Nix had to guess where the proper place was for her in the imagined circle Rassi and Solna were dancing around.

Or perhaps, more accurately, she had to make that place for herself, since Rassi and Solna were entirely focused on each other and balanced only alternate sides of the circle.

To her vast surprise though, gliding into the dance was all but effortless. Apparently, later dancers joining in was part of the ritual, which was interesting for a trial-by-not-quite-combat sort of thing.

That the ritual also anticipated late arrivals was the likely reason she felt her strength flow out rapidly the moment she began to follow the proper footstep. The drain stopped as she leveled out with her two young wards, who seemed to have been strengthened equally by the Force which had been drawn from Nix.

So that was fair.

Which wasn’t exactly what Nix had in mind.

Watching from the sidelines she’d barely been able to sense the girls at all, much less what they were doing to themselves. It had been Kelda who’d observed, silently, that they were slowing all of their vital processes to grow quieter and quieter, which Ravas noted could do a fair bit more damage to them than simple bruising.

Since neither Rassi nor Solna were going to allow themselves to fail the other, Nix, without any preternatural help from the Force, foresaw that the dance was going to end with both of them in dire need of medical attention. She could have called an end to the ritual there, but that would have done the sort of harm that no medical attention could fix.

Joining in on the mayhem may not exactly have been the ‘responsible adult thing to do’, but it felt like the best path she had available between unpleasant alternatives.

Which wasn’t to suggest that slowing her heart to where it was only barely beating was in any sense pleasant.

Each step she took had her muscles calling out for blood, which her heart, solid, reliable organ that is was, usually easily provided. With the work stoppage at the central blood processing plant however, the muscles work orders were encountering difficulties being fulfilled.

There was an obvious answer to that problem of course.

Nix could use the Force.

She could lift engine parts, or even entire ship’s at this point, if she set her mind to it. Moving her own blood was trivial by comparison (in theory moving another person’s blood was doable to, though Nix knew anything with blood also had enough presence in the Force to at least somewhat resist that sort of nonsense).

There was a problem with the simple solution though. Like there always was. Using the Force to make up for the stillness inside her would send out ripples like a boulder dropped into lake, and in a dance where the winner was determined by who could be the most “silent” in the Force, ‘cheating’ with Force powers would be an immediate loss.

So Nix trudged on, each step heavier and weaker than the one before.

She was older and stronger than either Rassi or Solna. She had a year of formal training in using the Force and a lifetime of intuitive practice with it. If it came to any other sort of “Force battle” she would have completely outclassed the two young girls she was competing with.

After another two passes around the circle though, Nix had to concede that both of her opponents were more practiced at the specific technique the dance tested.

A part of her had to smile at the thought – not that she had the blood left to raise her lips into even a faint smirk.

But, hey, she’d gone on a voyage to learn new Force practices and look, here she was dancing in the middle of one! Victory, right?

Victories sucked, Nix decided.

Not that she was going to lose.

Neither Rassi, nor Solna were going to give up on each other, but Nix had an advantage. She wasn’t going to give up on either one of them.

The darkness closing in around the edges of her eyes sight had other ideas on that account but Nix was able to push it away with the thought of how desperate Rassi must have been in the days, and weeks, and even years leading up to their meeting.

To entrust herself to a stranger, a monstrous one if what her people told her was true, that could only have come from the sort of misery that could have left her hating everyone on principal.

But Rassi didn’t hate people.

At least not other people.

Nix had wrestled with valuing herself long enough to recognize the deep need in Rassi for someone to believe in her.

That carried Nix through one step.

The darkness didn’t diminish in strength though.

Nix’s heart had slowed to where it wasn’t beating at all.

Which meant neither where Rassi or Solna’s.

Which meant they were all in danger.

But the girls weren’t giving up. 

Because Solna had been the person Rassi needed and was willing to give her life if needed to not lose that.

Solna, who hadn’t abandoned the beliefs of the Silent Enclave. Solna who couldn’t deny the terrible truths about the Enclave she’d been presented with.

Was this dance and its worst ending a means of escape from all that?

Not consciously, Nix thought. Solna didn’t want to destroy herself, despite how easy of an answer as that would be. Solna burned with fury and righteousness. She didn’t want to escape the world, she wanted to fix it, to make it how it should be, no matter what it cost her.

And the most important part of the world, was Rassi, the girl she hadn’t been able to save except by wishing with all her heart and witnessing the destruction of the only way of life she’d ever known.

Nix’s vision was gone by the time she finished the next step.

Hearing dwindled to nothing with the following one.

In the darkness, there were sources of strength remaining though.

Rage at the unfairness of the lives gives to Rassi and Solna.

Fear at failing them.

Despair at yet another impossible burden on top of the prospect that she might lose the person dearest to her if they couldn’t rescue Ayli.

Nix glanced at those childhood companions of hers, long “allies” who had only rarely done her any good whatsoever, and never without regrettable costs. She could have called on any of them to survive, and even to “win”. 

Except it wouldn’t have been the sort of “win” that fixed anything.

Dominating the girls, even with Solna’s shield, might have been possible, and would have settled the matter.

Right up until they grew strong enough, maybe in a few weeks, maybe in a few year, to throw off the compulsion. Their reaction to the betrayal then wasn’t something Nix needed to guess at, nor did she need to spare it a thought to know how knowing what she’d done would sicken her own heart.

So, no, the Dark Side could keep it’s quick and easy answers. 

Nix was one with the Force and the Force was with her.

For one more step.

She didn’t move her blood, she didn’t move her breath, or her body.

She simply reached inside, found the love that still beat within her silent heart and too a single step more.

And that was all she could do.

The darkness swam in to take her thoughts and she felt a ghostly hand holding her up.

“Not sure which of you three is the least sensible,” Ravas said as life and strength roared back into the silence that had overtaken Nix. “And I want you to consider that I’m the one saying that, despite the idiotic things I’ve done.”

“The girls?” Nix said, blinking to get her vision back.

“They’re fine,” Kelda said, kneeling down beside an unconscious Solna. 

Rassi was on the ground as well but was already starting to come around.

“What happened?” Nix asked, her thoughts still looping around themselves in little swirls.

“You won,” Kelda said. “Or at least you held out longer than they did. We’ll have to see if they’ll honor that since they hadn’t exactly asked you to join in their trial.”

“The dance accepted her,” Rassi said, pushing herself up to a sitting position and holding her head in her hands.

“And she outlasted us,” Solna said with a groan. “I don’t know how though.”

“She didn’t manipulate the Xah,” Rassi said.

“I didn’t have to,” Nix said. “This was a contest of wills, right?”

“And skill with the Xah,” Solna said.

“I’ve got a few years of experience on you in terms of skill, and for the rest? I only had to carry myself through the dance. You two were carrying your uncertainties too.”

“What, we…” Solna started to say.

“We weren’t as centered as she was,” Rassi said.

Solna frowned but didn’t try to correct the statement.

“I meant what I said when I joined the dance,” Nix said. “You’re both carrying a lot of undeserved pain. I can’t lift that from you, I don’t know how. But I do know that with time and a fresh perspective it can change. If I won anything here, I ask that you let me be that perspective.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Rassi said.

“She wants to us to believe her when she says things about us,” Solna said.

“I just want you to listen, really listen,” Nix said. “What you believe is ultimately up to you. All I can offer is something for you to consider.”

“We can do that,” Rassi said, and Solna nodded in agreement.

“Hate to break into this conversation,” Goldie said, “but we’re back in normal space and I’m getting a secure hail from Thirty-two.”

“Heading to the bridge now,” Nix said, jogging on only slightly unsteady legs to the secure console.

A hail from Thirty-two was what they’d been expecting. Hopefully something along the lines ‘we caught the ship, Ayli’s now safe in my office, and the people who took her are an expanding cloud of gas particles’. Nix wasn’t expecting that of course, but it was still a nice mental image to hold her nerves at bay.

A secure hail though suggested that Thirty-two felt the need to avoid warning their quarry what was waiting for them. The chance that the Evil Kidnappers weren’t aware that their planet was under a loose blockade by a quasi-pirate fleet seemed remote, and if Nix’s suspicions were correct, the kidnappers had every intention of making their presence known. Why settle for one Jedi-trained Force user when you could lure in four after all? 

“Goldrunner here,” Nix announced after hitting the ‘decrypt’ button.

“Nix? So good to hear from you,” Thirty-two said. “I only wish I had the news to report that you wished to hear.”

“No sign of my wife yet?” Nix asked.

“You’re the first ship we’ve registered entering the system in the last week,” Thirty-two said. “But that’s not the news that’s going to disturb you.”

Nix heard the others arrive behind her and suppressed her groan at Thirty Two’s words.

“I don’t want to ask, do I?” she said.

“Most likely not,” Thirty-two said. “Which is why I will tell you anyways. Praxis Mar is active.”

“Define ‘active’ please?” Nix said, knowing there was no definition that would be either comforting or good.

“Tectonically, energetically, probably spiritually too, though we don’t have sensors for that I’m afraid,” Thirty-two said. 

“You don’t need them,” Ravas said. “You’re right. I can sense it from here.”

“What is that place? Why are we here?” Solna asked, staring out the forward viewport at the tiny pale dot in the distance that was Praxis Mar.

“We need to go. This is wrong,” Rassi said.

“I don’t know if we can,” Nix said slowly, the echoes in the Force from the conflict on Praxis Mar washing over her.

Praxis Mar had called to several people, but it was calling to her most insistently of all.

Solna knew Rassi wasn’t an idiot. Rassi was, in point of fact, brilliant. That was why it was so incredibly maddening that Rassi couldn’t see how wrong she was.

“I’m not wrong you know,” Rassi said, which wasn’t a sign that she was reading Solna’s thoughts. Solna knew that her sinful shield was still firmly in place.

She also knew that the shield wasn’t really sinful.

Accepting that fact was more difficult of course. Her head could see the logic of Rassi’s argument. Her heart though was still poisoned by, basically, her entire life up a few hours until earlier. 

The shield wasn’t the most bitter pill she had to swallow though. 

Reflecting on the past, a part of her knew that Nix had been right.

She was the one at fault for where Rassi had ended up.

Solna had never knowingly corrupted the Xah. She hadn’t reached out with her will and demanded that the future change to suit her desires. She hadn’t bent anyone’s will to her own, or pushed aside the gross physical laws of the galaxy in order to move pieces of it where she wanted them to be.

But she had wished, silently and often, that Rassi, or more accurately Rassi and herself would find a place where they belonged.

She hadn’t moved the Xah, but her heartfelt yearning had been heard and answered through the most subtle of nudges, bending the fates of Nix, the ghosts, Rassi, herself, and probably the entire Silent Enclave to where a meeting was more than likely and the outcome they’d arrived at essentially inevitable.

Or it had been subtle right up until they reached the precipice of change, after which Goldie had blown up a building and they’d fled across the stars which was sort of the opposite of subtlety.

That alone would have gotten her expunged, even if she’d been able to remain perfectly faithful to the beliefs she’d been raised with.

Beliefs she still felt herself clinging to.

It wasn’t right to change the fates of others.

It could only be a sin to impose your will against the natural flow which life chose to follow.

To a part of her, a large part still, that had to be true. 

Silence in the Xah was wise. It was good. It was safe.

But it hadn’t been for Rassi’s parents.

And even all of Solna’s training hadn’t given her the skills to be quiet enough.

It felt like everything in her was crumbling down, basalt granite foundation loosing all cohesion as the world she knew turned to drifting sand.

But against all of that, there was Rassi.

Rassi who had always been too big, too loud, too easy of a target for everyone who wanted to take out their frustrations. Rassi who’d been hurt time and again, and who had crawled inside herself and become so silent that even Solna sometimes couldn’t find her. Rassi who’d let Solna in and trusted her and believed in her, even when Solna hadn’t been able to be there for her.

Rassi, who for the first time in as long as Solna could remember, had hope in her eyes.

Solna wasn’t going to let anyone take that from Rassi, most especially not Rassi herself. 

“Is this the area?” Solna asked, casting her gaze up to one of the ship’s camera. Goldie would be able to hear her no matter where Solna was, but looking at the camera made it seem more like a conversation.

“It’s as much of an open space as I’ve got,” Goldie said. “We’re not carrying much cargo at the moment, but if you need more I can drop the boxes at the far end of the room off on a tether.”

Solna dragged Rassi through the door as it whooshed open and surveyed the space. It was plenty big enough for a Silent Dance, but the current occupant of the room seemed to be engaged in something that might be a bad idea to interrupt.

“Nix?” Rassi asked when she saw the Jedi floating crossed legged with her eyes closed. The Xah was swirling around her, flying away across the tiniest of gaps and the span of space to a distant star.

“Come on in,” Nix said, without opening her eyes or descending to the ground.

“What are you doing?” Rassi asked. 

Solna was curious to hear the answer too, despite the stab of fear that the answer might be enough to show her how to do the same thing. With how easy the mental shield had been to learn, it seemed a reasonable worry that all of the Jedi arts might be effectively contagious if you were exposed to them.

“Checking on my wife,” Nix said.

“Is…is she okay?” Rassi asked.

“She’s on a ship that’s a Dark Side nexus, trapped in a prison cell, and being delivered to an enemy whose apparently more powerful than both of us combined,” Nix said, uncoiling her legs and releasing the Xah so she could stand up rather than float. “Surprisingly though, yes, she’s doing fine. That’s going to change if they make it to Praxis Mar though.”

“What are you going to do?” Solna asked, the questioning leaping from her lips before she could think to stop it.

“I think I’m supposed to say ‘trust in the Force’?” Nix said, glancing over at a spot where the two ghosts appeared.

“Only if you believe you can,” Kelda said. “I mean it is a good idea, but sometimes we need to actually tell the Force what it is we want. Clear communication is, shockingly, an important part of even that relationship.”

“I can’t help but feel that was a dig aimed in my direction,” Ravas said.

“You always were the perceptive one,” Kelda said.

“In this case, I’m thinking we go with clear communication and all the gunships we can scrounge up,” Nix said.

“Music to my ears,” Goldie said. “Do I get the Quad Turbo Laster battery now?”

“Sadly my darling, there’s not enough time to install one,” Nix said. “Also your power system would need a complete overhaul to handle the load.”

“Right. Save Mom Two first, then proper upgrades, got it,” Goldie said.

“I also believe our wards here have something they need to resolve?” Nix said.

“How did you…?” Rassi asked.

“Goldie mentioned a dance and you’re not in your room,” Nix said. “Sensing you in the Force is harder than sensing either of these two,” she gestured to the ghosts, “but some things aren’t hard to work out with simple intuition.”

“We would like to settle a matter with a Silent Dance,” Solna said, knowing she didn’t need to ask for formal approval. Nix wouldn’t know what she was approving after all, and she wasn’t an Elder of the Silent Enclave, but it still felt right to ask for permission.

“Goldie mentioned coffins?” Nix asked, taking a seat on a crate at the side of the cargo hold.

“Oh, we won’t need those,” Rassi said. “The Silent Dance isn’t dangerous.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Solna said, prompted to honesty by Nix’s apparent acceptance of their plan. “If both of the dancers are skilled enough and neither is willing to concede, the dance can push them to where bruises or worse occur.”

“This is how the Enclave resolved disputes?” Nix asked.

“It’s one of the tools we have,” Rassi said. Solna could hear the lingering remnants of connection Rassi felt to the Enclave in the ‘we’, even as the coals of her own connection to them burned down lower and lower.

“Is it acceptable for me to watch?” Nix asked.

“Yes, but you can’t interfere,” Solna said.

“Just so that I’m clear, is that ‘can’t’ as in ‘it would be culturally inappropriate’, or ‘can’t’ as in ‘doing so would cause grave harm to one or both of you’?” Nix asked.

“As you shouldn’t,” Rassi said.

“Okay,” Nix said, and leaned back on the crate.

“I feel like our master would have put a stop to a fight before it happened no matter what form it took,” Ravas said.

“They did. Several times. Look where that got us,” Kelda said, taking a seat on one of the other crates/

“I’m not so unhappy with where it got us, but I’ll agree we could have gotten her by far easier roads,” Ravas said, sitting beside Kelda on her crate rather than finding one of her own.

That ghosts could be cuddly was something Solna had never considered and would have been extremely puzzling if everything else about her present wasn’t much father removed from the life she was used to.

“What are the boundaries?” Rassi asked, walking across the cargo hold to take a spot at the edge of an imaginary circle between them.

“Our extents and no further,” Solna said. She wasn’t going to hurt Rassi, but she did intend to fight so hard Rassi would have no option but to admit Solna was right.

“And the words?” Rassi asked, following the proper form even as she cast aside everything else the Silent Enclave had taught them.

“You will understand which of us is wrong. You will see the worth I see in you. You will hear the truth of my sin and you will carry none of its weight on your shoulders,” Solna said, naming the stakes she was fighting for before completing the proper form, “and the silence?”

“You will understand which of us is wrong. You will see the innocence I see in you. You will hear the shriek of my failure and will accept me as outcast and broken,” Rassi said.

Which Solna would never do.

What Rassi viewed as a failure to be what she should have been, the perfect Silent Doll for the Enclave, Solna knew to be a triumph of who Rassi was.

“In three beats we begin then,” Solna said and felt her heartbeat pause as it synced with Rassi’s.

“In two beats we begin,” Rassi said.

“In one beat, we begin,” they said together and stilled their breathing.

And then the dance started.

Solna took a step to her right, traversing the circle as Rassi did the same, the Xah within them slowing, and slowing, and slowing.

Another step and the stillness of their breath spread to the hearts, the shared beating slowing together, step after step after step.

With their hearts held in ever deepening silence, the blood in their veins began to slow and yet still they danced, one step around the circle, after another, twirling to face outwards and inwards as they went, their hands and arms describing glyphs of perseverance and intention in the air.

Solna’s body screamed for her to drawn on the Xah, to move her blood, to bring air in and out of her lungs, to power her thoughts, to keep herself alive.

And she refused.

To move the Xah even with the smallest ripple was to forfeit the dance, and to forfeit the dance meant allowing Rassi to continue to believe the terrible lies she was telling herself.

Across the circle, Solna could see Rassi struggling. There were some advantages to being smaller, but Solna knew her hyperactive metabolism was going to work against her as much as Rassi’s bulk would.

It didn’t matter though. 

Rassi would crumble first.

Not because she was weaker, but because she was in the wrong, and she knew it.

Solna had seen the confirmation in Rassi’s eyes. There’d been no disagreement with Nix there. Rassi hadn’t tried to hide that either. She knew Solna had sinned. She knew who deserved the blame for their situation, no matter how any of them tried to pretend it wasn’t okay that she’d driven the two of them from their home.

No matter how much Solna was having trouble regretting her actions enough, or feeling the  guilt she was so clearly due.

Guilt which should have pressed her onwards. Shame should have fired her resolve to prove that she was the one who deserved punishment, not Rassi.

Never Rassi.

Guilt and shame were a weak fuel though. Step by step they went on, and Solna felt her strength draining away. She’d pledged that their battle should only be unto their limits and she was fast approaching hers. As the end of her strength loomed every closer though, Rassi showed no signs of faltering. 

Solna’s best friend was pushing herself relentlessly forward to prove what? That the Enclave had been right? That Rassi’s true self was a mistake, a broken thing to be discarded.

Anger rose in Solna’s breast but before she could draw on it for strength, a new dancer joined the circle.

“My words and my silence are this,” Nix said. “That you will understand that you are both right, and both wrong. You will see yourselves as I see you. You will hear the words you should have heard long ago and know that you are neither sinners, nor unworthy.”

Solna was falling apart. Rassi could see it happening, but she didn’t know how to put Solna back together.

Which was typical.

Why would Rassi ever think she could fix anyone else when she was such a broken mess herself?

“You want to abandon the Xah?” Solna asked, horror creeping over her at the thought.

“No, I don’t want to die or anything like that,” Rassi said, seeing only belated how that might have sounded. “I just want to give up the…I don’t know…whatever we have that lets us hear it and corrupt it. I want to be like the people in the markets. They don’t go around messing up the Xah all the time like we do. They just live their lives and it’s fine.”

“Like we do?” Solna asked, and Rassi could head the pain Solna was trying to hide.

“You’ve never corrupted anything,” Rassi said, putting all the steel she could find inside her into the declaration. Solna had to understand that, even if Nix was right about who’d shaped their fate to bring them here.

“But you think this is my fault.” It was a whisper so quiet Rassi wouldn’t have been sure she’d heard it at all, except for the scream in the Force that accompanied it.

“No. Solna, no. Look at me,” she took Solna’s face in her hands and pulled her friends eyes up until they met her own. “You saved me.”

“We’re on the run and being hunted by our own people,” Solna said. “Tovos will come for us, and the others. Assuming they don’t just expunge us both.”

“You. Saved. Me,” Rassi said. “They were going to come for me sooner or later. We both know that. Maybe they wouldn’t have expunged me, but Primus Dolon would not have let someone like me live. People thought I was a danger to the enclave already. He would have made sure there was an “accident” or I would have been sent on a mission where the accidents could create themselves. No one wanted me there.”

“I did,” Solna said. “I do.”

Rassi drew her into a hug.

“I know. Do you know how much it means to me that you came?” she asked.

“What was I supposed to do? Let you leave?”

“Anyone else would have. But you’re not anyone else. You’re the best thing the Silent Enclave ever produced.”

“I hate you,” Solna said over a tearful snuffle.

“I know,” Rassi said. “But I’m still right.”

“Shut up,” Solna hugged Rassi tighter and they stayed like that for a long moment, the warmth of each other cast against the empty cold of the unfathomable distance they’d already fled, and the uncaring chill of the galaxy that awaited them.

“You didn’t corrupt anything,” Rassi said. “But I know why Nix said what she did.”

“Why?” Solna asked, their hug more relaxed by not released at all.

“Let me ask you a question first, okay? Maybe a few of them,” Rassi said.

“No, I don’t like Milgo or his brother Scavto,” Solna said, answering an old, teasing accusation as though she hadn’t already demonstrably proven that.

“Good,” Rassi said, holding her closer. “You’re too good for them.”

“What? Why were you trying to throw me at them then!” Solna tried to shove away from Rassi but Rassi didn’t let her go.

“Because they were the best of a bunch of terrible choices,” Rassi said, “and I didn’t think either of them would care if we stayed friends.”

“You’re an idiot. A complete and total idiot. Let me go, I need to hit you,” Solna said.

“Nope. I mean you’re right, but I’d be a bigger idiot to let you go,” Rassi said. “And that wasn’t my question.”

Solna groaned, but in place of making an attempt to pull away and make good on her threat, nestled in closer and groaned in exasperation.

“Go on then, ask,” she said.

“You learned how to do something from Ravas?” Rassi said, with a certainty that suggested it wasn’t really a question.

“Yes. A Jedi trick. A sin,” Solna said.

“It’s not,” Rassi said. “I mean even by the standards of the Enclave, it’s not.”

“What are you talking about? Of course it is. I’m twisting the Xah into what I want.”

“Nope.”

“What? You can’t just say ‘nope’. I’m doing it right now. I know exactly what I’m doing!” The irritation in Solna’s voice was an oddly welcome sign. Solna rarely cried, but there was a fire in her that Rassi was sure could light the heavens ablaze if that was ever warranted.

“I can, because I can feel it. It’s shielding your thoughts right?” Rassi asked, mostly certain of that but aware that she could be missing a few nuances.

“Yes. She was able to read my mind, and then she showed me how to block it,” Solna said. “I know it’s a sin, but I just…I can’t let someone hear what I’m thinking. I…”

“It would be worse than being naked at a full camp dinner,” Rassi suggested and felt Solna’s nod of agreement. “So, what your doing is a good thing then.”

“No! It’s good for me, but that Xah…” Solna started to say before Rassi cut her off with a squeeze.

“I can feel your Xah, and I can feel the Xah around you,” Rassi said, opening her mind so that if Solna reached out to her, she’d see the truth in Rassi’s next words. “Do you know what you’re doing to the flow of the Xah? Nothing. You are as quiet as you ever are and the Force is flowing through and around you just like it always does. There is literally no difference between how you are now and how you were yesterday, at least not with the shield you made. You’re just a bit more tense today than yesterday, but I can’t imagine why that would be.”

Solna poked her in the ribs, which Rassi squeaked in response to but had to admit was deserved.

“How’s that possible though?” Solna asked. “I am definitely doing something with the Xah, or the Force, or whatever.”

“Next question,” Rassi said. “Nix told us what the Expunging Rite is, and how it’s done. Is there any chance, even the tiniest one, that someone, like say Primus Dolon, who uses it, is not controlling the Xah and manipulating it to get it to do what he wants?”

“No,” Solna admitted. “To kill someone like that. It wouldn’t be possible without corrupting the Xah to an unimaginable degree.”

“Which is the biggest conceivable sin there could be, right?”

“Well may not the biggest, or, no, you’re right. It doesn’t get worse than that. Every other bad thing I can think of it simply just as bad,” Solna.

“So, this questions a big one and I think it answers yours about what you’re doing, and what you did,” Rassi said. “Would the teachings of someone like that be the truth, or would they be something that served their own interest?”

“Yes but our entire society can’t be built on lies. People would see them,” Solna said.

“Let me ask this then, you are incredibly talented, but you still picked the shielding trick up almost instantly. If it’s that easy, and it make no ripples in the Force, then why wouldn’t it have been taught to us from when we were little kids?”

“Maybe it’s something only Force adepts like the Jedi can do?” Solna suggested weakly.

“The Xah and the Force are the same thing,” Rassi said. “We have a different name for it because we have a different relationship to it, but both names refer to the binding between all of us and all things. Anything a Jedi can do, we can do too.”

“Or maybe I’m just defective and should have been a Jedi,” Solna said, audibly pouting.

“I will literally fight you,” Rassi said. “I will have Goldie clear room in the cargo hold and I will fight you in a Silent Dance, and force you to see that you are not defective. At all.”

“You can’t beat me in a Silent Dance,” Solna said with a smirk in her voice.

“Of course not. But I can keep going for a very long time. However long it take to get it into that stubborn head of yours.”

“I would like to see you try,” Solna said, her old familiar competitive spirit coming to the surface at last.

“It’s on then! Goldie!” Rassi called out.

And was met with only silence as a response.

“Huh, I guess they were sincere about giving us privacy?” Solna said, which apparently neither of them had fully believed.

“Right. Gotta hit the button on the wall,” Rassi said and started to get up.

“Nope,” Solna said, clinging to her and holding her in place. “I don’t want to fight you.”

“Good. Then don’t pick up on someone I love,” Rassi said.

They sat together in silence for a while before Solna let out a long breath as a thought unwound from where it had been constricting her heart.

“I put us here, didn’t I?” she asked.

“A lot of things put us here,” Rassi said. “If Primus Dolon wasn’t such a evil scumbag, we’d still be in the Enclave. If Nix hadn’t been questing for information on people like us, we wouldn’t have met her.  If I hadn’t felt the Force pulling me towards her I wouldn’t have risked talking to an outsider.”

“But I was the one who bent it all to happen like it did,” Solna said.

“I think it’s like your shield,” Rassi said. “And I think what the Silent Enclave taught us was wrong.”

“Well, yeah, making sure we couldn’t keep our thoughts secret from the Primus suggests they taught us a lot of wrong things, but how’s it like the shield?”

“We were taught that the Jedi warped and twisted to Xah and that our emotion did that too if we didn’t keep them hidden and inside ourselves. Your shield shows us that’s not true though. I mean, sure the Jedi probably can do things with the Force that are terrible – the mind control stuff isn’t made for example, but when I saw Nix use something like it she wasn’t using it to control or hurt anyone, just to keep her and me safe.”

“So it’s okay to twist the Xah if it’s to keep ourselves safe?”

“That’s the thing, I don’t think it twists the Xah at all. I think how the Jedi use the Force, or at least how I’ve seen Nix use it is more like a conversation. She asks the Force to do something and supports her like a friend would. Like it’s doing with you. You’re not ‘corrupting the Xah’, you’re communing with the Force and it feels like its all in favor of doing what you’re asking it to.”

“What about you then? Why would you want to lose that? If it’s so good, why don’t you just become a Jedi too?” Solna asked.

“I’m…I’m not like you,” Rassi said. “I really have twisted up the Xah before. If I was to try to become a Jedi, I would be definitely screw it up, and I don’t think the galaxy needs another bad Jedi in it.”

Solna’s only reply to that was a moment of silence before she pushed Rassi away and got to her feet.

With a deep breath she walked over to the plate beside the door and pressed the lower button.

“Goldie?” she said.

“Solna! How may I be of service? Are either of you feeling hungry? Or perhaps I can send the clothing waldo in if you’re ready for that?”

“Thank you Goldie. Could you send in a meal for Rassi? Also, we’ll need a space cleared in the cargo hold. And if you happen to have a coffin available, that would be good to have on hand as well.”

“What do you need coffin for?” Goldie asked.

“Someone is bad mouthing my best friend. I’m going to beat them senseless in a Silent Dance and if that doesn’t work I may strangle the life out of her. Or slap her until the stupid comes out. I don’t know. I’ll get creative I guess.”

Everything was wrong and Rassi was an idiot. Solna knew both those to be factually accurate statements. The second was not particularly revelatory. Rassi was beyond frustrating. Usually though, Rassi was frustrating about little things, like worrying about the opinions of the idiots in the enclave. Or being afraid that she was taking up too much space. Or that a few little slips with the Xah somehow mattered more than her patience, kindness, and beautiful laugh.

As the otherworldly blue of hyperspace whirled past them though, Solna could feel just how out of their depth they were.

First, everyone, or everyone except Rassi, obviously, were all screaming in the Xah, their emotions thundering against Solna’s temples with seventeen different flavors of fear and thirteen varies of anger. 

Nix, who had more-or-less kidnapped Rassi, had gone from a blazing maelstrom of rage when they met, to an almost acceptably serene harbinger of doom when she lured them both away, and was now a jangled mess of conflicting hates and hopes as they all went chasing her wife to someplace that even the droid ship seemed to be afraid of.

And yet Nix was the one accusing Solna of having bent the Xah to put them all here.

“That’s a lie. You’re lying!” It wasn’t Solna’s most eloquent defense but the thought that she would be accused of corrupting the Xah and putting the girl she…her best friend in a situation where they were cut off from the family and flying into mortal peril? Only a lifetime of practice allowed Solna to keep control of the Xah within her.

Well, she had it mostly controlled. Rassi noticed the turmoil in Solna’s Xah. But that was Rassi. Rassi always knew what Solna was thinking.

And in the face of an accusation like that?

Solna stormed off the bridge, too upset to care were she was going, or that there wasn’t all that much ship for her to go to.

On some level she knew she wasn’t alone.

Of course Rassi came with her.

They were always there for each other. It was just how they were.

That Nix and the two ghosts came too was far less welcome.

“I didn’t do this,” Solna whirled around to shout at them. Shouting was fine. The Silent Enclave wasn’t an audibly silent place. They were people. People made noise. Angry people shouted. It was natural. 

“Your senses are so sharp. Better than mine, maybe even better than theirs,” Nix said, gesturing to the two ghosts who were hanging back and so silent in the Xah that Solna could only barely hear them. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid!” Solna said, keeping her voice low and calm. If it sounded like a murderous growl, that was surely someone else’s imagination.

“You’re angry. And afraid. It’s hard to tell you’re feeling them both at once, but they work together.” Nix’s body language and her Xah were equally annoying. They were both too relaxed, and Nix was too focused on what Solna was doing. A moment earlier she’d been a twisted ball of knots over the fate of her wife, and now she was treating Solna like a someone who was important enough to be a distraction from all that.

It had to be a Jedi trick. Solna knew Nix wasn’t trying to influence her through the Xah. She would sense that even if nothing else made sense. To be able to just turn off your emotions though? That had to be some corrupt Jedi practice.

Or it’s just being older and having more perspective, the one named Ravas whispered to her in the Xah.

Are you reading my mind? Solna asked indignantly. She only thought the question. Didn’t disturb the Xah with it. And Ravas answered anyway.

Your thoughts are not particularly quiet ones, Ravas said.

Leave me alone!  The idea of her thoughts being open for everyone to hear was mortifying on a level Solna previously hadn’t suspected existed.

That last thing you need is to be alone, now, trust me on this, Ravas said. I speak from long and disastrous experience on the matter.

You don’t know me. I’m not like you! Solna shouted back. Nix was saying something but Solna head was filled with the ringing of the accusation still.

I’m not, Ravas said, but I have spoken those exact same words, for the exact same reason. And I learned two things from them.

What. Solna didn’t want to listen to Ravas’ voice in her mind but she was even less interested in listening to Nix explain whatever she was explaining, and she desperately didn’t want to look over at Rassi either.

First, that fleeing from our fears does not resolve them, and second, I learned how to do this. Ravas twirled her finger and a blanket fell over Solna’s head.

Not a physical blanket, but a sort of mental shield.

It protected Solna. Shielded her thoughts. She could sense the barrier it created around her, and the isolation is provided. Touching it, she felt the warm security it offered and knew that within it, she would either be safe or would know for certain if someone was trying to read her mind.

Was it a manipulation of the Xah though?

More importantly, did she care?

“No!” she said, aloud, cutting off whatever Nix had been saying and startling everyone. “You can’t tempt me with your Jedi tricks.”

“We, uh, weren’t talking about Jedi tricks though,” Nix said. “I was saying how it didn’t matter why you were here, learning to handle a blaster would give you a tool that you didn’t need the Force to wield.”

“I’m not talking to you,” Solna said. “I’m talking to her.”

“Yes, but now your talking with your words, and not telepathy,” Ravas said.

Solna touched her head and found the security blanket was still there.

“Get it off me, stop doing this to me,” she said, nauseated at the idea that she’d committed so many sins, so quickly.

“I stopped the moment after I showed you how to guard yourself,” Ravas said. “What you  wear now is entirely of your own creation.”

“No. That’s not true, I would never do this,” Solna said, the idiocy of being terrified of being cast out of a group she’d run away from not at all lost on her.

“It’s okay Sol,” Rassi said, taking Solna by the left arm and shoulder. “It’s all okay.”

Which was a comfort, in that it meant Rassi was still with her, and a terror since it meant that Rassi thought Solna was creating the mental shield on her own. 

And had corrupted the Xah to alter their fates.

“Might not be the best time to be giving them blaster training,” Kelda said.

“Perhaps not,” Nix said.

“She does need to accept what she’s capable of though,” Ravas said. “Hiding from the Force isn’t going to lead anywhere happy.”

“Can’t throw an engine into overdrive for too long though,” Nix said, which was both obvious and made no sense in context.

“Rest and food?” Kelda asked.

“I don’t know much about people maintenance beyond that,” Nix said.

“I can stay with her,” Rassi said, helping Solna get up.

When had she sat down? She didn’t remember falling to the floor but apparently she had?

That would explain why Nix had been kneeling down to talk to her.

With the mental blanket in place, Solna felt a degree of equilibrium return, though buried inside it was the dread disgust at the fact that she probably was the one who was manipulating the Xah for the mental shield.

“Of course,” Nix said. “Goldie can you show them to one of the guest rooms.”

“Sure. Want me to keep an eye on them in case they need anything?” the ship asked.

“I think they might like a bit of privacy at the moment,” Nix said. “Show them the wall comm. They can use that if they need anything.”

“Right. Follow me then,” Goldie said and a small repair bot hovered up to about head height and bobbed in an approximation of a nod at Solna and Rassi.

And then Nix just left, with Ravas and Kelda trailing in her wake.

“There’s pretty decent sound baffling in the guest rooms,” Goldie said as she led them to down a corridor or two and around a corner to where the passenger rooms were located. “We’ve docked at some noisy ports, and had some noisy guests. 

The door to one of the rooms hissed open automatically, revealing a space roughly half the size of Solna’s room at home. It could sleep two, but it would be a cozy fit.

“Thanks Goldie, is this the wall comm?” Rassi asked, pointing at a small panel near the door which a variety of blinking lights on it.

“Yep. The call button is the green one on the bottom. Press that and I’ll hear you. The Yellow button above that is the Ship’s Comm button. Press that and everyone aboard will hear you. If you need anything, like food or clothes, just let me know.”

“Clothes?” Solna asked, finding that to be an odd idea somehow.

“I’ve got a few basic fabricator waldos I can whip some up with,” Goldie said. “In case you want to clean up and change into something fresh.”

That sounded both heavenly and impossible. Solna didn’t want to think about the dust and grim she’d been covered by in their escape, but changing into new clothes would make everything that was happening too real.

“That would be great Goldie. We’ll let you know what we’re thinking in a bit,” Rassi said.

The door whooshed shut on its own, and there was quiet at last.

Solna could still hear Nix and the ghosts in the Xah but they were distant and surprisingly quiet compared to the people in the market place she was used to running into who weren’t part of the enclave.

Rassi was her usual calming, relaxing self. Not that Rassi was calm or relaxed, but what she projected into the Xah was the sort of gentle concern for Solna that was more comforting than any mental security blanket ever could be.

“I’m sorry,” Rassi said before Solna could form a thought beyond processing the relief she felt.

“For what? You don’t…” Solna started to say but Rassi hugged her and cut her off.

“I didn’t want to leave without you, but it wasn’t fair,” Rassi said. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”

“But you didn’t?” Solna said. Had Rassi not heard what Nix had accused Solna of?

“Of course I did? Who do you think told Nix that we had to pick you up? This is all my fault.”

Nope.

Solna was not going to let that stand.

“Don’t. None of this is your fault. You…you didn’t deserve how people were treating you, and you don’t deserve this. It’s..this…you didn’t do anything wrong.”

The relief and comfort were still there, but so was a painful need to make Rassi understand, to make her accept that she was as, no, more worthy than the idiots in the enclave who were always tearing her down.

“I wanted this though,” Rassi said, her voice small as though the confession would lead to…would lead to what? 

“You didn’t,” Solna said. “You wanted to be safe. You wanted to be away from a bunch of people who treated you bad because they were garbage. But you didn’t want this,” Solna said, speaking words she knew had to be true.

“But I did,” Rassi said. “I wanted to be on a starship, flying off into the unknown with you. I wanted us to be together when we found a new life, where we…where I found someone to teach me.”

“You want to learn from them?” Solna asked, shocked to the core at the idea. “You want to become a Jedi?”

“No, no!” Rassi said. “I want to learn how not have the Force at all.” 

Rassi found ghosts peaceful. That made less than no sense. For one thing they were clearly dead and yet still poking around in the living world which was as deep a corruption of the Xah as she could imagine. For another, they were Jedi. Jedi! Like, not the new fangled type Nix seemed to be. One of them, Kelda, was straight up wearing ghostly Jedi robes, and the other, Ravas, was surrounded by a chorus of memories both dark and light. 

And love.

Both of the ghosts sung of love by their presence. 

Not the wild hollering of first love, though Rassi could hear clearly that they’d never loved anyone but one another. Theirs was the quiet, abiding sort of connection that drowned out even the echoes of their deaths.

Kelda had come with news of a problem, something to do with Nix’s wife – and that was a concept that set Rassi’s toes and fingers tingling – but even with that and the dread concern it filled Nix with, Rassi felt peaceful in Ravas and Kelda’s presence.

“This doesn’t make any sense!” Nix kept her voice low and controlled but in the Xah she was screaming. “If you couldn’t find me, and Ayli couldn’t sense me, how did Paralus manage it? I don’t have any connection to him at all!”

“You must,” Kelda said. “Something you did caused a massive change in something he’s a part of. He wouldn’t be able to reach beyond the stars and manifest before you otherwise.”

“There’s zero chance anything I’ve done to him had more impact than what Ayli and I are to each other,” Nix said. “Or you and me. I’d still be completely ignorant of my connection to the Force if it wasn’t for you.”

“When he came for Ayli, she was in the Shadowed Cave,” Kelda said.

Ravas bapped her on the head.

“You let her take that test without us there to help?” Ravas asked.

“Yes, and she passed it easily,” Kelda said. “I told you she was ready. She even got her eyes back.”

“I’m sorry, what test is this? What did you do to her eyes?” Solna asked.

Solna who resolutely refused to accept that the Jedi were anything other than an abomination. Solna who had never so much as nudged the Xah in the slightest. Solna who nevertheless still called Rassi her friend despite Rassi’s increasingly frequent “mistakes” and “fumbles” with influencing the Xah.

Rassi did not understand her friend, couldn’t tease out the contradictions in her to get them to make sense, and didn’t really want to try in fear that she might unravel whatever it was that held them together.

“Ayli’s eyes changed color after some encounters we had about a year ago. Kelda’s been helping her fix that,” Nix said, clearly distracted as she…

Rassi could quite tell what Nix was doing. It wasn’t manipulating the Xah. That was easy to sense. Nix only seemed to be listening. 

Aggressively.

And then calmly.

And then more aggressively.

“Things are getting worse,” Nix said.

“I can return to her,” Kelda said.

“Or we both could,” Ravas said, with a not-terribly-subtle ripple in the Xah to indicate she intended to bring violence and mayhem along with her.

“No, she’s handling it,” Nix said. “I think.”

“What are you seeing?” Solna asked.

“It’s not sight,” Nix said. “It’s in here.” She tapped her chest. “I can’t do the manifest across the stars. I’m not strong enough and I wouldn’t be able to do anything there even if I could manage it.”

“And it would be wrong,” Solna said, which didn’t seem like the right thing to say or the right time to say it.

“I should be with her,” Kelda said. “If that tank caught up to her, she’ll need someone watching over her shoulder while she fights it.”

“She’s not fighting,” Nix said. “And she has someone with her. No. Someone’s. That’s got to be Bopo and, and someone I don’t know.”

“Monfi,” Kelda said. “He’s a Padal Horizon Knight. He’s hunting Paralus as well.”

“I thought the Horizon Knights were wiped out generations ago?” Ravas said.

“The galaxy is a rather large place it seems. The Jedi, the Sith, the Dathomiri Night Witches, the Silent Enclave, and so many other Force Traditions that people thought were destroyed are hanging in there just fine.”

“I think she’s been captured,” Nix said, her hands were steady over the ship’s controls, but Rassi could feel the tremors in the Force.

Jedi were supposed to be masters of their emotions. Cold and merciless as they bent the fate of the galaxy to their will (until it finally snapped back at them). If that was true, then Rassi could believe that Nix was no Jedi. Not from how Nix was pulsing the Xah around her like hands spasming into angry fists.

“Just tell me where they’re going and I’ll plot an intercept course,” Goldie said.

“Praxis Mar,” Nix said, closing her eyes.

And the disturbing ripples she was sending into the Xah ceased.

Nix wasn’t peaceful. Rassi could still sense the tension inside her, but she’d chosen to stop interfering with the Xah despite her emotions.

Which was something Rassi had never once managed.

“What kind of ship are they on?” Goldie asked, a nervous tension in her mechanical voice.

“I don’t know,” Nix said. “Something dangerous.”

“That makes two of us,” Goldie said.

“Was it her choice?” Ravas asked.

“I think it was,” Nix said. “Which means she’s counting on us to get her out of there.”

“We do not want to go back to Praxis Mar,” Kelda said.

“I know,” Nix said. “But they’ve got a headstart.”

“Doesn’t mean we can’t catch them,” Goldie said.

“Ayli will buy us time,” Ravas said. “And she can buy you more if we’re there to help her.”

“If only we could go,” Kelda said, putting a hand on Ravas’s hand.

“What do you mean?” Ravas asked. “I can sense her clearly.”

“As can I. We could even get to Praxis Mar before her,” Kelda said. “And both are traps.”

“What do you…oh, well that’s, annoying,” Ravas said.

“Traps?” Nix asked.

“Whatever ship she’s on, it was the scene of a ghastly enough tragedy to turn it into a floating Dark Side Nexus,” Kelda said. “The moment we appear within it, Paralus will know we are there and will likely be able to manifest more completely because of the imbalance either of us would cause by being there.”

“We could fight him together,” Ravas said, but Rassi could hear the uncertainty in her voice.

“If he is backed by the might of Praxis Mar, we would have a challenging time of it. Particularly since he could likely drag us back there, turning us into hostages rather than assets,” Kelda said.

“I thought I was meant to be the pessimistic one,” Ravas grumbled.

“I’m not being pessimistic,” Kelda said. “We will fight him, but on our terms, not his.”

“Will your wife be okay on a ship like that?” Rassi asked, trying to imagine what could be awful enough to permanently corrupt the Xah if the Expunging Rite didn’t do it.

“She thinks she will be,” Nix said. “And knowing her she’s probably right, but I don’t like ‘probably’. Not for her. Goldie can you get Thirty Two on the line. Last I checked, he was in charge of the fleet Sali left to guard Praxis Mar.”

“Sending a holo-message out now. I’ll have an optimal hyperspace route calculated in about five minutes too.”

“Jump the instant the calculation is done,” Nix said.

“I’m making some guesses about what their path might be from Cellondia. Do you want to check them over?” Goldie asked.

“Nope. You’re going to think of everything I would, and I don’t want to lose even an instant.”

“Should we drop these two off somewhere?” Kelda asked, gesturing to Solna and Rassi.

Rassi flinched at that. 

From how they’d been talking about Praxis Mar, it sounded like a deadly dangerous place. Leaving the two people they could least depend on behind made a lot of sense, but it would mean she and Solna would be defenseless and alone on a strange world. 

If Primus Dolon regrouped and tried the Expunging Rite on them, they’d be dead before Nix would even know they were danger.

“We can’t do that,” Nix said, sending a wave of relief crashing through Rassi. “These two are under my protection, and for now, they still need it.”

“Can you protect them Praxis Mar?” Ravas asked.

“We can,” Nix said. “Alone, I don’t think I’m a match for this Paralus. Together though?”

“I doubt it is unaware of the strengths we possess,” Kelda said. “It has waited a standard year for the chance to assault Ayli and yourself. It was likely observing your actions for a great deal longer than that.”

“You should teach us how to fight it,” Solna said.

Which showed that she’d clearly been possessed.

Or had suffered the sort of grievous head injury that only occurred in the holos where no actual damage was done and yet the victim’s personality was completely reversed.

“What? We can’t…” Rassi started to say but was cut off.

“That’s a good idea,” Nix said. “And it will keep me from slamming the hyperspace button and just hoping we’re pointing in the right direction. Let’s go down to the cargo hold.”

“I know I’m normally the last one to ask this, but are you sure this is a good idea?” Ravas said.

“Oddly, yes,” Nix said. “I’m not sensing these two playing any special role in what’s to come, but try to sense them in general.”

“It’s easier to notice where they’re not,” Ravas said. “Please tell me you’re not planning to make use of that. Spies have a far higher mortality rate than most people understand.”

“Which is exactly why they will not be spying for us,” Nix said. “Or engaging with anything that we find which has anything to do with Paralus Stahl.”

“Why then would they need training?” Kelda asked.

“Three reasons,” Nix said. “First, I’m done with being blind sided. I can’t foresee everything that’s before us, but I can plan around the sort of problems which are almost certain to arise and running into unexpected problems is almost guaranteed to happen. Second, they deserve to know that they can defend themselves, without using the Xah even.”

“What?” Solna asked, as surprised by that as Rassi was. 

Rassi wrestled with the smile that tried to cross her face. Solna had asked for training “knowing” that Nix would refuse, or that the training would involve committing Jedi-style sins against the Xah, which would in turn prove that she was right to distrust them.

“I know you hold to your traditions, and I don’t want to take that from you,” Nix said. “I’m not going to change who I am, even if you think that makes me an abomination, because that’s my choice, but it doesn’t have to be yours.”

“Of…of course,” Solna said, looking more rattled than Rassi could remember seeing her in a long time.

“What’s the third reason?” Rassi asked.

“I said I don’t see you or Solna playing a role in what’s to come,” Nix said. “But that doesn’t mean you won’t. I’m not going to ask anything of you. You deserve safety and support, not to be used as tools or weapons.”

“Bending our fates with Jedi powers is worse than asking us to fight for you,” Solna said.

“Absolutely true,” Nix said.

“And our fates are being bent,” Solna said. “We’re not supposed to be here.”

“Also true,” Nix said, a faint smile spreading across her lips as she glanced at Kelda and Ravas.

“Then why are you doing it?” Solna asked. “I didn’t see it at first, but with this? There is no way we’re here at precisely the time you need more soldiers by accident.”

“I don’t think it’s an accident either,” Nix said. “But look at me, really look, and you’ll see, I’m not the one who was asking for the Force to change your destiny’s.”

Rassi did as Nix asked. 

Nix wasn’t lying.

And she wasn’t wrong.

“That’s all your doing,” Nix said, looking not at Rassi but at Solna.

Ayli didn’t crash into her friend Bopo’s home. Smashing through the front door and causing several thousand credits of property damage did not, necessarily, mean that she had “crashed” into Bopo’s house. 

Especially since what awaited them more than justified the destruction they brought with them.

Archivist Bopo was an older Galruxian, an offshoot species from the Rodians. She had gone back to pursue an academic career after working in starship manufacturing for the first several decades of her life. In her time as a researcher, she hadn’t lost an appreciable amount of the muscle mass she’d developed hauling ship components around, which made it all the more concerning to see her struggling to break free of the grip of the Hunter-Killer droid which had her gripped by the neck.

Ayli could have wasted time trying to reason, or threaten, or plead for Bopo’s life, but none of those held even the slightest chance of success.

So she threw her lightsaber.

It wasn’t entirely unreasonable. She’d suspected that Paralus would move against Bopo based on the fact that Bopo was Ayli’s primary connection on the planet. That Paralus’ droid accomplice would use Bargus Brell’s HK droid to do its dirty work was also more or less a given, since that’s what HK droids were built for.

There was still a chance that negotiations could have produced a peaceful resolution – Paralus was likely to have some demands he intended to make if nothing else.  Crashing through the doors however bought Ayli a moment of surprise that she couldn’t afford to waste.

The HK droid had a machine’s response time to dangers which lay within its prediction algorithms domain. Rather than dodging the flying laser sword, the HK unit simply swung Bopo around as a shield.

Which Ayli had anticipated it might do because, while she did not have machine reflexes, she could hear the warnings in the Force, and she could see what the obvious counter to her attack was. By giving the HK something it thought it could respond to though, Ayli ensured it would stay in position, which let her close the gap to it with a Force assisted leap.

Calling her saber back to her hand before it could strike Bopo wasn’t hard. Her hand was where it was meant to be. Unfortunately the HK unit saw the change in Ayli’s attack while she was mid-leap and it had weapon systems to spare.

Monfi swatted the first blaster bolt away before it could hit Ayli, and she caught the second on her blade.

The HK switched to jets of flame, but Ayli had the velocity to dive under it’s arc and take its left leg off at the knee joint.

Despite its heightened response time, there wasn’t any argument it could make against gravity pulling it to the ground, which dropped both it and Bopo on top of Ayli.

Acting as a cushion for Bopo wasn’t the worse thing in the galaxy, but the HK unit was significantly heavier than it looked.

Ayli had shut her lightsaber off when she dodged under the flame stream to avoid hitting Bopo by mistake. As the HK unit spun two of it’s chest lasers at her though, Ayli flicked the blade back to life, plunging it through the the HK’s central chassis. 

She wasn’t sure where it kept it’s memory banks, but she did know which compartment was the only one large enough to house its power supply.

With a Force assisted kick, she flung the inert carcass of the HK off herself and Bopo before the minor explosion in it’s chest reduced it to a pile of very expensive rubble.

“Y…yo…you…” Bopo tried to choke out, finding it understandably difficult to speak after being held aloft by her throat.

“It’s okay,” Ayli said. “We’ll get you out of here to somewhere safe.”

“I think she’s trying to tell us there’s a problem with that,” Monfi said, a pair of blasters in his hands.

“Indeed,” a chorus of mechanized voices said in perfect unison.

Ayli looked away from Bopo, following her friend’s wide-eyed look of terror to find at least a dozen more HK units emerging from doorways and alcoves, each with a clear shot at herself, Bopo, and Monfi.

Against one assassin droid, Ayli hadn’t felt too uncertain. Even before she’d learned to use the Force she’d encountered one of them and they weren’t as impossible to outfight as their reputation suggested. Against a dozen assassin droids, Ayli also didn’t feel much uncertainty, though for very different reasons.

“I am supposed to thank you for accepting my invitation,” the mechanized voice said. “I am also to instruct you that you are to surrender yourself, or this person, and everyone else you know and care about will pay the price.”

“Who am I surrendering to?” Ayli asked, inwardly groaning that they’d entered a negotiation phase despite her best efforts.

Not that negotiations were a bad idea in general. Negotiations were a fantastic thing when the parties involved each had a reason to seek an end to their hostilities. When it came to resolving differences between two parties who each believed themselves to be the aggrieved one, entering negotiations as soon as possible was always the best move.

The controller of the HK droids did not wish to resolve its conflict with Ayli any more than the Imperial Officers she’d stared at down the barrel of a blaster had ever been interested in pursuing justice. These negotiations were about asserting control and maneuvering to be sure Ayli didn’t have any counter plans in play, while she tried to buy what time she could and look for an opportunity to swing things back in her favor.

With over twelve HK units holding target locks on her though, Ayli didn’t need Force visions to show her those opportunities were going to be largely figments of her imagination.

“You are surrendering to overwhelming firepower,” the mechanized voice said.

“That’s a ‘what’, not a ‘who’,” Ayli said.

“Correct,” the mechanized voice said.

“Okay then Overpowering, why am I surrendering to you?” Ayli asked.

“The alternative is death,” the mechanized voice said.

Ayli laughed.

“Oh, sorry there, that one’s not going to cut it. Please try again,” Ayli said.

“Surrender or you will die, and your companions will die as well,” Overpowering said.

“Nope, see that’s not how this works,” Ayli said. “The choice you’re giving me is to either die here and do some damage to you in the process, or wait and die later after you’ve been able to get something that you want. There’s no logic in surrendering under those conditions, and you know that. So, like a good little machine, why don’t you play back the instructions you’ve been given to convince me to do what your master commanded you to get me to do.”

Ayli hadn’t been certain that she’d be able to provoke Overpowering but the blaster bolt one of the HK units fired at Bopo told her she had managed to hit a nerve. She felt almost as proud of that as she did bouncing the bolt back at the offending droid to send it toppling headless to the floor.

One down, lots left to go.

“Surrender now and you, and you alone, will be brought back to the one who seeks you,” Overpowering said. Ayli was intrigued that it hadn’t said ‘my master’ or anything of the sort. 

That Overpowering was an unfettered machine intelligence was horrifyingly obvious, but Ayli had still expected it to bow to the one who was really calling the shots, especially since ‘that one’ was a Dark Side Lich and Dark Siders were egomaniacs, the lot of them.

“Okay. Excellent. Now we have something to work with,” Ayli said. “My answer is no.”

“Then you will die.”

“Uh uh, not so fast,” Ayli said. “You haven’t asked me why my answer is no.”

“Your reasons do not matter. You will die,” Overpowering said.

“I think they rather do matter.” Ayli knew she couldn’t talk any of them out of the situation, but buying time meant buying hope and that she could definitely do. “Your orders are to bring me back. As a corpse might be a viable alternative but alive is the preference.”

“Preferences can change,” Overpowering said.

“They can. Mine are quite flexible in fact,” Ayli said. “But you still haven’t asked me why my answer is ‘no’.”

“Your reasons are immaterial. Surrender or be destroyed.”

“Again, your programming is coming up just a bit short.” Ayli knew that Overpowering wasn’t a droid, and if there was one thing the other unfettered machine intelligence she knew hated, it was when people assumed the limitations of a droid applied to them as well.

“I am superior to you by all measures.” Which was the kind of thing an entity would say when it had been told since it’s creation that it was nothing more than a tool.

“You need some help with understanding people still though,” Ayli said. “See, you’re not threatening me with death and destruction. That’s a given no matter what choice I make. The choice you’re offering is whether the people with me will be part of that death and destruction or not.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Which is why I have to say ‘no’. Because while you’ve made that offer, its purely empty words, and there’s no trust relationship between us which you can call upon to support your claim.”

“There can be no trust between us.” Overpowering seemed confused by why the concept had even arisen in the conversation.

“Sure there can,” Ayli said. “You can establish an easy trust bridge by letting these two go.”

“Ayli, what are you doing? Don’t be stupid girl,” Bopo said. 

“I’m not. I brought this trouble to your door, or what’s left of it. Let me take it away too.”

“Your friend can go,” Monfi said. “I have a vested interest in seeing how this plays out.”

Because if he was with her, his partner could follow them. 

It wasn’t a bad plan.

Ayli was terribly interested in having Horizon Knight blood on her hands, but she also knew Nix would kill her if she turned down backup when it was offered, especially since alone she really was likely to wind up dead.

“I’m sorry, in what galaxy do you think I‘m going to watch a bunch of bolt buckets walk one of my friends off to her death?” Bopo said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Because, of course she wasn’t.

Ayli wasn’t sure why that surprised her. Bopo had always been a sensible sort, with a knack for somehow still making the worst decisions Ayli had ever seen. 

Somehow that reminded Ayli of Nix, which left her questioning if she had a preferred personality type she liked to associate with and what that said about her.

“It seems I am in need of an alternate means of persuasion,” Overpowering said as glaring red floodlights streamed in through the windows from outside. A deep and multi-harmonic rumbling accompanied the lights.

“I recognize those engines,” Boppo said. “That’s an Assassin-class Corvette out there!”

The Assassin-class Corvettes were Imperial ships. Ayli knew them well. One had burned a city to the ground trying to root out the Rebel cell she’d been with.

“If you recognize the ship, then you know what it is capable of,” Overpowering said.

“You’ve moved up to holding the city hostage now?” Ayli asked, the smell of a hundred burning buildings rising from memory.

“Will that be enough to convince you to surrender or shall I destroy it to prove my sincerity and look for bigger or more personal targets?” Overpowering asked.

Ayli tried to sense where her decisions would lead her, but so many branches of her future were cloaked in the Dark Side that the Force did not seem like a trustworthy source to turn to for divination.

So she looked instead to her companions.

Monfi nodded his agreement, and while she hadn’t known him long, she appreciated his support nonetheless. It was Bopo who convinced her though. Bopo who had seen her make the dumbest of mistakes was looking back at her with confidence and a trust Ayli knew she couldn’t let down.

“We surrender then,” Ayli said. “Let’s go have a chat with your master.”

Nix had braced herself for an argument on two fronts. From Rassi, she expected disbelief fueled by the natural denial of the horror that had befallen her parents. From Solna, on the other hand, she’d expected a refusal to trust an outsider and the immediate dismissal of everything Nix said on the grounds that Nix wasn’t part of the Silent Enclave and therefor could never be trusted.

“What do you mean?” Rassi asked, the denial Nix expecting sweeping over her features.

Solna however simply looked away.

So that Rassi wouldn’t see the understanding in her eyes.

“Oh wow. Now is not the time for this,” Nix said. “I’m not quiet like you two and everyone is going to notice that in about a minute when they get the building fire under control. Please, just trust me. We need to leave.”

“You do,” Solna said. “Rassi’s not like you. She can be on the other side of the camp when they find you. She can be safe.”

“Sol, no,” Rassi said, her confusion turning to gentle certainty. “I’m never going to be safe here.”

“You could be,” Solna said, clearly trying to convince herself as much as anyone else. “You have been. We can make it work.”

“They’ll kill you too,” Rassi said. “I’m slipping. So much. People are going to know. And if my parent’s weren’t an accident, then I won’t be either. And they won’t stop at me.”

The shared sorrow between the two felt so mild to Nix’s sense, at least until she adjusted for how quiet each of them usually was in the Force.

Which was a good, if terrible, sign.

They were mourning the loss of everything they knew, and they would only do that if they’d already made their decision.

“Time’s up,” Goldie said. “I’ve got multiple groups converging on your position, and they are most definitely armed and dangerous.”

“Come pick us up then,” Nix said, drawing the Force into herself in a blatant display of Jedi-style power. 

The Silent Enclave would discover that Rassi and Solna was missing soon enough, but at least in this moment, Nix wanted their presence with her to be a secret.

“Inbound. Small problem though, you’re still inside and they’ve got you surrounded on all the sides that have doors leading out,” Goldie said.

“Then make us a new one,” Nix said. “Don’t worry about anyone in here. I’ve got that covered.”

“Oh I love you Mom! One door coming right up!” Goldie said, her glee radiating through the Force despite her mechanical nature.

“Uh, what does that mean?” Solna asked, looking away from Rassi with panic in her eyes as the future descended on them.

That was when one of Goldie’s proton torpedoes obliterated the wall behind them.

Nix, knowing exactly what she’d asked her daughter to do, was ready for that and caught both the debris and the blast wave with a wall of Force power that clanged louder than the bomb blast in the Silent Enclave.

“It means I will not let either of you be hurt and that we are getting out of here,” Nix said as Goldie slammed down outside the new exit the building had gained with the sort of force she would only use when there were no crew members to be splattered by it.

Rassi and Solna turn and looked eyes with one another. Their decision was already made and the look they shared was merely the confirmation of that.

Where Rassi went, Solna would follow.

Nix was pleased when that turned out to the the edge of space and beyond only a few moments later as Goldie blasted out of the atmosphere and began running the calculations for a jump to light speed.

“What about your friend?” Rassi asked as Nix led them to Goldie’s cockpit.

“I’m more her daughter really,” Goldie said over the intercom.

“What? Who is that? There’s no one else here!” Solna said, eyes darting to the viewports around as though she might catch sight of a stowaway grappled to the outside of the ship.

“Rassi, Solna, meet Goldie. She’s the ship we’re in,” Nix said. “And also my daughter.”

“That sounds complicated,” Rassi said.

“Not terribly, she built me. Isn’t that what mother’s usually do with their kids?” Goldie said.

“You…you exist in the Xah?” Solna said. “But that’s not possible. Droids, unliving things, they can’t be part of the Xah!”

“Generally a true statement,” Nix said. “But life is a lot more complicated than we usually give it credit for being.”

“Oh, Rassi, this is wrong. What had we done,” Solna said.

“Taken a very frightening step into the galaxy that is all of our birthright,” Nix said. “I know this is a lot, and there’s no need to try to take it all in right away. The key is that you’re safe now.”

“But we’re not,” Solna said.

“You will be in five…four…” Goldie jumped to light speed on four before continuing, “threetwoone. We’re in hyperspace now. Whatever problems you had, they are light years behind you and will have four hundred billion systems to try to track you through if they try to figure out where you’ve gone.”

“No,” Rassi said. “They’ll know. They always know where we are. People have fled to the stars before. It didn’t save them.”

“The Enclave must be kept secret at all costs,” Solna said.

“They’re not going to Expunge you,” Nix said.

“They could,” Solna said.

“No. They really can’t,” Nix said. “You’re with me now and the Expunging Rite isn’t one that either the Jedi or the Sith used.”

“Because it was a secret,” Rassi said.

“Not exactly,” Ravas said, appearing on the bridge in the open co-pilot’s seat. “I saw what Primus Dolon was beginning to work on and the rest of pretty easy to understand from basic principals.”

“Then you know how deadly it is!” Solna said.

“Deadly yes,” Nix said. “Practical? Eh, that’s more debatable.”

“I don’t understand?” Rassi said.

“The Expunging Rite, as you call it, is primarily used against recalcitrant members of your sect, correct?” Ravas asked. “People who have intentionally stunted their ability to manipulate the Force.”

“People who do no corrupt the Xah,” Solna corrected her.

“People who have reduced defenses against others manipulating the Force around them,” Ravas said. “The Expunging Rite capitalizes on this in a similar manner a martial art designed to be used against comatose targets might be designed if the aim was to produce a maximum amount of horror.”

“Think of it like a fighting style were you tear your opponent apart with your teeth,” Nix said. “It’s terrifying, and works perfectly well if the victim can’t defend themselves. Using it against someone who know how to fight though? If you’re lucky they’ll cave your face in with a punch the moment you come charging at them teeth first.”

“That…that can’t be right,” Solna said.

“It kills us because we’re weak?” Rassi said.

“Absolutely not,” Nix said. “The rite kills people because the person behind made an unforgivable choice. The victims are not at all fault. Being unused to manipulating the Force isn’t a reason for someone to die. We all have weaknesses, and it’s not our fault if others exploit those against us.”

“So we must stay with you then,” Solna said. “Because we are weak and only you can protect us.”

Nix knew that Solna was trying to provoke her. It was as much about searching for a reason to flee from the change before them as it was about defining where the boundaries were in a new relationship.  Knowing that there was a fathomless pool of fear behind her words made it, slightly, easier to remember that Solna was even more of a child than Nix had been at her age, and that gave her a path to the patience she needed, when a host of other alarm bells were ringing in her mind.

“Well, right at the moment we’re in hyperspace, so while leaving is theoretically possible, I’m pretty sure that theory states the best case scenario would be winding up stranded in interstellar space,” Nix said, wondering if she’d even get the hint of a smile from Solna.

She did not.

“We both know that’s not what you meant though,” Nix said. “You’re wondering if, like all the Jedi you’ve heard about, I’ve kidnapped a couple of kids to indoctrinate into my corrupt Jedi-ways. Is that about right?”

“No.” Solna’s scowl told Nix she’d more or less hit the mark though.

“Good. Since that would both be a horrible and a deeply stupid thing for me to do,” Nix said. “Which is why we’ll do this instead; I basically stole you. It was for what I believed was your own good, but you had no time to prepare and don’t know what tools you have to exist outside the Silence Enclave yet. Since I stole you, I’m responsible for you. That doesn’t mean I own you, and it absolutely does not mean you need to give up your beliefs or start training to become a Jedi or any of nonsense like that. What it does mean is that I owe you food and lodging. I also promised that you would be safe, and so, yes, I will defend you. Part of that, if you choose it, is that I will teach you what I know about how to foil the Expunging Rite, as well as anything else I understand about the Force.”

“And what do we owe you for all of this. What price do we have to pay?” Solna asked, clearly incapable of believing a word Nix said. 

Which on reflection, Nix couldn’t blame her for. Words rarely ever captured the full truth of a thing, and could so, so easily be slanted so that even the truth they did convey could misdirect the listener. Solna was right not to trust her, at least until Nix had the chance to fill the framework of her words with the clarity of deeds.

“You’ve already paid a hell of a price in leaving the Enclave,” Nix said. “The rest of the price is that I get to sleep at night knowing that the dying hopes of two loving people didn’t fall into the void.”

“And that’s all you want from us?” Solna asked.

“Oh I want a heck of lot more,” Nix said. “I would love to learn more about the Xah and the relationship your people have with it. It would be fantastic to have a pair of padawans as gifted as you two are. Heck, even having someone who was willing to clean out the heat exchange relays every five day would be a nice change of pace. None of that are things you have to do. Or should worry about at all until our current crises are a bit more settled down.”

“The heat exchange relay cleaning would be really nice,” Goldie said. “I can do a lot with the waldos but they are not good at dealing with those.”

“Where are we going to go?” Rassi asked, offering her hand for Solna to hold.

Solna shook her head at the offer, and Nix could feel her discomfort at admitting, even tacitly, the emotional weakness she was feeling.

“My wife and I have a home on an island with an old Jedi temple,” Nix said. “It’s not an abandoned village or anything, there are other people there, it just hasn’t been used as a Jedi temple in centuries.”

“So we won’t need to put on Jedi robes or anything?” Rassi asked a faint hint of disappointment in her voice.

“Nope. I prefer coveralls like this,” Nix said, pointing to her attire. “And Ayli, that’s my wife, wears all kinds of stuff. You’ll get to meet her when we get there. She’s been training with the other Force Ghost we know.”

“How many Force Ghosts do you know?” Rassi asked.

“More than they should,” Kelda said, manifesting beside Ravas. “And this one comes bearing problems I’m afraid.”

Ayli hadn’t stolen the speeder she was driving. Stealing something implied that someone owned it and, given that it wasn’t sufficiently locked down to prevent her hotwiring it, she had to assume that no one owned this particular bike. Some planets had individual scale public transportation after all, and as long as Ayli didn’t look into the laws in Haliph City she wasn’t breaking any of them.

That was definitely how it worked.

She was sure.

The sirens in the distance? Couldn’t be for her.

Nor was the shouting she heard when she rocketed away on the speeder likely at all related.

The city was having a bad day after all. Droids had blown up in a bunch of different places.

Places that she’d been admittedly.

But still.

And then there were the assassin.

Only one of whom was probably dead. 

Another might or more not have a fractured skull.

But he’d survive.

On the back of the speeder, Ayli’s new friend Monfi had his arms around her waist in a vice grip and his eyes shut as hard as they could be.

That did not make navigating traffic at high speeds any easier.

It also did not include Ayli to reduce her speed by any amount.

She was on a rescue mission after all.

She couldn’t claim to have a deep connection with Archivist Bopo but they’d known each other since Ayli attended her first classes in xeno-archeology. As with most of Ayli’s academic associates, they’d lost touch after she graduated, and had kept in touch more via following each others work than through direct correspondence, but Ayli had remembered Bopo fondly enough to suggest her as a source to check in with when Nix announced she wanted to search for other Force traditions.

Which meant Bopo was in trouble.

“Kelda, have you regained enough strength to manipulate physical objects yet?” she asked, knowing that her Force Ghost friend would be able to hear here despite the roar of the wind and the fact that there wasn’t really even space for two on the speeder, much less three.

“You’d like me to get the ship prepped for launch?” Kelda asked. Because Force Ghosts had rather good intuition. Who could imagine?

“Yeah. I’ve got the departure documentation loaded in the buffers. If you can send that and start up the engines as soon as I get to Bopo’s there might be some chance we get out of her without any more attacks.

“My associates have that covered,” Monfi said without opening his eyes.

“Do you think that, or do you know it?” Ayli asked, sliding the speeder under a transport lifter because stopping at an intersection was simply not on the agenda.

“The kill order that brought the assassins in was logged by one of Paralus’ minions. They’ve been neutralized,” Monfi said.

“You mentioned that before, which means you’re not working alone?” Kelda asked.

“Horizon Knight’s don’t. We are frequently outmatched by the things we hunt, so we hunt in groups.”

“Not unlike the Jedi,” Kelda said. “We would bring our Padawans along on safe missions, and other Knights if we sensed danger in the offing. Or, if we were feeling particular foolish, we would rush off alone to confront the problem.”

“A Horizon Knight’s mission almost always involves danger, so our apprentices follow us no matter what end we pursue,” Monfi said.

“Which was something else the Jedi didn’t approve of as I recall,” Kelda said. “Then a mere thousand years later, they let themselves be embroiled in a war and dragged their children along with them.”

“Wait, are you saying you have kids here? In Haliph?” Ayli asked, gritting her teeth at the extra time it would take to collect them all.

“My apprentice has long since flown off on his own,” Monfi said. “My partner on the other hand has both of her apprentices here, and the three of them tracked down Paralus’ associate, a man named Bargus Brell,  already. If they hadn’t the tank you noticed earlier would have been a problem long before now.”

As though the Force took some unholy glee in disputing statements like that, Monfi had no sooner said those words than the building in front of the speeder bike exploded outward as a droid operated tank burst through it and began blasting its main cannon at that.

Ayli’s lightsaber was in her hand before she was consciously aware of it.

She knew she blocked two of the tank’s blasts, mostly because she was conscious of the choices she made for where the ricochets would land.

Just because she was having a terrible day, didn’t mean anyone else needed to have their lives ruined or cut short by Imperial cannon fire.

Ayli shook her head.

It wasn’t the Imperials who were after her.

The Empire was dead.

The Rebellion had cut it’s head off, and burned every bit of its body they could find.

In the moment it took her to remind herself of that fact, Monfi had snapped to action, opening his eyes and extending a hand towards the tank. It didn’t explode like the (much smaller) recon droid had. Instead it’s main barrel simply bent downwards by the width of a handspan.

Which was enough to completely ruin the firing channel.

Ayli hoped the droid pilot would fail to process the damage properly and blow itself up with the next attempt to fire the main cannon, but it didn’t.

Instead four blisters rose on the sides of the tank and extended the barrels of the smaller secondary cannons to continue the onslaught.

Ayli knew how fast those could fire and the sort of damage they could inflict on unshielded bodies. Whether she’d be able to parry the onslaught with her lightsaber was something she wasn’t inclined to research however, so she banked the speeder into a hard turn, leaving the main road to crash down alleys in search of a more sheltered path to her destination.

“Should I still prep the ship?” Kelda asked.

“Definitely. We’ll be departing with a crew of three, not counting you.” 

“You mean five do you not?” Monfi asked.

“Nope. Three. You, me, and Bopo,” Ayli said.

“And my partner and her apprentices?” Monfi asked.

“You have a ship. We may need a backup. They should get that in the air. You can send them our coordinates and heading as soon as we have one.”

“Reasonable, but who is the third who’ll be departing with us?” Monfi had closed his eyes once more.

“Bopo’s a friend of mine from school,” Ayli said. “I’m also hoping she’ll have some idea where my wife might have gotten herself too.”

“As a Jedi you should be able to sense that directly shouldn’t you?” Monfi asked.

“I’m not a Jedi, but yes, I should.”

“Oh. I understand the question about Paralus attacking our connections,” Monfi said.

The alleyways weren’t designed to support traffic at the same speeds as the main thoroughfare. In Ayli’s view that was a mark in their favor since her pursuers would have a harder time keeping up.

That the narrow gaps of alleys and the sudden ninety degree turns meant that she had to focus too much on her piloting to think about what might have happened to Nix was also a blessing.

“I don’t understand though. They had to have neutralized Brell. If not we’d be swarmed with assassins by now,” Monfi said. “And I don’t sense anyone still connected to the contract.”

“Your partner did her job,” Ayli said. “Bargus Brell is well connected but he’s an idiot when it comes to tech.”

“The droid were under the control of the assassins though,” Monfi said.

“Some of them. Maybe most of the original batch,” Ayli said. “Bargus has a droid servitor though. A decommissioned HK bot. Give it the right commands and it could hack all sorts of bots around the city, from the taxi droid that took the first shot at killing me to the tank who just crashed through a building about three blocks back.”

“But someone has to be controlling the droid, don’t they?” Monfi said.

“Normally? Yeah. Droid that can kill people are kept on a tight lockdown. Droids that can control other droids to kill people are melted down to scrap on sight.”

“Which would suggest they wouldn’t be the problem here.”

“Yes. Except that I can’t sense the person who’s the problem here. Or even that there is a person whose the problem, which means…” She braked the speeder so hard its tail end flipped over its front as the spiraled out of the alleyway, dodging the cannon shot which had been waiting for them and expecting movement that was in the same star system as sanity.

“Which means Brell and his droid are both trying to kill us,” Monfi said a moment after Ayli twisted them upright into a landing which didn’t entirely destroy three parked cruisers.

 “Not the HK,” Ayli said. “That’s the access point. It’s too well known here. Whatever company that tank belongs to definitely has security in place to keep an HK out of their systems. Paralus must be working with a unrestricted droid of his own. That’s probably who brought the kill order to Brell in the first place.”

“A droid wouldn’t be any faster to get here than Paralus himself would though,” Monfi said. “Unless Paralus needed to be somewhere else though. Or couldn’t come here at all for some reason.”

“Just to verify, even if he’s good at hiding himself, there’s nothing special about a Lich that let’s them hide the Dark Side they exude right?” Ayli asked, splitting her focus despite it being a monumentally bad idea.

Well, monumentally bad for someone who wasn’t as good a pilot as she was.

“Not that the Horizon Knights have ever discovered,” Monfi said. “I don’’t think that helps us though. The Dark Side exists everywhere people do.”

“That’s true, but I’ve had a lot more experience than I’d prefer with Dark Side monsters. Even when you can’t see them, you can tell they’re around if you know how to listen for them.”

It was not as easy as Ayli suggested, nor was she practiced enough with the Force to be sure she could detect the monsters the Dark Side spawned reliably.

Except in this case.

Paralus Stahl was focused on her.

Something she’d done had forged a connection between the two of them. A connection that had allowed him to track her across the stars. A connection which let him foresee her actions to the point where he could have agents in place the moment she landed on a new world.

Connections, however, go in both directions.

She didn’t know who he was. Not really. Or what she’d done that placed her in his sights.

But she knew he was looking for her, and so she looked back.

Casting her awareness into the Force while driving at twice the posted speed limit down crowded streets wasn’t difficult. It didn’t require a special effort of will, or a special degree of talent. It simply required trust.

Trust in the Force.

She’d always listened to it when she was behind the controls of a vessel. It had taken being possessed by a Sith Force Ghost and a year of training under the tutelage of a trio of very dear instructors, but that had allowed her to hear more than distant whispers of the Force.

As her awareness rose outwards towards the stars seeking the heart of the malice which was directed at her, she gave control of her body over to the Force almost entirely.

Where once the Force had been a distant echo, from within the trance she embraced she caught glimpsed echoes of the world around her and piloting through it with perfect awareness of what was around her and what would be at every instant of the course she’d chosen.

The greater part of her awareness though was swallowed by the void between the stars.

Within the endless dome of the sky there were countless lives and distance on a scale to dwarf all understanding. Deep inside that though, she could feel the hate that sought her.

Hate that had an all too familiar home.

From across the light years, Praxis Mar was at war, and it was calling her home.

There were a variety of reactions Nix could have chosen from on being confronted by Darsus Klex’s return. Most of them were violent, with a few of them also being explosive. Despite the seething mass of emotions roiling inside her though, Nix chose one of the non-confrontational approaches.

“Go peddle your nonsense somewhere else,” she said, casting about for a path which would lead them to safety-by-way of Rassi’s friend Solna.

“I’m not here to sell you anything,” Darsus said. “Quite the opposite. I’m here to collect.”

Except it wasn’t Darsus Klex.

It looked like him.

It was his body.

No.

It was a projection of his body.

And every path forward led through him.

Which was inconvenient.

“Who is that?” Rassi asked.

“A dead man,” Nix said. “Not an important one either.”

“You seem distracted. Perhaps I should clear your agenda,” the thing that wasn’t Darsus Klex said and stretched out his arm.

Nix felt the Force coil and surge, not quite in the soul destroying manner of the Expunging Rite, merely with enough malice sufficient to kill in a more standard manner. The killing blow flowed into Nix but passed through her, following the connection she’d forged with Rassi, the intent on twisting the young girl’s throat until it collapsed permanently. 

In the first instant Nix cast herself against the flow. The rage simmering in her rose to meet the attack, intent on tearing it and the false Darsus Klex to pieces.

But he turned out to be strong.

A lot stronger than she was in fact.

With a sickening dread, Nix felt the assault crashing over and around her rage like a tidal wave, far too large for her to stuff back to its source.

Fortunately, fluid mechanics was a field she was well versed in on both a practical and academic level thanks to her eclectic experience and reading habits.

Shoving a wave back was a terrible idea. Redirecting a wave to a more useful direction though? That was a winning strategy.

So she sent the killing Force towards Primus Dolon.

Despite being on fire and in a collapsing building, Dolon still had the presence of mind to resist the deadly blow as well.

Which was curious.

The Silent Enclave wasn’t supposed to know how to manipulate the Force.

The Expunging Rite was a rite because it offered a clear external mechanism for directing the Force to destroy someone. The resistance Dolon offered was that of someone who was used to manipulating the Force with an incredible degree of precision and subtlety.

Not really a surprise that the leader of a sect who swore off using the Force to influence their fates would in fact be using the Force to influence his own fate, but it did stoke Nix’s anger a bit higher.

Which seemed to please the false Darsus Klex.

“I wonder if I need to anything at all,” he said. “You seem to be understanding the true nature of things on your own.”

“I understand that I do not have time to deal with you,” Nix said. “And I understand that you do not have time to spare either.”

“And why would you say that?” the false Darsus said.

“You’re rushing things,” Nix said. “If you wanted to kill me you would have gotten down to that immediately, without this pointless banter. If you planned to corrupt me, you would be making a better effort at it than this half-assed attempt.”

“I’m wounded,” the false Darsus said.

“Not yet,” Nix said. “I mean, you’re dead, so there’s limits to what I can do to you, but I’m willing to get creative if that’s how you want to play whatever this is?”

“This is corrective surgery,” false Darsus said. “Your light is a cancer that needs to be excised. Darkness or death, either will serve.”

Nix could feel the malice hiding behind the controlled demeanor of the man in front of her. That coupled with the memory of his please at her anger against Dolon gave Nix the key she needed to banish the Force projection he was using.

“You know there’s a service charge for everything right?” she asked, allowing a deep breath to uncoil the tension that was locking her into violent reactions. “I usually charge standard repair rates if we’re going with an hourly approach, but I don’t think contracting an assassination on yourself really counts as a repair? There’s probably also ethical and legal restrictions I’d need to check on so, maybe we can circle back to that once I’ve been able to do some research on the local laws wherever you are? I can submit a standard bidding form, but I’m not sure how I’d break the pricing out. Maybe transport, custom fees, and cleanup when I’m done? We can work something out I’m sure.”

“Uh, what?” Rassi asked.

“He asked me to kill him,” Nix said. “I don’t usually do assassinations. I’m a ship’s mechanic, so fixing things is more where my skillset is, but, and this is important, he did just try to kill you about a minute ago, so I’m provisionally on board with taking this particular assassination job.”

“I don’t think…” Rassi started to say and then interrupted herself, “wait, where did he go?”

Nix chuckled.

“Ran out of stamina,” she said. “That Force Projection trick isn’t easy. Could you feel how much Force was just radiating off him. It was meant to be intimidating but once I stopped focusing on all the murder that was in the air, I could tell it was a sign of how much energy he was putting into showing up here.”

“I don’t understand,” Rassi said.

“I’ll explain more later,” Nix said. “Right now, we need to get to Solna.”

“Okay, she’s in the light sculpturing lab,” Rassi said and started leading Nix out of the lab.

“Is anyone there with her?” Nix asked.

“Ask her where is it too and I can touch down next to it,” Goldie asked. “Oh, wait, no worries, I’m in their net. Got the location.”

“I think she’s alone,” Rassi said. “Everyone else is out in the streets looking for you, or heading towards the burning building.”

“Good.”

“I don’t know how we can get to her though?” Rassi said.

“Leave that part to me,” Nix said, breathing slowly and regularly to get herself back to a state where she could speak to the Force without anger or fear putting jagged edges on her words.

They reached the door out of the far end of the building Nix had been incarcerated in and discovered that Rassi’s senses were entirely accurate. There was a tremendous amount of commotion and it fell into three categories; those helping with the partially collapsed building, those forming a defensive perimeter in case the enclave was under some greater attack, and, the most worrisome group, those who were hunting for Nix.

In regaining control of her emotions, Nix had been able to quiet her presence in the Force enough that those who’d been drawn towards her like moths to a bonfire were momentarily confused. That they were all within her immediate vicinity was something of a problem though.

“They’re waiting for us out there,” Rassi said. “They know this is the exit that we’ll use. How are we going to get out?”

“We’re going to walk,” Nix said, breathing in deeply and closing her eyes.

I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.

It was an old mantra, one Kelda had taught her, one which predated the Jedi, and one which was still able to fill her with the peace she needed.

When the Dark Side cloaks someone, it is a numbing of the senses. It wraps deadly intentions in impenetrable darkness and dims the awareness of those who might interact with those intentions.

Nix’s request to the Force came from a different place. She bore no hatred of the people who sought her harm. She wished for nothing to happen to them, no harm, no befuddlement, no terror at not being able to perceive their foe. She merely wished to pass by them in peace.

Silently voicing her wish to the Force, she gathered Rassi by her side, including the young girl in her wish by the bonds she felt with a child who needed to protected just as much as she herself had.

Together they left the building and calmly walked past the anxious people, and down the street filled with the shocked and terrified masses.

It wasn’t until they stepped inside the lab Rassi was leading them to that either spoke.

“How?” Rassi asked, looking at Nix with a wholly unfounded sort of awe.

“The Force can have a strong influence on mind’s which aren’t trained to think for themselves,” Nix said. “It helped too that we were giving them what they wanted.”

“They wanted to find us though, didn’t they?”

“Not really. They wanted to be able to say that they looked for us everywhere they could. That they followed their orders and did as good a job as anyone expected them to,” Nix said, following Rossi through the lobby and down a hallway. “None of them really wanted to face a Great and Terrible Jedi Warrior who’d cut them to pieces with her magic laser sword.”

“You don’t have a magic laser sword though?” Rassi said.

“Yeah. People are surprisingly confused by what a lightsaber is,” Nix said. “I mean, they look pretty, but a blaster will make you just as dead and can do it from a lot farther away. I’m also not particularly Great or Terrible, but you’ll get to see that for yourself I’m sure. Is this where she is?”

“Uh, yeah,” Rassi said.

“And she knows we’re here right?”

“Yes, she does,” Solna said, opening the door to the lab and blocking the entrance to it with her body.

Where Rassi was solidly built, Solna had the physique which suggested someone had found a pile of sticks and used them to assemble an overly bright and curious human being.

“And will she be coming with us?” Nix asked. The Force said Solna definitely had to leave the encampment with Rassi, but Nix wasn’t about to engage in double kidnapping unless at least the kids involved were in agreement with it.

“She will not,” Solna said. “Rassi, what are you doing? Have you gone insane?”

“No! Solna, I…I know how this looks, but we need to go. Primus Dolon? He’s going to kill you if you stay!”

“And he’s going to kill you, Expunge you, if you leave!” Solna said.

“I’d rather be expunged than let you die!” Rassi said, grabbing Solna by the shoulders.

Solna was half a head taller than Rassi but in terms of mass couldn’t begin to resist being pushed into the room.

So she grabbed Rassi’s shoulders and shook her instead.

“Don’t you ever say that!” Solna maintained her calm insofar as she didn’t move her hands from Rassi’s shoulders to her throat and start throttling her, and Nix admired the restraint. 

“I’m sorry,” Rassi said. “I don’t want either of us to die, but after today? I can’t stay here.”

“Why?” Solna asked and turned to Nix. “What did you do to her?”

“Swore I would protect her,” Nix said. “And you. No one is going to harm either one of you. Not without getting through me and all my Evil Jedi powers first.”

“What? That doesn’t make any sense. You don’t even know her. Or me!’

“I didn’t,” Nix said. “Not until the Force, or the Xah if you prefer, showed me something I can’t walk away from.”

“The Xah doesn’t do that though,” Solna said. “It doesn’t make us do anything.”

“It’s not,” Nix said. “I’m making me do this. I have to.”

“Why? What did you see?”

“I saw how her parents died. I was with them in the Force and I know their last thoughts were the hope the she be protected and love.”

Rassi and Solna were both silent at that for a moment.

“But why does that mean we need to leave?” Solna asked.

“Because I also saw who killed them.”