The warmth of the bacta was the next sharp sensation. I floated in it the way a body floats in a river after the current stops. Thick fluid pressed against my chest, my eyelids, the insides of my nostrils, and the sensation carried something familiar I couldn't place. More chemical tang. Artificial warmth. The faintest vibration of machinery working on the other side of glass I couldn't see. My lungs moved but I hadn't told them to. Something else was breathing for me.
I couldn't feel my hands.
His voice found me before anything else did. Before the light, before the glass, before the drain of fluid that would pull me screaming into Kamino's cold. It came through the tank's wall like a blade through armor. Dulled by the medium but sharp enough to cut.
"They are the memories of a dead man. A side effect of the cloning process."
The words settled into the place where my name used to be. I reached for it. Galen. The syllables were there but they felt borrowed, the way a saber hilt sized for another hand still ignites but never sits right. Juno's face surfaced in the murk. Her hand on my shoulder. The warmth through the sleeve. "Be careful." My mouth tried to form her name and the bacta flooded in, bitter and clinging, and I gagged against whatever tube they'd threaded down my throat.
A dead man's memories. Was that what she was?
The doubt sat in my chest like shrapnel. I couldn't pull it out without tearing something. But the doubt was not the only thing building. The Force was gathering behind my sternum without permission, pooling behind a dam I hadn't built, and something in me wanted out more than it wanted answers.
The dam broke and then the tank broke with it.
Transparisteel fractured outward in a web of cracks that became shards that became noise, bacta spilling across the lab floor in a warm tide that carried me with it. I hit the deck on my hands and knees. The air was cold. Always cold on Kamino.
I coughed bacta and bile until my throat was raw. The chamber's lights stabbed through my vision. White. Clinical. Not a lab. Something smaller. A private cell built for one subject. Monitoring banks lined the curved walls, their screens still cycling data I couldn't read through the bacta in my eyes. The shattered tank behind me was the only tank in the room. Observation viewport to my right, the transparisteel dark, Vader's absence still pressing against it like a handprint on cold glass. Training droid components scattered across the far corner, limbs severed, chassis cracked. Someone had been testing what I could do before deciding I was ready for the conversation I'd just interrupted. Somewhere above me, ventilation cycled air that carried the antiseptic bite of sterilization fields and underneath that, faint and impossible, the warm resin smell of wroshyr bark. Kashyyyk. The smell had no business being here. I breathed it in and it was gone before my lungs finished filling. A flicker. Nothing.
Then the alarms hit. My breakout had tripped every sensor in the facility. Red strobes cycling, the flat wail of a breach warning drilling through the walls, and beneath it the percussion of boots on wet deck plating converging from every direction. Kamino responding to me with garrison reflex.
I stood. My legs trembled and the floor was slick and my body felt like it had been disassembled and put back together by someone working from a schematic they didn't fully trust. Every joint loose. Every muscle half a beat late. No saber. No clothes worth the word, just the thin medical shorts and bare feet on cold durasteel. Nothing but the Force and a body that barely remembered how to stand.
But I stood up. And I moved.
The corridors of Kamino were wet and narrow and built for technicians, not combat. The first squad found me at a junction thirty meters from the lab. Four stormtroopers, blasters up, boots splashing through condensation that never dried on this planet. The lead one fired before he finished his shout.
I raised my hand and the Force answered the way a muscle answers. No thought between the impulse and the act. The bolt caught on an invisible wall and hung for a fraction of a second before I redirected it back into the shooter's chest plate. The plastoid punched inward and took the ribs with it. I felt something soft give through the Force, the resistance landing in the hilt before the eye caught it. He folded. Hit the deck chest-first and the visor bounced off wet durasteel and blood pooled beneath the seam where his bodysuit met the gorget. He was still falling when I pulled the second trooper forward by his rifle strap, his feet leaving the wet deck, and used his momentum to swing him into the third. They hit the wall together and I felt the pull in my own shoulders, the recoil of moving two hundred kilos of armored body at speed. The first one's neck folded sideways and the snap carried through the Force before the sound reached my ears, a clean separation I felt in my own spine. The second trooper's shoulder caved under the weight with a grinding pop and his arm hung at an angle that meant whatever held it to the socket had quit. The fourth pivoted to fire and I was already inside his reach, palm flat against his chest plate, and the Force went through me and through him and through the wall behind him. The durasteel buckled outward. He went through it and the wall kept what it caught. Sheared plastoid. Strips of black bodysuit. The wet red of what the armor had been built to keep inside, smeared across the torn metal in a pattern the maintenance crews would need solvents for. The recoil traveled back through my palm and up my arm and settled into my shoulder like a bruise that wouldn't form for hours.
My hand tingled. My forearm burned. The corridor was quiet in the way that only dead things are quiet.
I moved. Not away from the danger but through it, as Vader had drilled me to move and as instinct demanded, because the only safe direction in a facility this size was forward and the Force was pulling me somewhere deeper.
A service corridor. Wider. Three troopers and an officer with a sidearm who fired first. I twisted sideways, the bolt cutting through the space my ribs had occupied a heartbeat before, and caught his wrist with the Force. I wrenched the joint past where joints go. Something inside the glove separated with a sound like leather giving way and his fingers opened and the pistol hit the deck and his scream hit the walls and both kept echoing. The first trooper rushed me and I met him at full stride, the Force carrying me forward faster than the gap between us had any right to close. My forearm caught his throat and what was hard then became soft on impact. The sound he made after wasn't breathing. Wet. Gurgling. Final. His boots left the floor and I used him, redirected his choking body into the second trooper's firing lane, and the bolt meant for me punched through his squadmate's back plate and blew the chest open on exit. What came out flash-burned on contact with air and hit the far wall still steaming. The smell arrived before the body landed. Burnt meat and melted bodysuit lining and the sharp chemical reek of superheated plastoid. The third broke left to flank and lightning left my fingers before I chose to use it. The arc found the gap between his helmet and neck guard and cooked everything behind the visor. Every muscle in his body fired at once and locked. He dropped rigid, faceplate fogged from the inside, smoke curling from the seal where helmet met gorget. The ozone hung thick and underneath it something sweeter and worse. The smell of a body that burned from the inside out. I breathed it and catalogued it and kept moving.
Each engagement fed the next without pause. A trooper rounded a corner and I caught his rifle mid-draw with the Force, ripped it from his grip, and drove the stock into his faceplate with the same Force pull that freed it. The visor shattered inward. Transparisteel becomes shrapnel when you reverse its purpose, and the shards went in and his hands reached for his face and found the ruin the stock had made of it. He hit the floor before the reaching finished. The rifle spun end over end into the next trooper's shin and the bone gave before the armor did, a wet snap I felt through the Force, and the stumble gave me a window to slam him sideways into a blast door frame. The push was harder than it needed to be. His body hit the frame at a speed that crumpled plastoid into flesh. The dent his shoulders left in the durasteel was deeper than the dent the frame left in him, and what slid down the metal afterward left a red trail that caught the emergency strobes. Behind him, two more opened fire from a defensive position and I tore a wall panel free with a flick of my wrist. It absorbed both bolts and I sent it spinning into them, its edge catching the first across the helmet at the jawline. The helmet turned. The head inside it stayed where it was. The neck gave with a crack I heard above the alarm's wail and he dropped with his head lolling at an angle the living don't achieve.
I didn't need my saber. Just the Force and the trained reflex that connected one technique to the next the way water connects one rock to the next in a river. My arms ached. My fingers still burned from the lightning, the discharge ghosting backward through muscle and bone from wrist to elbow. The terrifying part wasn't that I was good at this without my weapon. It was that the smell of ozone and scorched armor lining and cooked flesh felt like coming home.
The pull led me deeper. Past sealed blast doors the Force unsealed with a thought, past viewports where Kamino's storm threw rain in sheets that rippled in the lightning's flash. The corridors widened. Training wings gave way to production infrastructure, the kind of scale that doesn't serve one subject but serves an industry.
I felt it before I saw it. A pressure in the Force that wasn't hostile, wasn't friendly, wasn't anything I had a category for. It was like standing in a room full of mirrors and feeling every reflection breathe.
The blast doors at the end of the corridor were sealed. I tore them open with the Force and the chamber behind them swallowed me whole.
It was a spire. A vertical cylinder that climbed the full height of the facility, its walls lined with concentric rings of tanks that spiraled upward into a darkness the emergency lighting couldn't reach. Hundreds of them. Maybe more. Amber fluid cycling through each one, the faint pulse of life-support systems threading every tank into a single chamber-wide thrum, the throb of one shared pulse. The scale of it stole my breath before the details did.
Then the details arrived.
The first face I saw through the fogged glass I mistook for a reflection. My jaw. My scars. The bridge of my nose where it had been broken and healed wrong. I stepped closer and the figure in the tank didn't step with me. Its eyes were closed. Its hands curled at the same angle mine curled when I stopped fighting sleep. The mouth was slightly open, bacta pooling at the lower lip exactly as it had pooled at mine, minutes ago, in a cell I'd thought was unique.
I looked up.
Row after row. Ring after ring. Every tank held the same figure. The same jaw. The same scars. The same closed eyes. Some were further along than others. Some had the muscle I recognized from a mirror, fully formed, ready. Others were earlier, softer, the features still sharpening into the face I'd spent my life assuming was mine. One tank near the base held something that wasn't finished at all. The shape was wrong. The proportions hadn't decided what they wanted to be. The face had started to become mine and then veered sideways and the result was a thing I couldn't look at for longer than the Force made me before my eyes dragged themselves away.
My legs locked. Every joint seized at once and the part of me that had catalogued every kill in the corridors above went dark. I stood in the amber glow of a hundred copies of myself with nothing between me and what I was seeing. There was no angle to calculate. No economy of motion to approve. Just the raw unfiltered fact of my own face repeated until repetition stripped it of meaning.
I tried to breathe and the air tasted like the bacta I'd coughed up in the cell and I realized it had always tasted like this in here. The whole facility smelled like the inside of my tank because the whole facility was tanks. Was me. Was the production line that had made whatever I was and might have made whatever I was a hundred times before getting it right. Or might still be trying.
Juno's face surfaced in my mind and for the first time since the tank it didn't bring warmth. It brought nausea. Because if I was one of these then the memory of her hand on my shoulder wasn't a memory. It was a feature. Installed. Tested. Approved by the same man who had stood at that observation viewport and decided which version of me to keep and which to let the amber fluid reclaim. Every one of these bodies might have her name in its mouth. Every one of them might have reached for it the way I had, gagging on bacta and grief, and believed it was real.
My hands shook. The Force pulsed through the chamber in waves I couldn't control, rattling the nearest tanks in their frames, and I tried to hold it. Tried to breathe through it under the discipline Vader had drilled into me for surges like this, when the dark side found purchase in something real. But this wasn't the dark side. This was something underneath the dark side. Something that lived in the space between horror and identity where the Force stopped being a tool and became a mirror, and the mirror was showing me a hundred copies of my own face and the Force was screaming the way I couldn't.
The nearest ring of tanks cracked. Not from a push. Not from a technique. From proximity. From standing too close to a conduit that was channeling more revulsion than the architecture of a human body was built to contain. The glass fissured outward in webs that caught the amber light and the fluid behind it began to seep and I felt every crack in my chest the way I felt the tremor building in the floor beneath my feet.
I didn't choose what happened next.
The Force left me the way a scream leaves a throat. Not released. Torn out. It erupted from my center in a concentric wave that expanded outward at the speed of everything I couldn't process, and the spire answered. The first ring of tanks exploded. Not shattered. Exploded. Glass and amber fluid and the bodies inside them blowing outward in a spray that hit the walls and cascaded downward in a tide of warmth and wreckage. The wave climbed. The second ring went. The third. Each detonation feeding the next the way my combat had fed itself in the corridors above except this wasn't technique and this wasn't flow and this was the Force using me the way a storm uses a lightning rod, finding the path of least resistance through the most concentrated point of pain.
The sound was beyond sound. A pressure wave that compressed the air in my lungs and bounced off the spire's walls and came back and compressed them again. Tanks burst in sequence, climbing the cylinder, ring after ring, amber fluid raining from above in sheets that caught the emergency strobes and turned the air into something between liquid and light. Bodies fell. Some hit the floor with the wet weight of things that had never been alive enough to die. Some were still connected to their support structures by tubes and cables that stretched and snapped and the snapping sounded like tendons tearing and I heard it in my teeth. Glass rained for what felt like minutes. The shards caught in my hair, cut my arms, mixed with the amber fluid that was soaking through whatever they'd dressed me in. The facility's floor became a shallow lake of bacta and broken transparisteel and the things that had been growing inside it.
The Force had passed through me and taken everything with it. My vision bleached white and came back overexposed, the edges burning. Blood ran from my nose and I tasted copper and bacta residue. My ears rang at a pitch that buried the alarms. Every nerve from scalp to soles fired without instruction, the full-body burn of a current that had used me as its exit point and left the door open on its way out. My legs wanted the floor. This time I stayed up. Stubbornness or the Force or the refusal to kneel in a room full of things that wore my face. My bare feet held the glass-covered floor and the floor held me and that was enough.
I stood in the ruins of the spire. Amber fluid around my ankles. Glass underfoot cutting with every shift of weight. The bodies of things that wore my face lay scattered in the shallow tide the way debris scatters after a hull breach. Some intact. Most not. The ones the blast had caught directly were worse because the tanks had given them the dignity of suspension and the floor gave them nothing but gravity and the truth of what unfinished flesh looks like without fluid to hold it together.
High above, at the top of the spire where the blast's radius had thinned, a handful of tanks still glowed. Still cycled. Still held the face I was standing in the wreckage of. I didn't reach them all. The thought arrived with the taste of blood and I didn't know if it was relief or failure.
I moved through the wreckage. Through the shallow amber lake and the glass and the bodies that didn't move when I stepped over them and the ones that twitched when I stepped too close, fingers curling around nothing, mouths working without sound, tissue that had never learned to be anything but raw material. Each step cost something on bare feet that had been collecting cuts since the first corridor. Each step proved I could still pay it. I left bloody prints on the floor between the amber pools and it occurred to me that Vader could track me by the trail alone if he wanted to.
Whatever I just did had done more than destroy the tanks.
The base of the spire's far wall had buckled outward where the reinforced durasteel met the floor. The metal had peeled back, twisted, exposing a second layer of plating behind it. Heavier gauge. Darker alloy. Magnetic locks built into the seam, their indicator lights dead from the surge that had killed everything else in the chamber. The Force had cracked open something Vader sealed behind his production line, and the gap in the wall breathed air that tasted wrong for Kamino. Dry. Still. No salt. No humidity. Sealed atmosphere, independent climate system, the kind of environmental isolation the Empire used for long-term evidence storage and sensitive ordnance.
My body moved toward the breach before my mind cleared it. The Force pulled from somewhere inside the sealed room, a low steady traction against my sternum that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with recognition. Whatever sat behind that wall, the Force knew it. Or it knew me.
I squeezed through the gap. The metal edges caught the thin medical fabric across my ribs and tore it and I barely registered it because the room on the other side swallowed every thought that wasn't inventory.
Ten meters across. Twice as deep. Reinforced shelving along every wall, storage containers locked into magnetic brackets with a precision that didn't come from organization. It came from control. The same hands that had arranged my training schedule to the minute had arranged this space to the centimeter. Emergency lighting had failed in here. The only illumination bled through the breach behind me and from a faint blue pulse near the room's far wall that my eyes went to and my body flinched from in the same instant. Preservation field. Active. Whatever it protected, Vader considered it more valuable than the clones.
The gear locker sat against the left wall. Imperial markings stenciled on the exterior, Vader's personal cipher beneath them in characters I could read the way I could read his breathing through the Force. The magnetic lock surrendered when I pulled. Inside, three combat suits hung vacuum-sealed in individual compartments, each one sized to specifications I recognized because the specifications were me. Fitted body glove, matte black, built to move with the muscle underneath it rather than restrict it. Light armor plates for the torso, forearms, shins. Articulated joints. Boots with mag-lock soles and reinforced caps. Utility belt with empty saber clips.
Three sets. Three compartments. Three expected iterations of the same body standing where I stood, pulling the same suit from the same locker with hands that matched the same prints.
I dressed in the vault of the man who built me. The body glove sealed against my skin and the fit landed exact and my hands started shaking again because exact meant grown to spec, meant the body wearing the suit and the suit containing the body had been designed in the same room by the same mind. The armor plates clicked into place over my chest and forearms and the familiar settling of combat weight against my frame brought the training reflex online before the thought attached to it could catch up. My body knew this. My body had always known this. The question of whose body it had been when it learned didn't improve the fit.
The boots sealed around my feet and something in my chest unlocked. My soles had been bare since the tank. Bare on wet durasteel. Bare on broken transparisteel. Bare through every corridor kill and the shallow lake of ruined clones and every meter of floor between. The cuts had been open and screaming the entire time and I'd been running on top of them because the alternative was stopping. The boots contained the damage the way a tourniquet contains a bleed. Didn't fix it. Held it. The relief of solid footing on a surface I'd been cutting myself against for the last hour hit harder than it had any right to, and I stood straighter and hated that I stood straighter and kept moving.
Weapon racks lined the right wall. My training eye cataloged them before the rest of me caught up. Lightsaber hilts in sealed brackets, data tags beneath each one. The Force pressed against my awareness from every hilt at once, layered, each one carrying a signature I'd felt before in the instant a blade had met its owner and the signature had stopped.
I reached for the first. Organic curve, flowing lines built for Togruta hands. Shaak Ti's. My fingers closed around the grip and Felucia hit me behind the eyes. Green canopy light on sacred ground. Her face across the meditation platform. The blade going in and the sudden lack of resistance when plasma found tissue and the sound she'd made. Not a scream. A release. My hand came back trembling.
Kazdan Paratus's weapon beside it. Angular. Oversized for a Jedi his height, built for hands that preferred droids to people. Raxus Prime surfaced when I touched the metal. The hermit in his tower of garbage, fighting to protect replicas of a life the Empire had already erased. He'd been alone so long the loneliness had become his peace. I'd collapsed it because the mission parameters told me to.
Kota's hilt further down. My hand knew it before my eyes confirmed. Grip worn smooth by decades of campaign use, activation switch recessed to favor touch over sight. Nar Shaddaa. The TIE fighter facility. The moment my blade caught his eyes and the Force transmitted the severing to me as a white flash across my own vision. Phantom blindness lasting three full seconds. He'd screamed. The scream lived in the worn grip under my fingers. Kota was alive somewhere, blind and broken, and I was holding the weapon that used to be his eyes.
I pulled a tactical pack from the gear locker and loaded all three hilts inside. Sealed the flap. Adjusted the strap across my shoulders. The rack wasn't getting them back.
The workstation filled the far corner. Terminals dead, screens black, but the storage banks underneath droned with their own hardened power supply. I pulled the nearest bank from its housing and the labels glowed faint in the dark.
Numbered entries. Starting at one. Climbing past a hundred. TERMINATED. ABERRANT. DISPOSED. Secondary tags on the longer entries. ACCELERATED DEGRADATION. PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVIATION. TEMPLATE REJECTION. Each one a body that had opened its eyes the way I had and failed whatever threshold Vader set. The entries near the end got detailed. Force sensitivity indices plotted against the original's baseline. The last few carried a different tag. VIABLE. My hands had gone still on the storage bank and my stomach was trying to crawl out through my throat and neither reaction consulted the other.
I pulled three more banks and stashed them in the pack. Whatever I did with the data mattered less than removing it from his inventory.
The shelf behind the workstation held something I almost missed. Half-hidden by a terminal housing I'd shoved aside. Cylindrical casing the size of my forearm, scuffed Imperial serial markings my hands recognized before my brain assembled the letters. PROXY unit. Backup data core. The droid who had tried to kill me every morning as primary directive and had been the only thing in Vader's fortress glad to see me walk into a room. The core sat dormant but the Force carried something from the circuitry. Faint. Residual. A groove worn into the substrate by ten thousand loyalty cycles that had stopped being simulations.
I lifted the core. Cold metal against my palms. Filed next to my own termination records. I sealed it in the pack and tightened the strap and the vault wasn't keeping him.
Something pulsed at the edge of my awareness before I'd finished inventorying the rack. Low. Familiar. A low growl I'd felt ten thousand times pressed against my palm during training strikes and sparring sessions and every kill Vader had ever pointed me at. My saber. The crystal's song cut through the vault's silence and my hand was already open and reaching before my eyes found the source. Locked container beneath the preservation field's blue pulse near the vault's center. Imperial sigils on the security panel. Red indicator holding power despite everything else running dark. None of it mattered. The hilt tore free from the inside, shearing the lock apart on its way out, crossed three meters of dead air, and slapped into my right palm with a sound like a fist finding its grip. Every nerve from my wrist to my shoulder woke at once and my fingers closed around the hilt and the hilt settled into my grip and neither one of us had forgotten the other.
The grip fit calluses I hadn't earned yet or had earned in a life I couldn't verify, and the blade ignited with a sound that matched my pulse, the first note on Kamino that felt right. Red light flooded the vault and painted the emptied rack and the dead terminals and the pack sitting on the floor with its cargo of the stolen and the dormant. I extinguished the saber and clipped it to my belt, then my posture corrected itself and the correction felt like the first mechanical truth my body had offered since the tank.
Then I turned toward the back of the vault and the Force closed around my lungs.
The reliquary sat against the deepest wall. Three meters of empty floor separated it from everything else, as if the room's architect had understood that this object occupied a different register than the weapons and the data and the operational records. Durasteel frame. Sith runes etched into every surface, glowing faint crimson, stinging my vision when I tried to read them the way staring at a welding arc stings. A barrier field whined between the runes at a register designed to repel Force interaction. Vader's will woven into the containment, a lock made of intention rather than engineering. Inside, suspended in red light, a lightsaber.
The hilt was carved with wroshyr vines.
The vault went quiet. The hum of the preservation field. The groan of stressed metal from the spire behind me. The distant percussion of Kamino's storm against the facility's hull. All of it fell away and the only thing left was the carved wood pattern on a hilt I'd seen in the hands of a man who died trying to protect me from the man who built this room.
Kashyyyk. The clearing. Sunlight through the wroshyr canopy and a boy's hands gripping his father's robes and the sound of Vader's respirator growing louder than the forest could absorb. My father built this weapon. Seated the crystal himself, calibrated the focusing lens, wrapped the grip in vines from the trees he'd raised his son beneath. He'd carried it into the clearing. He'd ignited it. He'd stood between the red blade and his boy and the red blade had won because it always won, and the weapon had fallen and the hands that took it carried it here and locked it behind runes on a planet where nothing grew.
My knees hit the vault floor. Not a decision. Not a collapse like the spire. Something older than either. The boy on Kashyyyk had a father and then he didn't and the distance between those two states was the distance between standing and kneeling and my hands caught the floor and the impact traveled through my palms and up through my forearms and every cut and bruise and burn from the last hour reported in at once because the part of me that had been managing the pain had just clocked out.
I reached for the barrier and it pushed back. Cold pressure against my hands, against my chest, against whatever I had left. The runes flared and the repulsion intensified and Vader's will pressed against mine the way his hand had pressed against my father's throat in the clearing and I pushed harder because pushing was the only verb I had left.
"Be strong, Galen."
My father's voice. Not from the room. Not from memory. From the crystal itself, a resonance woven into the kyber's lattice the way his voice lived in the walls of the house he built. Present after the builder is gone. Carried in the material rather than the air. The words landed in the center of my chest and what came up was not the grief I'd felt in the spire. The spire grief was about what I might not be. This was about what I'd lost before I understood I had it. Before Vader. Before the weapon. Before the clone question erased the ground under my feet. A man named Kento Marek who loved his son enough to die in front of him. A boy who watched it happen and spent every year after becoming the thing that killed his father's kind. And now that boy, or whatever copy of that boy had survived, kneeling in the killer's vault with the killer's gear on his back and the killer's archives in his pack, reaching for the last physical proof that something had existed before all of it.
I pushed. Not with training. Not with the Force as Vader had taught me to use it, measured and controlled and efficient. With everything underneath. Below technique, below doctrine, below the dark side and the light side and every system anyone had ever built to make the Force into a tool. The raw want that predated all of it. My father's weapon sat behind that barrier and I would tear through Sith runes and magnetic containment and Vader's will itself to close my fingers around the last piece of him that existed in the physical world.
The barrier cracked. The runes flared white and burned out. The frame buckled inward and the containment glass shattered and rained across the vault floor, catching the blue preservation light and scattering it in fragments across the emptied rack and the dark terminals.
The saber snapped to my left hand and the hilt was warm.
Warm the way skin is warm. The wroshyr vine carvings pressed into my palm and the crystal inside pulsed once through the Force, a single deep beat, and the warmth traveled up through my wrist into my forearm and settled behind my sternum where the grief was sitting and the two occupied the same space without canceling each other. My father's weapon in my hand and my father's voice in the crystal and whoever I was, whatever the iteration logs said about the body holding this saber, the crystal didn't care. The crystal knew.
The blue blade ignited and the color cut through everything Kamino had shown me. Not the facility's amber. Not emergency red. Not the clinical white of the evaluation cell. Blue. The color of something that had existed before Vader's reach and still existed after it. The light fell across the emptied vault and for one instant the room didn't belong to its builder.
I drew the crimson from my belt with my right hand and let it sing again. Both blades resonated. The dissonance between the two voices settled into something my body recognized before my mind named it. The vibration traveled through both wrists and met in my chest and the combined resonance was the sound of everything Vader had forged standing in the same body as everything Vader had stolen. Both. Neither resolved. The combined chord traveled through my teeth and found something deeper, and beyond the walls Kamino's thunder answered in the same register.
The storm met me in the hangar. Rain drove through shattered transparisteel panels and the wind carried Kamino's salt-chemical ocean bite. TIE fighters sat on platforms in rows, their solar panels slick, fuel lines running beneath the deck in conduits the Force traced for me through the plating. Stormtroopers regrouping at the far end. Organizing a perimeter.
Too late.
Both blades hissed with the rain where it crossed the plasma. Two different sounds. The crimson growled against my right hand, familiar as a pulse, and the blue sang against my left with a resonance that wasn't entirely mine. The crystal pulling at tones my father's hands had calibrated and my hands were still learning. I moved faster.
The first squad opened fire in a staggered volley and I stepped into it. The blue caught the lead bolt and angled it down into the deck at the shooters' feet and the rain-slicked plating turned the deflection into shrapnel, molten metal spraying across their shins and greaves. The crimson left my right hand before the first trooper finished flinching. I threw it. The saber spun end over end across the hangar at knee height, carving a trench through wet durasteel, and hit the squad from the side while they were still looking at me. The first lost both legs below the knee. The blade sealed the stumps as it passed, plasma fusing flesh shut in the weapon's wake, but the body hadn't caught up to the loss. His weight shifted forward and he hit the deck face-first, armor ringing on wet durasteel, and the scream came after because pain travels slower than a lightsaber. The second caught the spinning blade through his torso on the rotation and the exit wound steamed in the rain. I called the crimson back with a pull that wrenched my shoulder and the grip slapped into my palm wet and warm from the kill.
A flanking squad poured through a service entrance to my left. I pivoted, blue forward, crimson reversed, and the first bolt caught the blue blade at an angle that sent it screaming into the fuel conduit running beneath the nearest TIE's platform. The conduit ruptured. Pressurized tibanna ignited on contact with the redirected bolt's heat and the explosion lifted the TIE off its landing struts and dropped it sideways across the squad's position. Solar panel first. The panel hit the deck and the troopers beneath it became pressure and sound, plastoid driven into flesh driven into durasteel in a wet layered crunch I felt through the Force as three signatures snuffed at once. The concussive wave knocked me sideways and the fireball's heat washed across my face through the rain and I used the stumble, rolled it into a sprint toward the survivors, the Force driving each stride pulling themselves from the wreckage. The crimson opened the first from hip to collarbone in a rising slash. The wound sealed itself in the blade's wake, edges fused black and smoking, and the body's reaction to being split and cauterized in the same stroke was a full-system spasm that didn't stop until he hit the deck. The blue followed in a lateral sweep that caught the second across the helmet and passed through plastoid and skull without slowing. The two halves separated and the rain washed the sealed edges clean before they hit the deck, plasma heat having fused everything it touched into something that steamed in Kamino's cold air.
I felt both blades through the Force as plainly as my own hands. The crimson was a fist. Blunt and direct. The blue pulled at angles I hadn't chosen, guided micro-corrections into my wrist that felt like another hand on the hilt, the crystal's resonance humming suggestions my training translated into technique before my mind could object. My father's weapon fighting through his son's muscle memory and the combination producing something neither of us could have managed alone.
A squad held the catwalk above the main platform. Elevated position, overlapping fire, textbook Imperial formation. I tore a landing strut from the nearest grounded TIE with a Force pull that cost me three steps of forward momentum and hurled the strut upward. It hit the catwalk's support column and the entire section buckled. Troopers grabbed for the railing as the platform tilted and I was already underneath, both blades up, and the first body that fell met the crimson on the way down. The blade went through his back plate and out his chest and I pivoted the angle to dump him before the weight pinned me. A second fell wide and the blue caught him across the midsection and the two halves hit the deck on either side of me. A third landed on his feet and got his rifle up and I threw him. The Force carried him off his feet and into the burning wreckage of the toppled TIE and his armor conducted the heat faster than his nerves could register it, the screaming lasted four seconds.
My shoulders burned. The dual-wield pulled at muscles Vader's training had never conditioned because he never intended me to carry two blades, and the deficit was building in every joint between my neck and my wrists. Both forearms vibrated from the impact of plasma meeting armor, the resistance translating backward through the hilts into flesh already shredded by lightning and corridor kills and everything the last hour had demanded. I was running on borrowed time and the interest was compounding.
The last cluster broke and ran. They made it three steps. I drove both blades into the deck and lightning arced from my hands through the standing water, the current spreading across the slick surface in branching veins that found every boot sole in a ten-meter radius. The closest trooper's legs locked and he pitched forward rigid, muscles firing in a cascade that cracked his own teeth. The second dropped mid-stride and convulsed in the pooling rainwater and the charge jumped from his armor into the trooper beside him and that one folded sideways against a fuel container and stopped moving. The smell of ozone and scorched hair and something that smelled like a machine shop with the ventilation off hung in the wet air.
I pulled both sabers from the deck. The hilts had soaked up the discharge and the grips were hot against my palms.
The hangar was quiet as the monotonous alarm rang on, now unanswered. Rain and the groan of settling wreckage and the tick of cooling metal where the toppled TIE had burned itself out. My eyes moved the way they'd been trained to move. Threat assessment first, then exits. The threats were finished. The exits were sitting on launch platforms in a row, solar panels slick with Kamino's rain, half of them undamaged. I stood in the wreckage of a fight I'd already won and the victory meant nothing because Kamino had given me everything it was going to give. The vault's pack sat heavy across my shoulders. Three Jedi weapons. A hundred termination records. One dormant friend. Everything except the answer I couldn't pull from the clone logs or the amber wreckage or my own face multiplied past meaning. That answer wasn't here. Juno was somewhere in the galaxy and she was the only proof that what lived in my skull had ever belonged to someone real. I needed off this planet. The nearest intact TIE sat two platforms over, boarding ladder still down, cockpit dark. Its pilot was somewhere behind me on the hangar deck discovering what the rest of his squad had already learned about the cost of doing his duty.
The cockpit was cold and cramped and smelled of fuel and sweat and the plastoid residue of a pilot who would never need it again. I dropped into the seat and the controls were familiar the way violence was familiar. Muscle memory. The hands knew what the mind hadn't decided yet. The engines shrieked to life and the platform fell away and Kamino's storm swallowed the fighter whole.
Through the rain, as the TIE banked over a maintenance sector I'd never seen from above, a shape sat on a landing pad three platforms south. Angular. Predatory. A ship I didn't recognize, its hull scarred by a career's worth of atmosphere entries, its silhouette wrong for anything in the Imperial registry. A cold ripple moved through the Force that wasn't Vader and wasn't the storm and wasn't anything I could name. Something watching. Something that had been watching for longer than I'd been awake. The ripple passed and the rain closed over the shape and I pulled the TIE into the cloud layer and didn't look back. But the cold stayed in my chest for longer than it should have.
The pursuit lasted longer than the stolen fighter deserved. TIEs screaming out of Kamino's orbital platforms, laser fire stitching the void around me, the hull groaning under impacts it wasn't built to survive. I wove through their formation and the Force sharpened every reflex into something the pursuing pilots couldn't match with training alone. A hit scorched the nav console. The hyperdrive whined in protest. Cato Neimoidia glowed on the backup display and I slammed the lever and the stars stretched and Kamino vanished.
The jump to Cato Neimoidia was a long haul. Kamino sat at the fringe of Wild Space and Cato was tucked into the Colonies, half a galaxy of hyperspace lane between them. The drive held for the first stretch. Hours in the blue-white tunnel with nothing but a cockpit built for a pilot shorter than me and a body that had stopped sending good news. Everything hurt. Nothing was fatal. The bacta residue on my skin had dried to a film that cracked when I moved and the smell of it was constant and it kept triggering something at the edge of my awareness. A flicker of chemical tang and voices I couldn't place. I pushed it away each time and each time it went. But it went slower.
The hyperdrive failed somewhere past the Rishi corridor. The tunnel collapsed and realspace slammed back with a star field I didn't recognize and proximity warnings screaming at debris the navicomputer hadn't plotted because half its processing cores were scorched. I let the motivator cool, recalculated, and jumped again. The drive caught. Held for another day before it kicked me out a second time into empty space where nothing existed on any chart. Twenty minutes in a dead cockpit while the recycler wheezed air it was never rated to sustain this long. The TIE was built for sorties, not cross-galaxy transit, and the cockpit was becoming a slow lesson in how little space a body needs to poison itself.
Three days. Two failures. A jump drive that was dying the same way everything else on this fighter was dying. If this last stretch held, I might let myself believe I could find her.
Cato Neimoidia came out of hyperspace like a fist. The fog-shrouded bridges and the planet's mottled surface rushing up too fast, the TIE's damaged systems screaming proximity warnings I could feel through the seat before I could read on the console. The atmosphere hit and the hull glowed orange with friction and the fog swallowed everything outside the viewport. I fought the controls. The controls had stopped listening.
The bridge came up through the fog and the TIE hit it at an angle the airframe was never designed to survive. Metal screamed. The viewport shattered inward. My harness caught me and the deceleration tried to tear me through it and my head hit something hard and the world
Chemical taste. Not fuel. Not transparisteel dust. Something clinical and sharp that had no business inside a crashed starfighter. A heartbeat thudding against the inside of my chest that wasn't mine. Too steady. Too even. Too deliberate. Pumping at a rhythm nothing organic would choose. Cold fluid in veins I couldn't feel. Voices at the edge of perception, soft and urgent and speaking words that dissolved before they became language. Then
The wreckage groaned. Fog poured through the shattered viewport, thick and wet, carrying the mineral smell of Cato Neimoidia's acidic atmosphere. Pain reasserted itself with the patience of something that had been waiting its turn. My ribs. My skull. The taste was gone. The heartbeat was mine again, ragged and too fast and entirely organic. I hung in the harness, blood on my face, the cockpit a twisted sculpture of sparking consoles and sheared metal, and I didn't understand what had just happened. The moment sat in my mind like a gap in a sentence. Present and empty and impossible to read past without noticing.
I unclipped the harness and fell. The fog swallowed me as completely as Kamino's storm had, and the bridge's surface caught me with cold stone and corroded metal beneath my palms. I tried to push myself up. My arms shook once and quit. Three days in a cockpit with air that was slowly turning to poison, barley any sleep, no food, nothing but the hum of a dying hyperdrive and the smell of bacta residue cracking on my skin. My body had been writing checks since the tank and the crash was the last one and the account was empty.
I lay on the bridge and breathed and each breath came slower than the one before it and heavier. The fog pressed down. Cato Neimoidia's bridges stretched in both directions, vanishing into gray, and I thought about standing up and the thought didn't connect to anything that could execute it. The stone was cold under my cheek. The pack dug into my spine. My father's saber pressed against my hip where it was clipped and even the crystal's warmth couldn't reach whatever part of me was responsible for staying conscious.
The dark took me.
A woman's voice pierces the darkness. "Stabilizing the implants now. Vitals are holding."
Another, softer. "Unusual neural spikes. Consistent with... wait, I've never seen readings like this."
The light from overhead blinds whatever's left of my vision behind my eyelids. I reach for something. Anything.
The dark pulls me under again before my fingers can respond.