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Scalper has spent six hours trying to make her own nose bleed.
So far, she has achieved a headache, elevated blood pressure, and a powerful desire to fly to Kamino and start throwing scientists into the ocean until one explains something useful.
She sits in the sealed diagnostics room beneath Guard Medical with electrodes fixed across her scalp, one hand wrapped around a stress-test controller, and an unreadable Kaminoan report floating above the desk.
Boba watches from the other side of the room.
“You look stupid,” he says.
Scalper adjusts the sensor at her temple. “Thank you. Your medical insight remains invaluable.”
“You’ve been glaring at that screen for an hour.”
“47 minutes.”
“That’s worse.”
“It isn’t.”
“It is when the report hasn’t changed.”
The report has not changed.
That is the problem.
Kaminoans document everything. They record average reaction speeds across batches, acceptable height variance, nutrient uptake, bone density, behavioral deviations, and the clinical failure of every experiment that did not reach mass production.
Their accelerated-growth research alone occupies thirty-nine files.
The experiment failed repeatedly before the first military batches were decanted. Cardiovascular collapse. Skeletal deformity. Neural degradation. Organ failure severe enough that even the Kaminoans concluded it would reduce the useful lifespan of their product.
They abandoned it.
The Confederacy still spreads accelerated-aging propaganda because the idea makes an army of adults easier to describe as manufactured things. The Republic rarely corrects them because admitting the clones are exactly as old as they look raises uglier questions.
Kamino recorded the abandonment in six languages and enough technical jargon to kill an ordinary reader.
They also documented the tying of reproductive tubes once each batch completed puberty.
That section is extremely clear.
The section Scalper needs is not.
She scrolls through another page of dense genetic notation.
Boba swings one boot against the leg of his chair. “Are you trying to see whether you’ve got it too?”
“I’m ruling out environmental factors.”
“You’ve lived with clones on Coruscant since the war started.”
“Correct.”
“You breathe the same air.”
“Yes.”
“Eat the same food.”
“Not voluntarily.”
“And you don’t bleed.”
“Not from thinking.”
Boba considers that.
Scalper presses the controller.
The diagnostic program displays another sequence of contradictory military orders, ethical dilemmas, and cognitive loops designed to force sustained mental resistance. Her pulse rises. Her headache sharpens.
Nothing warm runs from her nose.
She releases the control.
“Again,” she mutters.
“You’ve done it nine times.”
“Seven.”
“I counted nine.”
“Two were calibration.”
“That means you did it nine times.”
Scalper removes the electrodes before she gives in to the urge to staple one to his forehead.
Boba smirks.
He has Jango’s face at 11, before age and grief sharpened it. He also has Jango’s talent for observing exactly where another person is most frustrated and poking that spot with a stick.
The resemblance is sometimes comforting.
Today, it is mostly irritating.
Scalper crosses to the medical scanner and checks the latest results. No capillary rupture. No abnormal neural activity. No unusual hormone response. Her headache comes entirely from exhaustion, tension, and reading Kaminoan prose.
“Nothing,” Boba says.
“Nothing useful.”
“Maybe you’re not thinking hard enough.”
She looks at him.
He lifts both hands. “Just helping.”
Scalper pulls up the comparative files.
Jango Fett.
Arla Fett.
Boba Fett.
Omega Fett.
The first two records are old, taken before the mass batches entered full development. Jango’s scans are extensive because the Kaminoans had treated every part of him as source material. Arla’s are more fragmented, though still thorough enough to make Scalper’s skin crawl.
Boba and Omega were decanted differently.
Not naturally born, despite what Jango had occasionally implied when outsiders listened, but removed from artificial gestation far earlier than the altered clones. They developed through infancy and childhood without the same late-stage interventions used on the military batches.
Boba has never displayed bleeding.
Omega hadn’t either.
If Omega were alive, Scalper suspects she would still be an outlier.
The thought lands hard.
Scalper closes Omega’s file before Boba can notice she has been staring.
He notices anyway.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You made the face.”
“I have one face.”
“You’ve got at least six.”
“Name them.”
“Angry, angrier, murder, Kamino, Fox, and the one you make when you think I’m going to do something stupid.”
“That last one is simply your face reflected in mine.”
Boba grins.
Scalper turns away before he sees her mouth twitch.
She opens the volunteer database.
28 Guardsmen have participated so far, drawn from both Jango and Arla lines. Commanders, medics, pilots, ARFs, prison officers, and one SpecOps ARC who considered the cognitive stress test relaxing.
Scalper scanned their brains before, during, and after symptoms.
She has tested oxygen levels, blood pressure, clotting factors, neural stress, endocrine response, atmospheric contaminants, food, water, armor sealants, bacta exposure, sleep deprivation, and proximity to Force-users.
Nothing explains it.
Bleeding appears when certain thoughts encounter resistance.
Not always treason. Not always disobedience. Sometimes it happens when a clone considers refusing a direct order. Sometimes when they question why an order exists. Sometimes when they think too closely about their own legal status, the Chancellor, or the possibility that obedience and survival are no longer the same thing.
The symptom begins with pain in the right temple.
Then blood from the nose.
Occasionally disorientation.
In severe cases, the clone’s emotional range narrows until compliance becomes the only thought that does not hurt.
That pattern is not natural.
Noses do not bleed for the shits and giggles.
Boba leaves his chair and walks to the display.
“Which one is Fox?”
Scalper does not ask how he knows Fox has a file.
Boba has spent enough time wandering Guard Headquarters to learn that Fox has a file for everything, including himself.
She opens the Chief’s scans.
There are too many.
Fox’s brain appears in layered blue light, marked by old electrical trauma, sleep deprivation, stress damage, and the aftermath of a reconditioning procedure Scalper still cannot view without wanting Dred Priest alive again so she can kill him more slowly.
Boba leans closer.
“What’s that?”
“Old damage.”
“From what?”
“Kamino.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down.”
“No.”
Scalper selects a scan recorded after Fox’s promotion. The medical notes list severe right-temple pain, spontaneous epistaxis, confusion, and rapid emotional flattening after sustained discussion of executive authority.
Fox had been trying to think about using his legal power against the Chancellor.
His own mind punished him for it.
Boba reads the symptom list.
“He gets it worse.”
“He thinks harder.”
“That sounded rude.”
“It was clinical.”
“It sounded like you called everyone else stupid.”
“I’d document that as an incidental benefit.”
Boba’s expression shifts as he studies Fox’s scan.
“Buir used to bleed.”
Scalper goes still.
“When?”
“When you were gone.”
She keeps her eyes on the display. “Be specific.”
“You left Kamino for a while. He was watching me and Omega.”
Boba’s voice has lost its teasing edge.
Scalper remembers leaving to tie off what remained of an old life. Names, safehouses, enemies, records that could lead someone back to Kamino. She had trusted Jango to protect the children while she was gone.
When she returned, he had been… different.
Not dramatically. Jango had always been good at burying pain beneath irritation. He dismissed the headaches as lack of sleep and the nosebleeds as Kamino’s dry internal climate, which was absurd on a world constructed from rain.
Scalper had been too occupied with raising Omega to force the matter.
Then Jango went to Geonosis.
Then Omega died in her ear.
Then there was never time again.
“What was he doing when it happened?” she asks.
Boba shrugs, but the movement is too deliberate.
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
“He wouldn’t say.”
“Boba.”
“He was looking at military contracts once. Another time he’d just come back from talking to Nala Se. He got angry when I asked.”
That could mean nothing.
With Jango, anger often meant nothing except that someone was breathing within range.
It could also mean the Kaminoans had altered him while Scalper was away.
Jango had been their template, their employee, and eventually their prisoner in every way that mattered. He slept in their facilities, ate their food, underwent their medical examinations, and trusted them exactly as far as a loaded blaster could compensate.
They had access.
More importantly, they had motive.
The mass army needed obedience. If the original template began questioning the project, the Kaminoans might have considered that a defect worth correcting.
Scalper stares at Jango’s neural scan.
No visible abnormalities.
Nothing obvious in the clones either.
Whatever causes the bleeding is either too small for standard imaging or designed to resemble ordinary tissue.
“Did you test Buir?” Boba asks.
“These scans were taken before the army entered full production.”
“So, no.”
“No.”
“Did you test me?”
“You’ve undergone routine scans.”
“For this.”
Scalper looks at him.
Boba folds his arms.
He’s been cooperative with medical treatment only because Scalper can physically pin him to an examination table and because Fox threatened to classify missed appointments as violations of his custody agreement.
The fact that he is volunteering now matters.
“You’re an outlier,” she says.
“You said that already.”
“I thought you weren’t listening.”
“I listen when people think I’m not.”
“That explains several security reports.”
Boba taps Omega’s closed file.
“She’d be one too.”
Scalper’s ruined throat tightens.
“Yes.”
“Because we came out earlier.”
“Likely.”
“So whatever they did happened later.”
“That is one possibility.”
“What are the others?”
“Genetic alteration. Chemical conditioning. A developmental procedure. Something introduced during late gestation or after decanting.”
“A machine?”
“Possibly.”
“Something in their heads?”
Scalper looks back at Fox’s scan.
“Possibly.”
Boba studies her rather than the image.
“You think the Kaminiise did it.”
“I think the Kaminiise don’t clean a laboratory without writing three reports about the mop.”
“But you can’t find this.”
“No.”
“So, they hid it.”
“Or I haven’t found the correct file.”
“That’s the same thing with more words.”
Unfortunately, he has inherited that from both sides of the family.
Scalper closes Jango’s scans and opens the earliest incident reports.
At the beginning of the war, she had written the Guard’s bleeding off as Coruscant being cruel to them.
It was not an unreasonable conclusion.
Poor air quality, limited sleep, ration deficiencies, helmet pressure, electrical injuries, chronic stress, and the Senate’s daily attempt to invent new forms of humiliation could explain half the medical problems in Headquarters.
Then the 501st reported Slick.
Sergeant Slick’s betrayal had not been his idea alone. A Force-user had twisted his thoughts, pushed at anger already present, and turned legitimate grievances into sabotage.
Slick bled during questioning.
Scalper had classified it as a side effect of Force manipulation.
That explanation had survived until Umbara.
Until Dogma.
She pulls up the restricted file.
Boba glances toward the door before leaning closer. “He’s supposed to be dead.”
“He’s supposed to be many things.”
The file still lists CT-6922 as executed for the killing of Jedi General Pong Krell.
The medical report hidden beneath that official record tells another story.
Dogma had questioned an order.
Not publicly. Barely even consciously.
He had spent his entire life building himself around regulation because regulation felt safer than uncertainty. Krell exploited that, turning obedience into a cage Dogma defended even while it killed the men around him.
Then the cage cracked.
Pain drilled through Dogma’s right temple. His nose bled heavily. His cognitive responses split between absolute compliance and violent recognition that the orders were wrong.
Dogma killed Krell.
The symptoms stopped.
Not because the conflict was resolved peacefully, but because there was no order left to obey.
That was when Scalper understood the bleeding was not isolated.
It was not Fox’s stress.
Not Coruscant’s pollution.
Not Slick’s Force manipulation.
Not a defect unique to Jango’s line, because women cloned from Arla displayed the same symptom under the same conditions.
Something connected them.
Something Kamino had done to every altered military batch.
Boba reads Dogma’s results in silence.
“He fought it,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
Scalper thinks of the blood on Dogma’s armor and the way his hands visibly shook in the footage after the rifle left them.
“Enough.”
Boba’s jaw sets.
He looks so much like Jango that Scalper has to glance away.
“What happens if they can’t fight it?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not true.”
“I know what I’ve observed. That isn’t the same as knowing the mechanism.”
“What have you observed?”
Scalper’s voice drops.
“They stop feeling.”
Boba does not make a joke.
The diagnostic room hums around them.
Scalper opens another Kaminoan archive. These concerns neural compliance benchmarking across late-stage batches. The language is suffocatingly dense, packed with statistical references, redacted procedure codes, and phrases designed to conceal meaning beneath precision.
She enlarges one section.
Behavioral harmonization remained within acceptable parameters following cranial maturation intervention.
Boba reads it over her shoulder.
“What does that mean?”
“It means a Kaminoan wanted nobody to understand it.”
“Cranial means head.”
“Yes.”
“Intervention means they did something.”
“Yes.”
“Harmonization means obedience.”
“Maybe.”
Boba looks at her.
Scalper exhales through her nose.
“Probably.”
She searches the procedure code.
The archive denies access.
That has never happened before.
As Chief Medical Officer of the entire Grand Army, Scalper can open surgical records, genetic failures, disciplinary experimentation, reproductive alterations, and every clinical note the Kaminoans ever wrote about Fox’s reconditioning.
This file refuses her.
Boba sees the denial.
“They hid it.”
Scalper copies the code into an isolated datapad.
“They tried.”
The diagnostics door flies open hard enough to strike the wall.
Lex rushes inside, breathless, one hand pressed to her comm and horror spreading across Arla’s familiar face.
“Scalper, we’ve got a casualty wave coming in! The Jedi Temple has been bombed!”