It didn't announce itself. There was no clear boundary, no moment where the trees became different trees or the ground became different ground. It was subtler than that — a gradual accumulation of small wrongnesses that Homer catalogued without comment as they moved. The canopy thickening until the grey sky above became a memory. The undergrowth shifting from the hardy plateau vegetation to something older and lower and darker in color, plants that didn't grow in the highland margins because the highland margins didn't have what they needed. The sound changing most of all — the plateau jungle had its own vocabulary, birds and insects and the movement of things in the middle distance that you learned to read over years of proximity. This was different. This was quieter in the ways that mattered and louder in the ways that didn't, full of sounds that had no names in the catalog Homer had built over thirty years and therefore required attention until he could decide whether they required more than that.
He held up a fist without turning around.
The group stopped.
He crouched and looked at the ground and read what it told him. The tracks they were following had held since the tree line — Mira's prints, the narrow deliberate stride he'd memorized from Edran's description, and beside them the other set, longer and unhurried, the one that had no name yet. The soil here was darker than the plateau, wetter, and it held impressions cleanly. The tracks continued forward and slightly left, angling toward a depression in the terrain that Homer could see forty meters ahead where the ground dropped away and the trees grew closer together and the light, already thin, became something close to absent.
He stood and turned and looked at the group.
Seven adults and Pell. Edran directly behind him with the look he'd been wearing since the settlement — that focused, load-bearing quiet, eyes moving constantly, processing. Corvin beside him, which Homer had considered and decided was unavoidable. The man had a right. Whatever happened in these trees, Corvin had a right to be present for it and arguing otherwise would have cost time and goodwill they couldn't spare. Pell's mother Jena stood with her hand not quite on Pell's shoulder — close enough to reach him, far enough to let him keep his dignity. The two others — Bram and Sev, both plateau men with the same decades of Dathomir in their bodies that Homer carried — stood at the back of the group scanning the tree line behind them with the automatic vigilance of people who understood that threats on this planet had a tendency to use your attention against you.
Homer pointed at the depression ahead. Then held up two fingers and pointed left and right.
The group understood. They'd discussed it before they left — if the terrain allowed a split view, they'd use it. Cover more ground. Reduce the chance of missing something.
They moved into the depression slowly.
The sounds down here were wrong in a way that Homer felt in his chest before he understood it intellectually. He had been in Dathomir's deep territories twice in thirty years and both times had come back with the same conclusion — that the deep jungle operated on rules that the plateau jungle only approximated, that the further you went from the highland margins the more the planet's actual nature became apparent, and that its actual nature was something that human settlement had been politely ignoring for three generations because acknowledging it fully was not compatible with daily life.
He moved left with Edran and Jena and Pell.
Bram and Sev took Corvin right.
The depression widened as they descended into it and then opened, unexpectedly, into a natural clearing where the canopy pulled back enough to let in a column of grey light that fell on the ground like something poured. Homer stopped at the clearing's edge and looked across it and went very still.
The clearing was not empty.
What stood at its far edge was not, on first observation, obviously wrong. A figure. Standing between two trees at the clearing's opposite margin, partially obscured by the undergrowth, not moving. The posture was human. The proportions were human. It was only when Homer looked at it for a sustained moment that the specific wrongness resolved itself into something he could name — the stillness was absolute in a way that living things don't achieve. Not the stillness of someone standing quietly. The stillness of something that was not currently concerned with any of the processes that require movement.
He put his hand back and found Edran's arm without looking.
Edran stopped.
Homer looked at the figure for a long moment. It did not look back. Its head was angled slightly downward and its arms hung at its sides and it stood between its two trees with the patient totality of something that had been placed there and would remain there until something changed the instruction.
The green was barely visible from this distance. A faint luminescence at the figure's hands and throat, the color of the ichor light Pell had described, so faint it would have been invisible in better light. Here in the deep jungle grey it was just perceptible.
Homer turned his head slowly toward Jena and Pell and made a gesture he didn't have a name for — palm down, slow, the universal language of do not move and do not make a sound. Then he turned back to the figure.
It had not moved.
He became aware, gradually, of others. Not in the clearing. At its edges, in the spaces between trees where the light didn't reach. The same absolute stillness, distributed. He counted four before he stopped counting because the number wasn't the relevant information.
The relevant information was that they were between him and the way back.
He was still working out the geometry of this when Corvin's voice came from the right side of the depression, forty meters away, at a volume that meant he had stopped caring about being quiet.
It was not a word. It was a sound a person makes when something has happened to their understanding of the world that language hasn't caught up to yet.
Homer moved right without deciding to.
He came through the undergrowth fast and low and emerged onto a slight rise that gave him a sightline down into a second clearing, smaller than the first, and he took in what was there in the single comprehensive way of someone who has trained themselves to see situations whole rather than sequentially.
Corvin was at the clearing's edge. On his knees. His right arm was wrong — the angle of it, the way he was holding it against his body, the dark spreading down from the shoulder into his sleeve. Bram was not visible. Sev was on the ground at the clearing's center in a way that meant Sev was not going to get up.
Bram was at the tree line opposite, also on the ground, also still.
And in the center of the clearing, in the grey column of light that fell through the gap in the canopy, stood Veshra.
She was exactly as Pell had described her and entirely beyond what the description had prepared Homer for. The height. The dark layered clothing. The green light moving around her hands with that quality of being almost alive. She stood with the complete stillness of someone who had done what needed doing and was now simply present in the aftermath of it, no agitation, no performance, just the flat patient fact of her.
Beside her, holding her hand, stood Alis.
Homer had known Alis since she was four years old. He had watched her grow up in the settlement the way you watch all the children grow up when you are the person the settlement turns to — present at every gathering, every crisis, every ordinary day that accumulates into a life. He knew her face. He knew the way she stood and the way she moved and the specific quality of her attention when something interested her.
The girl standing beside Veshra had Alis's face and Alis's hands and Alis's height and none of the rest of it.
She was looking at her father on the ground in front of her and there was nothing in her expression that Homer could read as recognition. Not coldness — that would have been something, would have implied a suppression of feeling that meant the feeling was still there underneath. This was different. This was the look of someone observing a thing that does not have particular meaning for them. Corvin was a man on the ground at the edge of a clearing. That was what her face said. That was all it said.
Corvin was saying her name. He had been saying it since the sound Homer had heard from forty meters away. He was saying it the way you say something when you believe that saying it enough times will eventually produce the response that should accompany it — the recognition, the return, the evidence that the person you are looking at is still the person you know.
Alis did not respond.
She turned her face up toward Veshra's and something passed across her expression that Homer could not name — not happiness exactly, not fear, something more fundamental than either, the look of a person in the presence of the organizing principle of their world.
Veshra looked down at her briefly. Then looked up at Homer.
They regarded each other across the clearing for a moment that had no particular duration.
Homer had looked at a great many things in sixty-one years on difficult planets and he had developed a working understanding of the difference between things that could be reasoned with and things that could not. It was not a moral distinction. It was a practical one — some situations had negotiating positions available and some situations had already decided what they were going to be and were simply waiting for you to understand that.
Veshra's face told him everything he needed to know about which kind of situation this was.
He reached down and got his hand under Corvin's good arm.
"We're leaving," he said. Quietly. Not to Veshra. To Corvin.
Corvin did not move. He was still looking at Alis. Still saying her name, more quietly now, with the diminishing quality of someone whose certainty is running out.
"Corvin." Homer put weight into it. "She is not coming with us today. Do you understand me. She is not coming with us today."
The words cost something to say. He said them anyway because they were true and because the alternative was Corvin dying in this clearing next to Bram and Sev and that was not something Homer was willing to add to the day's accounting.
Corvin let Homer pull him upright. He kept his eyes on Alis until the undergrowth took her from his sightline and then he kept them on the place where she had been and Homer kept moving and Edran appeared from the left and took Corvin's other side without being asked and they moved back through the depression with the four still figures watching from the clearing's edges and the green light barely visible at their hands and throats and neither watching figure moving to follow.
Pell was at the rise with his mother's hand on his shoulder and his eyes very wide and his mouth closed because he had understood without being told that this was a moment that required silence.
Homer looked at him briefly as they came up out of the depression.
Pell had described Veshra accurately. He had left nothing out and embellished nothing and Homer had believed him and had come into these trees believing him and it had still not been sufficient preparation.
He filed this information away for later.
They moved back toward the plateau.
Behind them the jungle settled back into itself — the sounds that had no names returning, the absolute stillness of the figures at the clearing's edge resuming, the green light fading back to the barely-visible threshold where it lived. Dathomir's deep territories closing over the clearing the way water closes over something dropped into it.
In the center of the clearing Veshra stood for a moment longer.
Alis stood beside her.
Then Veshra turned and walked back into the trees and Alis followed without looking back and the clearing was empty and the column of grey light fell on nothing and the jungle held what it held and did not offer any of it back.
They came out of the trees at midday.
The settlement saw them from a distance and the seeing was enough — six where seven had gone in, and the way they were moving, and the way Edran and Homer were carrying Corvin between them with his right arm bundled against his chest in cloth that had been his shirt twenty minutes ago and was now something darker. The two women who had been maintaining the communal fire came to the perimeter without being called. The man who had stayed in his chair at the meeting came out of his dwelling and looked at the returning group and then looked at the tree line behind them and went back inside and closed the door.
Homer counted the faces as they crossed the perimeter. Looking for Sera.
She was at the door of her dwelling. She had come outside when she saw them coming and she was standing very still in the way of someone whose body has understood something that their mind is still negotiating with. Her eyes went to Corvin first — the arm, the cloth, the color of him — and then they went to the space between the returning figures, the space where a search party returning with good news would have someone walking that this one didn't.
Homer met her eyes.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked back at Corvin and something in her face completed a calculation and she came forward and took her husband's face in her hands and he said her name and then he didn't say anything else because saying anything else would have required him to say what he'd seen and he wasn't ready and she could feel that and she held his face and didn't ask.
Not yet.
They took Corvin into the meeting dwelling because it was the largest space and had the best light from the eastern window in the afternoon hours and Homer needed both. He sent Pell's mother Jena for the medical supplies — what the settlement had, which was adequate for plateau injuries and wholly insufficient for this — and he sent one of the women for water and fire and he sent everyone else outside because the room needed to be smaller than it was about to feel.
Sera stayed. Homer didn't argue it.
He looked at the arm while Corvin was still conscious enough to answer questions. The reanimated sister had done it with her hands, which Homer had not seen directly but which the wound described clearly enough — not a blade, not a clean thing, the kind of damage that comes from force applied without a cutting edge, the shoulder joint compromised in a way that left the arm connected by the wrong things and disconnected from the things that mattered. He had seen injuries on Dathomir in thirty years. He had not seen this specific injury before.
He told Corvin what needed to happen.
Corvin looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then he nodded.
"Sera," he said.
"I'm here," she said. She was at his left side with his left hand in both of hers.
"Don't let go," he said.
"I won't," she said.
Homer looked at Jena, who had come back with the supplies and who understood without being told what her role in the next few minutes was going to be. She was a plateau woman who had raised a child alone on Dathomir and she had the quality that produced — the ability to be present for difficult things without flinching away from them, not because difficult things didn't affect her but because she had decided a long time ago that flinching was a luxury she couldn't afford.
She positioned herself and nodded at Homer.
Homer worked quickly because quickly was the only mercy available.
Corvin made sounds that Homer filed away in the same place he filed other things that needed to be stored somewhere they couldn't affect his hands. Sera did not let go. She kept her eyes on her husband's face and she held his hand and she did not look at what Homer was doing and she did not let go even when Corvin's grip became something that should have been impossible and then became nothing at all when he went under, which was a mercy, the only one Dathomir offered freely.
When it was done Homer stepped back and Jena moved in with the supplies and Homer went outside and stood in the afternoon light and looked at nothing for a while.
Pell was sitting against the outside wall of the meeting dwelling with his knees up and his arms on his knees and his head down. He had been there since they came back. Homer had noted this and filed it the same way he filed other things that needed attention he didn't currently have to give.
He looked at the boy now.
Pell didn't look up. His shoulders were doing something that Homer recognized — the specific contained quality of someone who is not going to cry in front of people and is working very hard at it and has been working at it for long enough that the effort itself was becoming visible.
Homer sat down beside him against the wall.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
The settlement moved around them — the quiet purposeful movement of a community doing the things that need doing after something has happened, the practical language of people who know that maintaining the rhythms is the only way through. Someone was rebuilding the communal fire. Someone was moving between dwellings with the particular efficiency of a person who has assigned themselves tasks because tasks are manageable and grief is not.
"She knew him," Pell said finally. His voice was level. He was still looking at the ground between his feet. "She had to know him. He's her father."
Homer looked at the tree line.
"She didn't," he said. Not gently. Just plainly, the way true things needed to be said to children who were old enough to handle the truth and young enough that softening it would insult them.
Pell was quiet for a moment. "What did she do to her."
It wasn't entirely a question. It was the shape of something he was already working on, already turning over, and the asking of it was part of the turning.
Homer considered what to say. He had thirty years of Dathomir and a lifetime of difficult conversations and he had never had this specific one before.
"The clan on this planet," he said, "practiced things that don't have comfortable names. Things that work on people from the inside. The girl you saw isn't gone." He paused. "She's just somewhere we can't reach her from here."
Pell looked up at him. His eyes were dry, which had cost him something.
"Can she come back," he said.
Homer looked at him for a long moment.
"I don't know," he said.
It was the truest answer he had and he gave it because Pell had earned the truth today in ways that most grown people never did and Homer was not going to insult that by offering him something more comfortable.
Pell nodded slowly. Looked back at the ground.
They sat there for a while longer.
They buried Bram and Sev in the late afternoon.
The settlement had a burial ground at the plateau's eastern edge, marked by stones that the founding families had carried up from the ridge over the years, one for each person the settlement had lost in three generations of living on a planet that collected people at irregular intervals. Homer knew all the stones. He had placed several of them. He placed two more now while the settlement stood around the graves in the way of people who are honoring something while simultaneously understanding that the honoring has to be brief because the light was going and Dathomir's night was not something you stood outside for longer than necessary.
He said the things that needed saying. Not elaborate things. Bram had been on the plateau for eleven years. Sev for fourteen. They had been good neighbors and capable men and Dathomir had taken them in the way Dathomir took people — without warning and without negotiation and without particular regard for whether you were finished yet.
The settlement listened.
Sera was there, which Homer had not been certain she would be. She stood with her arms folded against her chest in the particular posture of someone holding themselves together by physical force, her eyes on the middle distance rather than the graves, present because presence was required and not because she had anything left to give it.
She had not yet asked about Alis.
Homer had not yet told her.
He had been deciding, through the whole of the terrible afternoon, how to do this. There was no construction of the information that made it acceptable. There was no framing that would allow Sera to receive it as anything other than what it was. He had been turning it over since the moment he'd watched Alis's face find Veshra's and go somewhere her father's voice couldn't follow, and he had not found a better version of it in all that turning.
After the burial, when the settlement had gone back inside and the fires were built and the evening had settled over the plateau with its particular combination of cold and dark, Homer went to Sera.
She was in her dwelling. Sitting at the table. The fire was burning — someone had built it for her, he could tell by the construction that it wasn't Sera's work, too much wood, too deliberately maintained, the fire of someone trying to do something useful in a situation where useful things were limited. Corvin was in the back room, sleeping the deep chemical sleep of someone whose body had decided that unconsciousness was preferable to the alternative. His breathing was audible from the front room. Steady.
Sera looked up when Homer came in.
He sat down across from her.
She looked at his face and read it the way she had been reading it all afternoon, the way people read the faces of those they trust to tell them the truth when the truth is available.
"She's alive," Homer said. First. Because that was the first thing.
Sera let out a breath that had been held since the tree line.
"She's with the woman in the deep territories." He kept his voice even. "She was standing with her. She was —" He stopped. Chose the next words carefully. "She was calm. She wasn't hurt. She wasn't afraid."
Sera was very still.
"She didn't know him," Homer said. "When Corvin —" He stopped again. "She looked at him and she didn't know him. I don't know what that means exactly. I don't know how it works or whether it holds or whether there's a way back from it. I'm telling you what I saw."
The fire crackled.
Outside the wind moved through the settlement the way it always did in the evenings, pushing the cold air down from the higher plateau, rattling something loose on someone's roof the way it always did.
Sera put her hands flat on the table in front of her. She looked at them for a moment. Then she looked up at Homer and her face had the quality of someone who has been hit hard enough that the pain hasn't arrived yet — clear and present and waiting for something to catch up to her.
"She's alive," she said.
"Yes," Homer said.
"She's alive and she doesn't know her father."
Homer said nothing.
Sera nodded slowly. Once. The nod of someone cataloguing facts because facts were the only thing she could currently manage.
"What do we do," she said.
Homer looked at her across the table. The fire between them. Corvin's steady breathing from the back room. The settlement outside doing what settlements did when the dark came and the fires were the only answer anyone had.
"We send another message to the Republic," he said. "And this time I'm going to make sure they understand what I'm telling them."
Sera looked at him.
"And if they don't come," she said.
Homer picked up his cup. Water, as always. He looked into it for a moment.
"Then we figure out what comes after that," he said.
It was not a reassuring answer. It was the only honest one he had.
Sera accepted it the way she had accepted everything today — without flinching, without falling apart, with the terrible practical endurance of a woman who had decided that falling apart was something she would do later, privately, when the people who needed her to be standing were somewhere they couldn't see.
Homer stayed until the fire burned lower.
Then he went out into the Dathomir night and stood for a moment looking at the tree line two hundred meters away, dark and absolute in the way it always was, holding what it held the way it always did.
He had sent one message to the Republic and received a form letter.
He was going to send another.
He was going to make it very difficult for whoever received it to file it in the appropriate records and move to the next item in the queue.
He went inside and started writing.
The second message came in at 0612 station time.
Sona Reik was forty minutes from the end of her shift and she had been running the last hour of it on the particular fuel of someone who has done the same thing enough times that the body manages without requiring full participation from the mind. The queue was lighter than usual — lighter than it had been in weeks, actually, some function of the ongoing fleet consolidations that had shifted communication patterns in ways she hadn't fully mapped yet. She was processing the last items with the automatic efficiency of someone already half-thinking about sleep when the Dathomir transmission resolved in the queue and she pulled it the way she pulled everything, without particular expectation.
She read the first paragraph and stopped.
She read it again.
Then she read the first message. She had it in the log — she kept her logs meticulously, a habit from the Rebellion years that the New Republic's somewhat more organized infrastructure hadn't managed to train out of her. She pulled it up alongside the new one and read them in sequence and the picture they made together was not the picture either one made alone.
The first message: four girls missing, tracks, a concern about the clan, a man writing without dramatics asking for help.
The second message: two men dead. A third man missing an arm. The missing girls located and not recoverable — that word, not recoverable, sitting in the middle of a sentence like something dropped from a height. A description of what had been seen in the deep territories that Sona Reik did not have a framework for and was not going to pretend she did. And at the end, in the same plain unadorned prose as everything else Homer Mayshack had written, a single line that she read three times:
I am not a man who asks for things twice. I am asking for the second time. Please send someone who understands what I am telling you.
Sona sat with this for a moment.
Then she did something she had not done in eight months of 0200-to-0600 shifts, something that was technically outside her authorization and would require a brief conversation with her supervisor that she was already composing in her head. She flagged the message Priority One. She printed a physical copy — actual flimsi, the kind that required a deliberate physical action to ignore rather than a keystroke — and she took it off the printer and she walked it down the hall herself.
She did not file it in the appropriate records first.
She would file it when she got back.
Winter was in her office when Sona found her.
This was not a certainty Sona had been counting on — Winter kept hours that bore no particular relationship to the station's official schedule, organized around the work rather than around the clock, which was either admirable or alarming depending on how you felt about people who treated sleep as a scheduling variable. It was 0620 and she was at her desk with a datapad in one hand and a cup of something that was definitely not caf based on the smell, reading something she set down without visible reaction when Sona came in.
Sona handed her the flimsi without preamble. "Second message from the Dathomir contact. I flagged it Priority One. I wanted you to have it before the morning briefing."
Winter took it. Her eyes moved across it with the specific quality of attention that Sona had observed before and never quite gotten used to — not the visible tracking of someone reading, more like the complete and immediate absorption of someone for whom reading and retaining were the same single action. She finished it in less time than Sona would have needed and set it on the desk in front of her.
She was quiet for a moment.
"You have the first message," she said. It wasn't a question.
"In the log. I can pull it —"
"I have it." Winter looked at the flimsi again. "You walked this down yourself."
"Yes."
Winter looked at her for a moment with the expression that Sona had learned meant she was being assessed rather than simply seen. It was not an uncomfortable experience exactly. It was the experience of being looked at by someone who was actually paying attention, which was rarer than it should have been.
"Good call," Winter said.
Sona nodded. "I'll file it when I get back to the desk."
She left Winter looking at the flimsi and went back down the hall and filed it and finished her shift and went to her bunk and lay down and stared at the ceiling for a while before she slept, thinking about a settlement of nineteen families and a man who had asked twice and the word not recoverable sitting in the middle of a sentence like something that couldn't be taken back.
Winter read the message four more times.
Not because she needed to. She had it completely after the first reading, filed in the part of her memory that kept everything with the same fidelity regardless of whether she wanted it to or not. She read it again because reading it again was a way of sitting with it, of letting the intelligence operative and the Alderaanian and the person who had learned a long time ago what it meant to be somewhere the galaxy had decided not to look — of letting all of those things process what the words on the page actually meant.
A Force tradition she'd understood to be extinct. Active. Operational. Taking children and doing something to them that made them unrecognizable to their parents.
Two men dead. One man missing an arm. A settlement of nineteen families on a planet with no Republic presence and no prospect of any arriving on its own.
And underneath all of it, in the plain prose of a man who had been on Dathomir for thirty years and had learned the particular economy of people who don't waste words because words on the Outer Rim don't carry as far: I am not a man who asks for things twice. I am asking for the second time. Please send someone who understands what I am telling you.
Winter set the flimsi down.
She understood what he was telling her.
Leia was in her quarters, which at this hour meant she was working rather than sleeping, which was not a surprise. Winter had known her since before either of them could reach the upper shelves in Bail Organa's library and she had in all that time never known Leia to treat sleep as anything other than a minor logistical interruption in an otherwise continuous exercise of will. She looked up when Winter came in with the expression she reserved for Winter specifically — the one that meant she had already registered that something was happening and was waiting for the information rather than the preamble.
Winter handed her the flimsi.
Leia read it. She was slower than Winter, which was true of everyone, but she was fast and she read with the same quality of genuine attention that she brought to everything — not skimming, not performing comprehension, actually receiving the information and integrating it in real time. When she finished she looked up.
"Dathomir," she said.
"Yes."
"The Nightsisters were supposed to be —"
"They were," Winter said. "Largely. This appears to be a remnant. Possibly a single practitioner based on the description."
Leia looked at the flimsi again. At the words not recoverable. Her expression did something brief and controlled and then was still again. "The children."
"Alive. Apparently." Winter paused. "Changed."
The word sat between them for a moment.
"Luke should know about this," Leia said.
"When I have more information," Winter said. "Right now we have a settler's account of something he witnessed from a distance under significant duress. Before I bring this to Luke I want to know what we're actually dealing with."
Leia looked at her. "You're going."
"I'm going."
"Winter —"
"I'm going to assess the situation and report back." Winter kept her voice level in the way she kept everything level — not suppression, just the long-practiced discipline of someone who had learned that calm was a tool as much as anything else and that deploying it on yourself was sometimes the most important application. "I'm not going into the deep territories. I'm not engaging the practitioner directly. I'm going to talk to the settlement, see what they know, see what they've seen, and determine whether this requires a larger response."
Leia was quiet for a moment. She had the look she got when she had an argument and had already determined that making it was not going to change the outcome — a look Winter had been on the receiving end of for most of their shared lives.
"How many people are you taking," Leia said finally.
"Two. Possibly three."
"I want daily contact."
"You'll have it."
Leia handed the flimsi back. Her fingers held it for a moment before they let go — a small thing, barely visible, the kind of thing you only noticed if you had been watching the same person's hands for thirty years and knew the difference between how they held something and how they held onto it.
"Be careful," she said.
"I'll be thorough," Winter said. Which was her version of the same thing.
She left Leia with the grey early light coming through the viewport and went to begin the preparations that needed making before she could leave, which were not few and which she had already begun organizing in her head before she cleared the doorway.
Homer Mayshack sent the message at the same hour he'd sent the first one — the middle watch of the Dathomir night, the settlement quiet around him, the fires burning outside and the tree line doing what the tree line did. He had written it in one sitting without revision because revision implied uncertainty about what needed to be said and Homer had no uncertainty about what needed to be said. He had said it plainly and completely and he had sent it and then he had sat at the comm unit for a while in the dark.
He did not know if it would work any differently this time.
He did not know if anyone on the other end was capable of understanding what he was telling them.
He had done what he could do from here and the rest was not in his hands and Homer Mayshack had spent sixty-one years learning the specific and necessary discipline of releasing the things that were not in his hands. He was better at it than he used to be. He was not entirely good at it yet.
He sat with the sent message on the screen for a moment longer.
Then he turned off the unit and went out into the night to check the fires.
The tree line stood where it always stood.
He checked the fires and went inside and did not sleep for a long time.
Night in the deep territories did not fall. It rose.
It came up out of the ground first — out of the spaces between the roots, out of the low places where the mist pooled and thickened, out of the soil itself, which held the day's darkness the way other soil held water. The canopy sealed what little sky existed here and the last grey light withdrew upward through the leaves like something being reclaimed, and then the deep jungle was what it actually was, what it had always been beneath the daylight's thin pretense: a closed world, complete in itself, operating by rules that had never required anyone's agreement.
The compound sat within it the way a stone sits in deep water.
It had been clan ground for longer than the settlements had existed — longer than the word settlement had meant anything on this world. The structures were stone and bone-pale timber, low and old, built in the era when the clan had been hundreds and rebuilt by one woman's hands in the era when the clan had been one. The reconstruction did not show. Veshra had been precise about that. A thing rebuilt should not look rebuilt. It should look continuous, inevitable, as though the years of silence had been a held breath rather than a wound.
At the compound's center, the fire.
The children sat around it in a loose circle, eating.
There were nine of them now. The four from the highland plateau settlement and five others taken from the smaller settlements to the south and east over the preceding months, gathered the way Veshra gathered everything — patiently, deliberately, without waste. The youngest was eleven. The oldest was sixteen. They ate a meal of the deep territories, root and fungus and the dark meat of the things that lived in the canopy, prepared in the clan way, eaten in the clan way, without conversation, because meals were not social occasions. They were maintenance. The body was an instrument and the instrument was kept in working order and the keeping was done with attention rather than chatter.
The jungle spoke around them. The night-sounds of the deep territories — the low percussive calls of things that hunted by echo, the wet shifting of the canopy settling its weight, the occasional distant sound that was not an animal and that none of the children looked up at anymore.
Veshra walked the perimeter of the circle.
She did this most nights. The children had learned the rhythm of it — the slow orbit, the pauses, the quality of her attention as it moved across them. She was not watching them eat. She was reading them. The way a girl held her shoulders said something about how the morning's training had settled into her body. The way another's eyes tracked the fire said something about where her mind went when it was not being directed. Veshra catalogued all of it with the same patient thoroughness she brought to every working, because that was what this was. The girls were a working. The longest and most important of her life.
Alis sat nearest the fire.
She had been with the compound for five weeks and the change in her had been the fastest of any of them, which Veshra had expected from the first time she had watched the girl through the trees at the settlement's edge. The sensitivity ran deep in her. Deeper than the girl had ever known, living among people who had no name for what she was and no use for it if they had. Here it had a name. Here it was the only thing that mattered. Alis had taken to the craft the way a starved thing takes to food — not gradually, but completely, with the relief of an organism finally given what it was built for.
She had seen her father today, on his knees at the clearing's edge, screaming her name.
Veshra had watched her face through the whole of it. There had been nothing in it. Not suppression — suppression left traces, tension at the jaw, effort around the eyes. Nothing. The man on the ground had been a fact of the clearing, like the light and the bodies. The initiation did not erase what the girls had been. It reorganized it. The old attachments were not cut away — they were simply rendered irrelevant, the way a tool that no longer serves is not destroyed but set down and not picked up again.
Her mothers had done the same for her, in her time. It was not cruelty. It was the craft's first gift: the removal of everything that divided a sister's loyalty.
Veshra completed her orbit and stopped at the fire's edge.
Beyond the circle, at the margin where the firelight failed, the two bodies lay where the sisters had carried them. The men from the search party. They had come into her territory armed and certain, and her sisters had met them, and the outcome had been the outcome such certainty always purchased. She had considered raising them — two more for the perimeter — but the working would cost more than two untrained dead were worth, and the deficit was already deeper than she preferred after the day's expenditures. There was a more efficient use for them.
"Alis. Vey."
The two girls rose. Alis from the fire's edge. Vey — twelve, the fourth daughter taken from the plateau settlement — from the circle's far side. Vey's father had been the man called Bram. He had come into the trees today carrying a hunting rifle and his daughter's name, and he lay now closest to the fire, his face turned toward the canopy, his expression holding the mild surprise that the dead so often kept.
Veshra indicated the bodies.
"Put them on the fire."
She watched the girls as she said it. This was the purpose of the instruction — not the disposal, which any of them could have done, but the reading. The old world would have called this a test of loyalty. The old world misunderstood loyalty. Loyalty could be performed, faked, gritted through. What Veshra was reading for was simpler and could not be faked: whether the instruction landed as a horror to be obeyed or as a task to be completed.
Alis took the man called Sev by the shoulders. Vey took her father by the ankles.
There was no hesitation. There was no moment of steeling, no breath gathered against the act, no glance exchanged between the girls. Vey looked at her father's face once, the way you look at a thing to judge its weight before lifting it. They moved the way you move when asked to bring in wood before the rain. The fire accepted what it was given the way fire does, and the smell changed, and none of the children around the circle stopped eating, and the jungle continued its low conversation with itself, and Veshra stood in the light of the burning and felt the thing she permitted herself to feel only rarely and only here, among her own, on her own ground.
Not happiness. Something with more weight.
Continuity.
The clan had burned its dead and its enemies on fires like this one for longer than the galaxy had kept records. Grievous had ended that. Seventeen years of cold silence in the deep territories, seventeen years of the rituals maintained by one voice where there should have been hundreds. And now the fire was fed again, and the hands that fed it were sisters' hands, and the circle around it was a clan — small, new, unfinished, but a clan, real, breathing, eating its meal in the firelight on ground that had never stopped being theirs.
The galaxy had decided the Nightsisters were a closed account.
The galaxy was in error.
When the fire had taken what it was given, Veshra spoke.
She did not raise her voice. She had never needed to. The children turned toward her as one — not the snap of soldiers, something more organic, the way a single body orients toward its own center of gravity. Nine faces in the firelight. Nine daughters of Dathomir, returned to their mother.
"The settlement elder has become a problem."
She let it sit. She taught the way her mothers had taught — the statement first, then the silence in which the statement did its work, then the reasoning. Understanding that arrived through silence rooted deeper than understanding that was handed over finished.
"I watched him today, in the clearing. The others broke. They ran at what they loved or they ran from what they feared, and either way they stopped thinking. He did neither." She moved slowly along the circle's rim as she spoke, the fire throwing her shadow long across the children's faces. "He looked at me and he looked at your sisters on the perimeter and he understood what he was seeing, and then he took the wounded man and he left — in good order, without panic, without waste. That is a dangerous quality in an enemy. An old man with patient eyes who has spent thirty years learning this planet. He is small. His settlement is small. But a small illness, left untended, spreads. And what we are building is young, and the young must be protected from illness above all things."
"Yes, Mother."
Nine voices. Not in the flat unison of automation — in the layered near-unison of a congregation, voices arriving within a breath of each other, the agreement preceding the words rather than following them.
She paused at the circle's far arc, where the light was thinnest, and looked at them across the fire.
"The people of that settlement came into our territory today carrying weapons. You felt the consequence of that. Some of you fed the fire with it." Her voice did not change. It never changed. The evenness was its own instruction. "I want you to understand why they came. They will tell themselves they came out of love. They believe it. But hear what is underneath the belief. They came to take you from your mother. They came to take you from your sisters, from your craft, from the first place that has ever known what you are. Their grief is not for you. Their grief is for themselves — for the daughters they imagined, the small lives they had assigned you, the comfort of your faces at their fires. They do not want what is best for you. They want you returned to what is best for them."
The fire moved. Somewhere above, the canopy shifted its weight.
"They had you for years and never saw you," Veshra said. "I saw you in a single night."
And this — this was the working's true mechanism, the reason it held where cruder methods failed. Because it was not entirely a lie. Every girl in the circle had lived it: the sensitivity with no name, the wrongness with no explanation, the parents who loved a version of them that did not quite exist. Veshra did not install falsehoods. Falsehoods were brittle. She found the true thing, the small real splinter of it, and she built upon that. It was why the daughters' loyalty was not a leash but a root system.
The children agreed in the eerie layered way of the circle, and the agreement was genuine, and that was the most terrible thing in the clearing — more terrible than the fire and what it held, more terrible than the still figures walking the dark beyond the compound's edge. Nine girls believed. Belief like that could not be cut away with a rescue. The settlement did not understand this yet. It thought its daughters had been stolen.
They had been converted.
Veshra completed the circle and stood with the fire at her back, her shadow falling across them, the green of the ichor faint at her hands — banked, resting, like the fire of a forge between workings.
"Tomorrow morning," she said, "you will go back to them."
Stillness in the circle. Attention, total.
"Each of you, to your own settlement. To your own doorstep. You will let them find you at the tree line at first light. You will be weary and you will be quiet and you will let them believe what they need to believe — that you escaped, that you were released, that whatever holds this place loosened its grip. They will bring you in. They will weep on you. They will put you by their fires and feed you and watch you sleep, and they will begin, very quickly, to see only what they want to see. It is what they have always done."
She looked at each of them in turn. Alis last. The firelight steady in the girl's unblinking eyes.
"Be patient. Be small. Wait until they are alone with you and certain of you." The green light deepened at her hands, briefly, like a slow pulse. "And when the moment offers itself —"
She did not finish the sentence loudly. She finished it the way the deep territories finished things, quietly, with total assurance, in a voice no louder than the fire.
"— strike them down."
"Yes, Mother," said the circle.
The fire burned. The jungle spoke. And in the dark beyond the compound's edge the still figures of the risen sisters kept their patient watch over a clan that was, for the first time in seventeen years, growing.
Nine days.
That was the arithmetic of it, laid out plainly the way Winter laid everything out. Homer Mayshack's second message had reached Station Viridian at 0612 on the fourteenth day of the month. One day for preparations — the ship, the team, the briefing documents she assembled herself because delegating them would have taken longer than writing them. Seven days in transit, the route threading through a stretch of the Outer Rim where the hyperlane data hadn't been updated since before the war and a cautious astrogator added half a day rather than gamble on Imperial-era charts. One final day in-system, holding in high orbit while the sensors mapped a planet that had nothing to say to them, and then the descent through Dathomir's permanent grey ceiling to the coordinates Homer Mayshack had attached to a message asking, for the second time, for someone who understood.
Nine days.
She would do that arithmetic for the rest of her life. That was the particular cruelty of her memory — it did not allow the mercy of approximation. Other people would eventually remember that it had taken about a week, that they had come as fast as they could. Winter would remember nine days, and the date, and the hour, and the way the mist parted below the ship at four hundred meters and showed her the settlement for the first time.
No fires.
That was the first wrong thing, and she registered it before the ship's skids touched the ground. Every piece of documentation she had absorbed about settlement life on hostile worlds — and she had absorbed all of it in transit, every survey record and trader's report the Republic's thin files on Dathomir contained — agreed on the centrality of fire. The fires never went out. Fire was the boundary between the settlement and the planet, maintained the way you maintain a wall.
The communal fire pit at the settlement's center was cold. The hearths, visible through doorways that stood open in the grey morning light, were cold.
The settlement was cold.
"Stay with the ship," she said to the pilot, and to the two others — Dell Aris, a field medic who had spent three years cataloguing what the Empire left behind on liberated worlds, and Tam Verro, security, a quiet Corellian who had been chosen precisely because he did not require conversation — she said nothing at all. They had seen what she had seen from the air. They followed her down the ramp with their weapons holstered, because there was visibly nothing left here to draw a weapon against.
The mist moved between the dwellings.
The tree line stood two hundred meters out, dark and patient, exactly as a man who was probably dead had described it in two messages she could recite without effort.
Winter walked into the settlement and began to read.
She had been trained for this. That was the thing she held in front of herself like a shield as she moved from dwelling to dwelling — the training, the procedure, the discipline of intelligence work, which taught you to convert a scene into information because information could be carried and acted upon, whereas the scene itself, taken whole, could not be carried by anyone.
The information was this.
The attack had come from inside. Every dwelling told the same story in the same grammar: no forced entry, no defensive wounds at the doorways, no bodies fallen mid-flight toward a weapon or an exit. The people of this settlement had died in their homes, near their fires, at their tables — close to the thing that killed them, facing it, unguarded. You did not die that way when something came out of the trees. You died that way when something was already inside, something you had fed, something you had wept over, something you were watching sleep.
The wounds were low.
Dell Aris was the one who said it out loud, kneeling beside a man in the third dwelling, and his voice had the flat over-controlled quality of a medic narrating his way through something by clinical procedure because clinical procedure was the only available handhold. Angle of entry, force distribution, height of the striking hand. He said it once and then he stopped saying it, because it was the same in the fourth dwelling, and the fifth, and Winter told him quietly that he did not need to keep repeating the finding. She had it.
The killing blows had been delivered by children.
There had been no mercy in them. That was the other thing the scene insisted on, dwelling after dwelling, and Winter catalogued it because cataloguing was her function: this had not been quick, and it had not been clean, and it had not been the minimum necessary. Nothing was taken. Nothing was stolen. The settlement's small wealth — tools, stores, the comm unit in the room behind the meeting dwelling — sat untouched. There was no motive present that her training had a category for. What had been done here had been done thoroughly, deliberately, with a violence far in excess of function, by small hands that had grown up in these rooms.
In the fifth dwelling she stopped.
It was the home of a family with a younger child — a boy, she would learn afterward, who had died beside his mother. On the wall by the hearth, at a child's eye height, a sheet of drawing flimsi had been pinned with a wooden peg. A child's drawing. The settlement rendered in unsteady lines: the dwellings as boxes, the communal fire as an orange scribble of warmth at the center, stick figures holding stick hands, and above it all, disproportionately large, the careful suns and spirals children put in skies they have decided are good. It had hung there long enough for the edges to curl.
A handprint lay across it. An adult's. In blood. The shape of it was not violent — that was the thing Winter stood with for a long moment in the cold dwelling. It was not a spatter, not an accident of the room. It was a press. A hand, wet, flat against the drawing, fingers spread, with the weight of a body behind it. Someone in their last moments had reached for the wall and met the drawing, and held it.
Winter looked at it until she had it completely — every line of the child's settlement, every whorl the blood had filled — which took her no time at all and would last her forever.
Then she walked out of the dwelling and stood in the grey light and permitted herself four seconds.
She had developed this discipline a long time ago, in the year when the word Alderaan had changed from a home into a casualty figure, and everyone around her had needed her to be functional, and she had learned that grief could be neither denied nor indulged but could be scheduled. Four seconds. She stood in the cold mist of a murdered settlement on a planet the galaxy could not find on a chart, and she let the whole of it touch her — the cold hearths, the low wounds, the handprint pressed into a child's good sky — and something in her chest moved the way ice moves, deep and structural, a sound only she could hear.
Then the four seconds ended, and Lieutenant Winter of New Republic Intelligence resumed.
"Footprints," Tam Verro said from the settlement's eastern edge. He said it carefully, like a man setting something fragile on a table.
She came and looked.
The soft ground between the dwellings and the tree line held the record cleanly, the way it had held every record in this story. Small prints, many sets, leading away — unhurried, evenly spaced, the gait of children walking, not running, walking out of the ruin of everything they had been born to. The direction was the direction it had always been. Toward the trees. Toward the deep territories. Toward the place Homer Mayshack had marked on a hand-drawn map attached to his second message.
No prints came back.
They never did, on this planet. She had read that in his first message nine days ago and had understood it as description. Standing here, she understood it as the planet's single law.
"Ma'am," Dell Aris said quietly, from behind her. "There's smoke."
She turned.
It was thin, and it was deliberate — a controlled line of grey rising from beyond the burial ground at the plateau's eastern edge, from a fold in the land that the settlement's structures had hidden from the air. A campfire. Banked and maintained by someone who knew how.
The first warm thing on the plateau.
Winter walked toward it.
They were in the lee of the ridge, in a shelter assembled from what the equipment berm had offered — a lean-to of practiced construction, the work of hands that had built such things many times across thirty hard years. The fire in front of it was small and correct. An old man sat beside it on a flat stone, and a boy sat a little apart from him with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, and neither of them stood when Winter came over the rise, because neither of them had anything left in the part of a person that stands for arrivals.
She knew the man from his prose. Sixty-one years old and built like something compressed rather than diminished; she had constructed him accurately from two messages, which did not often happen. Homer Mayshack looked twenty years older than the man who had written them. He looked like the husk such a man leaves behind.
There was a cup in his hand.
It was not water. She could smell it from four meters — harsh, local, the kind of liquor that settlements distill for trade and antiseptic and the worst nights of their lives. His message had not mentioned the drinking, or the not-drinking, or the eleven years; she would learn all of that later, from Pell, in pieces, and she would understand then what she was actually looking at beside that fire. What she saw now was simpler and sufficient: a man holding a cup the way you hold the only thing that has agreed to stay.
His eyes came up to her. They were patient eyes, as advertised, and they were broken, and they performed the assessment anyway — her posture, her gear, the New Republic insignia, the two figures on the rise behind her — because thirty years of habit kept running even after the man it served had stopped.
"You're from the Republic," he said. His voice was level and emptied out.
"Yes."
He nodded slowly. He looked at the fire for a while. When he spoke again it was without bitterness, which was somehow worse than bitterness, because bitterness would have meant some part of him was still fighting.
"Nine days," he said.
"Yes," Winter said. She did not explain the distances, or the charts, or the queue of forty-one other items, or the institution doing its institutional best. All of it was true and none of it weighed anything here, and she respected him too much already to set it on the scale.
The boy was looking at her.
Eleven years old, she judged, and she was right. Dathomir-born — there was a way these children held themselves that she had already learned from the prints by the tree line, an economy. His eyes were dry, and rimmed red with the effort of that, and behind the grief in them was something else, banked and burning, that she recognized with the particular precision of her particular memory. She had seen it in a mirror, a long time ago, in the year of her own erased world.
Rage. The clean, bewildered rage of a child standing in the ash of everything, asking the question that has no survivable answer.
How did they not see it.
"You're Pell," Winter said.
The boy's eyes widened slightly. The man's came up from the fire.
"Homer Mayshack's second message described you," she said. "It said you were the only one who saw her clearly. It said you described her completely, and accurately, and that he believed every word." She crouched, slowly, to put her eyes level with the boy's — not the crouch adults perform at children, but the one operative gives another when the briefing matters. "I've come a long way to hear it. When you're ready. Not before."
The fire ticked and settled. The mist moved along the ridge. Below them the settlement lay in its silence, nineteen cold hearths under a grey ceiling, and two hundred meters beyond it the tree line stood where it always stood, holding what it held.
Pell looked at her for a long moment.
Then he looked at Homer — and that small movement told Winter the entire remaining structure of this world: everything the boy had left lived inside one ruined old man, and everything the man had left lived inside the boy, and whatever she did next on this planet would be done carrying both of them.
Homer lifted his cup an inch. Not a toast. An abdication.
