E. Johnston: Star Wars: Ahsoka

“I’m Kaeden,” said the girl. “Kaeden Larte. Are you here for the harvest? That’s why most people come here, but we’re almost done. I’d be out there myself, except I lost an argument with one of the threshers yesterday.”

“No,” said Ahsoka. “I’m not much of a farmer. I’m just looking for a quiet place to set up shop.”

Kaeden shot her a piercing look, and Ahsoka realized she was going to have to be more clear or she’d stick out in spite of herself. She sighed.

“I repair droids and other mechanicals,” she said. She wasn’t as good as Anakin had been, but she was good enough. Away from the Temple and the war, Ahsoka had discovered that the galaxy was full of people who were merely good at things, not prodigious. It was taking her a while to readjust her way of thinking.

“We can always use that,” Kaeden said. “Is that all your stuff?”

“Yes,” Ahsoka said shortly, hoping to discourage further questions. It worked, because Kaeden took half a step back and looked embarrassed.

“I’ll let a few people know you’re setting up when they get in from the fields tonight,” she said, before the pause grew uncomfortably long. “They’ll be along tomorrow with work for you. In a few days, it’ll be like you’ve never lived anywhere else.”

“I doubt that,” Ahsoka said, too low for Kaeden to hear. She cleared her throat and spoke louder. “That will be fine.”

“Welcome to Raada.” Kaeden’s tone was sardonic, a forced smile on her face, but Ahsoka smiled back anyway.

“Thanks,” she said.

Kaeden walked back up the street, favoring her left leg as she went. The limp was not pronounced, but Ahsoka could tell that the injury was painful. That meant medical treatment on Raada was either expensive or unavailable. She shook her head and ducked through the door of her new house.

Cietra, whoever she was, was clearly no housekeeper. Ahsoka had expected some mustiness, given the abandoned state of the house, but what she found was actual dirt. The floors and the single table were coated with it, and she was a little worried what she might find on the bed. Ahsoka ran a finger across the tabletop and discovered that the dirt was mixed with some kind of engine grease, which made it sticky.

“The things Jedi training doesn’t prepare you for,” she mused, and then bit her tongue. Even alone, she shouldn’t say that word. It felt like betrayal, to deny where she’d come from, but it wasn’t safe and she couldn’t afford to slip up in public.

Ahsoka found a cupboard that had cleaning supplies in it and set to work. It was an easy job, if tedious, and strangely satisfying to see the dirt disappear. The cleaner wasn’t a droid, but it was efficient. As it hummed around the room, Ahsoka was able to find the best place in the house to hide her things.

The panel under the crude shower came off and revealed a compartment just large enough for her stash of credits. Everything else went under the bed, once Ahsoka finished disinfecting it. Then she sat cross-legged on the mattress and listened to the cleaner circumnavigate the room. Its hum reminded her of the training spheres she’d used as a youngling. She closed her eyes and felt her body ready itself for the energy bolt, though she was pretty sure the cleaner wasn’t going to shoot her.

From there, it was easy to fall into her meditation. For a moment she hesitated, afraid of what she’d seen— not seen—since the Jedi purge, but then she let herself go. Meditation was one of the things she missed most, and one of the few things that wasn’t likely to get her caught, even if someone saw her doing it.

The Force felt different now, and Ahsoka wasn’t sure how much of the difference was her. By walking away from the Temple, from the Jedi, she had given up her right to the Force—or at least that’s what she told herself sometimes. She knew it was a lie. The Force was always going to be a part of her, whether she was trained or not, the way it was part of everything. She couldn’t remove the parts of her that were sensitive to it any more than she could breathe on the wrong side of an airlock. Her authority was gone; her power remained.

But there was a darkness to her meditations now that she didn’t like. It was as if a shroud had been wrapped around her perceptions, dulling her vision. She knew there was something there, but it was hard to make out, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to. The familiar presence of Anakin was gone, like a disrupted conduit that no longer channeled power the way it was meant to. Ahsoka couldn’t feel him anymore, or any of the others. Even the sense of the Jedi as a whole was gone, and she’d been able to feel that since she was too small to articulate what it was that she felt. The feeling had saved her life once, when she was very young and a false Jedi came to Shili to enslave her. She missed it like she would have missed a limb.

The cleaner ran into the bed platform twice, stubbornly refusing to alter its course. Ahsoka leaned down and turned it in the other direction. She watched it for a few moments before she retreated back into her meditation, this time not quite so far. She wanted to get a sense of Raada, something more than her initial response could tell her, and this was as good a time as any to do it.

The moon stretched out around her. She was facing the center of town, so she reached behind where she sat. There were the fields, mostly harvested as Kaeden had said and ready for the next season’s planting. There was stone, rocky hills and caves where nothing useful could grow. There were large animals, though whether they were for labor or food, Ahsoka couldn’t tell. And there were boots, dozens of them, walking toward her.

Ahsoka shook herself out of her trance and found that the cleaner was cheerfully butting itself against the door to the shower. She got up to turn it off, and the new sound reached her ears: talking, laughing, and stamping feet. Her new neighbors were home from their day’s work in the fields.

KAEDEN SHOWED UPon Ahsoka’s doorstep bright and early the following morning with two ration packs and a—

“What is that?” Ahsoka asked, staring at the mangled bits of scrap Kaeden held under her arm.

“Your first patient, if you’re interested,” Kaeden replied cheerfully.

“I can’t fix it if I don’t know what it was supposed to do in the first place,” Ahsoka protested, but held out her hands anyway.

Kaeden took this as an invitation to enter. She deposited the broken pieces into Ahsoka’s hands and then sat on the bed, putting the rations down beside her.

“It’s the thresher I lost a fight with,” Kaeden said. If she felt strange about sitting on the place where Ahsoka slept, she gave no sign. Then again, the bed was Ahsoka’s only furniture, besides the low table.

Ahsoka spread the pieces on the table and sat down on the floor to look at them more closely. She supposed that the contraption might have been a thresher. But it could have also been a protocol droid, for all the mess it was in.

“I’d hate to see what happens when you win fights,” Ahsoka said.

“It was not my fault.” Kaeden said it with the air of a person who has made the argument, unsuccessfully, several times before. “One moment we were cruising along, set to make quota and everything, and the next thing I knew, disaster.”

“How’s the leg?” Ahsoka asked. Her fingers moved across the table, rearranging parts and trying to figure out if anything was salvageable.

“It’ll be well enough to go back to work tomorrow,” Kaeden said. “I’ll keep my harvest bonus, particularly if I don’t have to pay to replace the thresher.”