Chapter Text
There’s a woman living in the woods.
Red hair, so bright it’s almost pink. Glasses. A bad attitude.
No grasp of Basic. Absolutely none.
Mihaye has been a bartender for a long time. Several human lifetimes. He hears all the gossip that happens in this city. The woman is not the strangest thing he’s ever encountered, but as time passes, he realizes that she’s kind of up there.
Technically, nobody should be living in the woods.
Nobody can enforce that, though. They tried. She escaped, multiple times, and eventually they just… gave up.
She hunts, they know. Brings in the skins to trade for cash. Everyone’s pretty sure she steals from the orchards, too, but they can’t prove it.
And then she shows up at his bar and watches the other patrons. Picking at information. Mihaye doesn’t know what she’s looking for, given that she doesn’t even speak the language, except then she comes up to the bar and deposits four credits, pointing to a human patron’s glass.
She was gauging drink prices so he wouldn’t mark her up.
Fair enough.
He pours it for her, takes the credits, and moves on. He keeps an eye on her just in case, but there’s not much to notice. She just sits with her back to the bar, sipping on liquor, watching the room.
The red eyes with the indistinct pupils have him thinking near-human, but he’s not sure what kind. Mixed, maybe.
She looks far too skinny to be able to do all the things the rangers had suggested of her, escaping through the trees and throwing assailants several meters at a time… but they’d also said she ran on water, so maybe her near-human species was just stronger than the average in addition to whatever that was.
People do look at her. Most are assessing. A few are leering. Mihaye has other shit to focus on, but he’s also not immune to the question of ‘wait, why do her clothes look ironed?’
She’s living in the woods.
Where did she get lipgloss.
Mihaye assumes she stole it. Most people probably do.
She turns back to him, at some point, putting down another four credits and pushing the glass of ice back to him. Requesting a refill.
He gestures for her to wait a moment as he finishes up with another customer.
She blinks and waits, and as he wipes down the bar, he hears a slam and a scream. He whips around, and sees that the woman has slammed the face of one of his regulars down against the bar, nose already bleeding, and arm wrenched so far back that nobody would be surprised if the shoulder was torn.
She sniffs and lets go, and the man slides and stumbles to the ground, groaning.
Unable to use words, on account of that pesky language barrier, Mihaye does his best to gesture what the kriff was that?
She makes a face, nose wrinkling, and then points to the man, turns sideways, and grabs her own ass.
…well, that’s pretty clear.
Not unexpected, either.
“Gean, I thought you said you understood when we told you that we’d kick you out if you got grabby with other patrons again,” Mihaye says.
From the ground, Gean, garbles something, spits—great, now they’ll have to clean up bloody phlegm from the hardwood—and shouts, “she broke my nose!”
The woman looks down at him with an expression of such disgust that Mihaye can only assume she’s about to hit him again.
He calls for security and reaches over to, barely, tap her hand. She manages to get a kick in on Gean’s ribs before he does, but it doesn’t seem to be that hard. For a given value of it.
“I know you don’t understand me,” Mihaye says, “but if you do that again, I’ll have to kick both of you out. You got a good hit in, leave the rest to security.”
Her lip curls, but she seems to get the gist of it. She steps away from Gean and crosses her arms across her chest as security hauls him away.
Mihaye pours her that drink.
--
Perpura is not frantic with worry, but she’s not exactly calm. She is carrying a little ball of anxiety in her chest, and that anxiety is called ‘the tooka got out, and my six-year-old is going to be inconsolable if we can’t find him.’
Kliwo has been okay so far, because Perpura took her to the print shop to make ‘if found’ posters. There’s a small cash reward—very small, really—but it should be enough. Maybe. It’s enough to keep her baby’s hopes up.
The little girl is running up to everyone in the neighborhood with the flyers, determined to locate a lead herself. Perpura does her best to steer her daughter away from the less trustworthy individuals, but she fails to prevent the girl from approaching the lady from the woods.
(The rumor mill says they have a name for her, now. Uzumaki Karin. Nobody’s sure if that’s family-personal or personal-family, but she seems to prefer people calling her Uzumaki.)
“Excuse me!” Kliwo says loudly, “have you seen Arugi?”
She shoves the paper up at Uzumaki.
The woman looks at the paper, then at Kliwo, and then actually takes the page. She looks up to meet Perpura’s eyes as she hurries over to her daughter. She looks back down to the paper.
Uzumaki scoffs, says something that Perpura doesn’t understand at all, and then holds up her hand and closes her eyes.
She tilts her head. Perpura takes her daughter’s hand and starts to back away.
With a sigh, Uzumaki opens her eyes. “Genin douyou ni…”
She looks at Perpura again, holds up the page, and taps the part about the reward.
And then she turns and starts walking.
Kliwo stops to stare after her, and asks, “should we go with her?”
“Honey, I don’t think—”
“Maybe she knows where Arugi is!”
Based on the tapping on the reward, it’s a solid maybe, but—
Uzumaki turns to look at them over her shoulder, rolls her eyes, and makes an odd gesture with her hand, like she’s scratching the air itself.
“I think she wants us to follow her,” Kliwo decides, and Perpura—like, yes, probably, but the woman is dangerous. It’s not a small town, there are over a hundred thousand people here, but everyone’s heard about her. It’s been in all the papers. She’s completely evaded the police by running on water.
Uzumaki gives up on getting them to cooperate, and instead just…
Jumps onto the nearest roof and promptly out of sight.
“Wow,” Kliwo breathes.
(Uzumaki finds them ten minutes and three streets later, Arugi in her hands and squirming.)
(Perpura gives her the money, barely able to get out a ‘thank you,’ and the woman leaves.)
(At least Kliwo doesn’t have to get a story about sending the tooka to a farm upstate.)
--
Yanis has heard some rumors. She is desperate, or she wouldn’t be considering them.
She goes to a specific bar, praying to the high heavens, and spots a head of red-pink hair.
Okay! Okay. So, she’s here.
Yanis goes up to her and is noticed before she has to tap the woman on the shoulder or something.
There’s a language barrier, a pretty solid one, but…
Yanis holds up a missing poster.
Uzumaki looks it over. Considers. And says, “no.”
Yanis’s heart drops. “No?”
The woman’s mouth twists. “No.”
The bartender takes pity. “She can only find people or animals she’s met before; almost every time someone asks her to find a lost tooka, she says no. I think the only exception so far was when the cops were looking for a Trandoshan from off-planet, and there were only five in the city, so she just took them to each one in turn until they found the specific guy.”
That’s… weird. “So there just needs to be something unique?”
“Or nothing else in the area,” the bartender says. Uzumaki’s ignoring them both. “She did some victim location for that collapsed office building a few weeks ago, I think.”
Maybe… “Lost hiker? Should only be a few sentients in the woods, and most of them are search and rescue.”
He shrugs. “Show her the map, I guess.”
Scrambling, Yanis opens the interactive map that’s showing all the rangers currently trying to find the lost hiker. She zooms way out, and points to herself, and then the one dot that is herself. Another tap, and there are ID photos on all the other rangers’ dots.
She traces the hiking path, waves at the entire area of the canton park, and then points to the missing hiker’s photo again.
Uzumaki looks interested, now. She frowns at the map, eyes flicking from one spot to the next, and then sets it down, closes her eyes, and does something weird with her hands.
A few seconds pass. Yanis holds her breath.
Uzumaki opens her eyes halfway, though she doesn’t move her hands out of their odd position. She stares down at the map for long, long moment.
And then she pokes at four different spots. “Person.”
Oh! Okay, okay, Yanis needs to mark it out with ‘points of interest’ pins ASAP.
Uzumaki keeps her finger on one spot in particular. “Injury.”
…that’s probably their missing hiker.
“Need help?” Uzumaki asks. “Closer?”
Probably asking if they’ll need help narrowing it down once they’re closer.
That’ll be more expensive, but…
“Yes, please,” Yanis says. This is already faster than if they kept trying to find the guy on their own. “Come with me.”
--
Jango Fett doesn’t usually have trouble hunting people, but this is a nightmare of a situation.
It’s easy enough to find a sleazy businessman. The guy is living it up in a VIP seat at an insultingly expensive nightclub, but Jango’s been told in no uncertain terms to avoid collateral damage. Nobody should be getting shot except maybe bodyguards. No civilians. Not in public, either.
Fucking annoying.
The problem comes in when the guy leaves the club. Three nights in a row, the man has managed to… somehow lose Jango tailing him on the way to wherever he holes up in at night. Hops in a limo. Drives around a bit. Exits into one building or another, and then Jango’s tracking chip goes dead; then, when he enters the building, the man’s nowhere to be found.
He complains about this on the phone to Roz, one of his few acquaintances that isn’t now teaching on Kamino. She laughs at him.
“Try that redhead,” she says. “City’s a few hours from the one you’re in, but they say she can find anyone she’s met even once.”
Jango snorts. “They say the same thing about me.”
Roz shrugs, the holo glitching with the speed of her wings. “Believe me or don’t, but there’ve been rumors for a few months now, ever since she found Bossk.”
Jango freezes, just a moment. “Bossk?”
“I mean, she didn’t catch him or anything,” Roz dismisses, “but the cops asked her to find him for them, and she did, from four miles away. Then everyone failed to capture him, but she didn’t help with that part, just asked for her payment and left.”
Trandoshans aren’t exactly common on this planet, but finding him from a distance is a bit more unique.
“I’ll look her up,” Jango says.
…then it turns out that Uzumaki Karin can find anyone, including his sleazy businessman.
He meets her. Explains the job, so slowly that he wants to brain himself on the nearest wall, and then brings her with him to the first city with the stupid nightclub.
She looks at the sleazy businessman. She turns to get a drink. She ignores Jango and the club as a whole.
When the target leaves, she doesn’t. She just sits at the bar, finger tracing the rim of her glass.
“What are you waiting for?” Jango asks. Demands. Whatever.
“For mark when stop moving,” she says, which is…
Jango is going to trust in this. Because Roz said so.
Almost an hour later, Uzumaki gets up and leaves. She does not pay her tab. Jango, gritting his teeth, does it for her.
He exits, does not immediately see her, and then hears a whistle.
She is on a flagpole jutting out from a ten-foot building.
Upon getting his attention, she turns and runs up the side of the building, as if gravity is a suggestion.
Jango… fuck, he is doing this because he trusts Roz. Roz would not send him to a Jedi for help. Surely there are other people in the galaxy that can ignore basic forces of physics.
He powers up his jetpack to follow.
Uzumaki jumps between buildings in a way that doesn’t seem human, and Jango finds himself idly wondering what else she might be. The jumping has a few options, but the eyes… the thing with the pupils. It’s so odd. They’re not cataracts, and while her eyesight clearly isn’t good, the fact that she has glasses indicates she at least can see. Not well, but at all.
Also the running-up-walls thing. That is also relevant.
She leads him to a fancy apartment building; the place had been among the list of those properties that the guy owned via shell corporation, but that applied to half the luxury apartment buildings in the city.
Uzumaki walks to one of the balconies and crouches, still sideways. She points in.
“You’re sure?” Fett asks.
She blinks at him and points again.
It’ll have to do. Jango breaks through the window and immediately has the entire room screaming.
By the end of it, three security guards are dead, one woman—a waitress? a sex worker? a secretary? unclear—has fled to the bathroom, and the target is unconscious.
Uzumaki climbed in at some point, and is raiding the pantry.
“How are you planning to carry all that?” Jango asks.
She looks at him, blinks, and says, “fuuinjutsu.”
That means less than nothing to him.
He focuses on the bounty, deciding on the best way to get him the hell out of here. By the time he’s done tying up the body, Uzumaki’s back. She’s not laden down with anything obvious other than what she came with, but the pantry is mostly empty, so like… whatever. Not Jango’s business.
She holds out a hand, palm up.
“Once we’re out,” Jango says.
She glares at him. “I find you if you skip.”
…yeah, she definitely could. Jango’s pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to shake him down once she did find him, but just having a tail would be annoying.
“Understood,” Jango says, striding for the door into the rest of the building. “Let’s go.”
On the way out, she grabs a few glass bottles of cologne from a dresser, and hides them.
Jango still doesn’t know where, but it’s also still not his problem.
--
Peppal knows this won’t be cheap.
It’s just that it’ll probably be cheaper than the alternative.
And it’ll save more lives.
Probably.
Ze knows this. Ze does. Ze even managed to convince zir supervisor of it.
It’s still nerve-wracking, though, to watch as a woman strides past the thermal cameras and other detection methods to stand in front of a sixty-story hotel that collapsed in the earthquake, and just… do something weird with her hands.
She takes two minutes to focus, and then turns to Peppal and waves zir over. “Sixty-three alive. Twelve dying soon. Ten nearly dead. Dying soon first?”
A triage. That’s something that thermal imaging wouldn’t have gotten them. “The twelve can be saved if we get them soon? And can be reached without endangering the others, or—”
“Always danger,” Uzumaki sniffs. “I can choose for you.”
Peppal does not want to let her do that. Ze pulls up a large, 3D hologram of what the wreckage looks like from the outside. “Show me where.”
Uzumaki looks from the hologram to the pile of duracrete, and then starts carefully pointing at individual coordinates.
Some even match to the thermal cameras, which ze knows haven’t been shown to her yet. Some are deeper, where the cameras can’t reach yet, or are obscured by leaking steam and sputtering fires.
“Okay,” Peppal says. “Which ones are dying?”
By the end of the day, and several buildings later, Peppal is sure that the cost of Uzumaki’s help with locating survivors is justifiable.
An eye-watering bill, maybe. But justifiable.
(They saved lives. Isn’t that enough?)
--
Boba Fett has never met buir’s friend before, and he thinks maybe his dad was lying about this being a friend at all.
A lot of his dad’s friends are grumpy and mean, but Miss Uzumaki doesn’t even seem to like Dad, like, at all.
Also, she just looks at Boba for a bit, and then says, “copy?”
Dad said that she doesn’t really know Basic, let alone any other language, so she probably means ‘clone.’
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Dad tells her. Uzumaki rolls her eyes. “How’s that language module treating you?”
Uzumaki sneers, gesturing at the corner. “Do you want my scores? I am not a child.”
“A language module?” Boba whispers.
“One of those ones meant for first contact with an isolated civilization,” Dad tells him. “Only real option for someone whose only language is something that even protocol droids don’t recognize.”
…yeah, okay. If Dad was going to work with her more than once, it would probably be easier if she knew Basic. Or Mando’a, but that probably wouldn’t be as useful with other people.
Uzumaki fake-coughs. “What you want?”
“I need to find someone on another planet,” Dad tells her.
She gestures. “You know which planet? I have a range.”
“I remember,” Dad says. He sounds annoyed. Boba thinks he remembers that Dad tried getting her help with something before and she just told him to go away because she was good, but not good enough to search an entire sector. “I know the planet. It only has one continent, but it’s a big one.”
She mouths ‘continent’ to herself, and Boba watches as Dad sighs and pulls up a holo of the planet to show her.
“A handful of cities here on the edge, but the last we heard, he’s gone into hiding in the forest, which is pretty sparsely populated. Comes into town once in a while for supplies, looking rough.”
“I understand most of that,” Uzumaki says. Boba agrees with her; he even knows Basic, but he still needed a bit too long to translate ‘sparsely’ into Mando’a. Dad needs to try harder to use small words. “Is there something special about this one?”
Dad laughs, but he doesn’t sound like he thinks it’s actually funny in any way. “The man’s half-machine, and this isn’t a high-tech planet. That work?”
Just in case, Dad pulls up a holo again, showing all the prosthetic bits the bounty has.
Uzumaki frowns at it, considering. “This is… twi’lek?”
“Yeah. Most of the planet’s human,” Dad confirms. “You in?”
“You could find him by yourself,” Uzumaki says. “Why me?”
Because Boba’s birthday is next week, and Dad wants to finish up the job before then. “It would take too long, and I have something else to do. I can do five hundred for you.”
“What do you get for him?”
“Bounty’s three thousand,” Dad says, “and I’ll be handling transportation.”
“Liar,” Uzumaki accuses. “What is the money, really?”
“Five th—”
“Lying!”
Boba wonders how she knows. Dad’s all up in beskar right now. It’s not like she can see his face, or hear his voice that well through the vocoder, or anything like that. Even Boba can’t tell, and he’s really, really used to reading people’s body language through armor.
“I’m getting fifteen thousand if I bring him in alive,” Dad finally says.
“I want two thousand,” Uzumaki says.
“Fifteen hundred,” Dad counters. “That’s one and a half thousand.”
“One and nine hundred,” Uzumaki says, barely coming down. “Do you want to find him fast or not?”
Is this what people mean when they say price gouging?
“Fine,” Dad grouses. “Nineteen hundred.”
They shake on it. Boba wonders if this lady is really worth the money.
A week later, he decides that she pretty clearly is.
“About five hundred kilometers,” she says, pointing. Boba has to sit in the back of the speeder so she can give Dad directions from shotgun.
“In miles?” Dad asks. [1]
Uzumaki shrugs, leaning back in her seat and closing her eyes. “Wake me in two hundred. I will turn then.”
Boba thinks she means that she’ll, like, orient them or something. Get more detailed or whatever.
“You can’t just show us on a map?” Boba asks.
“No,” Uzumaki says. “Too far. I do not know this area. Let me sleep.”
Boba quiets down. He has a feeling Dad is annoyed with Miss Uzumaki, but she’s faster than any of the tech they could have used. So they’ll put up with her, like when they try to work with Zam or something.
Uzumaki does find the guy, less than a day later. And he’s pretty much exactly where she said he would be.
She stays in the speeder with Boba when Dad goes to fight. She seems bored, flipping through a magazine on the datapad she brought. Boba doesn’t know what’s so interesting about fashion, but a lot of grownups do, so he chalks it up to that.
Boba learns later that she never joins the fight. Even when people try to drag her in, Dad says, she just dodges and evades. He’s seen her fight once, mostly by throwing some odd knives and punching people, and she’d been competent enough to avoid dying… so Dad says she might just be lazy.
“I think that if you’re that good at knowing where people are and how likely they are to attack you, it’s pretty easy to just never be where people are looking for you,” Dad says. “Conserving energy by refusing to engage unless she has to. Makes sense, I guess.”
“She didn’t get injured at all?” Boba asks.
“She got shot,” Dad says, “and that’s when she started throwing knives.”
“…did you patch her up?” Boba asks. “Or did she have bacta?”
“No, and no.” Dad looks frustrated. “She fixed herself up somehow while I wasn’t looking, said she was bad at dying, and told me I was going to be buying her a new jacket.”
“Did you?”
Dad smiles, crooked. “I like to stay on the good side of my contractors. She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s good at what she does. Plus, I want to figure out how the hell she does all that.”
Boba’s not sure what ‘all that’ includes, but he figures it’s got to be at least the running on walls and finding people and taking blaster shots like it’s nothing.
“Maybe I can hire here when I’m a bounty hunter,” Boba says. “Maybe I can find someone better!”
“Well,” Dad says, “at least she keeps her end of the contract. That’s the important part.”
--
There’s a war on, and Aurra Sing intends to profit from it. There are bounties aplenty, and some big names in the hunter game are getting involved…
Even if only posthumously. Lucky Aurra, that Wessel and Fett are both out of commission, forever. Fett’s kid is bouncing around between teams right now, but the only way Fett’s interfering in the war anymore is through this army of clones.
Aurra does not know if these men are capable of actual thoughts. She doesn’t much care. She has bigger things to worry about.
“So,” Aurra says, to her fellow redhead, leaning against the bar and pretending she doesn’t notice Cad Bane watching them from the other side of the room, “you in?”
Uzumaki just looks at her, for a few long moments, and then says, “fuck no.”
…wow. Okay, then. “It’s a pretty good job; payout’s huge.”
“No,” Uzumaki repeats. “I have done something like this before. Big names. Politics. I ended that with a hole in my chest, and then in prison. And electricity. It was very bad. I am not doing big jobs about politics again.”
Honestly, as far as Aurra’s concerned, that’s not a bad reason to turn down the ‘taking the Senate hostage’ job. Annoying, though. “You wouldn’t even be taking hostages, just keeping track of threats in the building for us while we do the real negotiations.”
“Same as before,” she says. “No.”
Aurra really, really wishes she’d been able to convince the girl, because Aurra can’t really let her walk away knowing what she does. “Well, that’s a damn shame.”
Uzumaki looks at her with something bordering on disdain, and Aurra’s indifference ticks over to annoyance. Uzumaki huffs and pushes away from the bar counter. “Bathroom.”
Aurra watches her go, meets Cad’s eyes from across the room, and nods. They’ll wait until she leaves the building. Easier that way. The bathroom’s window is about twenty inches by four, too small for someone, even for Uzumaki’s size. Aurra just has to wait.
And wait.
People leave the restroom. Twi’leks, humans, a zabrak or two. Some togs. No Uzumaki. Aurra looks at Cad again, and then gets to her feet and goes to the bathroom with the intent of ‘checking on her friend.’
There’s a green twi’lek in there, washing his hands, and nobody else. The stalls are all empty.
“The fuck?” Aurra asks.
“You looking for someone?” the guy asks.
“Human, red hair, glasses,” Aurra says.
The guy shrugs. “Nah, there was a guy in here when I came in, but he was bald and already left. Sorry.”
What the fuck.
Aurra checks over the stalls anyways, but no dice.
She storms out, past Cad and the bar and everyone, and right through the door.
Aurra’s a killing machine. She’s Force Sensitive. She shouldn’t have any trouble finding one girl that she saw half an hour ago.
She closes her eyes, focuses, and has not a single idea of where to start.
So she comms Cad, heads for the spaceport to drag some security footage from the staff, and within three hours…
Still doesn’t know where this bitch went.
“I guess being able to find anyone means she can also escape anyone,” Cad says, voice crackling. “Fett senior always said she seemed more concerned with payment than politics. She won’t talk.”
Aurra sure fucking hopes so.
--
Wolffe doesn’t honestly pay too much attention to discussions about what’s happening on Coruscant, usually. He’s accompanying his General to a Council meeting in this instance, but really, Coruscant is Fox’s problem. Wolffe doesn’t have to care until they start talking about deployments.
Usually.
This time, they’ve mentioned Ventress is suspected to be on-planet, and that suddenly means that Coruscant very much is Wolffe’s problem.
He locks back in on the conversation.
It’s not looking good. They know she’s almost definitely on-planet. They don’t know where. Like, at all.
Wolffe still owes that bitch a broken nose, at the absolute least.
“Vos—” Master Ti starts, but Fisto shakes his head before she can continue.
“On a mission in the Slice,” Fisto says. “Dispatched him three days ago. Sinube?”
“Could reach out to some contacts, but that’s not guaranteed to catch anything,” Kenobi sighs. “We really don’t have anyone on planet that specializes in locating individuals. Maybe—”
They keep talking, but Wolffe’s memory dredges up a story from years and years ago.
He meet’s Cody’s eyes in the hologram. Gestures subtly with his hand. Gets a slight expression in return.
“I might have a suggestion,” Wolffe announces.
The Jedi fall silent, clearly surprised.
That’s fair. ‘Find the rogue assassin that even Jedi struggle to locate’ is a pretty niche thing.
“There was this woman that Prime used to hire sometimes,” Wolffe says. “Said she could find anyone, anywhere, so long as she’d met them before or there was something super unique about them.”
“There were some other limitations,” Cody adds, “but I think the main one was just that they had to be on the same planet.”
…probably because Wolffe said ‘anywhere,’ which is not accurate.
“Found a guy from a couple hundred miles off with no trouble,” Wolffe confirms. “I think they said she could do a couple thousand, in a pinch.”
The Jedi consider this. They have their own flurry of small gestures and meaningful looks, different from Wolffe and Cody’s. Windu is the one that asks, “we would be contracting a bounty hunter?”
“No,” Cody says. “We’re… pretty sure she’s not a bounty hunter.”
Just a bitch, according to Alpha-17, the only one of the clones except Boba to have ever met the woman.
“We can consider it,” Koon says. “Do you know how to contact her?”
Ah. Awkward. Wolffe glances to Cody again, and then Windu, and then stares at the wall as he says, “no, but Boba does.”
“…I suppose we’ll be making a trip to the prison, then,” Windu says, as if this weren’t the kid that killed Ponds. “Commander Wolffe, Master Koon, would you like to accompany me?”
Honestly, Wolffe wouldn’t mind. He lets Koon agree for him, though, and then they all call up Fox and ask for permission to pretty please visit their littlest older brother for information on Prime’s redhead.
It’s not until they’re in the jail, striding along at a pace, that a Jedi questions the epithet.
“That’s what you called her?” Koon asks.
Wolffe shrugs. “Boba always called him his buir’s redhead friend. He had trouble remembering her name. Didn’t get the feeling they were actually friends, but the part that stood out to Boba was her hair, so…”
“It’s not Aurra Sing,” Fox interrupts as he leads them down the many halls, “in case you were worried.”
“I assumed you would have told us if it were,” Windu says, a touch drily, “given her outstanding warrants, very recent crimes, and that we do know her name.”
Fox shrugs. “Not my problem. Just wanted you to know for sure.”
Wolffe would like to cuff Fox upside the head, but that would be unprofessional, in front of General Koon.
Boba’s in a cell, when they arrive. He’s not alone, but he doesn’t seem to care much for his cellmate one way or the other.
He’s glaring murder at Windu, though, once he notices.
Fox manages to ignore that better than the rest of them, treating Boba like any other little brother.
“Come with us,” Fox orders, “Jedi have an offer.”
“I’m not going to work with Jedi,” Boba sneers.
It’s cute, or would have been if that attitude hadn’t gotten Ponds killed. Wolffe coughs for attention, and then says, “it could help me get some revenge on Ventress. If that means anything to you.”
Boba actually considers this, because he’s the kind of little shit that really values revenge, even for other people, and even against his own better judgement or wellbeing. Hence, the prison.
“I would rather offer the opportunity to convince Judicial to allow us to transition your sentence to community service instead of prison,” Windu says.
Boba mouths ‘community service’ with horror. To him, that probably seems worse than just plain prison. [2]
“Or Kamino,” General Koon says, ever helpful. “I’m told that Alpha-17 has offered to take custody, as such.”
That is worse than community service, surely. Boba seems to agree. Wolffe has to do something, “99 is also there, and Br. Gilamar. Even Omega. I know Prime trusted Gilamar with you, and you like 99.”
As Wolffe suspected, this suggestion is less terrible for everyone involved. Wolffe would personally like to see Boba stuck with some community service for killing Ponds, but he knows the main goal here, other than finding Ventress, is to get Boba out of adult prison.
“We’ll see what we can manage with Judicial,” Windu says, “but at the minimum, cooperating will allow us to have your sentence shortened.”
Boba still looks unsure. He’s even shifting from foot to foot, like one of the new cadets. He’s fifth cycle, basically, he should be better than that.
“I’ll get you some meiloorun ice cream,” Fox says, sounding incredibly bored.
Wolffe is fascinated by the excited shock this manages to elicit from Boba, if only for a second. It’s kind of sad, actually. Who’s more easily bribed by ice cream than by lessened prison time?
…children, probably. Boba’s one of those.
“We just need you to get us in contact with that tracker that Prime used,” Wolffe says. “One-off job, not an ongoing contract. The redhead with the glasses you mentioned.”
Boba scrunches up his nose. “Uzumaki?”
Was that her name? No wonder Boba had trouble with it, back when he was still telling them about her. Guess he learned it later.
“Yeah,” Wolffe says. “That one.”
The Jedi seem to have come to the conclusion that Boba will respond much better to the clones convincing him than the Jedi themselves. This, Wolffe thinks, should have been obvious from the start, but maybe the Jedi had to say some things themselves to make it all official.
It works, though. Three hours later, they have successfully signed Boba out under some protocol or other—General Koon and Fox did that part, so Wolffe does not need to know or care which non-GAR forms were used to make this happen—and are flying towards the destination that Karin Uzumaki has given them to meet her at. She’s not too far, if using military flight lanes, and they get there before the afternoon is out.
General Windu stayed on Coruscant, on account of how someone has to be around to fight Ventress in case she pops up of her own volition, and all their other best duelists are off-planet right now, doing their jobs.
Also, Boba’s infinitely more comfortable with General Koon than he is with Windu, so there’s that.
Boba does not get to lead them to the meeting spot, because he’s in custody and a lot of people are making sure he doesn’t escape to try and kill Windu again. Someone’s got a hand on his shoulder at all times.
(Wolffe is pretty sure Windu wouldn’t even care that much, other than to worry for Boba, unless there’s collateral damage again. That said, Windu isn’t here, so…)
They wait around for a minute, at a small café that sells teas and chocolates and little cakes with fanciful curlicues in the icing.
“You are Jedi.”
Wolffe barely manages to avoid startling. At least two of his men swear in shock, and even General Koon—a Jedi master older than all of them combined—flinches a bit.
Wolffe turns, hand on his gun, to see an incredibly unimpressed human woman in black glasses.
Her hair is weird. It’s so red it’s kind of pink, just like Boba said, but it’s also just an odd shape. Boba hadn’t mentioned the weird haircut.
“Hi, Miss Uzumaki,” Boba says. He’d also startled, but is pretending hard that he didn’t.
“Fett,” Uzumaki greets. She looks over the rest of them with undisguised annoyance. She focuses on General Koon. “No politics unless the money is good.”
“We can pay adequately for your time,” General Koon says, amiable as ever.
Uzumaki… pulls out a datapad, types in a word, and then mouths something to herself.
A click signals internal comms. Booster, who’s closer to her, reports she wrote in ‘adequately’ for what looks like a translation.
Right. Only kind of speaks Basic.
“Details?” Uzumaki asks.
General Koon holds up his comm to project an image of the assassin in question. “Sith acolyte Asajj Ventress. Reportedly on Coruscant, but we aren’t sure where.”
Uzumaki tilts her head. “Special?”
“Well, she is a Sith,” General Koon says.
Uzumaki waits. Silently.
“Like a Jedi,” Boba says, “but even more evil.”
“Jedi aren’t evil as a baseline, you little shit,” someone mutters. For the sake of not having to decide if he needs to make a report, Wolffe chooses not to identify who said it.
“Powerful in Jedi way,” Uzumaki says, “but different?”
General Koon nods.
Uzumaki tuts. Thinks. Decides. “I can do that.”
She stands and gestures for them to lead the way.
“You don’t need any tools, do you?” Wolffe asks.
“No,” Uzumaki says. “Just me.”
[1] Both franchises use metric, but obviously, Space and Ninja Land would use different systems. I decided that the Japanese franchise uses metric and the American franchise uses Imperial.