Chapter Four
Jedi Sentinel: Cult of Fear
It may have looked like Xen was sleeping in his hammock — that he was selfishly taking a day off with an innocent in mid-peril! — but in truth, he was simply a master of resting meditation. Everyone’s favorite kind of meditation.
He’d been stonewalled by the company, warned off by Gatts, and now he was waiting for The Force to guide him. Or maybe he was trying to resign himself to following the sheriff’s advice and letting this one go.
Or maybe he had social anxiety, because the voices in his head had a lot of critical things to say. He heard his master’s voice from decades past, telling him what a great Jedi he’d become, if only he’d apply himself… and the disappointment in his voice when they said their goodbyes. He heard Taos asking him to marry her, then breaking up with him when he questioned the institution. He heard Gatts pleading with him to take the deal, back when Serenity had him fitted for a noose.
And then he was back there, in his mind, base jumping off the crater’s ridge in the middle of the night, igniting his lightsaber to carve his way through Serenity’s corporate headquarters. The tower rose like an obelisk from the jungle, bone white and nearly windowless, the solar eclipse logo carved deep into its face. It glowed eerily in the light from Prassis’ twin moons.
There was no other way to reach the executive boardroom, you see. It had no windows, no exterior walls, and the doors were heavily blast shielded. It was their sanctum, their temple, and Xen had been absolutely certain he’d find the dark side there. He’d crashed down onto their great, big table amidst a column of smoldering debris, ready to confront evil.
And they were evil, make no mistake, but not in the way you can fight with a laser sword. Lots of expensive suits; not a single hooded robe.
He’d surrendered peacefully, a few decapitated security droids notwithstanding, but they’d wanted his head on a pike all the same. Only Gatts had stood in their way, insisting on locking him up in her jail and refusing to press charges. They’d buried him in lawsuits all the same. It had taken years to reach a settlement. Gatts almost lost her job. Their relationship never recovered.
Even The Force wanted him to leave this alone.
What a traitor.
Xen was saved from his reverie — uh, meditation! — by some rude rube who thought it wise to kick a Jedi out of his hammock. The Sullustan’s mouse-eyes fluttered open to find a human standing between himself and the sun. “What in the name of — “
“You were in my room,” she stated flatly. “Yesterday.”
“No I wasn’t,” Xen defended himself, rolling backwards and onto his feet before brushing the sand from his floral print shirt. “Also, who the hells are you?”
She was bald and slight, almost as short as Xen himself, and dressed in a skirt that poofed wider than her shoulders. “Don’t bother denying it. I hid a holorecorder in the overhead light. I saw the whole thing on my datapad.” Belated recognition shone on Xen’s face. “You probably should’ve stolen it.”
The Jedi took her measure anew. She wasn’t dressed as an initiate, but he did recognize that skirt from his B&E. There was something hard behind her eyes, a righteous resolve that Xen had seen many times before, as often in his allies as his enemies. “Then it seems we know each other’s secrets, which means you’re not here to blackmail me. That’s nice.”
“Nothing nice about it!” she barked. “You could’ve blown my cover, you git!”
“What are you? Republic? Corporate Sector?”
“Freelance,” she bragged. “I’m working on a story.”
“How can I help?”
She scrunched up her little face. “Just like that, huh? No further questions? Don’t wanna ask for anything in return?”
“Can’t two people just help each other?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she snorted, “if one of them’s a sucker.”
“Then you might be in luck.” He offered her a beer, but she ignored it.
“I want you to teach me that illusion you do. Everyone at the compound knows about it. Could be useful in my line of work.”
He spit up his beer. “The second self?” She nodded. “But you’re not even a Jedi!”
“Try me.”
“It takes years of training just to open yourself up to The Force. And most Jedi never get beyond pushing and pulling things.” She didn’t respond, just stared at him with a kind of angry patience. “I couldn’t possibly!”
She took a step toward him as if she might leap over the hammock and throttle him. “Look, my family has its own… esoteric traditions. And I’m not without my talents.” It was true; The Force was with her. “I’m just asking you to try. And in return, I’ll find out where they’re keeping your friend. The one who tried to escape.”
That perked him up. “So he’s still there? Do you know who he is?”
“Don’t you?”
“No,” Xen shrugged. “I just ran into him on the street and tried to help.”
“You’re a real helper,” she confirmed dryly.
“Aren’t you?”
Finally, she relaxed a little. “Maybe I am. Do we have a deal?”
He held out his hand and she took it.
“You can call me Ostia. Now… what’s the first lesson?”
The rowboat tilted madly on the waves. The tide was going out and taking them with it. They’d drifted into the shadow of a fifty-meter finger of stone, not too far from the island. Seabirds swooped and squawked all around them, which made it less easy to meditate, admittedly.
“If you can’t meditate amidst distraction,” Xen lectured his new student, “you’ll never be able to call The Force to your side when you need it.”
Ostia sat in the bow, approximately cross-legged, her rapier eyebrows crossed in what was, by her standards, peaceful concentration. “You’re only doing this because I kicked you out of that hammock,” she complained.
He didn’t disagree. “Just reach out with your feelings and tell me what you find.”
“Besides those blasted birds?”
“Besides the birds,” he confirmed.
“… the ocean. It’s deep, out here. Cold and dark and empty.”
“Is it?” the Jedi scoffed.
“… no, not empty. It’s pregnant with life. Plants and algae and the tiniest animals, all swimming and eating and fighting and — “
“Pull back.” Xen reached out to her, through The Force, and nudged her back toward herself. She was talented, maybe a bit too talented. “What do you sense between them?”
“Push and pull, like the tide,” she answered, tilting her hairless head. “A tension, a web of cause and effect. Energy. Limitless potential energy.”
“Good, kid. You’re a natural.”
“Told ya,” she grinned.
“Don’t get cocky.” He took it all back. “And don’t get distracted by the immensity of it. The Force is unknowable, but it ain’t everything. It’s created by living beings, including you and me. They’re what’s important. Find a single node in the web and focus on that.”
“… a whalebird.” There was a hitch in her breath, then a slow smile brightened her face. “It’s glorious. It has a white belly, but the rest is all black feathers, slick and waterproof. It’s stretching its flipper-wings, luxuriating in the warm water near the surface before… oh!”
A plume of water shot from the ocean, opposite the island and halfway to the horizon. “It breathes soooo deep.” She mimicked it, stretching out her arms and filling her lungs to bursting.
“Ostia!” Xen splashed her from the side of the boat. “Don’t lose yourself in it. Never lose sight of yourself.”
She opened one eye, to allow the daggers to escape, but otherwise took it in stride. “I can sense you,” she challenged him, returning to her meditation. “You’re hard to miss, actually. So many threads connect to you — loves and loyalties, promises and regrets — but you’re also so… still. Like a shallow pond on a cold morning.”
“You really know how to flatter a guy.” That calm was the result of years of Jedi training, nothing she could accomplish in a few days.
She continued. “I can feel your pulse and the blaster wound below your heart… and the other blaster wound above your knee. Still so strong, for your age — “
“Okay, okay, that’s enough about me.” He thought about splashing her again, but chose restraint. “Turn that keen perception on yourself. Can you find your own node in The Force?”
“Yes.”
“Now…” the moment of truth, “push it towards me.”
Ostia’s figure blurred, shifted, and then there were two of her! Both sat cross-legged in a pile of frilly skirts, but one floated over the oars in the center of the boat. “Like I said, you’re a natural.”
She opened her eyes and the illusion evaporated, but she caught just enough of it to be aggravatingly proud of herself. “What did I tell you?!” she crowed, rocking the bitty boat.
“Great start, but that trick’s only good for impressing at cocktail parties. To truly master the second self, you’ll have to cook me dinner.”
It wasn’t as sexist as it sounded. He also made her repair an engine.
“You can switch between tasks as fast as you want,” Xen heckled her from a salvaged recliner in the sitting area, “it won’t be enough. You have to split your mind down the middle. You must do it all at once.”
Xen’s home had been a hangar. Was still, really. He’d converted it into a mechanic’s shop primarily by hanging a sign out front that read, “Mechanic’s Shop.” The interior was mostly floor space, empty except for the piles of parts and half-finished projects that took up every last square meter.
Ostia bounced around the back quarter like a child’s ball. The kitchen was only recognizable as such by the presence of a crusty stove, on which Ostia was preparing a stir fry. On the nearby plasteel table, she struggled to install a power coupling without letting the vegetables burn.
Xen’s sitting area occupied the adjacent corner; whether it was a living room or a waiting room depended greatly on your point of view. “Your progress today was impressive,” Xen admitted, “most impressive. Care to tell me more about your family’s traditions? I’m always curious to know how non-Jedi understand The Force.”
“Because I don’t have enough to do already,” she presumably glared at him. Xen couldn’t see her face behind a stack of power cells. “Now I gotta entertain you, too?”
“Yup.”
“It’s your dinner that’s gonna burn,” she warned him, nudging the pan with one foot while she held two live wires apart.
“I’ll risk it.”
“Ugh, fine. We’re dreamers,” she told him. Trusting others with information was obviously difficult for her. Xen wondered how much of it would be the truth. “We touch The Force in our dreams, prophetic dreams. We walk the threads of fate that connect people and events.”
“Prophecy is a delicate art. Many a Jedi have been led astray by misunderstood glimpses of the future.” He’d meant it as a compliment, that her family navigated such waters, but it came out like a warning.
“Well, my relatives make a lot of money at it, so maybe the Jedi just suck. No offense,” she added as the power coupling threw sparks into the frying pan, which was gonna be either a disaster or culinary genius. “I have a particular talent for reading people, but I didn’t wanna just use it to swindle daddy’s business partners. I want to do something good, make the galaxy a better place.”
“Oh yeah?” the Jedi scoffed. “What have you made better so far? Anything I’ve heard of?”
“I busted up a Bothan Space slavery ring!” she countered, all angry indignation. Her foot slipped and the frying pan clattered against the stove. “I set up a Hutt gangster and got him captured by bounty hunters, shipped off to void knows where. Served him right.”
“And you followed that up by going undercover at a health spa?”
“They’re torturing people in there and you know it! They take people’s life savings and they — “
“Don’t let those touch!” he cried, springing from his chair, but all for naught. The power coupling flashed, shorted out, and started smoking like a deep sea vent, dark and foul.
“Dank ferrik!” Ostia swore, sucking on her burnt fingers. Smoke also began rising from the frying pan. “Double dank ferrik!” She pulled it off the stove and wafted the fumes out the back door. “Happy now?”
“Only if you learned something,” he responded sagely.
“I learned you’re a nosy jerk,” she replied.
“Then I’m happy.”
The Wishing Tree was closed.
The Wishing Tree. Was closed!
Skeeves never closed. And he never renovated, so how in the name of all that was good and holy was The Wishing Tree closed for renovations?!
Xen felt like the center had fallen out of his universe, scattering his stars in every direction. He was still thinking about it fifteen minutes later as he leaned against the bar inside Repose. Under normal circumstances, he would never have set foot inside this cheap gallery of vice and misery, but it was the best place on the island for Ostia’s next lesson. And he was determined to be there for his student.
Even if he hated it.
Repose always felt cramped, despite the high ceilings and generous main floor. Thick curtains covered the windows and hung from the balcony railing, trapping heat from Jerash’s yawning fireplace. Who even needed a fireplace on a tropical island? Chandeliers hovered above the main floor, somehow failing to push back the room’s palpable shadows. Even the bar crouched beneath the stairs, laying in wait for the sober and those dangerously close to being sober.
Dozens of tourists laughed and drank and smoked bubbling hookahs as desperate townies plied them for credits and favors. That was the real soul of this place: people using people. It was why Xen avoided it like a plague. That and the owner hated his guts.
Speak of the Sith! Jerash oozed his way behind the bar and sidled up behind Xen, nonchalantly washing a glass like he worked here. “Stopping by to make trouble?” he asserted, skipping the Hello’s and How Are You’s in favor or direct antagonism.
“You know me, ever the instigator.” Xen innocently sipped his umbrella drink. He spared a glance up at Ostia, who had stationed herself on the balcony. If not for The Force, he may have mistook her for a tourist. Today, she was wearing a tall, white wig with a matching dress under a gilded shawl. She fit right in.
Her eyes were closed, her face far more relaxed than during her first lessons as she tried to split her attention between multiple conversations. They couldn’t be seen together, but Xen was there to be a centering, supportive presence. He was sure he could do that and trade barbs with the proprietor at the same time.
“I’d be a regular, if you served a decent fish and chips,” he lied while trying to give a pair of Rhodian newlyweds their privacy. They flirted with their pheromones as much as their words, which was difficult to ignore. Nearby, am Umbaran fixer negotiated payment with a smuggler, over some kind of endangered delicacy.
“The day I serve fish and chips,” even the phrase appeared to leave a bad task in Jerash’s mouth, “is the day I put photos on the menu.”
“Might be a good move. Your patrons aren’t the reading type.”
“As long as they’re the spending type — “
Xen’s attention was dragged away from a Twi’lek lothario’s seduction efforts by a familiar song being sung on stage… by a familiar voice… wearing a familiar patchwork vest. Tooka! It was Tooka, onstage at Repose!
“What’s the meaning of this?!” the Jedi whirled on Jerash.
“I generally think art should speak for itself,” the Bith replied coyly.
“Not the lyrics! What’s she doing in here? Is she working for you?!”
Jerash inspected his glass and put it away before answering. “I offered her a venue, yes. She jumped at the chance.” He picked up another piece of glassware and got to washing. “She didn’t tell you?”
A skipped beat marked the moment Tooka noticed her uncle Xen standing at the bar… arguing with her boss. She recovered quickly, like a pro.
Xen slammed his drink on the bar; the tiny umbrella made a break for it. “What are you playing at, Jerash?”
“Business, as always. You?”
“If she suffers any abuse or humiliation at the hands of — “
“You’ll amputate my arms with your laser sword?” Jerash cut to the chase, daring Xen to escalate.
“I’ll play it by ear,” Xen grumbled, not taking the bait.
The Bith dropped his dishrag and brushed off his hands. Apparently, his work here was done. “Well, it’s been a pleasant visit, as ever, but maybe you’d have a better time across the street… oh wait, it’s closed,” he gloated.
“What do you know about it?”
“Not much. Just that your friend’s got a new investor and some fancible notions about running me out of business.” Jerash leaned in close. “He… also hasn’t told you about it?”
“Who’s the investor?”
Now, the Bith leaned back and held his stomach, as if from laughter. “He hasn’t! How sad. If you spent half as much time keeping up with your friends as day drinking in your hammock — “
“Do you know or not?!” Xen’s fist hit the bar like a mynock against a viewport.
“Of course I do!” Jerash visibly savored the reveal. “It’s Tullum, that turncoat. Quite the coup for your barkeep. I don’t know how I’ll possibly recover.”
What in the name of the nine hells was going on? Tooka working for Jerash, Skeeves teaming up with Tullum… what next?! Hutts going straight? Mandalorians hanging up their gunbelts? Vegetarian Rancor?!
Xen was still reeling when Cairn Stobi stormed through the beaded curtain and marched right up to him like a starfighter dropping out of hyperspace.
“We need to talk,” she told Xen, giving her fellow Bith a curt nod.
The Jedi tried to put her off. “I’m kinda in the middle of, like, three things.”
“It’s about Taos.”
Of course it was! She’d probably decided to default on her loan and take up nerf herding. What a day! “Fine, but can you tell me about it here?” Xen fixed Jerash with an unwelcoming gaze until the saloon keeper raised his eye ridges and slinked off to the far side of the bar. “What’s happened?”
“She joined the cult.”
Funny. Xen understood those words individually, but in that particular order, they sounded like gibberish. “Serenity?” he fumbled.
“No, the other cult. Yes, Serenity!”
He still wasn’t getting it. “She’s an initiate?”
“No, no,” Stobi sighed. Her eyes found his cocktail and she swept it up, clearing the glass in one gulp. “Not yet, anyway, but they did something to her and now she thinks they’re the greatest thing since hydrospanners. And she’s…” Stobi lowered her voice and leaned in close, closer than their faces had ever been, “she’s talking about stealing her ship and having a baby and going cliff diving and getting a gun arm! It’s like she’s been replaced with a completely different person, Xen!”
“A little slower, please,” Xen begged. If the whole world could slow down, just a little bit, that’d be great. “Did something happen to her?”
“She was attacked in the street, outside their clinic. Someone in a hooded cloak blew powder in her face and she had a vision, also a seizure. I don’t know, Xen, I wasn’t there. You have to do something!”
Xen was still reeling from that when Tooka got up in his face. He hadn’t even noticed when she finished her song. Dimly, he wondered how Ostia was getting on.
“What are you doing here?” Tooka angry-whispered in his big ears.
“What are you doing here?” he countered.
“Working. You’re embarrassing me at work,” she scolded him before nodding significantly toward Jerash, who was eating this up.
“You know this isn’t a job, right?” Xen knew he wasn’t being discreet, but it was all too much. “It’s some kinda con. That’s all you ever get from these two.”
“I’m standing right here,” Jerash reminded him, “and Tullum’s on your side now, if that’s who you meant.”
Xen jabbed a finger at the Bith. “Do I look stupid to you?”
His amused shrug was answer enough.
“I need you to leave, Uncle Xen,” Tooka switched to a more conciliatory tone. “We can talk about this later.”
“After you talk to Taos,” Stobi chimed in.
He checked on Ostia, but she was already gone. Xen hoped she hadn’t heard all that, but he knew she had. That was the point of the lesson, after all, and Ostia was an excellent student. Much better than he was a master.
“Fine,” he surrendered. “Taos first, then I’ll come find you,” he told Tooka in his most parental tone. She rolled her eyes. “And I’ll come find you later, too,” he promised Jerash as Stobi dragged him out by both arms.
The Bith couldn’t stop laughing.
Written by Daniel Bayn
Cover image by Midjourney
