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It was such a small thing, in the end, that changed everything. Boba had been acting superior to the cadets. Later, he wouldn’t even remember what he had done. But it had been enough that one of the cadets had snapped.
“Don’t pretend you’re better than us because the Prime stole you from your batchmates,” the cadet burst out.
Boba snapped back with something unimportant, something he would forget before the day was done. And then a trainer came over, picked him up, and brought him to his father.
And that was it.
The situation was done. Over. Boba shouldn’t have thought about it again.
But he did.
Those words haunted him. He thought about them every night, as he fell asleep. They echoed in his dreams. He found himself thinking about them when he was trying to study. As most children that age, Boba’s first solution was to go to his father.
“Buir,” he said one day at dinner.
“Elek, ner ad’ika,” Jango Fett said.
“Do I have batchmates?”
“No,” Jango said sharply. He scowled darkly. “Who’s been telling you that osik?”
Boba was intimidated. He didn’t remember exactly which cadet had mentioned it, and he was worried that Jango would get angry he had forgotten. Better, in his inexperienced view, to lie.
“I was just wondering,” he lied. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie. He had been wondering. “All the clones have batchmates.”
“Well you don’t,” Jango said firmly. “You’re my son, not a soulless clone.”
“Yes, buir,” Boba agreed.
And that should have been the end of it. Jango certainly hadn’t raised Boba to doubt his words. But…
Boba’s nights were now more disturbed than ever. Jango’s scowl joined the cadet’s words.
“Don’t think you’re better than us,” the cadet hissed, scowling with Jango’s scowl. “The Prime stole you from your batchmates. He stole you from us, and now you are lost!”
Boba had forgotten which cadet had said it. He had forgotten the exact words. But he hadn’t forgotten the most important parts.
Not better than. They thought he was equal to the cadets, the clones, the troopers who would fight and die for the hated Jedi and the Republic. Inherently, no matter how well he carried on Jango Fett’s legacy, they would always see him as no better than one of them.
Stolen. They saw him as stolen from his batchmates, his brothers, the clones who owned nothing, not even themselves. They saw Jango as a thief, his thief, not his father.
It was all so alien to him. He had been raised believing that he and his father were a family unit, both entirely separate from and far above the clones. But what really separated Boba from the clones? He had always known that he had been made the same way as the clones; Jango had explained it multiple times as he told Boba they were different from the clones. Every time he saw the clones, he saw his own face or his father’s. What made him different from them, besides the rate at which they aged? Jango had said often that the clones had no souls, unlike Mandalorians. But the clones thought they had souls. He had heard of an afterlife that they believed in, that they told stories about. He had heard rumors of some clones managing to contact their dead in dreams, which was held up as proof that they had souls. Jango had never given any proof the clones didn’t have souls, acting as if it was self-evident, obvious, and inherent.
And what if Boba was a clone? Not just in how he was made, but one of the cadets?
The dreams continued, no matter how hard Boba thought about it, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it.
It tormented them, and he didn’t know why. He did know, instinctively, that if he wanted the dreams to stop, he would have to do something.
A chance came when Boba was dropped off with the Alphas for babysitting, while Jango went off-world on some business. Boba sat next to Alpha-01, who was practicing sewing up a wound in a chunk of fake flesh during their small amount of free time. Boba had found Alpha-01 was one of the calmest of the Alphas.
“Alpha-01,” Boba said, looking up. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, kid,” Alpha-01 said. He (and his batchmates) were already as tall as Jango and weren’t done growing. “What’s up?”
“Do I have batchmates?” Boba asked.
A look of faint panic entered Alpha-01’s eyes, and he glanced around as if for help.
“You lonely?” Alpha-01 asked.
“Maybe.” Boba refused to give him any more information.
“Sorry, kiddo,” Alpha-01 said. “You should try getting used to that. Prime took you as his son; he won’t accept you calling anyone your brother.”
Alpha-01 made to get up, when Boba stopped him by grabbing his arm.
“I’m just curious,” Boba insisted.
And he was more curious now than ever. He hadn’t expected an Alpha to call Jango raising Boba as ‘taking’ him. Nor had he expected an Alpha to immediately consider what Jango would want. They were all so stubborn, he had thought. But Alpha seemed to act like Boba’s question was more than it was.
“Well, you should stop,” Alpha-01 scolded. “Curiosity is unnecessary.”
“I’m going to be a bounty hunter,” Boba argued. “And I can provide an incentive to tell me what you know.”
“An incentive,” Alpha-01 chuckled, raising an eyebrow and sitting back down. “Do you need me to explain why you can’t beat me up?”
“Not that sort of incentive,” Boba rolled his eyes. Not only could the Alphas easily pick him up and manhandle him, but he was pretty sure they would all back each other up. Instead of being stupid and wildly overestimating his own strength, Boba dug around in his backpack, coming up with a treat Jango packed for him. Alpha-01’s eyes widened and both his eyebrows rose.
“You got me, kid, that’s a good incentive,” Alpha-01 said. “Hand it over, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Boba did so.
“Well?” he promted.
“I know you aren’t part of the Alpha batch,” Alpha-01 said. “The timeline doesn’t match up. You might be part of the Null batch. They’re Trainer Skirata’s little ducklings. Or part of Ninety Nine’s batch, since we aren’t sure how old he really is.”
“Thanks!” Boba chirped. He got up and started marching away. He didn’t know who Ninety Nine was, but he did know Skirata.
A hand grabbed the back of Boba’s shirt and lifted. Boba let out a yelp of offense as his feet left the ground and he was carried back to Alpha-01.
“You can’t just tell the little shit that and let him go,” the Alpha carrying him scolded Alpha-01. “He’s going to get beat up by that little pack of little shit-heads.”
Alpha-01 met Boba’s eyes.
“Alpha-17 is talking about the Nulls,” Alpha-01 explained. “I avoid them. Alpha-17 doesn’t.”
“More like you hide behind me,” Alpha-17 scoffed. He didn’t really sound mad, though.
“You enjoy it,” Alpha-01 said with great amusement. “You think they’d beat up Boba though? Risk Prime’s wrath?”
“They have Skirata’s protection; they think they can get away with murder,” Alpha-17 said, putting Boba down but not releasing him. “And they feel they earned their adoption. If Boba so much as implies he’s part of their little pack, the shit-heads will freak.”
“He’d know better than me,” Alpha-01 admitted. “You should probably go talk to Ninety Nine.”
“I was thinking about asking Skirata,” Boba said.
“He’ll just tell you to ask Prime,” Alpha-01 said.
“I don’t know Ninety Nine,” Boba admitted.
“Ah,” Alpha-01 said. He glanced at Alpah-17.
“One of the older batches, from when the long necks were figuring out the fast-aging,” Alpha17 said. “He’s the last of his batch. The others were scrapped as defective, but he was kept for study. If any clone knows who your batchmates are or were, it’d be him. He sleeps in Cleaning Station 1701. And you won’t go off to find him while we’re baby-sitting you, brat. Disappear when the Prime can only blame himself.”
“Fine,” Boba grumbled.
But if Boba was part of Ninety Nine’s batch, that would mean most of Boba’s batchmates would be dead. The thought was awful. Just a slight difference, and Boba would be dead, too, maybe before he opened his eyes. Or maybe the longnecks would kill him later. He didn’t know when Ninety Nine’s batch was scrapped. He hoped it was before they knew what was happening.
“Hey, brat,” Alpha-17 said. “You sould know that there’s a chance that you aren’t part of any existing batch. There were plenty of batches that were defective. But don’t let anyone tell you that you weren’t part of a batch. The longnecks always produce us in batches.”
“That means you’ve got brothers waiting for you,” Alpha-01 said gently. “When you go marching far away, you won’t have to march alone.”
Boba swallowed hard. He knew the clones had different ideas about the Manda than proper Mandalorians. One of those things was that clones were reunited with their batchmates when they died, and that all the clones would march as a single army, defective or not.
But that meant that Boba would be marching with clones he had never met, possibly clones who had died before he had spoken his first word. And he would not be marching with Jango Fett, his father.
The Prime had no place in the clone’s afterlife.
As Alpha-17 had said, Boba didn’t get a chance to find Ninety Nine while he was with them. Fortunately, Boba was less haunted by the words and the dreams while he was with them. Boba thought that maybe, just maybe, his dead batchmates approved of the steps he was taking to find them.
Alpha-01 did not eat all of the bribe or even most of it. Instead, he broke and tore it into many tiny little pieces and shared it among his batchmates.
Boba felt intensely jealous, though he didn’t understand why. He could ask Jango for a whole one and eat it on his own. But watching the Alphas receive the smallest of pieces, he felt longing and pain. Even those who refused a piece because there wasn’t enough for them all, Boba felt jealous of. They had gotten nothing! What could he envy them for?
When Jango returned, Boba greeted him as joyfully as ever. Somehow, though, Jango knew something was wrong.
“What happened?” Jango asked. “Did the Alphas do something to you?”
“No!” Boba exclaimed. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Try telling me anyways,” Jango encouraged.
“I got jealous,” Boba said. “Alpha-01 offered Alpha-17 a piece of a treat, but Alpha-17 refused. And I got jealous of ’17! Doesn’t that make no sense at all?”
Jango was silent for a while. When he finally spoke, his voice was full of forced cheeriness.
“I know what that means,” Jango said.
“You do?” Boba gasped. “What does that mean?”
“That you have too much free time,” Jango said, grinning mischievously.
Boba’s mouth dropped open in outrage.
True to Jango’s words, Boba’s free time was curtailed greatly. Boba didn’t have time to explore at all. For a few weeks, the only person Boba saw was Jango, who was teaching him how to use blasters. Even after that, Boba was far too busy to seek out Ninety Nine. For several months, Boba was almost too busy to see another clone, let alone seek out a specific one.
But Boba had no choice. His batchmates were getting restless, and his sleep suffered for it. He saw shadowy figures, some his size, some bigger, and some smaller, all begging him to find them. They wailed in his sleep that he had been stolen from them, that he was lost, that they missed him so badly. Boba woke crying in the night, but he refused to tell Jango about the ‘nightmares’, as Jango called them. Were they nightmares? Or were they the dead, begging him to remember them?
Boba didn’t know. But even if they were just nightmares, he was pretty sure he still needed to do something to stop them, and finding Ninety Nine was the best idea.
After about a month of near constant nightmares, and Jango’s increasing fussiness over Boba, Jango called a halt to all of Bobaa’s lessons and decreed that Boba could have a break.
Boba was immensely relieved. Finally, he would have the chance to seek out Ninety Nine. Now, his batchmates could be happy and Boba would be able to sleep through the night.
The hallways of Kamino were all similar-looking, but after growing up there, Boba found Ninety Nine’s room easily enough. It was getting late, though, and he hesitantly knocked on the door of Cleaning Station 1701. Moments later, the door whooshed open. A man, older-looking than Jango, but with a very similar face, smiled down at Boba. He had a gentle look in his eyes, far gentler than anyone else Boba had ever seen.
“Boba, right?” Ninety Nine asked softly. Even his voice was gentle, so unlike Jango’s or the Alphas’, as if he never expected to shout orders over a battle field.
“Yes,” Boba confirmed.
Never before had it felt strange that Boba was known to practically everyone in Kamino, whereas he couldn’t know everyone. But this time, it felt odd. Between the way the Alphas spoke respectfully of Ninety Nine, the gentleness of the old clone, and his uniqueness, Boba felt like he should have known of Ninety Nine as much as Ninety Nine knew of him. But Boba was not there to think. He was there for answers.
“Are you my batchmate?” Boba asked.
Ninety Nine looked surprised.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I…”
The words fell like a blow on Boba. Ninety Nine had been his best lead. If Ninety Nine didn’t know, would Boba ever? Boba sensed the nightmares nipping at his heels. He was tired, and he knew his nightmares would not stop simply because he had tried. The dead demanded to be remembered.
Boba interrupted him by breaking into tears. Ninety Nine knelt down and gathered Boba into a hug. It was warm and soft like curling up in a warm bed when the air was chilly.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Ninety Nine asked. “I cannot promise I can fix it, but I can offer advice.”
“My batchmates,” Boba whimpered. “They want me to find them, I think. But I can’t. You were my last hope. I’ve tried everything!”
“I might be able to find out who your batchmates are,” Ninety Nine soothed.
“Really?” Boba asked, hope rising in his chest.
“Everything will be recorded, and I can peek at those records,” Ninety Nine explained. “I promise, I will do my best to find who your batchmates were.”
Boba dreamed that night, though it did not wake him. There were others clustered around him, excited and waiting.
The next day, he found Ninety Nine again to learn the truth.