Standing in the empty shell that had once been her house, Solna felt like a vast gulf of time had passed, rather than just a few days.

“It was always this empty, wasn’t it?” Rassi asked, coming up to stand beside Solna in a manner that was somehow more comforting than any physical affection would have been.

“I hated it here,” Solna said. “I should have told you that. I don’t even know why I hid it.”

“Can you imagine what Honored Jolu would have done if she’d overheard you?” Rassi asked.

Solna had to laugh. Jolu had played the role of boogeyman for a lot of the children in the Enclave, but had taken a special interest in Rassi, and by extension Solna. Avoiding her attention had been one of the soft boundaries they’d been hemmed in by from the time they were old enough to understand that rules existed.

Despite her exalted position in their lives though, Jolu hadn’t been the true nightmare which plagued them. Her attention, if often sharp and biting, was always coupled with lessons and a chance for Rassi and Solna to redeem the mistakes they’d made.

The true boogeymen were the children that no adult saw fit to hold back from heaping abuse on Rassi and, far less often in Solna’s view, Solna too. The children weren’t alone though. There were plenty of adults who openly spoke of their eagerness for the day when Rassi would face the Trials of Silence, fail them, and cease to be a problem for the Enclave.

No one bothered to suggest that Solna would fail her trials. She was considered properly silent, noticeably more so than many of her age mates. Her defenses of Rassi was imagined to either be an eccentricity she would grow out of, or a sign of character defect so deep that she would be drawn down into the whirlpool of failure that would drown Rassi.

In theory Josta and Krelvarth should have been concerned about that. In other families, the caregivers would rise to defend their children, and would instruct them in private on how to be proper members of the Enclave. 

Josta and Krelvarth weren’t Solna’s mother and father though. They were family in that most people in the Enclave were related in some manner. The two of them had drawn the short straw for raising Solna after her mother abandoned her and ran off with a boy from a transport who might or might not have been Solna’s father. Solna didn’t think Josta would have accepted the responsibility if not for the support stipend that came with it. Krelvarth didn’t even care about that. His best quality was that as far as he was concerned Solna didn’t exist.

Solna wished more people were like Krelvarth.

“I keep expecting someone to catch us,” Solna said.

Rassi scuffed her foot on the floor. “I think they’re afraid of the reverse.”

“What do you mean?” Solna turned to study Rassi’s expression.

“Imagine if we did to them what we did to the Lich?” Rassi said, looking up to meet Solna’ gaze.

“We couldn’t though,” Solna said, puzzled at what Rassi was imagining. “They’d hear us coming the moment we landed.”

“Would they?” Rassi asked. “I know I’m loud. I can’t control myself like I should. Together though? When I’ve got you for balance?”

“That wouldn’t help?” Solna could see what would happen so clearly because there’d been so many times they’d tried to sneak off to catch a moment’s peace and so many times they’d been caught. How could Rassi think a silent assault on the Enclave would be anything but an unmitigated disaster?

“I lost track of you,” Rassi said simply.

“You what?”

“When we were sneaking past the Lich’s defenses? I couldn’t sense you. Not the whole time. And when I could, you were like the memory of a whisper.”

“So you were having problems sensing things?” Solna couldn’t make sense of what Rassi was saying. No matter how well they’d practiced their studies, neither one was ever unsure where the other was or how they were feeling.

“Not in the slightest,” Rassi said, shaking her head. “I could feel everything around us. All of the traps the Lich left. Ravas and Kelda. I could even tell where Goldie was!”

“But not me?” Solna felt an ache thud in her chest. “Did I do something wrong?”

The idea of losing her connection with Rassi was unthinkable. For as much as Solna had needed to protect Rassi over the years, there wasn’t anyone who Solna felt anywhere near as safe with.

No one else who she…

“No silly!” Rassi said, rolling her eyes and cutting off Solna’s train of thought. “You were perfect. You snuck past about a billion physical sensors and twice that many Xah constructs! And you made it look easy!”

“But you got by all of those things too?”

“I was with you.”

“But I wasn’t doing anything to cloak you. That would have been…”

It would have been a manipulation of the Xah.

The Force.

Whatever.

Solna had thought she was past that, but it turned out that a lifetime of indoctrination didn’t simply wash away cleanly in a few days.

“A corruption?” Rassi asked, a teasing tone in her voice. “Well no worries there Enclave girl. I did that all on my own.”

“What though? I mean how? You?” It would have been mean to call out Rassi like that after all of the trouble she’d had staying quiet in the Enclave, but Rassi was right. Solna hadn’t been doing anything to silence Rassi and somehow Rassi had slipped past the same traps Solna had.

“Yeah. Me,” Rassi said, one of the first prideful smiles that Solna had ever seen on her lighting up her face. “I was with you, so I could feel what you were doing.”

“You’re always with me though!”

Except she wasn’t.

The other kids tended to attack Rassi when she was alone. 

“I know, but I was always so afraid of disturbing the Xah that I was constantly fighting to be perfect. With you though, I didn’t have to be. I mean, yeah, we couldn’t really afford to mess things up, but the traps and stuff, they were fair. I was afraid of them but that was okay, so were you.”

Solna blinked. Had she been radiating fear? No. The traps would have definitely picked up on that. 

But she had been afraid.

“I could feel how you were letting your fear go, it didn’t ripple out into the Force, it just kind of blew through you like a gentle breeze.”

Was that what she’d been doing? Solna wasn’t sure, she hadn’t really been paying attention, just doing what she always did and letting…

She hadn’t been using the Force. She’d been letting it use her!

“Oh.”

“Yeah. The Enclave doesn’t know how to do that,” Rassi said. “That was all you. You invented that on the fly.”

“No. No I didn’t,” Solna said, understanding reverberating through her as memories came together and shattered more than a few long held beliefs. “It wasn’t on the fly.”

“Uh, when did you figure it out then?” Rassi asked, it being her turn to be perplexed.

“I’ve always known,” Solna said, tiptoeing through her memories. “Or I worked out how to work with the Force without being noticed long enough ago that no one questioned it.”

“Are you sure? You always passed the tests the Honored’s gave us, and they were definitely watching for things like that.”

“I passed because I was cheating!” Solna said, chuckling at the idea.

And at the idea of who she’d been. 

Or who she’d thought she’d been.

“I was never a prodigy,” she said. “I just figured out how to trick everyone in thinking I was one.”

Rassi stared at her for a good long moment.

Then she took Solna by the shoulders and looked her directly in the eyes.

“Repeat what you just said,” Rassi instructed her.

“I’m not a prodigy. I cheated.” It was an oddly freeing concept.

“So. Let me get this straight. You think that figuring out a technique as, let’s say you were five standards at the time, figuring out a technique that fooled literally everyone in the entire Silent Enclave, include Honored Jolu and Primus May His Breath Be Damned DOLON. You think figuring out a technique like that somehow indicates that you are not absurdly amazing? Is that really the line of reasoning you’re going with.”

“Yes?” Solna had to admit that Rassi’s phrasing did highlight a few weak points in Solna’s argument.

“I see. So you’re a prodigy and a tremendous idiot. Gotcha. Just wanted to make sure.”

“Shut up! And wait, what about you? Miss Woe-Is-Me-I’m-So-Bad-With-the-Xah? You just watched me and figured out how to do the same thing that I probably spent a decade working on?”

“Well, yeah, cause I was thinking about. You did it all on reflex.”

“That doesn’t make it better!” Solna wasn’t even sure which side she was arguing for anymore.

“It totally does though!” Rassi said, gripping Solna’s shoulder tighter.

Though not tight enough to hurt.

Never tight enough to hurt.

“Listen, my point isn’t that you’re amazing. That’s just a fact,” Rassi relaxed a bit as she spoke. “My point is that we’re both a lot stronger than we imagined. A lot stronger than the Enclave would ever let us imagine ourselves to be.”

“Okay, sure, I can see that,” Solna said. It was a weird idea, much too far outside the bulk of her previous experiences, but those were all suspect given the things she’d learned about herself and about the Enclave.

“I don’t think we’re alone in that though,” Rassi said. “I think what we’ve learned is what anyone who leave the Enclave can learn. I think that’s why they left. They’re afraid of us.”

Solna laughed. Rassi was being serious but she was also out of her mind if she thought that Honored Jolu was ever going to be afraid of them.

“If you look out that empty space right there where a window used to be, you might notice that what’s left of the camp has been pretty thoroughly destroyed, right? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the Death Shadows who did all of that might, just might, have been a slightly bigger worry than the two of us.”

Rassi smiled.

It was a smile Solna had seen before. One that said Rassi had noticed something that Solna should have too.

“Yeah. About that. You know what’s kind of funny about that? When was the last time the Enclave even caught wind of the Death Shadows being on the same planet they were on? How about the last time there was an actual attack?”

“Do we even know if there ever was an attack?” Solna said, seeing where Rassi’s argument was leading.

“Nope. I mean, let’s give Jolu at least the benefit of the doubt and say there was. Even if so though, it has been a long time since the Death Shadows found where the Enclave was staying.”

“And a day after we left, they suddenly attack in full force. Yeah. Okay that is pretty weird.”

“Not weird. Terrifying. At least to Primus Donol, and probably every other Elder. And you know what they would have to be asking themselves?”

“Whether we called in the Death Shadows before we left.”

“And if we can do it again,” Rassi said, completing her thesis.

“Did we?” Solna asked, a sick bile rising in her stomach.

“What? No. Of course not,” Rassi said. “But they can’t know that.”

“We can’t either,” Solna said. “I hated it here right? I was the one who bent the Xah so that Nix found us and flew us away. How do we know I didn’t also call down the Shadows as retribution?”