Ayli had lived in many places but there were few were she felt more at home than in the cockpit of a starship. The familiar rhythm of pre-flight checks and the engine cycles as the sublight and hyper drives came to life were a familiar balm which dulled her worry by almost a full one percent.

“I still can’t determine where either of them are, but I can sense that they left Cellondia days ago,” Kelda said from the copilot’s seat.

As a ghost, she didn’t need to sit for the trip, but it did make conversing easier.

“That checks out with Nix’s plans,” Ayli said. “I’ve sent a message to Archivist Bopo to see if she was able to point Nix in any particular direction but local time in Haliph City is the middle of the night so she’s not going to get it for another four or five hours.”

“And the trip to Cellondia is five hours?” Kelda asked.

“Yeah, so we might get a new destination right as we land.” Ayli confirmed the hyperspace route calculation, toying with the riskier alternative that would cut an hour off the trip but discarding it when a nudge from the Force suggested it would leave her ship damaged when she very much needed it to be ready for anything.

“And if the Archivist had no leads for them to pursue?” Kelda asked.

“Then we’ll track down whatever they did manage to find,” Ayli said. “If Cellondia had been a complete bust, they would have come home after all, so they had to have found something here.”

“True,” Kelda said. “But each of them can be quite clever.”

“Yes, but if it comes to it you know all we need to do is think of the most ill-advisable place to look for further information and make a beeline there and we’ll be right on their tracks.”

Kelda sighed.

“I wish I could say you were wrong. I wish I could say that wasn’t a consistent pattern of behavior dating back across the centuries in fact.”

“On the upside, we can make it work in our favor for a change,” Ayli said. “And it’s possible that Darsus, or whoever is wearing his skin these days, won’t be aware of that fact.”

“My suspicion is that our visitor in the cave is not navigating via normal corridors of spacetime which you pass through,” Kelda said. “There are worlds-between-worlds, and darkened pathways spirits may travel.”

“Was he a spirit though?” Ayli asked. “He looked just like Darsus Klex. Why would a spirit of someone else do that unless they’d possessed him like Ravas possessed me?”

“I don’t know. Which is worrisome. I can say for certain though that the shade that assaulted you was a projection. Had he been present in person, I doubt I could have driven him off as I did.”

“I’m surprised you were able to do anything in a Dark Side nexus like that?” Ayli said.

“Light shines the easiest in the Dark,” Kelda said. “But I’d rather not have to repeat that stunt. It was…tiring.”

Ayli heard an odd note in Kelda’s voice and turned to her before initiating lift off.

“Are you going to be okay?” Ayli asked.

“In time I’ll be fine.” 

“And until then?” 

“I’m wondering if that might be part of why I’m having trouble locating Ravas and Nix,” Kelda said. “The Dark Side is exceptionally good at cloaking things and I submerged myself in quite a lot of it there. I’m still submerged in it in fact.”

“Still? How?”

“The light you saw? That was me. Not as simply the source, but the light itself was me.”

“That you blasted out like an explosion?”

“Not an explosion exactly but yes.”

“And how are you going to be okay after doing that how?”

“I’m always connected to myself. I’m just spread a little thinner than usual. With time I’m gathering myself back together though. No need to worry.”

Ayli chuckled and brought the engines to life.

“Still working on the ‘worry’ thing,” she said, thinking back to the many meditation sessions they’d spent together unpacking the mess that was Ayli’s childhood.

Four hours later, as they arrived at the main starport in Haliph City, Ayli was forced to admit that she perhaps had a bit more work to do on that front.

“We seem to be ahead of schedule.” There was no accusation in Kelda’s tone but Ayli knew the instability in the flight had drawn a bit of attention. She could feel Kelda standing beside her, but it was easier to deal with disembarking if no one else noticed her, so Ayli had snagged a headset comm unit to wear so she didn’t look too odd speaking to thin air.

“I took a few short cuts.” 

Nix would have described them less charitably, but Nix had gone and fallen off the edge of the galaxy, so her complaints weren’t ones Ayli felt warranted much consideration.

No matter how right she would have been.

“Can we call on the archivist this early?” Kelda asked.

“Probably not the best idea. Bopo tends to be a bit cranky before her first three cups of kaf. If I know Nix though, she would have checked in with one of the local tech warehouses.”

“That seems like an odd place to look for clues to hidden Force traditions.”

“If they’re hidden then temples or libraries would be the odd places to find them wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose that is the first place someone might look.”

“Nix is more comfortable around mechanics and suppliers too,” Ayli paused as a public info kiosk to search for any supply warehouses near Bopo’s residence. “I don’t know what tact she would take but bring up Force users in casual conversation with a parts vendor would probably be easier for her than with anyone else.”

“You speak as though you lack her skill in that area.”

“Oh definitely,” Ayli found two likely candidates, both the sort of places that mostly dealt with fleet level procurement rather than personal retail. “I don’t need to bring up anything mystical though. I’m just going to tell them I’m looking for my wife.”

“And they’ll believe you?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. That’s what the Force is for,” Ayli said.

“Take care there,” Kelda said. “The Force can have a strong influence on weak minds, but persuading people with it is dangerous for a number of reasons.”

“Oh, no. I’m not going to do any mind control stuff. That’s…I don’t want to do that. I’m just going to listen. Like Nix taught me.”

“Ah, to see if they’re lying,” Kelda said, shaking her head in agreement.

“And hopefully get a sense of why.” Ayli called for a droid speeder to pick them up and noticed an odd glitch in the system that forced her to double enter her identity chit. 

“I may be able to help with that,” Kelda said.

“You’re recovering still aren’t you?” Ayli asked as a tiny whisper of concern began to worm a path towards her heart.

“Yes, but there’s plenty left of me to listen along with you,” Kelda said, seemingly not sharing Ayli’s misgivings. “You expect they might lie to protect Nix? Or simply to offer resistance to a potential bounty hunter?”

“Yes. To both. If they’re concerned for Nix, I can show them a holo of our last call to prove I am who I say I am. If they think I’m a bounty hunter all they’re going to want is their cut.”

“We don’t have that kind of credit on hand do we?”

“I wouldn’t trust buying that info even if we did. All they’d need to do is say something like ‘she was going to Coruscant’ or some other common destination even if they’d never seen her before.”

The droid speeder arrived and popped the backdoor open for Ayli to enter.

She hesitated for a moment, feeling more certain than ever that she was walking into a trap.

“The meter is already running,” the droid driver reported.

And walking into a trap she could sense was probably better than waiting for one to find her when she wasn’t aware of it.

“Where to?” the driver asked.

“I logged the destination in the pickup call,” Ayli said, not entirely surprised to find an automated system that couldn’t connect even the basic information given to it.

The driver twitched for a second before righting itself.

Without a word it pulled the speeder away from the curb and began heading in exactly the wrong direction.

“This isn’t right,” Kelda said, her voice and gaze going distant as she spoke.

“It is not,” Ayli agreed. She didn’t have her lightsaber in her hand only because she knew the attack which was imminent wouldn’t come until they were in a less populated area.

“I’m afraid I will not be much help in this,” Kelda said, growing more present but no more visible or solid than she had been.

“The last year argues otherwise,” Ayli said, thankful for all the training she’d received but especially the strides she’d made in learning to quiet her mind and react to danger with clarity and reason rather than impulse and fear.

“Normally Padawan’s are not exposed to this sort of test until they’d had ten years of study or more,” Kelda said. “But you have been an exceptional student.”

Ayli was half tempted to ask what sort of test Kelda was referring too but the droid cut her off by pivoting 180 degrees and raising a blaster pistol to point directly at the center of Ayli’s forehead.

Ten years seemed like a fairly brief span before subjecting children to a life or death scenario.

Then Ayli remembered the Imperial officer who’d tried to arrest her when she was eleven. They never found his body.

And they weren’t going to find the droid’s either.

She’d sliced it’s arm off and buried the lightsaber into the droid’s core before its sensors told it she was moving. 

The droid had only been the first part of the trap though of course, which was why Ayli rolled out of speeder rather than diving for the controls.

A stand selling local produce broke her fall and she rose just in time to duck behind a sheltering wall before the speeder itself exploded.

For a typical assassination attempt that would have been the end of it, but Ayli could feel that someone had sprung for a professional.

Her worry crystallized into an area on the ground directly at her feet and she leaped away as a pulse grenade landed where she’d been standing. Following its trajectory back she saw a group of three human men holding a launcher, a range finder and control device.

Without waiting Ayli used the Force to hurl the pulse grenade back at them.

Its fuse was unfortunately set to too short a value to allow it complete the journey back to its source but the explosion surprised the assassins nonetheless.

That gave Ayli the opening she needed.

Wisdom told her to flee. She hadn’t provoked this fight, and she didn’t need the trouble which an armed brawl in the city would bring. At the very least, the law enforcers would hold her in custody for previous hours she could instead be searching for Nix with.

Flight was the wise option.

Experience however had other things to say on the matter.

“Where did she go?” the bald assassin said from about ten meters below the top of Ayli’s Force assisted leap.

“Seal suits,” the one who was clearly the leader said as an armored helmet unfurled over his head.

“Reloading,” the one with the grenade launcher said just in time for Ayli to finish her leap and slash the gun in half.

She didn’t waste time with banter. One Force Push and the leader went tumbling off the balcony they were standing on. The fall wasn’t enough to kill him unless he landed poorly and Ayli found herself unconcerned as to that outcome.

The bald assassin was the large of the two remaining, so she bludgeoned him with the hilt of the lightsaber to distract him, grabbed his ear and proceeded to wrap his head against the nearby durasteel wall enough times that he sank to the ground senseless.

That was when she lit the lightsaber.

“Think carefully before you go for any hold out weapons you’re carrying,” she said to the remaining assassin, who was about to have a much worse day that Ayli’s had been so far.