Same system — the following day
The road to Deyross Haven did not end.
It dissolved.
Hard ground softened into rutted clay.
Clay surrendered to wet track.
Wet track finally admitted it had always wanted to be river.
Boardwalks began where the land gave up arguing.
Tein stopped just short of the first plank.
His cloak fell the way shadows fall when they decide to stay.
"El-Je," he said.
"Yes."
"We're no one here."
Not a warning.
A decision.
"No Council. No assignment. No investigation."
El-Je nodded once.
"Civilians."
Tein's gaze stayed on the distant rooftops — low structures stitched together out of prefab, scrap, intention, and the kind of hope that didn't dare show its face in daylight.
"Fear watches uniforms," he said. "We'll learn more before it notices us."
El-Je pulled his hood lower.
Not to hide.
To disappear.
They stepped onto the boardwalk and let the settlement take their weight.
⸻
Deyross Haven had been built the way storms build landscapes — wherever necessity fell hardest.
Narrow streets threaded between raised homes on stilts. Nets dried on racks like tired sails. Pumps thumped rhythmically somewhere beyond sight. The air carried water in it even when it wasn't raining — a constant, low-level insistence that everything here belonged to the river before it belonged to people.
It should have been a working town.
Honest.
Stubborn.
Instead…
Conversations ended when strangers passed.
Children watched from doorways with the hard silence of people who had learned what not to say faster than how to say anything else.
Windows opened just enough to see.
Not enough to be seen.
El-Je softened his presence until it felt like another stray thought the Force could misplace without effort. He kept his eyes moving — not suspicious, not intrusive — simply attentive.
Who carried fear differently.
Who hadn't slept.
Who kept looking over their shoulders as though expecting the space behind them to answer.
Tein stopped at a stall selling boiled river grain and smoked fish wrapped in paper that remembered other uses.
"Two," he said.
The vendor — an older woman with weather printed into the lines around her mouth — studied them.
Not their cloaks.
Not their hands.
Their eyes.
"You're not from here," she said.
"No one is," Tein replied mildly. "Not at first."
A flicker of something like respect passed through her gaze.
She handed over the food.
"Eat before the wind takes the heat," she said.
They ate on a low bench overlooking the inner canal — a thin ribbon of water cut between buildings, its surface moving with a steadiness that pretended to be calm.
El-Je chewed thoughtfully.
"This place feels… braced," he said.
Tein didn't look away from the canal.
"Yes."
"For what?"
Tein's jaw moved once.
"Memory," he said.
El-Je didn't ask more.
Sometimes the truest answers were the ones that refused to grow teeth.
⸻
They spent the morning walking.
Not searching.
Learning.
The repair docks.
The storage yards.
The small market ring that pretended it deserved the name square.
The clinic with its line of people who all insisted they were fine.
The notice boards with postings layered so thick that paper had become wall.
Names.
Missing.
Anniversaries no one wanted.
Deyross Haven did not cry.
It catalogued.
By midday, the town's rhythm had begun to reveal itself — shifts, routes, favored corners where conversation gathered, the paths children used when adults forgot to see them.
Tein let the Force lay patterns over the waking world the way light lays over water.
Threads.
Currents.
Silences that meant more than sound.
He already knew what they would find.
He had hoped to be wrong.
⸻
The first body lay where the night had left it.
In full view.
Because that was the point.
A loading platform overlooked the east canal — metal plates bolted onto old timber that protested every impact as though tired of being asked to hold anything else. Crates sat in neat stacks along the rail.
And at the end of the row —
Her.
A woman in cargo leathers.
Mid-forties.
Strong arms. Weathered hands. Practical haircut.
Eyes wide.
Mouth open.
Muscles frozen at the exact moment breath had failed to remember how to move.
There was blood.
Not enough.
Just enough to mark the world as complicit.
El-Je didn't reach for his saber.
He didn't even think of it.
He felt the world contract — like a chest trying not to sob.
Workers stood back from the platform, clustered in wary knots. No one had covered her. No one had touched her.
Fear had taught them reverence.
Tein approached with measured care — not ritual, not Jedi solemnity.
Respect.
He did not kneel.
He did not touch.
He opened himself just far enough that the Force could speak if it wanted to.
It did.
Not as a voice.
As an absence.
The same hollowness he had felt in the small settlement days earlier — as though something had leaned very close to a human mind and decided that fear made a better harvest than life.
El-Je stood beside him.
He kept his breathing steady.
"She didn't run," he said quietly.
"No," Tein agreed.
"And she didn't fight."
"No."
El-Je swallowed.
"So why is there blood?"
Tein's gaze shifted to the faint smear along the deck — a handprint, dragged across metal by someone who had already lost control of their body.
"She tried to hold on," he said.
Not to life.
To meaning.
A foreman stepped forward reluctantly — a broad-shouldered human with grease ground so deeply into his knuckles it had become part of him.
"She was alone on night shift," he said. "Routine inspection. Same route as always. She never missed a check."
His eyes refused to meet hers.
"Name?" Tein asked.
"Vera Lonn."
The word seemed to hang in the air like a weight placed on a brittle surface.
Tein inclined his head.
Names mattered.
"Anyone hear anything?"
A shake of the head.
"Nothing," the man said. "Not even a fall."
El-Je felt the shape of that statement as much as he heard it.
Fear didn't need sound.
It only needed a place to live.
He closed his eyes for half a breath.
And the world changed.
⸻
He was somewhere else.
Not illusion.
Not vision.
Context.
A corridor.
Dark.
The faint smell of oil and river damp.
And behind him —
A thought
wearing the memory of a woman it did not love.
Come with me.
He felt the invitation settle into the emotional spaces people rarely admitted they had — the hidden corners where fear and comfort sometimes shared the same seat.
He did not answer.
The world snapped back into place.
Tein was watching him.
Not alarmed.
Present.
"What did you feel?" he asked.
El-Je considered.
"Not attack," he said.
"Permission."
Tein nodded once.
Because that was worse.
⸻
They left the docks only when the local authorities arrived — gray-faced, professional, overwhelmed — the kind of people who had learned to do their work anyway.
Tein did not identify himself.
He did not offer help.
Not yet.
He had come to learn the shape of the thing.
Not to give it a name before it deserved one.
"Walk," he said quietly.
El-Je followed.
⸻
Afternoon lived longer in Deyross Haven than anywhere else.
The light turned metallic as it slid across water. Shadows stretched into long, watchful shapes. The town's routine moved through its motions with a brittle determination that felt like defiance.
They spoke to vendors who didn't want to speak.
To dockhands who pretended they hadn't seen nightmares.
To clerks who catalogued logistics like prayer beads.
To a child who asked whether Jedi could stop ghosts.
Tein said nothing that wasn't true.
El-Je asked questions with a gentleness that suggested he expected real answers.
Patterns emerged slowly.
Nightmares.
Waking terror.
A feeling of being watched when alone.
Always alone.
Always at night.
The victims had nothing binding them together.
Except vulnerability.
By evening, El-Je felt the town inside his bones — its weight, its hunger, its stubborn refusal to collapse because there were still nets to mend and mouths to fill.
He was tired.
Not weak.
Simply honest.
"Food," Tein said.
They ate at a small counter near the canal — broth and dumplings that steamed into the damp air. Conversation murmured around them in soft circles. The wind carried a thousand sounds and meant none of them as comfort.
El-Je finished slowly.
He didn't want to rush.
Rushing meant fear had already won.
⸻
They found the second body near sunset.
Not because crowds gathered.
Because a notice board — once meant for work postings — had acquired a new purpose.
A small slip of paper.
Two words.
Found south.
Tein folded it between his fingers.
"Stay close," he said.
The south district felt older — narrower platforms, patched railings, structures that had clearly survived storms through equal parts luck and stubbornness. The canal widened here into a shallow lagoon, boats knocking gently against worn moorings.
A knot of townspeople stood near the boathouse.
Quiet.
Alert.
Not shocked.
Tein slipped through the group without force.
The body lay on the planks just inside the open doors — arranged, almost carefully, in a posture that suggested prayer or surrender. Blood marked the boards more obviously this time — sharper contrast, harsher edges.
El-Je inhaled.
Then exhaled.
This looked like the first one.
But it didn't feel like it.
Tein crouched — not close enough to disturb anything.
The man was older.
Late fifties.
Hands calloused.
Jaw set even in death.
But the eyes…
They didn't have that impossible wideness.
They had fear.
But not the same kind.
This fear had known its name.
El-Je watched Tein's posture change by half a breath.
"What is it?" he asked quietly.
Tein didn't answer immediately.
He let the Force speak first.
There was fear here.
And pain.
And violence.
But it moved differently.
Less… focused.
More desperate.
He stood.
"Who was he?" he asked.
A younger woman — face drawn tight with exhaustion — answered.
"Dock chief. Harven Brill. He kept the south boats running."
El-Je's heart stuttered once.
The same first name as the mayor on the last world.
Not the same man.
Just the same life.
Tein nodded.
"Was he alone?"
A murmur through the small crowd.
Apparently, yes.
Apparently, always.
Tein looked at the blood again.
At the marks on the boards.
At the absence of that hollowness in the Force.
"This may not be the same thing," he said.
Not certainty.
Possibility.
El-Je absorbed that.
Relief did not arrive.
Because different did not mean safe.
A child clung to the woman's leg — watching everything, saying nothing.
Tein met the boy's gaze.
Then looked away.
Some truths weren't for children.
Some weren't for anyone.
⸻
They walked back to their rented room by slow degrees — letting the town close around them the way night closes around thought.
El-Je didn't speak until the door sealed.
"Master," he said.
Tein waited.
"The second man…"
He searched for the right words.
"…felt different. The first one…" He hesitated. "It was like something crept inside her head and didn't leave room for anything else. This one… he was scared, but it felt more like he was just trying to survive."
Tein nodded.
Quiet agreement.
"So it might not be connected," El-Je said.
"It might," Tein replied. "Fear makes imitators. Pain attracts pain."
He didn't force the conclusion.
He didn't deny it either.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we ask better questions."
El-Je lay back on the bunk.
He did not expect sleep.
He was wrong.
⸻
The dream came quietly.
No nightmare trappings.
No screaming.
Just presence.
He stood on the edge of Deyross Haven — where the boardwalk met open water beneath a sky that had forgotten how to choose a color.
Fog gathered in the distance.
Not creeping.
Arriving.
He did not feel cold.
He did not feel anything.
You understand, the not-voice said again.
As though they were already continuing a conversation he'd never agreed to begin.
El-Je turned slowly.
There was no figure.
Only suggestion.
Shadows within fog.
Possibilities wearing almost-faces.
He wanted to say he wasn't helpless.
He wanted to say he would not be used.
He wanted to say he knew who he was.
None of those words arrived.
You know what silence is worth, it whispered — not as threat.
As certainty.
Images flickered at the edges of perception — Deyross Haven burning, Tein bleeding beneath a sky torn open, El-Je standing alone at the mouth of some future he refused to accept.
He didn't know whether they were lies.
That made them worse.
You could make it matter, the presence murmured. Fear is a tool. Love is a handle. You could choose who suffers.
He felt the pull.
Not seduction.
Logic.
He remembered Tein's instruction.
Don't answer.
So he didn't.
He breathed.
One.
Two.
Three.
The fog recoiled slightly.
Not angry.
Interested.
There was a terrible kind of patience in that.
Something that had waited centuries and could wait longer.
Something that believed the future already belonged to it.
The dream broke.
⸻
He woke with his hand on his saber.
Tein stood by the viewport again.
The night outside had weight.
Neither spoke for a moment.
Then Tein said, very quietly:
"We stay quiet tomorrow."
El-Je nodded.
He did not mention the fog.
He did not mention the voice.
He did not have to.
The Hunt had rules now.
And fear was learning to follow them.