The hauler had been in transit for two days when Cognus first registered that her Master was sitting with something.
It did not show in any of the ways such a thing showed in the people Cognus had watched in her professional life. Zannah did not pace. She did not leave the cabin to stand at the bay’s viewport and stare into the streaks of hyperspace. She did not work the leather case at the bench, or open the false holocron’s containment, or do anything visible with her hands. She sat. She read. She wrote, in the small bound text she had brought with her from Ambria. The hauler hummed. The recycled air pulsed.
But the writing came in shorter intervals than it had on the outbound transit. Zannah would set her stylus down, look at the page she had filled, sit with it for some minutes, and resume. Cognus, watching from the bay across two open doorways, registered the rhythm. The Master was returning to a thought she had set aside and could not, this transit, leave alone.
Cognus did not ask what it was. She had not yet earned the right to ask, and even if she had earned it, she was not sure she wanted the answer. The wrongness in the Cesko residence had been the Master’s wrongness, not hers. The body had given her laughter and her own foresight had given her absence, and she had set both aside the way she had been setting aside the layered readings since Ambria. The category of unfinished things grew. She did not yet have language for it. She did not yet require it to have language.
On the third day Zannah moved to the workbench.
She set the small bound text aside and laid her hands flat on the bench’s surface, in the posture Cognus now recognized as the precursor to a Working. There was nothing on the bench in front of her. No leather case. No holocron. Nothing for her hands to be working on. The hands rested on the bench because the bench was the place where her hands worked.
She closed her eyes.
For perhaps an hour she did nothing visible. Her shoulders settled. Her breathing slowed. The hum of the hauler’s power couplings did not soften the way it had in the outbound transit when she had been working the case. Whatever she was attempting now, it was not finding the shape it required. After the hour she opened her eyes, frowned at the bench, and began again.
Cognus watched from her position against the bulkhead. She did not extend her foresight. She had stopped reaching for it inside the radius for any purpose that did not require it. After Cesko she had concluded that the gift was not, here, going to give her what it gave her elsewhere, and the conservation of effort was its own discipline. She watched her Master sit at the bench and reach for something that was not arriving.
After a second hour Zannah lifted her hands from the bench and turned toward Cognus.
“There is a Rite I will teach you today.”
Cognus rose. “Yes, Master.”
“It is the Rite of Quiet Hands. Inherited. Old enough that the lineage is no longer interesting. The text I am giving you is one I copied from Bane’s records ten years ago, before Doan, before any of this.” Zannah held out a small bound document Cognus had not seen her produce. “Read it. Slowly. Twice. Then we will work it together.”
Cognus took the document. It was no longer than thirty pages, hand-copied in a Sith script she could read with effort but had not learned to read fluently. The Rite of Quiet Hands. She did not know it by name. She read.
The first reading took her perhaps twenty minutes. The second was slower. The Rite was a discipline, not a technique. It placed the practitioner in a state where the small involuntary signals of the body, the things assassination training had taught her to read in others and conceal in herself, were suppressed entirely. Hands did not tremble. Pulse did not show in the throat. The micro-expressions that betrayed thought before thought reached language were held below their threshold of expression. The text named it Quiet Hands because the hands were where the discipline began. The hands, then the face, then the rest.
Cognus had developed, across the years of her professional work, a less formal version of the same discipline. The Rite framed the technique she had improvised and gave it structure. Reading it now, she registered two things at once. She had been performing a third of what the Rite asked. She had also been performing it inefficiently, leaning on conscious suppression where the Rite asked for a deeper structural quiet that would not require the conscious overhead.
Cognus finished the second reading and looked up.
Zannah was watching her.
“Tell me what the Rite is for.”
“For an apprentice who will be in rooms her Master is not in. Performing work her Master will not be present to monitor. With people whose precognition or empathy or simple observational skill is good enough to read what the apprentice is working to conceal.” Cognus considered the document’s last page. “It is also for a practitioner who is going to sit, daily, in proximity to a being whose presence she cannot name without revealing more than she means to reveal.”
Zannah did not move. The gold of her eyes held on Cognus for a beat longer than the answer required.
“The text does not say the second.”
“No.”
“You read it from the structure.”
“Yes, Master.”
Zannah inclined her head — a small, brief gesture that was not approval and was also not its absence. She crossed to the bay floor, lowered herself into a meditation posture, and indicated the floor opposite her.
“Sit.”
Cognus sat. She mirrored the posture. The hauler’s deck was cold beneath her. The recycled air moved across her face as it had been moving for three days. Her body produced its small physiological response to the cold and the air and the proximity of her Master. The moment she registered the response, it was exactly the kind of signal the Rite asked her to suppress.
“Begin with the hands,” Zannah said.
Cognus began with the hands.
The first attempt failed inside ten seconds. She had reached for the conscious suppression she had been using since adolescence, and the Rite immediately produced the layered, struggling quality of two systems trying to occupy the same operational space. Her right hand twitched against her thigh. She felt herself note the twitch and the noting itself produced a second twitch.
“Stop,” Zannah said.
Cognus stopped.
“You are working from the surface inward. The Rite works from the structure outward. The hand is quiet because the body is quiet. The body is quiet because the will has placed itself in the position of an observer rather than an operator. You are not preventing the hand from moving. You are arranging your own consciousness so that the hand has nothing to respond to.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Again.”
Cognus tried again.
The second attempt held for perhaps two minutes. The collapse was different this time — less the spasm of suppression failing and more the slow drift of a state she had not yet learned to maintain without effort. Her shoulders began to register their position. Her face began to consult the room.
“Stop. Better.”
“Thank you, Master.”
“You will work this every morning before any other practice. For six months. After six months we will discuss what comes next.” Zannah rose. Cognus rose with her. “You will not, in those six months, expect to find your work has improved. The Rite reveals its own depth slowly. The discipline is the practice, not the visible result.”
“Yes, Master.”
Zannah returned to the workbench. She did not sit at it. She stood at it for a long moment, hands at her sides, looking at the surface as though the bench had refused her something earlier in the day. She considered, briefly, whether to ask again. Then she turned back into the cabin and the door slid closed behind her.
Cognus took her position against the bulkhead.
She did not work the Rite. The Master had said every morning, and Cognus understood every morning to mean every morning. The first morning of practice would be the morning after this conversation, not the afternoon of it. She turned the document on her knee and read it a third time, more slowly than the second, and then she set it aside.
The hauler ran on.
Cognus thought, in the hours that followed, about the structure of what the Master had given her. Quiet Hands was a Rite Zannah had taught her without explanation. The reasons offered themselves in sequence. The Master required an apprentice whose body would not betray her in rooms the Master could not enter. The Master required, also, an apprentice who would be in proximity, daily, to a being she could not name. Both were true at once. The Rite served both. The Master had chosen the Rite that did the most work for the smallest pedagogical investment, which was not the choice of a teacher beginning an apprenticeship without urgency.
She set that observation aside as well.
On the fifth day of transit Zannah emerged from the cabin and stood at the viewport in the bay for the first time since Nal Hutta. She did not speak. She watched the streaks of hyperspace at the angle hyperspace was watched from a hauler’s small viewport, which was not a particularly good angle, and Cognus watched her watch it.
“We will be at Ciutric in two days,” Zannah said, without turning.
“Yes, Master.”
“You have been to the estate.”
Cognus did not answer immediately. The Master had said it as a statement, the way the Master said most things. It was, as a statement, accurate. It was also a thing the Master had been carrying with her since before the question of Set Harth had been answered. Cognus had registered the carrying without commenting on it across nine days on the outbound transit and four days on the return.
“I have, Master.”
“You took Bane from it.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Tell me how the household responded.”
Cognus considered the question. It was not the question she had expected. She had expected something operational — the layout of the grounds, the staff’s habits, the security configuration as it had stood the night she had taken Bane. The Master was asking instead about the response.
“The household did not respond,” Cognus said. “They observed Sepp Omek’s departure with a contracted security operative as routine. The household had been told that the merchant occasionally traveled on short notice, with private security, and would return when business permitted. I left the morning after the capture. I did not stay to observe how the staff handled a return that did not, that month, occur.”
“And the estate when you arrived?”
“In good order. Staff present. The grounds maintained. The mansion cared for in the way a property of that kind was cared for in the absence of its owners — without ceremony and without gaps.”
“The same household will be there when we arrive.”
“Yes, Master.”
“They will receive Allia Omek and her business associate with the same lack of ceremony.”
“Yes, Master.”
Zannah turned from the viewport. She looked at Cognus across the bay, the gold of her eyes steady, the small set of her shoulders that said she had concluded an internal conversation she had not been performing aloud.
“The estate is ours,” she said. “The household has not been given reason to think otherwise. They will not be given reason now.”
“No, Master.”
Zannah crossed back toward the cabin. At the door she stopped, did not turn, and spoke once more.
“You will work the Rite tomorrow. Every morning until I tell you otherwise.”
“Yes, Master.”
The cabin door slid closed.
Cognus settled against the bulkhead and turned the document of the Rite on her knee. She read it a fourth time. The fourth reading produced what the third had not. She had agreed, in accepting the Rite from her Master’s hand, to a discipline she would carry every day of the years that remained to her.
The hauler ran on toward Ciutric.
She slept.