The guy was still shrieking when I pulled my hand off his face. His voice cracked halfway, turning into a raw, wet screech. One thing I appreciated about buildings here was their sound absorbance. At least it was helping me a lot.
Blood streaked down from his eyelids, lips trembling as he gasped for air.
"Scarif!" he choked the moment I yanked the rag out, thrashing weakly against the bindings. "Scarif, I swear! That's where they send them! The ship went there—please, please—"
I didn't answer. No need. He was spilling it fast enough.
"They—every week," he coughed, spittle and snot hanging from his chin. "Every week they send a batch. Mechanics, techs, anyone useful—they don't tell us why! I don't know anything else, I don't—"
The sobs shook him, chest heaving like it might split open. His face looked like it had been dragged across fire. The rag went back in before he found enough air to scream again. He gagged, muffled cries bouncing off the little flat's thin walls.
Scarif.
I leaned back in the chair. My pulse was steady. My head wasn't.
Scarif. How the fuck did I miss it.
It fit. It fit too perfectly.
Death. Fucking. Star.
Why else the kidnappings? Why else silence instead of contracts? The Empire could've had its pick of half the galaxy's engineers with one public listing. But you don't risk leaks when the project's so secret you'll glass a planet to keep it buried. You take who you want, lock them where no one can talk, and work them till they're ash.
I looked down at the crumpled man. He flinched just from the tilt of my helmet. The rag sagged with drool and blood, dark spots spreading across the carpet.
That technique I used before, on the soldier and now on him, was horrifically too efficient. I hadn't expected how quick it broke people. A couple of seconds was all it took. Pain that bypassed thought, cut straight past training, loyalty, fear of court-martial. After feeling it, they'd trade the Emperor himself for a chance it wouldn't happen again.
Same as the last one. And now this. No resistance left. Just a sack of nerves waiting to obey.
Scarif. Vasha was already off-world. That was what I'd learned from the trooper yesterday. That trail had led me to the detention site, Site Gamma.
–––
The detention site looked like nothing. Blank walls, plain gates, no banners, no signs. Just another box in a city full of boxes. Too plain. Too careful.
The giveaway was the guards. Rotations too clean. Their eyes too sharp for rent-a-cops. They weren't there for show.
No way in. Not for me.
So I did what I do best. Waited.
Three blocks over, on a rooftop with a half-broken chimney, HUD feed running. Hours ticked by while the sun slid down and the city lights came up. I kept the scope locked on the gates, watching every shift change, every routine.
Evening finally gave me what I needed. A handful of civvies walking out—staff who didn't wear armor. A couple looked nervous. A couple looked bored. People with clearance, but not enough pay to care.
I picked one. Mid-level. The kind of guy who carried himself like the job was paperwork, not danger. Perfect.
I let him walk. Shadowed him slow, never too close. Past transport lines. Past bars. Past everything. Just a man going home, never knowing what was breathing down his neck.
He finally reached it—small apartment block at the sector edge. Lights clicked on in the window. He was in.
So I waited again. Hours this time. Midnight before I even moved.
The door was locked. It barely mattered. One nudge of the Force, soft as a sigh, and the bolt slipped.
He didn't even get to scream before the tazer kissed his ribs.
That was the start. This here—him curled on the floor, rag stuffed in his mouth, eyes leaking blood—this was the end.
---
I stood, flexing my fingers. He whimpered under the rag, body curling tighter. I knew what was next, even if I didn't want to admit it.
Leaving him alive was letting a trail go free. I couldn't trust the guy to not reveal anything, hell, he would definitely be revealing everything that happened now. If anyone caught wind of me using Force, that was straight invitation to Inquisitors to inquisiton my ass.
My hand pressed flat over his chest. The pressure came easy this time. A twitch of the Force, and his body stiffened once, violently. Then silence. No thrashing. No breath. Just another corpse, one more servant of the Empire forgotten in his own apartment.
Cruel? Maybe. Necessary? Definitely. Compared to Vasha, compared to Scarif, compared to what they were building out there—this man's life wasn't even a footnote.
I let go and stepped back. The room smelled like piss and burnt skin. I ignored it.
Scarif.
---
The streets blurred under my boots. Neon signs flickered from balconies and shopfronts, buzzing like lazy insects. A pair of drunk dockworkers laughed too loud on the opposite sidewalk, and I cut down an alley to avoid them. I wasn't even paying attention to the turns I was taking anymore. My head was too loud.
I couldn't keep pretending. That little fantasy I'd let myself believe—me and Vasha, tucked away somewhere safe, patching speeders by day and maybe arguing about what to cook at night—it was gone. Scarif killed it.
I was in this mess whether I wanted to be or not.
A pair of eyes glinted at me from the shadows up ahead. For a second my stomach dropped, but it turned out to be a stray tooka-cat hissing over some trash. Still, I slid my hand inside my coat and brushed the cold steel of the gauss gun I kept strapped there. The city at night wasn't some holo-drama where kids wandered around in peace. Out here, you could get rolled for a pair of boots, and mine weren't half-bad.
And Scarif wasn't some outpost I could sneak into either. It was the single most secure place in the entire galaxy. The Empire's crown jewel. Walking into that fortress with my half-broken Force abilities and this not-yet-grown body was pure suicide. Best case, I'd get captured. Worst case, I'd end up a smear on the floor. Either way, Vasha stayed gone.
But at least there was one thing that gave me a flicker of comfort. They needed her skills. That meant her life wasn't in immediate danger. Short-term, she was safe. That bought me time.
Time to prepare.
I clenched my fists, nails biting my palms as I walked past a row of shuttered vendors. A bored patrol droid clunked overhead on its hover path, red eye scanning the street. I ducked under an awning until it drifted on. No more grinding slow. No more waiting for years until the Rebels decided to show up. By then it'd be too late.
And let's be real—the Rebels right now were nothing. Just scattered cells, whispers in the dark. Even if they grew stronger, why would they risk everything to save one mechanic girl who meant nothing to them? To them, I was just some street rat kid, barely scraping by. Potential, sure, but unrealized. And unrealized potential didn't save lives.
So the truth was simple: I had to make myself worth it. Fast.
The first thing that came to mind was the Force. Someone once said, "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." I'd laughed at that line when I first read it years ago, but standing here now, it wasn't a joke.
Problem was, I had no training. None. Everything I could do now was stitched together from half-remembered Wookiepedia entries. Trying to recreate powers from scraps of trivia like some kind of cosmic DIY project. Maybe that was fine if you had all your life to experiment. But me? I needed results. I needed them yesterday.
What I needed was a teacher. A Jedi.
I'd avoided the idea before. Contacting one of them meant dragging myself and Vasha into galactic-scale messes. But Vasha wasn't here anymore. That excuse was dead.
The Jedi weren't all gone. A handful had survived. And if I was going to learn, why not from the best?
Yoda had peaced out to some swamp planet that wasn't even on the standard maps. Great. Very helpful, tiny frog man. Which left the recluse. Obi-Wan Kenobi. The guy who cut Darth Vader in half. He might have shut himself off from the Force, but knowledge didn't just vanish. If he refused to teach me, well, being a kid came with a certain set of tools. Relentless pestering was one of them.
That could get me techniques. New tools. But it didn't solve the fundamental problem.
My connection to the Force was broken.
That wasn't just me whining. That was fact. Every time I tried to reach out, it came back jagged, distorted, like a bad signal. I'd spent enough nights meditating, if you could even call it that, to know the line was busted.
Maybe it was because Ezra's soul was the one really tethered to the Force, not mine. Maybe the Alex part of me—the transplant from another universe—was invisible to it. Which meant all this power rested on whatever fragments of Ezra were left rattling inside me. And those fragments were fading.
It made sense, didn't it? The Force wasn't just about biology. The Yuuzhan Vong from Legends were proof of that. Whole species cut off from the Force, untouchable, no matter what kind of body they had. If that could happen, then why not a broken soul like Ezra's?
But what could I do about it? It wasn't like I could crawl inside my own skull with a soldering iron and patch things up. That void inside me wasn't something tech could reach. The Force didn't seem to touch it either. Or maybe it did, but I had no clue how to use it. And in all the lore I remembered, I couldn't think of a single case of someone fixing a fractured soul.
So yeah, stuck.
A cold wind hissed through the alleys, carrying the stink of fried food and engine coolant. I tugged my coat tighter and kept walking. My boots splashed through a puddle, sending up greasy water. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye—a couple of men loitering by a stairwell, watching me too closely. My heart spiked. My fingers brushed the gauss gun again, but they just muttered something and went back to their cigarras. Lucky me.
A thought crossed my mind. What if I hadn't landed in Ezra's body? What if I'd been dropped into some random kid? Someone non-sensitive. Would I still have Force powers, even weak ones? Instinct said no.
So what made Ezra different? What made this body work at all?
Midichlorians.
That was the key, wasn't it? The little radios. The transmitters. They took the intent of the soul and broadcast it to the Cosmic Force. A non-sensitive didn't have enough of them, so the signal never got through. But Ezra did. His body had them. His soul had the line. That was why I could even manage these pathetic tricks.
Wait. Communicate. That was the word. Midichlorians weren't just measuring sticks. They were the antennae. The whole system.
So if my signal was scrambled, maybe the problem wasn't in the broadcast at all. Maybe I just needed to overpower the noise.
The idea hit me so hard I stopped in the middle of the street. A speeder zipped past, its horn blaring, and I realized I was standing in traffic like an idiot. I scrambled back to the sidewalk, cheeks burning even though no one cared enough to look.
Still, the thought wouldn't let go.
Maybe I couldn't fix Ezra's fading soul. Maybe I couldn't untangle the mess that was Alex-me tangled up in Force threads. But what if I didn't need to? What if I just drowned out the distortion with more signal?
More midichlorians.
I couldn't help it. A laugh bubbled up. It sounded half-crazed in the empty street. Here I was, in the middle of Lothal's capital at night, criminals in the shadows, stormtroopers around every corner, and my grand revelation was… cell count. Like some kind of cosmic blood test.
But crazy or not, it was something.
And right now, something was all I had.
---
By the time I made it back, the city had gone quiet. I didn't even bother with food. Just dropped the coat, locked the door, and sat cross-legged on the floor.
Deep breath. Hyper-Perception on.
The view unfolded the same as always. A sea of Living Force running through me like endless rivers. Zoom in. Narrow the focus. Push deeper.
There they were. The little lights. The midichlorians.
Same as I'd seen months ago, but sharper this time. Tiny pinpricks of glow sprinkled through every corner of me. Billions? Trillions? Hell, probably hundreds of trillions if you went by human cell counts and Ezra's Force sensitivity. Way more than I could ever count, even if I lived a dozen lifetimes with a calculator.
I shifted focus. Tried the same exercise I'd done before. Hold the perception steady inside, then nudge the Force outside at the same time. Two regions, same ability. Way easier than last time.
That's when I noticed it. The pulse I'd always seen at the start wasn't just raw Living Force like I'd assumed before. It was the midichlorians too.
A wave started in one cluster of those glowing specks. They pulsed, and the Living Force around them shifted like water being disturbed. That disturbance carried forward, hitting the next cluster, making them flare. Then the next. Each step of the cascade made the wave stronger, amplified as it traveled deeper into the network.
A relay race. Billions of tiny batons being passed from cell to cell until the whole body hummed.
I blinked, lost the thread. The perception dissolved. The cup I'd been holding midair dropped with a clang against the floor.
"Shit."
I smacked my fist against the ground, frustration buzzing through my bones. But under it, there was something else. A grin pulling at my lips. Because I finally had a path forward.
It was almost too obvious. Elementary logic. If your signal gets distorted on the way out, how do you make sure it still arrives intact?
Simple. You crank the signal until it bulldozes through the noise.
And midichlorians were the amplifier. Not just my own. Mine weren't enough.
I needed more.
Much more.
Lucky for me, the universe had no shortage. Billions of living beings. Trillions of cells. Midichlorians everywhere.
Why settle for your birthright when you could borrow someone else's.
Hell, why borrow when you could just take.
--
A/N: Apologies for the irregular updates. I had forgot to mention in previous chapter but my midsemester examinations have started and will last till 26, leaving me quite less time to write.
As such, I have taken to update once every 3 days for now.
Now the story of Ezra has truly started, after nearly 130k words lol. Lets see how far we go!
Don't forget to vote with stones!
And tune in to discord for early announcements!