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Chipped, Unchipped
Ahsoka had the chip in her sights and didn’t dare look away, not even to blink. She put down the drill.
They weren’t exactly qualified for this kind of work, but they were getting pretty good at it. It wasn’t so hard once you learned the right path to dig through all the white matter.
“Vitals holding,” Rex said. “Keep it steady.”
The chip scanner flashed and beeped. Ahsoka felt she hardly needed it anymore. All brains were more or less the same, and the brains they’d been tunneling into lately were exactly the same.
That was the point, wasn’t it?
Rex cradled Cody's head in his lap, keeping it still with one hand while the other shined the light they’d rigged on the end of the chip scanner. Ahsoka’s periphery seemed to shrink down to one dot, a circle smaller than a coin, flecked with bone fragments and a red-tinged ooze. She barely registered Rex’s hands right there by hers, but she could count on him to keep the scanner running while she dove in with the extractor and the thing that felt like intuition but was actually the Force.
When she was a millimeter away from the opening she’d drilled, their subject—victim?—made a little noise, like a whimper. It was such a small sound, but it snapped her out of the burgeoning trance like a shot of ice to the vein.
“Is he—?”
“He’s out of it. Keep going.”
Ahsoka blotted away the fresh seam of blood and let her hands take over like an astromech. With the Force at her command, with this much practice, she more or less was one; the closer the better. No different this time than the others. After all, they had done it before. Dozens of times now. Countless times.
But this time was different. This time, they didn’t know if it would work. Ahsoka started in with an out-of-body determination and vaguely wondered how she’d wound up like this: a fugitive kneeling in an abandoned tunnel with her fingers in a living man’s skull.
Actually, she knew exactly how.
They left dozens of graves on that moon, freshly packed and hardening in the frost. Rows and rows of them, all lined up, shiny as new cadets beaming in helmets with a splash of orange. Rex had stowed away their only shovel, so Ahsoka heaped the earth onto his grave with her bare hands.
Strapped into the gunner’s seat of the Y-wing, Ahsoka played Obi-Wan’s broadcast again. . . .This message is a warning and a reminder for any surviving Jedi: trust in the Force. Do not return to the Temple. That time has passed, and our future is uncertain. . .
In all likelihood, she was listening to her old master’s final words—one last act of selflessness meant to catch as many living ears as he could reach, including hers.
It felt like a reprimand. It wasn’t, but it felt like one.
Ahsoka looked over to Rex in the cockpit. She’d spent more time with him than almost anyone she knew, but at that moment, his manner seemed completely foreign to her. The last ember of adrenaline had fizzled out and left them skimming along at lightspeed with no direction. He slumped forward in the seat, hands on the controls without intent, stiff as a droid.
“We need to go somewhere,” Ahsoka said over the headset, quite pointlessly.
“Yes,” Rex agreed.
They didn’t discuss where, and in the end she couldn’t tell if he chose a specific target, or if he just picked the furthest place on the star chart to let the ship spit them out of hyperspace.
It spit them out on a small moon called Solesin. Ahsoka had never been there, but it passed for any number of rural farming planets that the war had decimated, only wetter than average. She could tell at once from the dilapidated houses that the rain here never stopped. They scoured the town for signs of life and, satisfied when they found none, claimed the first house with elevated foundations and an intact roof.
The one-level house had two bedrooms branching off a small main room that ostensibly served as both kitchen and living space. There was a counter on the far end of the main room, but no plumbing except a washbasin sink that drained straight outdoors through a pipe in the wall. When they raided the vacant neighborhood for supplies, they came up with a handful of rations and a broken water filter. Miscellaneous items began piling high in the center of the empty kitchen: pots and pans, four wet blankets and a dry one, some spare clothes. They found a small table and two mismatched chairs in the shed out back. Whoever used to live here had liked to paint; they found an unusual amount of homemade paints and brushes but no canvass or finished pieces.
Ahsoka looked at the paints and felt a wave of sickness roll over her, thinking of the helmet grave markers they’d left on that moon. Yet she found herself hoping that whoever owned this place had taken their artwork with them, wherever they’d gone. Given the state of things in here, the hope seemed a bit optimistic.
Rex had taken a pretty bad hit during their escape. The purpling splotch on his shoulder had edges that blurred like a drop of ink in water, a bruise shot through with veins of red and green. He could barely lift his arm. With no meds or medic to help things along, he was stuck for a few days on the mend, and she wouldn’t leave him. That was the excuse, anyway. The truth was that Ahsoka couldn’t have moved if she wanted to. Constant and insistent, the sudden imbalance in the Force clung to her like drag on a ship. She felt as if the universe had split in two with her head at the center, and a part of her had splintered and flown off into the dark, out of reach. Even on solid ground she felt off, loose somehow, like sidestepping quicksand.
At first they rigged up the radio. They kept it playing day and night and pretended not to jump at every crackling sound that came through, eager for a familiar voice even though every piece of news hit them with the impact of a crashing destroyer. They kept calm, spoke little, and listened.
It was the end of the world out there. It was the end of the world out there, and they had to do something about it. But for two whole rotations they did nothing.
The radio told them, The war is over. Order has returned to the Capitol. The Temple is empty. The traitors are dead.
All of them?
Ahsoka kept thinking about what she’d felt on the bridge of the Tribunal, the vision she’d had, the sounds she’d heard from across time and space. She thought about all the things Maul had told her on Mandalore about the Sith’s apprentice, about grooming and destruction.
She thought about the younglings, the ones too small to have ventured into the ice caves of Ilum or rolled the soft glow of a kyber crystal in their hands.
Traitors, all.
Eventually they did leave. Rex ducked out first for a quick supply run and came back with a crate full of rations and medical supplies. And information.
“Good news,” he said. “I’m dead.”
He’d found a lightly-guarded terminal at Triton Station where nobody had bothered to change the security codes. The official report from the Tribunal claimed a total loss of all soldiers involved.
“What about me?” Ahsoka asked hopefully.
“Inconclusive. They must think your kind are harder to kill than us.”
Funny.
They hopped along the Rimma Trade Route, sought out hands to shake and covert glances to exchange before scurrying back to the secret safety of the house on rainy Solesin. They got a transmission out to the Martez sisters on Coruscant, but didn’t dare travel that close to the Core.
“It’s swarming with military here like you wouldn’t believe,” said Trace’s flickering hologram.
Ahsoka did believe it. “We’ll be in contact again soon.”
“Don’t get caught, you two.”
They got caught on Sluis Van. Sort of. When the troops dropped on them, they were just two nameless, faceless figures among the rioting hundreds.
They had stopped to trade their ship for something a little more discreet and a less military grand larceny. When the explosion went off in the town square, they swerved from exchanging coin to ducking debris to shepherding civilians out of the blast zone. Then Ahsoka found herself standing over the limp body of a child, locked in an alleyway standoff with a blaster pointed at her face and Rex guarding her back.
The lone trooper didn’t seem to recognize her; his armor had the old mark of the 77th Company, which she hadn’t crossed paths with in years, and he was too shiny to know her face.
Rex, though? The trooper might not know him by name, but creeping around in civvies with a battered ARC trooper helmet and, well, a certain look about him gave it away.
The trooper leveled his guns at her.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ahsoka said, even though she knew he did. He’d just gunned down a ten year old for stomping the new regime’s flag. What other proof did she need?
She was on the cusp of a creative solution when a second explosion rocked the neighborhood and the whole alleyway threatened to come down on them. Ahsoka threw herself on the child, Rex threw himself at Ahsoka, and the trooper gasped and careened as an enormous chunk of wall knocked him right in the head. It would have crushed his skull if not for his helmet, but instead, it sent him stumbling.
The trooper jerked, waking from a nightmare.
His arms dropped and then, like a limp puppet, raised again to point his blasters at them. His armor began to clatter with the force of shaking, the same sound of desperate self-restraint she’d heard before, just once, on the Tribunal.
“Please… help me.”
He fired off a shot, and then a second, feebler shot. The latter beam went wide as he struggled to overcome the invisible string between his brain and his hands. It took Rex all of three seconds to disarm him and get him on the ground. When the trooper’s helmet came off, he looked relieved to see his weapons skittering out of arm’s reach.
Like addressing an unruly cadet, Rex ordered, “What’s your name, trooper?”
“My name’s… Nik.”
Ahsoka could see that he was struggling for control, limbs taut and straining even though Rex wasn’t holding him down.
“What’s… happening? What—?”
His gaze swiveled to the heap at Ahsoka’s feet. His eyes went wide.
“It’s not your fault, Nik,” Rex said, voice loud over the trooper’s hoarse gasp. “It’s your inhibitor chip. All of us clones were implanted with them when—”
Nik blinked and then made a sudden, maddened grab for Rex’s throat. “Traitor!” he hollered.
They squabbled in the dirt until Rex got ahold of his wrists, holding him back. Nik struggled, then sagged. His breathing quickened into sharp, shallow pulses.
“We… I killed… so many…”
“Listen to me, Nik.” Rex put his hands on the trooper’s head and forced his face up to make eye contact. “It’s not you, it’s your chip. You need to fight it. If you can fight it for just a few minutes, we’ll get you out of here.”
“Take it out. Take the chip out.”
“I can’t. Not here. If you can—”
“Then kill me,” Nik said urgently. “Please, you have to kill me.”
“I won’t do that.”
“I can’t—”
Overtaken by a sudden impulse, the trooper lunged, fingers glancing off Rex’s face. Then they were tussling again, stones and debris scraping armor. Nik writhed for freedom, his expression cold and determined. He kicked repeatedly at Rex, who didn’t seem to feel the blows as he fought to regain control.
Ahsoka didn’t try to interfere until she saw a glint of light on silver and realized Nik had freed the knife from Rex’s belt.
Rex dodged, grabbed for Nik, missed. The knife caught his hand, puncturing his glove. He jerked away, but immediately dove back in for the blade, undeterred.
Ahsoka bolted towards them. “Rex!”
The sound of her voice seemed to startle Nik out of his trance. He stalled like a stammering engine. His wild eyes flashed from Ahsoka and back to Rex. Then he jerked his wrist out of Rex’s grip, slick with blood, and made another jab with the knife. Steady as the executioner’s swing, Nik slashed his own neck before he had time to think twice.
It was a futile thing, but Rex kept on the pressure until the blood had soaked his sleeves and all down his front. Nik gurgled his last breath and died with Rex’s thumbs pressed into the wound.
The quiet came, then—that same quiet that sat with them on Solesin. The one that hailed from the burial grounds on a nameless moon. It settled over the four of them, two dead and two living, until a distant explosion put a jumpstart on reality.
Rex stood, slowly. With all that blood, he looked like a drowned man.
Back at the house, silence closed over them with the definitive weight of a steel door. Ahsoka tuned up some engine parts at the table while Rex washed all the blood from his clothes and hung them up to dry on lines they’d strung through the kitchen. He stood at the sink up to his forearms in pinkish suds, barefoot in a pair of too-short trousers he’d found somewhere. She watched the old scars on his shoulders move and stretch as he worked his arms in the washbasin.
Suddenly Rex stopped, turned around, and said, “All I want for my brothers is what you gave me on that ship: free will.”
Ahsoka’s head pounded, the imbalance in the Force pressing into her temples. She squeezed the sides of her head to push out the feeling of being trapped in an over-pressurized cabin. “I’m starting to wonder if any of us have free will.”
No answer. Ahsoka looked up at the soft sound of a door closing and found herself alone.
Rex wasn’t one to sulk, or really even to ruminate. She knew exactly what he’d say if she voiced any concern about him: we weren’t designed that way. But he was spending a lot of time in that bedroom—more and more as the days went on. She might go a whole day without seeing him if she took the ship out for the afternoon. His reserved nature had made him a good captain, but nowadays he was just quiet.
The Grand Army had been a series of communes as much as anything else; Ahsoka wondered whether Rex had ever been alone like this before. Probably not.
Being the only other major life form on the moon made his feelings all but radiate in this small space, but she tried not to tune into them. It felt indecent, a violation of his privacy, and Rex seemed to want some privacy just now. But Ahsoka could sense that he was intensely focused all the same.
She could learn something from that.
Ahsoka sat perfectly still on the floor of the kitchen, cross-legged for meditation but without any of the focus—the mental equivalent of crouching with her knees tucked into her chest. She put her fingers over her eyes and concentrated, willing herself to reach out past the specks of life swimming through the mudflats, past the seabirds diving in and out of the clouds, beyond the visible lines of space. She felt the energy flowing, swirling around moons and planets and asteroids like water caught in a tidal flow, but it was all wrong.
The collective life force of the Jedi had always been there for her, so steady and strong that she’d taken it for granted, as certain as the floorboards beneath her.
The Purge had gouged a wound in the universe, wide and jagged, deep as a black hole. The lives she had always felt humming alongside her were gone, or lost. Or changed. She would have to let them go and learn to live with that, limping along with a missing limb and no suitable prosthetic.
She felt simultaneously everything and nothing. Her chest and belly swelled with a dry, hollow heat that itched at her throat like hunger.
“Ahsoka.”
Rex had appeared with a large bowl and what looked like a spoon sticking out of it. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there, trying and failing to meditate through the fog. Hours, possibly. Time was getting slippery these days, and she suspected she was losing a lot of it.
“You alright?” he asked.
Ahsoka let her hands fall on her lap. “I’m fine. Thank you, Rex.”
They didn’t always travel together. The surrounding planetary system was of no real interest to the new regime, but Ahsoka and Rex still didn’t like to leave the house unprotected. So one of them might go off on an errand, and the other would stay in case unfriendly company stopped by.
None ever did. Ahsoka kept vigil with the radio and listened for news about the state of the Republic, or whatever you’d call it now. A few hours of hearing bad happenings and worse prospects still took to her nerves better than walking around in silence, distracted and dazed, no appetite, buzzing with the magnetic energy of the Force’s universal tilt towards the Dark Side.
Rex left for a few rotations, and when he came back, he had the chip scanner.
“Tech gave me this.”
Ahsoka asked how it worked, and Rex explained his adventure with the scrapped Jedi cruiser on Bracca, and what he’d seen with the group formerly known as Clone Force 99.
“Won’t do us much good now,” he said resignedly. “From what I hear, things took a turn after I left. The whole junkyard’s crawling with soldiers.”
“Did they figure out what you were doing there?”
“Nah. They’ll just think we were trying to scavenge intel.”
Ahsoka paused, considering that. “Think they locked down all the old cruisers now that they know people are out there looting them?”
“You can bet on it. Shame, really…”
She could sense his regret, but didn’t need the Force to know what he was thinking.
“If spies were able to spot your small group that quick, they would have definitely noticed if clones starting showing up in droves,” she said delicately.
“Ah, you’re right,” Rex sighed. “But this new resistance is so scattered, even a few dozen good troopers could really make a difference out there. Think of how much we could’ve done with one Jedi cruiser.”
Ahsoka held out her hand for the chip scanner. She turned it over, looked at the dials and the tiny screen.
“We don’t need a whole cruiser,” she said. “We don’t even need a whole med bay.”
Seventy-five hours, four planets, and one stolen nurse droid later, they had the other half of the process shrunk down into one handheld tool. Despite the overtly torture chamber look of it—sort of a carbon-spanner meets micro computer meets really sharp drill—the function was simple and elegant. Or would be, assuming that it worked.
The tool joined the chip scanner along with the rest of their basics in her backpack, and for a while it just stayed there, until they landed on an occupied Outer Rim planet and overheard a medic complaining about ‘those damn defective clones’ taking up valuable cells at the outpost.
Clones with aberrant behavior. Clones with persistent headaches. All of them from various planets in the Juvex sector, dumped here because Kamino was too far to bother with the cost of shipping them home.
Ahsoka and Rex didn’t really discuss it first. She knew they were tiptoeing around a line somewhere, but not talking about it meant the wire trap could never spring and trip them up.
They snuck down to the outpost to snag one of the troopers like a pair of stray cats stealing fish from a barrel. The body clanked and clattered in its armor as they ducked back out, back to their ship. The guards had been keeping the troublesome troopers partly sedated to begin with, but he zonked out cold once Rex shot him with a dose of conergin.
Ahsoka wondered what his name was.
Rex read aloud from the chip scanner when its little red light honed in on the spot—ninety degrees from the right orbital floor, below the parietal and temporal intersection. The calibrated program beeped its readiness. The drill on the end of the tool began to whir, near-silent but catching light on the scalpel-sharp edge with every rotation until it sped so fast it seemed to glow instead of flash.
If everything went to plan, the drill would cut into the trooper’s skull. Then a small probe embedded in the center of the drill bit would deploy and follow the scanner’s signal to the inhibitor chip, where it would latch on and retract, pulling the chip out and repairing the damage along the way with a capillary laser and no small amount of bacta spray. They’d patch up the hole with glue stat, stick a bandage on his head, and give it a few hours to heal up. No harm done.
Ahsoka held the extraction tool in her hands, and in those last critical seconds she could feel the blood in her own face, the pulse behind her eyes. She didn’t hesitate so much as pause, her hand vibrating from the drill, but when she glanced up, she saw Rex watching her as steady and certain as if it were his head she was about to tunnel into with no experience and only about eighty-five percent confidence that it would work.
She looked back at the unconscious trooper’s face, tattooed on one cheek and utterly defenseless. Then she looked past it—past the short, fragile threads of life force—and honed in on the thing they had to destroy, far beneath the surface.
The drill came down with no resistance and, guided by the beeps of the tool and her tether to the Force, tunneled its path towards the inhibitor chip, navigating past the vessels that would most certainly kill the trooper if nicked. For such a tiny little hole, the amount of blood surprised her; within seconds the cot was damp, her hands and forearms flecked with warm, wet pinpricks. There’d been no blood at all during Rex’s chip extraction, although with half a battalion trying to ram down the door, she hadn’t exactly been watching.
The tattoo on the unconscious trooper’s face disappeared under a trickle of blood, but he didn’t so much as twitch. His vitals held steady on Rex’s handheld screen while Ahsoka held her breath at the extraction point, and then slowly, meticulously slowly, began to draw back out. The chip came free, the healing spray deployed. By the time Rex put the bandage on the trooper’s head and washed off all the blood, he looked no worse for wear.
Ahsoka wasn’t shaking, but she felt oddly tremulous, as though she’d just come-to after passing out. Her throat burned with acid and anticipation.
The trooper’s name was Strafe, and his bewilderment on waking quickly gave way to a euphoric relief, and then even more quickly to horror.
Strafe had a lot to say about his brief service with the new regime. And as he started to realize the things he’d done under the ethereal haze of the inhibitor chip, they watched him slide right across the grief spectrum from denial to rage.
Maybe if he’d come off any different, if he’d directed any of his wild emotion at Ahsoka or Rex—say, faulted them for putting a hole in his skull without getting his permission, just as an example—they would have put the chip scanner and extraction tool back in the bag for good. Maybe. But all Strafe wanted was to haul out the rest of his brothers, one at a time, until each of them had a matching bandage on their head.
It took several hours for the wound to heal enough for Strafe to go without the risk of dislodging his brains. He spent that whole time pacing a track into the dirt outside their ship, restless and livid as a mudhorn. They went back to the outpost as soon as they could, but it looked much different when they got there. When the guards had discovered Strafe missing, they’d decided it wasn’t worth the risk of losing intel to keep defective clones around. They’d cleaned house, then moved on to a better planet.
Of the heap of bodies on the prison floor, they found two men alive. Of these, one had survived the firing squad with only superficial wounds and a concussion. The other died there on the ground, but not until after Strafe had explained the reason for his headaches.
“It’s these damn inhibitor chips, Meddle. That’s what’s been laying us up like this.”
The dying man’s lungs popped and crackled with fluid when he breathed. “You always said… I was… wrong in the head,” he wheezed, then laughed and coughed. “Can you fix it?”
Strafe took his brother’s hand. They shared a long look.
Meddle nodded. “I know. But I’ll know.”
Everyone looked at Ahsoka, still holding the tool.
Meddle didn’t wake up from his de-chipping, but Strafe and the other survivor—Lev—set off with no particular orders and a general mission: be useful, don’t get caught. It was clear Strafe wanted to team up on what he assumed was an ongoing stealth mission to free as many clones as possible from the mental confines of the inhibitor chip, but Ahsoka and Rex thought it better to keep their numbers low (and no one needed to know about the extraction tool’s requirement for a Force-sensitive wielder). Strafe and Lev were too green and shiny to challenge someone with a face as battlewary as Rex’s, even outside the Grand Army’s hierarchy, so they didn’t push it far.
“Can I ask your name, Sir?” Lev said as he shook Rex’s hand.
“You can call me Nik.”
Cloaked and determined, Strafe and Lev went off to be useful, and to not get caught.
As for Ahsoka and Rex, they buried the dead men. Then they went back to Solesin.
It was raining as ever, the landing pad as steeped in mud as the first time they touched down there. They took as few trips as possible back and forth from the ship to unload the weapons and other cargo they’d collected on their tour of the Outer Rim, then they scraped off their boots and went about the usual routine. Rex hung the wet clothes and equipment up to dry, turning the inner walls of the house into a tent of fabric and canvas in shades of black and blue and grey. Ahsoka closed up the ship for the night and put a pan of water on to boil.
Partway through supper, Rex interrupted the scrape of disposable tin forks on their tin meal kits. “Did you know about the Consult? On Coruscant?”
They hadn’t spoken almost since leaving the outpost. “What’s that?” she said.
“A person.”
“Never heard of them. Why do you ask?”
“I was just thinking,” Rex said slowly, “about Umbara.”
Ahsoka gave him a keen look. Following an extensive inquest, the chancellor had put a gag order on the whole ordeal, apparently for fear of news getting out to the public about General Krell’s treason and further upsetting faith in the Jedi Order. So much for that. She herself didn’t even know everything that had happened there—just that it had been a massacre of spectacular scale.
But the point was, nobody talked about Umbara, not ever, and especially not the clones.
Rex went on. “I always tried to get my men some off-duty time after a hard tour like that. Give ‘em a chance to heal up right and blow off some steam. But when we got back from Umbara, I had a few soldiers who were pretty worked up, and a few drinks at 79’s wasn’t going to help them any.”
“If they weren’t well, couldn’t you take them to the military hospital on Coruscant? They have a whole battalion of nurse droids there.”
Rex shook his head. “This was different. I was afraid if I sent them to med bay, they might be decommissioned. And they didn’t want that; they just wanted to get the fog out of their heads.”
“So what did you do?” Ahsoka asked.
“Same as I always did in a pinch,” Rex said, shrugging. “I talked to Cody. It turned out he had the same problem with some troopers in the 212th who’d seen the worst of it. We did some poking around and learned about the Consult. For a couple of credits you could meet with them and get things off your chest.”
“You mean just… talking?”
“Pretty much.”
“Just the trooper and this Consult person?”
“That’s right. For an hour, give or take.”
From what Rex’s troopers had confided to him, there were any number of tacks the meeting might take. If the Consult thought the trooper would benefit from some advice, or that they could talk him through the situation, they’d help with that. Otherwise, they sat and listened, judgment-free. They absorbed the words and let them pass on to wherever words went after you admitted them. It was strictly confidential, and the only rules were ‘no breaking things’ and ‘no touching.’ Demand got so high that after a few months, the Consult moved office to a space right across from a popular clone bar.
Some clones would sit calmly and talk about their feelings, or talk about the things that had happened as if they hadn’t been there at all. Some screamed themselves ragged, while others vented their most shameful, sacrilegious thoughts—it was a soundproof room, and you really could say whatever you wanted—and many took the time to say nothing at all, and just cried instead.
“It really was something,” Rex said, absently turning his fork. “Men who hadn’t had a peaceful night in weeks could suddenly sleep ‘til roll call. A few troopers I’d been especially worried about came around again—maybe not good as new, but they could manage themselves. I didn’t have to report them.”
All the time Ahsoka sat there and heard Rex tell about his troopers’ sessions with the Consult, she felt the thudding ache pushing into her sinuses and wringing out her guts.
“Rex, why are you telling me this?” she said, trying to keep her voice from sounding as wire-taught as it felt in her throat.
Rex looked at her. His eyebrow quirked, and then his thoughtful look softened into something calm and easy, reassuring, like they were just two friends catching up after a time apart, and he’d caught himself telling a story he’d told before. Silly me, that one again. I forgot you already knew it.
“Strafe reminded me about it today while he was storming around. I told him where to find the Consult if he ever wound up on Coruscant. If they’re still around, anyway…”
“I never heard any of this before,” Ahsoka said.
“Me and Cody kept it pretty close. If anyone up the chain of command found out we had troopers talking to a civilian like that, they’d put an end to it—not that anyone was spilling military secrets,” Rex added, still defensive of a legion that no longer existed (and half of which had tried to kill him). “Our troopers would never betray the Republic like that.”
“Just sounds like creative problem solving to me.”
“It was mostly Cody’s idea. Hate to think where he’s putting all his good ideas nowadays…”
“Well,” Ahsoka said, gently pushing past Rex’s regretful pause, “you gave the people under your command something they really needed. That’s all that matters.”
“Thing is, us clones were never supposed to hang on to things like that… things like Umbara. We were made to just let it go. But even if we were designed a little more resilient than most, we’re all still individuals, and individual people need different things.”
Ahsoka felt an unwitting pang of curiosity, and before she could stop herself, she asked, “Did you ever visit the Consult?”
Rex didn’t seem put off by the question.
“No, I never did,” he said, and uttered a quiet, dry laugh. He looked thoughtful. “I always said a hot meal and a good night’s sleep fixed me up just fine. But… if I’m being honest, I think I was afraid to go. I was afraid of what I might say.”
Ahsoka was beginning to resent this place. She hadn’t been anything but a soldier since she was a child, and aside from her brief stint in the underworld of Coruscant, this house was the closest thing to a civilian residence she’d ever had in her adult life. But the second she got back here and had to sit alone with her thoughts while Rex sat alone with his the next room over, that listless feeling came crawling back over her like a rash.
Ahsoka hadn’t taken to her designated bedroom much since they staked this place out as the headquarters for their own quasi-military operation. She’d started off in the main room and gotten used to the way the rain pinged against the one windowsill, and the occasional rushing sound that meant the gutter had clogged and unclogged itself again. Her bedroom became another storage warehouse, and when the time came to sleep, she would just spread out on the floor of the main room.
She slept better engulfed in the vacuum of space with the drum of an engine circulating the same stale air over and over again. The sounds of a starship were for her, like so many soldiers and wanderlust travelers, the greatest comfort in the galaxy. Even the steadiest rainfall felt like a distraction by comparison.
And she was distracted. The room swam and spun in the darkness, disrupting her sense of inner balance. No amount of deep breathing could restore her neutral state of mind. She had an acute sense of the energy around her, every granule of dirt shifting under the rumble of the storm, every creature ducking from one cover to the next. She had never been so in-tune with the Force, and yet, she felt a queasiness she didn’t understand, as if the sheer catastrophic magnitude of her failure had made it foreign to her somehow.
She pictured Rex and Cody in the color-blotted alleys of Coruscant, doing the quiet work of escorting troopers to and from the Consult’s room, protecting their brothers in ways the Republic couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or didn’t know how. To give them comfort in a foreign place, shelter from cruelty.
The rain kept on going, as constant and all-consuming as static. Rex’s door was closed, his presence dimmed into the calm lull of sleep. But now, lying wide awake on the floor, Ahsoka wondered whether he’d chosen this moon at random.
It didn’t take long for Strafe and Lev to drop them the location of more “disruptive” clones.
Rex’s eyes moved over the star chart as he sized up the risk, weighing the number of known enemy forces and the likelihood of assault.
“It’s not a hotspot, but… I don’t know,” he said in a low voice. “What d’you think?”
That morning, Ahsoka had tried to meditate again.
She had staked out a spot under the overhang where the downpour couldn’t quite reach her and, breathing in the cool dampness, opened her mind to the universe. Next thing she knew, she opened her eyes and found herself kneeling, clutching her throat, her windpipe crushed in the grip of an invisible hand. In her head she saw bodies in the Jedi Temple, small and crumpled and cast in a blue, humming glow.
The spell broke at the touch of cold rain as Ahsoka, fighting for air, toppled sideways off the front steps. She gasped, breathed deep, heaved up great mouthfuls of bile and thick, stringy saliva. The younglings’ screams took their time in fading out of her head.
Ahsoka had wiped the vomit off her chin by the time Rex rushed out to investigate the hacking noise. He jumped down into ankle-deep mud to help her up, but she waved him off. She climbed to her feet and washed her hands in the runoff from the roof. He helped her hobble into the house when she tried on her own and slipped off the first step. Back during the war, when she’d been a young padawan with something to prove, she’d not let anyone support her like this. She’d thought of it as babying, patronizing. Now she let Rex bear half her weight, grateful for the grip on her arm and the steady shoulder to lean on.
He didn’t say a thing except “there you go,” when he steered her into one of their two rickety chairs. Dazed by what she’d seen, and what she’d refused to see, Ahsoka lapsed into blankness while Rex brewed her a whole saucepan of tea. She drank half of it and still couldn’t get the taste out of her mouth, or the corrupted hum of that lightsaber out of her ears.
A few hours later, the transmission from Strafe came through. He and Lev had found another small outpost rumored to have clones with symptoms of chip rejection. They’d heard talk that these detainees would face questioning, and likely lab analysis, before their termination.
Ahsoka watched Rex studying the star chart, and it took a few seconds to realize he’d just asked for her opinion. As a tactical move, even from an egalitarian perspective, the answer was obvious. Nobody would miss a few more clones. In a few years the new regime would age them out, and their impact on the fabricated war would diminish with time, relegated to history, then memory, then nothing.
But as little as she’d owned in her life—almost nothing besides her lightsabers, which she had given up—Rex owned even less. For a while there, he hadn’t even owned his own mind. He had been owned, and been granted just two things: a number, to mark him as the Republic’s proprietary property, and a name. He rarely asked for anything, and never for himself. Even now, he stopped short of asking.
Ahsoka was a civilian now, not a Jedi, and she could do anything she wanted. She had no masters to disappoint, no codes to break. The trouble was that she wasn’t suited for wanting things anymore. She didn’t know how. She felt, on some level, that by surviving Order 66 she had forfeited the right.
But with one look at Rex’s guarded expression, deliberately skeptical, Ahsoka could see how bad he wanted this. And she was going to give it to him.
Ahsoka figured out pretty quick how much glue stat it took to stick a skull fragment in place, but the rest of her circumstances remained baffling to her.
Brother after brother, chip after chip, she settled into a procedure that seemed simpler by the day and asked herself why it was that the only time she felt purely connected to the Force—the Force as she knew it, and not the black shroud that had been trying to smother her ever since the Purge—was when she focused on channeling it through another person’s head.
Their invention was pretty effective, but it wasn’t perfect. Like any other drill, the trick was to not let up pressure. Otherwise the wiring might stall out halfway through extraction, and the tube probe that latched on to the chip might detach from the drill blade.
By the time they lost count of their de-chippings, this had only happened twice. Both times Ahsoka found herself in the uncomfortable position of having to fish the loose part back out with her fingers because if she used a pair of proper tweezers, it could cause a short. An electrical short was never something you wanted, and especially not something you wanted happening in someone else’s brain. And it wasn’t like they could just waltz into the nearest supply shop for a pair of polymer tweezers.
Two clones with fresh patches on their heads stood guard while Ahsoka and Rex bent over the unconscious third. Rex monitored vitals while Ahsoka tunneled into the bone and guided the probe through its usual path. Just when it had latched onto the inhibitor chip, she felt something stutter and the whole tool shut off. She lifted the drill out and saw the dislodged end still embedded in the man’s head, rapidly disappearing under an eager tide of blood.
Luckily, Ahsoka had small fingers. Deft fingers used to prying stubborn wires out of tight spaces and coming up to the victorious thrum of a working engine.
She had always liked fixing things.
“Never a doubt, Sir,” Rex said as he applied the bandage, slipping back into formalities out of habit and relief.
Ahsoka let out the breath she’d been holding for what felt like days, but held it again while the trooper was coming around from his drug-induced nap, and didn’t breathe easy again until he sat up and shook their hands with a tearful “Thank you.”
Just one more, she thought, as always. Just one more, and the rift will fill.
Sometimes, the clones did die under their care. Very rarely, and never with the drama and gore of battle—although, if Ahsoka was being honest, they would probably prefer a fighting death over the non-event of nodding off to sleep and never waking up again.
It happened with the first volunteer in a cell they’d stumbled upon on Kal’Shebbol. He’d known the risks and given his blessing before going under the drill, which made Ahsoka feel better even if it wouldn’t have changed their minds one way or the other. These days their subjects were just as likely to try to kill them while the anesthetic was kicking in as anything else.
Very few clones were aware of the tidal pull of Order 66, even fewer had been able to resist it, and almost none who resisted it could do so reliably. Ahsoka and Rex had broken into holding chambers full of these so-called defective clones who had a notion that something was wrong but no way of knowing why. They’d answered pleas from men who knew they were acting out a puppeteered farce but had no power to stop it. Twice they had intercepted troopers trying to go the way of Nik in the alley on Sluis Van—caught between a moment of clarity and the engineered compulsion to be a good soldier and follow orders.
The three men who survived that day’s round of chip extraction were in such a bad state that they still wanted to risk it, even after watching their comrade die.
Ahsoka sent the newly-freed on their way, and Rex dug the grave using the same shovel he’d used on every grave since the Tribunal. And once they packed the grave with red dirt and finished the other jobs they had come all this way to accomplish—the task of kidnapping and forcibly freeing troopers being more of a side job at this point—they returned to Solesin to lapse back into that state of hibernation.
It was becoming more and more difficult for Ahsoka to meditate these days. At times the best she could do was open her mind to the closest thing that wasn’t Rex: the earth outside their house. But the ground was just as beaten down as she was, flattened and bruised from a decade of foul weather. Things still grew and thrived on Solesin, but they were beyond her sight now, behind the shroud. She was too afraid to reach forward and touch the grievous wound carved into the galaxy. She worried about what she might see.
That night especially, after feeling the trooper’s life force sputter out under her hands, she dreaded what would come once Rex closed his door on her.
Except, after they’d gone through the usual return trip routine, Rex lit all of their oil lanterns and put them around the room. He took up the spot next to her mat, and for the next few hours they sat around in relative quiet, chatting here and there between rounds of dice, the same way they used to do on late watches during the height of the war. The relentless deluge outside filled in all the gaps where awkward pauses might have been, and with the lamplight reaching into the furthest corners of the room, Ahsoka didn’t have the impulse to scan for motion in the dark.
In fact, it was the opposite. She’d never seen the room in full-scale daylight because the clouds outside never dissipated, and she caught herself noticing the knots in the ceiling beams, the water stains on the walls, the whole room awash in a tepid orange glow that could have passed for sunrise, or sunset.
It was bright enough that when Rex went to scoop the playing dice back into their rolling cup, she saw the smudge of red on the back of his wrist.
“Ahsoka?”
She blinked, but she had been staring long enough for him to follow her line of sight.
“Ah,” he said, like she’d pointed out a stain on his shirt, “that’s what I get for washing up in the dark.”
He stood to clean his hands in the cold sink basin, and when he got back, the mark was gone and it didn’t seem to trouble him that it had ever been there.
All the lanterns had burned out when Ahsoka woke up, but the light in the room was gradually rising from black to gray. She found Rex still there, asleep on the hard floor beside her mat without a blanket or a pillow, hands folded peacefully over his chest.
She leaned in close to look at the back of his wrist. There was no more red smudge, and no cut where the smudge had been.
It was mud, she realized. Mud from digging that grave.
Tomorrow they might dig another, and the day after that. And in between, they would keep on saving as many clones as they could. It was an impossible task, like trying to bail all the sand out of the desert. There were just too many of them.
Ahsoka threw her blanket over them both and went back to sleep.
Strafe haled them with the news from Tipoca City—or rather, the news of Tipoca City.
“This could be a big win for us, Nik,” he said, voice echoing through the hologram. “Who knows what kind of tech could be floating around out there? If we get a team out early, we could collect information even the new regime doesn’t have…”
Ahsoka stood there, very calmly. She watched Strafe talk and only half-listened to the plan he had cooked up, more preoccupied with the sour pit sprouting in her stomachs. She couldn’t say why she felt it any more than she could explain her headache or her listlessness or the way her throat choked up when she thought about taking on a new mission. Mapping plans, giving orders, running strategy. She resisted the sudden urge to collapse into the closest chair and put her face in her hands.
She didn’t tune back into the conversation until she heard Rex say, “You go ahead with your team. We’ll be in touch if we can join you.”
“Very good, Sir.”
Ahsoka looked at Rex, expecting to find his focus on the hologram, but he was watching her instead.
“Rex—” she started as soon as the transmission ended, not quite decided on her direction, but he put up a cautious hand.
“Maybe it’s not my place,” he said carefully, “but you don’t have to do this.”
Ahsoka stared.
“You said it yourself: you’ve been a soldier since you were a padawan. But the Jedi aren’t meant to be soldiers.”
“I’m not a Jedi, either,” said Ahsoka. “I don’t really know what I am.”
Rex shrugged. “Now might be a good time as any to find out. I’ve been in contact with Tech… He thinks he can fine-tune the drill’s calibration so we can run extractions without the Force.”
Ahsoka felt a sharp stab of betrayal, which quickly gave way to gratitude and affection followed by despair. She still didn’t know what she wanted, but all of a sudden, she knew what she didn’t want. She couldn’t face another war.
Rex was all she had left in the galaxy. And now, her only friend was offering something else—the same gift she’d given him on the Tribunal.
“What about you?” Ahsoka asked, trusting he understood.
They regarded one another for a moment, then he nodded. “Don’t worry about that. You already buried me, remember?”
That afternoon, Ahsoka took the ship out for a few hours to test a repair to the fuel lines and get out from under the clouds, mental and otherwise. On her way back into the house, she almost tripped and smashed her face on a wooden crate of ammunition. She saw that most of their stock had been rearranged and sorted into neat, orderly stacks—rations in one pile, blasters over there, camping supplies placed with the canvas—instead of piled up wherever they’d had space when they acquired them.
She looked over to Rex’s bedroom and saw the door left open, and several cans stacked outside the doorway. The thought occurred to her with a sinking feeling that he had decided to go to Kamino without her after all, without so much as a goodbye, but that made no sense because she had the ship. And besides, she could sense he wasn’t far.
“Rex?”
Ahsoka peeked into the bedroom, which she found as cramped and tidy as she’d expected. Rex had swept the dust and rubble off the floor. The old mattress had a blanket folded on one end, no pillow. His armor sat neatly stacked in one corner, waiting. The room was empty and plain other than that.
Except for the walls, which had all been painted over, floor to ceiling.
Dumbstruck, Ahsoka stepped into the room and turned in a slow circle to take it all in, and a dozen different landscapes spun out around her.
Some spots on the wall had more detail than others, more finesse, but it wasn’t linear; she could tell at once that Rex hadn’t just gone from left to right, but painted on different bare spaces as he’d gotten more comfortable with the brush. The first place she recognized was impossible to miss, because it was the first thing you saw when you opened the door: right above the mattress, the seas of Kamino churned in dark blues and greens with the occasional whitecap, a hint of sunlight breaking over the domed rooftops of Tipoca City, still standing tall.
A few of the places were either too vague or amateurish to name—a snowy desert, sand dunes, sharp cliffs that could have been from any number of planets. Others had such detail that she could tell they must be real places, only she hadn’t been there. The space around the only window was painted black, with vines and leaves growing out of the windowframe, all in glowing shades of bioluminescent red; she could guess it for a nightscape, even if she couldn’t say where. But she knew the Maridun grasslands the moment she set eyes on them. He’d captured evening there just right, the way the winds kicked up and blew patterns in the reeds.
The blue crystals of Chrisophsis stuck up around the doorframe, and the far wall featured a dense, vibrant jungle—broad, drooping palm leaves in the unmistakable pinks and purples of Felucia.
Ahsoka’s chest tightened at the sight of a cityscape, the outline of the Senate Building and the Jedi Temple cast against a background of window-flecked towers at dusk.
Not a single drop of blood on any of the walls. Not a single crater burned into the land by thrusters, or even one ship painted on the filler space of black night and pinprick stars. It was the universe as it had been before the war, maybe even before the Jedi, and it was the universe as it would be after: complete, self-fulfilled, teeming with life at every brush stroke. Everything she’d struggled to see since the Tribunal’s crash landing.
“I guess the clone engineers didn’t put much value in the arts,” said Rex.
He’d appeared in the doorway looking slightly embarrassed, his face and shirt wet with rain. She saw the crate under his arm and knew he’d been picking through the tool shed out back.
Ahsoka smiled at him. “I dunno about that… some of these are right on the mark. Is this Eadu right here?”
“Good eye.”
“I remember this campsite,” she said, tracing her finger along the brown outline of a cliff, its ledge as sheer and steep as the edge of the world. “This was the, uh—the theater, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Rex said with a fond laugh. He came up alongside her for a closer look.
The battle of Eadu had caught them by surprise when they stumbled onto a Separatist droid repository, and it took a serious toll on their numbers. Afterwards, their ship destroyed, they’d had no choice but to hunker down with minimal life support and wait several long rotations for backup. That first night, Kix had moved dutifully from cot to cot, stooped over from his fractured ribs, resetting broken arms and legs with nothing to keep him going but moral support and way, way too many uppers.
When Kix had finally stabbed the last stim pack into his thigh, Hardcase decided to take a stand against the grimness. He’d grabbed a blanket and tied it around his neck like a cape, then started stalking bandy-legged behind Kix, heckling him with his best impression of the wheezy General Grievous.
The booing and laughter had drawn Cody out of his tent.
The entire group, Ahsoka included, had expected their no-nonsense commander to shut down the theatrics. Instead, Cody surprised them all by snatching the closest tent pole, brandishing it like a lightsaber, and with a heroic toss of his head—like sweeping a coif of ginger hair from his eyes—he shouted, in a flawless impersonation, “My dear Grievous! What a lovely surprise to find you so far from your hidey-hole!”
What followed was one of the most memorable battles of that tour, though Cody would later downplay it as ‘just a little morale booster.’ Ahsoka would never forget the energy of the troopers as they watched the two “generals” face off, Cody flourishing his weapon and whirling dramatically while Hardcase tried to fend him off while struggling to wield not one but six tent poles, the two of them bantering and mocking one another. Once it was over, almost everyone in earshot was in stitches, and half of them in tears—from laughter, from the physical pain of laughter, from the rare release of tension.
Ahsoka had looked over at Rex that night and seen him off to the side with his arm in a sling, incredulous but smiling against his best effort, no doubt wondering how they’d explain this one if Obi-Wan found out. She looked at him again now, saw him smiling that same way. Then she looked over the room, over the images he’d put out into the world with such tender care, knowing that the house might come down before anyone ever saw it.
She understood then that whatever came next, Rex would be okay. And that was the last thing she’d needed to know.
“I know what we’ve been doing isn’t practical,” said Rex. “I ought to let them go, but I’m not ready just yet. I might not be a soldier anymore, but I’ll always be a brother.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Ahsoka ventured. “And… I had an idea.”
“Did you, now?”
“It’s probably a bad idea. Actually, it definitely is. A really bad, really dangerous idea.”
Ahsoka turned to face the Coruscant skyline. When Rex tracked her gaze, they stared at it together for a few long seconds. Then he smirked.
“Sounds like old times.”
Cody had been very busy these past few months.
At first he’d gone with the rest of the 212th to stamp out the last few and feeble embers of resistance in the Mytaranor sector. Then, once he was done terrorizing the public into compliance with the new regime, he had traveled further outward to lock down some of the Outer Rim territories more prone to general anarchy.
But it turned out that pulling a weapon on the Jedi general you’d served shoulder-to-shoulder with for years and blasting him off the face of a cliff passed the litmus test for Order 66 compliance. In recognition of his stellar performance in the new era, he had been ordered back to serve as captain of the Royal Guard.
Rex had a good laugh over that one.
“I can’t think of a worse job for Cody than following around the chancellor all day in his palace. Some reward for valor—I’ll bet the assignment rankled him good.”
Whatever Cody had thought of his shiny new job, it meant two things for Ahsoka and Rex. First, it meant abducting, subduing, and performing an extraction on a clone who hadn’t shown any signs of resisting the effects of his inhibitor chip.
Second, it meant Coruscant.
As to the former, Ahsoka had some reservations about what might happen when Cody woke up—assuming, of course, that he did wake up. Every other clone they’d de-chipped had shown at least some fleeting symptom of rejecting the effect of Order 66, be it a hesitation, an outright (albeit fleeting) resistance, or just persistent headaches. All the while, Cody had been enslaving the population of Kashyyyk and executing any unarmed civilians who refused to register a chain code.
Ahsoka didn’t raise these concerns with Rex; they wouldn’t have made a difference in their decision, and besides, she had a feeling he’d already thought about it.
As for the latter issue—the issue of Coruscant—the good news was that the new “palace” was actually the Jedi Temple, the secret passages of which Ahsoka had long since etched onto the map of her memory. She could get them inside.
As for the bad news… well, aside from that one part, it was mostly bad news.
They left Solesin without much fanfare beyond an extra share of rations split between them. All Ahsoka felt once the ship shuddered above the rainfall and out of the atmosphere was a sense of calm and purpose.
That was short-lived. She wasn’t afraid, exactly—no more than she was ever afraid, which wasn’t much—but the weight the Dark Side fell on her harder than ever when they dropped out of hyperspace in the Coruscant System. It hung over her like a stinking cloud, heavy and oppressive, trying at every turn to flatten her out like a wrecking yard trash compactor. Ahsoka was counting on this newfound chaos in the Force to mask her presence so close to the epicenter. They couldn’t afford to run into any old friends.
Other than the sheer stupidity of it, their final plan didn’t end up much like “old times.” For one, they actually had a plan, but more importantly, it was just the two of them to manage instead of a whole squadron. Hiding two people in the tunnels was easy enough. Getting their hands on a spare set of low-ranking Royal Guard armor was trickier, but still doable. Impersonating said low-ranking Royal Guard member was no feat at all when you looked and sounded just like every other member, and save for one close call in the barracks, Rex made quick work of it.
Within three rotations they had the shift schedule, the inspection routes, and most importantly, they knew where Cody slept. The rest was a simple matter of flooding his private officer’s quarters with a few capsules of knockout gas and waiting for the smoke to clear.
Back in the tunnels, Ahsoka slipped out of her mind and folded into the wide, welcome arms of the Force—the Light Side, dampened by the sweltering presence of the Sith’s ill will towards living things, but not so easily snuffed out. After days of trudging through the dark, returning to the Force felt like the lightest breeze, the gentlest, coolest touch after a fever. It was almost easy to let go of her concerns, to let intuition and practice guide her way through Cody’s skull and into the white matter of his brain.
Until the extractor gave a little shudder, and a snap, and the probe snapped off the end of the drill.
There was a short pause. Ahsoka and Rex froze, she with the dislodged drill still hovering in place, he with the chip scanner in one hand and the other cradling Cody’s head on his lap. The drill site began to fill with blood, obscuring the loose end of the probe. But with the chip in her sights, Ahsoka didn’t dare look away, not even to blink. She put down the drill.
“Vitals holding,” Rex said, breaking the tense silence. “Keep it steady.”
Just before Ahsoka moved in on the probe, Cody whimpered. She faltered at the noise, so soft she might have missed it if she weren’t so close to him.
“Is he—?” she started.
“He’s out of it. Keep going.”
Cody’s little sound of pain had filled her with a small, deep surge of uncertainty. Then she remembered the day she’d freed Rex from his chip—how she’d done it on a concoction of adrenaline and blind trust in the Force, and the way his face had looked when she turned around and saw that it had worked.
Ahsoka clicked back to her senses. Carefully and decisively, she eased her finger into the hole she’d drilled in Cody’s head. The broken piece wasn’t too far down, and she felt for it, wiggled it up just high enough to pinch the end with her thumb, and tugged it free. The probe came loose, leaking bacta spray everywhere, the chip latched firmly onto the end. It dangled like a wet, scaly fish on a line when she held it up, triumphant.
“Gotcha.”
Cody’s vitals took longer than usual to stabilize. That didn’t surprise her, since the drill snapping off had killed power to the probe, which meant the capillary laser couldn’t do its job of repairing all the broken vessels in his brain. But really , Ahsoka and Rex assured one another in hushed voices as they resolutely mopped the blood from Cody’s face, the laser was just a backup for the bacta, which was an automatic mechanical release instead of a powered one, and so really, he ought to be just fine. He’ll be fine. No doubt about it.
As for what he’d have to say when he woke up? She didn’t bother to speculate.
Ahsoka patrolled the edges of their hideout while Rex stayed glued to Cody’s vital signs, confident that no one had found them but still wary of letting her guard down. No doubt someone had noticed Cody’s absence by now, but wherever they were searching, it wasn’t underground. At least not in their part of the tunnel system. She didn’t sense any intentions cast in their direction, and doubted the disappearance of one clone would be enough to draw attention that far up the ladder.
Right when she’d gotten complacent and decided to rest for a while at the end of the tunnel, the sound of violent coughing snapped her out of it.
Ahsoka went sprinting back to their hideout and found Cody wide awake, kneeling on all fours, forehead pressed against the cold dirt floor next to a puddle of vomit.
He was sobbing. The sound ran through her entire body with a chill, visceral and dense with anguish, and so loud that she would have worried about someone hearing them if they were any closer to the surface. His lungs must be working doubletime.
Cody heaved and retched and wept, clawed long dredges into the dirt with his fingernails. Rex knelt right there beside him. Indifferent to the volume, he rubbed his knuckles up the space between Cody’s shoulder blades, cupped his hand to the back of Cody’s neck, and leaned in close to his ear.
“—not your fault,” Ahsoka heard him whisper, while Cody fought to catch his breath. “It’s over now. I’ve got you.”
Cody needed another dose of bacta spray to stop his head wound from seeping, so they snuck back to the ship that same night. He moved like a drunk man, sluggish and staggering, one arm thrown over each of their shoulders. Borderline delirious, he alternated between gratitude and apologies with a lot of weepy mumbling in between. Ahsoka could hardly believe it when they got him on board undetected.
“He’ll be good as new once the meds kick in,” Rex said cheerfully when he emerged from the bunk.
His face dropped when he saw her backpack sitting on the ramp.
“I think…” Ahsoka began, still testing the idea as much as the words, “I’m going to try civilian life for a while.”
Rex looked more bemused than surprised. “Sounds ambitious. I wouldn’t know where to start.”
She grinned, wary. “Neither do I.”
Ahsoka sensed something between them that she couldn’t put a name to, on some magnitude beyond words. At first Rex raised his hand like he was about to salute her, then changed his mind and offered it out. She shook it. They stood there looking at each other, the both of them smiling with bittersweet fondness, before they gave it up and hugged instead.
“If you get bored of civilian life, you know how to find me.”
“That might be a while,” Ahsoka said, still clinging to his back, engulfed in his arms. “A really, really long while. Maybe not until the war’s over and we’re just a couple of old vets.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Rex said with a soft laugh. But what she heard was, we should be so lucky.
“I used to be a Jedi. Is that gonna be a problem for you?”
Ahsoka took the lack of hostile energy as a good sign. Good enough, anyway.
The Consult was human, with a sturdy frame and neat, nondescript clothing. Their eyebrows rose at Ahsoka’s reveal, but with interest more than surprise. No fear. Ahsoka figured this probably wasn’t the most shocking thing they’d heard recently.
“It’s a dangerous time to be a Jedi on Coruscant,” they said mildly.
“It’s dangerous everywhere. But I figured I was already on-world, so I… might as well…”
Ahsoka trailed off, uncomfortable and unsure how she’d wound sitting across a table from a total stranger now that she was here.
It was a small room, not too bright or too dim, but quiet enough to hear her own heartbeat, and that unnerved her. She wondered how many troopers had sat on this same soft chair, how many had cried in it, or turned it over in anger to stalk around like a cornered cat.
Ahsoka peddled on her next thought. She had come all this way to sort things out, but now being here seemed pointless and absurd. Selfish, even. The whole galaxy had been fooled by a war that was never meant to be won. Tens of thousands of men had been engineered for it, hatched and then discarded like refuse into space. Civilians killed, maimed, displaced. And she was worried about a migraine.
“So, what brings you here, Jedi?”
“Well, ever since the coup, there’s been this… change in the Force. It’s affecting me different than it used to, and I guess I’m worried it’s more than I can handle.”
“What does it feel like?”
“I’ve been getting these headaches,” Ahsoka said. “And you know that feeling you get when you’ve got the flu? That kind of hot pressure, right here?”
She touched the spot between her collarbones. The Consult nodded.
“It’s like that, but everywhere—in my head and my chest. And when I try to tune it out, I just…”
The Consult nodded again, understanding. “I don’t know the terminology, but, can you still manipulate the Force?”
Ahsoka laughed a little, surprising herself. “Honestly, that’s the only time it feels normal. When I’m really focused on a specific task, it feels like… like I can push the shadow out of my head. But the second I let my guard down, it comes back.”
“Focusing on the things that give us a sense of purpose can be a good distraction from grief.”
Ahsoka’s gut clenched. “Grief?”
“The whole planet is grieving,” the Consult said. “I’d wager the whole Republic is. Why shouldn’t you?”
Ahsoka did have a lot to grieve. She’d been grieving for a year before all of this unfolded—her disillusionment with the Jedi Order, her faith in their purpose. But at least the Jedi had always been there for her in the abstract if not in person, the collective wisdom of millennia, diffused into the ether for her to summon whenever she opened her mind.
All gone now, along with her mentors and friends. Plo Koon, who had brought her home. Obi-Wan, who had entertained her endless questions. Barriss, who had been right. And Anakin.
Anakin.
“I am grieving,” Ahsoka said slowly. “But I don’t think that’s what’s bothering me. I think it’s guilt.”
Ahsoka knew that was right. The second she said it, she felt the knife pulled out of her diaphragm, the pressure spilling out like a reservoir of blood built up behind a swollen wound. She really did feel a change in the Force. But the dark shroud over her thoughts—the pressure in her head, the hand on her throat? That was guilt.
Maul had been right, and it was so, so obvious. Ahsoka wanted to fault the Jedi Council for failing to see it or act on it, to save Anakin from the grand conspiracy, but for all she knew, they had been just as blind as she was before she left the Temple.
And if her time with Anakin had blinded her, then the time apart had returned her sight. The first time she saw him after being away, Anakin’s whole heart had been on his sleeve for the world to see. She could sense his uncontrolled emotions; he’d been stunned to see her, startled, then anxious and overjoyed, eager to pick up where they’d left off.
In a word, unhinged. An apprentice cultivated like a grape on the vine, groomed and nourished until he was ripe enough to pluck and squeeze into something else. Something sour and rotten.
“I… lost my master.”
Ahsoka felt the truth with every breath. The great scar on her heart, the imbalance in her mind—it was Anakin, at least partly, and there was nothing she could do about it. There was no Council to turn to, no clever rescue plan. No inhibitor chip that she could dig out with her own bare hands to turn him back into himself.
“Did your master die in the Purge?” asked the Consult.
“No,” Ahsoka said. “But part of me wishes he had.”
The Consult regarded her a moment, then smiled a sad, empathetic smile. “Love can be funny like that. Funny and cruel.”
And it was.
Ahsoka thought of Rex kneeling in that dirty tunnel, Cody’s head cradled gently in his hands. She pictured Rex stooped with his shovel, the blade plunging into the earth, over and over and over, across all the planets of the Empire. Emptying the desert of sand one way or another, grain by grain.