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Felix Fraldarius wakes up on the cold, steel floor of Peragus still wet with kolto.
The healing solution drying on his skin stinks of brine. His throat is rubbed raw from the tube that’s been shoved down his throat. His vision swims, and he feels like hurling down the grates that line the med bay floor.
What’s the last thing he remembers? A voice—a woman’s, telling him to wake up. Before that? Coruscant in the distance; the seize of his chest around nothing; a planet, crumpled like a ball of aluminum in his fist.
No, too far.
There was a freighter.
Felix’s hand instinctively goes for the knife that should be in his boot. It’s gone, along with his boots and the rest of his clothes. All he has on is the tan, skintight jumpsuit designed for maximum skin-to-kolto contact in suspension.
Shit.
Ahead of him are the arched doors of the med bay. If he can just get to his feet, find some armor and a weapon...
Felix stumbles. His elbows take the brunt of the impact as he slams against the floor, and he wheezes through his teeth. Physically, he’s in perfect condition. The kolto did its work. No more broken bones or bullet holes, but there’s a dense fog surrounding his thoughts. His limbs won’t obey the way they’re supposed to.
Felix slams his fist against the metal floor in frustration.
“Fuck!” His curse scrapes against his throat, hoarse with disuse.
Unbidden, his memory rings with the voices of his Masters: there is no emotion, there is peace. There is no passion, there is serenity.
Over two decades and the platitudes are still there in his brain, towering over the fog like wretched landmarks.
Felix swears again for good measure. Moving one limb at a time, he slowly pushes himself to his knees, then to his feet. Once he manages a few steps, locomotion starts coming back to him. The momentum builds. The med bay doors part for him as he approaches.
He keeps going.
Past the doors, past the security station and the morgue. A woman there wants to talk to him. Felix doesn’t want to talk to her right now.
Dead bodies are slumped on the floors, against the walls, beneath glass windows, so many Felix can’t keep count. Miners, judging by the tan-and-blue uniform. Their blood is still warm. Felix picks up a plasma torch, snapped off the leg of a spider-like mining droid.
Two of them are waiting for him en route to the command console. He takes out the first one with a blow to the head. The plasma cuts through its metal chassis like flesh. Not as pure as the energy passed through a kyber crystal, but familiar enough.
The second lunges at him. He ducks just in time. With a kick and a well-placed plasma blade through its motherboard, the droid crumples with the first.
He almost misses the third.
It’s over in less than a second. Felix experiences it all in the span of a blink: a familiar tingle up his spine, the white fog, and the double-vision. He sees it before it happens. He whirls around, and when he comes to, his torch is stuck halfway through the droid’s head.
He doesn’t bother pulling it free. He lets the droid fall to the ground in a crackle of dying electronics. From the corpse of a dead security guard nearby, Felix opts instead for the familiar metal of a vibroblade.
In his head, the woman tells him his connection is returning. He can see her face now, long hair covered in a robe the color of wet earth.
Felix has long since tired of people in dusty robes telling him what to do.
By the time he passes the holding cells, the blood is pumping through his body again. He can break into a jog without feeling like passing out. His thoughts are clearer, though unfortunately, so is everything else.
He can hear, smell, feel everything. He can feel the droids in a room before he opens its door. He hears the last gasps of a dying miner locked behind a security door. In the holding cells, he senses something—someone—very much alive, a tangled, serpentine energy writhing under a placid surface.
“Nice outfit,” the stranger says.
Felix opens the door and finds a man sitting on the floor of a force cage. He’s the only other body in the room. Yellow rings of energy buzz up and down the length of his prison.
“That’s not a regulation uniform, is it? Don’t tell me you miners got up to some fun only after locking me in here.”
The stranger eyes him up and down appraisingly. Sizing him up under the guise of ogling him. Felix returns the favor: a pilot’s leathers, shock of red hair, a handsome but highly punchable face. Tall, when he gets to his feet. The bulge of an empty holster at his hip. Felix could take him with a melee weapon any day of the week. Hand-to-hand or at range, he’s less certain.
“Who are you?” Felix croaks.
“Sylvain Gautier. If we were meeting under better circumstances, I’d shake your hand, but...” Sylvain gestures to the energy barrier around him. A hairline fracture in his smile gives him away as a liar. Or maybe it’s on purpose, a peek inside to convince the other person they’ve got him figured out, to get away with the bigger lie.
“I assume you’re here to let me out?” Sylvain continues. “I already told security it was an honest mistake. In some places, they’ll arrest you for not carrying a blaster—”
Felix cuts him off. “The entire facility’s down.”
Sylvain blinks. “Down?”
“Everyone’s dead. Droids went haywire.”
“Ah.” Sylvain adjusts to this new information. The gears turn visibly behind his eyes. “I guess it was a lot to hope that sound was the good kind of explosion...”
“Explosion?”
“Some of the miners got in a tiff over the Jedi that arrived. You know how it is,” Sylvain says with a wink. Then, batting his eyelashes, “It’s a little hard to hear me over the shields, don’t you think? Maybe if you let me out of here...”
“Tell me more about this Jedi,” Felix growls, one hand on the hilt of his vibroblade, “and I’ll think about it.”
Sylvain holds up his hands: No problem, officer. Happy to comply.
“ Some of the miners wanted to turn in the Jedi for the bounty put out by the Exchange. Don’t ask me the exact number—I’d feel dirty just repeating it. It’s a serious chunk of change. The kind that would get you retirement on Alderaan, emerald vineyard and all. Now, I’m not a greedy man, but the view of the sunset from the Falls...” Sylvain lets out a low whistle.
Felix doesn’t say anything. He feels the distant ebb and flow of the Force around him, a glimpse of an ocean after a decade of desert. All the muscle memory is there. Felix just has to reach out, grasp at the tendrils that slither around the stranger...
“Oh,” says Sylvain. His face flickers behind the energy shield. Thirteen plus seven—a bust. A hand on his thigh, a tongue in his mouth. “That’s you. You’re the Jedi.”
Felix wrenches his mind back into the present. Just a taste of the Force again, and he’s chasing after it like a relapsed addict.
“Ex-Jedi,” Felix corrects crisply, already walking away. “Thanks for the info.”
“Hey, wait, wait, wait!” Sylvain calls after him. “C’mon, you can’t just leave me here. I was just joking! I’m no bounty hunter. You have to believe me. I know how to get off of this place, and unless you know how to hack the command console to reroute emergency power, you’re stuck here just as much as I am.”
The door to the holding cells slides open with a low hiss. Felix pauses.
“I’m good with computers. I can lift the lockdown and open the hangar doors. You’ll need a pilot, too, if you want to get out of here,” Sylvain says.
Felix recognizes bait when it’s laid out in front of him. “I know how to enter coordinates into an auto-pilot, thanks,” he snaps.
Sylvain laughs and shakes his head. “The planet’s surrounded by a volatile asteroid field; you can’t jump into hyperspace until you clear it. One wrong move, and the whole thing goes up in a chain reaction. You won’t get far without a good pilot.”
Felix sighs. All that kolto must have turned him into a fish because he’s fallen for Sylvain’s trap, hook, line, and sinker. There’s a woman in the morgue that’d have a lot to say about that.
“How good?” Felix finally asks.
Sylvain grins. Felix feels the tug of the line, or maybe it’s just the last of the nutritional paste he hasn’t thrown up. He’s fully prepared for the barrel of a blaster between his shoulder blades before they even breach atmo. Sylvain’s smile is like a shark’s.
“The best,” Sylvain promises.