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Some call him The Shadow, or Mistwalker, or Ghost. Nova, or Starbird, or Phoenix. Some call him Kad, a Mandalorian word for saber, or Firith, which means defender in Ryl. Command calls him the traitor. Shadow is most common, but say one of the other names and a ‘trooper will know who you mean.
You see him nowhere, but you see him everywhere. Slogans painted on walls (“They lie” “You know the truth” “This is not who you are”). Leaflets, their messages more complex, tucked into lockers or hygiene kits. Rogue transmissions interrupting daily briefings. He must be infiltrating ‘trooper ranks, slipping in and out without anyone detecting him, but he must have help; nobody can be all these places at once.
Once, TZ-1719 stood on a table in the mess hall and read a leaflet aloud. She kept it up through all the blows MPs could deliver, through two blaster wounds, and was still shouting the message as they dragged her off. Command told us she was the The Shadow, and displayed a body they said was hers. But the messages didn’t stop, and a handful of ‘troopers swear they’ve seen her since then.
“It’s not me,” she told one of those ‘troopers. “You’ll know him when you meet him.”
You never see his face, or so the stories go. One minute you’ll be on work detail or in a convoy, thinking you know the people around you; the next someone whispers a time and a place over the helmet comlinks, though somehow never to officers’ coms. And never, so it’s said, to anyone who would snitch. Sometimes it’s more dramatic—an explosion, a crash, an accident, a fire, and a figure in ‘trooper whites, a lightsaber in his hand and the Resistance starbird blazing around him like holy fire—but mostly it’s the whisper. You get the message, people say, and if you’re brave enough to seize your chance…
Most people agree The Shadow is probably with the Resistance. A few say he’s a Jedi, because how else could he do the things he does? He killed Captain Phasma. The attack on Canto Bight interrupted weapons shipments for two Galactic Standard months. He led the fighters that destroyed Starkiller Base. Some people even claim he went toe-to-toe with Supreme Leader Kylo Ren. For two years he’s been First Order Command’s primary objective (Ren, so they say, is obsessed), but he’s never been captured. He must be a Jedi.
But more voices insist that The Shadow is one of us: a conscript, a child soldier, a buckethead. When command can’t hear, ‘troopers have whispered arguments about which company he came from. We all want to claim him, because he did it. More of us see through their lies now, but he did it first. He broke through their indoctrination and freed himself. And that’s why he comes back—not to fight the First Order, but to save the rest of us.
Keep listening, people say. One day, you’ll hear him.