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This. This is what you’re going to do.
Barriss hunches on the overhang. She is far closer to the hangar than she should be. If she’s discovered—she shakes her head.
If she goes through with this, keeps her silence, there is something far worse in her than the pain of any punishment she could undergo.
But it is necessary, the hum under Jackar Bowmani’s skin. The threat, like a failing pulse under her fingertips, echoes across the Force. It is part of a larger message—part of something Barriss cannot comprehend but she can see it. She can see the threat the Jedi pose to themselves.
And this, the ticking bomb within Letta Turmond’s husband, is necessary. It is necessary, for the good of the galaxy. The Jedi are not meant to fight in the war. She knows this deep in her heart. Knows it in the Force as well, as it has been the echoes since the beginning of the war. She had known it on Null, and as she looks at her hands now, bloodless, soft, green, and she peers down at the Temple from her perch across the way of the grassy sea.
Her presence here is necessary, and she thinks to herself, Barriss, what have you done. This. This is what she is doing.
On Null, she’d been eighteen, just old enough to be a padawan—perhaps if she was Human, but she is Mirialan. A padawan, as Jedi and clones died under her bloodstained palms, as she learnt the keenness of death in war, lives blinked out in an instant or in an eternity.
Master Hett had called her “Master Offee” back then. It still sickens her to this day.
So, that is how she knows this is necessary. That this blood must be shed if any change is to come. Change begets change, and tragedy is the biggest change she knows of. Tragedy, death, and the feeling of being unsafe in places you should never feel unsafe in.
Her hand tightens around the communicator, and she stares across the flat green leading to her home. The only home she’s ever known.
This. This is what she is risking.
Bare minutes before it happens, and she should not be this close, but just as this is a lesson for the Jedi, Barriss is also a Jedi who must learn.
She closes her eyes, hands folded over each other in her lap. The wind rustles her veil, brushing against her cheeks, cooling the flushed skin, and the weight in her sternum is a knife. A deep breath in, senses stretching out, and counts every person in there.
A mounting horror as she realizes how many people are in there—in her home—and she takes another knifing breath, and it doesn’t quell the feeling in her. It doesn’t do anything, and she wavers at that moment.
But the communicator beeps, the building blows, and Barriss is laid bare, feels it happen, from inside out, pinches in her abdomen, and it is too late.
She is always too late. This is what she’s done.