupted with a killing intent of her own and stepped in front of Rassi, bringing her hands up in a warding gesture.

Rassi let the Force flow through her and offer her the guidance she needed.

Killing the assassins wasn’t in harmony with the Force. It arose from life, to kill with it was to turn the Force on itself.

She wasn’t going to need to do that though.

And Solna wasn’t either.

Rassi could feel the paths before them, and could feel how many there were which ended with them in a better place.

All she had to do was choose which guidance the Force offered which aligned with her heart.

One of the killing intents vanished.

Another startled in surprise, panicked and went silent as well.

From the second floor of the building on her left, she caught a glimpse of the Horizon Knight Monfi slipping into the shadows as an assassin crumpled unconscious but still alive to the floor.

Rassi’s ally was the Force, but it wasn’t the only ally she’d brought with her.

Ayli’s calm had nothing to do with her Force training. When a ship is catastrophically damaged, an experienced combat pilot’s reaction is to remain calm. It’s how one survives the experiences required to become an experienced combat pilot.

Surviving the loss of half the shuttle she was piloting, along with, unfortunately, the shuttle’s entire drive system did present some unique challenges to her survival though.

“Hang on,” she said, as though she or Nix had any choice in the matter.

They’d been knocked into a spin and were, from what Ayli could sense, hurtling towards the Star Destroyer the Silent Enclave’s Elders were on. That was adjacent to good news, but it was where the good news ended.

Rather than the docking bay Ayli had intended to land in, it looked like they were probably going to collide with the super structure, likely in some particularly armored spot where the Star Destroyer wouldn’t even notice the impact.

“Damn it,” Ravas said. “This should have been fixed.”

“It was,” Nix said. “We’re not dead yet.”

Which suggested several questions to Ayli. First, why weren’t they dead?

The answer there was fairly obvious. The shuttle they were flying was a pirate’s shuttle and Sali was used to being attacked often enough that her equipment was top notch. The blast which had exploded the back half of the shuttle had done tremendous damage but the shuttle was designed to survive that sort of thing, with pressure locks that sealed the ship into five independent compartments so that the loss of one wouldn’t endanger the rest, to an engine compartment which vented explosions outward rather than allowing them to obliterate the shuttle itself.

Had she been flying a cheap corporate shuttle, Ayli was reasonably certain she and Nix would be dead already.

Possibly.

The other major question that arose in her mind was why the Force hadn’t warned her of the incoming shot that wrecked her ship.

There the only answer Ayli could find to that question relied on intuition more than reason, but in dealing with the Force that seemed like the best path anyways. Intuition told her that the Force hadn’t warned her of the shot that disabled her craft because it was busy warning her of all the shots which would have atomized it.

The Force was a powerful shield, but all shields had their limits.

And it hadn’t failed to warn her of any immediately deadly attacks.

Not yet anyways.

Aly was keenly aware that the limits of her awareness were significant and that the Jedi Order had been wiped out en masse by regular soldiers with regular blasters when they were distracted and the conditions were right for the Force’s warning to be missed or misinterpreted.

She wasn’t a Jedi, but she was reasonably sure that she could still die like they had.

Especially with the confounding presence of the Silent Enclave Elders and their ability to artificially smooth out the Force and dull the impression Ayli could receive from it.

As if in confirmation of that, Ayli reached out and found once more that she couldn’t feel the Force reacting to their predicament, or to the rest of the battle which was unfolding around them. The cloak the Elders were projecting was powerful enough that no ripples of the destruction where showing up at all.

“Impact in two minutes,” Ayli said, aware of her impending demise but ignoring that in favor of working the problem before her.

No thrusters was bad.

No hyper drive was also bad.

On the plus though, the shuttle weighed considerably less.

And the pressure compartment seals hadn’t been damaged so the bridge still had a standard atmosphere.

The spin was disorienting, but enough of the inertial dampening system’s remained online that it amount to a slight swaying sensation and the stars spiraling by outside the viewport.

“Nix we need to adjust our course, can you help me with that?” Ayli asked. Either answer would work for her, she just needed to know what resources she had available.

“Yes. I can stop our spin if you want?”

“No. Leave that alone. We look like debris at the moment. The Star Destroyer’s targeting systems won’t lock onto us.”

“Do you think we can land like this?” Nix asked, her eyes closed as she reach for a meditative state.

“Yes. This shuttle won’t be flying again afterward, but that’s pretty much a given at this point.”

“Fair enough. The docking bay then?”

“That was my thought, but they’ll have debris deflection systems in place there. I think we want to target one of the officer’s lounges.”

“Yeah, the viewing windows won’t be able to take the impact will they?” Because of course Nix was familiar with the design specs on a ship she’d never flown on.

“I’m hoping for that, but I’ll trust my mechanic if she thinks otherwise,” Ayli said.

“They can deploy barriers over the viewing windows, but those have a habit of sticking because they’re not used often and they need to be maintained from the outside,” Nix said. “There will be a pressure lock on the door into the lounge that’ll seal if the windows are breeched but if we don’t slow down we should crash through that too.”

“Good. That means the only trick we need to worry about is surviving the crash,” Ayli said.

“Let us worry about that,” Ravas said and Kelda nodded in agreement.

As plans went, it wasn’t the worst one Ayli had been a part of. Under normal circumstances, it was one that would absolutely prove to be fatal but then Ayli had never been in anything that could be considered ‘normal circumstances’.

She nodded her agreement and signaled that she was ready to begin by taking her hands off the now-useless controls.

Reaching out to the Force was still a unique experience for Ayli. Unlike Nix for who it was merely a conscious awareness of something she’d been doing all her life, Ayli’s relationship with the Force held so many vestiges of other people in it. From Ravas who she’d absorbed her initial skill with the Force from, to the Jedi of old who’d left their imprint on Ravas, to the echoes of the people who’d crafted the various holocrons she’d spent a year learning from.

Somewhere in there too was the tumult which she’d labeled as her own Dark Side. It seemed to only appear as a separate entity within Dark Side nexuses, and Ayli knew she should be concerned that she could compare and contrast the feel of multiple locations which were overwhelmed by the Dark Side, when the overwhelming majority of the galaxy went their whole lives without visiting a single one.

In a startlingly un-Jedi-like turn, Ayli found she’d developed a fondness for her Dark Side though. She wasn’t going to listen to it of course. Her Dark Side wasn’t exactly a bastion of reason after all. It did want to protect her though.

Which was probably why, despite the beating it had sustained, it was beginning to thrash around restlessly the closer they got to the Star Destroyer.

Ayli breath in, held it for a moment, and released it slowly.

She was going to be okay.

She and Nix had this.

And Ravas and Kelda where here to help them.

She wasn’t alone.

And the people she was with were more than capable of protecting themselves.

Except her memories were all too ready with a full sensory vid and audio show of the times when very competent people in the Rebellion had still failed to save both the people they were trying to protect and themselves.

There were no guarantees in life.

No safety.

Her Dark Side made its best arguments, resurrecting old fears and older heart breaks.

Ayli breathed slowly again.

Her fears were old companions. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye to any of them yet – they’d saved her life more often than she could count – but she was also beyond letting them overwhelm her.

The Force felt both the conflict within her and the moment she moved past it. It was there for her as either a storm of lighting to lash out with or the gentle hand she needed to guide the remains of the shuttle with. 

On the other side of shuttle, the Force responded to Nix’s request for a similar helping hand and together Nix and Ayli gently guided the shuttle on its path.

Right into a cataclysmic collision with a wall of glassteel.

The impact happened too fast for Ayli to fully perceive, even with her Force heightened senses. One instant they were tumbling through the space with the Star Destroyer looming ever large and the next there was a fading echo of a titanic crash and emergency klaxons screaming everywhere.

Ravas and Kelda both sagged in place as the wreckage of the shuttle sloughed off the shield they’d conjured into place to protect their two living charges.

“Let’s not do that again,” Ravas said.

“We said that last time too,” Kelda said.

“We really had people fooled when they called us quick learners didn’t we?” Ravas asked.

“Oh good,” Nix said. “The atmosphere shield wasn’t destroyed!”

Ayli followed Nix’s glance over to the gaping hole in the Star Destroyer’s hull where a thin, flickering forcefield was keeping almost all the atmosphere that remained in the room from venting into space.

“If they’re smart they’ll turn that off right now,” Ayli said. “Which means we’ve got plenty of time.”

Underestimating Imperial Intelligence wasn’t a terribly safe thing to do, but Imperials tended too be so certain of their own superiority that they routinely made the most idiotic mistakes imaginable.

Which was great.

Right up until they didn’t make the mistake you were counting on.

“We need to move,” she said.

“I still can’t find the Elder. They’re too well hidden. Do we have an alternate destination in mind?” Nix asked.

“Yes. The Bridge.”

“That’s going to be well guarded won’t it?” Nix asked.

“Most secure part of the ship.”

“Ah, and also where the fleet leadership will be.” Nix had grasped Ayli’s intent but Ayli felt that clarity was important.

“They don’t get to leave this ship.”

She expected some pushback on that. As a Rebel plotting the murder of an Imperial Officer was part of the days that ended in ‘y’. She wasn’t a Rebel anymore though. In fact she very much wanted to put that chapter of her life behind her, but she knew her ghosts would never forgive her if she let the cancer that was an Imperial command staff remain in the galaxy.

In place of pushing back on Ayli’s plan for bloody homicide though, Nix simply chuffed a little laugh.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” she said.

“What do you mean? You’re okay with this?” Ayli wasn’t sure anything about this was okay, and Nix was one of the least bloodthirsty people she knew.

“No, no, this situation sucks. The only good thing is that I’m not in it alone,” Nix said.

“But you see why eliminating them is necessary?” Ayli asked, again unsure if murder really was necessary. Her Rebel heart said yes, but the Force…

What was the Force saying?

“Not so much necessary as inevitable,” Nix said. “It was our idea to come here, but I’ve been following the Force like I usually do and if the Force decided it was going to send us four to deal with this, I think it’s pretty much done with both the Elders and these Imperial buttwipes.”

“So you think the Force is going to kill them for us?” Ayli asked, not sure if that was better or worse than what she had in mind.

“I think I’m willing to play it by ear, and if my wife says the Imperials don’t get to leave her, then I know several methods of making sure that happens.”

Nix wiggled her fingers and Ayli saw tiny but highly worrying sparks dance from digit to digit.

Solna was out of time. Her people, if she still wanted to call them that, were out of time. So why, she had to ask herself, was everything moving so slowly?

Sister Zindiana had dropped her, Rassi, and Tovos’ crew off outside the private landing facility which was serving as the Silent Enclave’s encampment and blasted back off to get Queen Saliandrus into space where she could help save Nix and Ayli.

Ravas and Kelda were gone as well, though they thought they might be able to make it back again if Solna or Rassi called for them, even if the Enclave’s cloak was still in effect.

That left Solna and her team with a clear view of their destination and nothing holding them back from approaching it.

“Waiting is going to get people killed,” she said, keeping her annoyance and impatience from her voice.

“The guards have arc-repeaters and thermal detonators,” Tovos said.

“They’re expecting a fight,” Rassi said. “They can feel the Death Shadows that are coming in the same as we can.”

“You’re right about them being ready for a fight,” Osdo said. “But arc-repeaters and thermal detonators won’t damage a Death Shadow. And they know that.”

“You think they’ve sensed us?” Solna asked.

“They saw the ship land,” Tovos said. “They know someone is here.”

“But we don’t greet strangers with heavy firepower,” Rassi said. “It makes too much noise.”

“We do when we know they’re hostile,” Tovos said. “The Enclave is on lockdown and they’re all bound into the cloaking field. I don’t know of any plans that call doing both.”

Solna considered that for a moment and tried to clear her mind. Worry was not going to see her through this. 

“You’re right,” she said. “Those are counterproductive to each other. The heavy weapons and high alert have to be making the cloak more porous. There’s too much killing intent with carrying them, and too many heightened emotions from just seeing one in someone’s hands.”

“And maintaining the cloak would have to require attention from everyone. Even the people who are handling the high explosives,” Rassi said. “So the question is, who are they expecting they’ll have to fight?”

Solna considered that too but Tovos found the answer before she did.

“Nix,” he said. “They’ve lumped her into the pile with ‘the Jedi’. When they sent us to bring her back, they told us to treat her exactly like one, including killing her before she could use her powers if she resisted. We never made it back but a strange ship shows up and takes off? They have to think that she broke us and tracked the Enclave down for revenge.”

“Then shouldn’t we walk in there right now and show them that you’re okay?” Rassi asked. “I mean they won’t want to see Solna or me, but you folks are still in good favor, right?”

Solna looked over the other former-Enclave members and saw varying looks of regret or disgust at Rassi’s statement.

“They left without us. Twice,” Osdo said.

“If we show back up now, without Nix in shackles, they’re going to know that we’re not on their side anymore,” Felgo said.

“They want us to be Lost?” Polu asked, his eyes pleading for the lie that his mind would no longer accept.

“They want us to be dead,” Yanni said, her voice quiet and still for a moment before she carried on. “It’s simpler if we are. They don’t have to explain anything. They don’t have to wonder why we didn’t come back on time. They don’t have to justify leaving us.”

“And there’s no worry that we’ve learned their secrets,” Tovos said.

“That’s not going to change though, is it?” Rassi asked. Meaning that waiting wasn’t helping them.

“It won’t,” Osdo said. “But the guards should be about to switch shifts since it’s almost sundown.”

“And the new guards will be better?” Rassi asked.

“See Muktong up there? He’s the one who gave us our weapon’s training,” Felgo said. “If Queen Sali is right, he’s got to be on one of the other assassin teams.”

“Which means the five other guards with him are probably the rest of his team,” Tovos said.

“We’re going to have to deal with him soon or later though, right?” Rassi asked.

“I’d prefer later,” Yanni said. “Especially if it’s after the rest of the Enclave knows that we’re there.”

“Harder to make us disappear,” Polu said.

“They’re leaving,” Tovos said.

“And being replaced with Degu’s team.” Felgo said the name as though it were a curse.

“Degu’s probably the leader of the other assassin team, isn’t he?” Solna asked.

“Has to be,” Tovos said. “The one that’s just ahead of us according to Queen Sali.”

“Which means he’s got less experience than Muktong,” Osdo offered hopefully.

“But still more than we do,” Felgo said.

“We’re out of time,” Tovos said, his eyes closed and his hands folded together in front of his face. “We’ve been out of time, but the Death Shadows will be here in minutes. We have to go.”

He rose from behind the embankment they’d crept up to and began to walk forward with purpose and a certainty that had to be at last half illusionary in Solna’s estimation. His team wasn’t put off by that though and rose to follow him.

“Let us deal with Degu and his people,” Osdo said. “You two need to get to whoever’s in charge now and tell them what they need to do.”

Solna still had no idea how they were going to make that happen.

She’d reached out to the Force, flagrantly violating the Enclave’s customs, only to feel a reassuring certainty that marching forward was the best action she could take. Maddeningly however, the Force was rather lacking in specific details for how or why things would work out well in the end.

“We’ll handle it,” Rassi said. “And if Degu’s team give you trouble, just shout for us. I’m not used to you jerks being nice to me and I’d like to see more of it.”

Tovos turned his head and flashed Rassi a rueful smile before turning to his comrades, “looks like we have our marching orders then.”

“Never orders,” Rassi said. “Just a request.”

Solna understood. They’d been forced into doing and being whats someone else wanted for too long. They need to work together, but that didn’t mean any of them should turn themselves into puppets of another.

Rassi held out her hand for Solna, a gesture that had never been unusual or them but was becoming more common and consistent with each new crisis they faced.

Solna nodded, took Rassi’s hand and rose, pulling their cloak in tighter and deeper than before.

The people of the Silent Enclave knew someone was out there – someone living – whether they had any sense of how many people that was remained an open question. As Rassi and Solna ghosted up to the frankly indefensible perimeter wall and leapt it with purely mundane effort, it became clear that noone was considering that anyone like them was a threat to watch for.

A short distance away, at the gate the private landing facility had put in the cheap fencing, Tovos and his team were greeting Dengu’s team. That Dengu radiated surprise loudly enough for Solna to catch a whisper of it was in part due to her actively working with the Force to enhance her senses, rather than passively absorbing information like she’d been trained too. 

More than that though it was a signal that Tovos had been right. His team was not expected to return. Wasn’t supposed to return. What was happening at the gate was not a joyous reunion. It was the opening round in a battle where the first blow was foregone conclusion and only who landed the final strike was at all uncertain.

Going to their aid was the last thing Solna wanted to do – she’d spent too long being angry with them for that to feel natural. And she had an important mission to do. And leaving Rassi was unthinkable.

So why was her stupid heart lingering on the whispers of her old enemies’ fates that she could still hear?

She scowled.

They’d better make good on their promise to Rassi and survive.

She’d kill them otherwise.

Rassi paused at a corner and cast a quick smile in Solna’s direction. They were so quiet that even with the connection they shared they weren’t leaking emotions to distract the other.

Which didn’t matter.

Rassi could still tell what Solna was thinking it seemed.

Rassi who was so incredibly quiet?

Rassi who couldn’t be calm and peaceful about returning to the Enclave? Who had to have a thousand worse memories of the place than Solna did.

Rassi who was not at all fighting the turmoil within herself that she normally had to?

No one had said Rassi was beautiful in Solna’s memory. Even Solna didn’t try to call attention to Rassi’s looks since she knew Rassi wouldn’t believe her and was sensitive to any comments about a body that people had said countless times was too large, too clumsy, and too unappealing for anyone to ever love.

Those people had been wrong. So very wrong.

Seeing the peace and confidence in Rassi’s eyes and the grace she moved with, Solna’s breath caught in her throat.

Her friend was beautiful beyond any words Solna had.

Which was a wonderful revelation at an absolutely terrible time.

“We are not alone,” Honored Jolu said from around the corner of the habitat they’d been sneaking past.

Rassi gave Solna’s hand a squeeze that made Solna’s heart skip a beat.

Also inconvenient.

What was her stupid brain doing to her?

“We are never alone,” Rassi said, sweeping their shared cloak aside and walking forward, without dropping Solna’s hand in embarrassment as they usually did.

“You?” Jolu’s look of surprise vanished behind an icy and emotionless wall.

“The betrayers! They’ve brought the Shadows to us again!” The cry came from a woman who’d never said more than three words to Solna or Rassi. Solna thought her name was Logi, or Lusa. She knew the two were sisters but she’d never bothered to work out which was which.

“Is that what you told them?” Rassi asked, looking only at Honored Jolu and ignoring the crowd who had gathered in the landing site’s central square.

From the voices which were rising in alarm, Solna’s guessed a good three quarters of the Enclave was present. From the absence of anyone on the central dias, she also guessed that the Elders had indeed abandoned the rest of the Enclave.

That Jolu had stayed behind was interesting, all the more so because Solna couldn’t sense anything from her old mentor and had no idea what Jolu’s true feelings were.

“Why are you here?” Jolu asked, her gaze firm and unrelenting.

“Because they need to know,” Rassi said, meeting Jolu’s gaze evenly.

“Get them!” someone called from the crowd and Solna felt a spike of killing intent rise.

But not from the crowd.

Atop one of the buildings, an air traffic control tower, a man was rising and bringing a blaster to his shoulder.

She acted without thought or hesitation.

She needed to protect Rassi.

And the Force was her ally.

She’d only meant to drag the rifle off course. To pull it from the man’s hands.

The Force however is a powerful ally and the man’s grip was quite a bit stronger than it should have been.

Everyone heard his cry.

Everyone felt the sniper’s shock of fear.

Everyone watched him fall, and some of them even saw what happened when he hit the ground.

There’d been no malice in the act. Solna hadn’t given in to her Dark Side (which was not at all unhappy with the results), but the fact that she’d killed a man wasn’t what sent a wave of undisguised terror through the crowd.

“Corrupt.” The word was whispered rather than shouted.

Everyone in the Enclave had grown up with the terror of the Jedi constantly hanging over their heads. Everyone had guarded themselves zealously against the slightest signs that they were changing the Xah at all.

And so all of them knew exactly what Solna had done.

Rassi had dreamed of winning renown in the Silent Enclave. She’d imagined a day when something bad would happen – strangers would appear, or maybe a Jedi would find them – and she would be the one to save the day. Everyone would know and everyone would treat her better and she’d be able to prove that she wasn’t as worthless as they always said she was.

Watching the a horde of Death Shadows closing in on the remnants of the Enclave held a surreal quality.

In her hand she held a dark crystal which was filled with ghosts that were spoiling for a fight. People who had spent years being crushed by the Dark Side and had some quality rage issues they needed to work out.

The Dead of Praxis Mar had volunteered to help her out of a desire to make a payment on the debt they felt they owed Nix and Ayli. At the time that had meant standing against the Silent Enclave, which had thrilled Rassi more than she had the words to express.

Somewhere though things had gotten complicated. 

Holding hands with Solna felt as fundamentally right as holding hands with Felgo felt fundamentally weird.

And yet the circle they’d formed was strong.

Stronger than the one Rassi and Solna could have formed on their own.

She hadn’t forgotten what Tovos and his crew had done to her but in the communion they shared, she felt their spirits seeking to make amends, which was the weirdest thing of all.

Almost weird enough to convince her to call upon the Praxis Mar ghosts to defend the Enclave that she’d wanted to see destroyed more than anything else in the galaxy.

“It’s too late. We can’t save them,” Polu said, disbelief drowning out everything else in his voice.

“We’d die if we tried,” Yanni said, not trying to hide the fearful memories that were tearing through her. “Just like Yoldo.”

Rassi didn’t have any pleasant memories of Yoldo, so his loss was somewhat blunted fo her, but given Yanni’s expression it wasn’t hard to imagine how horrible his death had been.

“It’s not too late,” Solna said, her presence in their bond as cool and strong as steel.

“Should it be?” Tovos asked, the despair in him a raw wound in their bond.

Because saving the people of the Enclave would mean saving a society which had used and betrayed them both.

Was something that was built on subjugation and exploitation worth preserving?

Rassi shook her head.

No.

It wasn’t.

But that wasn’t the right question.

She could understand Tovos’ despair. It resonated so deeply with her that it was hard to imagine how it could be wrong.

But it was.

The Silent Enclave was the corruption in the Xah that they had always used to control and dismiss her. It was a society built on strictures which could not be allowed to persist, and feeding it to the Death Shadows would tear it down more effectively than any other tool Rassi had at her disposal.

But it wasn’t just a society she would be consigning to suffering and death. It was people. Horrible people who wouldn’t be missed along with souls who were suffering as she’d been, and people who could do so much better if they were given the chance.

Tovos’ despair was willing to give up on all of them, to punish and destroy the people who’d never understood what they were a part of, and even the ones who were trying to be as kind and caring as they could, just to make sure the galaxy was rid of the ones who’d done them harm.

Rassi didn’t need the Force to tell her that path led to the Dark Side. That walking the harder path was what it took to make a better world. That if she failed, and she was very likely to fail, her choices would make her a better version of herself than the one which lay at the end of Tovos’ path.

“Sister Zin, can you get us to the Enclave in under about five minutes?” Rassi asked. A part of her hoped the answer would be ‘no’, which would spare her from making her old dream into a disquieting and uncomfortable reality.

“That depends,” Zin said. “Where are they, and why should we go there?”

“They’re twelve klicks directly spinward from here,” Rassi said.

“That would be a hard burn for an auto-transport like this one,” Zin said.

Which meant it was possible but she wasn’t particularly convinced yet.

“Tondu,” Solna said. “She’s there.”

“And she is?” Sali asked, apparently no more convinced than Zin was.

“No one special,” Solna said. “But she snuck Rassi and me half of a silverberry pie after we were kicked out of the Life Day celebration last year.”

“She has a younger brother too. Umbe?” Rassi said, recalling how she’d helped the little boy build a dirt castle once.

“Old Kodi’s there too,” Osdo said.

“An Elder?” Zin asked.

“No. He’s just an old guy. Lives alone but he always makes little droids to help people with tasks,” Osdo said. “He…I used to go talk to him, you know, after I’d mess up an assignment.”

“I went to him too,” Tovos said, his despair turning to something else that Rassi couldn’t quite place.

“Kodi’s nice but you two are stupid,” Felgo said. “I figured out a long time ago to bring food supplies to Grams Xela. She’s as smart as Kodi is and she cooks you good food too.”

“No one here wants to save the Silent Enclave, but we do want to save them,” Solna said.

“Nix did that for us,” Rassi said. “I think she’d want us to do the same for them.”

Zin’s reply was spoken by the auto-transport’s engines and the inertial dampeners which strained as they blasted off.

“Just a warning,” she said when they were a minute into the flight. “I don’t have a ‘stun setting’ on the weapons I’m carrying at the moment, so if anyone there gets any funny ideas and starts shooting at me or you, I will be reducing them to greasy stains on the ground, right?”

“I could give you a few choice targets if you’d like?” Felgo asked. He was joking but only barely so.

Rassi wasn’t concerned about that, in part because she knew the Enclave would be able to sense the far worse threat of the Death Shadows by the time they got there, and in part because she suspected that Felgo’s list would have a pretty fair overlap with her own.

“We haven’t learned that much,” Yanni said. “How are we supposed to fight the Death Shadows? We can’t do that thing Ayli did.”

“I believe that will be my job,” a ghostly skeleton man said.

It was only because they’d had a lifetime of training in controlling their emotions with an iron fist that Tovos’ team didn’t break the circle and leap to the edges of the room.

“Apologies,” Hendel the skeleton man said. “It’s been so long since I’ve dealt with the living regularly that it’s easy to forget how startling my current good looks can be.”

“What is that?” Yanni asked, obviously still considering a retreat to more distant and sensible grounds.

“That’s Hendel,” Rassi said. “He can help us deal with the Death Shadows.”

“He can help us deal with the Death Shadows,” Solna said.

“He can stop an army of them alone?” Tovos asked.

“Not exactly,” Hendel said. “Though, and consider that I’m saying this after what I’ve been turned into, those things are the definition of ‘wrong’, so I’d be delighted to try if it came to that.”

“I guess…I guess I can’t do any less then,” Yanni said, her courage grabbing hold of the entirely reasonable fear she was feeling.

“Our job isn’t going to be to fight the Death Shadows,” Solna said. “We’ve got a much harder task than that.”

“Dismantling the Silent Enclave?” Tovos guessed.

“Eventually, but before that we need to convince them to put right what the wrongs they’ve been part of for centuries now,” Rassi said.

“You’re right,” Hendel said. “That does sound harder. Where are you even going to begin with that?”

“We could dance for them, like Nix and Ayli danced for you,” Rassi said, looking over to Tovos, “Except, I don’t think I can trust them that much.”

“You absolutely shouldn’t,” Tovos said. “Even if all of the Elders fled, there will be people left who know what they were doing, both with the Expunging Rite and with the assassinations and if you open yourself up to them like Nix did for us, they will definitely try to strike you down. If they don’t the rest of the Enclave might pull them to pieces.”

“Wait, assassinations? When did that happen?” Sali asked.

“Whenever the Elder’s needed money,” Tovos said. “It’s what my team was training for, though they never called it that.”

“They told us we could be sent after Jedi sympathizers and people were were natural manipulators of the Xah and were corrupting it,” Osdo said.

“We were supposed to ‘quiet’ them,” Polu said, a note of pained remorse in his voice which Rassi suspected was due to how completely he’d bought in to the euphemism.

“How many other teams like yours does the Enclave have?” Zin asked, a low, suspicious lilt in her voice.

“We’re the only ones,” Yanni said. “It’s meant to be a great honor, so we’re supposed to keep it secret. Our missions too. They’re just scouting runs to ensure no one had detected us, or at least that they story we’re supposed to stick to.”

“They are not the only team,” Sali said.

“Certainly not,” Zin said. “I would estimate at least one other, or possibly two?”

“Definitely two,” Sali said. “For the kind of work they would have been doing you wouldn’t want the same biometrics showing up too often in the periphery of the kill site.”

“And they’ll be more experienced than this team?” Zin asked, without it sounding at all like a question.

“Since it sounds like these guys haven’t carried out a proper assassination yet? I would guess one of their senior teams has ten years of experience on them and the other one twenty. Past that they problem ‘retire’ them.”

Rassi had no idea how Sali could know the inner workings of a secret organization within a completely hidden society, but it didn’t sound like she was guessing about any of the things she said either.

“You leave us to take care of them,” Tovos said. “It’s the least we can do, after, well, everything we’ve done.”

“I don’t think you know what ‘taking care’ of a team of assassins looks like,” Sali said. 

“They won’t see us coming,” Felgo said, nodding in support of his leader.

“And you won’t see them,” Sali said. “Remember, they’ve had more practice at this than you’ve had. Even assassin’s who aren’t mystical Jedi types learn to be more aware than most.”

“You can hide yourselves in the Force, but they will be able to do that as well won’t they?” Zin asked.

“But they won’t be. They’ll be try to defend the Enclave,” Polu said.

“Will they?” Yanni asked. “Or will they be hiding even more deeply than the rest because they have more to hide?”

“I think you already know the answer to that,” Zin said. “Which is why you should leave them to us.”

“To you and Queen Sali?” Yanni asked. “But you can’t hide yourselves in the Xah at all?”

“Don’t have to,” Sali said. “Or did you think being a Pirate Queen meant you had fewer assassins to deal with than normal?”

Rassi tried to imagine what a ‘normal’ amount of assassins was, since it sounded like her assumption of ‘zero’ was somehow incorrect. Before she could arrive at an answer though an interruption arrived.

“I’m afraid we’re going to need you more than they will,” Kelda said and as she and Ravas appeared faintly on the auto-transport.

“What? How are you here?” Sali asked.

“Once we got out of the cloaking field you’re covered by we were able to locate Nix and Ayli,” Ravas said. “And we caught a glimpse of their immediate future.”

“I thought Force visions were untrustworthy?” Zin said.

“They are, usually,” Kelda said. “This one was startling clear though. The shuttle they’re using is going to be destroyed, and you are the only ones who can save them.”

“But you’re going to need a whole lot of pirates to pull it off,” Ravas said.

Solna expected to find many things when they landed on Selvus. A hostile welcoming committee seemed the most likely. The condemnation of her teachers and caretakers was all but a certainty. It had crossed her mind that an Expunging Rite in progress was not entirely out of the question either.

Instead what she found, what they all found, was chaos.

Goldie had touched down briefly at a starport named Dolos Station. Those who were intending to go ashore were promptly swept out of the ship, while those who chose to remain with Goldie as she rocketed off to pursue her parents remained clustered on the bridge.

Those who disembarked included Rassi and Solna, Tovos and his crew, and the Horizon Knight Monfi. Ravas and Kelda had expressed a desire to come with the shore party but given the cloaking field Tovos’ crew was still employing their ability to serve as messengers would have been severely limited.

“If you need us, you need only call,” Kelda said.

“Though you’ll want to make it a loud one,” Ravas added.

Everyone could sense that Nix and Ayli were in pursuit of the Enclave’s leadership and that a struggle awaited them. Kelda and Ravas would be the first line of support for that battle, followed as quickly as possible by Lasha, Nulo, Moffvok, Bopo, and, of course, Goldie.

Sali had opted to join the shore party since a battle with the elder Force Users didn’t seem like a good time to her.

Also there was the fact that Zin had contacted them as soon as they entered the planetary landing grid.

“Well my plan backfired,” Zin had said. “I specifically followed them in case they needed backup, but they never even made planetfall here.”

“What happened?” Goldie had asked.

“Apparently a ship broke the lockdown one of my Sisters had put on the port and Nix and Ayli followed them into hyperspace.”

Which was ridiculous. Everyone agreed it couldn’t have worked since you can’t simply jump after someone who goes to lightspeed. Without know they jump calculations, the chance that you’d even wind up in the same solar system were microscopic. 

“If Ayli did it, she had way to make it work,” Goldie said. “We just need to figure out where they went.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Kelda said. “Ravas and I can simply ask them.”

“Let’s do that then. Now,” Goldie said.

“We’ll need to drop our guests off on the planet first,” Kelda said.

“They’re getting a free ride. We can drop them off after we have Nix and Ayli back,” Goldie had countered.

“Except we won’t be able to come back here while their projecting their cloak,” Kelda said.

“And if they stop projecting their cloak, the Death Shadows will flock down on them and  us.” Ravas said.

Goldie sighed, which certainly wasn’t something she’d been programmed to do.

“Fine. Aunt Zin can you get us landing clearance asap?” Goldie asked.

“Already on it my dear,” Zin said. “You’re cleared for a landing on Pad C11 in ten minutes.”

Which was ten minutes longer than Goldie had wanted to wait, but it gave the shore team enough time to gather their stuff and collect what information Zin had to offer on the current state of the Silent Enclave.

Ten minutes and about fifteen seconds later though and the shore team was all on their own, with Goldie once more lifting off for orbit at maximum speed.

“We should go see how this Enclave of yours is doing,” Monfi said, hailing an auto-mover down that had enough space for them all.

“Sister Wenley is watching them still,” Zin said. “If anyone else had tried to leave she would have alerted us.”

“The others won’t be leaving,” Tovos said. “The Elder’s would have commanded them to stay behind when they left.”

“How long will those orders hold in the Elders’ absence?” Monfi asked.

“Until the Elders return or until someone in the Enclave grows old and skilled enough to be named a new Elder.” Tovos wasn’t saying anything Solna hadn’t expected to hear. The idea that the Elders were to be followed unquestioningly had been stamped in her since she was a able to understand words. Her current perspective on the Silent Enclave brought with it a new emotion in place of the desperate devotion she’d once felt.

Rage.

Beside her, Rassi blinked and pulled Solna in for a quick side-hug before offering her hand for Solna to hold.

Which was the right gesture. Holding Rassi’s hand was always comforting, and Solna knew that greeting the situation which lay before them with anger wasn’t going to lead to a good outcome for anyone.

“Let’s get you all back home then,” Sali said as she inspected the most obvious of the blasters she was carrying. Solna couldn’t quite sense where the other ones were, which was a feat in its own right, but the Force was quite clear that Sali, even after passing through the starport’s security was still bristling with more armaments than most New Republic fortresses possessed.

“I gather there will be some danger involved but this is an event which I need to record for the Order’s records,” Zin said.

“Which is why I’ll be right there with you,” Sali said. “Us pirates thrive on danger after all.”

Which wasn’t exactly true. Solna could sense that Sali was more unconcerned with the danger before her than thriving on it. She’d seemed reasonably happy to come along and corral Zin but beyond that a life of relative safety and ease seem to suit the pirate queen quite well.

That thought led to Solna ponder what it was she desired in her life.

Safety and ease always held their fascinations, but Solna wasn’t sure she was ready for either one. Not until she’d sorted out the Silent Enclave, or at least done her part to try.

What “that part” might be still escaped Solna. Even as angry as she was, the prospect of taking on the entire Enclave was daunting. For several reasons, not the least of which being that she could see how the Elders had done what they had, could see the techniques they’d used to manipulate the Enclave and if the Enclave fought back against her hard enough, she wasn’t entirely sure she could resist using those techniques too.

“The local security force should have the rest of the Enclave under house arrest by now,” Zin said. “After their ship blasted out of the port, the rest of them are being investigated for being part of a criminal conspiracy with a high flight risk level.”

“Security won’t find them,” Tovos said. It should have worried Solna that he was doing a field rebuild of his blaster rifle. That was standard procedure at the start of a combat mission, but they weren’t going into combat with the rest of the Enclave and Tovos knew that.

He believed it too which Solna found deeply at odds with the Tovos she’d known.

The Tovos she’d left behind at the Enclave was a bully and was among the least flexible of people when it came to the Enclave’s doctrine she knew. The young man who sat across from her in the auto-cab had found something important but at an unbearably high cost. What peace he’d been able to make with the loss of not only his crew member but the person he’d believed himself to be seemed to be based on anger at those who’d abused them as much as a love for his teammates he’d never let himself acknowledge before.

That Solna could reach all that from his stray thoughts was the most shocking thing of all though and the most absolute proof of how much he’d been changed.

Rassi squeezed her hand again, calling her attention away from concerns of the future to the reality which was rapidly approaching them.

“This is supposed to be the Enclave’s temporary berths?” Zin said as the auto-cab circled over an empty field where a few security enforcers remained milling about.

“Looks like they’re smart enough to falsify their landing coordinates,” Sali said. “Which means we do not want to go down there.”

“The auto-cab’s destination is already locked in,” Zin said.

“And you already have its controls hacked. So have it take us to the empty berths on the other side of the main terminal.”

“You have such faith in me,” Zin said as the auto-cab gently banked away towards another unused landing field at the outskirts of the starport.

No one asked why they weren’t going to land and talk to the security enforcers. Showing up at a mysteriously empty crime scene was a sure ticket to have all the blame for what happened pinned on you and while Zin’s contact could probably deal with the legal troubles for them, Security Enforcers were just as likely to shoot first and file charges against the corpses later since it cut down on the chance that their version of events would be challenged.

“We can find where they are,” Rassi said.

“They’ll be under a stronger cloak than we have,” Osdo said.

“And they have a lot more emotions to hide,” Rassi said. “Solna and I can find them, if we work together.”

“Should someone better with the Xah help her?” Felgo asked, not intending it to be a rude question, but simply still trapped in the impression he had of Rassi for the last decade or more.

“She’s much stronger than any of us,” Tovos said.

“I know Solna is. Everyone knows that, but Rassi…” Felgo said but Tovos cut him off.

“Rassi is who I’m talking about. Do you know why she was ‘always tripping up’? It’s because she’s so much closer to the Xah that it can’t help but resonate with her emotions. We were idiots not to see it.”

“And she wasn’t ‘always tripping up,” Osdo said. “She beat me at the last City Walk test we did. She was…she is pretty talented. But they never let us see that.”

“We never tried to see it.” Tovos had paused in the rebuild of the blaster with his head hung low.

“We could help them now though right?” Felgo asked.

“Why would they want us to?” Tovos asked. “Do you think they could trust us? Do you think they don’t hate us? We won’t do anything but disrupt their connection to the Xah.”

Solna had a free hand.

So she took one of Tovos’ hands from his blaster rifle.

“We don’t hate you,” she said.

Tovos shook his head and looked to Rassi, who had a far greater right to hold onto the animosity they’d both felt for him.

“I did,” Rassi said. “But I don’t want to anymore. You didn’t have to do the things you did to me. Or to Solna. Some of that wasn’t you. The Elders made us who we are, and so a lot of that is on them.”

“But some of it is on us,” Tovos said. “And we can’t ask you to forget that.”

“I’m not going to,” Rassi said. “But if you really are sorry for what you did, then I make out a lot better if I give you a chance to prove that.”

With her free hand, she took Felgo’s hand in her own to begin the circle which the children of the Silence Enclave formed with no more words.

Solna glanced over at Monfi who could have joined them as another Force user, but he shook his head with a smile. This was something he was an outsider to, and he clearly did not want to intrude.

Which was probably for the best. As the circle sank down into the silence of the Xah they swiftly passed the point where other Force Users could have easily quieted themselves. Unlike during a Silent Dance though, the ritual Rassi was leading them through was one predicated on supporting each other as they stilled the Force within them and cast their awareness outwards.

Solna had expected she and Rassi could cover the starport without endangering themselves. Together with Tovos, Felgo, Osdo, Polu, and Yanni though, they covered the planet.

Which was how they found the Silent Enclave.

And how they discovered the host of Death Shadows that were descending upon them.