The stone path back to the guest wing was lit by ground-level fixtures that cast warm circles every few meters. I walked through them slowly, barefoot, feeling cool stone alternate with patches of soft grass between the pavers.
I hadn't realized how useful having a library of memories could be until tonight. I'd spent a while sifting through my mindscape to fish out details about the Death Star, but it had proved worthwhile.
The whole thing was paradoxical. I didn't consciously remember most of it, yet the memory library had everything organized like I possessed photographic recall—at least for Star Wars-related content. Wiki entries I'd only skimmed once, articles I barely remembered reading, they were all there in crisp detail. I still had to know what I was searching for, but even with that limitation, it was something else.
How? No idea. It was kind of broken, maybe even OP in a min-maxing sort of way, but considering how thoroughly this galaxy had ass-blasted me so far, I'd welcome this particular brand of broken with open arms.
Armed with that information, the conversation with Bail had gone about as well as I could have hoped.
Not perfectly. Perfect would have been him accepting everything at face value and immediately pledging the full resources of House Organa to my personal crusade against Imperial tyranny.
Instead, Bail Organa had done exactly what a competent intelligence operator should do. He'd listened. He'd pushed back where pushing back was warranted. He'd identified the verifiable claims and started planning how to check them. And he'd filed away the unverifiable ones without dismissing them outright.
The Geonosis probe would confirm everything. Once it did, the man would come back hungry for more, and I'd be ready with the next breadcrumb. Not the full picture—never the full picture, not yet—but enough to keep him pulling threads in the right direction.
Let him find Captain Rossi's shipping manifests. Let him trace the doonium shipments and connect the dots himself. Information you worked for always felt more real than information someone just handed you.
Dropping "the Empire is building a planet-killing superweapon" on a man I'd known for less than twelve hours was a speedrun to being dismissed as delusional. Better to let the evidence build itself.
Baby steps. Galaxy-saving baby steps, but still.
I reached the guest wing and pushed open the heavy wooden door—actual wood, not composite, because apparently the Organas didn't believe in doing anything halfway. The suite was exactly as I'd left it. Arachnae sat charging in the corner, optical sensors dimmed to standby mode, the stuffed tooka doll still clutched in two of her manipulator arms. I still needed to figure out where she'd gotten that thing.
The bed was obscenely comfortable. I'd already decided to ask Bail about packing one or two of these for me when I left. Bit of a cheapskate move, maybe, but the man was rich as hell anyway. He could spare a mattress.
Vasha would have loved this place.
The thought arrived without permission. After we'd moved from the cramped apartment to the workshop building, she'd spent a week praising the bed we'd bought cheap from the previous owner. Said it was the first time in years she'd slept without waking up with a sore back.
Remembering her face that first night brought back a cascade of emotions I wasn't remotely prepared to handle. My eyes started stinging in that specific way that was the precursor to tears, the kind that came on fast and didn't stop until they were damn well finished.
As always, I blamed the childish body for the uncontrollable reaction.
I dropped face-first onto the bed before the walls could bear witness, burying any potential waterworks in the obscenely soft sheets.
The room was quiet. Actually quiet, not Lothal quiet. No engine hum, no recycled air circulation noise, no distant blaster fire or drunk spacers screaming profanities at each other through thin walls. Just the faint whisper of wind through the open window and the distant murmur of the lake below.
Speaking of the workshop—I hoped it hadn't been vandalized by squatters. I'd armed the security droid enough to handle a couple of them, at least.
I closed my eyes. Let out a long breath.
And immediately wished I hadn't.
*"Look at you..."*
Vasha's voice threaded through the darkness behind my eyelids, ragged and fading, wrapped in smoke and the crackle of fire. The dream had been weeks ago. The words sat in my memory with the stubborn permanence of something etched into bone.
*"...so big now, Ezra. When did you get so big?"*
The scene refused to fade.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes.
The whole dream had been a factory of horrors. Whatever cosmic jujitsu She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had used to construct that suburban nightmare, she'd built it from stolen memories and weaponized every fragment against me. I would very much like to stuff the entire experience into a mental trash compactor and never think about it again.
But those last words wouldn't stop playing back.
Everything else in the dream had been fabricated. When I looked back at the constructed parts, I could feel the seams—the uncanny valley of a manufactured reality that was almost right but never quite landed.
Vasha's words at the end didn't have seams.
Not to mention, they were ambiguous as hell. Why would she say that? There was nothing in the narrative of the dream that should have prompted it. Unless it wasn't the fabricated dream-version of her speaking those words.
Unless it had been her.
Compared to every other memory from that nightmare, that one part felt so genuinely Vasha—the phrasing, the tone, the way she'd always noticed things about me I didn't think were visible—that remembering it ached in a way that had nothing to do with cosmic parasites or Force manipulation.
In a normal universe, I'd chalk it up to grief. The brain filling in gaps with what it wanted to hear, polishing a memory until it shone bright enough to pass for truth. Textbook coping mechanism. Completely explicable by conventional neuropsychology.
But this wasn't a normal universe.
This was a universe where every living being was connected through an omnipresent energy field that could bend time, project consciousness across light-years, and apparently host eldritch abominations with a taste for human suffering. In a universe like that, dismissing anything as "just a coincidence" was the intellectual equivalent of plugging your ears and humming loudly while the building collapsed around you.
Something had pulled Vasha into that dream. Whether it was the Force acting on its own, Abeloth's manipulations creating connections she hadn't intended, or some other mechanism I couldn't name yet—she'd been there.
*Her.*
Which meant she was alive.
The feeling had been growing for days. A quiet certainty that settled deeper every time I examined it, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a still pool. Before Daiyu, my belief in Vasha's survival had been nothing more than desperate hope wearing a flimsy disguise. The kind of delusion you clung to because the alternative—that she was already dead and everything you were doing was pointless—would break something you couldn't afford to have broken.
This was different. This had weight. An almost physical quality to it, like gravity pulling in a specific direction. My gut, my instincts, whatever half-assed Force sensitivity managed to filter through my broken soul architecture—all of it pointed the same way.
She's alive.
That should have been enough to let me breathe.
It wasn't.
Because every time the certainty of her survival washed through me, a shadow trailed behind it. Orange fire swallowing the garage whole. The smell of burning that I remembered with perfect clarity even though dreams weren't supposed to carry scent. Her body lit up in flames, flesh charring as she reached for me.
The logical part of my brain kept trying to categorize it. Residual trauma. Emotional bleed from a manufactured experience. Neural echoes left behind by whatever She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had done to my brain chemistry during the invasion.
But there was another part—the part that lived in the Force now whether I liked it or not—and that part was scared.
It was the same flavor of formless dread that had screamed at me for weeks on Lothal. The same suffocating certainty that something terrible was approaching the person I cared about most. The alarm I'd been stupid enough to ignore because it faded when she held me.
I'd been wrong to ignore it then. Catastrophically wrong.
I wouldn't be wrong again.
My mind cycled back through the logical mapping I'd constructed for her current location and circumstances based on whatever scraps of evidence I had.
If Vasha was on Scarif—and Scarif meant Death Star construction—then she was either working as a technician or rotting in a cell.
The technician scenario was more probable. The Empire had an insatiable appetite for skilled labor, and Vasha was one of the best mechanics I'd ever worked alongside. Not just because of my influence, either. By the time she was taken, her diagnostic instincts had evolved to a level that genuinely impressed me even without Force assistance.
The way she could listen to a failing repulsor coil and identify the exact harmonic that signaled bearing failure versus power coupling degradation—that was pure talent refined through years of practice. If the two of us sat down to repair the same device and I was forbidden from using the Force, I had no illusions about who'd finish first. She'd wipe the floor with me.
If the Empire gave her a standardized aptitude assessment, she'd score high enough to be flagged as useful.
Which meant she was probably on a construction platform somewhere in the Geonosis system, elbow-deep in circuit boards, keeping her head down and doing good work because that was who she was. Hoping nobody noticed she was too talented to be ordinary.
The problem with that scenario was that the Empire's approach to workplace safety was roughly comparable to Imperial China's approach to dam construction. Which was to say, nonexistent except on paper, and the paper was probably also on fire.
The Death Star was the largest engineering project in galactic history. Thousands of workers died every standard rotation. Structural failures, radiation exposure, equipment malfunctions, or just being in the wrong section when some overseer decided to vent atmosphere as a disciplinary measure because the morning shift ran two minutes late.
Any one of those could be the explosion I'd seen.
The alternative—prison—was worse in a different way. If she'd been flagged as non-cooperative and shunted into general detention, she could be anywhere. Any of the thousands of Imperial facilities scattered across a million systems. Finding her under those circumstances would be like searching for a specific grain of sand on Tatooine.
Having lived on Tatooine, I could confirm that was a fundamentally stupid thing to attempt.
Either way, the conclusion was identical.
I couldn't afford to wait anymore.
That was why I'd walked out to that pavilion tonight instead of sleeping like a normal, well-adjusted person. The Geonosis intelligence mattered on a galactic scale, sure. The Death Star needed to be stopped regardless of my personal stakes. But if I stripped away the altruistic framing and the strategic justifications and looked at the bare machinery of my motivations with honest eyes—
The reason I'd sought out Bail Organa was to start building the network I needed to find her.
Bail had resources. Intelligence networks spanning half the galaxy. Contacts embedded in Imperial logistics who could pull shipping manifests, cross-reference prisoner transfer records, identify labor assignments on classified construction projects. If anyone could locate a single Twi'lek mechanic somewhere in the Empire's sprawling bureaucratic labyrinth, it was the man who'd been quietly undermining that same bureaucracy since before I was born.
I hadn't asked him directly. That would come later, after the Geonosis data confirmed my credibility and I'd accumulated enough goodwill to make personal requests without seeming self-serving. But the groundwork was there. The relationship was planted. And when the time came, I'd have someone to call.
Someone besides the one person I really wanted to ask but couldn't afford to involve.
A familiar presence registered at the edge of my awareness.
I scrubbed my face with both hands, took a breath, and stood up from the bed.
By the time the knock came—three measured taps, because even Obi-Wan's knocking had impeccable rhythm—I'd arranged my expression into something that could pass for normal under low lighting conditions.
"Come in."
The door opened. Obi-Wan stepped inside, still wearing his travel-worn robes but looking marginally less drained than he had during the flight from Daiyu. The estate's amenities apparently worked their restorative magic even on Jedi Masters.
His gaze swept the room—Arachnae charging in the corner, the untouched bed, my bare feet on the absurdly expensive carpet—and settled on me with an expression I couldn't quite parse.
"I hope I'm not disturbing you," he said, though his tone suggested he already knew I wasn't sleeping.
"Couldn't sleep anyway. What's up?"
A beat of silence. Then:
"Would you care for a walk? The grounds behind the estate are quite pleasant at night, and I find myself in need of conversation."
Coming from Obi-Wan Kenobi, *"I find myself in need of conversation"* was the emotional equivalent of a normal person activating a distress beacon. The man could sustain himself on ten words a week if circumstances demanded it. For him to actively seek out company meant something was churning beneath that placid surface, something big enough that even his world-class repression couldn't handle it alone.
"Sure," I said, reaching for the simple boots Carel had left by the door. "Lead the way."
___
A/N: Hope you liked the chapter. Don't forget to vote .
That aside, I have achieved an breakthrough in the Dao of Image Creation. Lo and Behold:
[Image] (MUST SEE!!)
Not just this, but I have also found a reliable way to create NSFW images ehehehehe. Too bad can't post them here :(
(can check out scribblehub through, have posted it there)
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