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Scalper waits until the medwing is quiet before she starts searching for the dead.
Quiet is a relative term in Guard Headquarters. Someone is snoring behind the third privacy curtain, the ventilation system has developed a metallic rattle Lex insists is “probably not fatal,” and a monitor near the recovery beds beeps every twelve seconds because its patient keeps removing the pulse sensor.
Scalper looks over.
Ghost lies beneath two blankets with one arm hanging off the cot. Her eyes are closed, but the sensor is clenched between her teeth.
Scalper points at her.
Ghost opens one eye.
“Put it back.”
Ghost reluctantly removes the sensor from her mouth and clips it onto her finger.
Scalper waits.
Ghost closes her eye again.
The sensor remains where it belongs for nearly eight seconds.
Scalper decides that is a problem for the next shift.
She returns to the terminal inside her office and locks the door. Her throat aches from the day’s work. It always gets worse when the air is dry, when she speaks too much, or when she has to drag commands through tissue that was never allowed to heal properly.
The Kaminoans had called the procedure experimental.
They hadn’t used anesthesia.
Her hand brushes the scar across her throat before she can stop it.
The memory arrives with surgical clarity. White walls. Restraints cutting into her wrists. A Kaminoan technician noting her pulse while another slid an instrument beneath her jaw. She had tried to tell them to stop, but pretending to be a clone meant pretending she had no right to refuse.
The first incision had burned.
The fourth had taken her voice.
The longnecks had apologized for the inconvenience in the same tone they used when a piece of equipment malfunctioned.
Scalper opens a hidden channel buried beneath the Medical Corps supply network.
Technically, she’s using military resources for unauthorized intelligence work.
Technically, half of Guard Headquarters should’ve been condemned three weeks ago, Fox has falsified twelve maintenance reports to keep the Senate from relocating them into CorSec barracks, and Stone is running a prison system held together by threats and plumbing sealant.
The Republic can survive one more technical violation.
A list of messages fills the screen.
Most are useless.
No confirmed sightings on Ord Mantell.
No bounty hunter matching the boy’s description on Nar Shaddaa.
A source on Concord Dawn heard rumors, but couldn’t verify them.
A broker on Tatooine wants twenty thousand credits before sharing information. Scalper adds his name to a separate file labeled PEOPLE TO THREATEN LATER.
She opens the most recent report.
A dark-haired Human boy, approximately twelve years old, had been seen traveling with a group of bounty hunters near Florrum. No image. No DNA confirmation. No known destination.
It could be him.
It could be one of a billion other children swallowed by the war.
Scalper leans back in her chair and closes her eyes.
She has been looking for her nephew since Geonosis.
Eight months of favors, bribes, old clan contacts, former smugglers, and people who owe debts they’d rather forget. Nobody knows where he went after the arena. Nobody knows who took him, whether he escaped alone, or whether someone sold him before his father’s body was cold.
The boy had been ten when the Jedi took his father’s head.
He’s twelve now.
Children should not be good at disappearing.
Mandalorian children often are.
Scalper rubs at the center of her chest, where an ache has settled beneath the bone.
The terminal light catches an old file icon at the bottom of the screen.
She shouldn’t open it.
She opens it anyway.
The image appears grainy and slightly distorted, copied from Kamino’s medical archives before the access codes were changed.
A blonde girl stands in one of Tipoca City’s laboratories, small hands folded behind her back. Her expression is bright and curious, untouched by the suspicion already growing in the older cadets around her.
Omega looks directly at the camera.
Scalper’s breath catches.
Before the war, there had been a daughter.
Not through blood and pregnancy. She’d never wanted that, and the life she’d lived before Kamino hadn’t left room for softness anyway. Not through gai bal manda, either. No formal vows before witnesses, no clan gathering, no child offered a place at the fire.
Jango had Boba.
She had Omega.
The longnecks never understood the distinction. To them, both children were experiments, specialized replications produced outside the standard army batches.
They understood ownership.
They didn’t understand family.
Scalper touches two fingers to the image.
Omega had been meant to be different.
The clones filling the medwing beyond her door are hers in every way that matters. Brothers, sisters, children, cadets she had helped train and soldiers she now stitches back together after the Republic spends them carelessly.
She loves them with the exhausted ferocity of someone who knows there are too many wounds and only two hands.
Omega had still been different.
Omega had been hers alone.
Leaving her behind remains the worst decision Scalper has ever made, which is impressive considering the competition.
She had trusted Jango with her. Not the Kaminoans, never them. She trusted the man who had carried his own boy through Tipoca City with a patience nobody else was allowed to see.
There had been unfinished business beyond Kamino. Old names from Kyr’tsad. Loose ends left from a life she’d buried beneath cin vhetin and medical whites.
She had been raised to kill.
She had chosen to heal.
Some people from her past considered that betrayal.
Scalper considered them deeply welcome to choke.
She had planned to return within weeks.
Then her brother called.
The message had been short. Geonosis. Jedi. Come now.
She had heard the strain in his voice and seen the blood beneath his nose.
That symptom had frightened her more than the Jedi.
He’d suffered headaches for years. Nosebleeds when he questioned certain decisions. Gaps in concentration whenever he pushed too closely toward the people behind the clone contract.
No Mand’alor should have his thoughts handled by another.
No one should.
The mind is the most intimate territory a person owns.
Someone had been walking through her brother’s with dirty boots.
She had agreed to help him with his revenge against the Jedi after Galidraan, but not blindly. Something was wrong. The Resol’nare bent in places it should’ve held firm, and Jango, stubborn, sharp, impossible Jango, sometimes spoke like a man repeating conclusions placed in his mouth.
She had almost found the source.
Then Geonosis happened.
Scalper remembers sand beneath her armor and the sky filled with gunships. She remembers choosing the right moment to fall, letting the battlefield swallow one identity so another could return to Kamino.
She remembers standing among the Alpha medical personnel when the feeds showed the arena.
A blue lightsaber flashed.
Her brother’s body fell in one direction.
His head fell in another.
Scalper’s nails bite into her palm.
She had watched without making a sound.
That part had been easy.
The screaming came later.
Omega’s voice over a corrupted laboratory transmission, frightened and calling for someone who wasn’t there. Alarms shrieked behind her. Something struck metal. The connection dissolved into static.
Then the scream cut off.
Scalper hasn’t found another record of her since.
No transfer orders.
No medical updates.
No body.
The absence should give her hope.
Instead, it feels too much like a grave with no marker.
A soft knock touches the office door.
Scalper closes the file instantly.
“Chief?”
Fox.
She unlocks the door remotely.
Marshal Commander Fox steps inside, still wearing fatigues from a shift that should’ve ended fourteen hours ago. His black hair is disordered, his gold eyes are bloodshot, and a folded report rests beneath one arm.
He looks at the blank terminal.
Then he looks at her hand, still pressed flat against the screen.
Fox knows better than to ask.
He had known her before the scar on her throat, although the reconditioning had stolen most of those memories from him. He remembered fragments. A trainer with blonde hair. A knife in Dred Priest’s throat. Arms pulling a twelve-year-old cadet away from restraints.
He knew enough to recognize her.
He had never said the name aloud.
“Anything?” he asks.
Scalper shakes her head.
Fox’s jaw tightens. “I sent inquiries through the Guard’s underworld contacts.”
She gives him a sharp look.
“You’re welcome,” he says.
Scalper reaches for her datapad and types.
YOU HAVE ENOUGH WORK.
Fox reads it. “Apparently, I enjoy suffering.”
She types again.
THAT EXPLAINS YOUR SCHEDULE.
His mouth almost twitches.
Almost.
Fox sets the folded report on her desk. “Stone intercepted a bounty posting involving a Human child. Age and description are close.”
Scalper opens it.
The image is poor, captured from behind, but the boy has dark hair and a familiar way of carrying his shoulders.
Hope is a cruel thing.
It slides between the ribs more cleanly than any blade.
Scalper studies the image until it blurs.
Fox remains beside the desk.
“We’ll find him,” he says.
She looks up.
There are promises people make because silence feels uncomfortable, and promises Fox makes like military objectives.
This is the second kind.
Scalper nods once.
Beyond the office, a monitor begins shrieking.
Ghost’s voice follows.
“I think my finger’s broken!”
Lex sounds half asleep. “You took the sensor off again, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re holding it.”
“That proves nothing.”
Scalper closes Omega’s hidden file and locks the terminal.
The dead can wait another shift.
The living are already causing problems.