Distractions.

They bounced around in Raey's head, making it impossible to do what Ar'tak wanted of him. Standing out in the middle of the lawn with hot jungle air pressing in, a dead body just out of reach, and someone making the earth tremble in a fight within the temple was a far reach from the calm, cool comfort of a Jedi apprentice's private quarters. Pain distracted him; the rush of fear and excitement brought about by his ill-considered attack distracted him; the eyes of Ar'tak and LN distracted him.

"I don't know how to do it again," he protested after a moment. "Shouldn't you do it? You actually know what you're supposed to be looking for."

"No, I don't. I am actually quite bad at sensing inanimate objects or things that haven't been pointed out to me ahead of time," Ar'tak replied, tension making him terse. Whatever he claimed, the mountain tremor had put him on edge, too.

"And you expect me to be able to do what the one with Jedi training can't?" said Raey incredulously, but LN cut the budding argument short with one raised hand.

"Look for the computer."

Ar'tak frowned, but Raey just cocked his head, intriqued.

"It was an old-school Imperial fighter that shot us down. If you know them as well as you claim, then find it."

.

LN wasn't sure how Jedi powers were supposed to work, but when Raey pointed out a direction, she followed. Ar'tak trailed along behind, his big alien eyes narrowed in confusion, but LN wasn't going to try to explain. The parts-stealing scavenger-Raey she had crashed a shuttle with and the awe-struck hero-worshipping-Raey learning Jedi tricks among New Alderaanians behaved quite differently, and while she wasn't quite sure what to make of the latter, she had a pretty good idea of how to motivate the former.

And Raey slipped further back into that old mentality the further away from the city they got. LN wasn't quite sure what it was that gave it away – he was walking up ahead, so she couldn't even see his face – but she could tell he was warming to the hunt like a blood hound. Ships. If LN had to guess one thing to be her young companion's passion, it would be ships.

She hadn't missed the jungle. The heat seemed even worse beneath the canopy of dense leaves, and the constant trailing vines and underbrush made it hard to move forward.

"Could you blaze us a trail with that lightsaber?" LN asked Ar'tak once, but the Jedi apprentice immediately shook his head.

"We should try not to leave a trail, or warn any enemies of our approach. Besides, the lightsaber is a noble and dangerous weapon, not a weed-whacker."

Raey kept quiet, focused so entirely on whatever weird sense was telling him where to go that LN wasn't sure if he would even notice if she tried to get his attention.

Then, about an hour of trudging from the city, Raey stopped suddenly and pointed. LN and Ar'tak caught up and stopped beside him, but it took LN a long moment to spot what Raey had seen.

Sunlight glinted faintly off an exposed bit of black metal, barely visible between the trees. The acolytes' fighter.

"You... found it," she muttered under her breath, wary of sentries but unable to stay silent for awe. "I can't believe you actually found it."

"I want it," replied Raey bluntly. "They owe me after killing the Diomediun."

Ar'tak looked over at them both, blue eyes narrow. "We should disable it," he warned, but LN just shook her head.

"Raey is going after his Resistance friend," she explained, trusting her instincts on this one. "And for some insane reason, I'm going with him."

"In that ship, we can get in," Raey added, pointing. "Get in, find Dameron, get out... quick and quiet."

Ar'tak let out a long, slow breath, then drew it back in sharply and nodded. "Right, then let's make sure there isn't a third dark one lurking about."

He strode forward, and Raey and LN exchanged pleased looks before following.

The ship looked completely abandoned. If there had been some third person guarding the ship, he would have to be completely invisible. Raey climbed up on top of the round body of the fighter and opened the hatch to slip inside. "It's empty," he called out, and LN clambered up after him while Ar'tak kept watch.

The inside of the black fighter was a little less cramped then the modern Tie-Fighters LN had trained in, but it also didn't quite match any model she had read about before. It was slightly larger, more comfortable, and was clearly designed to seat both a pilot and a gunner. Raey had already claimed the pilot's chair, so LN climbed into the gunner seat and gave him a stern tap on the shoulder.

"I didn't crash the last one," he protested, "I was shot down. There's a difference."

"One of us has been trained to fly ships. One of us has not. Who should fly the ship?"

Raey considered for so long, Ar'tak had time to finally climb in and began trying to find a comfortable way to stand behind the gunner's seat. An impossible effort.

"You," Raey admitted finally, and LN nodded.

"Gunner seat, before Ar'tak takes it."

"Hey!"

"Last one in gets to stand. That's the rule."

LN and Raey exchanged seats, a maneuver that required LN to do a little wriggling and for Raey to climb over a chair.

"This plan doesn't seem very well-thought through," Ar'tak commented, leaning awkwardly against the wall behind Raey. "Where are you even planning to go after getting off this planet? Back to Jakku in the hopes the First Order is still hovering around there for some reason?"

"I have given that some thought," replied LN briskly, running through the familiar startup sequence system check. "The movements of the Knights aren't tracked by any system I am aware of, but the movements of our destroyers are. If we can get into one of the First Order cross-system communication stations, I may be able to find and bring up the record of where the Resurrection has gone since leaving Jakku."

Raey's head popped up over the shoulder of her chair. "Are we going to be looking for prisoner transfer logs or something?"

"The Knights don't need to go through the same official channels as the rest of the First Order, so I doubt we'll be so lucky as to find a formal transfer request, but we should be able to track where their flagship has been. That will narrow down the number of potential locations your Resistance friend could be being held in." LN paused, half-glancing at Raey. "Even so... this is a long shot. You know that, right? Anywhere the Knights take him, it would take a miracle for us to infiltrate."

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"One step at a time, LN," he replied, turning his attention back to the gunner-position controls. "Besides, we have a Jedi now. They specialize in miracles."

.

It felt good to be in the sky again.

Raey, with nothing to do in his cramped little backseat position, kept his eyes fixed on the glass canopy that stretched across half of the circular roof. The layers of world fell towards them and vanished below, first leaves, then treetops, then clouds, then atmosphere, until finally they flew out into the dark starscape.

It made his stomach swoop, and his heart feel light again. Even the cold that sank into the metal walls of the starship and chilled the air inside felt better then the dreadfully heavy dampness on New Alderaan.

Then Ar'tak just had to break the beautiful silence.

Raey tried very hard not to pay attention. The entire Jedi-teaching thing had been hard enough to follow on the planet, and now Ar'tak wanted him to try to "focus on his feelings" for, it seemed, no particular reason.

"You clearly have some natural talent, finding this ship as you did, but every Jedi needs to hone their natural talent with practice and training. Only then can they..."

And Raey tuned him out again. The ship began to tremble underneath his feet, heating up for the jump into hyperspace. LN was completely focused on her piloting job, and already Raey missed the Diomediun. Taking turns steering, learning the ways of the shuttle under threat of destruction with LN in the co-pilot position, ready to step in but letting him hover on the edge...

He ran his fingers along and between the buttons on his control console, but they were totally unrelated to the flying of the ship. Unless something went dreadfully wrong, there wouldn't even be a reason to fire the fighter's guns. Idly, Raey began digging his fingernails under the panel, testing the attachments.

LN activated the hyperdrive and the fighter jumped forward into the star-streaked corridor of space.

"Alright, boys," she declared, interrupting Ar'tak in the middle of whatever it was the alien had been talking about. "I've found our fighter's ID and a code which, hopefully, marks us as a ship under the authority of the Knights of Ren. Our course is set for a backup data-transmission stations, one I worked as security at for a few months before being transferred to Squad D-19. I still have the map layout memorized, so follow my lead once we land."

Ar'tak shifted, leaned against the other wall. "You have a station memorized after only being on it for a few months?"

LN shot a look over her shoulder at him. "I memorized the layout before ever stepping foot on the station. Getting lost while on duty is not acceptable, so most of us prefer not to even risk it."

"Does that mean you have the floor plan of the Domination memorized, too?"

"Parts of it. The destroyers are a little large for squads to realistically cycle through the entire ship, so we generally stuck to a few select sectors or floors, with a few additional jobs added to the schedule as troopers became necessary. D-19 was a Level 2 squad."

Raey caught a strange tone slipping into LN's voice as she talked. He looked back at Ar'tak and saw the Jedi apprentice frowning slightly in thought.

"LN?" Raey ventured. "What was it like? Your... stormtrooper squad?"

Not quite what I meant, but alright. Raey didn't want to just come out and ask what sort of things LN had done during her years as a stormtrooper, so he hoped the last-second redirect helped soften the question.

She was quiet for a minute, making Raey tense with the worry that it was a topic she really didn't want to talk about.

"It's hard to explain," she said eventually, and the lack of anger in her voice made Raey relax again. "Ar'tak, how would you describe your relationships with the other people in that temple of yours?"

His response came without a moment's hesitation. "Some of them are my friends, some are my teachers, and all feel like family. Even people I barely talk to, when we pass in the halls... there is a connection because we are all here - there - for the same reason. To save a culture. To protect, and to learn."

LN was quiet for another moment, but then she nodded. "Sounds about right, but try and take all the... friendship out of it. The connection is there, but it is a connection born of mutual understanding without any of the rest of it."

Raey felt the space-chill sinking into his bones again, and not in a good way.

"My squad, D-19, consisted of nine people at a time. I got to know them all as well as I've known anyone, but none of us would have called one another 'friends'. It wasn't encouraged. Attachments lead to emotional mistakes on the battlefield, so we were just comrades. Bunkmates."

"The other stormtrooper on the Domination...?" prompted Raey, and LN let out a heavy breath of a sigh.

"FL-2218. He had the oldest designation of any of us common-ranks, and he was next in command under Squad Leader." A long pause. Her voice fell. "I think... he might have helped us escape. If I had just said it out loud, if I had had the courage to take the risk..."

Ar'tak made a little, uncomfortable noise in the back of his throat. "What about the rest of your squad?"

LN fiddled with something on her console. "There was RK-3297, who I think you would have gotten along with under different circumstances, Raey. He was the newest addition to the squad and was completely obsessed with ships. We got him after LB-1460 and LM-5619 were killed in a scouting mission... I transferred out of the communication station with those two. We were from the same generation of classes, so we tended to get assigned in the same groups whenever troopers were needed."

The hint of oddness Raey had noticed before slowly solidified into a distinct, unfiltered melancholy. LN almost seemed to forget that he and Ar'tak were even in the fighter with her as she continued.

"MK-4414... he transferred to D-19 right out of the academy. That was when we were first active in the Yavin system. He is the reason I started wondering... why I looked further. His first mission with us, we were tracking a group of early Resistance fighters through the forest. They weren't supposed to know we were there. He saw the ambush coming. I still don't know how; he just focused on something the rest of us glanced over and made a connection the rest of us didn't. It was against orders, but he took the lead and got us into position above the ambushers. We got out of there without a single casualty, the mission was a success, but when we got back to base MK-4414 got called in by the captain. Reconditioning."

LN jabbed something on her panel, but all Raey could see was her stiff shoulders jerking with the sudden movement.

"He just couldn't keep his mouth shut. He couldn't turn off his brain like the rest of us. Once or twice, maybe it would have been fine. Squad Leader didn't even report him every time, but eventually someone higher up noticed the pattern. When he came back the last time, we all knew that it would be the last time. He was different after that. Never stepped out of line again."

Her voice failed. She fell silent, the muscles in the back of her neck twitching beneath the skin. Raey almost reached out, but didn't. He couldn't. He didn't know what to say.

Ar'tak leaned over, reached around Raey to do what he couldn't bring himself to do. The alien put a hand on LN's shoulder and gave her a light squeeze, like a tiny one-hand hug, then withdrew just as quickly. "That sounds like more then comrades, LN. That sounds like family."

"A family of murderers," LN said coldly, her eyes fixed on her console. "A family marching under the banner of tyrants, killing innocents, and leaving one another behind to die. That doesn't sound like the kind of family people are supposed to have."

"It doesn't have to end like that."

"It's the end for me."

Ar'tak didn't reply. LN's tone brooked no argument, forestalled any attempt to comfort or protest.

The silence returned, but Raey no longer enjoyed it.

.

.

FL-2218 sat on his bunk, his helmet on the mattress beside him and his hands clasped between his knees. The eyes of the rest of the squad were fixed on him, but it was Squad Leader who demanded a response.

"Are you certain you want to submit this report?"

FL-2218 wanted to swallow – he did not. He wanted to clench his fingers together, dig the fingernails into his skin – he did not. He let nothing betray the dark sick feeling that twisted in his gut.

"I have nothing to add, sir."

"A bound prisoner overpowered you?"

"He grabbed LN-2737's stun baton while she was accessing a terminal. Everything that happened after that, I was unconscious for."

"That does not look good for either of you, FL-2218. And LN-2737 isn't here to corroborate, or refute, your claims."

"I have nothing to add, sir."