Chapter Twenty

Going through the terminal in front of her, Anaïs realized just how screwed she was. The owner of this antiques store, who was really an intel broker, had been deep in the middle of this entire thing.

And now she had to save her.

Melea Vondarr, who was in her eighties, had sat in the middle of a network of spies, helping the criminal underworld and city government function in tandem, both going after each other, both making some gains, some losses, but never any real progress in either direction.

Searching for her master’s name, the Padawan found a list of non-acceptable crimes and practices. No rape was allowed. No going after someone’s children. No using children to do your dirty work. No torture lasting longer than a week, which she thought was an oddly specific time-frame, and other things like that. But, according to Ms. Vondarr’s notes, enforcing those rules had kept things. . . fair, and when one side, either criminal or governmental, stepped over the line, certain pieces of information would then find their way to the opposite side.

That was, however, until someone strong enough to ignore the rules had arrived. The ‘Baron’, had, in fact, been a Baron, just not on this planet. He’d been running a criminal empire on Chrellis, before a Jedi had rallied the people to rise up against him, and he’d escaped, along with his personal guard. He’d touched down on Noonar a few years ago, and had seemed to, after some difficulty, adapted to the rules.

But he hadn’t.

Three years ago, after having gathered the worst of both sides, criminal and governmental, to his cause, he’d staged a coup, killing the president, and taking over everything. A few had escaped, and gone to the Republic Senate, but the Baron had been planning this for a while, and they’d never made it to Coruscant.

Now, instead of helping to keep the peace, Ms. Vondarr had worked to manage the resistance, after a first failed counter-attack. They’d managed to get some people to Coruscant, but by then the story of the ‘revolution’ against the ‘mad leader’ had already been spread, and how the ‘honorable Baron’ had stopped the bloodshed, allowing the government to take over and submitted himself to their ‘judgement’. Instead of punishing him for murder, they’d instead passed a law to make him the monarch of the planet, and he’d graciously accepted.

Anaïs had written better stories when she was nine.

However, the right bribes had been given, so the people that’d tried to ask for help had been arrested for perjury and shipped back to Noonar, where they were tortured for weeks, ending in their public execution.

The resistance had tried, over and over again, to get help, and to try to reclaim their world, and each time they had failed, losing more of their people.

And this was the state of things when her and her master had entered the city.

Well, Anaïs thought with grim humor, this is definitely the kind of situation that needs a Jedi.

As of a week ago, about the time that the Force had talked to Lucian, which she’d only been on the edges of, the resistance had failed in their very last attempt, the last of their assets spent, and the last of their fighters and agents killed or captured. Ms. Vondarr had known they were coming for her, and had tried to cut and run, leaving the note, and the recounting of events that Anaïs was currently reading, before she tried to escape.

That her and her Master were here probably meant the old woman hadn’t succeeded.

However, that didn’t tell Anaïs if Ms. Vondarr had been captured, or had made it to a safe-house. Unsurprisingly, on a terminal that was expected to be unlocked, given the warning, there wasn't a handy list of safe-houses to check, even an encoded one, or at least not one she could find. She wasn’t a slicer, couldn’t take apart the terminal’s very programming to find hidden files, only having slightly more training than the average Padawan, with her master’s hurried instruction not being enough to close that gap.

Searching other files, they were accounts of the Baron’s atrocities, the crimes he’d committed, and the crimes he’d condoned. She shivered now understanding exactly what the guards had wanted to do when they said they’d ‘question’ her. There were dozens of reports, and even a few recordings she dared not watch, of what would have happened, had her master not stepped in.

No, she told herself, that wouldn’t’ve happened, though I would’ve outed myself as a Jedi when I stopped them.

But, damning as it would be in the eyes of the law, that didn’t help her now.

Closing her eyes, she tried to reach out with the Force, tried to have it guide her. She wasn’t so arrogant as to believe it would talk to her as strongly as it did her master, or how it did other Jedi, but she was lost, dead in space, drifting without something to guide her.

She could feel her master in the distance, his presence unbound, for possibly the first time, clearly visible in the Force. He was already halfway across the city, leading the Baron’s forces far from her, the deaths he was causing so numerous that, even with the storm of his presence, she could feel them like a black comet arcing across the landscape.

But that wouldn’t help her, so she centered her mind, not opening herself fully as the Temple had taught her, becoming one with the Force without distinction, but remaining, not still, but present. She was her, and while the Force ran through all things, trying to match it completely would see her influenced by all aspects of it, the Light and the Dark, and she was sitting in a thick mist of evil.

Instead of becoming the Force, she calmed herself, her desires, save one. She wanted to save Melea Vondarr, and focused on that bright spark of hope, of her desire to protect, and cast it out like a fisherman would a tackle, baited with a wish for the Light to prevail, where the Dark had metastasized.

Nothing happened.

Frustrated, and worried, the metaphorical line almost snapped as the Dark emotions spread from her, her fear of failure straining her connection to the Light.

Centering herself again, she tried to let it go, though it was difficult. She had a task. She would do her best to complete it. Her master believed in her. She could do this.

Nothing continued to happen.

Her thoughts drifted to the list of addresses she had. Maybe she should start there?

She refocused, trying to feel the Force, instead of her own guesses.

Maybe she should start at Ms. Vondarr’s secondary address? Anaïs hadn’t actually found that address in the terminal, only on the list that her master had left her.

Shaking her head, she cleared her mind once more. There were a dozen addresses on that list, and she couldn’t rely on sheer chance, not when a woman’s life was on the line! She centered herself, focusing on her desire to protect Ms. Vondarr, calming every other thought in the Force, straining herself to-

Secondary! Address!

The thought hit her, like a thrown stone to the head, and she tried to push it out, no matter how much she thought it might be correct, so that the Force could show her. . . . .

I’m an idiot, she thought with a sigh, grabbing the paper and looking up the secondary address, and how to get there.

SWPP>

As she ran across the rooftops, she let out a sigh of relief, almost there, feeling that she was running out of time.

The shop had a back-door, of a sort, which, after going through a small tunnel, had let her walk out several streets away from where she’d entered, avoiding the death and chaos that her master had left in his wake. However, there were several checkpoints between where she emerged and the secondary address, and, had she’d gone the normal way, she would’ve ran afoul of them. Even if she hadn’t been. . . questioned, she had a feeling it’d still be too late, so she’d gone elsewhere.

Stealth, as she’d learned, was the art of not being seen. Easy in theory, hard in reality, but that was before she’d started training with her master. Maneuvering down a city street, making sure to stay in your target’s blind spot, or screened by others, required a level of Force Sense she still had trouble with. However, she now could take advantage of one important fact.

People rarely looked up.

With soft steps, nowhere close to her master’s silent stride, she ran across a rooftop, Force singing through her body, and, with one foot on the ledge, pushed, sending herself hurtling the forty feet across the wide boulevard, hands out to catch the edge of the windowsill, the building on the other side being several stories taller.

Far easier to climb then the wrecks and courses Master Lucian had set up on Uphrades, if only for the fact that no one was shooting at her, she lifted herself up it, pausing right before the edge, the sense of danger swinging about the top. Waiting for it to pass, she crested the ledge, and saw an armed man, blaster rifle in hand, at the other end of the rooftop, sitting back down as he watched the next street over, the street where Ms. Vondarr’s secondary address sat.

Taking care to move carefully, she lifted herself fully onto the roof, glancing over the ferrocrete surface, noting the parts where it had started to crumble into gravel. Not enough to threaten structural stability, but enough to make noise if she stepped on it.

Letting out a silent breath, she centered herself. Collecting live mine-scorpions on the moon of Uphrades had been tricky, especially with the Lamp-hares harassing her. This should just be a little difficult. She stalked forward, silently, breath steady and inaudible. The sun was setting, but it was doing so in front of her, so the long shadows it cast wouldn’t give her away.

She stopped two feet behind him, confirming that he was, in fact, watching the very apartment building she needed to get to. The man sighed, and she felt the danger sweep across the rooftop once more, as he sat back and started to turn.

With quick, quiet steps, she moved to his right as he looked to his left, reaching down into a bag and taking out a can of beer. As he leaned over to do so, she moved, quietly, and flicked the safety of his rifle on, just in case.

Stepping back around him, waiting, he flicked the tab with one hand, the other holding his weapon and took a deep sip, the sense of danger flicking upward. Squatting down as he looked up at the sky, missing her, the man sighed again, shook his head, and went back to watching his target.

Okay. . . now what? Anaïs thought. She knew the palace was being watched, and, while not in uniform, the badge that all the soldiers carried had been pinned to the front of the sniper’s chest. Did she knock him out? People only stayed out for a few minutes, unless you had some way to drug them, and she didn’t. Did she try to Mind Trick him? Those worked best when they made sense, when they were something the person would normally do, and being told by a random girl on a rooftop to ignore his duties didn’t seem to be either of those things.

The man was drinking on the job, but he didn’t seem drunk, so did she try to whisper in his ear to get drunk? Mind Tricking someone without them knowing you were there was another Knight-level skill, according to the Temple, and Lucian had agreed, though he had disagreed with the standards of ‘not knowing you were there’ that the Temple used, because he had to find some reason to complain.

Before she could decide, though, the sniper sat up, grabbing a datapad, putting his beer down to open a file and scroll through a list of names and pictures, stopping on three, a Rodian, a woman with ginger colored hair, and a boy, maybe her age, with dark hair and a nervous smile.

“Gotchya,” the Sniper told himself, voice rough, leaning the rifle on the ledge, pointing it down towards the pedestrians on the street, aiming right for, now that Anaïs looked, a boy, maybe her age, with dark hair. The same boy as on the datapad.

Struck with indecision, not sure the correct course, the Force silent, her thoughts froze as the Sniper pulled the trigger, only for nothing to happen. “What?” the man in front of her asked, leaning back and looking over his weapon, flicking the safety off.

As the Sniper started to sight in, and with her mind screaming at her that she had to do something, Anaïs struck out, not with her lightsaber, but with the palm of her hand, muscles enhanced with the Force, striking the back of his head.

It wasn’t a lethal blow, though, without treatment, it would leave the killer with brain damage, but the man was shoved down as if thrown from the force of the impact, neck hitting the edge of the ledge with a sickening crack, the black bloom of the Dark Side making his death unmistakable.

No! she thought, I didn’t mean to kill him! She hadn’t really killed anyone before, not on purpose! Yes, she’d deflected some blaster bolts, but that’d been accidental. And she’d killed animals, but this was different! He was sentient!

Her mind was in turmoil, but the lessons her master had drilled into her head kicked in, her now instinctual reaction to the Dark Side causing her to center herself, pushing out the spiraling Dark and letting her stand as she was.

Yes, she had killed him, but he was about to kill someone else. Someone that, as far as she knew, had done nothing wrong. What she had done was, if not right, than at least not evil.

And it wasn’t like Master Lucian didn’t kill people all the time.

Knowing it was a slippery slope, but also that, in this case, from what she’d read, she wasn’t wrong, she moved past it. Yes, she killed a man. She would likely kill more before tomorrow. Her master was still killing them, though the chaos had died down, and the rate had dropped enough so as to be barely noticeable underneath the miasma of Darkness that hung over the city. Now was not the time to get lost in deep thoughts. She had a mission to accomplish.

However, that left her with the issue of what to do next.

Well, I’m already here. Might as well go in, she thought, looking at the apartment building across the street. The gap was only twenty-five, maybe thirty feet across, and the apartment building was as tall as the building she was now on. Taking a few steps back, she ran, launching herself across the space, and easily landing on the other side, trying the door on the roof, and finding it locked.

With a quick application of her lightsaber, she was in, the weapon off, but held at the ready, as she quickly headed down the staircase, hearing someone slowly tromp up them. Getting to the third floor, she ducked inside, silently running down the dirty, but empty, hallway, finding her way to the correct doorway.

Looking at it, something seemed. . . wrong to her, her lessons from her Master allowing her to spot the small laser tripwire that had been installed, flush with the doorframe, that would activate something as soon as it was tripped. Working quickly, she reached inside her belt, bringing out a bit of metal, and using the Force to warp it in just the correct configuration.

Leaning down she quickly fit it over the laser, completing the ‘circuit’, and making it think it was still going strong, despite being broken. If it were a higher-quality trap, this wouldn’t work, but the mass-produced models had ‘tolerances’ built into them so that even street-thugs could set them up.

Standing back up, hearing someone about to enter the hallway, she quickly put in the code for the door that Lucian had left her, only for it to flash red, not unlocking. With no time left, she darted backwards, hiding around a corner as someone walked into sight of the door and went “Huh?” The voice was young, and almost sleepy.

Remaining still, Anaïs watched as the person was shown to be the same boy that’d almost been shot, who walked up to the very door she’d been at, and, not even looking around, input the correct code. With it memorized, she watched in disbelief as he walked inside, and would’ve tripped the alarm had she not disabled it.

Did he already see it was taken care of? she thought, before shaking her head, moving forward, not even needing to put the code in again as he’d left the door open a crack. Following in silently, she saw that, taped to the ceiling, was an incendiary grenade, the cord from the laser tripwire running through the doorway and up to it.

So not an alarm, Anaïs noted with some trepidation, ghosting forward even as the boy had walked further in, and was going through cabinets, obviously searching for something. Without so much as a hint of a warning of danger, he turned, spotting her, and let out a yelp, stumbling backwards, tripping over a box and falling over with a loud, carrying crash.

She just froze, staring, wondering why the Force hadn’t warned her.

“Who-Who are you?” the boy demanded, scrabbling upright, reaching inside his jacket to pull a blaster pistol, only for it to slip from his fingers and go skidding across the floor, both of them standing as they watched it slide to a stop next to her feet.

Anaïs hesitated, not having thought this far ahead. Did she give her name? That she was a Jedi? That she was a Jedi Padawan? “I’m. . . I’m someone that was hired to find Melea Vondarr by an old friend of hers, and get her to safety,” she went with, which was true, from a certain point of view.

“I, I’m not gonna tell you where Grandma is!” the boy declared, identifying himself instantly. “How do I know you’re not working with. . .” he trailed off, eyes going to the unlit lightsaber in her hand, and she berated herself for not storing it. “You-You’re a Jedi!”

Kriff it. “I am,” she said, activating it with a snap hiss, the green blade extending, not threateningly, just to prove what it was, “which is why you need to help me.”

“I, she said she knew a Jedi, but, you’re just so young. And hot,” the teenager replied.

Anaïs nodded, “That would be my Master, but I need you to. . . wait, what?” she asked in turn, processing what he said, before shaking her head. “That, um, that doesn’t matter,” she deflected, trying to refocus on her task. “Why are you here?”

At the question, the teen reddened. “I, um, I’m here to get Grandma Melea. Everyone else got off planet, but she didn’t, so I came back to help get her out. Mom said it was too dangerous, but it hasn’t been that bad. I’m pretty good at this entire spy thing!” the boy bragged.

“No. No you aren’t,” she had to disagree, pointing to the pistol at her feet, causing the boy to frown.

The boy reddened, blustering, “Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t. I might’ve shot you or something!”

“And the sniper?” Anaïs questioned, deactivating her lightsaber, pointing out the window, then pointing at the doorway. “And the bomb?”

Blinking owlishly, the teenager moved over to the window and looked out, causing the Padawan to sigh, deeply, and, seeing the gun propped against the ledge, he jumped back. Moving to the entryway, he called to her, “I don’t see anything!”

Picking up the blaster pistol, wondering if this was why Knights didn’t like to work with non-Jedi, she called back, “Look up.”

There was another yelp, but at least this time he didn’t fall over, and he rushed back to her. “There’s a grenade in the hallway! Was it supposed to blow me up!?”

“It’s an incendiary. It would’ve burned you to death,” she corrected. “Just leave the doorway alone.”

He nodded rapidly. “Oh. Okay. So, you’re a Jedi,” he declared, as if that wasn’t obvious, and she nodded when it became clear he was waiting for confirmation. Again. “And you’re looking for Grandma Melea?” She nodded, wondering where this was going, as she’d already said that. “Oh, okay. Good. Bye!” he said, turning and starting to walk away, without his blaster.

“Wait!” she called, and he stopped turning around. “Where is she?” Anaïs asked.

“What?” the teen asked in turn, confused.

Motioning around herself, the Padawan stated, “I’m trying to find her. You’re here to get her. Where is she?”

“Oh, um, I don’t know?” the boy more questioned than said. “But, you’re a Jedi. You’ll figure it out. You can just use the Force and stuff, so I can just go home. Thanks!”

Anaïs had to remind herself that using the Force to strangle innocents was wrong.