Industrial District Perimeter, Lothal6 BBY (Two Weeks After the Canyon)
The screams reached Ezra before he saw the source.
He'd been returning from a supply run in the lower markets, pockets weighted with protein rations and a used medkit he'd haggled down to reasonable price. The route took him past the Imperial factory complex, a sprawling compound of prefabricated structures and belching smokestacks that turned Lothal's sky the color of infection. Normally he avoided this area after dark, too many patrols and too little cover, but exhaustion had made him careless about route selection.
The screams clarified that carelessness into something approaching fate.
Three stormtroopers stood in a pool of portable floodlight, their armor transformed into bleached bone by the harsh illumination. At their feet, five civilians knelt in the dust, hands bound behind their backs with plasteel restraints. Two were crying. One was praying in a language Ezra didn't recognize. The other two just stared at the ground with the hollow expression of people who'd already accepted what came next.
Execution detail. The Empire's preferred method of maintaining order through intermittent displays of overwhelming violence. Pick random citizens, manufacture charges of sedition or conspiracy, shoot them in public view. Repeat until compliance became instinctive.
Ezra's first impulse was to keep walking. These weren't his people. This wasn't his fight. He'd already killed enough in the past two weeks to populate nightmares for months, and getting involved here would accomplish nothing except adding his body to the count.
But, yes, always but. He couldn't let this one go.
The lead trooper raised his blaster, the weapon's power cell whining as it charged to full capacity.
Ezra moved.
His fist connected with the lead trooper's helmet with force that should have shattered bone in Ezra's hand. Instead, the trooper staggered sideways, the blaster shot going wild, superheating air where a civilian's head had been a heartbeat before.
Ezra's other hand already moved, pulling the survival knife from his belt in a motion so smooth it felt choreographed. The blade was standard Imperial issue, salvaged from a dead guard weeks ago, ten centimeters of durasteel designed more for utility than combat. But steel was steel, and momentum was momentum, and the gap between a trooper's helmet and chest plate measured exactly the width required for a blade thrust at the correct angle.
He drove the knife home, felt resistance as it punched through the bodysuit's weave layer, then the wet give of flesh parting. The trooper made a sound between a cough and a scream, hands scrabbling at the wound, at Ezra, at anything that might reverse the sudden understanding that death had arrived wearing a child's face.
Ezra twisted the blade and pulled, arterial spray painting his jacket in patterns that would never fully wash out. The trooper collapsed, still trying to speak, still trying to understand how the execution had inverted so completely.
The second trooper brought his weapon up, training overriding the shock of watching a comrade die to a street kid with a knife. Ezra lunged for the blaster of the dying man, fingers closing around grips still warm from their previous owner's hands. He rolled, came up in a crouch, fired three times in rapid succession.
The first shot went wide, adrenaline destroying his aim. The second caught the trooper center mass, the armor absorbing most of the impact but staggering him backward. The third, fired with the strange clarity that sometimes emerged from chaos, punched through the trooper's chest plate at an angle where the armor was thinnest.
The trooper dropped, servos in his armor whining as they tried to compensate for sudden catastrophic system failure.
The third trooper ran.
Ezra almost let him go, but there can't be any witnesses. He fired once more. The shot caught the fleeing trooper between the shoulder blades, punching through armor that wasn't designed to handle impacts from behind. The body pitched forward, momentum carrying it another three steps before physics and death reached consensus.
The civilians stared at him with expressions that ranged from gratitude to terror to something that might have been religious awe. One of them, an older woman whose face bore the deep lines of decades spent working under Lothal's harsh sun, spoke first.
"You saved us."
Ezra wanted to correct her, but did it really matter?
Instead he moved to the nearest corpse, the one he'd stabbed, and began stripping anything useful. The blaster, obviously. A spare power cell. Fifty credits in the trooper's belt pouch. A combat knife better than the one currently slick with blood in Ezra's other hand.
"You need to run," he managed finally, voice rough like he'd been screaming. "Imperial response times in this sector average eight minutes. You've got maybe five before patrols converge."
The woman who'd spoken stepped forward, wrists still bound. "Help us with these restraints first."
Ezra hesitated, then used the combat knife to cut through the plasteel. The material parted easily under the blade's monomolecular edge, and within seconds all five civilians stood free. They scattered immediately, disappearing into the maze of service alleys and maintenance corridors that surrounded the factory complex.
Smart. The Empire punished proximity to violence as readily as violence itself. Witnesses became convenient scapegoats when actual perpetrators proved elusive.
Ezra grabbed what he could carry from the bodies and moved in the opposite direction, away from the factory, toward the wasteland regions where patrol density thinned to near-invisibility.
He'd gone maybe half a kilometer when the sirens started, their rising wail cutting through the night's ambient industrial noise. Searchlights stabbed upward from the factory complex, sweeping across the landscape in patterns designed to catch movement and punish hesitation.
Ezra dropped into a drainage culvert, pressed himself against the duracrete wall, and waited while patrol speeders screamed past overhead. His heart hammered against his ribs, each beat so loud it felt like it should be visible on Imperial sensors. But the patrols continued past, converging on the execution site, leaving the surrounding area temporarily clear.
He emerged from the culvert only after the sound of repulsor engines faded, moving with careful deliberation toward his tower. Every shadow could hide a patrol. Every sound might signal discovery.
The tower appeared through the darkness like a promise of sanctuary. Ezra climbed the exterior ladder with muscles that trembled from exertion and adrenaline crash, pulled himself through the access hatch, and collapsed onto the floor inside.
For several minutes he just lay there, breathing, letting the reality of what had happened settle into something his mind could process. Three dead stormtroopers. Five freed civilians. An Imperial manhunt that would flood this sector with troops until someone answered for the deaths.
Eventually he forced himself upright, stripped off his blood-spattered jacket, and examined the new equipment spread across his floor. Two blasters now, both fully charged. Extra power cells. The combat knife. Credits enough for a week of decent food.
Ezra moved to his makeshift weapons cache and began field-stripping one of the blasters, cleaning the components with methodical care while his mind processed the night's events. He should feel something, he thought.
But a part of him was happy that the feeling was dwindling. He reassembled the blaster, loaded a fresh power cell, and set it within arm's reach. Then he pulled out the datapad and began drafting contingency plans for when the Imperial investigation inevitably closed in. New safe houses. Alternate identities. Escape routes that didn't rely on infrastructure the Empire could shut down at will.