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There were laws on New Cov about breathing.

Every child born beneath the high sealed domes of Ilic learned them before they learned their letters: do not remove your respirator beyond the city membranes; do not touch unfamiliar bark; do not step into puddles shining silver in the dark; do not follow the sound of voices calling through the yellow mist, because certain flowers had learned to imitate distress calls from the settlers who died harvesting them.

The jungles of New Cov were beautiful only from behind transparisteel.

From inside them, they were hunger.

The Imperial labour installation at Settlement Nine had not been built by men who expected to stay long. Its durasteel barracks stood on pylons driven into black marshwater. Its floodlights made a white wound in the trees. Its processing vats stank of boiled vine resin and military disinfectant. The perimeter fence was electrified high enough to stop a Wookiee from climbing it and deep enough to make escape through the mud suicidal.

The official documentation referred to the installation as an agricultural rehabilitation station.

The prisoners called it nothing.

Names suggested a place one could survive long enough to remember.

Lieutenant Ardin Fole hated the prisoners most during storm warnings.

On clear nights, he could almost pretend they were simply labour units: tall, filthy shapes moving baskets of biomolecule fruit beneath the rifles of the stormtroopers; insectoid dissidents cleaning collector vents; two Rodian brothers repairing extractor pumps with wrists burned raw by restraint cuffs. The records reduced each one to height, strength, calorie requirement and expected yield.

But when the storm beacons began their low, funereal moaning, the Wookiees stopped working.

They stood in the chemical rain suits the Empire had issued them—patched, too thin, never enough for old bones—and lifted their faces toward the canopy.

Listening.

That was what Fole disliked.

It made him feel as though the jungle had become a room into which he had walked without permission.

“Move them,” Colonel Malven Hesk said behind him.

Fole turned. Hesk had emerged from the armored command crawler in his storm cape and mask, gloves polished despite the rain beginning to freckle the mud. He was a lean man in his late fifties, with the colourless features of an officer who had learned long ago that cruelty was tidier when conducted through paperwork.

“Sir, the storm sirens have sounded. If we continue harvesting—”

“Governor Vale requires the shipment before midnight.” Hesk’s respirator altered his voice into something metallic and ugly. “The biomolecule consortium does not care if a few labourers develop respiratory blistering. Neither do I.”

A Wookiee prisoner some meters away turned her head.

She was old. Even Fole could see that: streaks of silver through the brown fur, one eye cloudy, her back stooped from years of labour. The electro-collar around her neck seemed absurdly small against her size. She stared at Hesk without lowering her gaze.

Hesk noticed.

“Unit Besh-Twenty-Seven,” he said to a stormtrooper sergeant, “has not met quota for two consecutive days. Make an example.”

The sergeant lifted his shock-prod.

The old Wookiee did not flinch.

That unsettled Fole almost as much as the storm.

The jungle shuddered.

Somewhere far beyond the lighted perimeter, thunder moved through the canopy, slow and enormous. Not a crack of weather but a long-bodied growl, as though some sleeping creature beneath the roots had rolled over and opened one eye.

The first drops struck the roof of the harvesting shed.

They hissed.

Every exposed leaf began to smoke.

The old Wookiee looked out beyond the fence again.

And, quite softly, she spoke a sentence in Shyriiwook.

Fole did not understand it.

The other Wookiees did.

One after another, throughout the holding yard, they went still.

The stormtrooper with the shock-prod stopped two steps from the old prisoner.

“What did she say?” Fole demanded.

A battered protocol droid attached to the prisoner registry stood beneath an awning, one arm missing, its translation circuits frequently unreliable. It clicked faintly before answering.

“She said, sir: ‘The trees have remembered us.’”

Several troopers laughed.

Colonel Hesk did not.

“Get them moving,” he said. “And double the patrols along the western fence. I will not have superstitious beasts encouraging disorder.”

Above them, hidden behind three hundred meters of leaves and poisonous mist, something moved.

Not hurriedly.

Not clumsily.

Something that knew the height of every limb, the give of every vine, the pressure each footfall could place upon living wood without stirring the sensor-web below.

The figure paused on a branch thick as a freighter’s loading ramp, rain touching the edges of his fur before steaming away from the waxed storm-cloak across his shoulders.

He was old now.

Not frail. Never that.

Age had come to him like weather came to wroshyr bark: darkening him, deepening him, wrapping scars inside scars until what remained was not weakness but testimony.

A lightsaber hung at his hip.

Its hilt had been carved long ago from wood, the grain worn smooth by a hand that had carried it through the death of an Order, through the chains of an Empire, through a hundred nameless places where children whispered that perhaps Jedi had not all vanished into graves.

Beside him crouched a younger Wookiee.

Rriikarra was taller than most humans even before the adulthood still approaching her had finished making its decisions. Her fur was black along the shoulders and tawny around the face, braided with three small silver beads inherited from her mother. Rain glittered along her whiskers. The hilt fastened across her chest was shorter than Gungi’s and bound in dark leather, built partly from Kashyyyk wood and partly from a fragment of Mandalorian iron that Sev had given her when she was twelve.

Her breathing was too quick.

Gungi heard it without turning.

He raised one broad hand and placed two fingers against the branch.

Wait.

Rriikarra’s eyes remained fixed upon Settlement Nine below.

Through the poisoned drizzle she could see the prisoners in the yard. She could see the stoop in elderly backs. She could see a Wookiee cub, perhaps not more than five standard years old, held behind one of the barrack windows with both palms against the glass.

Her claws sank into the bark.

Gungi made a quiet sound in his throat.

Not correction.

Recognition.

He had known rage before she was born. He had carried it when he was hardly more than a cub himself, when the Jedi Temple became smoke and warnings and vanished voices; when men in identical white armor began appearing in the dreams of every survivor; when Kashyyyk’s trees grew crowded with hiding places and no hiding place was ever safe for long.

Below them a stormtrooper struck an elderly prisoner across the shoulder with a shock-prod.

Rriikarra’s hand went to her lightsaber.

Gungi caught her wrist.

Her head snapped toward him, teeth bared—not at him, never truly at him, but at the unbearable patience of goodness in a world that had used patience as another weapon against the imprisoned.

Gungi looked into her face.

Then he signed with one hand.

*Not until the doors are open.*

Rriikarra stared down at the prison compound. Her breathing became rougher.

*They are hurting them now.*

Gungi’s eyes did not leave hers.

*And we are here now.*

For a moment she remained rigid. Then her fingers eased away from the hilt.

Far to their north, somewhere invisible in the green-black storm, a muffled crack moved through the trees.

It was so quiet the Imperials below did not hear it over the rain.

Gungi did.

Rriikarra did.

A single trooper on the outer sensor post ceased existing as part of the camp’s defences.

Rriikarra made a faint, bitterly amused rumble.

Her grandfather’s ears twitched.

A voice came through the receiver nested against the fur beneath Gungi’s jaw, harsh and dry and human, older than it once had been but still carrying the same contemptuous enjoyment of a properly placed shot.

“North observation post is asleep,” Sev said. “Very deeply asleep.”

Another voice followed, younger, carrying restrained laughter beneath Mandalorian discipline.

“He is stunned, buir.”

“That’s what I said.”

“You shot his helmet off.”

“He won’t lose it now.”

Rriikarra released a breath that might almost have been a laugh.

Gungi answered into the comm in Shyriiwook, low enough that the sound was swallowed by the storm.

Sev replied at once.

“Yeah, yeah. No unnecessary killing. I remember the sermon. It was longer the first four hundred times.”

The younger voice—Torin Sev, eldest of the commando’s sons—said, “You quote him when you think no one hears.”

“Do I sound like I need my own child exposing me during an operation?”

“You always said never leave weaknesses unreported.”

“I should have raised quieter children.”

“You raised Mandalorians.”

There was a silence.

Then Sev muttered, “That was my first mistake.”

The warmth vanished from his voice a heartbeat later.

“Four patrols outside the fence. Two watchtowers. One crawler with heavier plating than the briefing suggested. The landing pad’s running a beacon despite the storm, so your governor may be expecting friends. Torin’s placing charges on the repeater. I can drop tower personnel when you give the word.”

Gungi watched the holding barracks.

A stormtrooper dragged one Wookiee prisoner away from the others by his collar chain. The prisoner stumbled once and was forced to his knees beside a resin cart.

The cub behind the glass disappeared, pulled back by frightened adult hands.

Gungi closed his eyes.

Rain dripped from the ends of his fur.

The jungle around him pulsed with poisoned life, with vines opening beneath the storm, with insects folding themselves inside bark, with flowers lifting mouths filled with anesthetic pollen. Under all of it he could feel the camp: fear packed into narrow huts; sickness; anger that had been punished until it dared not show its teeth; the small fading light of people taught day by day that the galaxy had forgotten them.

And inside that suffering, stubborn as a root splitting stone, he felt something waiting.

Not for rescue.

For proof.

Proof that the Empire was not the only thing capable of coming back.

His eyes opened.

He touched Rriikarra’s shoulder.

Now.

The first stormtrooper vanished from the western fence at nineteen minutes past local midnight.

TK-7782 had complained about patrol duty from the moment Sergeant Davin assigned him to it. His respirator seal was old, the weather turned his visor amber at the edges, and he was convinced the camp armourer had given him a power pack with less than half a charge. The poisonous jungle on the far side of the fence writhed beneath the rainfall, leaves turning their undersides upward as though tasting the chemicals in the water.

He hated New Cov.

He hated the prisoners.

He hated the officers who slept inside sealed vehicles while he walked two meters from vines capable of dissolving a glove.

His partner, TK-8041, went ahead of him through the mud, sweeping his rifle-light between the tree trunks.

“Picking up movement?” 7782 asked.

“Everything moves in this dump.”

“My scanner chirped.”

“Probably one of those crawler things.”

“It said heavy mass.”

8041 stopped.

The two troopers stared through the poison rain.

Beyond the fence, between the immense swollen trunks, there was nothing but falling water and yellow vapor. Their beams reached only a little distance before the storm drank them.

Then a branch groaned above them.

7782 lifted his rifle.

A hand came down from the dark.

It was furred, broad enough to cover the entire front of his helmet, and absolutely silent.

He had time to make one short sound before his feet left the walkway and his whole body rose into the leaves. His rifle hit the mud, firing once into the fence in a spit of blue energy.

8041 spun around.

“Seven? Seven!”

His own light shook over the dropped weapon.

The electrical fence crackled where the shot had hit.

“Control, west perimeter. I have a missing—”

Something landed behind him.

The trooper turned.

For one second the lightning illuminated an enormous figure standing less than an arm’s length away.

A Wookiee.

Older, silver marked across the muzzle and chest.

A long dark cloak hung from his shoulders. Rain hissed against it. His eyes caught the reflected light with an exhausted, terrible sadness.

The stormtrooper backed into the fence.

“What in—”

The Wookiee moved faster than anything that size had any right to move.

A hand struck the barrel of the blaster aside. The weapon discharged into the sky. Two fingers closed on the trooper’s chest plate and pushed—not violently, barely at all—and 8041 felt an invisible impact seize him and carry him backward into the mud.

His helmet struck one of New Cov’s thick rubbery roots.

His vision went white.

By the time he fought his way upright, the walkway was empty.

His missing partner’s rifle lay in the mud.

His own comlink was gone.

Something clicked softly on the tree above him.

He looked up.

There was a young Wookiee crouched upside down from a low branch, hooked there by powerful feet and one hand, her black-and-tawny face suspended above him.

In her other hand she held his comlink.

She tilted her head at him.

Then she brought one enormous finger to her mouth.

Silence.

The trooper’s eyes widened behind the visor.

The Wookiee dropped on him.

At Central Control, a monitor blinked yellow.

Sergeant Davin leaned forward over the motion-sensor board and slapped the side of it.

“Western post just went dead.”

“Interference from the storm,” said Technician Pell without looking up from his cup of caf.

“It went dead after a discharge.”

“So lightning hit it.”

“Lightning doesn’t log a blaster pulse first.”

Pell sighed and dragged his chair over. He had the pale, hollow cheeks of men who lived too long on processed ration bars and believed cynicism constituted competence. He brought up the perimeter sensor lattice.

Rain scrolled across the display as static. Leaves registered in faint green noise. The fence held in blue. Small wildlife appeared and disappeared in nervous scatterings of points.

Davin tapped the western sector.

Two helmet feeds had gone dark.

He opened a command channel.

“Patrol West Two. Report.”

Nothing.

“West Two, report immediately.”

Static.

From somewhere outside, beyond the prefabricated wall of Control, came a distant Wookiee roar.

It was not loud.

It did not need to be.

Every man in the room stopped moving.

Pell cleared his throat. “Prisoners getting worked up.”

Davin looked at him.

“Inside a sealed barracks?”

A second monitor blinked.

North observation post offline.

Then the camera mounted over Tower Two tilted sharply downward, shuddered, and showed for half a second the boots of the tower sentry leaving the platform as though some invisible hand had yanked him bodily into the rain.

The feed went dark.

Pell stood up so quickly his caf spilled.

Davin hit the alarm.

Red lamps came on throughout Settlement Nine.

The siren that followed was almost immediately swallowed by the greater siren of the chemical storm.

Inside Barracks Three, the old Wookiee woman lifted her face.

Her name was Graarrawa.

Once, before her fur had turned silver and the scars had sealed one eyelid half shut, she had lived in the high homes of Kachirho with a mate who played a stringed instrument carved from flowering wood. She had carried two children through the last years of the Clone Wars. She had watched green-armored troopers become white-armored troopers, watched platforms become prisons, watched human officers discover that Wookiee hands were useful for building war machines they would never be allowed to use.

She had survived Kashyyyk.

She had survived because the Empire had always assumed old women remembered too much grief to be dangerous.

The Empire did not understand that memory was the sharpest thing she had left.

Around her in the barracks, prisoners stirred anxiously as red lights flashed through the narrow windows. An Ithorian man curled protectively around his adolescent daughter. A Devaronian miner whispered a prayer. Three Wookiee youths began testing the barred door despite knowing its charge would throw them across the room if they touched it.

Little Naaww, the cub, climbed against Graarrawa’s side, trembling.

“What is happening?” he asked in a frightened series of chirrs and clicks.

Graarrawa looked through the rain-smeared window.

For a moment she saw nothing but floodlights, guards running, mud splashing around polished white boots.

Then one floodlight burst.

Then another.

Something passed beneath them, not like an animal, not like a fleeing prisoner, but like the shadow cast by a tree falling through the night.

A stormtrooper turned toward it.

A green light appeared.

It did not sweep wildly. It moved once. The stormtrooper’s rifle fell into the mud in two pieces, its severed ends glowing.

The trooper stumbled backward.

An immense figure stepped into the floodlight behind him.

Graarrawa stopped breathing.

No.

No, that was impossible.

The light vanished again before the others in the barracks could properly see it. The figure withdrew into the storm. Blasterfire began from the watchtower, wild bolts ripping through leaves, striking tree trunks, hitting nothing.

The younger Wookiees growled eagerly now. One struck both fists against his chest.

But Graarrawa remained utterly still.

There had been a boy.

A lifetime ago.

A small boy, small only by the measure of Wookiees, with fur not yet fully grown at the shoulders and eyes that carried too much pain for any cub to possess. An Imperial transport had brought him down through the fog in binders. The guards had called him animal. One had called him Jedi before another struck him hard enough to leave blood on the loading platform.

Graarrawa had been young enough then to fight foolishly, old enough to know she could not reach him without bringing death upon everyone chained beside her.

But three nights later the lights had gone out in Processing Camp Aurek.

The child had escaped.

The story spread through cages, through mines, through night-work platforms where exhausted workers carried ore beneath Imperial guns.

A Jedi cub lived.

A Jedi cub had climbed into the trees.

A Jedi cub had returned twice in secret to cut shackles from those he could reach.

Thereafter, whenever equipment failed or guards vanished or a supply transport burned on a landing platform without anyone seeing who had lit the fire, prisoners whispered that the child was still among the branches.

The Empire ordered them whipped for repeating it.

It only made the story holy.

The little boy beside Graarrawa clutched her fur.

“Grandmother?”

Another rifle discharged somewhere outside.

A human screamed.

Graarrawa pressed one hand against the window.

Her voice shook as she answered him.

“The child became old,” she said.

The camp had thirty-seven stormtroopers assigned to perimeter defence, eight Imperial Army technicians, eleven armed labour overseers and four officers, excluding Colonel Hesk.

Within seven minutes of the alarm, nine stormtroopers failed to answer comm checks.

Within nine minutes, both observation towers stopped reporting.

At eleven minutes, a patrol sent into the western jungle returned without helmets, weapons or belts, stumbling one after another toward the gate in their undersuits with their hands raised above their heads. One of them had written in bright harvesting pigment across his chest plate before losing it.

RUN.

Sergeant Davin saw them through the control window and felt something wet collect beneath his collar despite the air filtration.

“Open the gate,” said a young trooper near him.

“No,” Pell snapped. “They could be compromised.”

“They’re our men!”

“They’re bait!”

A bolt from somewhere high above the camp punched into the gate control panel. Sparks exploded across the yard.

The gate locks died.

The three stripped troopers outside began screaming to be let in.

An Imperial overseer ran toward the manual release.

A second shot, almost lazily precise, struck the mud directly in front of his boot.

He froze.

A voice came across the camp’s unsecured comm channel.

It was human.

Male.

Old, or nearly so.

“Step away from the gate,” it said.

The overseer’s face went grey.

Davin lunged toward the transmitter.

“Identify yourself!”

There was no answer.

He shouted louder. “This facility is under the authority of Governor Rennic Vale and the lawful Imperial administration of the Churba Sector. Identify yourself or you will be treated as a hostile combatant!”

A quiet crackle answered.

Then the voice returned.

“I was treated as a hostile combatant before your father was old enough to shave.”

The red alarm lights flickered.

“Funny thing about that,” the voice continued. “It didn’t improve my mood.”

Pell leaned toward Davin, whispering. “Mandalorian?”

Davin stared through the glass at the drowned darkness beyond the compound.

He knew enough old war stories.

There had been Mandalorians during the Rebellion, mercenaries and patriots and lunatics in painted armor. There had been clone commandos once, before his time, soldiers bred for impossible objectives and whispered about by older officers whenever too much liquor had loosened their mouths.

But those men belonged to museums and personnel archives.

They did not belong in trees outside a labour camp, stripping Imperial patrols and shooting gate controls out of the rain.

A new signal burst across their channel, younger than the first.

“Repeater is primed.”

The older man replied, “Take it.”

A muffled detonation sounded beyond the southern wall.

Every console in Central Control flashed, scrambled and went dark.

The outside comm array sagged sideways through the rain, smoking from the base.

Davin looked at the dead screens.

“Colonel,” he said into his private comm. “Colonel Hesk, we are under coordinated assault. Two, perhaps four attackers. Wookiees and at least one marksman. Our communications repeater has been disabled.”

Hesk’s voice answered from the armored crawler, disgusted and incredulous.

“Two attackers?”

“Possibly more.”

“You have fifty armed personnel.”

“Sir, we can’t see them.”

“Then illuminate the jungle.”

Davin looked toward the floodlight controls.

All across the camp, remaining troopers were taking positions behind resin carts and storage containers, rifles aimed toward the perimeter. The prisoners had retreated within the barracks, dim forms behind transparisteel. Rain flayed the ground into rising steam.

Davin activated every remaining exterior searchlight.

Great white beams swung outward.

For a moment the jungle became a cathedral of enormous trunks, trembling leaves and suspended golden vapor.

Nothing moved.

“Motion grid,” Hesk ordered through the comm. “Full sensitivity.”

Pell’s hands shook as he rerouted emergency power into the ground sensors. The wall monitor stuttered once, twice, and produced a simplified image of the terrain outside Settlement Nine.

Rain interference.

Small animal traces.

Troopers.

Electrical distortion from the fence.

Then two marks appeared in the western grove.

Pell stared.

They were not moving.

Davin leaned closer.

“What is that?”

Pell adjusted the scale.

Two red silhouettes resolved between the tree trunks, each tall enough that the sensor program displayed warning sigils across the image.

LIFE-FORM MASS OUTSIDE STANDARD PARAMETERS.

One stood perhaps twenty meters from the fence.

The other stood slightly behind and above it, balanced on something unseen.

Neither moved.

Not a sway.

Not a step.

Despite the beams sliding through branches. Despite blaster rifles trained into their position. Despite the poisonous rain.

“Sir,” Pell whispered into the comm, “we have detected two large life-forms at sector West Four.”

“How large?”

Pell swallowed.

“Wookiee-sized.”

Colonel Hesk was silent.

Outside, several troopers saw the readings repeated on their helmet HUDs. Rifles shifted toward the location.

One trooper called out, “I’ve got them! West Four! Fire!”

The camp erupted.

Red bolts tore into the illuminated grove.

Tree bark burst.

Leaves ignited and vanished in wet sparks.

Poison pods ruptured, filling the air with violet smoke.

Every trooper fired until blaster barrels glowed.

Davin watched the motion grid.

The two silhouettes remained perfectly still.

Even under the barrage.

“Cease fire!” he screamed. “Cease fire!”

The bolts faltered.

The storm filled the silence left behind.

A torn curtain of vines slid from one scorched trunk and collapsed into the mud.

Nothing stood where they had fired.

Yet the motion grid still showed two enormous forms.

One twenty meters from the fence.

One above it.

Perfectly still.

“That is not possible,” Pell said.

From somewhere close behind Central Control came the ignition-snap of a lightsaber.

Not the roar of a weapon drawn in fury.

A clean, almost gentle sound.

A blade humming awake.

Pell began to turn.

Every light in Settlement Nine went out.

Darkness did not descend.

It struck.

One moment Sergeant Davin could see his own hand and the red-lit angles of the control station; the next there was only the blackness of the storm, absolute and total, dense enough to have weight.

Men shouted.

A rifle fired inside the control room, its scarlet bolt illuminating Pell’s terrified face for a fraction of a second before striking the ceiling.

“Hold fire!” Davin roared. “Hold your—”

Something heavy passed across the roof.

The whole building creaked.

Outside came a confusion of voices: stormtroopers calling positions, officers demanding emergency power, someone shrieking that there were figures inside the fence. The prisoners began roaring inside the barracks, dozens of Wookiee voices rising in the darkness until the camp vibrated with it.

Davin fumbled for the emergency glowrod clipped to his belt.

He activated it.

Greenish light spilled through Control.

The outer door stood open.

He was certain it had been locked.

Rain pooled on the floor beneath it.

There were muddy footprints inside the threshold.

Huge ones.

Pell whimpered.

A shape descended slowly from the ceiling rafters behind him.

Davin’s glowrod swung up.

The young Wookiee hung from the support beams like a nightmare given flesh, one hand and both feet braced overhead. The hilt in her free hand ignited.

Not green.

Gold.

Its blade washed her rain-dark face in amber light.

Pell screamed and fired.

She dropped.

The shot passed where she had been. She landed between the two men hard enough to shake the floor plating, brought her blade around once, and Pell’s rifle fell apart at the receiver.

Davin raised his own weapon.

It left his hands before he could fire, torn away by an invisible force and driven point-first into a console.

The young Wookiee advanced.

Her lips curled back from her teeth.

For one horrifying instant Davin saw the truth: she was not calm. She was young enough to hate them with all the violence they deserved. Her hand trembled upon the lightsaber hilt. Her amber blade shifted toward Pell’s throat.

Then a low voice rolled from the doorway.

Not human.

The younger Wookiee froze.

Davin turned.

An older Wookiee stood in the rain.

The green blade in his hand illuminated silver fur, a weathered face and eyes so tired they made terror feel childish. His presence filled the doorway. Behind him, lightning exposed fallen stormtroopers lying in the mud, breathing but unmoving, their weapons piled away from them.

The younger one snarled something at him in Shyriiwook.

Davin did not need a protocol droid to understand the emotion.

*They deserve it.*

The older Wookiee did not look at her weapon.

He looked at her.

The girl’s breathing hitched.

For several heartbeats the only sound in the control room was the storm and Pell sobbing on the floor.

Then the golden blade turned away from his throat.

It cut through the locking mechanism controlling Barracks One.

Then Barracks Two.

Then Barracks Three.

Outside, cell doors released with great mechanical clanks.

The prisoners roared again.

The older Wookiee crossed the room and placed one enormous hand upon Davin’s shoulder.

The sergeant was twenty-nine years old. He had served on two worlds, broken three labour strikes, once watched a Trandoshan contractor beat a Wookiee miner until he could no longer stand and told himself it was not his responsibility because he had not held the weapon.

He had never thought of himself as brave.

Now he discovered he was not even capable of lying well.

“I only followed orders,” he babbled.

The Wookiee regarded him.

There was no anger in his face.

That was worse.

The younger Wookiee pulled the registry data core from its socket and cast it toward her elder. He caught it without looking.

Outside, a new voice rang through the darkness.

“Prisoners! Listen carefully! This is Torin Sev of Clan Rusk. The perimeter is compromised, and that is excellent news for you. Remain clear of the towers and follow the amber lamps when they activate. Anyone wearing Imperial armour who attempts to stop you will be persuaded not to.”

A frightened Imperial voice cried, “There are hundreds of them!”

The older human marksman answered from the trees.

“No. Four of us. That’s the embarrassing part.”

There was a rifle crack.

A trooper screamed and dropped his weapon.

The green-bladed Wookiee leaned down to Davin.

He spoke slowly, a gravel-deep phrase of Shyriiwook.

The young one translated in clipped Basic.

“He says you will open every remaining enclosure.”

Davin stared at her.

“And if I refuse?”

The gold blade hummed by her shoulder.

Her grandfather made another low sound.

She glared at him in irritation, then faced Davin again.

“He says you will open every remaining enclosure.”

There was something final in the repetition.

Davin stumbled to the controls.

Colonel Malven Hesk had considered himself a practical man.

Practicality had taken him from the debris of the Emperor’s death to Governor Vale’s service. While lesser officers offered ritual loyalties to dead men and dying flags, Hesk had understood that the Empire was not a throne, nor an anthem, nor a hooded figure issuing commands from a throne room.

It was control.

Control of labour. Control of food. Control of information. Control of fear.

New Cov gave Governor Vale two useful commodities: biological extracts sold quietly to weapons consortiums, and a jungle sufficiently lethal that no committee from Coruscant ever insisted on inspecting where the labourers came from.

Hesk had built Settlement Nine himself.

He had signed every intake order.

He had signed for the Wookiees because their muscles doubled the harvesting output.

He had signed for dissidents because punishment was cheap and silence profitable.

He had signed for cubs because adults with children worked faster when their offspring remained in Imperial custody.

And now, inside his armored command crawler, surrounded by reinforced durasteel and its independent filtration system, he tried to understand how four intruders had dismantled eleven years of order in less than twenty minutes.

His crawler had emergency illumination. Its tactical screens remained active on internal batteries. Its hull could withstand small-arms fire, acid rain and, theoretically, the physical strength of an enraged Wookiee.

The locks had sealed.

The weapons turret was armed.

His personal guard of six stormtroopers lay outside the main hatch where some attacker had dropped them so neatly their helmets formed a white arc in the mud.

One of them had knocked on the crawler door moments earlier.

Hesk had not opened it.

He was still telling himself this had been rational.

“Settlement Nine Control,” he snapped over the internal comm. “Report.”

For several seconds there was only static.

Then Lieutenant Fole answered, his voice cracking.

“They’ve opened the barracks, sir.”

“Then close them!”

“The locks have been cut.”

“Shoot escapees.”

“Sir, the troopers won’t fire.”

Hesk stared at the receiver.

“What?”

There came a sound over the channel: voices, many voices, Wookiees moving through the camp. Metal striking metal. A rifle thrown down.

Fole spoke again, lower.

“They can hear something in the trees, sir. A sniper. Every time one of ours raises a weapon toward the prisoners, the weapon is shot from his hands. Just the weapon. Every time. The men believe he is playing with them.”

“He is one marksman.”

“He has not missed.”

Hesk clenched his fist.

“Governor Vale has reinforcements at Ilic. Get the beacon transmitting.”

“The communications array was destroyed.”

“You have a portable relay in the administrative office.”

There was another pause.

Hesk suddenly understood.

“Lieutenant?”

“He is here, sir.”

Hesk heard an animal rumble through the comm.

Deep.

Close to Fole’s transmitter.

Fole whispered, “There is a Jedi.”

A rush of cold passed through Hesk’s chest.

“No.”

“I saw the blade.”

“No,” Hesk repeated, because it was unacceptable, because that word belonged to Imperial history broadcasts, to burnt temples and classified lists, to a vanished generation. “Jedi are dead.”

The rumble came again.

This time another voice translated.

Young. Female, perhaps, though the growling cadence made certainty impossible.

“He says your Empire has been telling that lie for thirty years.”

The transmission ended.

Hesk sat without moving.

The crawler’s air filtration system cycled calmly. A green status light assured him the poison outside could not reach him. Another indicated the hull was sealed.

He forced himself to breathe.

There had been stories, naturally. Force-sensitive rebels. Luke Skywalker at Endor. Wild claims of blades appearing among insurgents and vanishing before the Empire could photograph them properly. Governors blaming supernatural assassins for common failures. Men of authority required monsters whenever their incompetence was too large to bury.

But Hesk had served on Kashyyyk during the years after the Purge.

Not at the beginning. Not when the great initial deportations had filled platforms with smoke and fur and blood.

Later.

When the occupation settled into procedure.

There had been stories there too.

A young Wookiee seen above the refinery lines.

A green light in the lower forests.

A boy taken in restraints who had escaped from an auxiliary processing camp despite two locked gates and a stun collar.

Officially, Hesk remembered, the reports had attributed the losses to indigenous resistance activity.

Unofficially, frightened men at night referred to him as the tree-child.

A Jedi youngling.

A survivor.

Hesk had dismissed it.

After all, if the child lived, the Empire had controlled Kashyyyk for decades regardless.

A single escaped boy changed nothing.

Outside the crawler, an alarm stopped abruptly.

Not deactivated.

Cut off.

Hesk heard the prisoners more clearly now through the hull, voices moving across the yard. He heard the crash of a supply locker opening. He heard orders spoken in Basic by the younger human voice, disciplined and calm: masks first; injured toward the processing shelter; children together; no one into the jungle without guides.

Then he heard a different voice.

A Wookiee voice.

Old.

It began as a questioning murmur.

Then rose into a sound Hesk had not heard in many years.

Recognition.

The sound of memory suddenly finding flesh.

Graarrawa walked into the storm without a respirator.

The younger prisoners tried to stop her. One took her arm; she shook him off with a gentleness that became immovable.

Chemical rain struck her fur and began to burn along the tips. She did not care. Not after Kashyyyk. Not after the holds of the prison ship. Not after the mines on Orvax, the transfer station at Brentaal, the disappearance of her youngest son into an Imperial labour register no one ever allowed her to access.

Pain had become a language she understood too fluently to mistake it for a command.

The yard was illuminated now only by emergency amber beacons dropped in a line through the mud. Prisoners stumbled out from barracks under the protection of storm masks and scavenged cloaks. A Mandalorian in matte green-and-grey armor guided them away from the fence, one hand on the shoulder of an injured Ithorian, blaster held low but ready in the other.

He saw Graarrawa moving alone through the rain and immediately came toward her.

“Ma’am, mask,” he called, reaching for one clipped to his belt. “You cannot breathe this for long.”

Graarrawa barely heard him.

Beyond him stood the Wookiee with the green blade.

It had been extinguished now. It hung in his lowered hand.

He stood amid prisoners as though frightened to approach them.

That, more than the scars, more than the grey fur or the age in his shoulders, told her she was right.

The child had always been frightened of being worshiped for surviving what others had not.

She walked toward him.

The Mandalorian caught up and put a filter mask into her hands, saying something firm but not unkind. She took it because his concern reminded her of sons; then she continued walking.

Around her, other elderly Wookiees began to notice where she was going.

They saw the figure at the center of the yard.

They heard the old sound rising from her throat.

Gungi watched the silver-furred female approach him through the burning rain.

At first he believed she was injured.

Then he saw her eye.

The clouded left one.

The scar carved down along the muzzle.

Memory struck him so sharply he almost staggered.

Not a camp.

A platform beneath Kashyyyk rain.

White armor.

A stun collar far too heavy around his neck.

His lightsaber gone.

He had been barely grown, young enough that grief still arrived as fury and not exhaustion. Three prisoners had been chained near him while an overseer processed transfers. One had been a female with a newborn hidden inside the heavy folds of her work wrap until the child made a frightened sound.

A stormtrooper had turned.

Gungi had lunged despite the collar.

The electricity had put him on his knees.

But the female prisoner had looked at him as the guards dragged him away.

Not afraid.

Not pleading.

She had growled one word.

*Live.*

He had never known her name.

In the yard of Settlement Nine, thirty years later, the old Wookiee stopped before him.

Rain smoked faintly along her shoulders.

Around them, the camp had receded into stunned quiet. Prisoners gathered. Even the liberated children watched from behind the legs of adults, sensing something older than battle passing between the two figures.

Graarrawa lifted one shaking hand.

She touched Gungi’s cheek.

His face crumpled.

She spoke.

The words came slowly, roughened by years and poison and old grief.

“The Jedi child who escaped.”

Gungi closed his eyes.

A sound tore from him.

It was not the cry of a warrior. It was not a victory roar.

It was the sound of the boy he had been, returned without warning from a locked room in memory; the boy who had left cages behind because he could not free everyone; the boy who had carried their faces into adulthood and never allowed himself to believe any remained alive to forgive him.

He bowed his head until his brow rested against hers.

Graarrawa brought both arms around him.

The prisoners surrounding them began to speak.

Some recognised the story without recognising the face. Some had heard it whispered by parents on Kashyyyk before their families were transported elsewhere. Some had been young labourers themselves when sabotage began appearing through the occupation zones: collars found opened, guard posts empty, messages scratched into tree bark where Imperial patrols could never reach them.

Others simply understood that an old wound had found someone who remembered its first name.

Rriikarra stood several paces away.

Her lightsaber was deactivated.

Rain ran through the fur of her cheeks.

She had known her grandfather as a teacher whose patience could irritate her beyond reason, as the one who corrected her footwork, who insisted she listen to trees before cutting branches for a practice staff, who refused to allow hatred of stormtroopers to become hatred of every frightened person behind a mask.

She had heard fragments of his past.

Never this.

Never the terrible smallness that returned to him when the old woman called him child.

A human hand touched Rriikarra’s shoulder.

She nearly spun with her claws out before recognising Sev.

He had removed his helmet.

His face was a landscape of age the Empire had never intended him to possess. Grey hair had grown in close and uneven over old scalp scars. One eye remained painfully sharp; the other had a pale artificial sheen where time and combat had eventually taken payment. The old red handprint on his Mandalorian breastplate was weathered now, dark beneath rainwater.

His rifle rested across his back.

For once, Sev had nothing sardonic to say.

Rriikarra looked at him.

Sev’s jaw worked once.

“He never told you that part.”

It was not a question.

She shook her head.

“Did he tell you?”

Sev released a quiet breath through his nose.

“Not willingly.”

In the yard, Graarrawa stroked Gungi’s face as though confirming that he had truly become old. Gungi remained bowed, one hand covering hers.

Sev watched him for a long moment.

“I found him in the trees,” he said finally. “Or he found me. Depends which one of us tells it.”

Rriikarra turned her head slightly toward him.

“Kashyyyk?”

“After my squad left.” The sentence was spoken without drama. That was what made it heavy. “I was wounded. Separatists all over the lower trails. Communications gone. Then Order Sixty-Six came through the channels I still had access to, and every Republic frequency changed its meaning in a matter of minutes.”

He glanced toward Gungi.

“I had a rifle. He had a blade and a concussion and the stubbornness of a feral tooka. First time I saw him, I thought he was trying to kill me.”

Rriikarra rumbled softly, questioning.

“He was trying to steal my rations.”

She stared at him.

Sev nodded solemnly.

“Nearly succeeded.”

Despite everything, a small laugh escaped her.

Sev’s expression softened.

“Then the Imperial occupation landed in force. We both learned there were worse things in those trees than each other.”

Gungi had lifted his head now. More elderly prisoners were approaching. One touched his arm. Another showed him an old burn scar around his throat where an Imperial collar had been. Gungi listened to every word. He did not look away when they told him names.

“He used to go back,” Sev said.

Rriikarra looked at him again.

“Into the camps?”

“I told him it would get him killed. Told him one youngling and one half-dead commando weren’t an army. Told him if he wanted to fight the Empire, he had to survive long enough to fight it properly.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his mouth.

“He listened very respectfully. Then he went back anyway.”

Rriikarra made a low sound of satisfaction.

“Don’t sound so pleased. You inherited that from him. Makes operations exhausting.”

Torin Sev approached through the rain, helmet under one arm. He was broad-shouldered like his father but darker-haired, his armor painted with green Wookiee knotwork across one pauldron. A strip of woven Kashyyyk fibre had been knotted around the base of his gauntlet.

“Buir,” he said quietly. “Imperial survivors secured near the processing shed. Twelve surrendered. Six unconscious. Several ran for the eastern jungle before we could stop them.”

Sev winced.

“Storm condition?”

“Level four alkaloid rainfall.”

“Then they’ll come back quickly or they won’t come back recognizable.”

Rriikarra did not pity them.

She tried to.

The feeling did not arrive.

Torin looked toward the prisoners surrounding Gungi. His face grew solemn.

“Is that her?”

Sev nodded.

Torin had been raised on the same stories as Rriikarra. Stories of a young Wookiee Jedi and a missing clone commando moving through occupied Kashyyyk like twin curses upon slavers; stories Sev pretended to dislike whenever his children asked him to repeat them; stories he always corrected in maddening detail whenever anyone else told them incorrectly.

Torin removed his gloves.

He approached the gathered Wookiees not as a soldier but as someone arriving at a family grave.

Graarrawa saw him first.

She studied the Mandalorian armor, then looked past him to Sev.

For the first time her one clear eye widened.

Gungi turned.

Sev stood in the rain with his helmet under his arm, suddenly looking profoundly uncomfortable under the attention of a dozen liberated Wookiees.

Gungi said something low to Graarrawa.

Her mouth opened.

She moved toward Sev.

“Oh, great,” he murmured, barely audible. “Here comes the emotional part.”

Torin looked scandalised. “You fought half a campaign to find these people.”

“I preferred being shot at.”

Graarrawa reached Sev.

For a moment she simply stared into the weathered human face.

Then she spoke.

Gungi translated into Basic, his voice rough.

“She asks if you are the red-eyed soldier who carried the wounded cub into the roots.”

Sev looked down at the mud.

“Helmet had red markings,” he said. “Both eyes were fine at the time.”

Graarrawa struck him in the chest.

Not hard enough to injure him.

Hard enough that Torin started forward before Gungi stopped him with one lifted hand.

Then Graarrawa dragged Sev down into a crushing embrace.

The old commando went rigid.

His arms hovered awkwardly for a moment, as though he had spent his whole life learning how to survive blades and blasters but had never been briefed on this particular attack.

Then his eyes closed.

Slowly, carefully, he embraced her back.

She growled against his shoulder in a voice thick with grief.

Gungi translated only after Sev looked at him.

“She says she believed you both dead.”

Sev swallowed.

“Most people did.”

“She says she kept telling the children the ghosts would return.”

Sev’s face twitched.

“Ghosts are bad for mission discipline.”

Graarrawa released a sound that began as a sob and ended, impossibly, as a laugh.

Torin bowed his head.

Rriikarra wiped at rain on her face as though rain were responsible for all of it.

Inside the armored crawler, Colonel Hesk watched the yard through a narrow external camera and understood that the camp was no longer his.

The Wookiee Jedi stood among the prisoners.

The Mandalorian marksman had revealed his face.

Another armored man, younger, assisted wounded labourers toward shelter. A young Wookiee carrying a lightsaber moved from terminal to terminal, removing data cores and destroying collar controls with deliberate precision.

Not raiders.

Not rebels after supplies.

Witnesses.

That terrified Hesk more than slaughter would have.

If they had come only to kill, their violence could be classified as atrocity. A report might call them extremists. Governor Vale might issue bounties. Dead Imperials could become useful propaganda.

But the attackers were gathering records.

They were organising evacuees.

They were keeping surrendering stormtroopers alive.

They intended someone to answer questions.

Hesk accessed his crawler’s secure transmitter. The exterior repeater was gone, but the vehicle carried an emergency orbital pulse strong enough to break through a storm if aligned correctly.

He entered Governor Vale’s priority code.

The terminal searched.

Searched.

Then rejected the connection.

Signal obstruction.

Hesk tried again.

A heavy metallic groan came through the hull.

He froze.

Something had touched the crawler’s exterior.

Not struck it.

Touched it.

He rotated the nearest camera.

The image showed only rain running over armored plating.

Another groan.

This time from the rear access hatch.

Hesk activated external speakers.

“This vehicle is armored and sealed,” he announced, fighting to keep his voice level. “Any attempt to breach it will be met with lethal force.”

No answer.

He brought the dorsal turret online.

The targeting display swept over the yard. Prisoners scattered as the cannon assembly rose from its recessed housing. Hesk locked the reticle on the tall green-bladed Wookiee.

His finger settled above the firing control.

The turret abruptly stopped responding.

Hesk frowned and struck the manual override.

Nothing.

Outside, the younger armored human—Torin—stood atop a storage container holding a severed actuator cable in one hand. He tossed it aside.

A shot punched into the crawler camera.

The feed went black.

Sev’s voice arrived through the external speaker system, apparently transmitted into an Imperial frequency he had obtained from one of the captured guards.

“Colonel Hesk. Heard a lot about you.”

Hesk turned in his chair.

“How do you know my name?”

“You signed it very often.”

Hesk’s mouth went dry.

“The files are Imperial property.”

“That’s an interesting description for a prisoner ledger.”

“You are interfering in the lawful detention of insurgents and criminal aliens under sector authority.”

There was a pause.

Then Sev laughed.

It was not a loud laugh.

It was the humourless sound of an old predator discovering prey had mistaken legal phrasing for armor.

“I knew men like you when the Empire still had an Emperor,” Sev said. “They talked the same way. Always thought if they buried the killing beneath enough words, nobody could smell it.”

Hesk unholstered his sidearm.

“The governor will retaliate against every settlement that assisted you.”

“He’ll have difficulty.”

“Why?”

“Because your personnel records, payment transfers, private labour quotas and communications with three biomolecule contractors are currently transmitting to New Republic Intelligence, the Kashyyyk Restoration Council, five independent news relays and an exceptionally angry Bothan woman who owes me a favour.”

Hesk could hear the smile in Sev’s voice now.

“She was delighted.”

Hesk turned toward the emergency transmitter.

The indicator had changed from green to red.

SIGNAL DIVERTED.

“No,” he whispered.

“You should have paid technicians better,” Sev continued. “They surrender much faster when they know their officers plan to let them die in poison rain.”

Hesk slammed his fist onto the console.

“You think this matters? Vale is one governor. There are dozens more. The Empire remains. These animals will spend their whole lives running from one camp to the next.”

A different voice answered him.

Rriikarra.

Her Basic carried a growling accent that made every word feel pulled across stone.

“They are not running tonight.”

The rear hatch groaned again.

Hesk raised his sidearm toward it.

The crawler’s internal lights flickered.

“Back away!” he shouted. “I will kill whoever comes through that hatch!”

Outside, the camp fell strangely quiet.

The prisoners had been moved back.

The Imperial captives held under guard stopped whispering.

Even the storm seemed to soften, rain turning from violent sheets to a constant hiss upon the metal shell.

Hesk could hear someone beyond the crawler.

Not clawing.

Not cutting.

Breathing.

A deep, measured breath.

He knew then who stood outside.

The hatch gave another small, protesting creak.

Hesk’s training overrode panic for half a second. He checked the locks. Four durasteel bolts remained engaged. The door was designed to withstand explosive decompression, external fire and physical impacts well above the strength of any organic species.

A Jedi could not simply—

One bolt bent.

Not snapped.

Bent.

Very slowly.

The metal made a soft, agonised noise as it warped inside its housing.

Hesk backed away from the hatch.

His pistol trembled in both hands.

A second bolt began to move.

Outside, Gungi stood before the crawler with his eyes half closed.

His right hand was raised.

Not clenched.

Open.

Around him, rain rolled off his cloak and gathered in the mud. Graarrawa watched from beneath a shelter awning, a respirator now secured over her face. Rriikarra stood beside her grandfather, golden lightsaber still unlit in her hand.

She could feel what he was doing.

Not strength alone.

That was the first lesson young Force-sensitives always misunderstood. They imagined the Force as exertion, as power forced outward through clenched teeth and tightened muscles.

Gungi was not tearing at the hatch.

He was finding every stress inside it.

Every weak weld.

Every bolt under strain.

Every place the Imperial designers had accepted an almost invisible imperfection because no attacker would ever have time to exploit it.

Then he was asking each weakness to remember itself.

Metal screamed.

The second bolt folded inward.

An Imperial prisoner beneath guard began to pray.

Rriikarra watched her grandfather’s face.

There was grief there.

There was anger.

There was also restraint so complete that it frightened her more than fury would have.

He could rip the hatch away in an instant. She knew it. Sev knew it. Perhaps even the officer cowering inside knew it.

Gungi chose not to.

He chose that the man within would hear every second of the safety he had trusted failing him.

Rriikarra understood then that mercy and gentleness were not the same thing.

Behind them, a liberated Wookiee opened the smallest holding pen.

Four children emerged.

The youngest stumbled in the mud and began crying from fear rather than injury. Torin immediately knelt, pulled his cloak free from one shoulder and wrapped it around the child. Another cub clung to the back of his armor, apparently deciding the Mandalorian had become transport.

Sev stood above them with his rifle trained toward the treeline.

“Torin.”

“I know.”

“That is not tactically ideal.”

“I know.”

“You appear to have acquired a child.”

The cub tightened both arms around Torin’s neck.

Torin looked at his father.

“Temporary mission asset.”

Sev stared at him.

Gungi, despite everything, released a soft rumbling chuckle.

Inside the crawler, Hesk heard it.

Laughter.

The prisoners were laughing outside his sealed armored vehicle while its bolts bent one by one.

The third lock buckled.

The hatch opened perhaps half a centimeter, enough for a thread of chemical mist to curl through the seam.

His respirator sat in a cabinet two meters away.

Hesk rushed for it, one hand still clutching his pistol.

The drawer would not open.

He pulled harder.

It remained sealed.

Beyond the hull, the younger Wookiee’s voice came faintly.

“We removed the filtration reserve line.”

Hesk stumbled back.

“You cannot do this!” he screamed toward the hatch. “Do you hear me? I am an officer of the Imperial government!”

The older Wookiee spoke from outside.

Hesk heard the sound through metal.

It was not translated immediately.

For several seconds he had only the raw language: deep, wounded, resonant, carrying the thickness of generations and forests and funerals. Hesk had heard Shyriiwook countless times as noise in labour yards, as defiance in processing lines, as cries when family groups were separated.

He had never heard it addressed to him as judgment.

Rriikarra translated.

“He says he heard officers say the same thing on Kashyyyk.”

The fourth bolt began to move.

“He says they believed uniforms made them larger than what they did.”

Hesk pressed himself against the far wall.

“He says the trees outlived them.”

The final bolt broke.

The hatch did not fly away.

It peeled outward.

Slowly.

Durasteel screamed across durasteel, warped hinges drawing long sparks through the gap as the door was opened by nothing visible at all. Poisoned rain hissed onto the interior floor. Amber emergency lamps outside framed an enormous silhouette.

Gungi lowered his hand.

The torn hatch fell into the mud.

Hesk fired.

Rriikarra ignited her blade.

The bolt met gold and flew upward into the crawler ceiling, showering sparks over Hesk’s shoulders.

His pistol ripped from his grip.

Gungi caught it out of the air and squeezed once. The weapon crumpled in his hand like cheap foil.

Hesk sank backward until he hit the internal console.

The old Jedi ducked beneath the torn hatchway and entered.

He was forced to stoop inside the crawler. That somehow made him worse, made the machine seem childish around him. The rain gleamed through his fur. His green lightsaber remained unlit at his hip.

Rriikarra followed, amber blade filling the cramped compartment with light.

“You murdered Imperial personnel,” Hesk managed.

Rriikarra bared her teeth.

Gungi lifted a hand toward her.

She stopped.

Sev’s voice sounded from outside the hatch.

“Actually, most of yours are alive. Complaining, but alive. Your jungle ate two who ran rather than surrender. One is still missing, which I admit is inconvenient for paperwork.”

Hesk looked desperately from one figure to another.

“What do you want?”

Gungi reached into a pouch at his belt.

He removed a small holographic projector.

When he activated it, lines of blue light filled the crawler.

Names.

Hundreds of them.

Prisoner identifications. Shipping transfers. Death records marked as equipment loss. Children classified as dependent labour. Species designations. Harvest quotas. Disciplinary punishments. The camp, rendered not as huts and fences but as the lives it had swallowed.

Hesk stared at the list.

Rriikarra’s voice became quieter.

“He wants you to look.”

Hesk swallowed.

“I know what records are.”

The amber blade shifted, scarcely a motion.

Gungi did not restrain her this time.

Rriikarra stepped closer.

“No,” she said. “You know what numbers are.”

She touched the projector controls.

A name enlarged in the air.

**Krravvorr, male Wookiee. Age at intake: 71. Deceased. Respiratory collapse during quota extension. Remains incinerated.**

Another.

**Braalara, female Wookiee. Age at intake: 9. Reassigned. Location: unavailable.**

Another.

**Suu Dallin, Ithorian. Agricultural engineer. Detained for sheltering fugitives. Deceased during interrogation.**

Another.

Another.

Another.

Hesk turned his face away.

A massive hand caught his chin.

Gungi did not hurt him.

He simply made looking away impossible.

Rriikarra spoke each name.

The officer shook once.

“I did not personally—”

Gungi roared.

The sound inside the narrow crawler struck Hesk with physical force. He collapsed against the console, hands rising uselessly to protect his face.

Outside, the entire camp fell silent.

Gungi stood over him, breathing hard.

His claws were extended now.

Rriikarra saw how near he stood to a line he had taught her never to cross. Not because Hesk did not deserve death. Perhaps he did. Perhaps a hundred different laws and a hundred grieving families could argue for it without shame.

But because her grandfather had once been a child in chains, and the Empire had spent his life trying to teach him that pain was the only language worth speaking.

He would not become fluent for Hesk’s benefit.

Gungi withdrew his hand.

He signed to Rriikarra.

Her anger cracked slightly around the edges.

She translated.

“He says you will transmit a confession.”

Hesk laughed once, strangled and desperate.

“To whom?”

“To everyone your records have already reached.”

“They will execute me.”

Sev appeared in the hatchway behind them, his face unreadable.

“Not if the New Republic gets you first.”

Hesk looked at him wildly.

“You think they will protect me?”

“No.” Sev’s artificial eye caught the amber light. “I think they’ll keep you alive long enough to hear what survivors call you.”

Hesk shook his head.

“I will say the statement was coerced.”

“You can.” Sev shrugged. “You can say we forced you to keep elderly prisoners in chemical fields. You can say a Wookiee Jedi made you falsify years of contractor payments. You can say we somehow invented the bodies buried beyond the west fence.”

The silence inside the crawler thickened.

Rriikarra stared at Sev.

Gungi slowly turned his head.

Sev’s expression had become very cold.

“Found the grave site while scouting,” he said. “Thirty-two markers. Probably more beneath the root growth.”

Graarrawa had come close enough outside to hear.

A low sound left her.

It spread outward through the gathered prisoners until sorrow moved across the camp like wind through branches.

Hesk whispered, “I followed authorised disposal protocols.”

Rriikarra moved before thought caught her.

Her blade swept up.

Gungi caught her forearm.

The golden light stopped a handspan from Hesk’s throat.

The Imperial officer had lost control of his bladder. The smell mixed with filtration air and poisonous rain.

Rriikarra strained once against her grandfather’s grip.

“He called them disposal,” she snarled in Shyriiwook.

Gungi’s answer was quiet.

Her face changed.

The fury did not vanish.

It folded inward around something wounded.

Sev looked between them.

“What did he say?”

Rriikarra’s blade lowered.

“He said the dead should not be given his face as the last thing justice remembers.”

Gungi released her arm.

For a moment she could not look at him.

Then she shut off her lightsaber.

Hesk began to cry.

Not with remorse.

With the humiliating, childlike terror of a man whose life remained in the hands of beings he had declared animals.

Gungi pointed toward the transmission console.

The confession took twenty-six minutes.

Colonel Malven Hesk tried to lie six times.

The first lie concerned Governor Vale’s knowledge of Settlement Nine. Sev produced three direct authorisation messages.

The second concerned the prisoners’ supposed criminal convictions. Torin carried in intake documents showing the seizure of Wookiee civilian ships whose passengers had never been tried before any court.

The third concerned child labour. Rriikarra brought Naaww to the crawler entrance—not inside, never inside—and asked Hesk to repeat the claim where the cub could hear him.

He could not.

The fourth concerned the graves.

Gungi placed one hand flat on the console and stared at him until the lie died unspoken.

The fifth concerned a supply convoy scheduled to arrive at dawn.

That lie almost mattered.

Hesk claimed the convoy carried medicine and food.

Sev checked captured manifests and found two platoons of stormtroopers, detention restraints, and enough incendiary compounds to burn the camp and erase evidence before outside investigators arrived.

The sixth lie was the smallest.

Perhaps that was why it made Graarrawa step forward.

Hesk said he had never been on Kashyyyk.

Graarrawa stood in the doorway of the crawler, filter mask in place, her single good eye fixed upon him.

She reached inside the ragged cloth wrap around her shoulders and drew out a piece of old metal no larger than a coin.

An Imperial service badge.

Corroded around the edges, its numerical stamp still legible.

She dropped it onto the crawler floor.

Hesk stared at it.

All colour left his face.

Graarrawa spoke.

Rriikarra translated for the recording.

“She says you wore that insignia when you supervised Processing Platform Aurek on Kashyyyk.”

Hesk said nothing.

“She says you stood beside the transports.”

Nothing.

“She says you were younger then.”

Graarrawa’s voice broke into a growl that made even the liberated prisoners outside lower their heads.

“She says she was younger too.”

Gungi stared at Hesk.

And now Hesk recognised him.

Not merely as a Wookiee Jedi.

As the prisoner he had seen delivered in restraints long ago. The frightened, bleeding young creature who had refused to kneel properly; who had bitten a guard’s arm through undersuit mesh when the trooper tried to separate him from another captive; who had escaped days later during an impossible power outage.

Hesk had signed an incident report.

He had marked the fugitive as presumed dead in the lower jungle.

He had forgotten the child before the ink dried.

The child had not forgotten him.

“You,” Hesk whispered.

Gungi stood utterly still.

Hesk began shaking harder.

“I was not in command. I was junior processing personnel. I did not decide policy. I was only—”

Graarrawa struck the crawler wall with both hands.

The bang made him flinch so violently he nearly fell out of his chair.

Gungi spoke one sentence.

Rriikarra translated it for the record.

“He says you have spent thirty years becoming exactly what you claim you were forced to serve.”

Thereafter Hesk confessed.

He confessed to Settlement Nine, to the falsified death reports, to the selling of forced labour through shell contractors. He named Governor Vale. He named overseers. He named local corporate officers who purchased extract knowing exactly who gathered it. He described the emergency burn order that would have been used in the event of inspection.

When he finished, the storm had begun to weaken.

The rain continued, but the chemical hiss upon the crawler hull grew less violent.

Dawn remained hours away.

Gungi stepped out of the vehicle.

He looked older than he had entering it.

Rriikarra followed, carrying the recording unit.

Graarrawa waited for them.

Behind her, prisoners clustered under scavenged shelters. Sev and Torin had organised groups according to injury and breathing protection. Imperial captives sat disarmed in the processing shed, guarded by Wookiees who had been provided stun batons and warned, gently but firmly, that justice demanded witnesses.

One young Wookiee had asked what justice had ever demanded for them.

Sev had looked at him for a long time before answering.

“More than the Empire gave you. Less than your grief wants tonight.”

The young Wookiee had hated the answer.

He had obeyed it anyway.

Gungi gave the confession unit to Torin.

“Transmission window in four minutes,” Torin said. “Once the storm drops below the threshold, I can bounce it through the camp beacon. The Republic relief cutter is twelve minutes away, assuming the coordinates hold.”

Sev looked up into the canopy.

“They will. I walked their pilots through the descent route personally.”

Torin glanced at the poisonous jungle.

“You walked them through it?”

“Figuratively.”

“Good.”

“I enjoyed that moment of concern.”

Rriikarra sat abruptly on the edge of a broken resin crate.

Her hands were trembling now that there was no longer anyone to strike.

Gungi watched her.

He walked over and lowered himself slowly beside her.

For a while neither spoke.

The camp filled the silence for them: injured people breathing behind masks; children murmuring; the clink of weapons being collected; Torin trying to prevent two Wookiee cubs from investigating the projectile launcher mounted on his vambrace; Sev telling him this was character-building.

Rriikarra stared at the mud between her feet.

At last she signed without looking up.

*I wanted to kill him.*

Gungi nodded.

*I still do.*

He nodded again.

She looked at him then, furious that he would not either condemn or absolve her.

*Does that make me wrong?*

Gungi took a long time before answering.

His hands moved carefully.

*It makes you wounded by what you saw.*

Rriikarra swallowed.

*You wanted to kill him too.*

He looked toward the crawler.

Hesk sat inside under the watch of two former prisoners, his hands bound with his own detention cuffs.

Gungi signed.

*Yes.*

The admission seemed to frighten her more than any lecture could have done.

She had spent her life assuming he had climbed past anger into some unreachable holiness.

Instead, the old Jedi beside her carried rage with both hands and simply chose, every day, where not to place it.

Rriikarra bent forward until her brow touched his shoulder.

Gungi wrapped one arm around her.

Across the yard, Sev saw them and looked away, granting privacy with the solemn tact of a man who had once shot an Imperial interrogator through a ventilation slit from four hundred meters away because the interrogator would not stop talking.

Graarrawa came to sit on Gungi’s other side.

She moved painfully, joints stiff beneath wet silver fur.

Gungi immediately reached to help her.

She swatted his arm with offended dignity and lowered herself without assistance.

For a moment the three generations sat together: the woman who remembered the beginning, the child who had survived it into old age, and the granddaughter carrying the unfinished consequences in her blood.

Graarrawa touched the wooden hilt at Gungi’s belt.

She made a low questioning noise.

He removed it and placed it carefully across both palms.

The old woman traced the worn grain.

Her expression became distant.

She spoke.

Rriikarra listened, then translated softly for Sev when he approached.

“She says that after he escaped Platform Aurek, the guards searched the trees for seven days. Every evening the prisoners were lined up and questioned. Every evening nobody spoke.”

Sev stopped beside them.

Graarrawa continued.

“She says on the eighth morning, they found a branch pushed between the bars of the women’s holding pen. A fresh branch from high canopy wroshyr. Impossible to reach from the ground.”

Gungi bowed his head.

“She says it had three words scratched into the bark.”

Rriikarra’s voice faltered.

“What words?” Torin asked, arriving behind his father with one cub still attached stubbornly to his cape.

Graarrawa looked at Gungi.

Her old hand covered his.

“Still among you,” Rriikarra translated.

Gungi’s shoulders shook.

Sev sat down beside him heavily, armor creaking.

For a while he said nothing.

Then, staring at the storm rather than at his friend, he muttered, “You never mentioned the branch.”

Gungi made a quiet embarrassed sound.

Sev shook his head.

“Thirty years of pretending you weren’t sentimental. Fraud.”

The rumble that came from Gungi this time was a real laugh.

Small.

Cracked through with grief.

But real.

Graarrawa heard it and smiled.

The transmission beacon reactivated five minutes later.

Torin sent the confession first.

Then the prisoner registries.

Then the grave coordinates.

Then a short signal on frequencies used by Wookiee relief networks scattered through nearby sectors.

Settlement Nine liberated. Survivors located. Medical evacuation requested. Names attached.

The last file transmitted was not an official document.

It was a simple recording taken by accident from Torin’s helmet camera: amber lights in poison rain, liberated prisoners gathering around an old green-bladed Jedi, and Graarrawa calling him the child who escaped.

Torin almost deleted it.

Sev stopped him.

“Send that too.”

Torin looked at him.

“To Intelligence?”

“To Kashyyyk.”

Gungi turned at the sound of the homeworld’s name.

Sev met his gaze.

“People should know one of their ghosts is still alive.”

Gungi made a reluctant sound, uncomfortable already.

Rriikarra nudged his shoulder.

Graarrawa growled something that needed no translation.

It was, very plainly, an order.

Gungi surrendered.

The recording went out.

Far above New Cov, the first relief vessel broke from hyperspace with running lights dimmed against detection. It was an aging Gallofree transport painted in New Republic markings too recently applied to conceal older scars beneath. Two escort fighters followed her, wings gleaming briefly as the planet’s storm systems swallowed them into cloud.

The liberated prisoners heard engines before they saw anything.

A stirring passed through the yard.

Children lifted their faces.

Adults who had learned never to trust approaching ships began moving instinctively backward.

Graarrawa did not move.

Gungi stood beside her.

The transport descended carefully beyond the landing pad, unwilling to risk the camp’s potentially trapped surface. Repulsors churned rain outward in great silver sheets. Its boarding ramp opened before it fully settled.

Medics emerged first.

Then New Republic security personnel, weapons lowered.

Then two Wookiees bearing the insignia of Kashyyyk relief organisations on their rain capes.

The sight of them broke something open inside the camp.

Several prisoners fell to their knees.

One began roaring the names of family members as though the arriving rescuers might know where every vanished person had gone.

The relief Wookiees moved into them without hesitation, embracing, supporting, listening.

Graarrawa remained standing only because Gungi held her arm.

A young medic approached her with a respirator upgrade and a field scanner. She bared her teeth until he backed away.

Sev snorted.

“Still terrifying. Good.”

She heard him and snapped something rude enough that Torin laughed.

“What did she say?” Sev asked.

Torin’s smile widened. “She says you have grown too thin and ugly to be properly threatening.”

Sev considered this.

“I like her.”

“She also says your son is better looking.”

“I retract my support.”

Torin bowed politely to Graarrawa.

The small cub on his cape copied the bow from his shoulders, nearly slipping off in the process. Torin caught him automatically.

Rriikarra smiled despite the exhaustion dragging at her.

Then a warning tone sounded from Sev’s gauntlet.

His face changed.

“Ships,” he said.

The relief personnel went rigid.

Torin set the cub gently into Graarrawa’s arms and sealed his helmet.

“How many?”

“Three atmospheric signatures coming from Ilic. Imperial configuration.” Sev looked toward Gungi. “Vale decided to clean his desk personally.”

Colonel Hesk, still bound within the crawler, began laughing.

It was a ruined sound, swollen with desperate relief.

“You think you won?” he shouted through the open hatch. “Governor Vale has gunships. Troopers. Incendiaries. This whole encampment will be ash before any court sees it!”

Rriikarra rose.

Gungi’s hand closed gently around her shoulder before she could take a step toward the crawler.

Sev was already moving.

“Torin, relief ship launches immediately. Get noncombatants aboard.”

“There are too many for one lift.”

“Then they do two.”

“The gunships will reach us before—”

“They will not reach you.”

Torin stopped.

Sev checked his rifle with hands so calm they chilled the blood of every listening Imperial captive.

“Buir.”

“Do not make that tone at me while I am being impressive.”

“You are not staying behind alone.”

“I didn’t say alone.”

Gungi approached.

His lightsaber ignited with a green flare against the rain.

Rriikarra stepped to his side and activated hers.

Gold joined green.

Sev looked between them.

“Fine. Jungle ghosts. Very dramatic.”

Graarrawa came forward with Naaww wrapped in Torin’s cloak against her chest.

She spoke to Gungi.

He listened.

His ears lowered.

Rriikarra translated.

“She says not to disappear again for thirty years.”

Gungi touched his forehead to hers once more.

Then he turned toward the trees.

The relief ship began boarding survivors.

Three Imperial gunships entered New Cov’s lower atmosphere under strict orders from Governor Rennic Vale.

The governor himself occupied the central vessel, furious enough to consider the storm an insult deliberately engineered by his enemies. Beside him sat Major Pellon, commander of his security force, reviewing settlement feeds that had cut off almost forty minutes earlier.

Vale was a broad, soft-bodied man whose uniform had been tailored to create military lines his own flesh refused to provide. He had been prosperous under the late Empire and grown richer beneath its fragments. He resented the New Republic because it spoke of accountability and regulation; he resented Imperial warlords because they demanded tribute; above all he resented instability because it made extraction schedules unreliable.

“Explain again,” he said, “how a camp fortified against Wookiee labour riots fell to four intruders.”

Pellon kept his eyes on the tactical display.

“We do not have confirmed numbers.”

“Hesk reported two Wookiees and one marksman.”

“Hesk stopped transmitting before verification.”

“Hesk is a coward, not a fantasist.”

The gunship shook in storm turbulence.

A pilot spoke from the forward station.

“Settlement beacon acquired. Visibility limited. Landing zone will be hot.”

Vale fastened his restraint harness with jerky movements.

“Incendiary teams first. Destroy the processing offices, burial zone and labour registry terminals. Eliminate escapees. We will report that chemical containment failed during an insurgent assault.”

Major Pellon turned to look at him.

“All escapees?”

Vale stared back.

“Do you have a more convenient way of ensuring silence?”

Pellon returned his gaze to the monitor.

“No, Governor.”

The three gunships descended through the canopy corridor toward Settlement Nine.

One thousand meters from the camp, their navigation sensors registered a single moving heat trace in the branches above the flight route.

A targeting officer frowned.

“Contact high canopy. Large organic.”

Vale snapped, “Shoot it.”

The lead gunship fired.

The cannon bolts tore through the branch.

The large heat trace dropped.

Not helplessly.

Deliberately.

The pilot shouted as an enormous Wookiee fell through the storm directly toward the gunship’s forward canopy, green light igniting in midair.

Gungi struck the cockpit plating with both feet.

His lightsaber drove down through the sensor housing, not through the pilots, severing the navigation array in one violent glowing line. Warning lights exploded across the gunship interior.

The pilot screamed and hauled the vessel upward.

Gungi released his hold and vanished into the branches as the crippled transport spun away from the landing vector, coughing smoke.

Governor Vale lurched against his harness.

“What was that?”

Major Pellon stared through the storm.

A second shape streaked across the canopy.

Gold light flashed.

One of the escort gunships lost an external cannon as cleanly as if a maintenance crew had unbolted it.

“Jedi,” Pellon whispered.

Vale struck him across the arm.

“Do not use that word on my vessel.”

A rifle round slammed through the central gunship’s port engine regulator.

The compartment alarms changed pitch.

The pilot shouted, “Engine response dropping! We’re being engaged from the trees!”

Vale spun toward the tactical officer.

“Find the shooter!”

“Cannot acquire! Thermal is saturated by storm flora!”

Another shot.

The starboard stabiliser burst in a shower of sparks.

Somewhere above the gunship, invisible in the wet dark, Sev settled his rifle against a branch brace.

His visor overlaid trajectory corrections over a jungle that he no longer required machinery to read. New Cov was not Kashyyyk. Its trees were uglier, wet with toxins, and far less welcoming. But branches were branches. Rain was rain. Imperial pilots continued, through every generation, to imagine looking forward constituted awareness of their surroundings.

At his shoulder, Torin’s voice broke across the comm.

“First transport lifting. Forty-six survivors aboard. Second relief vessel has exited hyperspace and is inbound.”

“Good.”

“You have three minutes before the gunships clear your firing lane and begin blanketing the canopy.”

“Then I have an entire lifetime.”

“Buir.”

“Torin.”

A silence.

Sev adjusted his aim.

Torin spoke more quietly.

“Come back.”

Sev’s finger rested against the trigger.

Thirty years ago, the last voices he heard through a combat channel before the galaxy divided into before and after had been his brothers calling for extraction, calling his name, being ordered to leave him.

He had spent a great many years pretending that being abandoned made returning less important.

It did not.

He exhaled.

“Always was the plan, son.”

He fired.

The third shot shattered the central gunship’s sensor spine.

Below the canopy, Rriikarra ran along a branch slick with chemical rain.

She had never felt so much at once.

Fear for the prisoners aboard the slow-lifting ship.

Fear for Sev, impossible and old and alone in the branches with too much of his past around him.

Fear for her grandfather, who moved ahead of her like some ancient creature of storm and memory, leaping across chasms with one hand touching bark before every landing, asking permission even now from a world that might kill him if he slipped.

And beneath fear, there was a fierce, almost joyous certainty.

The Imperials had come expecting frightened prisoners.

Instead they had entered a forest where every branch knew their enemies’ names.

The damaged lead gunship tried to circle toward the landing pad with its surviving cannons deployed. Gungi signed to her across the canopy.

*Engines only.*

Rriikarra growled an answer.

*I know.*

His ears tilted in a manner she recognised as grandfatherly disbelief.

She launched herself outward.

For one breathless second there was no branch beneath her, only poisonous rain and the roaring flank of the gunship passing below.

The Force caught her landing.

Her claws slammed into the hull plating. Her golden blade ignited and carved through the rear repulsor casing.

The gunship lurched.

An access hatch burst open and two stormtroopers stumbled into the rain, one firing wildly.

Rriikarra deflected the first bolt into the hull.

The second went wide.

She hooked one huge arm beneath the trooper nearest her and flung him—not into the abyss below, though every furious part of her wanted to—but backward through the open hatch into his companion. Both crashed against the deck.

She reached inside, seized the emergency release lever and tore it free.

The troop bay door opened.

Eight stormtroopers stared at the young Wookiee hanging outside their failing gunship with a golden lightsaber in one hand and their release mechanism in the other.

For half a second no one moved.

Rriikarra roared.

Three dropped their rifles immediately.

The others required a little more persuasion.

By the time the gunship struck the mud beyond Settlement Nine in an uncontrolled but survivable slide, every weapon aboard had been sliced into smoking pieces.

Gungi landed beside the wreck moments later.

Rriikarra climbed down from its side, breathing hard.

Her grandfather regarded the disarmed soldiers crawling out into the rain.

Then he looked at her.

She lifted her chin defensively.

“All alive,” she said in Basic.

Gungi made an approving rumble.

She tried not to look proud.

It was unsuccessful.

Above them, the governor’s central gunship remained airborne, limping through the storm with one functioning engine and its sensors damaged. Its loading bay opened.

Imperial incendiary canisters fell toward Settlement Nine.

Sev saw them.

“Gungi!”

Gungi turned.

Five canisters dropped through the canopy toward the processing yard where the second group of prisoners waited for evacuation.

Incendiaries.

Enough to turn the entire compound into an inferno before anyone could clear the perimeter.

Gungi thrust out one hand.

The falling canisters halted.

For an instant they hovered over the settlement, dark cylinders suspended in amber emergency light and rain.

The strain struck him visibly. His knees bent. His teeth bared.

Rriikarra reached for the Force alongside him.

The canisters shook.

Not falling.

Not yet.

Sev switched targets.

Through his rifle scope he found the gunship bay, the release rack, the frightened technician staring downward at explosives that had refused gravity.

The governor was behind him.

Sev had never seen Rennic Vale in person.

He did not need confirmation.

Men who ordered camps burned while seated behind troops always held themselves in precisely the same offended posture.

Sev shifted the crosshairs away from the governor’s head.

For Gungi.

For witnesses.

For the children who deserved a trial more than a corpse.

He fired into the control panel beside Vale’s face.

The governor shrieked and fell backward as the console erupted.

Torin’s voice broke across the comm.

“Second relief transport is down! Clear the prisoners now!”

Rriikarra looked at Gungi.

He could not hold the canisters forever.

His growl became sharp.

*East ravine.*

Together they moved their hands.

The suspended incendiaries flew sideways, gathering speed through the storm. They passed over the fence, over shattered observation posts, over the dark jungle beyond.

They plunged into an empty ravine filled with poisonous flowering growth.

The explosion bloomed violet and orange beneath the canopy.

The shockwave tore leaves from trees and threw rain outward in a shining ring.

The gunship reeled.

Settlement Nine remained standing.

All across the compound, liberated prisoners stared.

Then a roar rose from them.

It was not fear this time.

The sound struck the hovering Imperial vessel as surely as any weapon.

Inside the damaged gunship, Governor Vale dragged himself up from the deck.

“Land!” he demanded.

The pilot looked back at him in disbelief.

“Sir, the landing zone is hostile!”

“Land and kill them!”

Major Pellon remained strapped into his seat.

He had watched a Wookiee leap onto a gunship.

He had watched incendiaries stop in midair.

He had watched fire intended to erase an entire population hurled harmlessly into an empty gorge.

He looked through the forward viewport at Settlement Nine.

Below, the second transport had settled with its ramp open. Freed prisoners moved toward it beneath the sheltering bodies of armed Wookiees and New Republic personnel.

Near the compound center stood the old Jedi.

Beside him, the younger one.

In the branches above, the marksman remained unseen.

Pellon unfastened his harness.

“Governor,” he said, “we are surrendering.”

Vale stared at him.

“You are what?”

Pellon drew his sidearm.

The pilot glanced back once, then slowly disengaged the weapons controls.

Vale’s face turned purple.

“You treasonous little—”

Pellon leveled the pistol at him.

“I reviewed the transmission while we descended. Your camp records are already public. Your confession order is recorded. Your incendiaries are recorded. If I kill every being below, it will not save you.”

Vale’s mouth worked uselessly.

Pellon looked toward the pilot.

“Put us on the landing pad.”

The gunship descended.

This time no Jedi attacked it.

No rifle fired from the trees.

The vessel touched down hard beside the broken camp fence. Its ramp lowered into the mud.

Major Pellon emerged first with his pistol held by the barrel.

Behind him came pilots, gunners and stormtroopers, weapons discarded inside the bay.

Governor Vale did not emerge until Pellon returned inside and dragged him out by the collar.

The prisoners stopped boarding.

Graarrawa moved to the front of them.

Her respirator hid her mouth, but not her eye.

Vale slipped in the mud, falling to one knee before the old Wookiee woman.

For perhaps the first time in his life, the governor found himself at the physical level from which his victims had been forced to regard him.

“Keep them back!” he shouted at the New Republic medics. “I am a protected political official! I demand formal custody!”

Graarrawa looked at Gungi.

Gungi said nothing.

The old woman walked slowly toward Vale.

The governor recoiled.

She did not strike him.

She reached down, took his expensive white-gloved hand, and pressed it into the mud of Settlement Nine.

Then she made him touch the ground.

The ground into which his prisoners had bled.

The ground above the graves Sev had discovered.

The ground he had intended to burn clean.

Graarrawa spoke for a long time.

Rriikarra translated, her voice low enough that everyone leaned in to hear.

“She says this mud knows more names than you ever learned.”

Vale tried to pull his hand away.

Graarrawa held it down.

“She says you will stand in a room where those names are spoken.”

His breathing became ragged.

“She says you will hear them until your own name becomes very small.”

When she released him, Vale stared at the mud coating his glove as though it were blood.

Perhaps, in every way that mattered, it was.

The second transport took the remaining survivors just before dawn.

Settlement Nine remained behind, no longer functioning as a prison camp but preserved as evidence. New Republic security teams secured the Imperial captives. Medical personnel marked the western graves and erected shielding over them until proper rites could be arranged.

The poison storm passed eastward.

New Cov’s dawn arrived colourless through the jungle mist.

Where floodlights had once made prisoners labour beneath weapon sights, there was now only the pale glow of rescue ships preparing to rise.

Graarrawa refused to board until she had walked one final time to the western edge of the camp.

Gungi accompanied her.

Rriikarra followed at a distance with Sev and Torin, understanding this was not a moment to crowd even though none of them could bear to leave the old woman unsupported.

Thirty-two crude markers stood beyond the fence.

Some were little more than pieces of machinery pushed into the mud.

Others had no marker at all; Sev had identified them only by soil disturbance and thermal inconsistencies beneath the root mass.

Graarrawa stood before them.

For a long time she did nothing.

Then she began speaking names.

Some she knew.

Some she guessed from those absent in the camp.

Some belonged to people dead decades earlier, on Kashyyyk or aboard ships or in factories on worlds that had never seen a wroshyr tree.

Her voice grew weaker as she continued.

Gungi knelt beside her.

When her throat failed, he took up the names.

Rriikarra joined him.

Then Torin.

Sev remained silent longest.

Words had never been the weapons he trusted best.

Eventually, however, he removed his helmet, lowered his head and spoke the names of three clone brothers no grave on Kashyyyk had ever carried properly.

Boss.

Fixer.

Scorch.

Rriikarra looked at him in surprise.

Sev did not open his eyes.

“Not dead,” he said roughly. “Not then. Maybe not ever. Doesn’t mean I didn’t lose them.”

Gungi reached across the space between them and placed one hand against the back of Sev’s neck.

Sev bowed further beneath it.

For a moment the old Jedi and the old soldier remained like that before the graves: two survivors of wars that had consumed the names of children, brothers, families and entire peoples; two beings who had no right, statistically or historically or sensibly, to be standing there beneath a poison dawn.

Graarrawa watched them.

“Ghosts,” she murmured in Basic this time.

Her pronunciation was imperfect but unmistakable.

Sev opened his eyes.

“No,” he said.

He looked at Gungi, at Rriikarra, at Torin, at the rising relief transports.

“Ghosts haunt ruins.”

Gungi tilted his head.

Sev put his helmet beneath one arm.

“We’re not finished breaking things yet.”

Rriikarra laughed.

It rolled through the graves, bright and young and a little savage.

Graarrawa considered Sev for a moment.

Then she gave an approving growl.

The first transport rose through the canopy.

New Cov swallowed it briefly in mist before it climbed into clear sky.

Aboard, frightened children slept against strangers who were becoming rescuers by holding still long enough to be trusted. Wounded prisoners received medicine with suspicious expressions, several refusing to release improvised tools they had taken from the camp. An Ithorian father watched his daughter eat a ration bar and wept so quietly no one interrupted him.

In the ship’s small forward bay, Naaww sat wrapped in Torin’s cloak, staring solemnly at the Mandalorian’s helmet.

Torin had placed it on the deck beside him while checking a medical scanner.

Naaww reached out one claw.

He tapped the helmet.

Torin looked down.

The cub asked a question in Shyriiwook.

Torin glanced toward Rriikarra for help.

She translated with a smile.

“He asks whether all small Mandalorians grow inside helmets until they are ready to come out.”

Torin looked at Sev.

Sev leaned back against the bulkhead, eyes shut, apparently pretending not to hear.

Torin considered his answer carefully.

“Tell him yes.”

Rriikarra barked a laugh.

Gungi, seated beside Graarrawa with one of her hands resting over his wooden lightsaber hilt, made the rumbling sound that meant he was trying very hard to remain dignified and failing.

Naaww listened to the translation with enormous eyes.

He immediately looked toward Sev’s helmet.

Then toward Torin.

Then toward the medic nearby.

The cub said something excitedly.

Rriikarra covered her mouth.

“What?” Torin asked.

“He wishes to know when your own cubs emerge from your spare helmets.”

Sev opened one eye.

“Excellent question.”

Torin pointed accusingly at him.

“You encouraged this.”

“Parenthood is about creating educational opportunities.”

Graarrawa, exhausted and half asleep, released a soft laugh.

Gungi turned toward her.

Her hand tightened around his.

She spoke quietly in Shyriiwook, so quietly that only those nearest heard.

Rriikarra did not translate.

She did not need to.

Gungi understood.

She had said: *I kept the story alive.*

The old Jedi bowed over her hand.

His answer was almost a whisper.

*The story kept me alive too.*

Outside, the poisoned jungles of New Cov stretched beneath the transport like an endless dark sea. Settlement Nine vanished beneath the canopy.

But its signal did not vanish.

It travelled.

It reached Kashyyyk first.

Through restoration villages and rebuilt high-canopy settlements, through families still piecing together ancestry records shattered by occupation, through old resistance cells whose members had grown grey while waiting for some portion of justice not to arrive too late.

A recording passed from hand to hand.

In it, a storm camp stood broken beneath amber lights.

An elderly prisoner walked through chemical rain.

A Wookiee Jedi bent his head before her.

And the old woman called him the child who escaped.

For three nights, lanterns were lit in the high trees.

Not memorial lanterns.

Welcome lanterns.

The signal travelled farther.

It reached New Republic offices where tired administrators who believed the war’s worst crimes were already known discovered new columns of names.

It reached Bothan networks, mercenary halls, shipping guilds and Mandalorian enclaves where a certain old clone commando’s survival produced reactions ranging from disbelief to quiet toasts to very loud arguments about unpaid bets.

It reached Governor Vale’s allies.

Some fled.

Some destroyed records too late.

Some sent messages to patrons in portions of the Imperial Remnant where the word justice still meant only the speed with which one arranged for witnesses to disappear.

Eventually, through channels never intended for ordinary citizens, a report found its way into an Imperial intelligence archive awaiting review by a commander not yet openly returned to the galaxy.

Far from New Cov, aboard a starship travelling under controlled silence, Grand Admiral Thrawn studied the footage without expression.

Captain Pellaeon stood beside the display with his hands clasped behind his back.

“The local governor was incompetent,” Pellaeon said. “An illegal labour operation, inadequate perimeter discipline, no contingency against insurgent action. The New Republic is already exploiting the incident for propaganda.”

Thrawn watched the recording replay.

The frame showed Gungi in profile, silver-marked fur wet with rain, his green blade cutting through a barracks lock.

Then Rriikarra, golden lightsaber raised as stormtroopers abandoned their weapons.

Then Sev’s distorted rifle signature from a canopy shot no ordinary marksman should have landed in weather conditions so poor.

Thrawn paused the image upon Graarrawa embracing Gungi.

“The governor’s incompetence is not the central matter,” he said.

Pellaeon waited.

Thrawn magnified the faces of the surrounding prisoners.

Not terror.

Recognition.

Hope, perhaps, but not the simple relief of rescued captives. Something older. Something being confirmed.

“The Wookiee elder is identifying him as a figure from the Imperial occupation of Kashyyyk,” Thrawn said.

“Yes, Admiral. Intelligence indicates a surviving Jedi youngling may have participated in resistance actions during the early occupation. Records are incomplete.”

“Records are often incomplete precisely where mythology begins.”

Pellaeon looked again at the frozen image.

“Four operatives liberated a labour station. Effective, certainly. But strategically limited.”

Thrawn turned his red eyes toward him.

“Is it?”

Pellaeon did not answer immediately.

Thrawn resumed the recording.

The liberated prisoners roared as Imperial incendiaries turned away from them in midair.

“The Empire imprisoned these beings in order to reduce them to labour,” Thrawn said. “Governor Vale has instead presented them with a hereditary symbol of survival, accompanied by a Jedi descendant, an experienced commando of unusual ability and a living public demonstration that Imperial authority can be made helpless.”

His fingers rested together thoughtfully.

“He has not lost a labour camp, Captain. He has created a legend.”

Pellaeon studied the green and gold blades in the storm.

“Do you want them hunted?”

Thrawn considered.

On the display, Sev’s helmet camera captured Torin pulling a Wookiee child into his cloak while blasterfire moved above the camp. A minor act. Tactically irrelevant.

Emotionally devastating.

“No,” Thrawn said at last. “Not carelessly.”

Pellaeon frowned.

“Admiral?”

“Men such as Governor Vale misunderstand ghosts. They believe the proper answer is to enter the dark with more soldiers and brighter lights.”

Thrawn deactivated the display.

“The wiser response is to understand what unfinished grave called them forth.”

The screen went black.

But in hidden settlements, in forests, in ports and whispered prisoner routes, the story continued.

The Imperials on New Cov said the motion sensors had found two enormous creatures standing perfectly still among the trees.

They said every light went out at once.

They said an armored command crawler had been opened as though its metal hatch were no more substantial than wet bark.

They said a marksman lived in the branches, old as the Clone Wars and incapable of missing.

They said a younger Wookiee carried a golden blade and looked at slavers as if deciding whether they were worth the mercy her grandfather demanded.

Some said there had been four attackers.

Some said forty.

Some said the very trees of New Cov had risen in memory of Kashyyyk.

The prisoners who had been there never argued with any version.

When asked what happened at Settlement Nine, Graarrawa would sit beneath newly planted saplings on Kashyyyk, little Naaww beside her, and close her one clear eye against the afternoon sun.

Then she would answer:

“The Empire built a cage in a poisoned forest.”

A pause.

A small smile.

“And one night, the forest came to collect its children.”

Much later, after the relief vessel had carried them home and the medics had finally persuaded Graarrawa to sleep, Gungi stood alone on a high landing platform beneath Kashyyyk’s stars.

The welcome lanterns remained lit in the branches above and below him.

Green lights, warm lights, hundreds of them, swinging gently in the night breeze.

He heard Sev approach before the old commando spoke.

“You’re brooding.”

Gungi rumbled without turning.

“Contemplating. Right. Jedi word for brooding.”

Sev came to stand beside him at the platform edge. For once he carried no rifle. His armor had been removed except for the undersuit and the weathered red-marked chest plate, as though part of him remained convinced a peaceful night represented suspiciously poor planning.

Below, distant voices drifted from the settlement: Rriikarra telling children some highly embellished version of the gunship landing; Torin disputing details; Naaww loudly insisting that he had personally captured Governor Vale; Graarrawa making no effort whatsoever to correct him.

Sev leaned both hands on the railing.

“She recognised you quickly.”

Gungi nodded.

“Wish someone had warned me I looked memorable at that age. Might have combed my fur.”

Gungi glanced at him.

Sev’s mouth lifted slightly.

“I remember you, you know.”

The old Jedi went still.

“Before the trees. Before the camp escapes. Saw you once during the battle. Little thing with a wooden lightsaber hilt moving alongside Yoda’s people. Couldn’t have been more than a youngling.”

Gungi looked back toward the lanterns.

“I didn’t know your name then,” Sev said. “Wouldn’t have mattered. We were made for missions, not for remembering every civilian or Jedi who crossed our sights.”

He was quiet for a while.

“Then everything collapsed. And there you were in the lower forest, trying to steal my ration pack and nearly biting me when I caught you.”

Gungi made an indignant rumble.

“You absolutely did bite me.”

Another rumble.

“Yes, I was wearing armor. That isn’t a defence.”

Sev’s smile faded.

“You gave me somewhere to go after my army stopped being mine.”

The night breeze moved through the lanterns.

Gungi turned to him fully.

Sev stared downward.

“I know what those prisoners saw when they looked at you. I know what she meant when she called you the child who escaped.”

He swallowed, irritated by his own voice.

“But you ought to know what I saw.”

Gungi waited.

Sev touched two fingers against the worn handprint on his chest plate.

“I saw the first person who looked at me after Order Sixty-Six and did not see a weapon, an enemy, a clone, a defect or a problem someone had forgotten to finish solving.”

Gungi’s eyes closed.

Sev gave a humorless chuckle.

“Terrible judgment on your part. Obviously.”

Gungi reached out.

His large hand settled over the red mark on Sev’s armor.

Not as Jedi to soldier.

Not as saviour to saved.

As brother.

Sev bowed his head once.

Behind them, there came a thunderous clatter, followed by Torin shouting, “Naaww, no, that is not a training detonator!”

Rriikarra barked laughter.

A Wookiee cub shrieked delightedly.

Sev looked toward the commotion.

“There. Your legacy.”

Gungi’s answering rumble was very fond.

“Mine? Absolutely not. That level of chaos is clearly genetic on my side.”

The two old survivors stood beneath the lanterns as the settlement behind them filled with living noise.

For the first time in many years, perhaps for the first time since childhood, Gungi allowed himself not merely to remember those he could not save.

He allowed himself to hear those who remained.

Rriikarra’s laughter.

Torin’s exasperated commands.

Graarrawa’s stern voice ordering children away from explosive devices.

Naaww’s repeated declaration that he was now a Mandalorian because he had worn a helmet for nearly three minutes.

Sev beside him, breathing steadily in the dark.

The wind passed through the great branches.

Kashyyyk answered in leaves.

And somewhere far away, on a poisoned world where an Empire had believed its walls sufficient, the abandoned machines of Settlement Nine rusted slowly in the rain.

No prisoners remained behind its fence.

No overseers walked its mud.

No floodlights cut the darkness into cages.

Only the jungle returned, vine by vine, root by root, closing over metal and ash and the foundations of old cruelty.

Years later, travellers would claim there were figures in those trees whenever a storm came.

A green light.

A gold one.

The red blink of a distant scope.

The impression of something huge standing perfectly still beyond the reach of every sensor.

Some refused to believe it.

Others learned not to build cages where the trees could see them.

Because the Wroshyr ghosts were no longer running.

They had found one another again.

And the Empire, though it did not yet know it, had begun hearing footsteps in every forest it had ever wounded.