Kelda knew she wasn’t supposed to follow Ravas. Not out beyond the Temple’s security perimeter. Not into the Howling Wilds. Given their history in fact ‘not anywhere’ would probably have been a good rule to live by.

The funny thing was, Kelda was usually all about following the rules. The Jedi had a lot of rules, but the rules were there to make things better. Following the rules was how you found harmony, and harmony made you stronger at using the Force.

At least that was how it was supposed to be.

It was true that the more Kelda behaved as the Masters taught her too, the less worried she was and the easier of a time she had reaching out to the Force. The other padawans felt the same too. 

Or they said they did.

Most of them.

But not Ravas. 

So why did Kelda always follow where Ravas led?

“Come on, hurry up,” Ravas said, turning around and noticing how far behind Kelda has fallen.

“We’re pretty far out here,” Kelda said, calculating whether there was any chance they’d make it back to their dorm room before light’s out.

“I know! That’s why I was able to find this,” Ravas said. “I don’t think anyone comes out this far.”

“If we go much further, we won’t make it back in time,” Kelda said.

Ravas tilted her head and dropped her hands to her hips.

“You’re worried about getting back?” she asked. “You haven’t even seen it yet though!”

“I don’t know what ‘it’ is!” Kelda said, letting a very un-Jedi-like note of exasperation show in her voice.

“That’s because you’ve got to see it for yourself!” Ravas said and turned to continue leading them onwards.

“But couldn’t we come tomorrow?” Kelda asked. “If we left earlier we’d have plenty of time to get there and back.”

When Ravas turned again, the scowl on her face was set hard as stone.

“If you don’t want to go with me, you can head back,” she said, her voice flat with barely concealed anger.

“No!” Kelda said, uncomfortable not with Ravas’ anger but with the disappointment that lay beneath it.

She and Ravas had been angry at each before. They’d had brutal and mean-spirited fights, each one instigating one squabble or the other until they’d learned to control their emotions. Kelda was better at that than Ravas was, and they both knew it, which should have meant that Kelda would be the one who was stronger in the Force. 

Except that she wasn’t.

When they tested their powers against each other – something they weren’t supposed to do, but even Kelda had been willing to bend that rule to satisfy her curiosity – they’d always come out as equals.

Kelda suspected that was because Ravas was holding back. There always seemed to be something in her best friend that Ravas was restraining. Some well of power that Ravas could choose to draw on but which she refused to, maybe because she knew how important the Force was to Kelda and she didn’t want to upstage Kelda too much?

That couldn’t be true though. Kelda didn’t want it to be true.

People thought Ravas was a bad student. There were whispers that she was going to fail the tests to become a Knight when it was time to take them. That definitely couldn’t happen though. Ravas was too good a Jedi, and too good a person, to be passed over. 

Some of the whispers were jealousy. The Padawan’s who judged themselves solely by their proficiency with the Force were rarely ever happy with the test results that showed Ravas at the top of their class.

Kelda didn’t worry about that though. Her concerns were rooted in the constant disciplinary actions Ravas invited onto herself. 

The whispers that Ravas was a bad influence weren’t true either, but Kelda could see that more people than just the padawan’s bought into it.

“No! I’m coming,” Kelda said, an old and familiar resolution filling her soul that Ravas would have at least one person who was in her corner.

Always.

Both her resolution and her concerns blew away in the winds of forgetfulness when she saw what Ravas had been so excited to show her.

“Can you believe this is still here!” Ravas said pointing down into the chasm before them.

The chasm in which a crashed but still fairly intact starfighter lay.

 A Sith starfighter.

Half of Kelda recoiled at the thought of being so near a tool of the ancient enemy of Jedi. It was the weaker half through because the parts of her which were enthralled by sleek ship’s design wanted nothing more than to climb down and inspect it closer.

“So, still want to go back?” Ravas asked, a smug smile gracing her stupidly perfect lips.

“Shut up,” Kelda said. “You could have told me, you jerk.”

“And spoil the surprise?” By which Ravas really meant spoil her own enjoyment at watching how shocked and flustered Kelda was.

“I could have brought tools, climbing gear,” Kelda said. “How are we supposed to check it out like this?”

“Well, we’d have to get closer I guess?” Ravas said, stepping to the edge and holding one foot over it into the empty air beyond.

“No. Don’t you do it,” Kelda said, more from reflex than any hope she might be able to talk Ravas out of what was a demonstrably terrible idea.

“You know, you say ‘No’ an awful lot,” Ravas said. “You should try thinking positively once in a while.”

And with that she stepped out over the chasm and plummeted.

Kelda didn’t need to waste any time.

She’d known what was coming.

And she’d known what she was going to need to do.

Ravas was about five meters from the top of the Sith Fighter before Kelda was able to grab hold of her with the Force and lower her gently down on top of it.

“I could have done that myself!” Ravas called out.

Which was true. But Kelda wasn’t going to leave Rava’s fate up to chance, or worse, Ravas’ sense of ‘dramatic timing’. 

Kelda stepped into the chasm intent on breaking her own fall with the Force in a non-dramatic manner, but before she dropped more than her own height, Ravas had caught her and lowered her slowly onto the Sith Fighter as well.

“Getting back up is going to be worse,” Kelda said as she touched down.

“Not if we can get this thing to fly again,” Ravas said.

Kelda pinched the bridge of her nose.

Neither of them knew how to fly any spaceships, much less a Star Fighter, much less a SITH Star Fighter. That was a problem for the Kelda of some distant and unforeseeable point in future though. A future that was likely to roll around in less than an hour, admittedly, but a lot could happen in an hour.

“What makes you think it will even power up?” Kelda asked. “It’s probably been down here for a million years of something.”

“It would be rust and dust if it had been here for a million years,” Ravas said. “Plus I don’t think they made ships like this a million years ago.”

“They definitely don’t make them like this anymore,” Kelda said. She expected the ship to feel twisted and evil in the Force, but her senses weren’t giving her any sign of that.

The craft under her feet was a tool. Plain and simple. It might have been created to murder Jedi, it might have even successfully murdered a whole bunch of Jedi, but that was in the past. All that remained was metal and wiring and space for two young Padawans to sit inside it.

“You know if we come back in this, there is zero chance they would let us keep it,” Kelda said.

“Yeah, I’m not stupid,” Ravas said.

“You jumped into a chasm with no way back up,” Kelda teased her.

“You jumped after me,” Ravas counter-teased.

“Oh course,” Kelda said. “Where else would I be?”

Ravas scoffed at that and looked away, “Now who’s the stupid one?”

Kelda felt a little thrill of delight at having flustered Ravas. It wasn’t easy to do, and it required just the right moment of honesty to do it, but Ravas’ reactions were wonderful to see.

“How did you find this?” Kelda asked, changing the subject before it drifted towards topics that their instructors would have called ‘improper attachments’.

“They have detailed scans of the whole area from when the Temple was being converted to a school,” Ravas said. “This thing showed up as an ‘exposed metal deposit’, which sounded cool, but not as cool as this!”

“Where did you find scans of this place?” Kelda asked, reasonably sure she did not want to know the answer.

“In the archives.” Ravas’ blaise tone was one she only adopted when she was admitting something that would definitely get her in trouble.

“Our archives?” Kelda asked.

“Well, I mean, they’re part of the Temple, so they should be ours,” Ravas said.

Kelda groaned.

“You were sneaking around in the Secure Archives? Ravas! How did you even get in there?”

“It wasn’t hard. For Secure Archives, they’re not terribly secure.”

“Oh, we are going to get into so much trouble for this!”

“No we won’t,” Ravas said, based as far as Kelda could tell on wishful thinking and vague hopes.

“They’ll expel you!” Kelda said, naming the worse thing in the world she could imagine happening.

“No. They won’t,” Ravas said. “If we get caught, we can say that I needed to clear my head and meditate and that you followed after me to make sure I was safe. They don’t need to know about the archives. We can say we just stumbled on this without knowing it was here.”

“But they’ll know that’s a lie,” Kelda said.

“It’s not,” Ravas said. “That’s how I found out that there was a Star Fighter here.”

“Wait, when did you sneak out here? We were together all of yesterday?” Kelda said. Which was true every day, and just as things should be.

“It was last night,” Ravas said, strangely more silent than she should have been.

“Last night? After light’s out?” Kelda asked, struggling to piece together a timeline that would make sense.

“Yeah,” Ravas said. “I needed to meditate.”

Ravas never needed to meditate.

Kelda had wondered if the Zabrak people were incapable of it but the other Zabrak padawan who joined their class was so serene while meditating that he would start spontaneously floating.

So Ravas couldn’t have needed to meditate.

Except she wasn’t lying.

Kelda was certain of that, and the Force confirmed it.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” Kelda asked, worried at the sudden distance she felt from best friend. “I would have come with you.”

“I…uh, I didn’t want you to get in trouble,” Ravas said.

Which was a huge lie.

Ravas delighted in getting Kelda into trouble.

It was one of the central tenets of their friendship.

“Come on! I would have gone with you,” Kelda said, her brain short circuiting at the thought of Ravas leaving her behind.

“It was late, and you were already asleep, and we had the training run coming up in the morning, and I can be nice too sometimes okay?” Ravas got more defensive with each protestation, but it was the final one which convinced Kelda.

Or maybe it was just something she’d been hoping to hear.

“Wait, but you did the run today too?” Kelda asked. “And you came in second place!”

“Sure. Why do you think I didn’t beat you?” Ravas asked, the old cocky challenge in her voice again.

Kelda glared at her, but didn’t press the issue. She thought the run had been a little too easy. They would need to race again when they were both rested. 

“Can I ask you a question?” Ravas said, worryingly serious again.

“Always,” Kelda said.

“If the ships works, would we have to bring it back to the Temple?”

“Where else would we go?”

“Out there,” Ravas said, gesturing to the river of stars above them.

“The Jedi would never let us do that,” Kelda said.

“Yeah, I know,” Ravas said, her eyes cast down in a disappointment it would be years before Kelda understood.