Time had an unpleasant habit of marching on no matter how much Nix wanted to linger in a moment and process everything that had just happened.

In this particular case, lingering was contraindicated by the rhythmic thumping of a starship’s heavy laser batteries blowing chunks out of Spire on a faster cycle time than they were supposed to be run.

It was the misuse of what were very delicate weapon systems that bothered Nix more than the fact that Darsus Klex was intent on killing them and in a position to accomplish that feat before anyone could intervene.

“What do you mean she killed you?” Ayli asked, her lightsaber still in her hand as they raced down the ancient stairway which lead to the secondary hangar bay.

“Your wife’s master slew me and killed my master,” Ravas said, appearing in front of them and disappearing as they ran past her. “It is not particularly complicated.”

Nix laughed at how the Force moaned at the deep, deep inaccuracy of that description,  but doing so hurt her ribs. Being spun around like a child’s toy was not a pleasant experience it turned out, and hadn’t been without a fair bit of bruising and pain. That Ravas had destroyed the Ancient Specter wasn’t something Nix thought she should feel gleeful about. That didn’t stop her from feeling gleeful though. The Ancient Specter had been a jerk in addition to being an unnatural abomination that the Force was glad to see destroyed, and Nix had no reason to disagree with the Force on that.

“She’s not my master,” Nix wheezed out as they ran. Between her and Ayli, she was, normally, in far better shape for physical exertion but human stamina had its limits and the beating she’d taken had exhausted most of hers. Nix could rely on the Force to give her strength but that was only going to hide the additional damage she was doing to herself which seemed like a dangerous idea even under the somewhat dire circumstances before them.

“She taught you how to manipulate the Force,” Ravas said. “Whether you acknowledge her or not, she holds mastery over you, through the power she holds and the power she can grant you, if nothing else.”

Kelda hadn’t taught Nix anything. Or at least nothing specific. And from Nix could see, Kelda didn’t have any power to grant, or any desire to empower Nix at all even if she could.

But arguing with Ravas was only going to drive a wedge further between them. Probably? Nix wasn’t sure she could get a good read on the Zabrak woman’s ghost. Which might be a trait of Dark Side users, or it might just be a Ravas thing.

“She cares about you still,” Nix said instead, hoping to break through the ghost’s perpetual detached distain and was rewarded to see Ravas miss her next flickering teleportation appearance. Nix knew Ravas was still around, but she’d managed to fluster the ghost, which in turn said Ravas still had feelings she could connect to. 

The trick was maintaining that connection.

“She knew we’d find you,” Nix said. “She didn’t warn me not to, or tell me that you were dangerous. I think she wanted me to help you.”

Ravas’ laughter was short and bitter.

“You presume much,” she said. “To think that you could be of value to me when you were too weak to save yourself or one you profess to care about.”

Which was true, and stung, but Nix didn’t let the hurt linger. How could she. It was true. She hadn’t been able to protect Ayli or herself. Even if she got stronger, there would still be people and situations that would be beyond her ability to manage. 

But that was where friends and allies came in.

“Every part has value,” Nix said, drawing on the lessons she’d picked up rather than trying to explain things in terms Ravas would gravitate towards. “You just need to know where they fit in and what they can do.”

The tower shook with a particularly close explosion and Nix had to grab onto Ayli to steady herself.

“It’s not much farther now,” Ayli said. “Can you keep going?”

“Yeah,” Nix said. “That was just a lucky shot, he’s firing blindly because doesn’t know where we are.”

“He does not need to locate you. Not when he has sufficient firepower to reduce this spire to rubble. As you are, you cannot escape this place,” Ravas said. “Your enemy has you boxed in.”

Nix reached out with her senses, casting them to where her intuition guided her and was rewarded to find things in motion that she hadn’t requested or dared hope for.

“Is that the future you see for us?” Nix asked, knowing she was doing a poor job of baiting the trap she planned to lay.

“I do not look to the future,” Ravas said. “Even your master would tell you that the Force only offers lies to doom the weak willed and unwary. You should know to deal with your present as it is.”

That was not at all how Kelda would have described things, Nix knew. From how tangled Kelda had been trying to express even simple concepts, Nix guessed an explanation of the visions the Force could offer would have been accompanied by an hour of caveats and exception warnings for every minute of solid lecture. 

That aside though, she was still glad to hear Ravas’ answer.

“Kelda didn’t mention any of that,” Nix said, using the name to diffuse some of the shock Ravas seemed to feel on hearing it. “Honestly, I think you’ve taught me more than she has by an order of magnitude at this point.”

“I’ve watched you,” Ravas said. “You’ve learned nothing from me.”

“Maybe we need to speak more then,” Nix said, ignoring the distrust and disgust in Ravas’ voice. There was an undercurrent to it which whispered all too clearly that Nix wasn’t the source or target of Ravas’ distress. 

Like an angry, hissing Growler Cat, if you wanted to get past her defenses, you couldn’t pay the unhappy noises too much attention. They needed to be respected of course. Pushing Ravas too quickly would likely result in similar bloody slashes to trying to pet a Growler Cat could produce. Given time, and space, and understanding though, Nix suspected that both Growler Cats and Ravas would grumble themselves into a begrudging acceptance of their associate.

“I think not,” Ravas said. “You can no more change what I am than she could, and I have no patience to entertain the arguments of the dead.”

“Maybe I just want to listen,” Nix said.

“You will not accept what I have to say,” Ravas said. “You do not see the Force as it truly is.”

“I can only accept what I believe to be true,” Nix said. “But I can promise to listen. Your story deserves to be heard.”

“She’s right,” Ayli said. “As a historian, one of my most important functions is to preserve and present the past as the people who lived it saw things. What we know of your life and the cult who sprung up in worship of you is so fragmented that it paints a picture which cannot possibly be accurate. Your story won’t be accurate either. None of us can relate the full history of our lives, but that doesn’t mean our stories aren’t worth preserving.”

Ravas missed another teleport appearance, but at the next landing she appeared in front of Ayli, halting their passage.

“I will not be able to tell you anything if you perish in this Spire,” she said. “Let me in. Only till we are free of this place. I can save you both. As I did in the control center.”

“You’d give me your word that you would set me free once we’re safe?” Ayli asked, though Nix could tell she wasn’t really contemplating accepting the deal.

“You would accept my word?” Ravas asked.

“Yes,” Nix said, knowing that Ravas had probably never been in a position where she felt any compunction about breaking a vow or a promise. “But in this case we don’t need to put you or Ayli to the test.”

“You will die,” Ravas said. “He will kill you. It is in his nature, as I have seen in countless others.”

“Yeah, I hate that you got put through that,” Nix said, catching glimmers of the myriad of complete monsters Ravas had to deal with during her apprenticeship under her Dark Side master. 

Ravas laughed again.

“You would hate more what I did in return.”

“I don’t think I need to,” Nix said, the near bottomless well of loathing Ravas possessed seeming to hold all the hate that could ever be needed for the things she’d done in life. “Just like I don’t think we’re going to die here.”

“If you would listen to nothing else I say, listen to this; the future is uncertain. It is always changing, and here, of all places, what you see coming to pass will be a trap. The Dark Side does not grant you life or freedom freely. You must earn it, and here you are sunk deep into its embrace. Here you must fight, must kill, to survive. Any visions which tell you otherwise are tests to winnow out those who cling to rosy dreams because they are too weak to face the terribly reality before them.”

Nix smiled, warmth wrapping around her heart at the sentiment behind Ravas’ words. The ghost cared. Ravas couldn’t admit that. Not directly. But she cared.

“Oh we definitely need to talk more,” Nix said. “I could get drunk on how refreshing it is to hear someone explain this stuff directly.”

“Then let me fix this,” Ravas said.

“You don’t need to,” Nix said. “I’m not saying we’re going to be safe because I’ve seen a vision of a future where we’re safe. I can’t even feel the usual flow that tells me where I should go. It’s like the Force has just been silent, or mostly silent, since I got here. So, yeah, I know I can’t rely on that. Which is why I’m relying on something far better instead.”

“And that would be?” Ayli asked.

Nix held up here hand and slowing closed her fingers into her palm until her index finger remained for one moment longer.

“Wensha, Lamplighter, do you copy!” Sali yelled over the comm unit Nix was carrying.

Nix dropped her hand to punctuate that this was the moment she’d been waiting for.

“We’re here Goldrunner, can you see the secondary landing bay?” Nix asked.

“Sure can Mom!” Goldie said. “Just need a moment though.”

A large explosion reverberated through the spire. 

“Got ‘em!” Goldie said.

“Got who?” Ayli asked.

“Wait. Dang it. Got the wrong one,” Goldie said.

“What is happening out there?” Ayli demanded.

“We’re escaping,” Zindiana said. “Thought you might like to come along.”

“Thought you might have a decent hiding spot,” Sali said.

“We’ve got a few Klex fighters following us,” Goldie said. “And Darsus’s ship. Sorry, I thought I hit him but one of his escorts intercepted the particle beam.”

“Particle…are you dogfighting with the Klex’s?” Ayli asked. “Where did you get a particle beam cannon from?”

“The same place she got a Quad Turbo Laser batter and two torpedo racks,” Sali said.

“As parents you really need to be careful letting your kid hang around with a pirate,” Zindiana said.

“I don’t…what is happening?” Ravas asked, looking as dumbfounded as Nix had ever seen her.

“You were right that on our own, we’d be dead here,” Nix said. “But we’re not on our own. All this exploration stuff? It’s been a fantastic cover for Sali and Zin to do the real work of getting us out of here.”

“Coming in for a landing right now,” Goldie said. “Don’t be in the hangar.”

The roar of starship engines on the other side of the door told Nix that Goldie had scanned the hangar before arriving. Also, if any of the Klex forces had been waiting for them there, well, those unfortunate souls were now free floating plasma. 

“We’ve got maybe thirty seconds before they start firing into the hangar. Let’s be flying out of here before then,” Nix said and dashed into the hangar and towards Goldie’s open ramp, happy to let the Force give her the strength she needed for this one critical moment.

Behind them Ravas stared is disbelief and consternation.

This wasn’t how things would have gone in her world.

This wasn’t a world she knew how to deal with.

Or that she’d ever imagined could be real.

Ayli was glad she already had her lightsaber in her hand. It didn’t feel like it was going to be enough, but it was a damn sight better than being unarmed. That thought sent her stepping in front of Nix, who, notably, did not have a lightsaber to defend herself with.

“It’s always adorable when one of them volunteers to die first,” the Ancient Specter said.

His appearance suggested that he was the shade of a departed human, tall and fair haired, in the prime of his life.

Except that what stood before Ayli was not and never had been human. She wasn’t even certain that she was really seeing it. It felt more like a projection from the Force rather than anything that held memories of breath and blood.

“If you’re so eager for the dying to start, why don’t you come a little closer,” Ayli said. The lightsaber could hurt the specter. It’s blade wasn’t magical, or imbued with the Force, it was simply very good at disintegrating things and for all the specter’s incorporeal creepiness, it’s presence in the world as anything more than a patch of bad feelings was dependent on the ectoplasm it seems to be composed of.

“The food thinks it’s not worth playing with,” the Ancient Specter said, rising from the chair it had been lounging in to pace across the control room. “Do not worry food. We will not rush your suffering. We know you cannot linger here as long as we have, but we have much time together.”

The lightsaber could hurt the Ancient Specter but Ayli could feel the power radiating from the monster. A part of her wished she hadn’t been training with Nix, hadn’t been honing her awareness and senses. Without some ability to sense the Force, she wouldn’t have known anything about the Ancient Specter, wouldn’t have had any sense of just how overmatched she was.

“You don’t want to do that,” Nix said. “You don’t even want to try.”

Ayli risked a glance back, expecting to see Nix offering her hand in peace to their adversary.

Nix did not look peaceful.

Her features were cast harder than durasteel, and any traces of mercy were hiding too well for Ayli to detect them.

“Oh, we assure you, we have spent countless time desiring nothing more than this day when we may feast once more,” the Ancient Specter said, pausing at one of the desks to pick up a ceremonial ribbon with a phrik disk medallion hanging from it.

“You won’t,” Nix said, her voice flattened into a knife edge.

“But we will let you live, or whatever you’re doing, if you find someplace else to be,” Ayli said, knowing the bluff wouldn’t work but surprised by why it failed.

“No we won’t,” Nix said, spoiling a negotiation which hadn’t ever held any real chance of success.

“How delightful,” the Ancient Specter said. “Descension in the ranks. Perhaps we shall start with the one which thinks it knows how this will turn out?”

Before Ayli could react, she heard a gurgle from behind her and spun to see Nix floating two feet off the floor, clutching at her throat.

“Fear not, at least not yet, we promised to take our time and so we shall,” the Ancient Specter said.

That was enough for Ayli. Remembering the things Nix had taught her, she charged forward, letting the Force guide the stroke of her blade.

And she missed.

The Force was so snarled within the specter that  it only needed to casually wave one hand and Ayli was sent tumbling off course into one of the walls. Blood burst from her nose as an unseen hand ensured that she smashed face first into the wall and then bounced hard off the ground when she fell back.

She felt a growl building inside her and shot back to her feet in time to see the Specter rotating Nix in the air like a pinwheel tool.

Movement wasn’t as easy as it had been the moment prior but Ayli pushed herself forward, keeping her steps careful and centered.

It didn’t matter.

The Ancient Specter waved its hand again as Ayli flew back into the wall, impacting it like a fall from orbit.

“Don’t give up,” the Ancient Specter said. “It’s ever so boring when they lose hope soon into the proceedings.”

Ayli had not lost hope, but her control over her rage was definitely starting to slip.

Which wasn’t helping Nix, who was still gulping for air.

“If you want me to fight, then leave her out of this and I’ll give you the fight you’re looking for,” Ayli said, hoping that if Nix got free for even a moment she might be able to escape.

Escape to where was an open question, but anywhere that wasn’t near the Ancient Spectre had to be an improvement.

As Ayli fought to move forward, Nix was fighting too. As she spun around, NIx dragged one of her arms painfully forward. She’s raised it no more than a hand’s breadth before flew backwards, crashing into a wall of her own. 

Nix rose with fire in her eyes, and Ayli saw it hadn’t been the Ancient Specter who threw her away. Nix had done that to herself in order to break free.

“How very clever,” the Ancient Specter said. “Keep it up. Keep looking for trick that will save you. That will let you escape. That will buy you one more breath.”

Nix collapsed to her knees, driving downwards by a terrible blow to her back.

Desperate to do something, anything, Ayli hurled the lightsaber at the specter.

The blade froze in mid-air and began slowly twirling, as under the specter’s control as everything else in the room was.

“How sad, now that one’s disarmed,” the Ancient Specter said. “Here, let us give the food its tool back.”

Ayli barely had time to duck as the lightsaber shot towards her, point first. At the speed it was going it should have struck the wall and shattered into a million tiny fragments. Instead though, it dropped down lightly to clank on the floor beside her.

“Go on,” the Ancient Specter said. “Take it up again. You might get closer this time. Maybe you can distract us. Maybe the other food can. Maybe we will peel the skin off of her and stew you in a marinade of her suffering. Or does her agony not touch you?”

Ayli’s fight against the emotions swirling within her was as losing a battle as the one against the specter. She could feel the yellow rings Nix had spoken of starting to cloud her vision.

You’re still you, and you still get decide who that is, no matter how strong the temptation to be someone you don’t want to be gets. Nix had said those words while they practiced together. Had believed in her. 

Still believed in her.

Ayli drew in a deep breath and thought of the calm she’d felt working with Nix. Thought of the calm she felt flying, even through the tightest of scrapes. Thought of the peace she would feel again in the future that waited for them.

It wasn’t much, and it didn’t drive away the rage and the fear that was threatening to overwhelm her, but it was enough for her to rise to her feet again and call the lightsaber to her hand once more.

“Yes, yes, try again. Try harder. Give us everything you have and more,” the Ancient Specter said.

“No.”

It wasn’t Nix or Alyi who had spoken, and for a moment Ayli didn’t recognize the voice, charged as it was with an unnamed and unfamiliar emotion.

“They are not yours. They’re mine,” Ravas said, her voice disembodied and echoing from all the points around them.

“I beg to differ progenitor,” the Ancient Specter said, it’s voice filled with an all too nameable and familiar anger.

“Good. You’re begging. Now leave them. They’re mine.” Ravas said, her voice closer than it had been, though still without a particular location.

“You hold no sway here, progenitor. Your time is past. You are weak and we shall feast!” the Ancient Specter roared, turning left and right ever more frantically.

Ayli jerked backwards as a hand burst through the specter’s chest, carrying a mass of pulsing purple slime that had been its heart.

“I said, they’re mine.” Ravas shoved the specter forward, it’s body crumbling to dust as she crushed its heart into a bright gemstone.

The overwhelming pressure from the Force faded and the sense of snarled wrongness diminished as well.

“Thank you,” Nix said, through a choking cough. “Thank you for coming.” She grasped onto the nearest console to steady herself as she rose to her feet. “I didn’t know if you would.”

A series of complicated emotions raced across Ravas’ face too quickly for Ayli to catalog or sense, before the dead Zabrak woman school her features back into their usual vaguely-annoyed expression.

“I came to protect my legacy,” Ravas said, turning to Ayli. “You can still be of much use to me.”

Ayli wondered about that.

On the one hand, she clearly was not in Ravas’ league when it came to manipulating the Force. The ease with which Ravas had dispatched the specter aside, there was also the small issue that Ravas seemed to have discovered how to live on indefinitely after she died, a trick which Ayli was certain she could not replicate.

“What did that thing mean by calling you ‘progenitor’?” Nix asked. “I got the feeling that it was a lot older than you are, wasn’t it?”

“Indeed,” Ravas said. “It had existed through millenia long before I trapped it here.”

“You brought that thing here?” Ayli asked. “Why?”

“My master commanded it,” Ravas said. “It was not our intention to capture a creature such as that specifically, merely to sanctify this location and enhance the energies which it naturally gives rise to. The arrival of the specters was both of a result of that process and a boon to it.”

“Killing that one isn’t going to break the hold the Dark Side has on this place, will it?” Nix asked, sounding like she already knew the answer.

“The Dark Side’s shadow will be weakened,” Ravas said. “Over time it may even fade back to its natural levels.Or perhaps one of the other specters will consume enough of its fellows to rise as the new Ancient. I never studied how a Dark Side nexus might be cleansed.”

“Would Kelda know?” Nix asked.

A tremor ran through Ravas’s body, but again, she reasserted control over herself.

“The Jedi were arrogant fools who would tell you they knew everything of how the Force worked,” Ravas said. “In her case however, maybe.”

Ayli had roughly one hundred thousand questions she wanted to ask, at least half of them hanging on the tiny wistful note at the end of Ravas’ words. With too many of them to sort through though, a silent moment passed before Ravas continued.

“She was always a good student,” Ravas said. “The attentive one. If anything in the Jedi texts had anything of actual value to say about this place, she might have known of it.”

“Thank you,” Nix said. “She’s not here. She’s almost always distant,” Ravas snorted at that but didn’t interrupt. “But this place feels like a world apart from the rest of the universe. It feels, is ‘cut off’ the right way to say it?”

“It is just the opposite,” Ravas said, in a far more pedagogical tone than Ayli would have guessed the ghost would ever adopt. “This is a nexus of the Force. It is more connected to the universe than almost anywhere else.” There was pride in her words, but it faded as she continued. “Those connections are not ones which would speak to you though. They are bound within and around themselves. Strong. Unbreakable.” Pride leaked out leaving only sad regret. “Inescapable. And limiting.” She turned and paced away. “It was not the working we should have made.”

“Why didn’t you undo it then?” Nix asked.

“Time. It ran out of us,” Ravas said. “When she killed me.”

Nix had not expected to drive Ravas off as easily as she had. Part of her had assumed the ghost was going to be a permanent fixture in her life so long as she was with Ayli. If she was feeling honest with herself, she would admit that more than a few plans had crossed her mind for how she might exorcize Ravas, even if only for a day or an hour.

“Who was she talking about? Who did you speak to?” Ayli asked.

It was not the most important question before them at the moment, but it did suggest how much Ayli trusted Nix, given that Nix was the only thing standing between them and drowning in what was becoming a swiftly flowing river of liquid nitrogen. 

“It has to be Kelda,” Nix said. “There can’t be anyone else who would freak Ravas out like that after all the centuries she’s been dead.”

“She knows you’ve spoken to her old flame though, doesn’t she?” Ayli asked, uncertainty frosting her words more than the freezing river could.

“You know, I don’t think she does, or did I guess,” Nix said. Holding the bubble around them wasn’t as difficult as she’d imagined it would be, but that was because she wasn’t doing most of the work.

The Force wasn’t a muscle, or a battery. She didn’t have a giant reserve of Force energy in her. That wasn’t how it worked. Or it wasn’t how it worked for her. Ravas’ arguments suggested that some Force users did use their own reserves of strength to dictate how events would play out, but Nix knew that would never work for her.

What felt right to her was harmony. All her life she’d reached for that. She had memories of being just a wee little thing and feeling pulled by a flow beyond anything else in size. It had saved her life then. Not in a grand gesture but simply by coaxing her tiny feet onto the side of the hover platform that hadn’t collapsed due to bad rigging. No one else had considered the path of her steps significant. She was just a little child randomly running around an air concourse who’d gotten lucky. Nothing mystical about it. But the moment had stuck with her. She’d listened to the flow and it had carried her to safety, and so she’d grown up with at least one ear tuned for it, learning to follow where the Force led her without being fully aware that it was at all unusual.

She wasn’t unique in following the Force where it led her. Everyone felt its push and pull. When it went against their desires though, most pulled back or pushed on through it. Nix couldn’t claim she hadn’t done the same, more than a few times, and so she hadn’t thought she was particularly special.

Even standing amidst a river of death, she still suspected she wasn’t. 

She could feel the Force passing through her, could feel the liquid nitrogen parting because while it weighed far more than she could ever lift, it was so very small compared to the what the collective life of the universe could handle.

Not that she could call on the entirety of the Force. Only what she needed. And only as much as needed her.

“There’s enough coolant in this tunnel to reach the shuttles, isn’t there?” Ayli asked.

“More than,” Nix said. “Which the shuttles will not be happy about. Darsus isn’t going to be flying back to his daddy any time soon.”

“That raises certain problems for us too then,” Ayli said.

“I’m hoping we’ll find something at the end of the tunnel that’ll help with that,” Nix said.

“Hoping or you’ve had a vision of something?”

“Just hoping,” Nix said. “I can’t hear too much with all this rushing past us.”

It wouldn’t have been impossible for the Force to give her a clear view of where to go, but it seemed to prefer to leave things unspecified as much as possible. What bits of precognition Nix had experienced seemed to be limited to short bursts centered around moments of extreme peril.

Which suggested it was good that she wasn’t seeing what was to come.

“How much longer can you hold this bubble up?” Ayli asked.

“Long enough to get us to the far end,” Nix said. “There’s got to be a hatch or something we can use to get to safety. Especially if the candidates were following a tradition like Ravas where they’re burning their own reserves to use the Force.”

There was not, it turned out, a hatch at the end of the hallway.

There was a lift.

“This thing is a hundred years old, right?” Ayli asked.

“At least. It could be a lot older if the Children of the Storm found one of Ravas’ old bases to put to use for their scheme.”

“And it’s been exposed to extreme coolants, probably more than once.”

“Given the wealth the Children put together? I’m guessing hundreds of time? Maybe thousands?”

“And no one has been maintaining it?”

“I don’t see any droids around, so, yeah, probably not.”

Ayli flicked a switch on the lift’s control panel with her gloved hand.

The lift started rising instantly leaving the half filled corridor behind them.

“How is it still working? I can’t get a Kaf machine to last more than month and the Children have a death trap that lasts centuries?” Ayli demanded.

“Kaf machines are meant to break. They want you to buy new ones,” Nix said. “No one’s buying replacement death traps though, so they make those with extensive self-repair functions. The energy budget is probably pretty high but until the magma cools they’ve got a nice reliable geothermal source to tap into.”

“Should get one of those for the Goldrunner,” Ayli grumbled.

“Wait, did you think I didn’t build that into Goldie’s skillset?” Nix asked. “She can repair and modify herself however she wants, well within the limits of the components she has available.”

The lift finished ascending to reveal a room of long faded opulence. Small plasma torches burst to life on their arrival, illuminating a grand stage which they stood in the center of. Rising rings of seats flanked the stage on one side while on the other a huge red curtain hung, framing a view of empty wasteland outside the spire.

“I feel like there’s supposed to be an audience waiting for us here,” Ayli said.

“I think there is.” Nix gestured to the far back seats where spectral forms were flickering in and out of existence. 

“I don’t…” Ayli started to say and then drew her breath in sharply. Her lightsaber was in her hand and blazing with light an instant later. “Those aren’t ghosts.”

Nix watched and listened, trying to understand what she was seeing.

Ayli was right.

There were no ghosts in the theater chamber.

There were only the things which had eaten the ghosts.

“Oh. This was not a good place to come to,” she said, understanding the danger they were in. 

The Spire was a place where the Force had been cast out of balance and twisted into an ugly, tangled mess. Pain and death was baked into the foundations of the structures and the designers ill-intent had been preserved as well as lift had across the centuries.

The spectral creatures who inhabited the Spire had been drawn to it like moths to a flame and were caught in its web of hate and malice as surely as the ghosts of those who’d failed their tests had been.

“We should leave,” Ayli said, stepping in front of Nix as the spectral forms began to flicker closer.

“Darsus is still down there,” Nix said. “And the shuttles will be frozen to the floor for a while.”

“That is a problem,” Ayli said. “But it might not be as bad a problem as this one.”

“We might be able to talk to these things,” Nix said. “We know that’s not an option with Darsus.”

“They don’t look like they’re interested in conversation,” Ayli said, brandishing the lightsaber in a clearly threatening gesture.

“Hey!” Nix yelled to the specters. “We’re not the ones who did this to you. We can fix it though.”

“We can?” Ayli whispered.

“We can blow up the Spire if we can get out of here,” Nix said.

“As a historian, I find that idea abhorrent,” Ayli said. “As a sapient being with breath in my body still I am all for it though.”

The specters did not seem concerned with either Nix’s plan or Ayli’s lightsaber.

They should have been though.

As the first one flicked within range, Ayli lashed out, the red blade searing through whatever ectoplasmic substance the specter was composed it.

It screamed and Nix could feel it dying.

The others surged forward at that.

Some of them charged towards the stage, holding back only as far as the circle Ayli spun in to ward them off. 

The others turned to the wounded specter and devoured it, drawing fresh screams from it which seemed to energize all of them.

“Killing them makes things worse,” Nix said.

“Glad to hear any alternatives,” Ayli said.

Nix raised her hand and tried to shove the lot of them back as she’d held back the liquid nitrogen. When the Force she called onto the shield them reached a specter though it twisted and buckled, warping in on itself. 

The specters didn’t have material bodies to grasp onto but the long simmering rage within them had carved channels which carried away Force projections.

“I think these things are evolved to eat Force users,” Nix said.

“Maybe that’s why Force people carry lightsabers?” Ayli said.

“Good luck that we’ve got one then,” Nix said, noticing that even in this dire situation there were still threads of luck working in her favor.

“It’d be luckier if we had two of them,” Ayli said.

“Can you hold these things off if we try to get out of her?” Nix asked.

“I think so,” Ayli said. “They’re so, I don’t know, snarled? Makes them easy to get a read on even when they’re flickered out.”

“Let’s try to get up there then,” Nix said, pointing to the booth at the back of the theater where a variety of machinery was visible.

“I don’t think there’s a spaceship up there,” Ayli said.

“If there is, it’s a really small one,” Nix said. “What I’m looking for are the controls to this place, and the comms.”

“That could be useful,” Ayli said. “Stay close okay.”

Staying close turned out to be far easier said than done. Their dance on the Goldrunner had been at least partially under Nix’s control and she’d held back from moving as fast as she could to give Ayli a chance to get used to sensing the distance between the two of them. Fighting against the specters required just a bit more speed and precision than that.

They were halfway up the stairs to the back of the theater when the first specter slipped past Ayli’s guard. Nix could sense them too and managed to get her right hand in front of the specter before it struck.

Cold deeper than the liquid nitrogen flashed through her hand and up her arm. It was reaching into her chest to freeze her heart when she rallied and used the Force to move her own hand, casting the specter away.

“Nix!” Ayli had sensed the damage Nix had taken but there wasn’t time to deal with that.

“I’m fine,” Nix said. “I can keep up. Go all out. You won’t hit me.”

Ayli hesitated for a moment and wound up narrowly slicing a specter in half before it could barrel through her chest.

Nix laughed at the indignation on Ayli’s face and that broke the last bit of hesitation that was holding Ayli back.

Together they spun through a dizzying series of steps, slicing another two specters who were torn apart by the hoard before the growing melee reached the doors at the back of the chamber.

Nix opened the doors with Force, allowing them to dance through before she slammed them shut again.

Despite their incorporeal nature, half the specters didn’t seem to be able to follow them. They lost another half of the horde when they dashed into the stairwell leading to the control room, and the last few dropped away step by step as they rose to the top of the Spire.

Nix wanted to believe that meant they were moving towards safety.

But she knew they weren’t.

That feeling was confirmed when they entered the control chamber.

“It has been so long since anyone came here to die,” the most ancient of the Specters said.

Being dunked in liquid nitrogen was not a typical hazard for a starship mechanic. The cooling lines to various components tended to be better behaved than that, and most didn’t carry anywhere near as much of the liquified gas as the trap which had dumped its contents on Nix’s head.

It hadn’t been foresight which saved her, or not exactly foresight. As she stepped across the threshold, the Force had spoken with perfect clarity to let her know that she was in danger from literally every direction.

So she’d pushed it away.

All of it.

In every direction.

The effort had driven her to her knees but with both arms extended she was able to maintain the bubble of space that the liquid nitrogen was flowing around.

It was still really damn cold though.

“NIX!” Ayli yelled from only a few meters behind her, and a new warmth entered Nix’s heart.

“I’m okay!” she yelled back, adjusting to the weight of the freezing liquid and struggling back up to the her feet.

“She doesn’t have the strength for this,” Ravas said, her voice carrying through the barrier between them without any of the muffling that Ayli’s had.

A spark of irritation lit in Nix’s heart at Ravas’s claim and with it the load she was carrying seemed to lighten.

That wasn’t what she needed.

She could feel the whole spire around her was suffused with memories of loss and pain. It was tempting beyond measure to snap back at it, or to cut it off.

I tried to turn away from it, a familiar voice whispered in her mind from a place more distant than the stars, Which worked to a degree. It was what I’d been trained to do, to rise above, to find clarity by creating emotional distance.

Is that what I should do? Nix asked, feeling that wasn’t the right answer somehow.

Which was all the answer she received.

She listened for a long moment, hoping Kelda might speak to her again. In the distance, Ayli and Ravas were arguing but Nix wasn’t listening for them. She was focused on the brighter, more hopeful side of the Force. 

Which was almost as drowned here as she was.

This was not a place where good things happened.

This was not a place where people had been kind to one another.

This was not a place where people had even lived. It was built for a purpose and that purpose was as mechanical and unbalanced as its engineers could make it.

Nix noticed that the liquid nitrogen was not getting any lighter. The sensible action was to go back. They could wait for the flood to warm up and evaporate as gas. In the worst case, the rebreathers in their masks would prevent them from suffocating in an all nitrogen environment and they could explore at their leisure.

Except, if Nix was making a trap like this, she would definitely make sure it was able to recondense a fresh supply of liquid nitrogen in the time one flood’s worth was able to evaporate.

By that logic, she should move forward. She took a few steps in that direction and felt the liquid nitrogen sloshing around her. She could keep going. A corridor full of liquid was heavy but she had this. She could keep going.

But did she want to?

Ahead of her, the first ice covered statue awaited. The figure was humanoid, but so covered in ice, Nix couldn’t tell what species it was supposed to be beyond that broad description. It’s pose was one of supplication and terror, fallen to it’s near with one hand raised in despair to ward off the doom which had clearly claimed it.

That was what awaited Nix if she failed. She knew that as certainly as she knew she would not fail.

Ayli sounded so far away, but that was due to the muffling effect of the liquid between them.  And because Nix was still moving away from her.

Nix stopped.

The creators of this trial had engineered it to isolate the applicants. It drowned you and it was only through your own strength that you could win through to the far side, emerging reborn from the cruel baptism or left behind like the statue as a frozen testament to those who dared challenge a trial they were too weak for.

Nix wasn’t too weak. Even as drenched in the Dark Side as the spire was, she could still feel the Force flowing through her, life sheltering life. The original engineers had envisioned that but they hadn’t counted on putting another engineer to the test.

With a contended smile, Nix reversed her course and walked back to where Ayli was waiting.

“You’re alive!” Ayli said and grabbed into a fierce hug the moment she was through the atmo-barrier that was keeping the liquid nitrogen out of the entry chamber.

“And running away,” Ravas said, though neither woman paid her any attention.

“Come on, you knew that,” Nix teased, guessing more than knowing that Ayli had been able to sense her presence.

“Don’t do that to me again,” Ayli said, parting from Nix and giving her what passed for a stern look.

“I won’t. In fact I think this will work better with if we both go in there,” Nix said.

“Imagine that. Just like I’d said?”

“Yes, but this time I have a plan for what we can do.”

“Is this a plan I’m going to hate?”

“I don’t think so,” Nix said. “It involves stabbing things with the lightsaber.”

“I’m listening.”

“There’s no one in there to stab though?” Ravas said.

“We don’t need to stab someone,” Nix said. “We need to stab something. Specifically the delivery nozzles for the liquid nitrogen.”

“Won’t that mean they’ll dump more liquid nitrogen on us?” Ayli asked.

“Right now the tunnel is still pretty full,” Nix said. “There’ll be vents to let the gas escape as it warms up, otherwise this whole place would explode the first time the trap was triggered. If we lightsaber the nozzles, the machines that condense the gas will be stuck permanently refreshing the supply. Since it’s probably not designed for extended duty, it’ll probably fry itself in a couple of days or so. Then we can wait a bit, let the the flood in there evaporate completely, and walk around at our leisure.”

“Won’t that much coolant take a long time to evaporate though?” Ayli asked.

“Typically, yeah, but that can vary a lot based on the materials its interacting with. Also, unless I miss my guess, they’re venting the waste heat from the compressor underneath the floor of the corridor,” Nix said. “I don’t think you’d want to have a trap like this and then not be able to get into your base for a month or more.”

“Or you could just perform the trial as it’s meant to be performed,” Ravas said.

“You mean, rush right into the trap and stumble on the second trap which is obviously waiting for us before we clear the first one?” Ayli asked.

“Your strength is great enough to overcome all of the obstacles in here,” Ravas said.

“And my intellect is sharp enough to know when to listen to my wife,” Ayli said and threw an accusatory glance at Nix.

“The Klex’s won’t be happy,” Nix said. “But I think that’s a good thing. If Darsus gets bored enough he might either leave, or do something stupid.”

“Which could be bad for us,” Ayli noted as that it were by far the most likely outcome.

“It could be, but there’s not a lot of ‘good for us’ options in how this ends,” Nix said.

“Unless Sali and Zin are able to do something about that battlecruiser,” Ayli said.

“They’ve got Goldie to help them,” Nix said. “She’s not built for cracking battlecruiser command systems but she should be able to keep them off the Klex’s scanners unless they do something really loud.”

“With Sali I’d say ‘loud’ would be the most subtle we could hope for, but Zin’s got a better head on her shoulders than that.”

“So, you’re okay with this plan then?” Nix asked.

“It’s going to annoy the Klex’s so it seems like a perfect one to me,” Ayli said. “We should comm them as soon as we’re done though. Days without a message from us will yield very different actions than if they know we’re stuck here, waiting.”

“Maybe we comm them first?” Nix suggested. “Giving them the impression that they get a say in what goes on here might increase their patience a bit.”

Ayli grumbled and shrugged. “You’re probably right. Let me do the talking through. Better if they think of you as just the ship’s mechanic.”

Raising the Klex battlecruiser meant venturing out of entrance chamber and into the disguised hangar where they’d left their shuttle.

Which was how they saw that it hadn’t taken long at all for Darsus to grow bored enough to do something stupid.

“I knew you’d run away!” he said, from behind the safety of six of his father’s armed guards.

“Oh good, you’re here. That saves us a comm,” Ayli said, refusing to break her stride towards their shuttle. “Let your father know that there’s a trap, which we expected obviously, and that we’ll be dismantling it. Looks like it’s going to take about a week to get past it.”

“I’m not your message boy,” Darsus said. “And you don’t have a week. Get by it now.”

“The tunnel to get through is filled with freezing coolant,” Ayli said. “It’s going to take a week, at a minimum for it to evaporate.”

“Not my problem. Get through it.” Darsus stepped in front of his goons, his blaster already in his hand.

“Don’t taunt your enemies,” Ravas said, walking directly behind Ayli.

“Really Darsus?” Ayli said, not bothering to reach for either her blaster or her lightsaber. “What’s your play here? You’re going to shoot me for calling your father?”

“I might shoot you just because I feel like it,” Darsus said, blaster shaking just a little in his hand.

Nix could feel the Dark Side rising. This was not the sort of place to have tense standoffs. It wanted violence and it needed death.

How do I stop this? she asked, hoping Kelda, or anyone might have the answer.

I usually used a lightsaber to deal with situations like this, Kelda said. Can’t say it was a great option then, not sure if it’s a great option now.

Which was as helpful as Nix had expected.

If a lightsaber wasn’t the solution though what other tools did she have to work with?

She breathed in and tried to draw the possibilities to herself.

If she tried to interrupt, Darsus would shoot her. For certain. And then Ayli could cut him in half. Possibly she’d carve up the rest of the guards too. Possibly they’d fill her full of blaster bolts before she could manage it. That would depend on how much aid Ravas provided. Nix might survive – dodging a blaster bolt at the range they were at would be difficult but moving enough not to get hit anywhere too vital was theoretically possible. The other guard though would fire far too many blasts for her to avoid given that there was no cover to work with.

Alternatively, she could try to force push Darsus and his minions out of the cave. The Spire was definitely happy with that idea. It wasn’t quite as visceral of a slaughter as it would prefer but all those bodies dashed to pieces at its base would add nicely to pool of Dark Side energy which wreathed the Spire.

Most other violent solutions ran to the same end, through either more direct or more subtle means.

What I need is some way to turn this place against itself, she thought and received and feeling of approval from Kelda in the far distance.

Which was, of course, the answer.

“Hey, Ayli,” she called out. “Why don’t we deal with the trap now? We don’t want Darsus to get too frosty on us.”

Ayli’s hand had dropped to her side where the lightsaber hung, but she paused and met Nix’s gaze before nodding. She didn’t know what was coming next, but that was okay. Neither did Darsus.

Dedlos was, if anything, even less tolerant of living beings infesting its surface than Lednon Three had been. Where Lednon had been wracked by a mega-storm which only threatened to electrocute would-be interlopers, Dedlos was a bit colder in its menace.

“It’s so cold there the atmosphere has frozen,” Nix said. “We’re going to need special gear to even attempt the Second Trial.”

“No you won’t,” Ravas said. Ulno Klex, Darsus and their bodyguards couldn’t hear her, but Ayli and Nix could which made it all the more infuriating when the ghost failed to provide any follow up information since asking her for clarity would have made them both seem too unhinged for Ulno to continue working with. As a method of getting booted out an airlock went, speaking to people who weren’t there would have been an undeniably effective one, so Ayli settled for glaring briefly in Ravas’ direction.

“The Children of the Storm set these up to con their marks,” Ayli said. “If people felt they’d passed the tests because they were wearing a lot of tech, they would have been less invested, both emotionally and financially. There must be a hidden base on the surface somewhere that we could dock with.

“I have this sneaking suspicion that the Children conveniently never mentioned anything about that when they told you we’d be arriving in this system, did they?” Nix asked, turning away from the 3d projection table of the planet to look at Ulno Klex.

“Quite surprisingly they did,” Ulno said. “They even provided coordinates for the ‘sacred site’ you were intent on looting next.” He spun the globe and tapped his finger on the center of a landmass in the northern hemisphere. “It is, as you might imagine, an empty shell and quite clearly a trap.”

Ayli spun globe so the ‘sacred site” face her and then gestured to zoom in for a ground level view.

“Oh yeah, that is a great place to kill people,” she said, which Ravas sniffed at. The ghost had clearly been looking forward to pointing out how foolish it would be to go there, but in Ayli’s line of work, picking through the ruins of ancient civilization wasn’t something you got to do more than once if you weren’t observant for dangers they contained.

“Is that an atmosphere dome they have setup over it?” Nix asked.

“That’s the first part of the trap,” Ayli said. “Any permanent installation on a world like this would be built into permanent atmosphere enclosures. Powered domes are for temporary camps or if you want to be able to turn them off an expose everyone inside to the native atmosphere with the flick of a switch.

“So we would need suits to explore it anyways, great,” Nix said.

“Not just suits, powered suits,” Ayli said. “The frozen atmosphere is partially liquid. It will steal heat a lot faster than vacuum will.”

“And powered suits can be detected, which will set off the other traps,” Nix said with resigned understanding.

“Also, that place is visible from space. A simple scan of the surface would pick it out a hundred times out of a hundred. On a planet they erased from the galactic nav charts.”

“That does seem a little sloppy,” Nix said, continuing to study the globe.

“You’re the ones who seem sloppy,” Darsus said, pacing around the outskirts of the room. “We should be sending them in now. Is the point that they’re expendable?”

“You really have no idea how to get the most out of your investments do you?” Ayli asked, without really thinking about it.

She’d run into Darsus a few times before the whole debacle with the Goldrunner started, and repeated exposure had only solidified her opinion that he was two brain cells short of having a pair of them.

“She’s correct,” Ulno said before Darsus could open his mouth and make the situation worse somehow. “There’s no point sending our guests to explore a location of no value. If we wanted to kill them, we have plenty of options here, and none of those incur fuel costs or the potential loss of a shuttle.”

“We could send them in their shuttle.” Darsus’ objection was the whining of a five year old who really wanted to break one of his toys.

“I thought you’d claimed the Goldrunner as your own?” Nix said. “I guess this means we still own her?”

Darsus growl of rage was held in place by Ulno’s chuckle of amusement. The bodyguards didn’t move or make a sound in either direction but Ayli noticed one of the fighting to suppress a smile too.

“We have an advantage in searching for the right place,” Ayli said, dragging the topic of conversation away from humiliating Darsus. 

“The liquid atmosphere?” Nix guessed. “It would prevent them from building anything in the lowland areas. And the seas are all frozen solid.”

“You can carve things into ice,” Darsus said, as though Nix was an idiot for not considering that.

“Under ice bases would need tunnels to the surface,” Ulno said. “And the gaps in the ice would be both unusual and detectable, though not without some effort.”

“Also, if the planet every goes through a warming phase, your ice walls would flood into the base. Or you could use regular walls and hope the extreme temperature changes don’t create cracks in them,” Ayli said. “So, they’re not in the oceans. And they’re not anywhere too low.”

“I do hope you’re not going to propose a full geological survey of the planet’s mountain ranges?” Ulno asked.

“If I thought I could get you to pay for one, I absolutely would, but given that the portable treasure here is going to be minimal, I assume that’s not in the budget?”

“It is refreshing to deal with a professional,” Ulno said.

“Well then in my professional opinion, this is where we want to look,” Ayli said, pointing to a small island that was covered in mist with a single spire rising from it.

“Seems rather isolated, on a planet where there’s nothing in particular to be isolated from?” Ulno said.

“That’s one draw, though there are at least fifty places that are about as isolated,” Ayli said. “The mist is the real pull though.”

“There’s mist all over the place,” Darsus said.

“Yeah, in scattered patches, here and there, with one commonality to all of them except this place,” Ayli said.

“They’re all in deep crevasses? Huh, why is that?” Nix asked.

“They aren’t crevasses, or at least not natural ones,” Ayli said. “Someone fought a war here a long time ago. Those cracks are from Mantle Breaker bombs.”

That she’d seen the effects of far more recent detonations was a fact she didn’t intend to share with anyone in the room. The sight of the ancient aftereffects of ones brought back enough unpleasant memories as it was, the last thing she needed was to dwell on those thoughts any further.

“It’s why this planet is so strong in the Dark Side,” Ravas said. “Even a thousand years later, the ones who died here still call out in rage against their fates.”

“What’s causing the mists then?” Darsus asked. “No one’s dropping bombs on it anymore.

“Mantle Breaker bombs cause massive seismic shocks to a planet. You can destroy most infrastructure with them, and you will definitely leave scars in the crust that extend down to the magma layers if the planet is still geologically active.”

“So the magma is boiling the atmosphere back to a gaseous state?” Nix asked. “Sounds unstable.”

“It is, but on geologic timescales,” Ayli said. “In the meantime, I’m guessing the view from the top of that spire is breathtaking.”

“And a perfect sales tool for the cult’s scheme,” Nix said. “We’ll still need to wear suits when we go down there though.”

“Do a quick scan. I’m betting we’ll only need breathing masks,” Ayli said, wishing for a moment that Zindiana was able to back her up on that. She could sense the nun, as her pirate queen, had secreted themselves in the duct work nearby, but conversing with them would be even worse than talking to Ravas.

Ayli wasn’t sure how Zindiana had convinced Sali not to come into either the throne room or the war room with guns blazing, but Ayli was glad they’d worked that out. The last thing she needed was more chaos in a situation where they were already dancing on a knife’s edge.

“You knew?” Nix asked as the scan completed.

“With the frozen atmosphere melting in the magma at the base of that mountain, you’ll have gas ascending and thinning out until it refreezes.. If it was going to be useful as a base, you’d want to pick a spot on it where the air pressure was close to galactic nominal.”

“There’s got to be a lot of places like that though,” Darsus said.

“Probably, but none of the others are setup so you can watch snow fall upward,” Ayli said.

An hour later, Ayli landed of the Klex shuttles through what she refused to call ‘snow falling upward’.

“That was a damn blizzard!” she yelled to be heard over the howling, icy winds.

“WHAT?” Nix yelled back, not a square inch of her visible with the heavy parka and face mask she was wearing.

“INSIDE!” Ayli pointed towards the richly ornamented door hidden at the back of the shallow cave they’d discovered.

“It might be trapped,” Nix was still yelling but it was easier to hear her as they moved away from the winds.

“Save your time, it’s not,” Ravas said. “No one want to fumble for their keys with all that going on out there.

Ayli smiled in appreciation as Nix gave the door a quick inspection nonetheless. Trusting Ravas would have been an easy habit to fall into given that the ghost had been consistently helpful lately. Easy and probably also fatal, so Ayli was pleased to see Nix was still taking the implicit threat of Rava’s presence seriously.

“She’s right. No one has set anything up on it recently,” Nix said, which stopped the impending ‘I told you so’ Ravas had been preparing.

Inside they were greeted with a long, mural covered corridor.

“This is the test,” Ravas said.

“Walking down a corridor doesn’t seem like much of a test,” Ayli said, knowing it would not be that simple.

“A corridor? Are you inside already then?” Ulno Klex asked over the small holocom Nix was holding.

Part of the condition for sending the two of them to the planet had been that they stay in constant contact with the Klex Cartel’s battlecruiser. Ulno had promised that he would glass the planet’s surface if required to prevent their escape, and Ayli had no doubt that he would keep his word on that.

“You should be seeing what we’re seeing,” Nix said. “Let me adjust the feed to get through the rock and atmosphere.”

The device squeed in her hand and then snapped into perfect clarity.

“Looks safe enough,” Darsus said. “Send ‘em in.”

“No,” Nix said. “It’s not safe.”

“We are well aware of that Ms, Lamplighter,” Ulno said. “May I remind you that is why we have allowed you to undertake this endeavor?”

“She means walking in there blindly is stupid,” Ayli said. “This place looks simple because its a puzzle.”

“They’re just afraid to go. Or they’re stalling,” Darsus said. “Maybe hoping some will swoop in and save them.”

No one ever swooped in to save anyone. Ayli knew that, and she certainly wasn’t waiting for it.

“Okay,” Nix said. “Let me go in first.”

“We go together,” Ayli said.

“We work the problem together,” Nix said. “That doesn’t mean we have to march in lockstep. Let me go in first and you can bail me out of whatever trouble we find. If we go together there’ll be no one on the other side of the trap to free us from it.”

Ayli discovered she hated it when Nix was both reasonable and right.

“I should be the one to go first then,” she said.

“Yeah, except I called dibs,” Nix said and skipped into the corridor.

And an instant later an avalanche of liquid nitrogen filled the passage.

Nix had been right. In general terms. If she’d had more specific information available about what waited for them when they dropped back to regular space, they might have avoided being captured at all. Ayli had certainly made a game attempt at evading capture but once they got stuck in a tractor beam there wasn’t much she could do that wouldn’t tear the Goldrunner to pieces.

“So very nice to make your acquaintance at last,” Ulno Klex said as Nix and Ayli were marched into his throne room. Which was to say, the room he’d outfitted on his battle cruiser to impress those who were easily awed by the scenery. 

Nix had never met Ulno Klex before, and hadn’t expected to meet him at all given that he was supposed to be dead, but she’d run into enough people with towering egos like his that she knew how their encounter was going to go from the moment they stepped in the room.

“You are surprised I am the one who captured you?” Ulno asked, rising from him throne and pacing on the dias it rested on. 

Behind him six guards with blaster rifles at the ready were doing their very best to look menacing and dead serious, despite the absurdity of their boss trying to impress a historian and a mechanic and, apparently, failing for unknown reasons.

“We did meet a couple of bounty hunters who seemed to think your next of kin had put a price on our heads,” Ayli said.

She did not have her lightsaber.

They’d agreed that while she’d made a lot of progress with it, carrying one would send exactly the wrong sort of message to their captors.

“Indeed, very fortunate that the galaxy was so easily convinced of my demise by a paltry few credits,” Ulno said. 

Nix had expected him to be outwardly grotesque somehow, but apart from the implied threat of the faux-military regalia he wore, there was nothing terribly remarkable about the man. Human, like an outsized portion of the galaxies population. Moderate height and build. Blonde hair shading to gray. Even his features were bland. It was as though someone had shaken together the least interesting qualities the galactic community possessed and poured them into a bag of ego problems that liked to hear itself speak.

“Isn’t it a bit embarrassing to let people think you’d been killed by nobodies like us?” Nix asked. She didn’t want to be Ulno’s friend. A part of her wanted to shove him through enough bulkheads that he popped out into the vacuum of space. And then just popped. That, however, was not an option. Nor was it a particularly wise idea given what channeling the Force with such hate-filled intentions could do to her.

“Oh, not in the slightest,” Ulno said. “You see you are among the galaxy’s premier assassins. No on has heard of you before of course because that is the mark of a premier assassin, is it not?”

“Did you pay off the real assassins?” Ayli asked.

“Pay?” Ulno sounded offended. “Why would I pay for people when they already work for me?”

Ayli closed her eyes and shook her head in disbelief.

“This can’t get any stupider,” she said.

“I assure you, this whole stratagem has been quite brilliant,” Ulno said. “With my untimely demise, over a hundred warrants on almost as many worlds have gone null and void. Not to mention how easily it allowed me to smoke out those who thought to they were in a position to usurp my throne. Tell me, how is my dear Saliandris?”

“You’re the one who’s got her.” Ayli’s lie held exactly the proper tone of resentment for the loss of a friend who was also a major aggravation. “Don’t pretend like we’re not supposed to have figured that out.”

Ulno stopped pacing.

He was puzzled.

Mostly because he definitely did not have Sali, and yet Ayli sounded so certain in her accusations that even he had to wonder at that for a moment. The guards behind him glanced at one another as though trying to work out which of them might have captured the pirate queen and not told their boss.

“Alas,” Ulno said. “You are our only guests at present.”

“So, you’ve spaced her already,” Ayli said. “Probably what she deserved. The jerk.”

Again, sadness lingered behind Ayli’s words just long enough that even Nix had to force herself to remember that neither Sali nor Zindiana had fallen into the clutches of the Klex cartel, thanks largely to the Goldrunner’s unadvertised smuggling modifications and some cleverly timed fake battle damage Nix had arranged.

“She…I’m afraid you are supposing scenarios which have yet come to pass,” Ulno said. “We have not apprehended your friend yet. Rest assured we will though.”

Ayli chuckled, and Nix used the distraction to reach out with her senses, searching for Sali and Zin.

They’d left the hidden compartment at Goldie’s signal. Both were in good health still, and neither had been spotted yet despite being quite close by.

Too close by.

Nix grimaced. Sali was not in a pleasant or forgiving mood. Zindiana wasn’t in any sort of mood at all. Together the two of them were committed to mayhem and murder, though not necessarily in that order.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to lie,” Ayli said. “She wasn’t much of a friend. If you spaced her, I can’t really blame you.”

Nix felt a flash of annoyance from Sali, who was apparently close enough to have heard Ayli’s comment.

“Seriously, she interrupted so many of my deals, I was probably a couple of days from spacing her myself before your goons got to her,” Ayli said. She’d felt Sali’s presence too and was performing for two audiences.

“And which goons would those be?” Ulno asked, suspicion radiating from every pour.

“The one’s at Galvus Station,” Ayli said.

“You escaped from Galvus,” Ulno said. “Quite cleverly I might add.”

“They weren’t that clever,” Darsus Klex said, strolling into the room from the door behind Ayli and Nix. “They fell right into our trap.”

Ayli laughed again.

“This was your Dad’s trap,” she said. “You had nothing to do with it.”

Nix caught feel the surge of anger boil out of Darsus even without turning to see him. Darsus’s anger didn’t lessen at all when his father burst out laughing.

“This one has your number little Darcy,” Ulno said. “And of course you are correct,” he added with a nod towards Ayli. “The galaxy is already under the impression that I was foolish enough expose myself to an assassin. We don’t want to foster even the smallest doubts of my capabilities when I reveal my survival.”

“Little Darcy?” Nix whispered with a suppressed laugh, just loud enough to be certain that Darsus would be able to hear it.

She felt rather than heard him draw his blaster.

“I don’t think you want him to do that,” Nix said. Her hands were locked in restraints but she was still able to waggle a couple of fingers towards Ulno. She wasn’t pushing him away physically, and she knew she didn’t need to gesture with her hands to use the Force even if she had been trying to fo that. Nonetheless, it did feel right to toss a bit of persuasive energy behind her words with a physical gesture. Irrational. Probably useless. But her hindbrain liked it and who was she to argue with ancient instincts.

“I don’t want him to shoot you?” Ulno asked, the mildest hint of confusion in his voice. “And why would that be?”

“If you wanted to shoot us, you could have just blown up the Goldrunner,” Nix said. “Or shot us and threw us out an airlock instead of wasting your time.”

When they’d exited hyperspace, Nix had been pretty certain that’s how things would play out, but a tiny part of her had been worried that her certainty might have stemmed from wishful thinking more than accurate premonitions that Force was providing.

“You are most astute, Miss…erm, Mechanic?” Ulno said.

Because why bother learning a mechanics name? She clearly wasn’t anyone important.

“It just made sense and I figured you didn’t get to be where you are without being pretty smart,” Nix said.

“Not like you,” Darsus said. He was still holding his blaster but Nix could sense that he was cowed. To shoot now would be a defiance of his father, and Darsus wasn’t ready to make that play yet.

“I’m guessing you want us to explore Dedlos for you?” Ayli said.

“And why would I want you to do that I wonder?” Ulno said, clearly pleased that people were working out his scheme.

“Lednon Three was a nightmare of traps and ancient guardians,” Ayli said. “I’m guessing your fond enough of Little Darcy there that you’d prefer to send someone more expendable to risk the dangers of the Second Trial.”

“I do so love my boy, that is true,” Ulno lied.

“My only question is what’s in it for us?” Ayli asked.

“You get to keep breathing,” Darsus said, raising his blaster and placing the barrel against the back of Ayli’s head.

Nix wasn’t sure she could manage any sort of fine control with the Force yet, so crippling the blaster was out of the question. Shoving Darsus’s hand aside the moment he thought of tightening his finger on the trigger however was quite definitely in her wheel house. If Darsus and the gun happened to be slammed through one of the bulkheads that would be a real shame. Nix thought she might even lose two to three whole minutes of sleep over it.

“Breathing’s nice,” Ayli said. “Treasure’s nicer though.”

“And what sort of treasure do you imagine we would let you keep?” Ulno asked.

“The best kind,” Ayli said. “The stuff you don’t care about.”

“I don’t care about you,” Darsus said.

“Oh, good, then you won’t care if I go back to my ship and never bother being in the same system as you again?” Ayli said.

“That’s my ship,” Darsus said. “You stole it.” 

“Did I?” Ayli asked. “Most have taken it from a real idiot then, cause I’m a pretty talentless thief.”

Darsus decided to shoot her and acted on that instinct in a heartbeat. Nix had felt any warning of danger though because his finger never got to tighten on the trigger. 

“Don’t taunt your foes,” Ravas said to no one except Ayli and Nix. “Kill them or avoid them. Making them angry only gives them resolve and strength.”

And entices them to make hasty and thoughtless decisions, but Nix didn’t have the luxury of speaking freely like Ravas did.

“I’m impressed. Most people who taunt Darcy like that wind up as disagreeable messes for the staff to clean up,” Ulno said as Darsus dropped his blaster to his side and shook his head to clear his thought from the static Ravas had filled his mind with. “He must see something useful in you.”

“We can be useful to each other,” Ayli said. “We’ll figure out how to bypass the Second Trial like we did the First. You can take all the treasure you want from the temple, and the location of the Third Trial. Leave us the facility, intact please, and I’ll have a historical site that I can write a thousand papers about. It’ll make my career.”

“And if you fail?” Ulno asked.

“Have you lost anything if we do?” Ayli asked.

“Our friends among the Children of the Storm will not be pleased to have their sacred sites raided,” Ulno said.

“The Second Trial doesn’t have much of value at it, aside from the location of the Third Trial,” Ayli said. “And I know they’ve kept that a secret from you.”

“Do you now?” Ulno asked.

“That’s where their treasure really lies,” Ayli said. “Without that, they wouldn’t have any means of paying you for the supplies and services you provide them, and if you knew where it was, why would you bother bartering for the loot when you have a battlecruiser and can just go and take it?”

Ulno laughed, and there was no kindness in it.

“I like how you think,” he said. “We are going to have a most profitable relationship.”

Ayli was married to a maniac. She was convinced of this even before Nix called the start to the bizarre game she’d made up for them.

“I get what you and I are doing,” Ayli said, holding a lit lightsaber blade three finger-widths from her wife’s face. “But why is she here?” 

She pointed to the ghost of Ravas Durla, who, as a ghost, didn’t have much to worry about from bumping into an energy arc that was capable of carving through blast doors.

How did I let her talk me into this? This is insane! Ayli kept repeating those words to herself but they did not make the situation any saner with repetition.

“Your challenge is to keep your blade from getting farther than the width of my hand away from me as we move,” Nix said, as cheerfully unconcerned as only a person who’d spent a week growing back bodily organs in a Bacta tank could be. “My challenge is to keep my hands aligned with hers without touching them.”

“How will you know if you touch her though?” Ayli asked, still deeply unclear what the point of the exercise was.

“I’ll electrocute her if she does,” Ravas said.

Ayli stiffened at that. 

No one got to hurt Nix. Even the thought made her blood boil and her grip tighten on the saber’s hilt

“Hey, I’ll be okay,” Nix said, running her fingertips along Ayli’s outstretched arm. Ayli felt the tension run out of her like a slowly receding wave.

“Arrogant,” Ravas said, but there was an expression on the ghost’s face that suggested she was as puzzled by Nix’s suggestions as Ayli was.

“We’ll see,” Nix said and offered Ravas an amused smile. “We can begin whenever you’re ready.

A cold smile crept over Ravas’ lips and an instant later she burst forward in an attack. Ayli tensed, and start to whip the saber’s blade away from Nix but stopped before she’d moved it more than half a finger’s width.

She didn’t need to move it. She could feel that it was safe for now.

Across from her, Ravas was straining towards Nix, hands bent like claws. Nix wasn’t looking at that though. She had her eyes fixed on Ayli, offering support and looking as calm and relaxed as could be, while her left hand was held up inches from Ravas’s clawed hands holding them back without making contact.

“How?” Ayli asked, which Ravas echoed with a growl.

“Aggression can be really predictable,” Nix said and turned to Ravas. “I feel like this is so basic it would have been an exercise you would have done as a kid. Not with a lightsaber, but maybe with a partner?”

Ravas growled again, and Nix began to give ground. Not fleeing, Ayli noticed, or retreating. It was more flowing that that. With slow, careful steps, Nix pivoted around allowing Ravas to press inward and control the basic direction of the dance, while Nix controlled the pace and angles they turned though.

For her part, Ayli found it almost relaxing. Moving the blade along with Nix was as simple as following the steady flow of their dance, and little by little, Ayli began to see where Nix would lead them even before they moved from one step to the other.

Ravas’ growl turned towards Ayli, but Nix brought her other hand up, blocking the hand Ravas had thrust out in Ayli’s direction.

“Just work with me,” Nix said. “I’m the one you’re mad at.”

That refocused the ghost’s attention. Nix seemed to reward her by stepping up the pace, falling back from Ravas’ advance faster and with quicker, tighter turns.

Ayli marveled at the feeling of speed that sang through her. The room around them turned into a blur as they changed directions, but even so it was almost effortless keeping the blade where it was meant to be. 

Rather than the speed demanding ever more perilous timing, it felt like the faster they went, the deeper into the shared calm Nix was bringing them, and the farther ahead that Ayli could see.

On one pass across the room, Ayli caught a glimpse of Ravas’ hands again and had to look twice. They’d relaxed from the claws they’d been curled into and where open and flat, paralleling Nix’s hands evenly.

Stranger still, the expression on Ravas’ face had faded from one of burning intensity to a quiet confusion.

Ayli made eye contact with Ravas on the next pass, asking without words what had changed.

Ravas turned from that glance, her sudden retreat forming a sharp change in the steps of the dance. Rather than throwing them off though, Nix flowed into the role of pursuer, casting aside being the one pursued as naturally as the step she’d been poised to take.

That hadn’t been what Ravas was anticipating and she jerked backwards, lending a staccato pattern to the danced steps, but, curiously, she did not lower her hands.

Nix matched her movements, never touching their hands together but keeping pace as Ravas slowed in her flight, pressed forward once more and backed away again, her movements growing more frantic as she strove to knock Nix off her footing.

The dance continued like that for another several passes around the room before a crate flew from the corner directly at Nix’s head. Nix caught the crate without a glance and looped it down to settle beneath her, giving the fight a third dimension as she stepped onto and over it.

One by one, more bits of brick-a-brack from the around the room took flight, most of which Nix simply directed into orbits around the dancers, turning their tight cluster into the center of a debris whirlwind.

Ayli sensed the moment when Ravas won, or would win. A sponge, soft, harmless, but just distracting enough was going to slip past Nix’s defenses and pop her on the nose. The blow would throw off her concentration allowing Ravas to bring their hands together and shock her and then the whirlwind would collide in on them.

The lightsaber could fix that.

Ayli could slice the sponge in two.

And then slice Ravas in two.

A lightsaber couldn’t hurt a force ghost, but the move would bring an end to their dance and warn Ravas that worse consequences would follow if she pushed it.

But that would be a win for Ravas.

And Ayli didn’t need to fight.

That was what Nix was trying to show her and Ravas.

With her own free hand, Ayli reached out.

There was a wind blowing around her without the air moving. There was electricity that sang between her and the ship and Nix and the sponge and everything. The weight of everything tugged at everything and it all flowed through her, just like she was flowing through the dance.

The sponge didn’t have to hit Nix.

Ayli had seen it happen, had seen the survivable catastrophe that followed, but that future was not written into the past yet.

So she chose another.

With a wave of her hand, she drew the sponge to herself, grasping onto it without turning her attention from following Nix. 

Crisis averted. Future changed.

Ayli didn’t have anything to do with a sponge, so she allowed herself a half spin and put it on the silliest spot she could imagine.

Being a ghost, Ravas shouldn’t have been able to hold a sponge on the top of her head, but she’d either forgotten that or the Force itself was amused at the idea so it stuck there for a long moment until Ravas glanced up, frowned, and stopped advancing or retreating.

The whirlwind of debris settled gently to the floor as the dance came at last to a halt.

Nix turned to Ayli and sketched her the sort of bow someone who’d only seen the gesture in holonet drama vids of imaginary royalty might make. Since that was as close as Ayli had come to royalty too, she returned the gesture in a similar manner. When they both turned to Ravas though, the ghost was gone.

“That’s probably not good,” Ayli said, trying to imagine where a ghost might go to hide and why Ravas of all people would.

“It’s okay,” Nix said. “She just needs a bit of time.”

“Should we give it to her?” Ayli asked. “She did try to kill you there.”

“No she didn’t. She tried to beat me. If she’d wanted me dead, she would have been a lot more direct about it.”

“Direct how?”

“Did you ever feel her fighting for control of the lightsaber’s blade?” Nix said. “And when I asked, she agreed to keep things between her and I.”

“You knew she would, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly? It’s hard to put in words still, since it’s more like I’m just following my feeling still. She seemed, honorable isn’t quite the right word but it’s close? I challenged her and she answered the challenge. Twice there actually. I hadn’t set any boundaries on the challenge, so the whole ‘chucking everything in the room at us’ thing was fair game. I think if we’d agreed not to do that up front she wouldn’t have done it though.”

“You think she would have given up an advantage like that?” Ayli asked, reflecting on her own bone deep willingness to do whatever was required to win when the situation required it.

“It would depend how the boundary was phrased I think,” Nix said. “If it was ‘let’s all play nice now’, I can’t picture her agreeing to it in the first place. If it was a question of enhancing the challenge by putting other limits on it though? Or rather raising the difficulty so that she’s one of the only ones who can handle it? She knows how strong she is, and I can’t picture being that strong and not wanting to show it off.”

Ayli considered that and had to shrug in agreement. Ravas may have been centuries old, but that didn’t seem to have diminished her ego at all.

“How did you hold her off? I thought she was going to slam you right into the saber’s blade,” Ayli asked.

“That week long nap seems to have done me a lot of good,” Nix said. “Once I finally admitted to myself that what I was doing wasn’t just listening well and lifting a bit harder than most, I realized I’ve been training in this stuff for a long time. People used to tease me about being such gearhead that I’d move engine parts out of sheer impatience rather than waiting for anyone to give me a hand with them. I always thought they were just lazy or weak. In hindsight though, moving a vario-power coupling by myself wasn’t all that different from throwing the Smoke Wraiths across the room. I just pushed a little harder with them. Or, well, a lot harder, but the basic idea was the same.”

“So you didn’t just wake up knowing how to use the Force?”

“I don’t think that’s possible, although who knows, maybe Ravas or someone like her can do some kind of data dump of their Force skills into someone else? That sounded like what she was offering on the bridge when we were getting away from the assassins yesterday.”

“Wasn’t interested then. Not interested now,” Ayli said, suppressing a shudder at the thought of what else would come along with a ‘gift’ like that from Ravas.

“I’m going to bet she’ll make the offer again, probably the next time we’re in dire circumstances,” Nix said.

“And I’ll tell her to go to hell then too,” Ayli said.

“I think she’s already been there,” Nix said. “I think that’s what her life was. Maybe not all of it, but definitely the end, and probably a long time before that too.”

“Did you see something?” Ayli asked, wondering how adept with the Force Nix had become.

“Not a vision or anything like that,” Nix said. “I probably need a lot more practice with being aware of what it is I’m trying to do before I can manage full scale visions. What I got was more of a general sense that things sucked for her and that the anger we see in her comes from a place of hurt fury rather than sadism or general malice.”

Which, to Ayli, explained why Ravas had chosen to latch onto her. 

“We’re coming up on our hyperspace exit,” Goldie said over the comms.

“There’s going to be more people there waiting for us, aren’t there?” Ayli said, the certainty of it stealing through her like ice water.

“I think so,” Nix said. “And I don’t think we’re going to escape them this time.”

Nix knew that being within a few inches of an active lightsaber blade was, as a general rule, a terrible idea. Especially when it was a red lightsaber blade. 

Not that red blades were inherently malevolent. As she’d told Ayli, the ‘laser swords’ (why anyone would call them that baffled her tech-literate heart, they were not laser) weren’t mystical magical artifacts. They were tech. Plan, simple tech, that was thousands of years old and well understood to the point where mass producing them would have been trivial. 

But why would anyone bother?

There were plenty of cutting torches on the market to cover a variety of engineering needs. There were also plenty of weapons on the market which were capable of killing people at far great ranges than “arm’s reach”. 

All in all, lightsabers were aesthetically appealing yet severely impractical tools.

Unless of course the wielder could make use of their unique properties in ways people without the force couldn’t hope to manage.

Ways that she and Ayli needed to learn.

“This is not how you practice with a lightsaber,” Ravas said.

She was sulking in a corner of the cargo room Nix had cleared out for her and Ayli’s first training session.

“It does seem pretty dangerous,” Ayli said, her arms locked in a pose as rigid as stone.

“I trust you,” Nix said, taking a step to the right, closing the gap between herself and the saber’s blade.

Ayli jerked the blade away, her breath escaping in a short gasp.

“I wasn’t ready,” she said.

“Yes you were,” Nix said with a smile. “You know when I’m going to move. Don’t be afraid of it.”

“I could hurt you,” Ayli said. “I could kill you. This is…why are we doing this?”

A long night’s sleep had left Ayli better rested and more in balance – otherwise Nix wouldn’t have dreamed of trying this sort of training – but she was still having to fight a lifetime of stress.

“We can stop,” Nix said. “As soon as this gets to be too much, we can go and do something else, or switch to simpler exercises. I think this will help though.” She took another step, gliding from one foot to the other. 

Ayli had met Nix’s gaze and was searching for something there and didn’t seem to be aware that Nix was slowly dancing around her. 

But she moved the blade in time with Nix’s dance anyways.

“How is this helping?” Ayli asked. “Did you learn some kind of Jedi training techniques while you were in that coma?”

“This isn’t a Jedi technique,” Ravas said. “It’s just foolish.”

Nix cast a glance over towards the ghost of the Zabrak woman and offered her an amused smile.

Ravas could have been such a menacing figure, but, while she appeared reasonably young still, she could seem to help sounding like anything but a grumpy old woman.

Nix’s amusement did nothing to improve Ravas’ mood, but, for whatever reason, it was Ravas who broke the eye contact and looked away first rather than challenging or threatening Nix.

“She’s right,” Nix said. “This is just something I came up with. It’s a variation on a routine I ran into in a self-defense class I took on Coruscant.”

“You know how to fight?” Ayli asked, her eyes widening just a bit.

“Sure. Clobber the other guy with a wrench when he’s not looking. Or shoot him with a blaster if it comes to that,” Nix said. “The first rule in the self-defense classes was ‘don’t fight if you don’t have to’ and the second was ‘if you have to, do whatever it takes to be the one to walk away from the fight’.”

That drew a harsh bark of laughter out of Ravas, before she looked away again with a scowl.

“Doesn’t seem like you’d need a long class to teach you that,” Ayli said, her form growing more fluid as she relaxed into the slow rhythm of the simple step pattern Nix was setting for them.

“Most of the rest was about basic exercises we could do for strength and stamina, with some techniques for escaping when someone grabs you,” Nix said. “How well those work varies a lot depending on who or what grabs you though.”

“You’ll have to show me those later,” Ayli said. “I learned things like that too, most of which work somewhere from ‘fairly well’ to ‘much too well’.”

“How does a grapple escape work ‘too well’?” Nix asked.

“When it leaves you with a corpse to dispose of,” Ayli said.

“That sounds like it worked perfectly fine,” Ravas said.

Nix quickened her pace by a half measure.

“I probably shouldn’t be agreeing with her, should I?” Nix asked, flicking her gaze over towards Ravas. “If you’ve got options and you feel the person grabbing you needs be stopped permanently? I mean, I’ll probably want them stopped permanently too.”

“It’s usually not worth it,” Ayli said, adjusting to the new pace of the dance effortlessly. “Killing someone almost always creates more problems than it solves.”

“No arguments there,” Nix said. “Still, better to do it with the techniques you know, or even a blaster, or your lightsaber there than with the Force.”

Ayli’s attention snapped to the lightsaber in her hand as though she’d forgotten it was there. With a jolt, she snapped it away from Nix.

“I forgot…” she started to say, but Nix stepped in close and cut her off.

“You forgot to be afraid,” she said. “It’s okay. We’re doing fine.”

“I still don’t see what we’re doing though?” Ayli said.

“Are you worried about the lightsaber possessing you?” Nix asked.

“No. I wasn’t worried about that.”

“But you wanted to put it away before. You thought it was too dangerous to use.”

“I…” Ayli struggled to explain how that wasn’t what she’d been thinking but Nix could see that it was exactly what Ayli had been spiraling around.

“It’s fine. And you’re fine,” Nix said. “I know this all started when you grabbed the saber, but its just a tool, a basic bit of tech I could whip up with a ten credit shopping spree and a good workshop for fab and assembly. It’s not too dangerous for you, because you’re not too dangerous. Unless you want to be.”

Ayli angled the lightsaber down and let the blade extinguish.

“You’re right,” she said. “I know you’re right. What I was feeling though? It was making me want to be dangerous, even when I really shouldn’t have been. I…I can do that to you.”

“And you haven’t,” Nix said. “Believe me, I will be the first to let you know if you start to lose yourself, because I don’t want to lose you. In case I haven’t been clear so far, the whole marriage thing? I haven’t regretted it for an instant so far. I’m a better version of myself already and we’ve only been together for few of weeks so far.”

“And you were in a coma for one of them,” Ayli said with a forced bit of humor coloring the words.

“Pretty good job to have where you get a week of vacation that early on I’d say.” Nix’s joviality was less forced, but didn’t seem to put Ayli at ease at all.

“No more vacations like that,” Ayli said. “Ever.”

“Agreed. I can think of much better things to do with a week’s vacation,” Nix said. “Like, for example take this training up another notch.”

She lifted Ayli’s left hand which was holding the lightsaber in a loose grip.

“I thought this was to get me past having a hangup about this?” Ayli said, gesturing with the lightsaber’s handle.

“That was part of it,” Nix said. “We can do more though.”

“It won’t be enough,” Ravas said. “You’re missing the most important part of training with a blade.”

“And what would that be?” Ayli asked, not bothering to hide her disdain.

“You’re afraid. That’s good. Fear can be used. You don’t wish to be a danger though? Then do not pick the blade at all. Lay down and wait for the galaxy to kill you if that’s what you want. You won’t be a danger to anyone if that’s what you truly desire,” Ravas said and began pacing back and forth as the spark of fervor in her voice seemed to spread through her whole body. “Training with a blade is for one end. If you would hold a weapon, you must learn to kill with it. Let you fear  teach you. Let your rage teach you. Whatever it takes. Whatever will bring you victory.”

“That sounds so reasonable doesn’t it?” Nix asked. “Funny how fear and rage don’t exactly have a great reputation as the traits you want to base your decisions on though right? It’s almost like they’re the easy and stupid path. Simple answers because thinking is so hard and it just feels good to smash problems rather than spend the effort making sense of them.”

“You know nothing,” Ravas said. “You’ve never been trained. You’re making everything up as you go.”

“Yep. I am,” Nix said. “I’m not wrong though.”

“How do you know that?” Ayli asked.

“When we’re quiet, and calm, we can hear things a lot more easily,” Nix said. “It’d be easy to say it’s the Force speaking to us, but I don’t know if it’s that or just our heart be honest about what we feel and our minds checking it to make sure we understand what it is we want, and what we can do about it.”

“Pah, Jedi nonsense,” Ravas said. “They clung so hard to their serenity because their own anger terrified them. They cast aside the power they could have wielded and made themselves small and weak because they couldn’t face the truth.”

“I’d like to hear your truth,” Nix said. “If you’re willing to share it?”

“You know my truth,” Ravas said. “You see it every time you look at me. The monstrous thing you cannot abide.”

“Join our dance,” Nix said.

“What?” Ayli asked.

“What?” Ravas asked.

“Join us,” Nix said. “For what comes next.”

“I…what do you mean?” Ravas asked.

“You saw the exercise we were doing,” Nix said. “Come stand beside me and dance with me.”

“Why?” Ravas asked, her ghostly eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“Because I don’t think you’ve ever done this either,” Nix said. “Because I think it will be challenging for all of us.”

“And if I kill you while we dance? Or if she does?” Ravas asked.

“Then we’ll see that you were right I suppose,” Nix said.

“No. I don’t want to do this,” Ayli said, backing away.

Nix reached out and pulled her back with the Force, exerting as much pressure as a blustery gale might and no more.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “That’s what this is for. Together we can do this. You’re not going to hurt me because you have all the control you will ever need. And you’re not going to hurt me, because I’m not as helpless as you’ve been afraid I am.”

“And her?” Ayli asked, gesturing towards Ravas with the lightsaber’s handle.

“She needs to be a part of this too,” Nix said. “We can learn things from her. She’s had training we can never get, and she has a perspective we’ll never be able to duplicate.”

“And why would I want to share that with you?” Ravas asked.

“Because, it’s a chance to prove that you’re right, at the risk of having to admit that you were wrong, and I’m willing to bet that’s not a challenge you’ve walked away from all that often?” Nix said.

She wasn’t guessing. She hadn’t known that but as she spoke the words, she felt herself slipping through some cracks in the walls Ravas had put up.

“I do not walk away from challenges,” Ravas said, drawing herself up to her full height and become more solid in so doing.

Ravas was sure she was going to win. Nix could see it in her eyes, just like she could see that she already had.

Ayli did not storm off the bridge. She exited in a controlled and decorous manner as befitted the captain of the ship. That little sparks of rage were still threatening to send her into a wild screaming fit was not a concern for anyone else. 

After all, she hadn’t screamed. 

Or drawn her blasters. 

And she certainly hadn’t picked up her light saber.

Because none of that was going to help anyone.

Arriving in her quarters, Ayli felt a wave of exhaustion wash over her and let herself sag against the wall for a moment.

What was she doing? Why was she so angry? That wasn’t her. She didn’t blow up at every minor setback. Nothing had even really gone wrong. Everyone was fine. The ship was fine. So why did she still want to hurt people so badly?

“I’m not like this,” she mumbled to herself, massaging her face with both hands. Another wave of emotional and physical exhaustion crashed over her. 

It wasn’t that bad though. She could carry on. She had to. The ship needed her.

“Can I come in?” Nix asked, her voice muffled by the closed door.

Like she needed to ask? It was her room too. How stupid was that? What kind of idiot would ask such a brainless…

Ayli felt a stab of fear run through her.

“That is not me!” she said, the spiral of her emotions became a war between shame at where her thoughts had been drifting and terror that she was losing control on a far more fundamental level than she’d guessed.

Nix stopped waiting.

“Hey,” she said and drew Ayli into a half hug, her hands on Ayli’s upper arms.

“Sorry,” Ayli mumbled.

“What for?” Nix asked. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I…” How could she explain? I felt angry? I was cruel to you in my thoughts? I’ve let something awful inside me and its twisting me into a hate filled monster? 

Or had she been a hate filled monster all along? 

Maybe there wasn’t anything new here at all.

Maybe this was who she’d always been and she’d simply been hiding it because she’d been weak before.

Was that Ravas whispering in her ear?

No.

She knew Ravas’ voice. There was no one dredging up doubts in her head. No one except herself.

“How many days did you spend worrying about me?” Nix asked, guiding Ayli towards the bed.

“Do we count the time before you got injured?” Ayli asked, trying to make a joke of it, but her fatigue crushed what little humor she was able to wrap around the words.

“Yes,” Nix said. She sat Ayli down on the edge of the bed and climbed behind her, her hands traveling from Ayli’s upper arms to the tops of Ayli’s shoulders. “Related question: how much sleep have you gotten while I was recovering?”

The massage Nix gave as she spoke moved from one ridiculously tense muscle to another.

“We took turns standing watch after we caught the first assassin,” Ayli said, not answering the actual question because she wasn’t sure she’d gotten any sleep at all since Nix had been hurt. No good sleep certainly.

“I really am sorry,” Nix said. “For getting hurt. For worrying you. I had a sense that something would happen on Lednon. I also had the sense that things would turn out okay though. It didn’t occur to me that ‘okay’ would include you being put through the ringer for a week.”

“I wasn’t the one who got hurt,” Ayli said. “I should be apologizing to you.”

“I pretty clearly recall that you did get hurt,” Nix said, digging her thumbs in to work out a particularly trying knot near Ayli’s spine.

“Not as bad as you did.” Ayli felt tension unwinding in more than just her shoulders.

“I didn’t have to endure a week of waiting and wondering if I’d managed to save you in time. Or if you were going to live but be damaged to the point that you couldn’t be put back together,” Nix said. “It’s not your fault that I was hurt…”

“I was the one…” Ayli tried to protest but Nix cut her off.

“I’m an adult. And I knew the risks. Better than you did in fact, though I didn’t quite appreciate that at the time,” Nix said. “We went in there together, and we were right to, and I would go in there again with you any day. We only got out of there because we were together.”

“Next time we might not,” Ayli said. It wasn’t a secret fear, but speaking the words aloud made it feel like they were even more likely to come true as a result.

“Maybe not,” Nix said. “That’s okay though isn’t it? Sometimes we’ll take risks and risks mean not being sure how things will turn out. What I am sure of, is that I want to face those risks with you.”

“You would be so much better off somewhere else though,” Nix said. “With someone else.”

“Definitely not,” Nix said, turning Ayli so that she was laying facedown on the bed, thereby giving easy access to Ayli’s back where even more tension had settled like a pile of bricks.

“I’m not good to be around right now,” Ayli said, the shame of her moment of condensation and rage towards Nix still stinging her even though it was starting to seem like she was blowing it out of proportion.

“You feel off balance right? A bit out of control?” Nix asked, focusing on the muscles at the bottom of Ayli’s shoulder blades.

“No,” Ayli said, because she felt a lot worse than that.

Though the massage was blunting that feeling somehow.

“You seemed to be pretty angry after we jumped,” Nix said, working a spot on Ayli’s back that seemed to have turned to granite. “And it was anger that let you fly like that, wasn’t it?”

Ayli’s shame swelled within her. Had she been that obvious? Or could Nix just see far too much of her.

“I…” Ayli started to say but faltered. She what? She had no idea how to explain what she was feeling.

“You were backed into a corner. After being hurt. After spending a week or more with worry chipping away at you. After skipping far too much sleep and probably missing too many meals if I’m guessing right. Oh, and you’ve also had the ghost of Ravas Durla picking away at your psyche probably since Lednon Three, assuming she wasn’t with us even earlier.”

“How do you know that?” Ayli asked.

“The Ravas bit?” Nix shrugged. “I can see her. I know that’s weird. Clearly no one else can or I think Sali and Z would be freaking out more, but I can see her plain as day. Well apart from how translucent she is.”

“You can see her? How?” Ayli asked, she wanted to sit up and have a face-to-face discussion with Nix but that would mean cutting the massage short and no power in the galaxy could convince Ayli that was a good idea.

“Honestly? I’m not entirely sure,” Nix said. “I guess I’ve been training myself to be aware of things, no, be aware of the Force I should say, for a long time now. It wasn’t until I met Kelda that it started to click though. Oh, and in the spire. I didn’t know I could use the Force to do that but I had to and so it just kinda happened.”

“Wait, who’s ‘Kelda’?” Ayli asked, twisting her head to glance back at Nix.

“A friend of Ravas. Her lover maybe?” Nix said. “Also a ghost. I’ve met her twice now. The first time I though I’d fallen asleep and dreamed it. The second time I was in whatever coma state I’ve been in for the last few days.”

“Is she like Ravas? What does she want to do to you?” Ayli asked, trying to imagine Nix having to hold off a ghost like she’d had to hold off Ravas.

“I don’t think she wants to do anything to me,” Nix said. “And she’d not like Ravas. I think she might probably have been a Jedi when she was alive. When she appears, there’s a calm aura about her. Ravas is sort of the polar opposite of calm.”

“Don’t let her tell you what to do,” Ayli said.

“She apparently can’t. She seems really keen on making sure I know to trust myself and what I can do. Which has helped a bit, believe it or not. As far as why she’s talking to me in the first place though?  I think she wants to save Ravas. Unless I missed my guess, I don’t think their history together is a happy one. I can’t fix that, but there’s got to be some way of making a brighter future for them, even if they’re both ghosts now.”

“Should Ravas be saved though?” Ayli asked. “She’s done terrible things. I’m sure of it. I can feel the memories of her hate lurking at the back of my mind.”

“I can’t say. Not yet anyways. I don’t know her story. I don’t know her. But I think I need to,” Nix said.

“Why would you want that?” Ayli asked, wondering if Nix’s attraction was limited to women who were secretly monsters in some manner.

“I think it’s what she needs,” Nix said, moving down to work on the muscles in the small of Ayli’s back.

“Why would you care though?”

“It’d be great to say it’s because caring is just the right thing to do, but, again, full honesty? I hate that she’s hurt you. It’s why I sorta smashed her into a wall the first time I saw her,” Nix said. “That was a gut reaction though, and not a great one. I think it’s the same gut reaction that Ravas has gotten her whole life. There’s more in there though. More to her. There’s someone who’s worth understanding.”

“Is that another Force power you have now?” Ayli asked, half joking but half uncertainly curious too.

“No. She’s incredibly closed off. I can’t read anything in her that she’s not clearly advertising so that I’ll stay away,” Nix said. “As for what’s behind those walls though, I’ve only got one thing to go on.”

“That she was tied up with the cult we’re looking for?”

“I don’t think that was her idea at all,” Nix said. “If any of them had been useful, she would have started haunting them the moment they touched her lightsaber.”

“That was probably a mistake, wasn’t it? I shouldn’t have done that?” Ayli asked.

“Much too soon to say,” Nix said. “Sure, it’s given us some trouble so far, but it also saved both of us.”

“Still, I probably shouldn’t be using it anymore,” Ayli said.

“Then don’t,” Nix said. “It’s an effective tool but it’s just a tool. If it changes how you approach situations though, then don’t bother with it. Or keep it around in case you need to cut open a stuck rations container or something. It would be amazing at that.”

“I’m serious. That thing is dangerous,” Ayli said.

“That’s good. We need dangerous things sometimes,” Nix said. “Blasters, for example, aren’t exactly safe but everyone on this ship except for me seems to be carrying at least two or three of them.”

“This is different,” Ayli said. “You’re right that I’ve been angry. Or even more than that. On the bridge? I was out of control. All I could feel with seething, blood red rage. I wanted…I wanted to hurt someone so badly.”

“And so you came here,” Nix said. “To calm down. To give yourself a chance to breathe and get control again.”

“I shouldn’t have had to. I shouldn’t have been like that.”

“You were like that. There’s no should have or shouldn’t have about it,” Nix said. “What’s important though is that for as out of control as you felt, you made the choice to come here. I think what you were dealing with there was more than just your own anger though. I think you tapped into the Force through the anger you were feeling and that got as empowered as your reflexes did. Even with the Force hyper-charging your rage though, your choices were still your own. And you made good ones.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to next time though,” Ayli said, feeling like she was confessing a secret so terrible that it had to drive everyone away. “I feel like everything’s getting worse. Like I’m going to lose myself into a mindless fury if I keep going like this.”

“We can turn back still,” Nix said. “No treasure in the galaxy is worth giving you up for.”

“We’ve come so far though.”

“And we have farther to go,” Nix said, sliding her hands up to the base of Ayli’s neck and then oh-so-gently down her lekku. “But that can be anywhere. We have the whole galaxy to explore, and all kinds of treasures we could find.”

Ayli shivered at the gentle touches on her lekku. With the tension draining from her muscles, the fatigue she felt was washing slowly over her and her eyes were growing heavy. She knew she shouldn’t fall asleep. There were things to do. Plans they had to make, but she felt so cozy and safe under Nix’s warm hands that those concerns began to float away.

“I don’t want to give up,” she said.

“Then let’s keep going,” Nix said. “Together.”

“I don’t want to be a monster.”

“Then let’s learn the right way to use these gifts we have,” Nix said, trailing her fingertips gently down Ayli’s back.

“Together,” Ayli said and let herself drift off at last.

To say Nix was worried about the growing influence Ravas seemed to have over Ayli would have been rather understandable, she felt. Ancient Dark Side ghosts didn’t exactly have the reputation of being particularly benevolent.

Or existing at all really – Nix wasn’t sure she’d ever heard of something like whatever Ravas was but she didn’t need many examples to compare Ravas to in order to figure out that she was bad news. 

What was puzzling was why was she concerned about the Zabrak woman?

Ravas had taken the navigator’s seat in the Goldrunner’s cockpit behind Ayli despite having no apparent need to rest her ghostly legs. She wasn’t hovering over or menacing Ayli at all, preferring instead to stare out the side of the ship at the swirling blue of hyperspace.

Nix was tempted to see if she could engage Ravas somehow, but the ghost had been very determined not to make eye contact with her. That wasn’t too surprising given how much animosity they’d already shown each other, but Nix, for reasons she couldn’t articulate even to herself, wanted to bridge that divide. 

They didn’t need to be enemies. 

But that wasn’t the life Ravas had led.

“We’ll be exiting to to the Tarventi system in a minute,” Ayli said after clicking the ship’s comms on. “I should be able to get Goldie in range to scan for the hyperspace lane within twenty minutes, less if we’re lucky.”

“I still say we should stop at the Smoking Barrel,” Sali said. “Goldie needs some real weapons if we’re going to be fighting off assassins for a while.”

“We’re not going to be fighting anyone,” Ayli said. 

She was wrong. Nix didn’t like that she knew that, and she had no idea who they were going to be fighting or where, but she knew Ayli was wrong. 

Trouble was waiting for them.

Nix cast another glance towards Ravas, who shrugged without glancing in Nix’s direction. Apparently it was the sort of trouble a ghost either couldn’t help with or didn’t see the need to bother be concerned about.

Nix got to work rewiring a few of the control systems, It wasn’t strictly speaking necessary for their continued survival but it would give them a bigger margin of error and, as a mechanic, wide safety margins were like a warm fluffy blanket on a snowy day.

“Okay, this will be a quick in-and-out,” Ayli said. “The sooner we can get to Dedlos the better.”

“We’d be there already if I’d been even vaguely aware of my surroundings, sorry,” Nix said, her hands yearning to work the tension out of Ayli’s shoulders.

“That was not your fault,” Ayli said, her eyes fixed forward.

“I’m pretty sure all I needed to do was throw myself forward and I wouldn’t have three tiny little scars in my abdomen,” Nix said, resisting the urge to raise her shirt to show off her new battle marks. Distracting one’s pilot when she was returning a ship from hyperspace was more or less the definition of a bad idea.

“We can  get those taken care of,” Ayli said.

“I don’t know,” Nix said. “They might be a good reminder for me to pay attention more.”

A suppressed growl broke free from Ayli’s lips.

“That wasn’t your fault,” she said, little sparks of anger curling around the corners of the words. “Do you remember what happened? Do you remember why you weren’t aware of the giant crystal monster behind you?”

“I…” Nix paused. What had she been doing when she’d been stabbed? She’d been drinking the Bacta Gel pack? No, that had to be after. She’d been distracted by something…by Ayli?

“You saved me,” Ayli said. “You got hurt, saving me.”

And Nix remembered.

She’d lashed out. 

Like she had with Ravas.

She’d lashed out and destroyed part of the tower. She’d smashed at least two Smoke Wraiths to pieces. And she’d saved Ayli.

With the Force.

Nix was quiet for a moment.

She’d never thought of herself as anything special. She still didn’t really.

But she had spoken more than once with a dead Jedi. And she could see a Force ghost who no one else seemed to be able to perceive. And she could apparently move things with her mind.

Which was neat.

And scary.

“It was worth it,” Nix said. Being forced to recognize what she was capable of, what she’d probably been capable of for years. And saving Ayli. Both of those were worth the risk she’d taken.

Ayli was silent in response, pulling back the lever which dropped them out of hyperspace.

And directly into a trap.

Plasma bolts slammed into Goldie’s deflectors faster than her sensors could place the ships they came from.

Ravas chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” Ayli growled, spinning the Goldrunner into an evasive pattern as the sensors clocked three refurbished Tie-Fighters bearing down on them.

“You draw on the Force so easily,” Ravas said. “You were born to wield my saber. And to do so much more.”

The sentiment was close to what Kelda had told Nix, but the delivery was painfully different.

“Doing all I can already,” Ayli said through gritted teeth as she pulled the Goldrunner out of the course of the incoming fire by thinner margins than the width of her lekku.

“Who’s shooting at us? We just got here!” Sali said rushing into the cockpit and plopping down on the navigator’s chair.

Ravas vanished from it and reappeared between Ayli and Nix.

Sister Zindiana arrived last, Nix’s usual seat at the mechanics station. “Someone followed us to Lednon Three,” she said.

“Doubt it,” Ayli said. “If anyone else was able to find that place, they’d have done so long ago. I think our friends in the orbital stations sent out an alert.”

“Yeah. Could be that,” Sali said. “Those stations weren’t big enough to be self-sufficient. Whoever was manning them has to be getting supplies from somewhere, which means they’ve got allies in other system.”

“Systems like the ones leading to the next trial,” Ayli said.

Nix wasn’t listening to the conversation as much as she was watching Ayli fly. It wasn’t a randomized pattern Ayli was using. She was reacting to each and every bolt that came at them. There were compromises she had to make, of course. The Goldrunner wasn’t fast enough to outfly purpose-built dogfighters like the Tie’s (not yet at least, Nix was working on that). 

Each move that Ayli made felt right though. Nix’s intuition was cheering as each flick of a switch and every pull of a lever bought them the time and safety they needed.

“Goldie, get the scanner’s running would you?” Nix asked.

“We’re not close enough yet,” Ayli said.

“Let me worry about that. Just buy us time, okay?” Nix said.

“Trying!” Ayli said, the growl never leaving her voice, though Nix didn’t feel it was directed at her.

“Let me help,” Ravas said.

“NO!” Ayli said. “I can do this!”

“Found the hyperspace lane!” Goldie called out. “It’s a ways out though. What did you do to my sensors?”

“Took off the limiters on active scan,” Nix said. “We can’t exactly land at a docking port like this or we’ll fry all of the deck crew within a hundred meters or so, but I can set it back like it was before then. Also we might need some new scanners sooner rather than later.”

“Give me whatever speed you can,” Ayli said.

Nix laughed. It wasn’t a safe sort of laugh, and Sali and Zindiana seemed to get that given how they both immediately clung to their chairs. Ayli on the other hand was past the point of concern. 

Tie Fighters were, for all their other failings, fast and extremely maneuverable. With a good pilot they could outmaneuver anything short of an A-Wing. As a medium freighter, the Goldrunner was not dissimilar to a flying pile of mud by comparison, so what Ayli was doing was nothing short of miraculous. 

Nix wasn’t content with that though.

She was going to give her wife an even better miracle to work with.

“Throw all the deflector power to the rear shields,” she said as she twisted the last pair of wires together.

Ayli, beautiful, amazing, wonderful Ayli did not ask why or argue.

She just hit the button.

Medium freighters are neither quick nor maneuverable.

Nix couldn’t improve Goldie’s maneuverability much with a kitbashed change. What she could do though was turn it from a medium freighter, into a sub-light missile.

“Enemy contacts are falling away,” Goldie reported. “Also our hyperspace lane is coming up real quick. We’ll need to slow down for me to calculate the entry point.”

“Don’t slow down!” Nix yelled. “Ayli, you can do this!”

Ayli’s response was entirely non-verbal as she jammed even more speed out of the Goldrunner’s engines.

Given the response time of the sensor relays and the processing power of Goldie’s navigation circuitry, it was mathematically impossible that they would enter the hyperspace lane at the proper microsecond and avoid careening off it into the unknown reaches of the galaxy.

It was impossible for a machine but Ayli nailed it.

By sheer force of will, she slammed the Goldrunner out of normal space and onto the cosmic highway that ran straight to Delos and their next trial.

Nix sagged in relief as they returned to the blue of hyperspace. Tie Fighters were fantastic attack craft, but, unless they’d been heavily modified, one thing they all lacked was a hyperdrive. No one would be pursuing them. They could breath easy.

“Who the hell was that!?” Ayli slammed her fist on the control panel and then punched it again. A piece broke off, and Ayli didn’t care, hitting the panel again as though it’s fragility was just another bellows to stoke her rage.

“Might not want to break our ship while we’re in hyperspace there Wensha,” Sali said.

Ayli whirled and growled at the pirate queen. Nix caught just a glimpse of Ayli’s eyes but it was enough to see how much they’d changed.

Yellow irises, ringed by fiery red.

Those were not the eyes of the woman she felt so comfortable, and warm, and safe with.

Those eyes spoke of danger. Or power, and rage, and an overwhelming desire for destruction.

Nix had never studied the Jedi or learned much about any Force tradition, but she could feel how monstrous the transformation was which was working inside Ayli.

Fear rose as a primal response.

Destroy Ayli it said. Remove the danger. Be safe.

She could move things with her mind.

Killing someone with it would be so easy.

Bodies were nothing but weak points, from throats to hearts to brains. Squeeze almost any part and problems ended.

She could have done it. Nix knew she had that kind of power now. But fear was something she was used to shoving aside. She’d been alone a lot, and so she’d been afraid a lot. So, instead of listening to her fear, she turned to her heart.

The last thing she ever wanted to do was hurt Ayli. 

Or give up on her.

Whatever it took, she wanted to reach her wife and help Ayli find her way back from the shadows which were swallowing her up.

“You did it. We’re safe,” she said, rising to stand beside Ayli. She didn’t hug or even touch Ayli this time though, sensing that with the whirlwind of emotions that was swirling through Ayli’s mind, the last thing she needed was more stimulation.

Ayli turned to her, hands bunched into fists which sagged and relaxed open as the spinning rage behind her eyes wound down into tiny ripples.

“Right. They can’t follow us, can they?” Ayli said, unstable but reclaiming her balance with each breath as she focused on Nix.

“Nope. With how they were flying around us, there’s no chance they were loaded down with a hyperdrive in addition to all the weaponry they were packing. There’s just not enough room,” Nix said, offering the details more as reassurance than an argument to support her claim.

“I still want to know who they were,” Ayli said, the fire had gone out of her words though and her eyes were back to their usual color.

“Those were some of the assassins I’ve been worrying about. I recognized their flying pattern. They’re some of the good ones,” Sali said. “And if they knew to wait for us there, you know there’s going to be others waiting for us around Dedlos too.”

“And they’ll be even better,” Zindiana said.

Nix breathed in and looked for where her intuition was telling her to go.

Dedlos.

The next trial.

Where Ayli would need her even more.

And where death awaited.