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The boy remembers nothing about why he’s in the cell. The boy is not really a boy, but not quite a man yet, still in that awkward half-grown hinterland. But he doesn’t remember his childhood well just now—doesn’t remember anything well just now, in fact. His life is a ragged old coat, more hole than not. He doesn’t remember enough to know why exactly this might be.
His body, on the other hand, remembers plenty. He rather wishes it wouldn’t. His body recalls itself to him with its night-dark bruises and its sharp pains, that renew themselves in new places when he isn’t paying attention. His body throbs into his awareness with the missing tooth that aches in the side of his mouth. It reminds him that bad things have happened with the burn around his neck where the shock collar sits.
He has a new shock collar. He’s sure of it. It feels different to the one he used to wear: bigger, heavier. His old collar was loose at the hinge at his nape, and he remembers this now only through the way he moves, careful to avoid the pinch that doesn’t come.
Here’s something he doesn’t need to remember, because he knows it for a fact, fundamental as the fact that water flows downhill: he has to wear a collar always, because he is gifted with the Force. Those with a facility for the Force are capable of feats beyond the expected. They may not be able to be overpowered, should the need arise. Therefore slaves known to have a sensitivity to the Force must always be collared, so that they can be controlled.
Except that the boy doesn’t think he’s a slave any more. This is another fact, he thinks. He is a prisoner now, and that’s a different state of being. He did something to get himself put here, to change his state. He wishes he could remember what.
The flesh under his collar burns all the time. This tells him that the collar has been used recently, and a lot. This could account for the gaps in his memory.
Time passes in stops and starts. The guards outside his cell change from moment to moment. Then sometimes the guards are inside his cell. He has an image in his head: the guards’ faces are long way away above him, distorted in laughter and hatred. Did he see this from the floor? He finds himself on the floor a lot. It’s cold and gritty on the floor, but familiar.
His cell is a little box, taller than it is wide, with no window, and the doorway to the corridor outside is protected by a humming ray shield that when the lights are off fills the cell with a dull red glow. There is a bed that folds down from the wall. There is a hole in the floor for him to use as a toilet. The whole thing feels made of one piece, like it was poured into a mould in a factory somewhere, shipped here, and dropped into place.
Though he’s sure he’s not one any longer, the guards call him slave. They call him something else, too: condemned.
Condemned means he is going to die, probably soon, and at someone else’s hands. He knows he must have done something to be here; he knows he’s not innocent. That too is a fact. It has always been a matter of time until he came here. He was always going to do whatever it was that he did.
The boy puts it together with what remains of his mind. These two names in conjunction add up to why the guards are sometimes inside his cell, with their monstrous laughing faces, and why he always has new bruises, and why the collar is used on him so much it wipes his memories out, which is not, he’s pretty certain, a normal side effect of casual shock collar use. The guards can do whatever they please to him, the boy comes to understand, though slowly and inarticulately, because he is a condemned slave. Anything short of killing him. That task is up to the Empire.
He gets food and water at intervals he can’t make sense of. (He doesn’t think that’s on purpose, rather the result of his imperfect memory.) He considers using his spoon to add to the collection of graffiti carved into the wall beside the bed, but decides against it. What would be the point? Then, later—he thinks it’s later—he finds his own name amongst the scratchings. Or is it his own name? He repeats it to himself but it doesn’t become clearer, only turns into a jumble of nonsense syllables. When he sleeps, he wakes himself up still mumbling.
In one moment of icy lucidity, the boy thinks, I’m going mad in here. For a minute, he’s his old self, and he misses the other slaves on the estate and his own bed and even his daily duties, and the fear of what’s happened and what’s to come seizes him like a big clawed hand and shakes him, rattles him down to his very bones, and he makes himself small in the corner of his cell, face against his knees, and tries to keep from screaming aloud.
But the fear passes along with the clarity. The meanings of the words break up and drift apart even as the words themselves linger in his mind. He mouths them like broken teeth, turns them over, spits them out. Here. Mad. I’m. They’re curious objects. There’s no sense to them. They make him laugh, their oddity, and that he should have found them here in his cell, like somebody else’s belongings.
When he looks into his water cup, he sees a face he doesn’t quite recognise. It’s his own, but younger and somehow more naked than he expects. He draws his fingers over his cheeks and his brow in angular patterns.
It makes him think of his mother. Whenever he thinks of her there’s a throb of wanting and an equal, opposite impulse to push away. When he tries to understand why there’s a blank space. He’s forgotten. He probes the gap—she isn’t at the estate, he thinks, so where is she? Nowhere, the answer comes. Oh, yes, of course—she was sick and she died. She died and left him all alone, and he hates her for it. Hates her selfish weakness.
He follows the thread of that hate like someone lost in a fog follows a leading line. He hates her—why? Because every day she chose to remain helpless instead of doing something, anything to free herself and her son. Every day she knelt to meditate to calm her emotions like she’d been taught, she told him, and like she taught him. And every day in that meditation she shackled herself and tossed away the key. All that inner peace brought her nothing but a fading, prolonged, pathetic diminishment into death. She was an accomplice in her own captivity.
After she died he gave up trying to calm his emotions. Instead he focused on control. He didn’t want to die as well. He wanted to make other people die instead.
And had he?
His fingers trace his empty cheeks in his reflection. He ought to have markings here. His mother had markings on her cheeks and her brow. So had the man, another slave, he and his mother called “uncle” though he wasn’t, as far as they knew, related to them. They had had tattoos here, tattoos that meant things, clear as language. He should, too.
Why does he think that? He has never had tattoos on his face. Unless he isn’t just forgetting what has happened to him. Unless he is trying to remember what is going to happen, too.
His mother had visions of the future sometimes. Usually they came in dreams. The boy always knew when she’d had one, because she woke up sad, distracted from her duties, and she would pause at what she was doing apparently at random, her eyes filling up with tears. She didn’t have happy visions, it seemed.
Though the boy shared his mother’s talent for the Force—it was his birthright, like all Mirialans, she told him—he didn’t have visions much. That wasn’t his gift. The future kept taking him by surprise.
But now it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have a future. Or at least his future is very small, and is spooling towards an end at stop-start intervals.
When he’s with it enough, he bargains with a guard for ink. He doesn’t have anything to bargain with really, because whatever they want from him they’ve already taken. But he acts as if he does, just because even now something stubborn still alive inside him refuses to let him fall to his knees and beg. (That’s what life is, as an Imperial slave. All of you passing around the same worn-out scrap of dignity, playing pretend with one another, until something comes along to kick you into the mud and remind you that the reality of the galaxy is chaos, cruelty, powerlessness.)
But for some reason, one of the guards plays along. He’s middle-aged, with round shoulders and tired eyes. He’s impossible to read as he stares at the boy as he asks his question, then for a long few seconds afterwards. Then he says, ‘Fine.’ When the boy keeps staring at him, he says, more irritated, ‘What, you think I’m going to pull it out my arse right now, do ya?’ Then he backhands the boy across the mouth hard enough to send him stumbling to his knees on the floor of his cell. ‘You’ll be lucky if I bring it at all,’ the guard sneers. He steps back, and the red ray shield flickers back to life, humming like a bug.
Lucky is a word that sticks in the boy’s head like broken glass in a bare sole. Lucky, he repeats to himself when the lights go out. Lucky. Be lucky. Be lucky.
He doesn’t understand the guards at all. He can feel them through the Force, twin presences just outside, always two, except when they change over and there’s briefly four. He feels them, but their signatures in the Force are as unintelligible to him as words, as the buzz of the ray shield, as the shape of the light that comes through the doorway from the corridor and falls on the floor of the cell. Nothing can hold onto any inborn meaning now, not even people.
Maybe they’re not real, the boy thinks. Maybe he isn’t, either. Maybe no one is. Maybe they’re all just bad dreams, orphaned in the void. He floats in this comforting thought until at some point he moves and finds a bottle of ink beside him on the floor.
He’s already made his own needles, from a bone in a piece of meat that was part of a meal, that he sucked clean and chewed to spinters. Along with the ink and his cup of water, he sits down cross-legged with his back to the wall beside the door to hide what he’s doing, and begins to tattoo his own face.
He knows what to do, because he watched his mother and the uncle-who-wasn’t-his-uncle make the markings upon one another. Uncle, when he received word that his daughter, working elsewhere in the Empire, had given birth to his first grandchild. Mother, after they all heard the news of the Sacking of Coruscant and the destruction of the Jedi temple. They’d both done the coming of age markings on his shoulders and breastbone when he turned thirteen years old. And they had sung him the meanings of all the shapes and patterns, so that one day, when they were both gone, he’d remember. Now the melodies come back to him, through the bruised and electrostatic buzz in his head, and he imagines the ray shield at the door humming them along with him as he works.
He uses his reflection in the cup of water as a mirror. Dark tears of blood keep welling from his cheeks, dropping into the water and shattering his reflection. It takes— he has no idea how long it takes. He goes away; he comes back; he is still doing it. It takes an eternity. It hurts, of course it does, but it’s a deliberate pain. He owns this pain. This pain belongs to him. Not to the guards. Not to the Empire. Him.
In the space between the first mark and the last, he becomes someone new. He is no slave. He is not condemned. His tattoos name him hero and martyr.
Sometime after he’s done, he must have fallen asleep, because he dreams. There is something coming, in his dream, a shadow darker than the space between the stars, moving towards him through space, faster than a thought.
He is awake, his face stiff and searing, bringing tears to his eyes, and sitting on the sleep mat when he senses a new presence approaching. It’s impossible to ignore, like a bonfire to the guards’ candles. It’s another push-pull feeling—like a bonfire, the power threatens to burn; but, moth-like, he can’t help but be enthralled by it.
The ray shield goes off, and the presence enters the cell. Unlike the guards, and unlike almost every Imperial citizen on this remote planet, he’s not a Human. This person is the kind of alien the boy has only ever seen from afar: he has scarlet skin, with tendrils descending from around his mouth, and he glitters with gold jewellery that pierces his flesh. He is what everyone calls a Sith pureblood: descended from the ancient race that once founded the Empire as it was. This one is large, both tall and wide, he fills the doorway as he ducks through it. His livid yellow eyes sweep the cell, taking in everything, including the boy on his sleep mat. They narrow, and his long nose wrinkles.
The boy stands. He asks: ‘Are you here to kill me?’
‘No.’ The Sith bares his teeth in what could be a smile or a snarl. ‘I am here to take you to Korriban.’
The boy doesn’t know where or what Korriban is, but the word shivers through him like a cold wind. ‘Is Korriban a prison?’
The Sith’s snarling smile widens, a sharp white crescent. ‘Not for you,’ he says. ‘For you, Korriban is where you will break your chains. Or die,’ he adds, with the air of an afterthought. ‘Odds are, of course, very good that you will die there.’
The Sith’s voice is smooth and deep and excruciatingly privileged. The power radiating from him in the Force is, to the boy, like standing in front of the open door of a furnace. The mere proximity of such power focuses his mind. The boy is with it enough to realise that he is in the presence of likely the most important person he’s ever met. He can’t help but ask: ‘Why?’
‘Why will you die? Or why Korriban? In answer to the first, because most acolytes perish before graduating from their training, and you yourself are a deeply unimpressive specimen, unlikely to last long against those who were born citizens of the Empire. As for the second, well. War is the answer. It chews through lesser Sith like a nexu through an ash-rabbit den. So we find ourselves in constant need of fresh meat. That’s you, and other slave scum like you.’ The way the Sith insults him somehow fails to sting. He says it so casually, it’s like he isn’t even trying to hurt, more like it’s just his manner of speech.
‘But I did something,’ the boy says, not understanding why he’s saying it even as he does so. ‘I did something to get put in here. I’m not a slave. I’m a prisoner.’
‘Oh, yes. You killed a man,’ the Sith says off-handedly. He pulls a datapad from inside his robe, glances at it. ‘Your master’s son. Tried using you as target practice, it seems. Didn’t go too well for him. Says here you wrestled the blaster from him and emptied the entire charge pack into his head.’ He turns the datapad around. It takes the boy a moment to realise he’s looking at a flat image that shows the charred remains of someone’s skull. ‘Now, that’s the spirit we like to see in a Sith acolyte. Lucky we came across you when we did.’
Lucky. The Sith is pleased, the boy realises. He had been bored—hadn’t troubled to hide his boredom, broadcast it carelessly through the Force for anyone with the ability to feel it—but the murder amuses him. It reminds the boy of his master’s son—before he was that blackened, smoking skull—when his fighting dog had whelped a litter. One of the puppies, only days old, had been a little terror, nipping its siblings with his gums. The young man’s gentle surprise and delight had been the same as the Sith’s, now. And the boy is, for maybe the first time in his life, lucky.
The Sith turns to the guards waiting stiffly at the door. ‘You,’ he points at one, ‘fetch something clean for him to wear. I won’t have the boy on my ship stinking like a caged beast. Something acceptable—even the lowliest worm of an aspirant to the Sith Academy is worth a hundred of you.’ The guard snaps a salute and disappears down the corridor. The Sith turns to the other guard. ‘And you. That—’ He points at the boy’s collar, snaps his gloved fingers, a soft sound. ‘—Off, now.’
It’s the guard who had brought the boy ink. His brows are flat across his eyes, betraying nothing but determination to do his duty, such as it is, to the Empire. He takes something out of his pocket and stabs it with a finger—the collar falls away from the boy’s neck and hits the ground with a clank.
The fresh air stings the exposed skin of his neck. Without the weight of the collar, he feels like he’s floating again. He’s no longer touching the floor of the cell; cold, gritty, familiar. He is inches above it, made of mist and cloud, unsullied by the earth.
‘Now!’ The Sith puts his hands together smartly. Speaking to the boy again, he says, ‘You are no longer bound by the anxieties of small men. I want to see the young man who did this.’ He lifts the datapad. ‘Show me.’ He sweeps his hand across the cell, indicating the guard who had just released the shock collar, who now freezes where he stands, eyes going wide.
The Sith’s expectation, clear in the Force, makes everything sharp, like the world is made of blades, and the boy must act carefully to avoid cutting his own throat. The boy puts his hand cautiously to his neck. He takes an uncollared breath for the first time in years.
Then he plunges deep into himself to seize the power he feels waiting there, and pulls it out into his two hands. It is crackling lightning, blinding, sizzling. The power of the shock collar magnified a hundredfold. The electricity fills his cupped palms, arcs between his fingers, makes bracelets around his wrists. He looks up at the guard, whose face is made a mask of terror by the light of the power in the boy’s hands.
That deep dark something from his dream has arrived. It settles into him, making a home. It is his future. It is himself.