The spaceport district was full of holes in the wall that dealt
in shoddy second-hand objects. It didn't take them long to find
a place that provided well-worn, but at least also well-washed,
clothing. Qui-Gon picked out a long, loose shirt that reached
to mid-thigh, with sleeves he actually had to roll up over his
wrists; the slightly washed-out grey fabric was thick and dark
enough to hide the bandages, if he buttoned it all the way up
at the throat. Obi-Wan bought a couple of plain laborer's
shirts for himself, as well, while Qui-Gon tried his way
through the entire selection of boots and shoes without finding
anything that fit him. "I've gone barefoot for a long time," he
said finally. "It won't hurt me to go barefoot a while longer."
While Obi-Wan felt that footwear would have made Qui-Gon look,
at the least, a little more respectable, he had to admit that
he couldn't force the man to buy something that didn't fit just
to keep up appearances. He paid for their purchases, and they
went back outside into the midday heat. It wasn't far, Obi-Wan
thought, to the cantina where he'd placed his call to the
council the day before, and so he turned that way.
It did seem as though the pace on the street was faster, the
voices a little louder, more people were moving this way and
that, and now he understood why that was: Mos Espa was filling
up with those who had come to see the podrace tomorrow. The
cantina, when they reached it, was crowded and humming with
talk and laughter. Obi-Wan pushed his way through toward the
bar, when he was stopped by Qui-Gon's hand on his bandaged
shoulder. He looked back. "I thought we could get rooms here,"
he said, "and contact the council."
"I want to speak to Shmi first," Qui-Gon said.
"Of course," Obi-Wan said, a little too quickly. He changed
course and walked towards the back of the cantina instead, to
where the holocomm booths were. Local calls should be cheap. He
dug into his belt pouch and fished out the card, stopped
outside a free booth, and handed the card to Qui-Gon. "Let me
know when you're ready to contact the council."
He began to step away just as Qui-Gon muttered, "That might
take a while," and reached out to snag Obi-Wan's sleeve. "We
said we would both be in touch with her. It's better to call.
Watto might object if we came over to talk to her and didn't
buy anything."
It was a tight fit for two on the thinly padded bench in the
booth. Qui-Gon's elbow jabbed into Obi-Wan's ribs as he punched
in the comm code. Obi-Wan watched the little animated logos for
various rental agencies and tourist traps march around the
screen; one of them, for an all-you-can-eat restaurant, looked
suspiciously like a round, cute little Hutt with a bow on its
tail. Then the ads blinked out, and Shmi was looking at them.
As soon as she saw who they were, she leaned forward. "Have you
found Ani?"
"We have discovered who bought him," Qui-Gon said. He glanced
quickly sideways at Obi-Wan. "And Anakin is still entered for
the podrace tomorrow."
Her mouth was a thin line of worry, lips whitening with
tension. "You have to find him." Shmi looked to the side, her
eyes wide with the unfocused stare of someone trying to keep
the tears from spilling over. "To at least see him and know if
he is all right. This feels so very wrong."
"Shmi," Qui-Gon began, and Obi-Wan kicked at his bare foot
under the bench. Qui-Gon turned his head to look, Obi-Wan
looked back, and they argued silently for a while. The bench
creaked as Qui-Gon shifted his weight.
"You're not wearing the chain," Shmi said from the screen.
"Qui-Gon, how did that happen? Did Knight Kenobi remove it? Are
you--free?"
Qui-Gon held Obi-Wan's eyes for a moment longer, and nodded, a
tiny movement that would have been easy to miss. He turned back
to the vidscreen. "Anakin did it," he said. "We have seen
Anakin today, and his new owner, and it was Anakin who freed me
from the chain."
"He freed you," Shmi said quietly. "You know Ani always said
when he was younger that he wanted to free all the slaves of
Tatooine. All the slaves on the Rim, even." One tear broke free
from the inner corner of her right eye. "You saw Anakin today
and he freed you, and you left him with the man who bought him.
Is there more?"
"There is more." Qui-Gon's voice was perfectly steady. Obi-Wan
couldn't make himself shift, or straighten up, or even move.
"The man who bought Anakin is Xanatos, the one I--was
with--before I came to Jabba."
Shmi didn't make a sound, not one that was picked up by the
comm unit, anyway, but she looked as though she were about to
be sick. Her eyes were locked with Qui-Gon's, and they sat
staring at each other through the blue-light relay of a comm
screen. Obi-Wan felt his own skin crawl. Still, it was better
to tell her the truth, to let her know what had really
happened. At least he'd thought it would be better, until he
saw that look in her eyes.
When neither Qui-Gon nor Shmi had said anything for a long
time, Obi-Wan leaned forward. "We know where his ship is
docked, and we know he'll be at the race tomorrow. He's got to
be keeping the pod somewhere, too. We'll find him."
"And what will you do then?" Shmi asked, in a thready,
frighteningly calm voice. She stood up, the chair scraping the
floor before the comm console, and Obi-Wan saw her hand and the
long light sleeve of her dress, and then the call was cut off.
Qui-Gon didn't move a muscle, yet Obi-Wan would have sworn the
man slumped in his seat, and he himself could not speak just
then, with Shmi's face, Shmi's eyes, so vivid in his memory. A
knot of complex emotions burned in his chest. This could be
happening anywhere and everywhere on Tatooine right now, or on
any other world along the Rim. A child sold away from his
mother. A man sold away from his wife. And everywhere that same
terrible silence, the grief of those who have no safety and no
power.
No freedom.
It all seemed too big for him at that moment, too much to
grasp, and every word he had spoken to Qui-Gon about Shmi and
Anakin hollow and foolish. Obi-Wan pressed his hands together,
and started slightly when Qui-Gon touched his shoulder.
"This is where we are now," Qui-Gon said, and Obi-Wan looked at
him. "This place and this time. Because we can't help everyone,
everywhere, should we refuse to help one person who needs us?"
Obi-Wan closed his eyes. He wouldn't leave a child in the hands
of someone like Xanatos, no, and he wouldn't let a rogue Jedi
get away with having imprisoned and enslaved Qui-Gon, no, but
beyond that, there was something in what Qui-Gon said that went
counter to every pragmatic notion he held, and answered the
pain he felt, looking into Shmi's eyes. He couldn't put any of
that into words, and finally he just nodded.
When he looked up again, Qui-Gon was about to rise. Obi-Wan put
a hand on his shoulder in turn and pushed him down again. "The
council," he said.
"The council can go to hell," Qui-Gon said, and Obi-Wan was
startled into a brief choke of laughter.
But then, still pulled this way and that by conflicting
feelings and considerations, he sobered and said, "There are
many who will be happy to hear that you are free. It won't
matter what else you say to them, if they get to see you
again."
The contentious look in Qui-Gon's eyes faded. After a while, he
nodded, as Obi-Wan had. "Make the call."
Obi-Wan leaned forward and began to tap in the request code for
an interplanetary call, checking his card, which was starting
to run low. The animated logos jumped around on the screen
again, as cheerful as before. It would be barely past dawn in
the Jedi temple on Coruscant, he calculated, but many of the
council members were early risers. When he sat like this,
twisted sideways, he could feel the scabbed skin pull over his
shoulder, feel some of the small cuts break open again. He was
glad he'd bought those shirts.
Glancing quickly sideways at Qui-Gon, he wondered what the
council would see. The bruise, the tangled hair, the bitten
lip--when had Qui-Gon bitten his lip?--the rough shirt and the
untrimmed beard. Or perhaps just the eyes, where blue flame
still burned. What Obi-Wan saw, when he looked at Qui-Gon, was
a shining presence, shifting like a column of fire in the wind:
a dancing pillar of force. He dropped his eyes to Qui-Gon's
hands, folded on the tabletop. Those hands had touched him last
night.
The comm clicked and beeped, and the call went through and
started to send its signals. One, two, and then it was answered
by a droopy-eared Yoda perched on an antigrav seat. "Abuse the
privilege of an emergency code you should not, young Obi-Wan.
For urgent matters--"
Obi-Wan had never before heard Yoda break off like that, in the
middle of a sentence, nor seen his ears rise so abruptly. He
leaned back on the bench, and Qui-Gon leaned forward. "It is
good to see you again, my master."
"Qui-Gon." Yoda pushed the antigrav seat closer to the screen,
almost leaning into it. "A long time it has been since I have
seen you. Much missed you have been, Qui-Gon."
"It has been a long time," Qui-Gon agreed, and there was
silence for a little while. Obi-Wan tried to slip back a few
years into his best invisible-padawan persona. "I ran into some
trouble on that mission."
"Looked for you, we did." One of Yoda's ears curved, sagged a
little. Obi-Wan thought that later he would tell Qui-Gon just
how much they had looked. The way Qui-Gon and Yoda watched each
other now, though, he could not bring himself to call attention
to his presence in any way. "Freed you from Jabba, Knight
Kenobi did?"
"No. I was freed by a child, master. An untrained boy who is
powerful enough in the force to be able to break my chains. I
believe he is the chosen one that the prophecies speak of."
"Chosen one, hmmm?" Yoda tapped his gimer stick against the
edge of the comm screen. The sharp rap was oddly distorted as
the comm unit picked up its own internal echoes. "Discuss this,
we will, when you return."
Qui-Gon shook his head. "I will bring the child back with me.
He is the most powerful force user I have ever seen," and there
was a heavy pause as he looked at Yoda and Yoda looked back.
Obi-Wan wondered if Qui-Gon was stretching the truth. He hadn't
been able to gauge himself exactly what Anakin had done or how
he had done it. "He must be trained in the use of the force by
the Jedi."
"Why?" Everyone knew what it meant when Yoda tilted his ears
like that. He was about to dig his heels in. "Why say you
that?"
Obi-Wan knew he had succeeded in being invisible, since when he
leaned forward, both of them shot him a surprised look.
"Because right now he's about to be trained by Xanatos, and
that would be a disaster," he said.
"Xanatos!" Yoda spoke louder than before, and in the
background, Obi-Wan caught glimpses of movement. Maybe they'd
have the whole council listening in in a little while, though
he sincerely hoped not. "Xanatos is there?"
Obi-Wan sat back again and let Qui-Gon talk, briefly about his
capture and enslavement, much more about Anakin and Anakin's
abilities, and about the events of the day. Everything was
related with a different slant from how Obi-Wan had experienced
it, but not in any way that made him want to dispute it. It
really was something like being a padawan again, he thought
wryly, except that he had grown used to second-guessing how
Luxewa perceived events; Qui-Gon's perspective and priorities
were new to him. He shifted his shoulders very slightly. The
scrapes and cuts on his shoulder itched.
Plo Koon had come to stand behind Yoda now, and Mace Windu, as
well, and Yaddle, perched on another antigrav seat so she could
see the screen. Even Piell came up behind her. "Come back to
Coruscant at once, Master Jinn," he said. "We'll send a team
after Xanatos."
"You already have a team here," Qui-Gon said. "By the time
anyone else gets here, Xanatos will be gone, and he'll have
taken the boy with him." He put a hand on Obi-Wan's shoulder.
"We have started to investigate Xanatos' activities, and we
have a chance of finding him."
No longer invisible, Obi-Wan perforce raised his chin and
looked the council in the eye. "Knight Kenobi." That was Mace
Windu, leaning forward next to Yoda. "Is it your opinion that
you and Master Jinn can track down Xanatos?"
"I think," Obi-Wan said carefully, "that at this moment we are
the ones who stand the best chance of doing it." He shifted one
leg, not so incidentally jabbing the bony part of his knee into
Qui-Gon's thigh. Mission parameters were shifting rather
abruptly, here. "It seems likely that Xanatos will move on
after the podrace tomorrow and take the child with him."
Master Windu's eyes were cool and thoughtful. "Do you also
believe that the child is the chosen one?"
What Obi-Wan believed most strongly, at that moment, was that
there was no end to the trouble Qui-Gon Jinn could get him
into. Qui-Gon's fingers were digging into his shoulder again;
it was starting to be a familiar sensation. "I'm not as
familiar as Master Jinn with the prophecies regarding the
chosen one," he said. "The boy is, yes, one of the most
powerful force users I have ever met," he slanted a quick
glance at Yoda, who was unreadable, "and to leave him to be
trained by Xanatos would be a tactical error."
It was a dispassionate assessment, and a true one, and he saw
Shmi's face again, heard the raw tone in her voice. He wasn't
leaving Anakin in Xanatos' hands if he could help it,
regardless of how he had to formulate his opinion in order to
make it seem reasonable to the council. To judge by the press
of Qui-Gon's fingers, Qui-Gon thought he was being much too
conservative, but Mace Windu nodded slowly. "The boy and
Xanatos together could be a threat to the Jedi."
"Yes," Obi-Wan agreed, because it was true. Xanatos' grudge
towards the order guiding Anakin's raw ability could lead to
serious danger. The Jedi could not afford two enemies like
that.
"Careful you must be, Qui-Gon," Yoda said. "Certain, are you,
that you can do this? That you are recovered already from an
ordeal of several years?"
"I'm fine, my master." Qui-Gon's voice was quiet.
Mace Windu looked closely at him all the same, and then looked
at Obi-Wan. "Knight Kenobi?"
"I'm quite healthy as well," Obi-Wan said blandly, and felt
more than heard the small chuff of sudden laughter from
Qui-Gon.
Yoda tapped his cane. "Report in every day, you will." Even
through a low-quality comm screen, across light years, Master
Yoda's presence could be overpowering. Obi-Wan nodded. He
lifted his eyes to look over Yoda's shoulder and exchange a
quick, small smile of greeting with Yaddle, while Qui-Gon made
their good-byes to the council, still in the same quiet, polite
voice. The screen flickered off, and Obi-Wan retrieved his
card.
"When I was just knighted, I was told that young knights barely
past their knighting didn't talk back to the council," Qui-Gon
said, letting go of Obi-Wan's shoulder.
"When I was just knighted, I was told that you hadn't listened.
You left a legacy behind for a new generation of Jedi knights
to live up to." Obi-Wan tucked the card into his belt pouch. He
slid off the bench and out of the booth, and waited for Qui-Gon
to follow.
Qui-Gon swung his legs out and stretched them, wiggling his
bare toes. Then he stood up and leaned over Obi-Wan. "You
surprised me. Maybe you wouldn't have made such a bad padawan
after all."
Looking up, Obi-Wan noticed that Qui-Gon's beard grew unevenly
on the right side, and was greyer there. "Perhaps you can ask
Luxewa about it, since you never got round to finding out for
yourself. I'm going to get a room for the night. I think you'd
better stay here." He looked Qui-Gon quickly up and down. "You
don't look entirely respectable."
Obi-Wan walked away. "You've got blood on your shirt," Qui-Gon
said, behind him, but Obi-Wan didn't turn.
The truth was that in this cantina, it didn't matter what you
looked like, it only mattered what your money looked like. In
the spaceport district, a man with blood on his shirt was
nothing new, and the cantina owner wouldn't have looked twice
at Qui-Gon, either, regardless of the bandages and the bare
feet. Obi-Wan haggled for a while, realizing that their next
call to the council had better be paid by the recipient. He had
neglected to ask Qui-Gon whether he would stay with Obi-Wan, or
spend the night at Shmi's home. The free rooms none of them had
less than two beds, so at least he didn't have to go back to
ask.
As he settled on a reasonable sum with the Txinxi cantina
owner, Obi-Wan regretted his impulsive overreaction. What had
happened on Bandomeer all those years ago was over and done
with, and he knew that. Obi-Wan leaned his elbows on the
scarred stone ledge of the bar top and breathed slowly,
surprised at himself. He could remember so clearly what it had
been like to be that child, to be full of his own wishes, and
the hopes that had sprung up when he had encountered Qui-Gon at
what seemed to be the last moment. He'd been so sure that that
meeting had meant something.
Obi-Wan signed the guest log with a barely readable squiggle
and accepted the key to the room. He turned and leaned back
against the bar, and saw Qui-Gon lounging against the wall over
by the comm booths. It was past. It was all in the past. He
wasn't that child any more, and he'd do better to concentrate
on Anakin. It was already late afternoon, and the race would be
held at noon the next day; the podracers would be in the arena
from early morning. Taking another slow, deliberate breath,
Obi-Wan walked back to Qui-Gon.
"I'm going to change my shirt," he said, and went past the
booths and through the doorway beyond them, hung with ropes of
blue and green beads. The cantina only had six rooms for rent,
all of them off this one corridor. Obi-Wan unlocked the door
and went in, and Qui-Gon followed him, sitting down on one of
the beds. Obi-Wan pulled a shirt out of the package the clothes
dealer had wrapped for him. "Will you be staying here, or with
Shmi?"
"What?" Qui-Gon looked up blankly. Then he shook his head.
"Right now she blames me for not rescuing her son. I don't
think I'd be much of a comfort to her. I assumed you meant for
both of us to stay here."
Obi-Wan unfastened his belt and sash and took his shirt off,
looking at the rips and bloodstains over the shoulder. He
didn't think it could be salvaged. Dropping it on the floor, he
craned his neck and tried to see his shoulder. There was no
mirror in the room. He ran his fingertips over the marks. The
skin was a little hot and tender, but not unreasonably so.
"Perhaps she'll come to see things differently," he said. "You
weren't in a position to stop Xanatos. If anyone is to blame, I
am."
"I'll be sure to blame you when I talk to her again," Qui-Gon
said with a tired smile. "Stop picking at that or it won't
heal."
"I'm not picking at it." Obi-Wan put on one of his new shirts.
The weave was coarser than that of his old shirt, and he could
feel that it would itch. He tied the laces at the wrists and
throat. "It might be possible to trace Xanatos' movements
either from his ship, or through the podrace arrangements. If
Anakin is registered as racing for him now, he must have made
contact somehow."
"Probably through one of his crewmembers." Qui-Gon got to his
feet. "He's not likely to have appeared himself. But it's a
place to start."
Obi-Wan put his belt back on, forgoing the sash, and followed
Qui-Gon out of the room. The cantina was starting to fill up,
he noticed as they went through it, with people talking about
podracing. Out on the street, the change in pace and mood was
even more perceptible than earlier. It was like the eve of a
festival day. Obi-Wan wondered how often podraces were held.
That information hadn't been in his crash course on Tatooine.
The sun was low, and the light seemed redder and warmer. They
went to the hangar, where the admiring crowd had thinned out,
and found nothing; Xanatos' crew might be inside the ship, but
they weren't loitering around to be talked to, and the hangar
crew had no information about the ship or its owner. The Ya'an
yacht just sat there, looking sleek and expensive, with its
weaponry hidden beneath smooth polished plates. Not as fast as
the Arrow, though, Obi-Wan thought, if it came to that.
With more people on the streets, more grit and sand whirled up
in the air, and by the time they reached the speeder rental
lot, Qui-Gon's pants were tan to the knees, and sand had
trickled down over the tops of Obi-Wan's boots. The guards at
the rental lot looked, but did not comment or try to keep them
out. Perhaps they recognized Obi-Wan from before. He took care
to display the access card with the rental agency logo as he
walked across the lot.
They took the speeder out and went around the edge of the city.
By one warehouse, a work crew was digging a wall free of sand,
trying to hold the desert off. The city had probably moved over
the years, Obi-Wan thought, revolving like a lopsided wheel
around its central sources of water. Most of the new warehouses
were on the other side of the spaceport district, in what was
currently a more sheltered area.
Obi-Wan steered the speeder away from Mos Espa and out to the
podrace arena. The distance wasn't much, in a fast speeder, and
the arena could be seen from a long way away. It looked like a
very large toy dropped in the middle of a very large sandbox,
and its shadow ran broad and black out over the dunes,
stretching like a river away from the setting sun. Obi-Wan flew
up as close as he could get and parked the speeder near the
arena opening closest to Mos Espa. When he looked back, he
could see the first lights begin to come on in the town houses'
small windows.
Around the arena, a crowd of beings bustled this way and that,
unintimidated by its bulk. Vendors were already setting up
their stalls in preparation for the next day, and
raggedy-looking mechanics were wandering around hoping to be
hired at the last minute by one of the pod crews. Obi-Wan and
Qui-Gon made their way to one of the main entrances and looked
inside. The offices were closed. Not the betting offices, those
wouldn't close at all this night, but everything to do with
administration and management was shut down already. They
walked through the working crews and the milling crowds, trying
to pick out administration staff. In the area of the pit hangar
set aside for Anakin's pod, there was nothing as yet. "We could
stay here tonight," Obi-Wan said. "Sooner or later, they'll
show up."
Qui-Gon looked thoughtful, then shook his head. "It would be
better to find them someplace less crowded. We can always come
back early tomorrow morning." Some of the mechanics working on
the other pods were giving them suspicious looks, and Obi-Wan
was reminded that podracing frequently involved sabotage and
dirty tricks.
They walked around a while longer, talking to anyone who'd
stand still long enough and buying some food off a Twi'lek with
a sweet-rolls cart. Obi-Wan poured extra green sauce on his
roll and watched one podracing crew wax side panels, while
another was lifting out the entire pod engine and looking
worried. The sauce dripped down on his fingers, and he licked
it off. It tingled on his tongue. Some children were playing at
podracing, running through the sand; every now and then one of
them would fall over and scream "Boom!" and throw up clouds of
sand with thrashing arms and legs.
The other racing crews hadn't seen Anakin, knew nothing of him,
and thought very poorly of his chances in the race. Obi-Wan
talked idly to everyone he met between bites of sweet roll, and
Qui-Gon bent the full weight of his force-heavy stare on them,
but there was no information to be had. No one seemed to know
that Anakin had been sold; no one had seen a work crew in black
uniforms. The sun slipped below the horizon, and Qui-Gon tossed
the last piece of his roll to a small, scruffy jerz hunting for
scraps along the outside wall of the arena. "This is useless,"
he said. "They must still be somewhere in town."
Walking back to the place where they had left the speeder,
Obi-Wan noticed that he had sand between his toes. He unhooked
one of the small water containers from his utility belt, drank
slowly, and handed it to Qui-Gon, who finished it. One drop ran
from the corner of Qui-Gon's mouth down into his ragged beard,
and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.
Someone had put fliers for a betting agency on the speeder's
dashboard. Obi-Wan handed them to Qui-Gon, checked that no one
had siphoned off fuel, and took off. On the way back, he
watched the stars come out. Shmi would be home by now, away
from the distraction of work, all alone with the knowledge that
Anakin was gone. "Are you sure you shouldn't go to her?"
Qui-Gon folded the fliers and dropped them on the floor between
his feet. He rubbed the back of his hand against the bruise on
his cheekbone. Despite the hum of force around him, he looked
tired. "Are you uncomfortable, after what we did?" he asked
quietly. "Or is it just that I snore?"
"You don't," Obi-Wan said, a little startled. They were going
past the part of town that held the slave quarters, and the
small houses packed tightly together seemed to huddle,
sheltering against each other, as if for comfort. "I was
thinking about what it would be like for her to be home,
alone."
"She has friends among the neighbors." Qui-Gon turned his head
and looked at the town, where lights showed in more of the
small, deepset windows. "Women who understand this pain better
than I ever could." His mouth twisted a little. "I led Xanatos
to Anakin. He came here to find me. I haven't been much of a
friend to her."
The speeder's fuel gauge was almost at the red line. Obi-Wan
skirted close by the houses and warehouses, taking the shortest
possible route to the spaceport district and the rental
agency's lot. The work crew that had been digging sand was gone
now. Only the spaceport workers had night shifts to contend
with.
The lot was much emptier than before, he noticed as they parked
the speeder. The spaceport looked busier, too; several ships
had landed as they came in. The night shift would have much to
do. The rental agency office was still open. Podracing might
mean more off-planet customers looking for local
transportation. Obi-Wan jumped out of the speeder, and Qui-Gon
swung his long legs over the side a bit more slowly. The lot
attendant was reading a betting sheet, doing little
calculations in the blank spaces, but she promised to have the
speeder refueled at once.
The streets of Mos Espa were crowded, and became more so as
they moved away from the warehouses and in among the cantinas
and bars. Laughter and smoke and music spilled out from open
cantina doors. Hangar six was closed, and they couldn't get in.
Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon wandered along the streets looking,
listening, testing the force currents and stepping carefully
out of the way of drunken dockworkers who were celebrating
their anticipated win this night and might be drowning their
sorrows the next. They wandered into cantinas and looked for
the black uniforms Xanatos' crewmembers wore. Walking from
place to place was not enough to get the tlao smoke out of
their clothes. After a while, they split up to cover more
ground.
n, in the slave quarters. Obi-Wan walked right out to the
edge of the town and stood there, looking out over the sand
dunes, hearing the whine of engines as another ship landed in
the spaceport. The warehouses and loading docks were a solid
presence at his back. Obi-Wan closed his eyes and slowed his
breathing.
He knew his connection to the living force was sometimes
tenuous, less under his control, less intuitive for him than
the workings of the unifying force. Yoda had told him many
times that until he stopped thinking in terms of controlling
the living force, he never truly would master either it or
himself. Here under the stars, he took a step in and a step
out, and tried to sense the force currents to see if there was
anything they could tell him.
At first there was nothing beyond the awareness of life and
more life in the city. No trace of Anakin, no breath of
darkness or threat from Xanatos. Nothing strange at all. Then a
flicker at the edge of his awareness grew stronger, and he
concentrated on it. This was no darkness, though. This was
warmth, and strength, and a rock-like core of certainty.
Obi-Wan knew that certainty; he could see it every time he
looked in Qui-Gon's eyes. It had been there to see long before
Qui-Gon regained his connection to the force. It was just all
the more powerful now, shining like a beacon and attracting
anyone even marginally sensitive to it. Obi-Wan pulled away
slowly. Away from Qui-Gon, the desert night seemed cold, as
though the chill of space was seeping down from between the
stars. Obi-Wan drew back into himself, into the shelter of his
own body--and felt as a parting touch the deepest of cold
darkness, sliding down his spine like the blade of a black iron
knife.
He staggered. Straightening, turning, he saw nothing but a
sandy street and a warehouse wall. Obi-Wan put a hand to his
back and felt rough cloth and under that, uninjured skin.
Nothing had touched him physically, but then, he knew that. He
stepped back and leaned against the wall, digging his heels
into the ground. The sand yielded under his boots until he was
almost rooted in it. There was something out there. Obi-Wan
stared up at the stars. His pulse quieted as the startlement
wore off. Shaking his sleeves back, he put his hands together
palm to palm and reached out again.
And once again, there was nothing. The life of the city, the
force currents that swept over the surface of the planet, the
unmistakable presence of Qui-Gon, but no Anakin, and not a
trace of the dark presence that had touched him before. Braced
to encounter it once more, Obi-Wan found only the ordinary
swirl and flow of life. He shook his head, slipping back behind
his eyes once more. Those with a strong connection to the
living force could walk in its currents day and night, their
awareness of it like an additional sense, or so he was told.
That was not how it was for him.
Obi-Wan pulled his hands apart. A couple of his fingers were
still sticky from the sauce. He crouched down and rubbed sand
into the stickiness, and then scraped it off. A little better.
Straightening up, he stepped out of the shallow depression in
the sand that he'd made for himself and walked back in among
the houses. He wasn't straining to touch the living force any
more, but he found that he had a clear idea all the same of
where to find Qui-Gon. There was a subtle tug in the air, more
a memory of connection than anything else.
The children were back behind the cantina, picking through the
refuse, and this time he ghosted past without disturbing them.
Out on the more crowded streets again, he listened for anything
that might snag his attention as he moved through groups of
locals and travelers. A small girl was selling banners and
flags for the more popular podracers from a tray. When a
dockworker staggered sideways towards her, Obi-Wan tugged her
out of the way, and only a few flags fell off the tray into the
sand. She smiled up at him; her eyelids were heavy, her eyes
overbright. "Shouldn't you be in bed?" he said.
"I have to sell all this first." She straightened the piles of
banners and looked at the crowd with a jaded eye. "Everyone
just wants Sebulba banners, and I'm out of those. Kasht always
thinks people will buy more flags and banners for Undai'a just
because he bets on Undai'a himself." The girl shot a quick,
apologetic look at Obi-Wan and tugged her arm out of his grip.
"I gotta get back to work."
"Kasht, that's your employer?"
"My owner." She tucked strands of sand-colored hair behind her
ear. Her eyes turned wary. "Look, I really have to go. I, uh,
don't have time to stand around and talk."
Obi-Wan stepped back carefully. He fished in his pocket for
spare change and got out a handful of small, thin coins. "Is
this enough for a flag?"
The girl snorted. "That's not even enough for half a
flag." Obi-Wan started to tuck the coins away again, and she
stopped him with a hand on his arm. "But you kept them out of
the dust, I can let you have one cheap. Which d'you want?"
"This one," Obi-Wan said, picking one at random. He put the
money in the girl's hand and watched her dart into the crowd on
the street again, crying her wares in a thin, tired voice.
Looking down, he saw that it was one of the Undai'a flags, and
he didn't even know who Undai'a was. Obi-Wan rolled the strip
of flag around the plastine stick and tucked it in his belt,
and walked off.
He met Qui-Gon outside the cantina where they were staying.
Qui-Gon looked weary; there was a shadow over his face. His
hair was coming out of its braid. Noise spilled from the
cantina door, and Obi-Wan wished they could be out in the quiet
places under the stars, away from the town. Instead, he squared
his shoulders and they both went inside, pausing for a while in
the raucous crowd that filled up the cantina bar to listen to
what was said and yelled. No one wore a black uniform, and no
one talked about the Ya'an yacht, or about Anakin.
Obi-Wan glanced at Qui-Gon, who nodded, and they went down the
short hallway with the comm booths, through the thin beaded
drapery, back to the corridor with the cantina's few rooms.
Qui-Gon stopped at their door, Obi-Wan unlocked it, and they
went inside. The brick and plaster walls of the cantina, as in
most buildings in Mos Espa, were thick, and shut out most of
the sound.
"I haven't found anything," Qui-Gon said. "Have you?"
"No trace of Anakin or Xanatos." Obi-Wan sat down on the room's
only chair and began to unbuckle his boots. "But there was
something, when I touched the force." He paused to undo another
couple of buckles, but Qui-Gon said nothing. "I felt something
dark. Something very powerful."
Qui-Gon sat at the foot of one of the beds, facing Obi-Wan.
"Could you tell what it was? Where it came from?"
Obi-Wan shook his head. "It vanished completely."
"It could have been Xanatos. At least that means he's still
here."
Tugging off his left boot, Obi-Wan considered it. "I suppose
it's possible," he said quietly. He tugged off the right boot,
too, and flexed his feet, stretched his toes. His socks were
full of sand. "I don't know." There had been something about
that touch that spoke of a colder and more remote cruelty than
anything he'd felt from Xanatos, but then, his experience with
Xanatos was limited. Qui-Gon would know such things better.
Obi-Wan peeled his socks off and shook them out. The floor was
already sandy. The skin on his feet had chafed red in several
places, and he rubbed at them, wishing for a little of the
ointment he'd used back in Jabba's palace. Obi-Wan unbuckled
his belt, and the Undai'a flag fell into his lap. It was a
cheap print, Undai'a's name in white on red cloth. He picked it
up and twirled it between his fingers. Thinking back to the
selection on the girl's tray, he didn't think he'd seen any
banners with Anakin's name on. He could easily call up an image
of the boy's face, sunlit and smiling, but then it was followed
by the shadows of yesterday's vision.
"Is your ship ready to leave?" Qui-Gon asked, dispelling the
memory-image. He was leaning back on his hands now, rolling his
head, legs stretched out across the floor so that his bare feet
almost touched Obi-Wan's discarded boots. "If we can get to
Anakin before the race starts tomorrow, we can leave with him."
Obi-Wan frowned. "Xanatos will be there, too. And what about
Shmi?"
"I'll call her now," Qui-Gon said, "and ask her to meet us at
the ship tomorrow." He got to his feet, standing straight as
though he'd never sprawled across a bed in his life. "I know
Xanatos will be there. He's too well hidden for us to find him
tonight. It's our only chance."
"The Arrow is ready to go," Obi-Wan said slowly, "and she can
outrun Xanatos' yacht easily enough. But we can't take her to
the arena. Even if we get Anakin away from Xanatos, we'd still
have to get from there to the hangar, and Xanatos will have his
people all over the spaceport." Although none of them had been
visible tonight.
Qui-Gon, at the door, paused and looked over his shoulder. The
braid hung like a length of fraying rope down his back. "Do you
have a better idea?" Obi-Wan had nothing to say to that, and
Qui-Gon's hand went to the door handle. "Trust in the force,
Obi-Wan," he said and went out.
"I don't think the force objects to a good backup plan,"
Obi-Wan muttered. He got up, too, and stretched. His torn old
shirt was still on the floor by one of the beds, and he went
over and picked it up, folding it and putting it on the chair,
and his sandy socks on top of it. He righted his boots and put
them by the wall. The room was small, and untidiness would make
it seem smaller still. The beds were to either side of the low
window, the chair was by the door, and that was it.
Prickles of tired restlessness ran down his back. There wasn't
enough room on the floor for any of the moving meditations.
Obi-Wan sat down on one of the beds and pulled his legs up,
straightened his spine and relaxed his shoulders. He wished he
had a clean pair of socks. Everything he'd brought to Tatooine
had been left behind at Jabba's palace. Obi-Wan pushed his hair
back out of his face; there was sand in that, too. He brushed
his fingers against the coarse bedcover, counting threads with
his fingertips.
The door creaked a little. Qui-Gon stood in the doorway, still
straight-backed and square-shouldered, still looking tired.
"She wasn't there. I'll get hold of her tomorrow." He looked
around the room. "Is there--"
"End of the hallway," Obi-Wan said. "One ri of water per person
per day is included in the room price. It's measured out by the
wall unit when you punch in the room number."
Qui-Gon nodded and closed the door again. Obi-Wan closed his
eyes. There was a faint breeze coming in through the window.
This room was unusually hot; he wondered if it shared a wall
with the cantina kitchen. Sinking into himself, he breathed in
long, slow, calming breaths. He had to be ready, they both had
to be ready, for whatever would come the next day. He didn't
believe that Xanatos would leave Anakin unguarded before the
race.
He hoped Shmi was with friends who would support her.
The muted sound of people talking and laughing in the cantina
sounded almost like distant running water. Over it, Obi-Wan
heard Qui-Gon's returning footsteps, and he looked up when the
door opened. Qui-Gon had trimmed his beard, and cut a hand's
breadth off his hair, which hung loose and heavy over his
shoulders; he no longer looked quite so ragged. He hadn't
bothered to put his shirt back on for the short walk along the
hallway, and Obi-Wan was pleased to see that the bandages over
his collarbones showed no signs of bloodstains. "A ri is not a
lot of water," Qui-Gon said, came into the room and closed the
door.
Qui-Gon sat down on the other bed and leaned forward, elbows on
knees. He sat like that for a while, and Obi-Wan watched him
wordlessly, until Qui-Gon straightened up and began to braid
his hair again for the night. He did it very fast, strands
slipping so quickly between his fingers that Obi-Wan wondered
how he kept track of them. When he reached the end, he tied the
braid off with a thread that looked to be ripped from Obi-Wan's
torn shirt.
Obi-Wan got up and left the room in his turn. Out in the
hallway, he could hear that the cantina guests were singing
something. It was mournful for a drinking song, slow-paced and
in a minor key. Obi-Wan slipped into the bathroom and cleaned
himself up quickly, washing his face and his hands and his
feet. He knew he would never get all the sand off, not with
just a ri of water, and sure enough, when he walked out again
he could still feel sand between his toes. The same song still
echoed through the hall as he went back into the room.
The overhead light was off, but light from outside fell in
through the window, laying a pale bar across the floor between
the beds. Qui-Gon sat up in bed, leaning back against the wall,
loosely wrapped in a sheet. Obi-Wan began to undress, taking
off his utility belt and the new shirt and putting them on the
chair. He loosened the lightsaber and left it uncovered so that
he could get to it easily should the need arise. Then he
paused. "Perhaps I am a little uncomfortable," he admitted.
"This situation is new to me."
"It's new to me, too," Qui-Gon said, and for a moment he
sounded wryly amused, then he turned serious. "What we did was
by necessity, Obi-Wan. You were as courteous and considerate as
it was possible to be under the circumstances."
Obi-Wan took off his pants but kept his linens on. He went to
the empty bed and slipped under the sheet, stretching out with
his hands under his head. Qui-Gon was only a shadow at the edge
of his vision. Only that morning he had woken up tangled in
Qui-Gon's arms. The intimacy between them had been artificial,
created by situation, not by choice, but nevertheless, it had
left memories behind, in his body and in his mind. "Yes, Master
Jinn," he said.
There was a brief pause. "I think it would be better if you
called me Qui-Gon." The sheets rustled as Qui-Gon scooted away
from the wall to lie down. The sound of someone else settling
down for the night in a bed next to his own reminded Obi-Wan,
as always, of the initiates' dormitory. When Qui-Gon spoke
again, his voice was very quiet. "When Anakin broke the chain,
there was a moment when nothing happened. I thought... I had
been cut off from the force for so long. I thought it might
never return to me."
Obi-Wan shivered. Those words tasted like sand and ashes. "But
it did," he said, and then felt foolish for offering
reassurance to a Jedi master who knew perfectly well that it
had.
Qui-Gon moved again, and the bed creaked under his weight. "It
did," he said, too, and Obi-Wan took the soft joy in Qui-Gon's
voice with him into sleep.
The smell of lye woke him; the sheet was over his face, and it
smelled of cheap detergent. Obi-Wan sneezed. He pulled the
sheet away and blinked at the bright sunlight. Not much reached
in through the window, as the walls were so thick, but the
small square of light fell right over his face and shoulders.
In the other bed, Qui-Gon slept on, undisturbed by sun or
sheets.
Obi-Wan stretched, and sat up. The cuts on his shoulder itched
badly, so they were probably healing. The skin between his toes
felt abraded, and he pulled up a foot and started to brush the
sand away. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Qui-Gon,
who was sleeping on his stomach with one arm up over his head.
The braid trailed over the edge of the bed. Obi-Wan smiled
faintly, brushed the sand off the sheet, and pulled up his
other foot. The sun was warm on his skin.
No raucous sound filtered through the walls; the cantina was
quiet. Obi-Wan tried to remember the tune of the mournful song
he'd heard the night before. He swung his legs over the side of
the bed and ran his hands through his hair, getting it out of
his face. Qui-Gon stirred in his sleep, moving his hand
restlessly. The sheet slipped down and Obi-Wan could see
Qui-Gon's back, heavy with muscle, marked with a few scars. The
nape of Qui-Gon's neck looked bare and vulnerable. Obi-Wan got
to his feet and took the two steps that separated his bed from
Qui-Gon's and stretched out his hand. Then he hesitated,
changed his mind, pulled on his pants, and went out of the
room.
At the end of the hallway, a sleepy-looking Rodian was already
waiting in line. Obi-Wan stood beside him and waited, too. When
it was finally his turn, he hurried, using only a small part of
his water allotment for the day. It seemed likely he'd need it
more later. His hair felt lank and dirty--sandy, really--but he
ignored it. Xanatos was hardly likely to care how presentable
he was.
By the time Obi-Wan came back to the room, Qui-Gon had woken up
by himself and was loosening the dressings over collarbones to
look underneath. "You should leave those be," Obi-Wan said.
"Staring at it doesn't make it heal faster. Or so the healers
always told me," he added quickly as Qui-Gon looked up at him.
"They always told me that, too," Qui-Gon said, quite mildly. He
pressed the bandages back into place, but one of the tape
strips wouldn't fasten. The top right corner of the bandage
kept flopping forward. Obi-Wan sat down on the foot of his bed
and brushed the sand off the soles of his feet, shook his socks
out, and put them on. "If you let me have your card, I'll call
Shmi again," Qui-Gon went on.
"Yes, Master Jinn." Obi-Wan pulled his shirt on. It smelled of
the same cheap detergent as the sheets, he noticed now, only
not quite as strongly. It could not really be lye; wood was a
luxury material on Tatooine. He reached for his belt, only to
have Qui-Gon take hold of his wrist.
"I thought we agreed that you would call me Qui-Gon. I'm not a
stickler for the forms, and the situations we've found
ourselves in have hardly lent themselves to formality."
Obi-Wan looked at Qui-Gon's hand around his wrist. Qui-Gon's
fingers were tanned from years of exposure to the Tatooine sun,
his own skin much paler. "The situations have been unusual," he
said. "That's precisely it. The intimacy between us has been
enforced, not real."
There was a pause, and then Qui-Gon let go of Obi-Wan's wrist,
got off the bed, and walked over to his own pile of neatly
folded clothing. "Very well, Knight Kenobi." He pulled on pants
and shirt and walked out of the room; a few moments later,
Obi-Wan heard another door open and close at the end of the
hallway, and the faint rumble of the wall unit measuring out
water.
Obi-Wan finished dressing, shook sand out of his boots before
putting them on, and did up the buckles with slow care. The new
shirt was less comfortable than the torn uniform one, and not
designed for freedom of movement in the same way, but the seams
were old and worn and would probably give way rather than
constrict him, or so he hoped. He stood in the middle of the
room and stretched his arms this way and that, rotating his
shoulders, careful not to stress the fabric unnecessarily. The
room seemed more cramped now, in daylight, than it had last
night. The beds were very close, and there was no space for him
to practice even the smallest of katas.
A soft knock on the door made him turn a little too quickly,
and he felt a seam begin to give over his right shoulder.
Obi-Wan went to the door and opened it, and found himself face
to face with Shmi Skywalker. "I want to talk to you," she said.
"And Qui-Gon, is he here?"
"He'll be right back," Obi-Wan said, stepping aside to let her
into the room and hastily removing his torn old shirt from the
chair to offer her a seat. "He was about to call you."
Shmi shook her head at the chair and remained standing.
"Something will happen," she said. She looked unsettled, as
though her center of gravity had shifted unexpectedly. "I can
feel it." Shmi swayed on her feet, and Obi-Wan put a steadying
hand under her elbow. "We need to get out to the arena."
Obi-Wan was about to seat Shmi on the chair whether she wanted
it or not, when Qui-Gon came back. Shmi turned abruptly towards
the door, pulling away from Obi-Wan's grip, and a complex look
passed between her and Qui-Gon; then she nodded, and swayed
again, and Qui-Gon stepped forward and caught her in a
comforting embrace. Qui-Gon curved one hand around her head and
held her against his chest, and Obi-Wan, once again very aware
of the smallness of the room, turned away and looked out the
window. The sun was higher, the patch of light that had fallen
across his bed gone.
Behind him, Qui-Gon and Shmi talked so softly that he was
probably not intended to listen, but he'd never mastered the
skill of voluntary deafness. Obi-Wan folded his arms and
watched a jerz sneaking around the garbage cans as Qui-Gon
spoke soothing words of comfort and Shmi repeated her
conviction that something was about to happen. She'd found them
through the record of yesterday's call; when Qui-Gon asked
about the previous night, she said she had been with a
neighbor.
The jerz was small and thin, its ribs standing out beneath
matted fur. It reminded Obi-Wan of the children he'd seen
scrounging for food last night. He wondered if they were
slaves, but thought they were more likely to be street orphans.
He wondered if freeing all the slaves, as Anakin dreamed of,
would create a new underclass and cause increased poverty for
those who already had so little. His thoughts felt like an echo
of all the classes on history and economics he'd ever taken,
and the jerz overturned a garbage can with a loud rattle,
grabbed part of a stripped iribird carcass in its jaws, and ran
off. Obi-Wan cleared his throat and turned around. "I believe
it might be time for us to leave for the arena," he said.
Shmi had pulled out of Qui-Gon's arms and was standing more
securely on her own two feet. She turned to look at Obi-Wan,
and her gaze was level, determined. "Yes. It is far to walk."
"We have a speeder." Obi-Wan was glad Shmi was a small woman.
Speeder seats were not designed to accommodate more than two
people at most. "I think we'll all fit in it." Another thought
struck him. "Forgive me, but--you aren't working today?"
Shmi shook her head. "Today is a free day. Nearly all the shops
and business places in Mos Espa are closed. Only a very harsh
owner would make someone work on a podracing day." She smoothed
a hand over her skirt, tugging out a wrinkle only she could
see. Obi-Wan thought it was the same skirt she had worn two
days ago, when he had swung her out of the path of the dying
khant, but he wasn't certain. If it was, she had brushed all
the sand out. "We need to get there early. Anakin must not
enter the race."
"Come, then." Qui-Gon held the door for her and turned his head
to meet Obi-Wan's eyes before following. With a last look at
the back alley and the garbage cans, Obi-Wan left the window
and crossed the room in four long strides. He closed and locked
the door, and hurried to catch up with Shmi and Qui-Gon. His
hair fell in his eyes.
The cantina was almost empty. An overturned chair had been left
lying in the middle of the floor. Behind the bar stood a
sulky-looking Txinxi youth who looked to be the proprietor's
son. His whiskers were drooping, and he barely acknowledged
their existence as they nodded to him before going out. This
day felt almost hotter than the previous one. Sunshine beat
down on a few people hurrying along the street. Qui-Gon, Shmi
and Obi-Wan walked along briskly towards the speeder rental
lot. Obi-Wan thought that he had never heard Mos Espa be so
quiet before. No songs spilling out from the cantinas, no
street-stall owners crying their wares. No children running and
shouting.
When they arrived at the speeder lot, it, too, was empty and
quiet. The attendant's booth was closed, and so were the gates.
The fence around the lot wasn't all that high, though. "I'll
climb in," Obi-Wan offered.
Qui-Gon nodded, and Obi-Wan made his way up the metal rails
that made up the gates, swinging himself over the spikes at the
top and landing on the balls of his feet on the other side. He
hurried over to his speeder, almost the only one left in the
lot except for a couple of wrecks over in one corner, rusting
quietly. Business must have been good last night, with many
off-planet customers requiring transportation out to the arena.
Jumping into the speeder, Obi-Wan powered it up only to have
the engine die again at once. He frowned and tried again; the
engine gave a faint cough, then was silent.
Obi-Wan looked at the fuel gauge in sudden suspicion. It
pointed to empty, just as it had last night. Promising himself
a long talk with the lot attendant later, he jumped out of the
speeder again. A quick look was enough to tell him that the
wrecks in the corner weren't going anywhere any time soon, and
certainly there was no fuel in their tanks. Obi-Wan grabbed the
fuel container from under the speeder seat and ran back to the
gate. He tossed the container over and waited to see that
Qui-Gon caught it before climbing up and over himself. The seam
of his shirt tried to catch on one of the spikes, and he had to
tease it free before jumping down. Obi-Wan landed in a small
cloud of sand, and Qui-Gon held the container out to him again.
"What is wrong?" Shmi asked.
"No fuel," Obi-Wan said briefly and ran down the street towards
the nearest refueling station, hair falling in his eyes again.
The fuel container slapped against his leg as he ran. When he
got there, the station was closed, and all the fuel pumps were
locked. A hand-written sign in Huttese said, CLOSED ON RACE
DAY. Obi-Wan looked through narrowed eyes at the pump locks,
but they appeared quite complicated, and there was an alarm
system. He hoisted the fuel container higher and ran on.
The next refueling station was closed, as well, but it had two
automatic pumps. Obi-Wan slotted in his card and filled up the
container. The harsh smell of speeder fuel slapped him in the
face as he bent to screw the lid back on, and he sneezed,
picked the container up, and headed back as fast as he could.
Qui-Gon and Shmi stood waiting for him, both with their arms
folded, and they might have looked serene to anyone else, but
Obi-Wan could feel the weight of their looks as he came
running. When he came to a halt, Qui-Gon said, "It might have
been wise to refuel the speeder yesterday."
"I told the lot attendant," Obi-Wan said, not quite through
clenched teeth, remembering her cheerful agreement. "She must
have forgotten." Pushing the fuel container into Qui-Gon's
hands, he clambered over the gates for the third time. The side
seam of his shirt caught and ripped. As soon as he came down on
the other side, Qui-Gon tossed the container over, and Obi-Wan
caught it with a little bit of force-help and went back to the
speeder.
Pouring the fuel into the tank with his head turned away to
avoid the fumes, he couldn't help but notice that there were
traces of blood on the speeder seat. Obi-Wan screwed the lid
back on the container and pushed it into place under the seat.
The blood must be from his shoulder. He'd have to pay for
cleaning the speeder seat, or possibly to have it
reupholstered. Obi-Wan frowned at the amount of sand on the
speeder floor, straightened up, and was seized by sudden
dizziness. Stood up too fast, he thought, and then blood
and sand whirled across his vision. Blood and sand, sand and
blood, and a deep echoing darkness. A distant sensation of cold
laughter. He staggered and knew his hands were holding onto
something, though he couldn't see it.
Obi-Wan remembered everything Master Yoda had ever taught him
about visions: how fleeting they were, difficult to interpret.
How to sink into them, try to make them last, memorize every
detail so that it could be pondered later. How to give himself
over to what the vision was trying to say.
He concentrated on the grip of his hands, the sensation of
something hard under his palms, tried to remember to breathe,
and dragged himself forcibly back into the here and now. The
shadows faded. He was on one knee, gripping the side of the
speeder. The lingering smell of fuel in the air combined with
the remembered scent of blood from the vision made his stomach
churn, and he pushed himself upright and past the speeder, bent
forward, and was sick. He hadn't even had any breakfast to
throw up, he thought and spat, and breathed deeply away from
the fuel fumes.
Fumbling for the small water bottle at his belt, Obi-Wan
straightened up and kept breathing in slow and careful breaths.
He rinsed his mouth out twice, then drank a little to try to
settle his stomach. A rattle of metal made him turn around.
Qui-Gon was climbing over the gate. Obi-Wan waved a hand in an
I'm-fine kind of way, but Qui-Gon jumped down and came towards
h
"I don't know." Obi-Wan shied away from touching the memory of
that vision. "There is a darkness..." His words seemed small
and inconsequential compared to the horror he'd felt. There was
no way for him to adequately convey the urgency that had come
over him. "I think we should hurry."
They both got into the speeder, and Obi-Wan took it over the
gate. Qui-Gon got out to wait with Shmi while Obi-Wan went down
to the refueling station once again and filled up the fuel tank
at the same automatic pump. His card beeped when he took it out
of the slot. He had almost nothing left. Getting into the
speeder, he powered it up and checked all the gauges and
warning lights, unwilling to be caught short halfway to the
arena by some other deficiency. Everything looked to be in
order, so Obi-Wan nudged the speeder into motion.
Shmi had her arms folded more tightly around herself, and her
head was bent as if the weight of her braided hair had become
too much for her to hold up. Qui-Gon swung her over the side of
the speeder in a swirl of heavy skirts and clambered in after
her. It was a very narrow fit for three, especially when one of
the three took up as much room as Qui-Gon did, and Obi-Wan had
to hold his arms at an awkward angle as he steered the speeder
away from the spaceport district and out over the sand. The sun
stood mid-morning high, and he pressed his lips together. They
were late.
The city lay quiet to their left, without any noise or bustle.
No one spoke during the ride. Once, when Obi-Wan looked to the
side, he saw that Shmi was holding on to Qui-Gon's hand with a
white-knuckled grip. He wondered if her feeling of impending
doom was the same as his. Nudging at the controls, he pushed
the speeder to go faster.
The area around the arena looked different, and it took Obi-Wan
a few moments to realize why: instead of stretches of bare
sand, he was seeing closely parked speeders and sandskimmers,
and a few larger ships and floating yachts. Arena guards on
small hoverboards were directing the traffic. A hum of sound
rose out of the arena itself, loud enough to be heard over the
speeder's engine. "Get up close," Qui-Gon said, gesturing at
the right side of the arena's massive curved wall, where the
entrance for pilots and mechanics was.
Obi-Wan went that way, but as they got closer, in among the
parked speeders and skimmers, they were slowed down by others
who were also trying to get as close to the arena as possible.
Attendants wearing yellow shirts were waving their arms in
complex signals that seemed to mean 'go away and park somewhere
out in the desert'. Obi-Wan tried to push the speeder higher,
to go over the parked vehicles and aim straight for the
entrance they wanted, but the sharp change in angle flooded the
speeder's engine, and it coughed, ground, and stopped. They
landed with a teeth-rattling whump, and Obi-Wan flung
out an arm to keep Shmi from being slammed forward into the
speeder controls.
"Are you all right?" he asked, and she nodded. Behind them,
someone began to yell, and a claxon bleated and honked. Qui-Gon
glared at Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan glared back. One of the
yellow-shirted attendants was heading their way on his
hoverboard, and Obi-Wan quickly scrambled out of the speeder,
holding out a hand to Shmi, who was a little hampered by her
skirts.
Qui-Gon got out, too, and they set off on foot through the rows
of speeders. The arena loomed over them, its shadowed side
looking dark even in the middle of the day. Glancing up,
Obi-Wan saw that the sun was almost directly overhead, and the
race was going to start at midday. He lengthened his stride.
Shmi, used to walking on sand, had no trouble keeping up with
them, though he could hear her breathing grow faster and more
strained as they got closer to the side entrance they wanted.
When he looked back, he saw that the speeder was being dragged
away, and the line that had built up behind it was being
redirected.
At first Obi-Wan thought that the three hulking Couresians
standing by the entrance were part of the arena security team,
but as he came closer he saw that they were wearing a familiar
black livery. The entrance was a dark arc behind them, high and
wide enough to fly a racing pod through. Obi-Wan slanted a look
sideways, met Qui-Gon's eyes over Shmi's head. Qui-Gon drew
ahead, and Obi-Wan could feel the force moving, like sand
blowing against his skin. The Couresians turned towards them
and drew together, blocking their way. Shmi took hold of
Obi-Wan's arm, and he put his hand over hers.
"You will let us pass," Qui-Gon said. Two of the Couresians
scowled, and the nearest one swayed on her feet. Qui-Gon moved
his hand, the smallest of gestures. Obi-Wan felt every hair on
his arms and the back of his neck stand on end. "You will let
us pass."
The sounds from the crowd in the arena and all the speeder
engines behind them seemed distant and distorted. The shadow of
the arena fell over them, muffling everything. Obi-Wan kept
hold of Shmi's hand and walked forward. The Couresians' eyes
glazed over, and they moved aside. Qui-Gon strode ahead, and
Obi-Wan and Shmi followed. They knew their way around most
public parts of the arena, and some of the private ones, from
the night before. The large maintentance hall where most of the
pods had been kept overnight was straight ahead. They hurried,
their footsteps echoing against the arched ceiling, and came
out into the hall to find it empty. The shapes of some of the
pods were outlined in oil and grease on the floor. Obi-Wan
looked at the space that had been allotted to Anakin's pod and
saw no sign that it had ever been there.
At the other end of the hall, large double doors stood partly
ajar. A cheer came flowing through them, and Obi-Wan deduced
that the pods were lining up for the final pre-race checks, in
full view of the audience. Shmi's grip on his arm tightened,
and she pulled him forward, towards the double doors. "Anakin
is out there," she said.
Obi-Wan dug his heels in and looked back at Qui-Gon. "Master
Jinn," he said, and got no reaction. "We need a plan."
"You don't have a plan? I'm disappointed." The silky voice came
from the double doors. Obi-Wan turned his head slowly to see
Xanatos standing there, leaning casually against one of the
doors, balancing a small metal object on the palm of one hand.
"I must admit, I had higher expectations."
Obi-Wan prised Shmi's fingers off his arm, stepped away from
her, and unclipped the lightsaber from his belt. The back of
his neck prickled, and he shifted his fingers on the familiar
lightsaber handle. Shmi walked backwards out of range of his
sword arm without taking her eyes off Xanatos. Qui-Gon came up
behind her, and Obi-Wan felt a first stirring in the force.
"Your expectations have rarely matched reality," Qui-Gon said.
"Sad, isn't it," Xanatos agreed. "Then again, neither have
yours."
He bounced the metal object in his hand once, twice, and then
threw it straight at Obi-Wan. It unfolded in flight into a
fine-meshed metal net; the change in shape changed its
trajectory, and though Obi-Wan tried to dodge, it landed half
over his face, half on his throat and shoulder, and terror
exploded through him. He staggered, and fell.
It was icy nausea and white-hot horror at once. It was like
being dropped headfirst down a deep well. Obi-Wan wanted to
bring his hands up and claw the mesh away, but he wasn't even
sure he was moving, didn't know if his eyes were open or
closed. The room around him had vanished; the floor had ceased
to support his feet. It was as though all his senses had been
cut off and he couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't feel.
Everything was gone. In some small sane corner of his mind he
knew what had happened, but the rest of him was screaming.
The darkness he'd felt during his vision seemed to be all
around him, and he couldn't breathe. He would drown here. He
would die. He clung to the thought that he would die, because
the alternative was so much more horrifying. Everything was
cold; he thought his bones would freeze. He tried to close his
hand around the hilt of his lightsaber, but could not even feel
his own fingers.
Another ripping pain, as though his head were torn open, a
rattle of metal against concrete, and Obi-Wan gasped for air.
There was feeling again--warmth, and a steady embrace. He made
a small sound, twisted, and was helped over on his hands and
knees so he could throw up. Again, he thought, coughing
up bile. His stomach convulsed again, despite being empty, and
the bile burned his throat, and then he pushed himself away
from the mess. Up on his knees, Obi-Wan swayed dizzily, and
Qui-Gon caught him and eased him down.
"It's all right," Qui-Gon said, running one hand slowly up and
down Obi-Wan's back. "It's gone. It's all right." His voice
sounded real, and echoed against the walls, so the world must
be back.
Obi-Wan opened his eyes and blinked against the light. The
first thing he saw was the metal mesh, lying by the wall as if
thrown against it. He suppressed a shudder. Next to that,
Shmi's booted feet and the folds of her skirt. As he looked at
her, she pushed away from the wall and came closer, walking
carefully around the place on the floor where he had emptied
his stomach. Obi-Wan was curled up, leaning one shoulder
against Qui-Gon's chest, legs drawn close to his body. He
reached for the force and felt it whisper of trouble; felt it,
felt its presence all through his mind and body, and breathed a
brief sigh of gratitude.
"Are you feeling better?" Shmi asked softly.
Obi-Wan nodded and straightened up, away from Qui-Gon, who
stopped rubbing his back and instead offered a hand for him to
push against as he got to his feet. The dizziness returned
briefly, but after a few deep breaths, Obi-Wan felt much
steadier. Qui-Gon got up off the floor, too, and Obi-Wan looked
up at him. For a moment, Qui-Gon seemed like a wall he could
lean against. "It must have been so much worse for you--having
it in your body. I don't know how you survived and stayed
sane."
"I think there are those who would debate the last part,"
Qui-Gon said lightly, but he brushed a hand against Obi-Wan's
shoulder before moving aside.
Obi-Wan fumbled at his utility belt, grabbing the one remaining
water container. There wasn't much water left in the small
bottle, just barely enough for Obi-Wan to rinse his mouth out
again. He felt light-headed, as though he had just recovered
from a high fever, but otherwise well. His 'saber lay on the
floor, and he bent down and picked it up and clipped it to the
belt. "Xanatos?"
"He went out." Shmi was once again moving towards the double
doors, one small step at a time, and her voice was almost
soundless with tension, all air. "It's close to midday."
"He probably hoped to delay us until the race had already
started," Qui-Gon said. "When he left he said that this would
be the most memorable event of Anakin's podracing career. He
must have bet heavily."
Obi-Wan frowned. "He should have tried to stop you, not me."
"You're the one with the lightsaber." Qui-Gon took a longer
step over something lying on the floor, and Obi-Wan looked down
to see a second metal mesh net. "He was too slow with the
second one. I was warned by what happened to you."
Obi-Wan touched the handle of his lightsaber. He touched the
force, too, eager for its familiar presence, but it only made
him more uneasy. There were echoes everywhere, small traces of
his previous visions that seemed to cling to him like lint.
"I'll try to distract him. You try to get Anakin out of here
somehow." It wasn't a plan, more of a heartfelt wish. Qui-Gon
nodded, and they all went through the doors.
The noise was deafening. The heat was stifling. They came out
onto a sandy stretch of concrete leading directly out into the
arena. On either side, walls sloped down, and Obi-Wan could
just barely catch a glimpse of the audience tiers, packed with
beings in their best clothes who were cheering and singing and
laughing and shouting as they waited for the race to start.
Mingled scents of sweet rolls, grilled meat, and salty roasted
strips of tuber peel flavored the air. The voice of the
announcer overlaid all other sounds like oil on water.
There was a cluster of people at the entrance to the arena.
Looking for Xanatos' dark hair and dark clothes, Obi-Wan didn't
spare much attention for the mechanics and guards and vendors.
Children ran this way and that, playing tag with the guards.
Obi-Wan walked forward, with Shmi and Qui-Gon following him. He
caught a glimpse of bright eyes and tangled hair over by one
side; it was the girl from last night, her tray piled chin-high
with flags and banners, trying to shoo off a jerz sniffing at
her ankles without tipping any of her wares off the tray.
"There," Qui-Gon said, putting a hand on Obi-Wan's shoulder as
well as directing his attention with a soft force-nudge.
Xanatos was standing with some of the guards--they were his
guards, wearing the same dark uniform as the yacht crew,
carrying their blasters openly. There was no sign of the arena
staff. Obi-Wan headed for Xanatos. He touched the handle of his
lightsaber again, and as though that were a signal, Xanatos
stiffened and turned his head. Their eyes met. Xanatos said
something quiet to one of the guards and stepped forward to
meet Obi-Wan, though he stopped well out of the reach of a
lightsaber blade. "I didn't expect to see you on your feet
already," he said lightly.
Obi-Wan considered the distance between them, the placement of
the guards, Shmi's and Qui-Gon's position behind and slightly
to one side of him. It was like an exercise in strategic
geometrics, predicting the motion of bodies in limited space.
"Let us pass," he said. The sun was almost overhead; here down
between the high walls, it seemed that they were standing in
the only shade that fell on Tatooine.
Xanatos looked at him with eyes that seemed darker than before.
"Don't be tiresome. You have no business out there." With a
quick turn of the wrist, Xanatos held his lightsaber in his
hand, unlit, just the handle, looking like the tool at the
bottom of the toolbox that no one can remember what it's for.
"Anakin is going to start in the race." The 'saber blade leaped
into existence with a low red hum.
The announcer was naming the podracing pilots as they lined up
out on the concourse. Obi-Wan tilted his head slightly to one
side, trying to see past Xanatos and the deep shadow out into
the sunlight, and at the same time not lose track of that
lightsaber blade. "You knew we would come after you. Yet you
stayed on the planet, you're doing this, because you want
Anakin to win a podrace?"
"I have great hopes for him," Xanatos said lightly, and took a
step forward.
Obi-Wan reflexively took a step back, the same length, and his
lightsaber hummed to life before he'd thought about it. Out on
the concourse, the air shimmered with heat, and it looked like
melting glass. Obi-Wan went into a defensive stance and looked
at Xanatos, instead; he couldn't let himself be blinded by the
sunlight.
When the attack came, it seemed half-hearted, and Obi-Wan
reacted automatically before remembering Xanatos' way of
turning standard Jedi attacks and defenses on their heads. His
inattention cost him a piece of his left shirtsleeve. He
retreated another step and sank into the second guard position,
reminded himself that this was nothing like sparring, and
looked at Xanatos over the spit and hiss of his 'saber blade.
He could not allow himself to be taken by surprise again. For
all he knew, Xanatos had yet another of those meshnet balls
ready to throw at him. Obi-Wan balanced cautiously on the balls
of his feet. Xanatos raised an eyebrow and advanced a step. His
guards stood quietly behind him, each with a hand to a
holstered blaster, obedient, Obi-Wan supposed, to some earlier
instructions.
A signal blared over the loudspeakers, telling the support
staff to get off the concourse. Qui-Gon and Shmi were behind
him, waiting to get past. Obi-Wan launched himself out of the
defensive position into an attack from a different fighting
style, and Xanatos met him and stood against him, a flicker of
startlement in his eyes. Obi-Wan pressed his attack, leaped to
the right to come at Xanatos' weak side, and almost winced as
his 'saber cut a gouge in the nearest wall. These were close
quarters for fighting. There was no room for Qui-Gon and Shmi
to get past.
There was not enough time. The air quivered like something
stretched beyond bearable tension, about to snap. Obi-Wan moved
faster. He made himself feel the air, all the spaces where
Xanatos' lightsaber wasn't. His skin prickled and his head felt
hollow. When the right spaces were empty, he moved to fill
them. His blade hissed down, and Xanatos jumped backwards, not
far enough, not fast enough.
Xanatos swayed on his feet, his face white and shocky. His
lightsaber fell, the blade winking out of existence as his
fingers lost their grip on the handle. It bounced with a
clatter on the hard ground. The cut over Xanatos' shoulder
joint was deep and smelled of cauterized flesh. Obi-Wan tensed
himself to leap past the injured man and run out to the line of
podracers when a low Couresian voice growled, "Stop. Or I'll
kill her. Back off."
One of the big Couresian guards behind and to the right of
Xanatos had grabbed the little girl with the tray full of
flags. He held a blaster to her head; she tried to bite his
fingers, squirming and scratching, and he pressed the blaster
to her temple. Obi-Wan caught her eyes and willed her to be
still. He powered down his lightsaber and clipped it to his
belt. "Let her go," he said, spreading his hands persuasively,
trying to grasp the force energies that leaped around him like
a scattering of lightning bugs. "She's just a bystander, a
child, she has nothing to do with this."
The Couresian's flat eyes did not waver. "One step closer, and
she dies."
There was a moment of silence, as if the whole arena held its
breath in response to the threat. Then there was a roar of
engines, and the audience screamed, and the announcer crowed
gleefully in a burst of static. The race had started.
"Too late," Xanatos said, a note in his voice like laughter.
The other two Couresians came forward and took hold of him, and
one of them touched his shoulder, where the singed cloth fell
apart over the wound. Obi-Wan watched unconsciousness slide
through Xanatos like a wave that smoothed out the lines of
ambition and concentration, and left only those of pain. If
Xanatos didn't get immediate medical treatment, he'd lose the
use of that arm. One of the Couresians picked him up, and the
other covered Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon and Shmi with his blaster and
talked into a wrist commlink as they backed away. Obi-Wan
wondered, seeing Xanatos hang limply in the Couresian guard's
arms, if that touch had been an accident or a kindness.
The roar of podracer engines had faded, but now another engine
whine rose to take its place, almost drowning out the
announcer's exclamation of outrage. A small open land yacht
whirled up a cloud of sand and dust right at the edge of the
concourse, and the guards handed Xanatos up and jumped after
him. The Couresian with the little girl let her go, shoving her
towards Obi-Wan, and ran towards the ship. He leaped up, barely
made it over the railing, and the yacht took off, followed by
two arena guards on speeder bikes.
The girl stumbled into Obi-Wan and grabbed him around the
waist, fingertips digging in. She buried her face in his shirt
and started to shake. She was so thin that he could feel her
bones.
Qui-Gon strode down to the edge of the concourse and looked
after the vanishing ship, shading his eyes with one hand.
Obi-Wan bent over the girl and stroked her hair, stroked down
her back, trying to soothe her. He looked over her head at
Shmi, who stood by the wall, one hand clenched at her chest.
Her lips moved, but he couldn't hear what she was saying, and
the look in her eyes was eerily remote. The sound of pod
engines had died away in the distance. The announcer's voice
was fading in and out of a loud static buzz, and the crowd was
grumbling.
"...techical difficulties," came in a brief moment of clarity,
"but observers along the course have called in to report that
Sebulba is in the lead, closely followed by newcomer Ynn Rarr."
The next words vanished in another loud sputter of static.
"Local pilot Anakin Skywalker appears to have dropped behind
the others due to engine diffczxcczxtctzr--"
Shmi stepped away from the wall and went down to stand with
Qui-Gon, looking out into the arena and down along the race
course; Obi-Wan knew they were watching for the racers to
return, but he could see nothing himself except for a space of
sunlit sand and the other half of the arena on the other side.
He curved his hand protectively around the back of the girl's
head, and she began to relax her death grip on his shirt.
"They're gone," he said softly, pitching his voice to her ears
alone. "He's gone, no one's going to hurt you."
The little girl shivered convulsively. After a few more
moments, she leaned back and looked up at him. There was a red
mark at her temple where the blaster had pressed in, and her
lower lip was beginning to swell up. "I dropped my tray."
"It's over there." Obi-Wan nodded towards the place where she'd
been standing before. "Let's go pick your things up." The
speaker system crackled. The audience was starting to sound
angry. Maybe the visual link was down, too. Something was
wrong, something more than just these technical problems,
something beyond the wrongness of Xanatos' escape. The force
felt like a skittish animal. Every time Obi-Wan tried to touch
it, it danced back out of reach.
The tray had fallen pretty much straight down, and only about
half of the flags and banners had fallen off, the stacks
tipping forward in a neat cascade. Obi-Wan went down on one
knee, picked up the heaps of garish cloth and shook the sand
off them, and settled them back in orderly piles. He lifted the
tray, and the girl slipped the strap over her neck again and
looked a little less lost, back in her familiar role. "I gotta
go back up there," she said, nodding at the audience tiers. "I
gotta finish selling this stuff before the race is over."
"Be careful," Obi-Wan said. He got up and brushed the girl's
hair out of her face, and she gave him half a smile, tired and
frightened, but as collected, again, as a child of her age
could be expected to be. As collected as a Jedi child of that
age might be, Obi-Wan thought unexpectedly, changed by
responsibility and expectation.
They walked together down to where Qui-Gon and Shmi were
standing, while the announcer said that Ynn Rarr was gaining on
Sebulba. The girl slipped around the corner and started to walk
up towards the higher tiers, licking at her swollen lip.
Obi-Wan looked at Shmi, whose open face was full of fear. She
looked halfway to running off somewhere, her body seemingly in
motion, on its way to follow Anakin out into the desert.
"Now that Xanatos has left, we can find Anakin as soon as the
race is over," Obi-Wan said, aware that Qui-Gon had probably
said the same thing already.
She shook her head wordlessly. She didn't look at him, her eyes
were fixed in the distance as she waited for the podracers to
return from their first circuit. The loudspeakers crackled.
"...trouble. The technical difficulties should be solved in a
moment. And it seems, unbelievably, that Ynn Rarr is engine to
engine with Sebulba!" The audience exploded into cheers and
boos, drowning out the next few words. "...picking up speed
again. Anakin Skywalker may yet catch up to the--" Shmi swayed,
made a sound, and began to crumple. "Anakin Skywalker has
crashed! Onlookers say they're seeing an explosion and a cloud
of sand and smoke from Skywalker's last known position!"
Qui-Gon dropped to his knees, supporting Shmi. Her skirts
spread out in a puddle around her, like blood, covering the
sand. Her hand came up to clutch at Qui-Gon's shirt. Qui-Gon
looked up at Obi-Wan with eyes turned hard and sharp. "Go get
the speeder. We have to go out there."
Obi-Wan opened his mouth to say something about the wisdom of
flying an ordinary speeder across the path of a podrace, looked
at Shmi's face, and closed his mouth again. He nodded, turned,
and ran. Back into the depths of the arena's substructure,
through the empty rooms, and he leaped over the puddle of metal
meshnet on the floor, grimacing faintly at the sour smell of
his own vomit. He raced past an arena official in one of the
hallways, but didn't stop to explain his presence. The echo of
his footsteps seemed loud.
When he came out on the other side, there was no sign of any
Couresian guards. Obi-Wan looked around. Their speeder had been
towed, and finding out from the attendants where it was, and
then going to get it, would take time he didn't have to spare,
not with Anakin lying injured out in the desert. The arena
staff would send out a medical team, but that knowledge did
nothing about the cold feeling down his spine. Obi-Wan surveyed
the nearest row of speeders and sand-hovers, picked what looked
like the fastest one--a mishmash of engine and body parts that
looked like some crazy young kid's pride and joy--and vaulted
into it. It took him ten heartbeats to get the engine going;
whoever built this thing hadn't been focused on security. The
attendants spotted him and yelled at him and steered their
hoverboards in his direction just as he took off.
The controls were very responsive, and Obi-Wan shot up and
around the curve of the arena's great bulk a little faster than
he'd anticipated. He gentled his touch, slowed down, leveled
out, and came out into the concourse just as Ynn Rarr and
Sebulba came racing in, pod engines screaming, the air whipped
up from their passage almost unbalancing the light speeder.
Obi-Wan veered abruptly to the side, flying so close to the
edge he thought the side of the speeder scraped stone. He could
have reached out and touched the faces of the nearest
spectators. The audience was shouting, and so was the
commentator, and a handful of guards leaned out over the side a
little distance ahead and waved signal flags at him. He pulled
up so as not to hit them, slowed and dropped back down once he
was past, and felt the speeder shake as another wave of air and
exhaust fumes from the pods hit it.
Qui-Gon and Shmi were waiting. Obi-Wan hit the brakes and made
the speeder hover, hands dancing on the controls to compensate
for the weight shift as Qui-Gon almost threw Shmi in and jumped
after her. They took off as another pod screamed past, trailing
a ruptured cable and a spray of sparks and sand. A spatter of
sand hit Obi-Wan in the face, and he blinked, spat, cursed, and
kept flying. The rest of the racing pods were coming up behind
them. The speeder picked up speed quickly, and when they came
out of the arena, they were going fast enough that Obi-Wan
swung out in a curve to the left, looked back over his shoulder
to where the last few pods were coming through, two of them
trying to overtake a third, hoped that the distance was enough
to keep them alive, and threw the speeder to the right and
straight across their path.
There was barely time to hear Shmi's startled cry and the roar
of the engines. A stretch as short as that across the race
course had never seemed so long. They made it with about a
speeder's width to spare, and the pods roared past behind them,
with the racers probably cursing their names and planning to
lodge a complaint with the management, Obi-Wan thought. He
steered the speeder straight ahead, then veered a little to the
right, cutting across the circle of the racing course and
heading for the place where Anakin's pod had crashed.
The terrain was difficult for flying. He'd noticed it when he
had been out here before, but he'd been going much more slowly
then. It was what made the races such a challenge, and Obi-Wan
wished every sand ridge and tricky cliff formation to the other
end of the galaxy. He flew in as straight a line as he could
manage, fitting the speeder through narrow gaps, grateful that
the controls were so responsive. The balance was slightly off,
with Qui-Gon's weight all to one side and Shmi almost on top of
him. They flew around an outcropping where sand had scoured the
stone into a sharp overhang, and came out into a wide, shallow,
flat-bottomed canyon where columns of reddish crumbling stone
pointed to the sky like leprous fingers.
Smoke still rose into the air, and the wind carried a smell of
singed metal and melting plastic. Anakin's pod had crashed in
the narrow space between two rock formations, and one of them
had broken off at the impact, falling sideways, partly on top
of the crashed pod. Obi-Wan flew closer, maneuvering the
speeder carefully, and setting it down at a little distance
from the crash site, as near to it as he could get withod it apart
or melted it right into the rock. There was a low hiss from two
still-sparking wires. Shmi was leaning forward into the foul
smoke, coughing, her eyes running. In what was left of the
pilot seat, there was no sign of a body. Obi-Wan looked for
body parts, but all he saw was debris.
"I--I can't sense his presence," Shmi said, and coughed some
more.
There was blood, a thin spatter of it on one of the rocks, much
more on the sand below. Obi-Wan bent down and touched his
fingers to it. A lot of blood for a child to lose. Scuff marks
in the sand. The sand was too loose to hold any recognizable
tracks; his own footprints were only shapeless indentations. He
looked up and met Qui-Gon's eyes through the haze of smoke.
"There are a lot of scavengers on Tatooine."
"Chialla birds," Qui-Gon said. His mouth twisted sideways. "Or
Jawas."
Obi-Wan picked his way carefully to where Shmi stood. The
pieces of wreckage were sharp enough to cut through his boots,
hot enough to burn through the soles, even. She was as close to
the pilot seat as she could get, leaning forward, and he got to
her just in time to grab her hand as she reached out to touch.
"You'll burn your fingers to the bone."
"I don't care." Shmi left her hand in Obi-Wan's, though.
Despite the heat of the day, her fingers were cold. "I just
want to feel-- I could always feel his presence. Always."
One of the metal plates clanged, a buckle popping as the
material cooled. The hollow sound reminded Obi-Wan of standing
in Watto's back yard and watching Anakin work on the engine.
Memories of the vision whispered in his mind. In the midday
desert heat, he felt an impossible chill. Obi-Wan opened up
slowly to the force currents that swirled around the crash
site. He could feel the disruption the explosion had caused, a
secondary, invisible disaster area. "There is some kind of
presence," he began to say, and then he felt the currents shift
in response to something.
It was Shmi, pushing clumsily at the force with her untrained
mind, reaching desperately for something that wasn't there.
Obi-Wan tried to catch her uncontrolled push as he had caught
her hand, but the currents moved, started to whirl around them
both, and the world echoed hollowly with a scream caught under
the metal plate of the sky. All he could sense was darkness,
and Shmi's hand in his, and when he tried to touch the force,
an avalanche of grinding, tearing pain fell on him. Fire ripped
him open, sharp metal edges cut him apart, his bones
reverberated with a jarring shock, and all through it he felt
Shmi's fingers grip his own and heard her cry out.
Beyond the tight grip of pain, the darkness was very, very
cold.
Obi-Wan flailed for balance, trying to find himself, to find
Shmi, to find any lingering trace of Anakin. He couldn't tell
in from out, and his ears rang with soundless screams. The air
smelled of hot oil and burning flesh, and the fire was so cold,
as cold as he'd ever imagined space to be. He could feel his
bones freeze and granulate.
Somewhere in this icy chaos was the truth of what had happened
to Anakin, but he couldn't even breathe; he had lost all
control. The only thing he could feel past the cold was Shmi's
fear. Then she was gone, too, like water from a clenched hand,
and he thought he had lost her to the darkness and pain and
reached out wildly to the place where she had been--
--and touched warmth. A warm steady presence, a brilliant light
in the darkness, bright as a sun and immovable as a mountain,
and completely unmistakable. He grasped at that presence, it
grasped at him, and he was torn free of the darkness and
emerged once more under the high desert sky to the familiar
sensation of Qui-Gon's fingers digging into his shoulders. He
half expected Qui-Gon to shake him, but all he got was a long
look as cutting as a welder's torch. "Jedi masters have died
trying to do what you just did, you young idiot."
"I only followed her," Obi-Wan said a little breathlessly. The
words brought him back to himself, and he looked around quickly
for Shmi, saw her kneeling in the sand a little to one side,
looking pale, but present. "I didn't think that she would be
able to touch--that. It wasn't what I expected."
Qui-Gon's grip eased a little. His thumb rubbed a small circle
on Obi-Wan's shoulder, right over an itching, healing scratch.
"Death rarely is."
"He's not dead," Shmi said. "I would know." Obi-Wan saw that
she had burned her right hand after all, but not badly, not the
way he'd feared. There was a line of red across her palm, a
blister near the thumb. For the first time since he'd met her,
she hunched forward, her shoulders slumping in a curve that had
no pride left in it. She seemed weighed down by every piece of
burnt-out wreckage scattered around them.
Qui-Gon looked at Obi-Wan in silent question. Obi-Wan shook his
head. His lips felt numb. That deep cold seemed to have frozen
his nerves. "I don't think anyone could have lived through
that."
"Anakin isn't dead." Shmi struggled to her feet. A drop of
blood beaded on her lower lip. Obi-Wan had heard that tone
before in the voices of parents refusing to believe that their
child was gone. She didn't look certain, and she didn't sound
certain, and yet there was that about her that made him look
again at the crashed speeder and the spatter pattern on the
rock and the empty space where the body should be.
"I saw this before," he said without thinking. "The darkness,
the blood on the sand and the--" He broke off, catching up with
his tongue at the last moment, before he could mention the
sensation of burning in front of Shmi. The darkness his visions
had hinted at coalesced into this, and it felt strange and
unsatisfying and pointless. "Perhaps I should have been more
mindful of the future."
"The future changes in response to the present," Qui-Gon said,
and his hand hovered over Obi-Wan's shoulder for a moment. "You
have to deal with the present first." He turned away and went
to Shmi and put his arms around her, and she collapsed against
his body, her smaller frame almost entirely hidden by his. Only
her skirt flared out, hiding Qui-Gon's bare feet.
Obi-Wan went over to where the blood had soaked most deeply
into the sand, and looked more closely. There was a shallow
crater, as of something making a heavy landing, and he thought
Anakin's body might have been flung free of the speeder at the
moment of impact. He looked at the remains of the speeder and
the angle at which it had hit the rock formation, calculated
the possible trajectories. A body flung forward at an angle
would have landed somewhere around there. He crouched down to
study the marks in the sand. Something had been dragged off, he
could see a shapeless furrow in the loose sand, but then came a
patch of harder, rocky ground, and the track was lost. The
marks around the furrow were too unclear to be identifiable as
boot prints or paw prints. Most desert-dwellers wore robes long
enough to blur their prints into unrecognizability.
He went across the patch of stony ground all the same, to see
what was on the other side. The sand had been disturbed here,
too. Marks of something walking, marks of something being
dragged, and down in the shadow of the next spiky rock
protrusion, an odd fan-shaped pattern in the sand, and a much
larger, heavier indentation.
The thin whine of a pod engine cut across his concentration. He
turned around a heartbeat before Qui-Gon called out, "Obi-Wan!"
The racing pods were coming around again for the second
circuit. The medical team should be arriving any moment, too,
and possibly the arena guards, after the disturbance they had
caused.
Obi-Wan scrambled back over the rock and trudged through the
sand to the speeder. Qui-Gon lifted Shmi onto the middle of the
seat and climbed in after her. Obi-Wan got in on the other side
and worked on getting the engine restarted. The engine cooler
kicked in and blew out a spray of air in front of them, like an
animal snorting. Sand stirred in response. The sound of pod
engines was much closer now, growing from a whine to a roar,
drowning out the speeder's engine sounds, and Obi-Wan brought
the speeder up to skim height and turned it back the way they'd
come. He wove between the stone formations at a slower pace
this time, grateful that he hadn't managed to emulate Anakin's
accident. In the distance, he saw a sand skimmer that had to
belong to the arena's medical team, heading for the crash site
at a much slower pace.
Halfway back to the arena, it occurred to him that they would
not be very welcome there after staging a fight, disrupting the
race, and stealing a speeder. "Where should we go?" he asked.
Shmi shifted beside him. Her skirt was once more covered with
sand, tiny grains grinding their way in between the fibers. "I
want to go home," she said.
Obi-Wan glanced at Qui-Gon over the top of her head, then
nodded. He changed the speeder's course to an angle that would
let them cross the podrace course well away from the arena. It
loomed in the distance, one of the biggest buildings on the
planet, filled with beings who didn't care that a child had
been lost during today's race, except for the few who had bet
on him. Obi-Wan wondered if the little girl with the tray had
sold all her banners and flags yet.
He slowed down and listened carefully for engines before
speeding across the racecourse and continuing towards the town.
He could feel Shmi shaking, a bone-deep tremor that pressed
into him and almost made him feel as though he were shaking,
too. When his hand brushed against hers as he reached for some
customized controls, Obi-Wan could feel how shock-cold she was.
Qui-Gon's arm was around her shoulders, but she sat straight,
didn't lean into him any longer. Her shoulders pressed hard
into the seatback, where there were no bloodstains.
The slave quarters looked more huddled together and less well
kept this day. The paint was dingy, no blazing white here; the
doorways were low. Sand piled up along the walls in soft
encroaching drifts. "You'll have to give me directions," he
said quietly. "Tell me where I can put the speeder down." They
couldn't take the speeder all the way to her house. The streets
were all but deserted, but they were too narrow to risk even
the possibility of meeting someone.
Following Shmi's gestures and brief words, Obi-Wan landed the
speeder at the line between city and desert, not far from where
two wrecked sandskimmers had been turned into a playsite for
children; someone had painted the scavenged skimmer shells to
look like happy imaginary monsters, though the bright colors
were already fading, worn down by wind and sand, and one
monster's smile had turned into a threatening scowl. They got
out, and Obi-Wan realized that it wouldn't take long before
this speeder was taken apart as well, unless the owner had a
tracker installed. He bent over the panel to check, and found a
small blue light blinking steadily under the control board,
almost unnoticeable. He closed up the panel where he had
hot-wired the speeder and added a twist of force to keep it
shut a little longer, hoping it would be enough. Mos Espa was
empty, and perhaps all would-be speeder thieves were at the
podrace. He straightened up and followed the others into the
slave quarter.
Walking through silent narrow streets, they were all silent,
too. Obi-Wan fell behind a little and watched Shmi as she
walked. Then his gaze shifted to Qui-Gon. They both walked as
though they were tired, as though their feet were starting to
feel numb with fatigue. They walked apart, an arm's length of
air between them.
Shmi's house looked much like all the other houses. A little
neater, perhaps, a little more carefully kept. Paint flaked
from a patch at the side of the door, but the edges had been
evened out and flakes had been swept away off the sandy ground.
She walked inside without a word, and Qui-Gon followed. Obi-Wan
stopped outside for a moment, though the door stayed open. He
looked around the street and tried to picture Anakin there,
running and laughing with friends, or building something
complicated with engine parts he'd wheedled out of Watto, or
planning how to raise money and buy his freedom. The flashfire
anger he'd sensed in the boy seemed like the obvious other side
of the coin: all that energy, all that intelligence, and
nowhere for it to go. Shmi's son had not inherited her
patience; the rebel streak in Anakin had gone clear to the
bone.
Obi-Wan looked along the street, not even aware that he was
counting the houses until he found himself multiplying by the
number of streets he'd seen, trying to estimate the size of
this part of town. He shook his head slowly. He had the
statistics available to him on board the Arrow, and could
easily find out how many slaves there were in Mos Espa, and how
many there were on all of Tatooine, and how many there were in
this part of the galaxy, though that would only be an
approximation, given that a lot of rim planets were not
familiar with the concept of a census. Any numbers he came up
with on his own were likely to be more guesswork than anything
else.
Across the street, at one of the low doors, stood a plant in a
crude earthenware pot. It looked like some kind of ligneous
succulent, clearly non-native to the planet. It was
half-withered and dying. Two of the branches had turned
completely brown. Obi-Wan wondered how the people living in
that house had ever had the water to spare to start with.
He turned and went inside. Shmi's home was unexpectedly
spacious and cluttered. The furniture was simple, but seemed
sturdy and well made, and there were several objects on shelves
and hanging on the walls that seemed purely decorative. Obi-Wan
looked into the different rooms. Shmi was standing by a
workbench, looking down at a scattering of mechanical parts,
her hand moving slowly from one to the other. Both the bench
and the chair by it were adult height, so Obi-Wan assumed that
this was where she spent her working hours while Anakin helped
out in the shop.
Like most buildings on Tatooine, this one had low, small
windows that could be shuttered against a sudden sandstorm. The
light was bad, and he couldn't see her face. Obi-Wan looked
around for Qui-Gon and found him standing in a doorway, looking
into another room. This one was even more cluttered, and
Obi-Wan knew he was looking at Anakin's private space. It was a
good-sized room for a child to have, and full of half-finished
projects, broken toys, things that had been picked up in one
place and put down somewhere else. The bed was unmade. In one
corner sat a gold-colored droid, complete except for the left
leg, which lay disassembled in the middle of the floor. Anakin
had a surprising number of belongings, and he must have been
able to spend a lot of time working on them.
As if hearing the way Obi-Wan's thoughts turned, Qui-Gon shook
his head a little, braid shifting against his shoulders. "In
Jabba's palace," he said, "the favorites have rooms larger than
this house, and sleep on imported silk sheets. And the kitchen
drudges sleep ten or twelve all piled in together, when they do
get to sleep, on thin nufoam pads on the floor. He owns them
all."
Obi-Wan drew a breath and let it out. He could see Anakin in
this room, easily, working and laughing and calling out to his
mother. A little hesitantly, he put his hand on Qui-Gon's arm,
and Qui-Gon brushed across Obi-Wan's fingers with his own
before turning away and going out into the main room. "Shmi."
She came out from her workroom with a slow measured tread. She
had taken off her boots; Obi-Wan could see her bare toes peek
out under the hem of her long skirt. It made her look much more
vulnerable. She tugged at her hair with one hand, and the
knotted loops of braid came uncoiled and fell forward over her
shoulder. "He's not dead."
Qui-Gon lifted one hand, as if to reach out and touch her. The
shadows of his fingers spidered across the tabletop. "We will
buy your freedom," he said. "You can come with us to
Coruscant." Obi-Wan mentally fitted the three of them into the
Arrow's cramped space, wondered about provisions.
Turning away from them, Shmi walked past the table in the
center of the room and into the light from the door Obi-Wan had
left open. Her profile was limned in sunlight for a moment, and
then she turned back. "I would know if he was dead," she said.
"My heart would be certain, not feel this nothingness."
Qui-Gon bent his head. Lines of distress appeared around his
mouth and then smoothed out, as though through an act of will.
"You feel emptiness because he is gone. Shmi, I'm sorry. The
force--"
"He's not dead." There was no compromise in her eyes, only a
new kind of stillness. She made no move towards him. "I know
you are going to leave, but I will wait here for him. This is
the place where I should be."
Obi-Wan moved slowly, silently backwards until he was in
Anakin's room again. He crouched down and looked more closely
at the droid's disassembled leg, trying to see what Anakin had
been doing to it, while part of his mind tracked the rise and
fall of voices outside the door. There would be room for the
three of them in the Arrow, he was sure of it, but Shmi's voice
sounded implacable in all its gentleness. She must have felt
the same things he did, there in the desert at the foot of the
fallen stone column. She must be more force-sensitive than he
had thought at first, to be able to step into the force-memory
and drag him along with her. And in spite of that, she was
refusing to entertain any other possibility than that Anakin
was still alive. She held her conviction as a shield against
grief.
It seemed that Anakin had been working on a way to make the
droid's sensitive knee joints sand-proof. Sand was probably the
most common cause of mechanical failure on Tatooine. The fine
grains seeped in everywhere. Obi-Wan knew he had sand in his
boots again, sand in his socks. He could feel the grittiness
against his skin, knew it would raise slow welts and blisters.
He looked down at his hands. There was sand under his
fingernails. Obi-Wan reached for the fiberpliers lying on the
floor, because he could see just what Anakin had intended to do
next, but as soon as he touched them, he shook his head and
straightened up. Shmi would never forgive him.
All these unfinished things, all these tasks left undone, were
Anakin's legacy. Obi-Wan moved around the room and looked, but
did not touch. Anakin had been tinkering with household
appliances, trying to make them more efficient. He had also
built some things from scratch. Obi-Wan wondered if they worked
as intended, and whether the patents would belong to Anakin's
owner. He thought he would have liked to teach a child like
this, someone who enjoyed taking things apart and putting them
together again to make them better, although he wasn't sure
what Anakin's questioning mind would have made of the Jedi
order's strict rules.
He was studying an intricate model of what could either be an
advanced water storage unit or a new type of bacta tank, when
Qui-Gon spoke from the doorway. "Obi-Wan." Obi-Wan turned
around and looked at Qui-Gon's impassive face, reading the
quiet signs of unhappiness. He nodded, stepped carefully over
the droid leg and the tools, and went out of the room.
Shmi was still standing by the table. Her braids were twisted
from being wound in the knot, and trailed like tame snakes down
across her collarbone. Her face was impossibly still, and
Obi-Wan found himself wishing for grief, for rage, for anything
except this passive certainty that was going to trap her on
Tatooine forever. He walked up to her, and she took his right
hand in both of hers. "Thank you for what you tried to do," she
said, the warmth in her voice subdued, but genuine. "Now you
should take Qui-Gon to the place where he belongs."
Obi-Wan looked down at their hands, feeling her calluses
against his skin, and then back into her eyes again. The words
had the sound of a burial rite, as if Shmi were saying goodbye
to Qui-Gon in place of Anakin. Perhaps it was the solemnity in
her voice that made him feel as if he had been given a task of
great importance to perform, rather than just told to do what
he would have done anyway, get in the Arrow with Qui-Gon and
return to Coruscant. Something about all this felt shadowy,
tainted with the darkness that he'd sensed before; perhaps it
was her unacknowledged grief that fell like a thin veil over
everything. He didn't ask her to change her mind. If Qui-Gon
had not succeeded, Obi-Wan knew that he wouldn't, either.
"It was an honor to meet you," he said instead, and bowed over
her hands in a gesture rarely seen on Tatooine. When he
straightened again, she kissed his cheek and let him go.
The door still stood open, and Obi-Wan walked out first, not
looking back, but Qui-Gon came directly behind him, and he
heard the sound of the door closing. The street was still
unnaturally empty and quiet. The race must be over by now,
Obi-Wan thought, looking up at the sun. Most probably Sebulba
had won.
Qui-Gon walked past him and crossed the street in a few long
strides, to where the plant stood in its pot, and crouched down
to touch it. He ran his fingertips along the stem, and Obi-Wan
thought he sensed a faint whisper of the living force, thought
he saw the water-starved branches shiver in response. Qui-Gon
looked up over his shoulder, a trace of something sad and
defiant in his eyes. "It won't make a difference," he said.
"Not in the long run. The plant doesn't belong here; it will
die."
He got to his feet and fell into step beside Obi-Wan, and they
went down the street together, between the small huddled
houses. As they turned the corner, Obi-Wan said, "I thought she
would come with you."
Qui-Gon shook his head. "The tie to a child is much stronger
than the tie to a friend." Obi-Wan glanced quickly at Qui-Gon's
profile, but saw nothing beyond a statement of fact. "As long
as she believes that Anakin is still alive, she'll stay."
It was a long walk to the spaceport district, and Obi-Wan had
to lengthen his steps to keep pace with Qui-Gon, even though
Qui-Gon was still barefoot and the unpaved streets were rough.
Heat shimmered between the low white houses. They walked in the
shade when they could, but it was midday and the sun was
directly overhead. Obi-Wan felt a trickle of sweat run down his
spine. At first they hardly encountered anyone: the occasional
grandparent sitting in the shade of a doorway minding a small
child, a messenger from an offworld delivery service with a
stack of parcels. Obi-Wan saw a work crew repainting a house
and guessed that they were slaves who had not been granted the
traditional day off.
But while they walked, Mos Espa came alive around them again.
The streets filled up with people, bars and cantinas opened,
the air began to smell of food as those who hadn't squandered
their money on sweet rolls at the arena came home and began to
cook a midday meal. Children ran around in groups pretending to
be podracers, screaming out engine noises. Obi-Wan turned his
head before he could see one of them fall over and crash.
As they came closer to the spaceport district, there were fewer
children and more cantinas, and the occasional spice addict or
beggar slouched on a street corner. A group of Shjabree walked
along with their tails linked together, singing what sounded
like a war song; Obi-Wan kept a wary eye on them until they
rounded a corner and disappeared from his sight. Someone had
dropped an Ynn Rarr flag, and it was half tramped down into the
sand. Obi-Wan looked around, wondering where the little girl
with the tray was now that the race was over, and if there was
someone who would comfort her after what she'd been through.
Outside the cantina where they had spent the night, Qui-Gon
slowed his steps, and Obi-Wan looked up at him, and then
glanced at the cantina door. "Did you leave anything behind
here?"
"I left your old shirt," Qui-Gon said, "but I don't think you
want it back." He tugged a little at one long sleeve, and the
unbuttoned neck of the new shirt slid sideways so that Obi-Wan
caught a glimpse of one of the bandages. The punctures seemed
to be healing well; Qui-Gon showed no sign that they were
causing him any discomfort, and the shoulder that Obi-Wan could
see looked neither reddened nor swollen. On Coruscant, the
healers would find and remove the transmitter, wherever it was.
The lines around Qui-Gon's eyes seemed more marked. He looked
tired. "Where is your ship?"
"This way." As they walked away from the cantina, Obi-Wan heard
the sounds of raised voices and breaking glass. It was only
early afternoon, but the party had already started. Some of the
beings they met were unsteady on their feet. Obi-Wan led the
way down a narrow alley to a smaller, less crowded street, and
they walked side by side again, matching their steps. Obi-Wan
watched the ground, cautious of glass or pottery shards that
might have been thrown out into this back street along with the
refuse; Qui-Gon, though barefoot, didn't seem to be paying much
attention. Obi-Wan had to steer him away from a broken jar with
a touch to his elbow.
The back street was shadowed, cooler than the wider street
they'd left, if a bit on the fragrant side. Most of the house
walls facing it were windowless and blank except for the back
doors. As they walked, the house walls grew higher around them,
residential quarters and cantinas giving way to storage units
and warehouses. They met no one until the street ended and they
came out just by the main loading dock for hangars six and
eight. There was almost no activity on or around the dock, and
the large free loading space looked oddly empty. Two
dockworkers were stacking sacks into a crate at a pace that
suggested they'd much rather be doing something else, and a
woman in coveralls sat on an empty box in the shade of the
hangar six loading ramp, smoking a tlao stick. Obi-Wan thought
she looked vaguely familiar.
"You're not supposed to be back here," she called out to them
lazily, making no move to get up. "This is a workers only area.
You could get in the way of all the people here doing their
hard, hard work."
"We'll take the risk," Obi-Wan said gravely, and she grinned at
him, showing a gap in her teeth. Obi-Wan looked at the angles
of the buildings. If they cut through the loading area, they'd
come out across the street from where the Arrow was docked.
There was something, though... Obi-Wan slowed his steps,
picturing the woman with a spanner in her back pocket. "Weren't
you working on that Ya'an yacht out of Veeri?"
"Up until the moment it left, I was." She stretched her legs
straight out, wiggling the toes of her heavy, dusty boots, then
let them swing down again. "Got paid double overtime for it,
too." The woman shook her head, her voice heavy with
tlao-tinged amusement. "But the thing is, they wanted the work
at double speed. I think we should've gotten four times
the overtime."
Obi-Wan nodded absently, not about to try to untangle either
her mathematics or her work ethic. "What was their hurry,
anyway? I thought they came for the race."
The woman shrugged. She had stripy reddish hair pulled into a
haphazard tail low on the back of her head. Sweat darkened her
shirt over the breastbone. "I suppose. All I know is the
deadline for the upgrade was today."
Qui-Gon stepped forward, braid swinging over his shoulder,
fatigue put aside for the moment. Obi-Wan met his eyes for a
moment, then turned back to the woman, keeping his voice
casual. "They upgraded a brand new luxury cruiser? With what,
its own podracing arena?"
That got him a dry chuckle, ending in a smoke-heavy cough. "I
swear there was enough room for one. At least before my crew
knocked out a couple of walls to make the sickbay bigger. I
think the guy who owns it must be a hypochondriac or something.
Either that, or those guards get beat up a lot."
"I think that's quite possible," Obi-Wan told her.
"They loaded up on bacta like they were going into a war zone,
that's for sure." The woman blew a thin stream of tlao smoke to
one side of Obi-Wan. "More than enough for the extra tank they
put in. And they bought enough black-market sedatives to knock
out a rancor. I think they forgot to stock up on food, they
were so busy laying in the med supplies."
"Maybe they're getting the food through another contractor,"
Qui-Gon suggested.
The woman shook her head. "No one delivers on the day of a
podrace, and they took off not that long ago. I can't believe
that guy came all the way here for a podrace and then took off
almost before it was over." Then she added charitably, "Maybe
he got sick or something. They carried someone on board."
With instant bacta treatment, Xanatos' wound should heal quite
well, Obi-Wan thought. There would be scarring, perhaps some
o I have to tell you guys that there's no
up in zero-grav freighter storage space?" She jumped down and
tossed the stub of her tlao stick to one side. "Let me explain
it to you. Again."
The woman strode off to put the fear of space into her
co-workers, and Obi-Wan turned to Qui-Gon. "Did Xanatos ever
show any signs of precog--" He broke off on seeing the remote
look on Qui-Gon's face. Qui-Gon looked after the woman, who was
gesturing at the two handlers, her back to Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan,
and then swung himself up on the loading ramp and walked in
through the wide bay doors, his movements a little more stiff
than usual, before he disappeared into the shadows.
Obi-Wan kicked a little sand over the still smoldering
tlao-stick stub, checked that the three dockworkers weren't
watching, and followed.
Inside hangar six, it was quiet, with the kind of silence that
suggested sounds would bring hollow echoes. Xanatos had paid
for a lot of space for his yacht, and left a lot of emptiness
behind. There was a spill of oil on the ground, outlining the
foot of a support strut, and a large part of the hangar floor
had been blown clean of sand at takeoff. Qui-Gon stood in the
middle of the empty space; he'd stepped in the oil, and it had
left a dark smear across his toes.
Obi-Wan tested the air, touched the force, trying to brush
against it carefully, though there should be nothing here that
could suck him in as the accident had. He could feel a
lingering echo of Xanatos' presence, manifesting as a heavy
pressure in the air, like the heat roil above a volcano, but
mixed in with it somehow was the cold darkness of the crash
site, waiting to suck him in once more. Obi-Wan pulled back,
dismayed that the incident had been so deeply imprinted in him
that it was still warping his perceptions. It was deeply
unnatural to him to be wary of the touch of the force, to
approach it so cautiously.
Walking up to Qui-Gon, he kept his steps quiet, as though
Qui-Gon's silence were some form of meditation that shouldn't
be disturbed. At his approach, Qui-Gon shifted, slowly, to look
at him. "You felt his death, didn't you."
Obi-Wan breathed in. The memory of that darkness was still too
close to the surface of his mind for comfort, particularly
since he was somehow feeling its echoes in the force here as
well. Nothing about its touch had felt like life, and Anakin's
presence had vanished completely, as though it had never been.
Obi-Wan could not doubt, despite Shmi's conviction, that the
boy was gone. "It was... painful."
Qui-Gon's expression turned even bleaker. "I had such hopes for
him," he said, and Obi-Wan thought Qui-Gon was talking about
Anakin, but he wasn't entirely certain. He rubbed his
fingertips together, remembering the shape of the scar on
Qui-Gon's hip. It was no wonder, really, that Qui-Gon had not
wanted to take another padawan fifteen years ago. And it was a
shame that Qui-Gon would never get to teach Anakin. The look on
Luxewa's face on the day he'd been knighted was one of
Obi-Wan's most treasured memories. He would have liked to see
Qui-Gon look like that, for someone, no matter whom.
Wrapping himself in the silence, in Qui-Gon's stillness,
Obi-Wan sought the peaceful places inside himself. Aware of the
hollow feeling of the hangar's walls and space, the way they
wrapped around him distantly, he sank into his own greatest
density, the core of self. The experiences of the past few days
were layered in his mind like the sandstone of Tatooine's rock
formations, as though he had lived through a geological age
since coming to the planet. He could see all the events in
order, knew that he would be able to bring them back perfectly
for the mission report.
This was no mission report. Obi-Wan let the memories touch him.
The unfinished droid slumped in a corner, one leg missing. The
khant in the street, dying from dehydration. Shmi reaching her
hand towards scorching hot metal plates. Qui-Gon kneeling
before him, bare-chested and calm. The little girl's face as
the blaster pressed into her temple. The sound of Xanatos'
laughter and the silverglitter of a mesh net flying through the
air. The weight of Qui-Gon's arm across his chest as they
slept.
All these things swirled through him, cut momentarily free from
their places in his sequential experience of the past, as
solitary and fragmented as two-dimensional images. Two
visionary experiences in two days had shaken him more than he
had realized; his previous brushes with sensing what lay beyond
the present moment had not been nearly so brutal nor so vivid.
He sought recourse in these other moments, refuge perhaps,
seeing them for what they were, tiny pieces of his life that
had burned themselves more deeply into memory.
When he got back to Coruscant, he would talk to Master Yoda
about the visions. For now, he closed them away carefully,
before he could reexperience them, too. This was not the time,
not the place, for that. The visions could wait. Obi-Wan
blinked, slowly, and focused his senses on the present again.
There was still a lingering remnant of fuel fumes in the air.
The dust had not quite settled. If they'd looked up, walking
through the streets, perhaps they would have seen the white
takeoff trail across the blue sky as Xanatos' yacht departed.
Qui-Gon stood very still in the center of the empty space where
the yacht had been, head slightly bent, eyes closed, hands
turned palm up. His lips moved once, in a single word Obi-Wan
did not try to make out. Then he looked up and caught Obi-Wan's
eyes for a moment before turning and walking towards the hangar
doors that led out into the street.
Obi-Wan followed. There was a guard by the door, bored and
uninterested, who barely looked at them. Outside, music blared
from a speeder that had been parked across the street with its
engine running, and a fight was breaking out down on the corner
between a humanoid female wearing Ynn Rarr's racing colors and
a thin, scruffily dressed Zabrakian. Hangar five was the other
way, and he touched Qui-Gon's elbow to show him, aware suddenly
of having done the same thing before, as though it was a habit
that had grown on him without thinking, something done hundreds
of times rather than just once or twice. He stretched his legs
and walked faster, feet in time with the music for a couple of
steps before he outpaced the beat. Behind them, the mournful
howl of a jerz rose towards the sky, drowning out the curses
and shouts from the fighters.
The guard at the entrance to hangar five, a burly Shjabree male
with a mottled tail, recognized Obi-Wan and let them in with
just a nod of greeting. "We're leaving," Obi-Wan said. "I need
the bay doors opened."
"You're paid up for another three days," the guard said,
reaching back to tap a sequence of buttons on a panel to one
side of the door with his tail-tip. "You can't get that back,
you know. Company policy. What's your hurry, anyway? Bad luck
at the podrace?"
Obi-Wan could not immediately answer. In the shadows of the
hangar, behind the guard, he saw Shmi's face as he had last
seen it, wearing a mask of certainty, porcelain smooth and
porcelain frail. It was Qui-Gon who said, "Yes. We had bad
luck."
"Shame, that." The guard paused in the middle of the coded
sequence and swung his tail around to scratch himself on the
back of the neck. "You're clear to go, there's not much
traffic."
The space here was different. Hangar five was smaller, its
echoes were less noticeable. The guard entered the final code,
and the bay doors began to open with a slow creak. Sunlight
poured in, as most of the far wall of the hangar turned into a
vista of sky and sand. Hidden behind that clear blue was the
black nothing of space, open and waiting. Obi-Wan nodded a
thanks to the guard and led the way to the Arrow. It was just
as he had left it; none of the alarms had been tripped, none of
the subtler force imprints disturbed. There were advantages to
flying a ship that looked as though it would fall apart if the
pilot sneezed too hard.
When he touched the keyplate, it responded to his palm and his
force-presence, and the hatch opened with a low hydraulic hiss.
Lights came on in the ship's interior, and the systems began to
hum along a pre-programmed sequence. Obi-Wan put a foot on the
ramp, feeling the sand between his toes. He glanced over his
shoulder at Qui-Gon, who nodded, and they went into the Arrow
together. The top of Qui-Gon's head almost brushed the ceiling.
Obi-Wan pressed another plate, and the ramp pulled up behind
them, moving smoothly and easily. There was no sand in the
mechanism here.
The interior of the Arrow was pared down, minimalistic, but
well designed. Obi-Wan led the way, Qui-Gon followed; Obi-Wan
almost forgot Qui-Gon's presence there behind his shoulder as
he took the pilot's seat and looked at the scrolling results of
the preflight check already in progress. All systems were
performing to their usual standard. All drives were
operational, and the air recycling was functioning at plus
twenty. The water tanks were full. Obi-Wan looked at the comm
system, but there were no logs of incoming calls or recorded
messages while he had been away from the ship. As he watched,
though, a signal came in, and a light blinked insistently at
him. The call origin came up, and he nodded to himself. "The
council wishes to speak with us," he said.
"Already?"
"The comm system sends an automatic transmission to Coruscant
in response to my palm print on the door lock. They must have
been watching for it." Obi-Wan looked up at Qui-Gon, saw
shadowed eyes and a tired mouth, but Qui-Gon nodded, and
Obi-Wan pressed the button to accept the call. The screen
flickered to life, and they were facing Yoda, perched
cross-legged on an antigrav seat, gimer stick laid across his
knees. The room behind him was shadowed, but no other council
members seemed to be present. Obi-Wan tried to calculate what
time it would be on Coruscant, but didn't manage to narrow it
down to more than late at night.
"Concerned about you, I have been," Yoda said directly, not
bothering with a greeting. "An uneasiness in the force, I have
sensed. Tell me about it you will, hmmm?"
Obi-Wan drew a slow breath. He had not expected to have to make
a report at this moment. He wondered if the uneasiness that
Yoda had sensed was anything like the persistent darkness that
haunted him. "Xanatos was wounded in a fight, but escaped; he
has already left the planet."
Yoda's right ear twitched. "And the boy?" He leaned closer to
the screen, peering at them.
Memories tried to push their way up again, cold and dark and
painful, and Obi-Wan pressed them down, reinforcing the mental
wall that held them back. He didn't want to relive the visions;
he didn't want to relive standing over the smoking metal,
holding Shmi back. He didn't even want to see Anakin's
sun-bright smile, knowing that it was gone forever. "There was
an accident during the podrace."
"The boy's pod crashed," Qui-Gon said, his words overlapping
Obi-Wan's, grief in his voice. Obi-Wan didn't have to look at
him to know what expression would be in his eyes. He could feel
it all the way to his bones. Yoda's ears drooped, and he nodded
slowly.
Obi-Wan looked down at his hands and up again, putting his
thoughts in order. "We could still catch up with Xanatos," he
said, plotting it out as he spoke. "We aren't far behind, and
his ship has to stop on either Lun Yari or the free port on
Gath Five for supplies; they have no food." He could feel the
plates under his feet humming, straight through his boots; the
Arrow was all power and very little comfort. It was ready to
take off, to shoot into space, fast as a thought.
"Jedi on Lun Yari there are. Contact them we will, when the
council has discussed the matter." Yoda tapped the gimer stick
against his leg. He looked very serious, as though still
sensing the uneasiness he had spoken of before. "Return to
Coruscant. Enough you have done, Knight Kenobi, and too long
you have been away, Qui-Gon. Others there are who can pick up
your burden."
Qui-Gon drew a deep, audible breath, and Obi-Wan thought that
he would argue and disagree and speak up and be contrary. But
after a long moment, all he said was, "Yes, my master," and all
the exhaustion of the past seven years bled through in those
words.
Obi-Wan felt cold when he thought about how they had lost
Anakin, but at least he had found Qui-Gon, at least Qui-Gon was
free, at least something had gone right. And he could bring
Qui-Gon back to Coruscant. "Yes, Master Yoda," he said, too. He
would put together a bare-bones report and send it to the Jedi
on Lun Yari during the trip, to give them an idea of what they
were dealing with. After that, it would be out of his hands.
That was a strange feeling, though he had handed over missions
before.
"When you return, come to see me." The slow, clever gaze
encompassed both of them. Yoda nodded once, decisively, and
reached out to tap with his gimer stick at the comm panel. The
screen went blank.
The cut comm channel hissed a moment's static. Obi-Wan closed
it down, making sure the call was logged. Then he turned
around.
"Qui-Gon," he said. "Let's go home."
Obi-Wan held out his hand, and Qui-Gon took it, linking their
fingers together easily, loosely, for a brief moment of
connection before letting go. Obi-Wan returned his attention to
the ship. The controls were familiar and responsive under his
fingers, and he took the Arrow off the ground so lightly that
Qui-Gon, still standing up, didn't even shift his weight.
Out through the open bay doors, out into the sunlight, and
Qui-Gon dropped down into the copilot seat; his knees bumped
the console in front. He reached out and put a hand on
Obi-Wan's shoulder, and Obi-Wan smiled a little to himself. The
Arrow rose into the atmosphere, flying straight and high,
higher, ground dropping away below them. At first everything
seemed tidier, the gridwork of buildings an orderly pattern.
Then as they got higher, Mos Espa turned into a blur on the
viewscreen, pale against pale sand, growing smaller and smaller
before it vanished. The surface of the planet turned
featureless, sand and rock blurring together, mountains and
deserts meshing into a haze of tan and brown as the distance
grew.
Then they were outside in the black weightlessness of space,
and Tatooine hung like a small golden-brown ornament on the
screen, its heat distant. It looked like any one of the
insignificant worlds scattered around the galaxy rim, its
resident population small, its drifters many.
Obi-Wan looked at Qui-Gon, meeting his eyes. The smile was
gone, but he could feel the steady weight of Qui-Gon's hand
where it rested on his shoulder, and Qui-Gon's gaze met his own
in calm agreement. He keyed in another sequence, shifted his
hands on the controls, and the planet fell away beneath them.
They were gone.
Archive
