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Ahsoka Tano has been running for three days.
Maybe four.
Coruscant has swallowed the difference.
She races along a maintenance ledge on Level 1312, one hand scraping the wall for balance while neon signs flicker through polluted rain. Her bare feet slap against cold duracrete. One heel is bleeding, and something sharp has lodged beneath the pad of her left foot, but stopping long enough to remove it would let the Coruscant Guard catch her.
The 104th is close behind them.
She can feel Wolffe through the Force, controlled and furious, directing squads through adjacent corridors. He doesn’t want to hurt her. That almost makes it worse.
Ahsoka vaults a vent stack and lands badly.
Pain shoots through her ankle.
Her stomach twists with another wave of nausea. She hasn’t kept food down since yesterday, and the water she stole from a maintenance station tasted strongly of coolant. Togruta rarely get sick. The Temple vaccinates initiates against nearly everything that survives on Coruscant.
Apparently, exhaustion, contaminated water, and sleeping beside industrial exhaust pipes have joined forces against her.
Her montrals catch the rising whine of a patrol speeder.
Ahsoka ducks beneath a bridge as red searchlights sweep over the street.
“Commander Tano,” a Guardsman calls through an amplifier. “Stop moving and place your hands where they can be seen.”
She keeps running.
She isn’t a commander anymore, right? She isn’t sure she is a Padawan either.
She has no lightsabers. No boots. No reliable comm-link. Morai is trapped somewhere inside the Temple, her fury burning through their Force bond with enough heat to make Ahsoka’s skull ache.
Ahsoka hadn’t even been on Coruscant when the Temple hangar was bombed.
She was fighting not to die on another battlefield. Somehow, she was now expected to have planned an attack, recruited Letta Turmond, concealed the evidence, murdered Letta in a secured cell, and escaped Republic custody between missions.
Everyone believed it anyway.
The narrative turned before she understood there was one.
She drops through a service hatch and lands in a lower pedestrian tunnel.
Her knees buckle.
Ahsoka catches herself against the wall and coughs until her chest burns.
Rex told her on Kadavo that if she ever needed help and he couldn’t reach her, she should go to the Coruscant Guard.
At the time, that sounded simple.
Now Guardsmen are tracking her through the lower levels with military precision.
Would Chief Fox listen to her?
Would Marshal Commander Thorn?
Would Commander Hound investigate the evidence before someone decided an escaped Jedi was easier to bury than a conspiracy inside the Temple?
Ahsoka doesn’t know.
She trusted Ventress instead.
That sentence alone proves how badly everything has gone.
Ventress was alive, irritated, and somehow willing to help clear Ahsoka’s name. They separated after finding the warehouse district connected to Letta’s supply trail.
Ahsoka hears armored boots ahead.
She turns and sprints down a side passage.
“Target moving east,” a woman reports over an encrypted Guard channel.
Ghost, Ahsoka guesses. Commander of SpecOps. Wonderful.
A stun bolt strikes the wall beside her head.
Ahsoka dives through a market stall, scatters crates of hydroponic fungus, and hears the vendor begin swearing in three languages.
“Sorry!”
Another bolt flashes past her lekku.
The shooter is behind and above her, adjusting for every turn before she makes it.
ARC training.
Sniper.
Ahsoka leaps onto a freight conveyor, runs against its movement, then throws herself toward the roof of the adjoining warehouse.
A familiar voice crackles over the Guard channel.
“Clear my line.”
Ahsoka falters.
She knows that voice.
Not well, but enough to remember Umbara. A rigid young trooper defending General Krell until the truth broke him. A brother Rex had mourned because the official report said he had been executed.
Dogma?
The stun bolt hits between Ahsoka’s shoulder blades.
Her muscles seize.
Momentum carries her forward.
She crashes through the warehouse’s glass roof in an explosion of dust and glittering shards. Her shoulder strikes a suspended cable, turning her just enough that she hits stacked cartons instead of the floor.
Boxes collapse beneath her.
Ahsoka tries to move, but her limbs answer with weak tremors.
Red-and-black Guardsmen descend through the broken roof on rappel cables. One secures her wrists while another calls for a medic.
Ahsoka’s vision narrows.
Next to her face, a damaged carton has split open.
The same manufacturer’s logo printed on its side marked the nanobombs recovered from Letta Turmond’s husband’s body.
Ahsoka stares at it as darkness closes in.
Fox stands in the Guard medbay and watches Scalper fight to keep Ahsoka Tano alive.
The 16-year-old looks nothing like the commander he briefly met before the Citadel operation. That girl had been alert, sharp-eyed, and carrying enough restless energy to power a cruiser.
This one lies unconscious beneath thermal blankets, bare feet wrapped in bacta gauze. Glass cuts cover her arms and face. Her skin burns with fever despite severe dehydration, and every breath rattles faintly in her chest.
Dank ferrik.
No wonder Hound had practically begged Fox to leave Riyo’s apartment in the middle of the night. Riyo’s brother and mother were visiting, which made leaving without explanation particularly awkward.
Scalper adjusts the fluids feeding into Tano’s arm, then types one-handed on her datapad.
CONTAMINATED WATER. RESPIRATORY INFECTION. EXHAUST EXPOSURE. SHE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN MOBILE.
“She was running from half the GAR,” Fox says.
Scalper gives him a look that suggests this is not an acceptable medical excuse.
Relay stands near the door, helmet held tightly against his side. The former 501st member hasn’t looked away from Tano since arriving.
“I didn’t mean for her to fall through the roof,” he says.
“You fired a stun round while she was jumping between buildings,” Hound replies.
“I adjusted for her momentum.”
“She went through transparisteel.”
“She would’ve landed on the floor without the cable.”
Hound’s massiff, Grizzer, sniffs Relay’s boot as if evaluating his tactical explanation.
Fox looks back at the cot.
This isn’t the commander his wife praises either. Riyo describes Tano as clever, stubborn, compassionate, and incapable of remaining seated through an entire political conversation.
She certainly doesn’t describe a barefoot child coughing blood into Scalper’s sheets.
“Will she recover?” Fox asks.
Scalper types again.
YES. NO THANKS TO THE JEDI, THE PRISON, OR YOUR SNIPER.
Relay lowers his head.
Fox leaves before Scalper finds more people to blame.
Hound and Relay follow him into the corridor.
“The whole thing smells rotten,” Hound says.
Fox hands him the prison evidence summary. “It is rotten.”
Ahsoka Tano was not planetside when the Temple bombing occurred. She was deployed in active combat, surrounded by witnesses, with no opportunity to organize an attack on Coruscant.
The evidence against her is circumstantial at best.
Yet the Jedi Council expelled her, surrendered her to Republic jurisdiction, and allowed an absurd amount of military force to be deployed for her capture.
All because her lightsabers disappeared from the prison evidence locker around the same time she escaped.
“One saber was planted beside her cell,” Hound says. “She missed it during the escape.”
“The cameras?”
“Rigged. Someone looped the corridor feeds, took the second saber, and killed two Guardsmen with it.”
Relay’s grip tightens around his helmet.
“To make it look like Tano did it.”
Fox nods.
Skywalker and the 501st are enough of a headache that Fox generally avoids them, but even he knows Tano wouldn’t turn against her family this easily.
Family is usually the last thing a clone abandons.
Then there is the warehouse.
Hound opens the recovered inventory. “Same manufacturer’s mark as the nanobombs found in Trumond’s body. Enough material stored there to build several more devices.”
“And Tano led us directly to it.”
“She was investigating while sick, starving, unarmed, and being hunted.”
“Apparently.”
Relay looks between them. “Do you think she knew it was there?”
“No,” Fox says. “I think whoever framed her didn’t expect her to survive long enough to find it.”
They reach the investigations office. Hound brings up the newest laboratory report.
“Ventress arrived before the capture,” he says. “Claimed she was mugged.”
“By who?”
“Green-skinned woman. Force-sensitive. Took both of Ventress’s lightsabers.”
Fox reads the report.
Ventress was on her way to share evidence supporting Tano’s innocence. Someone attacked her, stole weapons that could easily be mistaken for Jedi sabers, then disappeared into Coruscant.
Hound expands another result.
“We sampled the hilt recovered outside Tano’s cell.”
Fox reads the genetic profile twice.
Mirialan DNA.
Relay shifts beside him. “That narrows it.”
“Considerably,” Hound says.
Fox’s comm-link activates.
The front-desk channel.
He answers and immediately hears Cynthia Hale’s irritated voice.
“Chief, General Skywalker is here. He is demanding an audience.”
Fox closes his eyes.
Of course he is.