The cargo hauler smelled of recycled air and the long, dry residue of bantha-hide bales that had occupied the bay for most of the previous month. Zannah had selected the vessel from the Omek family’s contracted carriers two systems before Ambria, when she had still imagined returning with Bane rather than from him. The carrier’s manifest listed Sepp Omek as primary lessor and his sister Allia as authorized second. The vessel was nondescript, dented at the port nacelle, registered through three intermediate brokers, and entirely uninteresting to anyone who might think to look.
Cognus sat against the bulkhead opposite the cargo bay’s small inset cabin, her legs folded beneath her, Bane’s saber resting against her hip. The hilt was longer than what she would have chosen for her own hand, weighted for a man half again her size. She had not slept, and she had not asked to sleep. The Master had walked into the cabin two hours after the hauler cleared Ambria’s atmosphere and had not emerged since.
The bay was cold, in the practical manner deep-space freight always was. A pulse of recycled air every few minutes, the hum of distant power couplings, the faint creak of unsecured panels finding their balance against the hyperdrive’s rhythm. Cognus listened to all of it with the half-attention of a hunter waiting in a blind. The shuttle had been left burning on Ambria; they had taken what could be carried and walked the kilometer to the secondary landing site without ceremony.
She closed her eyes and reached, lightly, for what would happen in the next several minutes.
The reading came back unevenly. Three threads, four. A door opening, a door not opening. Her own hand on the hilt at her hip, then her hand somewhere else entirely. The Master speaking to her, the Master holding her silence. Cognus opened her eyes and frowned at the bulkhead across the bay. Foresight had never produced this for her before today; it had produced certainty, or it had produced silence — the silence of a future too distant or too uncommitted to read. It had not produced layered indecision.
‘Fatigue,’ she thought. The duel and the vigil. The hours without rest. She had pushed harder than she had known she was capable of pushing, and the body she had pushed was now demanding the price. She let the reading dissolve and laid her head back against the bulkhead.
The cabin door slid open and Zannah stepped into the bay, pulling the hood of her traveling cloak back from her shoulders. She had changed. The robes she had worn at Ambria were gone, replaced with a layered tunic and trousers in the muted greys and umbers a moderately wealthy trader might wear on the long routes. Durable. Unremarkable. Expensively cut and entirely forgettable. The lightsaber that had been at her hip was no longer visible, and a datapad rested in her left hand.
“We will reach the Nal Hutta system in nine standard days,” Zannah said. She did not sit. She crossed the bay and stopped at the small workbench bolted to the far wall, setting the datapad against its surface. “You should sleep before then.”
“I will.”
“Soon.”
Cognus inclined her head. “Soon, Master.”
Zannah did not turn. The bench held the few items she had brought from the shuttle: a worn leather case, a small bound text, and a wrapped parcel Cognus had not seen opened. She watched the Master select the leather case, set it before her, and rest both hands flat against its surface. For a long moment Zannah did nothing visible. Her shoulders settled, her breathing slowed, and the hum of the hauler’s power couplings seemed, briefly, to soften around her.
Then Zannah began to work.
It did not look like work. It looked like a woman with her hands on a closed case, breathing. Cognus had spent only days with Bane before Doan, and what she had seen of him had been the practical violence of a Sith who treated the Force as a hammer. He had never spoken of sorceries. He had never demonstrated any. What the Master did now had no precedent in anything Cognus had been trained to read. It carried instead the still attention of a craftsman testing the edge of a tool that had been in their family for three generations and had served every one of them.
Cognus watched. Whatever the working was, it had a shape she could half-perceive and a structure she could not. After several minutes she tried again to reach forward. Small, careful. Not the full extension she had attempted earlier, only a brief touch on the next handful of moments.
The reading came back the same as before. Layered. Multiple. A future in which Zannah turned, and a future in which Zannah did not. A future in which the case opened, and a future in which it remained closed. Cognus held the readings against each other and could not resolve which was the line that would actually occur.
She let the reading dissolve a second time and watched her Master’s hands instead.
“What do you see?” Zannah asked, without turning.
Cognus considered the question and the silences around it. “Inconsistency.”
“In what you reach for.”
“Yes, Master.”
Zannah’s hands did not move. “The Iktotchi gift requires a clean field. After Ambria, the field is not clean. There are residues you have not encountered before this morning. Allow the gift to settle before you rely upon it.”
“Yes, Master.”
“It will pass.”
Cognus inclined her head a second time. The explanation was reasonable and economical, and it was the explanation she had nearly arrived at herself. She accepted it the way a competent apprentice accepted a Master’s framing — completely on the surface, with the sliver of independent judgment any professional preserved beneath. The reading had not felt like fatigue. It had been sharp at the source and broken only at the resolution. But the Master was not wrong about Ambria. Ambria had been thick with whatever Ambria was. A planet that refused to release the heat of a duel hours after the duel ended could plausibly do other things to a precognitive too tired to push back. She let the question close.
Zannah lifted her hands from the leather case. The hum of the power couplings returned to its ordinary pitch. The case had not been opened, and whatever had been done to it, or with it, had been completed without ceremony or visible result.
The Master turned, finally, and looked at Cognus across the bay.
“There was a name in the duel that I did not speak aloud.”
Cognus waited.
“Set Harth,” Zannah said. “A Dark Jedi. My contingency, not Bane’s — kept in case the Master’s confidence in his apprentice proved mistaken. Bane did not know I had cultivated him. He would not have approved of the precaution if he had known.”
Cognus did not show what the name produced in her. She had fought Set Harth in the hangar bay of the Doan stone prisons, briefly, before the press of bodies and falling debris had carried them apart. She had taken the measure of him then and judged him competent, vain, and unwilling to die for any cause that did not pay him first. She had assumed she would never see him again.
“He survived Doan.”
“He did. He left with a holocron he had not earned, while we were occupied with what came after. Andeddu’s. He has been on Nal Hutta long enough to have begun to learn what it contains.”
“He is a debt,” Cognus said.
“You are certain he is still there.”
Zannah did not answer immediately. She returned to the bench and laid one hand against the leather case again, lightly. Her eyes closed for the briefest moment, and when they opened, the gold in them had returned to its ordinary depth.
“I am certain.”
The exchange had taken perhaps a minute. Cognus understood, watching it, that she had witnessed two confirmations rather than one. The first was the Master’s certainty, given to her plainly and without elaboration. The second was a thing the Master had checked against the case, or against the residue inside herself, before answering. Whatever the second confirmation had consulted, it was not Cognus’s to know yet.
She set the observation aside, the way a careful operator placed a piece of intelligence beside a piece of context that might or might not eventually relate to it. Two observations about the Master she did not yet understand: a layered reading that should not have layered, and a confirmation made twice when once should have sufficed. She did not yet have language for what to call them. She would.
“He should not have been permitted to carry the holocron from Doan,” Cognus said.
“He was not permitted.” Zannah’s mouth moved into an expression that was not quite a smile. “He merely was not stopped.”
“You will recover it on Nal Hutta.”
“If it is still there. He will have taken his time with it across the years. The question is what he has learned from it, not what remains in his hands.”
Cognus considered the distinction. The holocron was an object; the knowledge it carried was a different question entirely, and she had not thought of the difference before this moment. She set the distinction beside the others, in a place she was beginning to recognize as separate from her ordinary mental architecture.
“You will retrieve it regardless.”
“I will close the loose end regardless. The retrieval is incidental.”
The certainty in the Master’s voice was complete in the manner Cognus had begun to recognize as habitual. There was no display in it. There was no announcement. There was the simple statement of a position that had already been examined from every available angle and confirmed against whatever the Master consulted when she consulted herself.
Zannah lifted the leather case from the bench and carried it back toward the cabin.
“Sleep, apprentice,” she said as she passed. “The next nine days will be quiet. Use them.”
The cabin door slid closed behind her, and the bay returned to its hum and its rhythm and its long, unremarkable dark.
Cognus remained against the bulkhead for some time after that. The hauler’s power couplings settled back into their steady cadence, the recycled air pulsed through the vents, and the unsecured panels found and lost their balance against the hyperdrive’s vibration in their slow, indifferent way.
She thought about the layered reading and the two confirmations and the case Zannah had not opened. The case mattered. She did not know why yet. Only that her Master had performed an act she could half-see and could not name, and the act had touched the case, or passed through it, or done some third thing she did not have a word for.
She set Bane’s saber on the deck beside her, drew her cloak across her shoulders, and slept.