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Your friend is dead. His mind is ours.
It’s a lie. Rex knows Echo’s voice, even in a sea of other vode, even buried in static. CT-1409. Wat Tambor is only desperate to keep his prisoner.
Tech opens the door.
It’s not that Rex held any expectations for what the room beyond the door would look like. If anything, he’s kept his mind empty, thinking only of what was needed to get him and the team to this point. But the room is not just big—it’s empty.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Tech says, looking around as he catches up to Rex. The far wall is studded with what look like stasis pods, with a circular control panel at its foot.
None of the pods look big enough for a clone. Rex remeasures by eye, thinks of how compact a brother can be when in a defensive curl. Maybe.
Tech darts off to the panel, fiddling with dials and buttons in Rex’s peripheral vision. Belatedly, Rex thinks he should have snapped at the other clone before he started just fucking around, but—no. Tech has shown his competency throughout this mission. “I’m definitely picking up a life form in there,” Tech says, hands jumping from control to control like hopping spiders.
“In—in where, exactly?” Rex asks, taking a step back. The more of the room he takes in, the more dizzying the number of pods becomes.
“In—” Tech frowns, and points at the pod directly above the center of the control panel. “In there, most strongly. These seem to be stasis chambers.”
“What does that mean, most strongly?” Rex pushes down his urge to grab Tech by the sides of his chestplate and shake him. “You’re saying all of these chambers have life signs?”
“My readings don’t make sense,” Tech mutters, more to himself than to Rex. He clears his throat, and says, louder, “I think I can get it open.”
“All of them,” Rex says. “Open all of them.”
Later, he’ll wish he’d kept silent. Let Tech make only one small discovery instead of—instead of—
Stasis chamber after stasis chamber cracks open, their contents hidden in the cryo fog that hisses out. Rex climbs the control panel to the central chamber; the one Tech had pointed to as having the strongest life signs. He pictures Echo as he’d last seen him, maybe stripped to his blacks, maybe naked, but whole, sore from being crammed into a stasis pod built for someone the size of an Ugnaught.
A brain.
There’s a brain where Echo should be.
The brain is suspended in a jar of clear fluid, with multiple wires touched to its surface or into its many twitching folds.
Like it’s alive.
“Where’s—” Rex’s mouth is dry behind his bucket, tinged with nausea. “You said there was a life form, Tech. Where is he? Where’s Echo?”
“I’m still detecting—”
“Where’s Echo, Tech?” Rex steadies his shaking hand on the butt of his blaster. “This isn’t Echo. Where is he? Where is Echo?”
No reply, and then, “You should see this, Rex. Come down here.”
Rex takes multiple seconds to tear his eyes away from the gently pulsing brain in a jar. He hops down from the panel on legs that don’t want to take his weight, and he locks his knees for a moment as he straightens. Tech’s visor is down as Rex approaches, keeping his facial expression as much a secret as on any fully armored clone. Rex turns. And he looks.
There are jars in every stasis chamber. A stomach. Most of two kidneys. Bones, sometimes. Something wispy that might be nerve endings. A pair of brown eyes.
The central stasis chamber is the only one to contain a brain.
“I,” Tech begins, and it’s the first time Rex has heard the other clone hesitate. “I tested some of the jars for genetic markers, while you were observing the most centralized stasis chamber. These all belong to a clone.”
“One clone?” Rex’s voice comes out faint, shaky. His eyes are drawn back to the brain.
“As with most regs, it is impossible to say—”
“Just fucking tell me!” Rex snaps, without looking away. “Is it Echo?”
A heavy beat, and then, “That is my belief, yes.”
Your friend is dead. His mind is ours.
The sound of Rex’s knee guards hitting the floor shock him into realizing he’s fallen to them, body sagging as he kneels at what’s left of his last Domino. Wat Tambor hadn’t been trying to deceive him into giving up.
His mind is ours. The brain keeps pulsating. Echo is dead.
“You said a life form,” Rex croaks. “Life signs.”
“Which I am still detecting. Technically.” Tech keeps his visor down as he paces a short circuit nearby. “If my readings are correct—and they should be—then Echo is still alive.”
“He’s in pieces, Tech.” Flat, dull. Another ugly truth Rex must swallow as a good soldier.
“They are datamining him as we speak,” Tech reminds him. “Every transmission has been live, including Echo’s SOS repeating his designation. If the Techno Union lets Echo’s brain die, they lose their means of intel.”
“You mean he’s—” Rex takes in the roomful of stasis chambers again, and experiences a fresh kind of nausea.
“Alive, yes. Just enough to be useful.”
“C-can he feel—”
“Rex!” General Skywalker’s voice cuts through the haze of Rex’s mind. “What’s going on? Where’s Echo?” A patter of urgent footsteps leads up to Tech, where the general says, “What happened here? Is Rex okay?”
“Echo is here,” Rex says, willing himself to stand. It doesn’t work.
“What do you mean, Echo is here? I only see you and Tech in here.”
“He’s…” Rex points.
The general walks along the whole wall, taking in the interiors of the chambers with growing muted horror. Tech hurries along beside him. “Echo is alive,” Tech clarifies. “Only just.”
“Only just,” General Skywalker repeats, quietly. He comes to a stop in front of the brain, partially blocking Rex’s view.
The next ugly truth Rex must choke down is that it doesn’t matter if Echo is technically alive. There’s no way to remove him, no way to restore him to anything resembling a thinking, feeling human. And leaving him here is not an option, which means there’s only one course of action.
“I’ll be the one to do it,” Rex says, finally forcing himself back to his feet. He pulls out his blaster, holding it two-handed in the hopes of quieting his worsening tremors. “I’ll make sure nobody ever uses Echo again.”
“Whoa, whoa!” the general says, holding up both hands. “We’re jumping straight to mercy-killing, Rex? We haven’t even thought about how to get him out of there!”
“There is no him,” Rex says, approaching the brain. “Not anymore. This is the only way left to rescue Echo.”
“Stop. Stop, stop, stop. Rex, hold your fire,” General Skywalker adds, when Rex keeps advancing in the face of all his stops. Rex obeys, though he doesn’t holster his blaster. The general sighs. “This is all so messed up,” he murmurs.
“We have very limited time,” Tech reminds them both. Rex glances back at the door, where the rest of the Bad Batch stands taking shots at the droids that keep closing in. Not one has looked back yet.
“We came all this way,” General Skywalker says, squaring his shoulders. “I won’t let it be for nothing. Not for you, Rex.”
“What do you mean?” Rex knows that tone in his general. It usually spells the end for the enemy, the general’s stubbornness and penchant for violence pointed full force at a single target, but Rex can’t find a way for that to apply here. Echo is almost dead, and the only merciful action is to make him completely dead. There is nothing to defeat here except the universe itself.
“Tech. Is Echo ready to be disconnected?” the general asks.
“I will need time to decrypt his cerebral interface,” Tech says, already at work by the time Rex looks his way. “But I will work quickly.”
“I’ll check on Hunter and the boys,” the general says, nodding at Tech. “Rex—just hold steady, okay? I’ll be right back.”
As soon as the general disappears into the previous room, Rex rounds on Tech. “This is pointless. If we fail here, and Echo goes on being used by the Techno Union—”
“The Jedi Order is historically capable of many mysterious things,” Tech says, never looking up. “I agree with you that it’s far from realistic to expect any positive outcome other than Echo’s final brain death. But also, historically, it’s a fool’s errand to stand in the way of one Jedi General Anakin Skywalker. Wouldn’t you agree?”
The problem is that Rex does agree. When he’s feeling amiable, Rex’s general always listens to his second-in-command, but not even General Kenobi can dissuade his former padawan when General Skywalker gets stuck on an idea. The fact that General Skywalker chose Rex over working with a CC like any other Jedi General—and apparently raised hell when the GAR tried to change that—says it all.
So Rex waits. He waits for Tech to announce that the pieces of meat and electricity that used to be Echo are ready to be removed from their many chambers. He waits for the sound of blasterfire to die down.
He waits for his general to return, and pull a miracle out of the Force.
General Skywalker strides in while Tech is still plugging away. “How’s it going in here?”
“Almost,” Tech says, hands flying over the controls now. “I only need a little more time.”
“I don’t know how much more of that we have,” the general says, frowning as he turns to Rex. “Any word on the extraction squad?”
Rex hadn’t even called it in. He really is off his game. “No word yet,” he says, which is not a lie. “I’ll call it in, see what I get.”
General Skywalker only looks disappointed for a second, the expression cleared away by something much worse: pity. Rex turns away completely, vambrace up to see who he can raise on comms.
“Enemy approaching,” Crosshair announces. “Droids. Lots of ‘em.”
“Ready for disconnect, sir,” Tech says, stepping back.
“How long do you think you can hold them off?” the general asks.
“How long d’you need?” Hunter fires back.
“Let’s find out,” General Skywalker says, under his breath. He shakes out his hands at his sides, then raises both of them as his eyes slide shut.
The Force.
It dawns on Rex, as the jars begin to rattle, that it’s too late to stop his general. Mired in his own recycled grief, Rex let himself believe that the general meant to, what, commune with Echo through Jedi tricks? Pull his tormented essence from the scraps of his former shell and—do what? Rex had let his trust in the general blind him, and now the jars are buzzing with energy all around the room as General Skywalker grits his teeth.
And Rex can’t stop him. Even if he wanted to fire on his general, what good would it do against the man General Kenobi called the most powerful Jedi in the order?
The jars all take a synchronized dive from their chambers, smashing on the floor, and leave dripping organs, bones and muscle floating above. One by one, the wires attached to the now-wildly twitching brain pull away, each falling slack as the next one moves.
The general closes his hands into fists, and the disembodied pieces glide through the air toward the brain.
The only thing Rex can hear is his own pounding heartbeat, his own ragged breathing, the tiny clacks of his armor as the body beneath them shakes. The general snarls, and the twisted remains of more than one kind of droid hurtle into the room moments later, completely disassembled and whirling around the brain in a vortex within seconds.
Organs slip against each other like younglings asked to stand in height order, as if they remember their place in the shape of a human body. Muscle strands wrap around brittle bone, braiding out into the shape of thighs, of an arm, of a neck reaching up toward the pieces of skull slotting into place around the brain.
Sweat breaks out on General Skywalker’s face. There isn’t enough Echo to put all of him back together, and pieces of scrapped droid fly to fill in the blanks. Two knees, two calves, two undeniably droid feet; a scomp link where there should be a hand. Metal that shrieks as it contorts to fit inside an abdomen, finding the gaps where non-viable organs failed to join their brethren.
The general pants with effort before grinding his teeth back together, his eyes screwed tight as the sweat pours from his temples. Sallow skin blossoms from the front of the skull, covering the unseeing eyes, the grimacing teeth; sculpting a wide, vodish nose between them. It crawls out along the lean muscle of shoulders, biceps; marches down a sparing ribcage, a hollow belly, sharp hips. It can’t hide the durasteel limbs, stretched to its limit.
A clone. A man. Suspended in midair, naked and lowering gently toward the floor.
Echo.
Rex only looks toward his general for a second, only gets a flash of piercing yellow eyes—haven’t the general’s eyes always been blue?—before he surges forward.
Echo.
Rex pulls his bucket off as he sinks to his knees, despite the droids threatening to break through behind them. He slides his hands under Echo’s back, bracing himself for a corpse’s chill that he never feels. When he pulls Echo up and into his arms, Echo’s thin chest is suddenly wracked with coughs.
Translucent eyelids flutter open. The same brown eyes that had stared at Rex from a jar now look up at him in confusion.
“Rex?”
It’s not right. No clone was ever meant to be taken apart and put back together this way. Echo had been beyond life, only a set of exploitable electrical impulses. He shouldn’t be able to look at Rex like that—like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. He shouldn’t be able to whisper, shouldn’t be able to reach for Rex’s face with a trembling hand that hadn’t existed just minutes ago.
“It’s me, Echo,” Rex whispers back.
“We—” Echo’s throat bobs. “The shuttle, Tarkin—”
Rex swallows, too. “All done with, brother. I’ve got you.” He’d meant to say we.
Something focuses in Echo’s eyes. “Y-you came back for me.”
General Skywalker’s eyes on Rex’s back burn through the plastoid of his armor. The enemy is closing in, and they’re far from safe. And still Rex curls around Echo, his living, breathing brother, and squeezes his eyes shut to staunch his tears. “Of course I did. Of course I came back for you.”
“What’s—” Echo pauses, maybe spotting the general over Rex’s shoulder, maybe Tech. “What’s going on? What happened?”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Rex mumbles, into Echo’s warm, dry skin. It doesn’t matter that it’s the wrong color. “I’ve got you. We’ve got you. You’re safe now.” He swallows a sniffle; a captain does not cry. “You’re going home.”
At first, Echo is too weak to walk on his own. His legs are still getting used to being legs again, after all, though he doesn’t know that.
Rex doesn’t tell him. Neither does General Skywalker.
By his own admission, Echo remembers nothing between his last moments on Lola Sayu and now, but as Wat Tambor’s forces threaten to breach the doors that Crosshair and Hunter have welded shut, he remembers a way out. Echo has only lived in his new shape for a few minutes, and he doesn’t understand how a scomp link has taken the place of his dominant hand, but he grits his teeth with a soldier’s determination and plugs in anyway.
There’s static at the edge of Rex’s brain when he looks at Echo. It gets louder when he slings Echo’s arm over his shoulders, helps Echo stagger along. Every rise and fall of Echo’s emaciated chest, every metallic step, every minute twitch of his reconstituted body feels unreal.
“How long are you planning on keeping the truth of his resurrection from Echo?” Tech asks. Rex pretends to not hear him.
But Echo is Echo. He still jokes like Echo, still plans like Echo, still fights like Echo where he can. The further they escape from the algorithm’s chamber, the stronger Echo seems, throwing himself into the thick of his own rescue. And Rex pushes back against the static, smiling at Echo before they board the shuttle back to Anaxes. Hopefully, it’ll be just like old times.
The barracks on Anaxes are not silent, exactly—even with the tide firmly turned, plenty of troopers are still stationed planetside, bunked down for the night. But the adrenaline that has pushed the men through a losing campaign has started to crash, and exhaustion sweeps through the battalion like a plague.
Echo’s gasping breath rings like a bell through the barracks, though Rex is the only one who wakes.
“Echo?” Rex whispers, sliding out of his bunk. He’d made sure to have Echo take the bunk below his; he wouldn’t let his brother spend the night alone in medical. He’ll never let Echo be alone ever again. “I’m here.”
“Re—ex?” His name rides out on a hiccuppy breath, Echo’s eyes wide and watery as they turn toward him.
A pair of brown eyes, staring down from a frost-rimed jar.
Echo’s eyes were never so pale in life. In his previous life.
“I’m here, brother,” Rex repeats, kneeling at Echo’s bedside. “What do you need?” He takes Echo’s limp, bony hand between both of his own.
“Rex,” Echo wheezes, “please. Please.”
“Don’t sound like you’re getting enough air,” Rex says with a frown. “I’ll get Kix,” he adds, moving to let go and rise.
“No! No.” Echo reaches for Rex with both h—with both arms, scomp hitting the back of Rex’s hand with a painful thump. Tremors run the length of Echo’s tortured body, thrumming against Rex’s palm. “Please, Rex.”
Rex kneels again. “Please what, Echo? What is it you want?” The longer he looks at Echo, the more he finds wrong. Echo is slimy with cold sweat, his already bloodless lips chapped.
Echo bites down on a sob, his hand clenching tighter around Rex’s. His grip is like a child’s, far from the ARC trooper Rex lost.
“Kill me,” Echo whispers.
That can’t be what Echo said. “Say again,” Rex says, tongue suddenly numb.
“It hurts,” Echo whimpers. “It hurts, Rex, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it feels wrong—“ His voice is getting louder, loud enough it might wake the other men in the barracks.
“I can take you to medical,” Rex says, shoving down his growing alarm. “I can take you to Kix, I don’t need to leave you.”
“No!” Echo writhes on the thin bunk mattress, teeth bared.
“Echo.” Rex won’t tell him to quiet down, but he knows Echo wouldn’t want an audience. Not to this. “I can’t help you if you don’t let me.”
“Kill me!” Echo says, panting, and there’s no mistaking the words this time. “Please, Rex, please, kill—”
“Stop that!” Rex doesn’t mean to admonish him, knows that’s not helpful to a trooper in pain. But looking at Echo, he can’t remember what he should have said.
Echo arches against the damp sheets, mouth pulling open in a silent cry of agony, even as he keeps his hold on Rex’s hand. “I’m not alive,” Echo sobs. “I’m not supposed to be here, it hurts, it hurts, Rex, please, Rex!”
“You’ve survived more than any trooper could be asked to survive,” Rex says, desperate to find the right words to soothe his old friend. “Look, I’m going to pick you up—”
Echo howls like an injured animal when Rex slides his hand under his thighs. In the next bunk over, Hunter cracks his eyes open, meeting Rex’s silently. Rex shakes his head, barely cognizant of the question.
“Where does it hurt, Echo?” Rex asks, more urgently as he leans in closer over the other man. “You need help, not—” He grits his teeth. “I’m not killing you.”
“I’m already dead, Rex,” Echo whispers. “What did you do to me?”
Cold fear blossoms in Rex’s chest. “I—we saved you, Echo.” He’s in pieces, Tech. “I came back for you.” I’ll be the one to do it. “You’re safe, now. You’re home with me.” This is the only way left to rescue Echo.
For a moment, Echo’s eyes search Rex’s. Rex holds his gaze steady, willing Echo to find that promised safety within it. To find his home in Rex again. He squashes the thought that Echo can see past his eyes, into his memories of pulling his blaster as he faced Echo’s remains. Echo’s breaths rattle in his throat, slow but even.
Then Echo’s face twists into a snarl.
“KILL ME!” he bellows, directly into Rex’s face. “KILL ME, KILL ME, KILL ME! KILL ME! KILL ME!” His hand leaves Rex’s, only to twist into the collar of his blacks and pull Rex even closer. “KILL ME! KILL ME, KILL ME, KILL ME! KILL ME!”
Rex doesn’t even realize the hypo is against Echo’s neck until it’s been depressed. Echo’s hand goes slack within seconds, his mouth twitching soundlessly as his eyes roll up. When his head lolls, tear tracks shine on his colorless face.
“He’s in shock,” Kix’s voice says from behind Rex, as the hand that must then also be Kix’s pulls the hypo away. Rex can’t say Kix sounds confident. “It’s to be expected, considering… Well, considering everything.”
“Shock,” Rex murmurs. He glances back to find Hunter behind Kix, though the sergeant only nods at Rex before heading back toward his bunk. There are half-awake men dotting many more nearby bunks, but a stern look from Kix has them all shutting their eyes. “Right.”
“I’ll keep watch for a bit,” Kix says, with a steadying hand to Rex’s shoulder. “Make sure he’s alright.”
“I can do that.” Rex is already looking at Echo again, watching his chest to make sure it rises and falls. Nothing else about him looks alive.
“Don’t make me go full medic on you, Rex. Back to sleep. I’ll watch him.” Kix’s hand squeezes. “Now, Rex.”
“When you put it that way,” Rex says, with a humorless chuckle. Kix doesn’t laugh in return. Rex climbs back into his bunk, his body heavy as it sinks into the insubstantial mattress. He’s so tired, and it should be easy to fall asleep, even with Echo’s hoarse breathing below.
It should be.
Echo is the first to wake. By the time Rex’s feet hit the floor of the barracks, he’s already got half his borrowed armor on. Rex still feels a sense of wrong-footedness when he sees Clone Force 99’s skull stenciled so close to 501st blue. Echo’s face is placid as he kits up, as if he’d slept smoothly through the night.
“Echo,” Rex begins. And then stops.
“Something wrong?” Echo asks, when Rex doesn’t continue.
“About last night.” Rex resists the urge to lean back against the bunk, standing ramrod-straight as befits a captain.
What he expects from Echo ranges from an embarrassed sigh to outright freezing up. He expects that Echo might grit his teeth, that he might try to wave it off. The worst he expects is for Echo to repeat his awful request.
But Echo only looks at him blankly, waiting for Rex to continue. When Rex doesn’t, still processing Echo’s lack of acknowledgment, Echo prompts him with a “Last night, sir?”
The Echo Rex knew would never lie. Not to him. And this Echo wears the same open, trusting expression.
“How’d you sleep?” Rex asks. Not his neatest pivot, but a workable one.
Echo snorts. “Like the dead. Didn’t even dream. Whatever Kix gave me before we all bunked down hit me like a speeder.”
Rex fumbles his way through a few more lines of small talk disguised as checking in on Echo’s condition. Today they return to Kamino aboard the Integrity; Rex hopes the more distance between Echo and Skako Minor, the more normal everything will feel. Just like old times.
The Jedi meet them on the airfield, with Clone Force 99 clustered behind them. Echo stands at attention as the three generals promise them accolades and medals; General Windu even acknowledges Echo’s post-mortem promotion to NCO. And maybe everything is fine. Rex follows the generals when they leave, expecting Echo will do the same.
When Rex doesn’t hear Echo’s footsteps—hard to miss on the hard tarmac—he turns to find him talking with Clone Force 99. Their sergeant, mainly. By the time Rex catches up, the conversation is over, the squad busying themselves with prepping their shuttle.
Echo’s eyes are glazed as he watches them. He doesn’t even register Rex’s words, an offhand compliment to the notorious Bad Batch, until Rex touches him, saying his name, and it’s like watching him wake from deep sleep.
“You and I go way back,” Rex says, squeezing Echo’s shoulder. He doesn’t think about the color of Echo’s eyes as he meets them. “If that’s where you feel your place is, then that’s where you belong.”
There’s only a flash of the Echo of last night, in the moments that Echo chews over Rex’s words. A rasping breath, drawn too quickly. Panic, in the set of his brows, in the width of his washed-out eyes. A tremble in his jaw, gone as quickly as it appears. Echo looks down, visibly swallowing.
“What do you want, Echo?” Rex says, a quiet nudge. He lets himself imagine he’d dreamed last night up, and Echo’s reaction now—well, it only makes sense, after spending 18 months away from soldierhood. Any choice made outside the heat of battle would be overwhelming. Never mind how he spent those 18 months.
But Echo looks up, his eyes heavy with something Rex doesn’t want to put a name to. “You know what I want, Rex.”
Rex’s hand falls away. Echo’s eyes are blank again, and he turns toward Clone Force 99. They accept him wordlessly, and when Echo faces Rex one more time and salutes him with his scomp link, they stand to attention behind him and mimic his salute.
Rex brings a shaky hand to his right temple, staring into Echo’s yellow eyes.