Arc III: The Hunt
Year: 25 BBY
Six months after the river.
Six months since the artifact went quiet.
Six months since the fear that had always felt contained — bounded, tethered to the small, black object wrapped at Tein's belt — stopped feeling like something that belonged to them at all.
The galaxy did not notice at first.
It rarely noticed small things.
Rumors flickered through systems the way static flickered through damaged comm relays: words like vanished, like empty, like gone. The sort of words that usually burned out on their own.
This time, they didn't.
Not yet a pattern.
Not obviously.
Just a wrongness that appeared in the kinds of places Tein already lived between: Outer Rim worlds along neglected routes, quiet nodes that rarely saw more than one Jedi in a generation — and only then by accident.
The ship rode through hyperspace with engines trimmed to a steady hum, the kind of efficient restraint that suggested Tein had weighed three faster routes and chosen the one that made them look like no one at all. Blue light washed the cockpit walls. The storm of realspace stretched ahead as an abstracted tunnel.
El-Je sat forward in the copilot's chair, legs still, hands relaxed on the console without touching anything.
He didn't fidget anymore.
He watched.
He listened.
He counted the small things without knowing he was doing it: shifts in vibration, the slight change in Tein's posture when he thought he was hiding tension, the way the Force felt here—
thin.
Not dead.
Not absent.
Just stretched.
Tein didn't speak for a long time.
When he finally did, it was without preface.
"There's been another one."
He said it the way surgeons spoke before naming an injury.
Not dramatic.
Not distant.
Simply careful.
El-Je didn't answer right away.
Because he knew what another one meant now.
They hadn't gone looking for this pattern. It had come to them the way storms come to pilots who fly the Outer Rim too long — first as rumor, then as a statistical discomfort, and finally as something that refused to be coincidence.
A river town on a frontier moon.
A fuel depot far from lanes.
A relay station used by traders too poor for real ports.
All quiet places.
All their places — the kinds of worlds the Jedi rarely watched unless Tein was already there.
And always the same ending:
one person gone still in the night, left unmarked, their expression frozen in a fear that had never found sound.
Not dozens.
Not constant.
Just enough.
Enough that the Council asked Tein — quietly, without committee debate or Temple attention — to keep his eyes open while he worked. To listen. To notice. To follow the silences where standard patrols would not.
So they adjusted their routes.
And the work changed.
Not rescue.
Not repair.
Investigation.
El-Je learned to hear what Tein heard in hyperspace quiet — that there are different kinds of silence, and some are made by the absence of people who should still be breathing.
So when Tein said:
"There's been another one,"
El-Je only asked:
"Where?"
Tein tapped the nav display. A system resolved in ghost-blue lines — two habitable moons, one marginal colony world, the faint scatter of trade routes like veins beneath skin.
"A small settlement," Tein said. "River shipping. Agricultural wetlands. Ten thousand residents. Two reported missing. One confirmed."
El-Je frowned.
"Confirmed how?"
Tein hesitated.
"A body," he said. "Unmarked."
El-Je went quiet.
The console chimed as their exit coordinates approached. Hyperspace fractured into stars. The ship slid back into the physical with the soft lurch of arrival, the system unfolding around them like a map slowly remembering its shape.
The planet below was green at the edges and brown at the heart, threaded with dark, glimmering rivers that refused to yield to planning. Cloud cover dragged shadows across the wetlands. Lightning stitched silently inside a storm cell at the horizon, like a wound trying to close.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then Tein said, very softly:
"Cloak."
He didn't look at El-Je.
He didn't need to.
El-Je had already pulled it tighter.
Not out of fear.
Out of habit learned through consequence.
The ship descended through layered cloud. Moisture streaked the viewport. Air density shifted around them in slow, stubborn currents. Flight beacons pinged back haltingly — old infrastructure, patched infrastructure, the kind that prayed for maintenance budgets and did not receive them.
The settlement appeared as a low, sprawling arrangement of structures built for function first and survival second. A comm tower leaned slightly, cables webbed around it like an injured limb splinted until it healed. Beyond it, a broad river cut the land into uneven pieces, its surface dark and reflective as a blade.
"Landing vector assigned," the console said.
Tein guided them down with the same quiet competence he always did. He never pretended ships were safe.
He simply respected how much could go wrong.
They touched down.
Engines wound into silence.
El-Je rose smoothly. Cloak settled. Hood resting against his neck — not dramatic.
Practical.
Tein paused at the base of the steps.
His hand brushed the wrapped obelisk at his belt.
He didn't look at it.
He hadn't looked at it in months.
Because there was nothing to feel now.
No cold.
No presence.
No whisper of attention.
Silence had replaced hunger.
And silence was worse.
El-Je waited beside him, saying nothing.
He had learned that asking sometimes made the truth harder — not because Tein would lie, but because Tein would have to decide how much honesty a boy should bear.
The ramp lowered.
Air slid in — wet, mineral-sharp, threaded with something sour beneath it like rot kept at bay by constant wind. Voices murmured beyond sight. Machinery rattled. Water moved in the distance with the slow authority of something that would remain long after people forgot why they came here at all.
Three officials waited at the pad's edge.
Not soldiers.
Not quite civilians.
The first — weather-lined face, eyes thinned by responsibility — stepped forward.
"You're the investigative team?"
Tein did not confirm Jedi.
He rarely did.
"Yes."
Relief flickered.
Then disciplined itself.
"This way."
They walked.
Hard-packed earth carved into channels by rain and repetition. Boardwalks crossing flooded ground. Nets hung to dry. Wind moved through everything — soft and relentless — as if reminding the town that belonging here was conditional.
Tein's gaze never stopped moving.
Not restless.
Attentive.
El-Je matched the pace half a step behind. His awareness opened the way Tein had taught him — not reaching.
Allowing.
The Force here felt…
bruised.
Not screaming.
Not calm.
Just aware of its own pressure.
They reached the administrative module — prefab, reinforced, worn smooth by storms. Inside, the light was low. The air smelled faintly of metal and damp paper. A console hummed beneath a desk like it was trying not to be noticed.
The official gestured to a closed inner door.
"She's in there," he said quietly. "The one we found."
El-Je swallowed.
Tein nodded.
"Who discovered her?"
"A river crewman. He… hasn't come back to work yet."
Tein didn't follow that line.
Not yet.
He stepped inside.
The temperature dipped by a fraction. A sheet lay over a shape on the cot. A medic stood nearby, hands clasped to keep from fidgeting.
Tein approached.
Lifted the edge.
El-Je stayed at the threshold.
He had seen bodies before.
But this—
This was worse than violence.
The woman looked like she had been interrupted mid-fear. Eyes wide. Mouth parted. Muscles locked in a plea that had never reached sound.
Her skin was not pale.
Not gray.
It looked
emptied.
El-Je contained his breath.
Tein hovered two fingers above her brow.
Opened himself — only slightly.
The echo that returned was not a scream.
It was the memory of one.
Fear without noise.
Fear without object.
The certainty of being seen from somewhere your eyes could not look.
Tein withdrew immediately.
The medic swallowed.
"No trauma. No toxins. Nervous system intact. It's like—"
She stopped.
El-Je finished softly:
"Like something took what keeps a person inside."
The medic nodded.
Slowly.
Tein lowered the sheet.
"Where was she found?"
"South bank. Water's edge."
Tein nodded.
Not deciding.
Not yet.
"Show us."
They walked again.
Toward the river.
Wind rose in cold pulses off the water. Reeds whispered. A simple stake marked the spot.
Tein crouched.
He didn't touch the ground.
He didn't need to.
The Force here felt thin — like fabric worn translucent by repeated pressure.
This is where it happened.
But not why.
Not how.
El-Je watched the river. Clouds reflected across its surface. Motion beneath hinted. Suggested.
Not showed.
A chill slid across his shoulders.
He did not reach for his saber.
He allowed the feeling to exist and pass through.
Tein stood.
"Has anything like this happened before?"
A pause.
"Yes. Not here. Neighboring systems. People we know."
A beat.
"And now — it's us."
Tein looked back at the water.
Said nothing.
Because he did not know yet.
Not the pattern.
Not the scale.
Only this:
Fear was beginning to move again.
And the artifact at his belt—
silent.
Perfectly, terribly silent.
El-Je looked at Tein's profile and saw the tension there —
not panic.
Orientation.
Like a man measuring the first tremor of a storm he had hoped was finished.
Tein turned.
"Where was she last seen alive?"
The investigation began.
Not with revelation.
With work.
Threading backward through quiet places.
Listening for echoes.
Letting the Force whisper nothing useful until it decided to speak.
And as the river slid dark and patient past the land —
something far away
began to feed.