The summons from the Council had been short.
Not urgent.
Not dismissive.
A thin message compressed into a few clipped lines:
Local administrator on Mordan's Reach reports recurring structural failures in a canyon-tier settlement.
Fear rising.
Corporate interests obstructing relief.
Assess. Assist quietly.
Determine if further involvement is warranted.
There had been no mention of Sith.
No mention of Dark Side disturbances.
No mention of anything that would have justified a full delegation of Jedi.
Which was why they had sent a Shadow.
And why Tein had brought El-Je.
It had been three weeks since the lesson on the plateau—the one that had ended with anger and strain and the quiet admission that hiding and surviving were not the same thing. Long enough for bruises to fade. Not long enough for the questions underneath them to do the same.
The settlement was already afraid when they arrived.
Not panicked—panic was loud, contagious—but afraid in the way people became when fear had nowhere left to go. The kind that settled into routines. Into silence. Into the way doors stayed closed a second too long after dusk.
Tein felt it the moment his boots touched the landing pad.
Mordan's Reach did not offer open plains or clean skylines. The settlement clung to a steep-sided canyon of rust-red stone, stacked in tight tiers—bridges, ladders, and narrow catwalks stitched between honeycombed dwellings like scar tissue holding something together that wanted to fall apart. Rain didn't fall here as much as drift: thin, oily sheets that slid down rock faces and gathered in black gutters, carrying the taste of metal and old fuel.
Above, the sky was a flat bruise of cloud.
Below, the canyon throat vanished into mist and heat.
Nothing here felt stable.
Which was exactly why the problem had gone unnoticed.
El-Je followed Tein down the ramp, cloak drawn tight against the damp wind. He did not stare. He had learned better than that. But his attention moved constantly—counting doors, watching faces, cataloging exits and choke points without entirely realizing he was doing it.
Tein approved.
The mission, as the Council had phrased it, was simple.
Minor infrastructure failures.
Equipment collapses that almost killed people.
Workers refusing to take certain shifts.
Corporate reports insisting everything was well within acceptable safety margins.
No bodies yet.
Just close calls.
Just fear.
The kind that never reached the Temple because it was cheaper to ignore it.
A local magistrate had flagged the pattern—not because he suspected anything mystical, but because commerce was slowing. People were refusing night work on lower tiers. Ship crews were already talking about rerouting.
Fear was becoming expensive.
That was when the Jedi were quietly notified.
And that was when Tein was sent.
Not to investigate publicly.
To determine whether this was something that needed to be quietly corrected—or quietly ignored.
El-Je didn't know that part.
He knew they were here to help.
Tein let him keep that.
They moved onto one of the upper walkways—a long run of metal planking bolted directly into canyon rock. Power cables ran exposed along railings and walls like veins, humming softly beneath the rain. The settlement didn't sprawl.
It clung.
Tein kept to the high walkways.
Not because they were safer.
Because they were quieter.
El-Je followed half a step behind, eyes moving the way Tein had taught him—wide first, then narrow. Broad setting. Micro details. Where boards bowed under weight. Which bolts had new rust. Which cables were under tension. Which shadows looked too still to be natural.
He was getting better.
Not in comfort.
In correctness.
A knot of people formed two levels down—voices layered, anger and worry braided into something that could turn in an instant. A corporate banner hung limp over the scene, its logo washed pale by rain and time: KELTRON MINING CONSOLIDATED. Below it, a security drone hovered too low, its thrusters washing grit across faces and making people squint.
Tein stopped at the corner of a support pylon and listened.
Not to words.
To the pattern underneath them.
A woman's voice cut through the noise: "He's still in there!"
A man answered, hoarse with too many sleepless nights. "If the braces go, the whole tier goes!"
A third voice—too practiced, too calm—tried to smooth the fear into procedure. "We've initiated standard containment. No one is authorized beyond this point. Please—please remain orderly."
Orderly.
In a canyon where a single snapped strut could drop fifty people into the fog.
Tein's gaze tracked the tier wall: a long seam where the rock had split and been patched with a lattice of metal ribs. Fresh weld scars. Fresh sealant. Fresh strain.
He felt El-Je's attention pull toward it like a magnet.
"Tell me what you see," Tein said softly, without turning.
El-Je swallowed once. "The wall's new."
"Not new," Tein corrected. "Newly stressed."
El-Je adjusted his angle, letting rain bead on his lashes without blinking it away. "The ribs aren't aligned," he said slowly. "They're… compensating."
Tein nodded once. "And what does that mean?"
El-Je hesitated, then answered anyway. "It means someone's been lying about how bad it is."
Tein moved again, boots quiet on wet planks. The boards gave a little under his weight—old wood, swollen with damp. He stepped where the supports were strongest without appearing to choose.
El-Je mirrored him.
They reached a junction where two catwalks crossed. A rusted ladder dropped to the crowd level below. Tein paused just long enough to watch the security drone's camera sweep—left to right, steady rhythm, prioritizing faces, not structure.
Not rescue.
Control.
He felt a flicker of something from El-Je: the beginning of anger, thin and sharp.
Not fear.
Not yet.
But far away, sealed in a compartment on a ship orbiting another world, the artifact did not need terror to notice a crack in a heart. It only needed the smallest emotional spike—a pressure change in the air of a mind.
It remained quiet.
It remembered.
Tein descended the ladder first.
Every rung was slick.
Every grip a choice.
Scar tissue tugged under his shoulder, Dathomir's old injuries remembering pain before it arrived.
El-Je came down behind him, careful, quick, silent.
At street level the smell hit harder: wet rock, exhaust, cheap disinfectant, and the faint tang of ion discharge from the drone.
A corporate security officer stood near the seam, helmet under one arm, other hand resting on a stun baton like the gesture itself was supposed to calm people. He looked at Tein and El-Je the way a man looked at problems he didn't want paperwork for.
"We're handling it," the officer said. His eyes flicked to Tein's belt—where no lightsaber hung, because Tein wasn't a fool. "Move along."
Tein didn't show a badge.
He didn't announce Jedi.
He didn't feed the officer a story that would spread through the tiers.
Instead, he asked a question that forced truth into the open.
"What's the casualty projection if the tier goes?" Tein asked.
The officer's jaw flexed. "Classified."
Tein stepped half a pace closer. Not a threat. A presence. "Answer," he said.
The officer's eyes hardened. "Who are you?"
Tein's voice stayed level. "Someone who doesn't want to count bodies after."
A child cried somewhere behind the officer—thin, frightened, exhausted. The crowd shifted like a single organism. People pressed forward, then back, then forward again as if the canyon itself were breathing through them.
El-Je's gaze flicked to the seam. He saw something Tein had already seen: a hairline fracture in the rock above the patched ribs, wetness collecting along it in a slow, deliberate line.
Water finding weakness.
Tein felt the canyon's strain in the Force—not mystical, not dramatic.
Just weight.
Time.
Gravity.
And lies.
"Standard containment," the officer repeated, louder now, for the crowd's benefit. "No one past—"
The rock groaned.
Not loud.
But deep.
A sound you felt in your teeth.
The crowd heard it anyway. Fear rose, instant and animal.
A woman screamed. Someone shoved. A man lost footing. The drone dipped, its thrusters blasting grit into eyes and mouths.
From behind the seam came a muffled impact.
A shout.
A human voice.
Still alive.
"He's in there," the woman sobbed. "My brother—he's in there!"
The officer's face went tight—fear trying to hide inside procedure. "Back up! Back—"
Tein moved before permission could be written into any report.
He didn't draw a weapon.
He placed his palm against the metal lattice at the seam.
Cold. Wet. Vibrating with stress.
He didn't push with the Force like a battering ram.
He listened through it.
Felt the load distribution. The points of failure. The braces that were still holding and the one that wasn't.
Then he anchored.
A Jedi could hold a falling column for a heartbeat.
A Shadow could hold it without anyone seeing how.
Tein let the Force flow into the structure the way water flowed into roots: not to dominate, but to reinforce—micro adjustments, invisible pressure, stabilizing where the tier wanted to shear.
The groan eased.
Not fixed.
Paused.
El-Je stared at Tein's hand on the lattice, eyes wide with something like awe and confusion—because Tein wasn't doing anything that looked like the stories said the Force was.
It wasn't lightning.
It wasn't a leap.
It was control.
Tein spoke without looking at him. "Eyes."
El-Je snapped his gaze back to the seam.
"Tell me what the crowd is going to do," Tein said.
El-Je swallowed hard. "They're going to run."
"Where?"
El-Je's eyes tracked the canyon geometry—stairs, ladders, bottlenecks. "Up the west stair. It's the widest."
Tein's jaw tightened. "And if they run?"
El-Je saw it: the west stair was bolted into the same stressed tier. Fifty bodies on it would be the final weight.
"It'll collapse," he whispered.
Tein held the lattice, breath steady, shoulder burning with strain he refused to show. "So stop them."
El-Je's throat bobbed. "How?"
Tein's voice didn't soften. "Decide."
The boy's hands clenched, then opened. He looked at the officer, the crowd, the drone. He looked at the woman sobbing. He looked at the west stair.
Then he moved.
Not toward the seam.
Toward the drone.
He stepped into its thruster wash, cloak snapping, rain stinging his face. The drone's camera pivoted toward him, red sensor light narrowing.
"Unauthorized—" it began, voice synthetic and flat.
El-Je didn't argue.
He scooped a fist-sized piece of canyon stone from the gutter and hurled it—not at the drone, but past it, into the mouth of the west stair.
The stone hit a metal railing with a ringing crack that echoed up the stairwell like a gunshot.
The crowd flinched as one.
El-Je used that flinch.
He raised both hands—not like surrender.
Like command.
"STOP!" he shouted.
His voice wasn't loud enough to overpower panic.
So he gave it teeth.
Not with a mind trick—Tein would never allow that here.
With the environment.
He stomped hard on a loose plank.
The plank snapped.
Someone screamed, thinking the tier was dropping. People froze.
El-Je pointed, sharp and absolute, to the east ladder network—narrow, slower, safer.
"NOT THERE," he barked. "THAT STAIR WILL GO. EAST. NOW."
The officer started to protest.
El-Je turned on him with a look that wasn't a child's.
It was Tein's lesson made flesh.
"You want control?" El-Je said, voice low enough that only the officer heard. "Then control them where they live."
Something in the officer shifted—not morality.
Convenience.
He raised his baton and shouted for the east route, and this time the crowd listened because authority had finally chosen survival over procedure.
They began moving.
Slowly at first.
Then in a controlled stream as neighbors grabbed neighbors, parents lifted children, and the canyon's panic changed shape—from stampede to evacuation.
Tein held the lattice through it all, sweat cold under his hair, shoulder screaming, jaw locked.
He felt the trapped man behind the seam now—faint, shallow breaths, a pulse like a flickering light.
El-Je returned to Tein's side, breathing hard.
He didn't ask what to do.
He looked at the seam.
"Where's the failure point?" El-Je asked.
Tein's eyes flicked, minimal. "Top brace. Third rib from the left. It's buckling."
El-Je nodded once.
He crouched, shoved his fingers into the gutter mud, and pulled out the thickest length of cable he could find—an abandoned hoist line half-buried in grime.
He ran it around the nearest support post, then around the lattice, then back again, cinching it tight with raw leverage and a knot Tein had taught him two worlds ago.
The cable refused him at first—stiff, heavy.
El-Je set his feet, teeth gritted, and let the Force into what his body was already doing—no flare, no outward reach, just a thin, instinctive thread of strength and timing flowing into his muscles at the exact moment he pulled.
The line drew taut.
Not dramatically.
Enough.
He felt it then—not power rushing outward, but strain balancing between his grip and the structure. The Force didn't blaze.
It tilted.
He held it.
"Now it has a second spine," El-Je said, breath shaking.
Tein felt the structure respond—just a fraction.
It mattered.
"Good," Tein said quietly.
Behind them, the crowd thinned. The west stair emptied. The tier settled into a tense equilibrium.
The officer wiped rain from his cheek like it was sweat. "We're calling a crew," he said, voice smaller now.
Tein didn't look at him. "Do it."
"And you?" the officer asked.
Tein's hand stayed on the lattice. "I'm going to pull your man out."
The officer blinked. "That's—there's no safe entry—"
Tein's voice cut clean. "Then we make one."
He shifted his stance—micro. Anchored his boots where the stone beneath would carry load without sliding.
El-Je watched, absorbing how Tein used the environment: not fighting it, not ignoring it—negotiating with it like a living thing.
Tein spoke without turning. "When I tell you, you climb."
El-Je's stomach tightened. "Where?"
Tein's eyes went to a narrow maintenance notch in the rock face—barely a handspan wide, hidden behind the corporate banner.
El-Je saw it and understood.
He was the only one small enough to fit.
Fear rose.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just enough to make the air feel tighter.
Somewhere far away, sealed and quiet, the artifact noticed the taste.
Tein didn't.
He only said, "You wanted to be useful. This is useful."
El-Je swallowed, nodded once, and moved toward the notch.
Rain slid down the rock like oil.
The canyon breathed.
Tein held the tier with one hand and a will that refused to be moved, while his not-Padawan climbed into the dark where a trapped man waited and the cost of being hidden began to take shape—
Quietly.
Without witnesses.
Exactly the way the Council liked their problems solved.