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Even though being stun-shot had apparently reset his "programming", or at least stopped it from having active control over him, Ezra could still feel it lingering inside him. It crept up on him when he was least expecting it. A compulsion. An intrusive thought sneaking in whenever his mind was too idle for too long. A dark whisper echoing through his head, tempting him to follow the last instructions that had been given to him:
To take the Jedi holocron and return to the man who had abducted him. Who had sedated him and drugged him and brainwashed him with some kind of old Sith technique that had turned him into a ticking timebomb, ready to snap into complete obedience at a single word.
Whatever Maul had done to him, Ezra knew it wasn't gone, just dormant. And Ezra was terrified of when it would come active again.
Because it was going to happen. Every time the compulsion came back, it was stronger. Harder to distract himself.
Harder to resist.
He did his best. He had rarely strayed from Kanan's side, or indeed even left the Ghost. He kept himself busy as much as possible. Kanan was only too happy to keep him close at hand, meditate with him, give him as many tasks to do as he could. The Ghost had never been cleaner or better maintained than the week after the incident.
But even Kanan couldn't stay with him forever.
Flickers of panic tingled through his spine as he clung to Kanan's arm, holding him back for a moment from ascending the ramp to the shuttle.
"Can't I come with you?" he begged. His voice wavered with fear and he could see the Rebel ground troops behind Kanan whispering in concern but he couldn't care about his own dignity, not when he could still become a danger to everyone on the base without someone there to... to keep him grounded.
Kanan shook his head, feeling and understanding Ezra's anxieties through their bond and trying his best to soothe them. "If Maul's still there or watching that facility and you're with us..." He let that horrible thought trail off. "It's too risky," he told Ezra.
Ezra eyes crumpled, dismay etched in every feature. "What about if he sees you?" he argued. "He'll kill you Kanan, he told me he would!"
Ever since Maul had triggered his conditioning, bits and pieces of his abduction had been coming back, including a very vivid and upsetting memory of the Zabrak standing over him while he was strapped down to the gurney, the first of several full syringes poised at his neck.
"Kanan will know something went wrong!" he'd promised the villain. "He'll find me! And then he'll make you pay for this!"
Maul's eyes had been utterly cold and chilling as he dismissed that with a calm, "Not if I kill him first."
Kanan was frowning severely, brows pursed over his eyemask. He gently pulled his arm from Ezra's needy grip, letting his hands fall on both of the boy's shoulders.
"I'm going to come back Ezra," he assured him. "I know you're scared. But we have to take this chance." The hands rubbed comfortingly on his shoulders. "We need the Dimalium-6, we can't synthesize it at the base. Making another regimen of IX serum might be our only way to break Maul's control over you." Lowering his voice, he gestured behind them to the other Rebels in the strike team. "You know they don't stand a chance against him, not without a Jedi there."
"That didn't stop him before..." Ezra muttered, shame and guilt sludging through his stomach, flashes of Maul's red blade cutting his men down as he flailed his own saber with heavier and heavier limbs, his vision blurring as the knockout dart took hold, flickering through the corners of his mind.
And they don't stand a chance against me, Ezra thought miserably to himself, knowing in his heart that if any of Phoenix squadron had tried to stop him after his brainwashing was triggered—anyone else but Kanan—he could and would have cut them down just as easily.
"Hey," Kanan said, gently touching his face. He smiled reassuringly. "It's going to be okay. Hera and Zeb will back this afternoon. And I've told Sabine not to leave your side."
Ezra raised his head, taking in a long, trembling inhale through his parted mouth. He nodded, the reminder easing some of his stress, dimming his anxiety for just a moment.
"Okay," he whispered.
Kanan pulled him in for a quick hug, squeezing desperately tight for a second, hands on the back of Ezra's head and shoulders, before letting go and stepping away.
Ezra stood in place and watched him go, his own hands limp by his sides.
"Kanan?" he called, right when Kanan had crested the top of the ramp.
Kanan turned halfway to face him.
Ezra's eyes were silently pleading. "Be careful," he said.
Kanan nodded. "You too."
He faded into the interior of the shuttle and Ezra stared after him until the ramp raised and sealed him out of sight.
-SWR-
Throughout the day, Ezra tried to keep busy. Keeping his hands and head occupied meant there wasn't room to feel anxious, wasn't space for his pulse to start racing for no reason and for the paranoia to creep in. He and Sabine moved lifts of cargo on and off ships all day and he actually felt at ease enough to joke around with her, for about an hour or two.
But of course, it couldn't last forever.
"Hera was delayed?" he repeated, gaping at the airfield commander. Pinpricks of nervousness were starting to creep up his arms and into his head. "What do you mean delayed?" he cried.
The Rebel technician looked up from his datapad with sympathy. "There was a backlog of ships trying to get through the Meridian Corridor checkpoint. She had to hole up on planet for the night. But she sent a transmission just a little while ago that she expects to back the next rotation."
Ezra inhaled very slowly, feeling the blood drain from his face and quiet murmurs of panic making faint tugs at his stomach. Portents of dread seemed to be hovering over him, reverberating through his body.
Noticing, Sabine nudged him pointedly. "Hey, it's okay," she told him encouragingly, smiling. "We've still got lots of crates to move. Let's get back to it. Then you can just turn in for the night. How hard you've been working today, Hera and Zeb'll be back before you even wake up."
He heard her, but it didn't comfort him. There was a sensation inside his mind, like an almost audible voice, a whisper creeping through his thoughts.
He inhaled again, regaining his focus. "Sabine..." he wavered, tilting back a little on his feet. He turned anxious eyes on her. "Don't... don't let me leave the base," he begged.
"Okay...?" she said slowly, clueless but concerned nonetheless.
"Please," he asked her.
Seemingly to sense the seriousness of his request now, her expression softened. "Okay," she told him. "I'll be right across the hall if you need me. All right?"
Ezra nodded shakily, unable to brush off his sense of impending doom, of tension in a wire getting ready to snap.
-SWR-
They finished their chores and tasks for the day, and the whole time Ezra felt like he was being watched. Like something was just waiting for him to be alone. Waiting for Sabine to take her eyes off him.
He resisted the urge to sleep as long as he could. He obsessively checked his wrist comm, making sure it was off. As he and Sabine walked up the Ghost's ramp and its cool interior enveloped them, Ezra shivered, his sense of dread only growing stronger.
The night was calm. The Ghost was unusually quiet without Chopper's loud raucous presence, without Zeb banging around in the kitchen or Hera clicking switches as she went over ship logs and navicomputer data.
Ezra hesitated just outside his room, long enough that Sabine put a hand on his shoulder from behind, comfortingly.
"I'm just across the hall, remember?" she whispered. "I'll even keep the door open."
"Mmhmm," he replied, lingering just one moment longer before he stepped inside, let the door swish closed behind him.
He took his boots off, shaking out the Atollon sand from the day, then hopped up the ladder in two steps and curled up on the bed.
His breath shuddered out of him. He lay there and listened to the gentle hum of the air filtration system for a while.
The minutes stretched out. He didn't close his eyes. He couldn't shake that ominous sense, the feeling that something was holding its breath and just waiting.
He drifted off, slipping in and out of sleep fitfully, mind swimming but unable to fully quiet. The whisper was back, the quiet voice of his conditioning, making his hands itch and his body restless. Ezra reached for the Force to try to quiet it...
...And found only the cold thrum of danger sense.
Blinking back alert in an instant, he could feel the dread like a physical vice around his chest, squeezing and compressing. His heartbeat was painful, and the whisper was physically audible in the room now.
His eyes were drawn to a strange glow that seemed to be coming from below him. Paralyzed with fear, he could only flick his head down to look.
The red Sith holocron was lit up bright in the center, pulsing, on the little table.
The whisper was coming from there.
Ezra...
Horror flooded through him. He hadn't thought of that. He hadn't—!
He trembled as the doom descended and Maul spoke again, voice full of command.
Swallowtail.
Return to me.
Bring me what I seek.
-SWR-
The first time she heard the door hiss open she ignored it, struggling with a particularly stubborn bit of carbon scoring on her blaster. She just furrowed her mouth and pinched harder with the cleaning cloth.
But the second time the door hissed she suddenly heard it, and notes of confusion entered her, realizing the second hiss had come from further down the hall. Kanan's room.
She glanced up just in time to hear the quiet footsteps, catch the glimpse of an orange jacket as it passed her room, almost silent.
She squinted, and then rose from her seat in concern.
"Ezra?" she called.
There was no response so she stood and went to go look outside. The sight of him moving purposefully towards the back of the living area had her nervous; he was too stiff, something was wrong with his gait and—
The confusion turned to alarm when she caught a glimpse of the two holocrons clutched loosely in his left hand.
Cold horror washed over her. The holocrons... that was what Maul had wanted.
Maul had gotten to Ezra somehow.
She didn't even think, just lunged herself forward into the hallway, sprinting almost horizontally around the central ladder and into the living area.
Ezra turned smoothly before she reached him, almost robotically, his free hand outstretched.
A hard, handless shove hit her square in the chest, knocking her back, almost all the way back to the doorway. Winded, Sabine felt herself smack the floor, her head ringing from the strike. She was too dazed to move for a horrible second, and heard his boots stepping up the ladder to the Phantom II.
She peeled herself off the floor, heart in her throat, scrambling up but it was too late, the hatch was closed and sealed, and solid thunks! behind it told her that the shuttle was detaching from the Ghost.
"No no no!" she cried, immediately switching course, barrelling the other way back down the central hallway, throwing herself into the Ghost's cockpit.
She was already powering up the engines and at the same time opening up the comms.
"Specter 5 to Sato, come in Commander Sato!"
"What is it, Lieutenant Wren?" The urgency and breathlessness in her voice had Sato immediately concerned.
"Ezra just took the Phantom II," she explained in a rush. "He's got Kanan's holocron, I think his conditioning reactivated somehow." She paused to take a large breath. "He's airborne, we cannot let him leave, Commander, the Ghost isn't going to be fast enough to catch him, I need air support now!"
"The A-wings are still being refueled!" Sato told her, the concern sharpening into notes of alarm and panic.
Another voice came on the line, one of their airfield technicians.
"Specter 5, we have him on the long range scanners. He hasn't broken atmosphere," he reported in a rush. "Holding steady at about a hundred meters aloft and flightpath horizontal, moving away from the base."
That made Sabine pause her hand above a switch for a moment. "He's not leaving Atollon?" she asked, bewildered. There was no reason to fly out over the desert before beginning the vertical ascent. So the more worrying implication of that news was that Maul was on Atollon. Pulse thumping, starting to have niggling suspicions, she asked, "What's his heading?"
"Bearing 7.5, about 14 degrees North Northwest."
Sabine stopped powering the engines, switching the open line to her comlink as she jumped back up out of the seat. "I know where he's going," she declared, as she took the hallway in a rush back to her room. "You remember that krykna nest we had to pull Commander Rex out of?" she asked, shoving her blasters and a few explosive timers in her belt.
"Unfortunately yes," Sato said.
Sabine grabbed one last paint bomb and whirled around to tramp down the hallway to the cockpit ladder.
"I'm taking a speeder," she told the commander as she slid down, rushed down the ramp and made her way through the base. "Meet me there as soon as you can scramble up the men, and come armed to the karking teeth."
"We are not a match for Maul, Lieutenant Wren," Sato warned her in concern.
Sabine slung her leg over the seat of a speeder, revving the handlebars with simmering fury.
"You didn't have me with you last time."
With that, she gunned the engine, taking off into the deepening night, cold wind whipping by her as she sped away.
-SWR-
She slowed and turned off the engine once she got close, not yet wanting to alert Maul that anyone was coming. Her heart palpitated painfully, cycling through fear and panic, and anger and outrage in turn.
The tingling in her head grew stronger when she confirmed the Phantom II's top fin sticking up from behind the next coral cluster.
Quietly, she crept closer. She felt down for the hilt of her WESTAR, but didn't unsheathe it yet, nerves on edge and tensed tight as she approached.
The shuttle was parked right outside the unnatural circular holes that were the entrance to the krykna's nest. Its ramp was down, and Ezra wasn't inside. Which meant he was already in the caves.
Sabine paused outside the entrance, lifting her comlink and opening the line back up.
"He's here," she whispered. "And so is Maul." Her eyes scanned over the piles of cylinders stacked near the tunnel opening. "He's got... a lot of ordinance stacked up here." She silently counted in her head. "I think I know where AP-5's missing pallet went, that he was complaining about."
"What the blazes can he possibly be doing with that many torpedoes?" wondered the airfield technician.
"Nothing good," Sato concluded grimly. "Sabine, wait for the strike team to get there. Do not engage him on your own."
Sabine shook her head. "I can't do that, Commander. He's got Ezra. I need to try to get him away from Maul before we charge in blasters shooting."
Sato gave an aggrieved sound, but replied, "Be careful. We'll be there shortly."
The line clicked off, leaving Sabine in silence.
She paused a moment just outside the tunnel, attaching an explosive timer surreptitiously to the side of the wall, as a just in case.
Then she steeled herself and walked through the hole.
-SWR-
Her heart pounded as she made her way through the tunnel, both blasters out and pointed forward. She heard the faint scuttling of krykna legs echoing softly. The sound made her nervous, but she didn't see any of the creatures.
She wasn't sure if that was a worrying sign or not.
There was a yellow light up ahead. Sabine swallowed, slowing even more as she approached. She had no idea what she was going to do, but Ezra was in here somewhere, so she had to try do something.
As she walked, a sense of danger permeated the tunnel, and she was hyper-attuned to every small noise.
Which was why it was a shock when a gravelly male voice spoke suddenly from behind her.
"Mandalorian. I should have known."
Sabine bit back a scream as she whipped around and aimed.
-SWR-
It was a short scuffle.
Firing point blank at him had done nothing but piss Maul off, he'd slammed her against multiple sides of the tunnel until her ears rang, even as his chest sizzled from the wounds inflicted by her blasters, which were now useless on the floor somewhere.
He had her hands cuffed in moments and dragged her by the arm through the tunnels into the room with the light, which was a slightly more open chamber illuminated by work lanterns.
Sabine's feet stumbled and scraped on the sandy stony ground, bile rising up her throat at the smell of the chamber, rot and filth and death. This had been one of the nest chambers. Now it was repurposed into a workshop, tables lining the walls and supplies haphazardly strewn across the floor in piles.
How long has he been here? she thought, holding back the nausea in her stomach.
She spotted a glimpse of Ezra standing in one of the near corners, before Maul yanked hard and deposited her ungently on the floor.
Sabine scrambled to turn over onto her back, to be able to see the room. Ezra was there all right, eyes and expression still blank, unmoving; he hadn't reacted at all to seeing her. Maul was closer at hand, looming over her with a seething glower.
"You should not have come here," he said.
Sabine pushed herself to a sitting position, squaring her shoulders and glaring murderously at him. "You shouldn't have taken Ezra," she shot back.
"He came to me," Maul dismissed with a casual air, as if it had been something Ezra had done voluntarily instead of having the command forced on him through brainwashing and mind control and Sabine grit her jaw at his flippancy. "You are a loose end I did not need," Maul snarled, looking agitated. "I had not intended to reveal my presence here to the Rebel base this soon. Now it seems I must advance my plans and leave with my apprentice much earlier than expected." The yellow eyes held irritation; his shoulders dipped as if begrudgingly resigned. "How unfortunate. I had hoped to wait until the Jedi was back."
"I'm not alone!" Sabine said, scooting back a pace or two from Maul out of nervousness, realizing now how very very stupid it had been for her to enter alone. "There's a strike team of others right behind me! They'll be here any second!" Despite her fear she faced him defiantly. "If you hurt me in any way you'll have thirty men outside waiting to fill you with holes," she promised darkly.
"I'm not going to do anything to you," Maul said ominously, raising a hand and snapping his fingers.
Behind him, Ezra sagged as if unfrozen from a paralysis, his eyes growing present and terrified.
He immediately lunged forward towards Maul.
"Leave her alone!" he cried.
Maul sidestepped the boy's clumsy attempt to knock him over. As Ezra was still stumbling past him, his tattooed arm flashed out, snagging the young Jedi by the neck and pulling him back, flush against Maul's chest.
Ezra choked a bit at the hold around his throat, and Sabine watched with petrified horror and fear as Maul grabbed a thick handful of Ezra's hair and pulled warningly.
Ezra's head tilted slightly back from the pressure and he went still, only his hands moving, grabbing onto Maul's arm and straining to insert fingers into the gap between his neck to loosen Maul's grip. His frightened blue eyes looked straight at her and she could see the fear and worry and despair in them.
"This is your mess, Ezra," she heard Maul hiss into his ear. "So you get to clean it up."
Ezra tried to look at him. "What—" he rasped out, thinly. "What do you want me—?"
"You're going to send a message," Maul told him, casually releasing him. "Take a lightsaber to her back. Leave a few marks. Carve your initials, perhaps. Or take off a limb or two."
Both teens gaped at him in horror, and Sabine felt sick to her stomach.
She watched as Maul took something off his belt—Ezra's lightsaber, she recognized in a moment—and handed it to Ezra.
"Make it slow," Maul ordered coldly.
-SWR-
Ezra's mind had been silently screaming ever since Maul had dragged Sabine into the room, something in him knowing the ex-Sith was going to hurt her, or use him to hurt her, and dreading it with a fear that pulsed in his stomach in sharp, painful pangs. But of course he couldn't do anything, couldn't even move until Maul released his command.
Even then, he could feel the chains of his programming still around him, as Maul pressed his lightsaber into his palm.
The warning in the yellow eyes made the unspoken threat very clear:
If Ezra did not do this himself, Maul would reactivate his programming and make him.
His throat was tight and so, so dry. He shook, finding it hard to breathe.
"Please..." he begged. "I—I can't—"
"You will," Maul told him chillingly. "Or else..."
He let that hang, ominously.
Ezra darted a look towards Sabine. She met his eyes, horrified and frightened, and his heart wrenched, twisting into knots. He couldn't bear that look on her face, the wordless terror she was looking at him with, as they both realized the ghastly trap they were in.
He couldn't make himself move for a long moment. Hyper-aware of Maul's looming presence next to him, and an invisible pressure around his head, Ezra still tried to stall by adjusting and readjusting his grip on the lightsaber hilt.
It was hard to breathe. He couldn't do this, not Sabine, not Sabine, he would never forgive himself, he couldn't, he couldn't, he had to, he—
Maul cleared his throat, growing impatient.
"Swallow—" he began.
"NO!" Ezra shouted in panic, jerking, taking a step to put himself between Maul and Sabine. "I—"
Maul crossed his arms and leaned back on one leg, expectantly.
Swallowing, the hard lump almost choking him, Ezra turned and faced her. He fumbled with the lightsaber in his hands before his shaking fingers finally found the button to ignite it.
The green blade blossomed to life.
Ezra watched Sabine wilt into her shoulders, her eyes crumpling, and felt swells of guilt crashing over him. Through locked eyes a thousand silent words were said, both of them trying to give each other a fleeting bit of comfort in this horrible moment.
Sabine broke eye contact first, lowering her head, curling all the way up onto the floor in resignation.
"Get... get it over with," she stammered, voice thick and trembling.
She had rolled onto her front, presenting him with his target. Ezra felt like was going to shake out of his bones as he slowly stepped over, the lightsaber hanging by his side, held limp in his left hand.
She was too small-looking, too thin, scrunching up and bracing for a pain he had to inflict on her.
Bile thick at the back of his throat, he raised the blade.
"I'm sorry," he told her in a desperate whisper.
He tried to make the first cut quick.
A shallow diagonal stroke, that could be turned into the first of an aurebesh "E". If he wanted. If the very thought of marking Sabine like that didn't make him want to puke.
"Aaaaaah!"
Sabine screamed as soon as blade met flesh, hunching up into her shoulders as Ezra hastily drew the blade away, slicing thinly.
His hand trembled, his expression wretched.
Sabine's horrible scream died down quickly and she panted, gasping with huge sobbing gulps.
His throat was tight. Ezra wanted nothing more than to whip around and attack Maul, chop his head off for making him do this to Sabine. Knowing it would be a pointless endeavor, though, he clenched his teeth and the hilt and focused on keeping his anger out of the next cut.
Another diagonal slash, just above and to the right of the first. He wasn't going to carve his initials, this was sick enough as it was, Sabine's shriek of pain gutted him, he hated this, he hated Maul, he was never going to be able to erase this awful moment from his mind. He could smell the burnt flesh and clothes and it churned his stomach.
Ezra caught a glimmer of tears in Sabine's eyes as she lifted her head.
His breath stalled.
He managed two more quick slashes before he couldn't bear it anymore.
"I can't!" he cried, dropping his saber, practically flinging it away from him in revulsion. "I can't, I won't do this anymore!" He buried his face in his clenched fists, wishing he could block out the sound of Sabine's crying, her tiny little moans of pain. The smell of sizzling flesh was sharp in the air; his heart pounded, but he couldn't inflict more of this on Sabine anymore.
Annoyed, Maul began to straighten. "Ezra—"
"At least give us a moment!" Sabine burst out unexpectedly.
Ezra peeked up from his hands, looking at her in confusion. She had leaned herself up on her right elbow—hair messy, cheek smudged, tear tracks clearly visible—and was addressing Maul, something angry and hurt in her eyes.
"Let me say goodbye to him." Her face lost its fierce edge. Eyes crinkled. "Please," she begged.
Maul mulled that over for a moment. A long moment of horrible tense silence.
"Very well," he acquiesced.
Stirring, he stepped towards Ezra, who flinched as Maul addressed him.
"Remember, there is no way out of these caves that I do not know about." Hard eyes stared him down. "If you try to escape, or help her escape, you will regret it," he warned sternly. Maul reached for his own lightsaber this time, drawing it out and brandishing the hilt. "I am going to go deal with your Rebel friends outside," he said. With his free hand he reached for Ezra, who squeaked fearfully as his jaw was captured in a painful grip. Maul brought Ezra uncomfortably close, teeth slightly gritted and breath foul as he hissed, "She had better be dead when I get back."
With that, he let go, and swirled out of the room like the departure of a dark thundercloud.
Ezra held his breath, heart skipping painfully inside his chest, waiting until the footsteps had faded away into silence.
Another tense tick or two.
Then he flung himself down next to Sabine.
He grabbed for the binders and loosed them at once.
"Sabine—" he strained, stomach knotting at seeing the wounds he'd dealt up close, the seared flesh, the ugly burns. "I'm sorry! I'm so—"
She waved a hand sharply to cut him off, getting her legs underneath her unsteadily. "It's all right." She pushed herself to a sitting position with a careful exhale and scooted around to face him. "I know you didn't have a choice."
She grabbed onto his arms and pulled him to her, wrapping arms around his neck and burying her face in his collar.
He was afraid to hold her back at first, and agitate the lightsaber cuts, but eventually his hands found the back of her head, fingers tangling in her soft purple hair.
"I'm sorry..." he choked out.
"I know," she said in a trembling whisper.
Ezra shook himself, pushing her back. He might not have had a choice before, but he had one now, and he didn't have a lot of time to take it. "Can you stand?" he urged. He glanced anxiously back towards the tunnel Maul had disappeared down. "I gotta get you out of here."
"Ezra—" she started to object.
"I don't care what he does to me," Ezra interrupted. "He can hurt me all he wants, I just can't—" His voice broke a bit as he spoke, his hands fisted into the fabric of the arms of her bodysuit. "I—I can't... let him hurt you, use me like that again to hurt you, I can't... I can't do that again, Sabine. I—"
He shook himself, regaining his composure.
"You have to escape now while you still have a chance," he told her urgently.
"I'm not leaving you," she told him, fierce determination in her shimmering eyes. "And..." she said, looking down, reaching into her belt and pulling out a detonation trigger. "I may have had a crazy plan up my sleeve," she admitted.
Ezra stared from her to the detonation trigger and fell just a little bit in love for just a split second as his hope surged.
-SWR-
The Mandalorian's boasted about back-up was not yet present, when Maul exited the caverns, but he could feel vague flickers of presence on his Force Sense that told him they were coming.
He would handle the matter quickly, then return to collect his apprentice, who would have undoubtably taken advantage of his momentary absence and allowed the girl to escape by then. The young Jedi padawan was nothing if not horribly predictable in that regard, and he'd be punished appropriately for it.
The girl would die soon enough, with the rest of them, anyway.
Maul ignited his double-bladed saber and flourished it, keeping the arc safely away from the ordinance piled by the caverns. He inhaled to center himself in the Force, breathing in the chill air of the blue night.
The sense of pulsing danger that met him when he cleared his mind was much closer than he expected.
Maul's eyes popped open, too late he saw and heard the beeping timer stuck on the outside rock.
He had enough time to blurt a shocked and incredulous, "What—?!" before the device blew and he learned firsthand exactly how ten proton torpedos going off at once in the same contained space felt hitting a body.
-SWR-
"We might want to brace," she'd told Ezra, right before the detonation went off, and even shielded by the rock and the twists and turns of the tunnels the explosion was almost deafening, and a rush of heat and wind and whistling air blasted through the chamber.
Ezra clutched onto her, shielding her body with his own, squeezing her painfully tight.
The roar of the blast rolled through the tunnels, bringing the echoes of crashing rock and rubble and the squeak of krykna as they were hit by the sheer force, the entrance where she'd laid her trap collapsing... and then it subsided.
Gravel scritched. Dust clouded up and settled.
Sabine grimaced, the sting in her back stabbing with sharp aches and twinges, but she didn't ask Ezra to let go, not yet. She could endure this. It hurt like hell, but Sabine knew that if Ezra had refused and Maul had reactivated his conditioning... the brainwashed Ezra would not have been nearly as hesitant or timid with his cuts.
Ezra had given her what mercy he could.
He noticed her grimacing and the pained grunts escaping her firmly closed mouth eventually, though, and hastened to pull back.
"Sorry!" he blurted, the guilt in his eyes returning.
She screwed her face tight, one hand bracing on her lower back, one hand on his shoulder. "Think that killed him?" she asked.
Ezra glanced towards the collapsed tunnel, his eyes scanning for something invisible. "I..." he said, "I don't know. I don't think so."
Sabine nodded. "Let's not stick around then," she said grimly.
He hurried to help her up, the worry in his expression raw, the way he almost flinched every time they made contact, like he was afraid touching her would cause her more pain, making her heart ache for him.
"I don't know which of the other tunnels leads out," he confessed, voice small.
A soft smile stole across her face. "Leave that part to me," she told him, leaning on him a moment in order to press a button on her gauntlet, activate a little hologram map of the tunnel system, something compiled from data taken on their last jaunt here.
For a second, when she stepped forward, Ezra didn't move with her, and Sabine whipped her head around to look with alarm at him.
She saw his thoughts laid bare on his face. He was still afraid of hurting her, afraid they wouldn't get far enough away from Maul, afraid to believe he could actually escape this nightmare.
He didn't think he deserved to be rescued.
She saw it all in a split second before her frantic tugging on his arm shook him out of it. He pinched his eyes closed, exhaling, shoulders sagging a bit in relief.
Then he took her hand and joined her as they turned and ran.
Sabine hoped, as her feet pounded and her back twinged with every rushing step, that two tons of cavern rubble buried on top of him was enough to at least slow Maul down.
They made it to another exit without seeing him, and soon the crackling static on her comlink resolved into familar Rebel voices, Sato praising her for the rescue, promising to send medics around to them at once.
She kept a firm hold of Ezra's trembling hand as they waited together in the chilly blackness of the starry Atollon night.