Same system — one week later
The first town let them go.
It didn't feel like escape.
It felt like stepping away from a wound that hadn't stopped bleeding.
Harven stood at the base of the landing pad as the ship powered up, coat pulled tight against a wind that didn't bother with comfort. The night before, he'd watched them walk the alleys and riverbank until the sky thinned. Today, the daylight made him look older.
Tein stopped halfway up the ramp.
He didn't make promises.
He didn't explain how little certainty he carried.
He only said, "Lock your routes. Keep people in pairs at night. And if anyone wakes from a nightmare they can't describe, I want it logged and sent."
Harven swallowed.
"That's it?" he asked. "You're… moving on?"
El-Je stood just behind Tein, feeling the shape of the question more than the words.
Tein's answer was quiet.
"There's a pattern," he said. "It started before here. It hasn't ended here. If we stay, we lose the rest of it."
Harven's grip tightened on his hat. "And if it comes back?"
"It will," Tein said. "Fear remembers the places it worked."
There was nothing kind in the statement.
But there was truth.
El-Je saw the mayor flinch. Saw him straighten anyway. People in the Outer Rim had learned that hope and fear didn't cancel each other out; they just had to share a body.
"We'll send the logs," Harven said.
Tein nodded once and turned away.
El-Je followed him up the ramp. As the hatch sealed, he felt the town fall out of sight but not out of mind. The Force held its outline like a bruise.
The ship lifted.
The river shrank to a dark vein through the land.
For a moment, El-Je thought he saw something move against the current — not a form, not a shadow, just a refusal to match the river's logic.
He blinked.
It was gone.
He told himself it had never been there.
⸻
Transit between worlds in the same system felt shorter than it was.
Fear lengthened distance.
Investigation shortened it.
The stars slid past in deliberate smears as the ship climbed back into the thin throat of local hyperspace. Navigation data scrolled in soft blue across the console—jump coordinates to a sister planet three routes over, same sun, same faint net of trade.
Different problem.
"Population?" El-Je asked.
He didn't ask why they were going.
He'd already watched Tein read the reports in silence.
"Nine thousand in the primary township," Tein said. "Another two in the surrounding villages. River trade. Agricultural wetlands. Same as here—on paper."
El-Je watched the numbers update, the schematics of the new world unfold.
"And in reality?"
Tein's mouth tightened.
"In reality," he said, "they stopped answering half their outgoing traffic four days ago. Two bodies confirmed. Both public. Both… arranged."
El-Je felt his stomach tighten—not the sharp twist of fear, but the heavier drag of expectation.
"Arranged how?" he asked.
Tein didn't look away from the forward view.
"We'll see when we land."
He could have described the reports.
He didn't.
Some things you didn't hand to a fifteen-year-old in words.
You let the world show them once.
Only once.
El-Je leaned back in his chair. Hyperspace washed the cockpit in cold light. The hum of the engines settled into a rhythm that almost counted as calm.
Almost.
"There's a center to this," Tein said quietly, half to himself. "It's moving along routes, not random jumps. Whatever's feeding learns from each place."
El-Je glanced at his belt.
At the wrapped obelisk.
"From the artifact," he said.
Not a guess.
A line between points.
Tein's hand brushed the wrap, a habit he hadn't allowed himself in months.
"The artifact was a door," he said. "We were the frame."
A breath.
"Now it's learning to walk without either."
The console chimed.
Exit coordinates.
The blue tunnel tore open into stars.
⸻
The second world filled the viewport in layers.
Outer orbit: a ring of debris—spent satellites, abandoned relay buoys, a single half-dead station broadcasting a weak identifier on a loop.
Lower: cloud bands dragged across a surface divided into three rough colors—wet green, bruised brown, industrial gray. The primary township sat where river and rail met, a knot of structure and heat. Just beyond it:
The outlying settlement.
Smaller.
Weaker.
Closer to the waterline.
That was their destination.
Tein guided the ship down through atmosphere. Turbulence greeted them in short, sharp punches, like the sky resented their arrival. El-Je watched the hull readings automatically, tracking stress, flow, the way he would track an opponent's breathing.
Mist sheared away as they punched through the last low cloud layer.
The outlying settlement revealed itself in one slow, unwelcome frame:
Raised walkways over standing water.
Board homes on stilts.
Storage towers built from grafted prefabs.
A single central square.
And in that square—
Movement.
Too many people.
Not enough direction.
Tein's jaw tightened.
"That's not good," El-Je said quietly.
"No," Tein agreed. "It isn't."
They took the far end of the pad, away from the crowd—but not far enough that people couldn't see the ship's silhouette. As the ramp lowered, the sound hit them first:
Voices.
Not panicked.
Not calm.
Closest to breaking.
El-Je's cloak settled around his shoulders as he stepped onto the ramp behind Tein. The air smelled of brackish water, engine exhaust, and something else beneath it—
Iron.
Old and fresh at once.
A woman in a stained worker's vest pushed her way to the front of the crowd. Her eyes were bright with fury stripped of everything that made fury safe.
"You're late," she said.
Tein took that without flinching.
"How many?" he asked.
"Three," she said. "Since dawn."
Her voice cracked on the last word.
El-Je felt the Force around the square like pressure behind a dam.
He didn't reach for it.
He just braced.
"Show us," Tein said.
⸻
They had been arranged to be seen.
That was the first cruelty.
The second was that they had been arranged to be understood.
The square was nothing more than a widened section of walkway with a low barrier and a view of the river. Today, it held three bodies.
One strung between two support poles by the arms.
One seated upright on a crate, head turned toward the first as if caught mid-conversation.
One kneeling, forehead pressed to the planks.
All of them—
Eyes open.
Muscles locked in the same soundless plea.
Blood spattered the posts and decking. Not enough for three deaths by violence. Just enough to say: something happened here that should have left more.
El-Je swallowed hard.
He did not look away.
Tein studied the scene with the care of someone defusing ordnance.
"Who found them?" he asked.
"Everyone," the woman said. "They were like this when the first shift came through."
There were children at the far edge of the crowd. Adults tried to block their view.
They failed.
El-Je could feel the tension inside those small bodies—questions with no safe answers, terror without vocabulary. The Force held their fear like heat trapped under glass.
Tein moved to the first corpse.
A man.
Mid-thirties. Laborer, by the look of his hands. Skin gone the color absence takes. Eyes dried in a permanent widening that suggested he had seen something he should not have believed was real.
His arms were lashed to the poles.
No tearing at the bindings.
No signs of struggle.
Tein's fingers hovered a breath above the man's chest.
Nothing.
No echo of violence in the flesh.
Only the residue of what had passed through his mind.
He shifted to the second.
A woman.
Blood smeared across her cheek, not from a wound of her own. The pattern of it suggested contact—someone else's hand, dragged there.
Her posture looked almost conversational.
As if she'd turned toward the first victim to say something and never finished.
Tein closed his eyes for a fraction of a heartbeat.
The third—
The kneeling figure—
Had left fingernail tracks in the planks. Ten shallow, parallel scratches where wood had given way under desperate pressure.
El-Je focused on those.
It was easier than looking at the faces.
"What did they do?" he asked, voice low.
The woman in the vest answered, not understanding the question's scope.
"They worked the south nets together," she said. "Same shift. Same crew. Mara. Joran. Lyeff. They were friends."
Tein took the names in.
Names made things heavier.
He straightened, gaze sweeping the gathered crowd.
"Anyone hear anything?" he asked. "Nightmares. Voices. Waking fear that doesn't fit the day around it."
There was a ripple of motion—people shifting, glancing at one another, not wanting to be the first to speak.
A younger man near the back cleared his throat.
"I live two doors down," he said. "I heard… something. Before dawn. I thought it was arguing. I almost went out." His voice thinned. "I didn't."
Tein's attention sharpened, not unkind.
"Words?" he asked.
The man shook his head. "It sounded like… like they were trying to talk through water. One voice. Then three. Then—"
He broke off, hands flexing helplessly.
"Then nothing," he finished.
El-Je felt something cold trace down his spine.
Talking through water.
Like a river in someone's head.
Like Dathomir's cavern air, thick with spell-smoke and certainty.
He shoved that memory back where it belonged.
"This isn't random," Tein said quietly—to the man, to the woman, to the town, to himself.
"Something is choosing who sees it."
The worker in the vest took a step toward him, fury flaring through the cracks of fear.
"Then choose it back," she snapped. "You're the ones with sabers. With ships. We don't—"
Her voice broke. She swallowed it down with visible effort.
"We don't have anything."
Tein held her gaze.
"I know," he said.
No promise. No apology.
Just acknowledgment.
"We're not leaving," he added. "Not yet."
The words loosened something in the crowd—not relief, not trust. Just enough tension to let people breathe.
It would have to be enough.
"For now, move the children," Tein said. "Keep your doors barred at night. No one alone. Not for any reason. If someone you love asks you to come outside in the dark… you wake your neighbors first."
Heads turned at that.
El-Je caught the implication.
If someone you love asks.
Not if someone knocks.
Not if you hear a stranger.
Tein was expecting familiars to be the bait.
The worker's eyes sharpened. She nodded once, the motion clipped. "You'll get a list of everyone who shared shifts with them," she said. "And everyone they fought with."
"And everyone they didn't," Tein said. "Fear doesn't need grudges to work. Just openings."
⸻
The bodies were taken down at last, covered with tarps that failed to hide what the town had already seen. People dispersed in unsteady lines, peeling away into side streets, clinging to routine with the desperation of those who needed to believe routine still worked.
Tein and El-Je walked the perimeter of the square in silence.
Crime scene.
Execution ground.
Lesson.
El-Je halted near the low barrier overlooking the water.
From here, the river looked almost calm. Swollen with runoff. Moving slow. Hiding depth by pretending to be shallow.
His fingers tightened on the railing until the knuckles paled.
"Something's wrong," he said.
Tein didn't answer.
He was waiting.
El-Je's jaw worked.
"It isn't just killing them," he said. "It's… teaching the town what it can do."
He looked back at the empty poles.
"At what it will do."
Tein finally spoke.
"Fear multiplies faster when you give it pictures," he said. "Stories people can't stop telling themselves."
El-Je stared at the water.
He didn't say: it feels deliberate.
He didn't need to.
The thought sat between them in the Force like a third presence.
For a heartbeat, he heard something else as well.
Very soft.
Not sound.
An intention brushing the edge of his awareness like a fingertip.
You understand.
It felt like his own thought for half a second.
Then it didn't.
El-Je stepped back from the railing.
The touch stopped.
He didn't look at Tein.
"Did you feel that?" he asked.
Tein's gaze was on him now, sharper than the chill in the air.
"What?"
El-Je searched for the right explanation and found none that didn't make him sound fevered.
"I don't know," he said. "Like… someone agreeing with me."
He hated how thin that sounded.
Tein didn't dismiss it.
"Next time," he said, "do exactly what you just did. Step back. Breathe. Don't answer."
"Answer what?" El-Je asked.
"If something wants you to notice it," Tein said, "it will keep trying."
He didn't glance at the obelisk.
He didn't have to.
⸻
They took a room above a repair shop near the edge of the settlement—a narrow, metal-walled space with two bunks, a single viewport, and the kind of echo that made sounds repeat themselves whether you wanted them to or not.
Night would bring more fear.
Tein wanted walls between his Padawan and the square when it did.
El-Je sat on the lower bunk, elbows on knees, staring at the floor. The sensations from the square still crawled along his senses like static.
"Master," he said quietly. "Those three… Do you think they killed each other?"
Tein stood by the viewport, watching mist thicken over the water. His reflection looked like someone he didn't intend to recognize.
"I think," he said, "they were pushed to the edge of something. Then shown where the drop was."
"That's not an answer," El-Je said.
"It's the only one we have without lying," Tein replied.
A beat of silence.
"You think it matters that there were three?" El-Je asked.
"Yes."
"Why?"
Tein let the question sit. The Force gave him nothing clean. Only possibilities.
"One is an anomaly," he said at last. "Two is a fear. Three is a message."
El-Je exhaled.
His hands still hadn't unclenched.
"Tomorrow," Tein continued, "we go to the main township. This was a warning shot. Whatever's at the center of this isn't here."
"And if it follows us there?" El-Je asked.
Tein's eyes on the misted glass were very dark.
"It won't need to," he said.
Because something had already moved ahead.
He could feel it.
Not in the obelisk.
In the shape of the pattern itself.
"Try to sleep," Tein added.
El-Je lay back without arguing.
He knew better than to promise he would.
⸻
He dreamed almost immediately.
Except it didn't feel like dreaming.
It felt like memory he didn't own.
He was standing in the square again. But it was empty. No bodies. No blood. No crowd. Just poles and planks and the slow, indifferent roll of the river.
Fog pressed in at the edges of his vision.
He wasn't cold.
He wasn't anything.
You understand, the not-voice said.
Not in his ears.
In the part of his mind that earlier had tried to label his own unease.
El-Je turned.
There was nothing there.
The fog thickened instead, shapes half-suggested within it—figures that might have been people, might have been memories, might have been the ghosts of choices not yet made.
"I don't," he said.
Honesty, even here.
Especially here.
The not-voice seemed… amused.
It didn't feel like anything he's heard before.
He had no name for it.
It felt like whatever had stared at Tein on a Dathomir plateau. Whatever had watched from the Nightsister chamber while ichor burned. Whatever had pressed against the walls of the artifact while pretending to be stone.
You are not like them, it observed.
Not accusing.
Not kind.
Stating a fact it intended to use later.
The fog shifted.
For a heartbeat, he saw Tein—back turned, blade lit somewhere he had never been, fighting shadows that moved like memory. Then the image was gone, as if someone had flipped through possibilities and lost interest.
The square emptied again.
You know what fear costs, the not-voice said.
You could make it mean something.
The offer in it was worse than any threat.
El-Je felt the urge to answer— to argue, to deny, to say I am Jedi, as though words in a dream had weight.
He remembered Tein's instruction instead.
Don't answer.
He inhaled.
He counted his breath the way he counted beats in a spar.
One.
Two.
Three.
The fog thinned.
The presence drew back—not angry, not thwarted.
Curious.
As though it had found something new to play with and wasn't finished.
El-Je woke with his hand on his lightsaber.
The room was dark.
Tein stood by the viewport, exactly where he had been before, watching the nothing outside as if it were a battlefield.
Their eyes met in the dull reflection.
"How long?" El-Je asked.
"Four hours," Tein said. "You talk more in your sleep now."
El-Je's throat went dry. "What did I say?"
"Nothing I understood," Tein replied. "Which worries me more than if I had."
He turned fully then.
"Tomorrow we go to the main town," he said. "Whatever's happening here started there. The sooner we reach it, the fewer pictures it can hang in the streets."
El-Je pushed himself upright.
He didn't say he'd heard something.
He didn't say it had spoken to him like an equal.
He just nodded once.
"Then we find it," he said.
Not bravado.
Just decision.
Tein watched him for a heartbeat longer.
You're fifteen, he didn't say.
You're already standing in places Masters would refuse to enter, he didn't say.
Instead:
"We follow the trail at first light," Tein answered. "Pack light. Sleep if you can."
El-Je lay back down.
Sleep did not come.
When it finally did, it brought no dreams.
Which was almost worse.
⸻
Dawn skinned the river in pale metal. The town moved in quiet, brittle lines toward a day that didn't want to arrive. Nets still needed casting. Pumps still needed maintenance. Fear hadn't yet learned how to stop hunger.
Tein and El-Je stood at the edge of the eastern road—a raised track leading inland, toward the larger township where the trade lines converged and the reports said the first nightmares had begun.
El-Je looked back once.
The square was visible between buildings.
Empty now.
But the Force still held its outline like a scar.
"Master," he said.
Tein waited.
"If this thing is… using people to make more fear…"
He didn't finish.
He didn't have to.
Tein's answer was very soft.
"Then we end it before it decides you're useful."
The road ahead cut through mist and scrub and the distant shape of taller structures. Somewhere beyond those—
A town led by a man who had decided the Jedi were too slow.
A town that had already been dreaming of fire.
Tein started walking.
El-Je followed.
The Hunt had stopped being theoretical.
Now it had a direction.