Western Sea-Port, Capital City, Lothal6 BBY (Three Days After the Factory Incident)
Ezra stood at the edge of the dilapidated pier, watching cargo haulers move through the predawn gloom like mechanical ghosts. The western sea-port occupied a neglected stretch of Lothal's coastline where bureaucratic oversight thinned to the point of irrelevance. Imperial inspectors focused their attention on the primary spaceport, leaving these water-based facilities to rot under the weight of their own corruption.
Which made them perfect for the kind of work Vizago had lined up.
"You're early." The voice came from behind him, female, carrying an accent that placed its origin somewhere in the Outer Rim territories where Basic blended with a dozen other linguistic traditions.
Ezra turned to find a woman perhaps twice his age, skin weathered by years of stellar radiation exposure, hair pulled back in a practical braid that had started coming loose. She wore the kind of clothes that made her simultaneously invisible and instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the smuggling trade... functional, worn, carrying the faint chemical smell of engine lubricant and recycled air.
"Ria Dorne," she said, extending a hand. "Vizago says you're the kid who walked out of that canyon mess with the goods intact."
Her grip was firm when Ezra shook, calluses in patterns that suggested extensive time working ship controls. He recognized the assessment happening behind her eyes, the same calculation every adult made when confronting a thirteen-year-old claiming professional competence in illegal activities.
"He mention' I can't believe Solomon is a kid?" Ria continued, releasing his hand. "Because I really can't believe Solomon is a kid."
"People keep saying that..."
"Yeah, well, people usually die when they underestimate what age means in this business." She gestured toward a freighter docked at the pier's far end, its hull scarred with the kind of damage that came from atmospheric reentry at inadvisable angles. "That's the Dust Runner. She's ugly but she moves, and her transponder codes are clean enough to pass casual inspection."
Ezra followed her toward the ship, his mind already cataloguing tactical details. The freighter was a YT-1300 variant, older model, probably held together more through mechanical sympathy than proper maintenance. But the engines looked recently serviced, and the landing gear showed none of the stress fractures that indicated structural compromise.
"Job's straightforward," Ria said as they climbed the boarding ramp. "We're moving silenced ion disruptors and high-grade spice from a mining outpost to a contact at one of the western island ports. Payment's fifty-fifty split, plus you get to keep whatever spare parts the buyer's throwing in as bonus."
Inside, the freighter's cargo bay smelled like hydraulic fluid and something organic that Ezra's nose identified as Corellian whiskey. Crates were stacked along the walls, secured with magnetic clamps that hummed softly with active charge.
"Disruptors are flagged intel by the ISB," Ria continued, running her hand along one of the crates with the casual affection people reserved for dangerous things they'd learned to respect. "If they pop up in Imperial databases, we're invisible until we're not. Then we're very, very dead."
"Jeez...reassuring."
"Truth usually isn't." She moved toward the cockpit, gesturing for Ezra to follow. "Route takes us low over the spice-fields, then out across the water toward the western islands. Patrol density should be minimal this time of morning, but the Empire's been twitchy since someone killed three troopers at the factory complex."
Ria was fishing, trying to determine if he posed a liability. The honest answer was yes, absolutely, he'd killed Imperial personnel and freed condemned civilians in an act that had probably tripled his threat profile in every security database on Lothal.
But honesty in this context meant the job died before it started.
"I'm clean," he said. "No outstanding warrants, no Imperial attention. Just another street rat trying to eat regular."
Ria held his gaze for three seconds longer than comfort allowed, then nodded and returned her attention to the controls. "Strap in. We're lifting in two minutes."
The mining outpost where they'd load the actual cargo sat thirty kilometers north, accessible through atmospheric flight that kept them below sensor threshold. Ezra took the copilot's seat, watching Lothal's landscape scroll past beneath them as dawn broke across the plains.
From this altitude, the planet's transformation became viscerally apparent. What had once been grasslands now bore the geometric scars of Imperial industry: strip mines, processing facilities, the skeletal frameworks of factories under construction. Even the air looked wrong, hazy with particulate matter that turned sunrise into something resembling infected tissue.
"You from Lothal originally?" Ria asked, hands steady on the controls as she navigated around a dust storm cell.
"Born here. Parents died when I was eight."
"Empire?"
"Factory explosion. Official story said equipment malfunction. More likely someone cut corners on safety protocols to meet production quotas."
"Lost my brother to something similar. Imperial mine collapse on Ryloth, took sixty workers with it. Investigators blamed the victims, said they'd been stealing equipment and compromised structural integrity."
"Were they?"
"Stealing? Probably. The Empire pays subsistence wages and expects gratitude. But the mine was going to collapse anyway, everyone knew it. Management just didn't care enough to halt operations until after the quotas were met." She adjusted their heading, compensating for crosswinds. "That's when I left. Figured if the Empire was going to kill me, might as well be for something I actually did rather than just existing in the wrong place."
The mining outpost appeared ahead, a cluster of prefabricated structures clinging to a plateau that overlooked one of Lothal's few remaining natural canyons. Ria brought them in low and fast, touching down with barely a shudder as the landing gear absorbed the impact.
The cargo transfer took twenty minutes, Ezra and Ria working in practiced silence to load the disruptors into concealed compartments beneath the deck plating. The spice went into standard cargo containers, their manifests falsified to list agricultural supplements. The deception wouldn't survive intensive inspection, but it might buy time to run if things went wrong.
"Something's off," Ezra said as they secured the last container.
Ria looked up from the magnetic clamps. "What?"
He couldn't articulate it, not in terms that made rational sense. Just that sensation of wrongness that had preceded the canyon ambush, a pressure against his awareness like weather changing before the storm arrived. The Force, he'd come to understand, didn't communicate in language or linear thought. It spoke in impression and intuition, patterns that his conscious mind struggled to translate into actionable intelligence.
"Patrol routes," he said finally. "They've shifted. We need to leave now."
"Kid, the patrol schedules don't change without advance notice. Imperial logistics are predictable to the point of stupidity."
"And when was the last time someone murdered three stormtroopers and vanished into the industrial district? You think they're running standard operations right now?"
Ria's expression shifted...
She moved to the cockpit without another word, firing up the engines while Ezra sealed the cargo bay. The Dust Runner lifted with the characteristic groan of a ship pushed beyond recommended performance parameters, climbing fast toward the dust storm cell that would mask their ascent.
They'd barely cleared the plateau when the Imperial patrol skimmers appeared.
Three of them, moving in formation that suggested military coordination rather than random patrol. They bracketed the Dust Runner's position, their sensor arrays lighting up as they began active scans.
"Kriff," Ria muttered, hands flying across the controls. "They're hailing us. Standard inspection protocol."
"Don't stop."
"If we run, they'll know we're carrying contraband."
"If we stop, they'll search us and find contraband. Either way we're caught, but running gives us options."
Ria hesitated for maybe half a second, then made her decision. The freighter dove toward the spice-fields, repulsors screaming as they pushed into atmospheric density they weren't designed to handle. Behind them, the skimmers adjusted course, their lighter mass giving them maneuverability advantages that physics made immutable.
Blaster fire stitched red lines through the dust-hazed air. Most of it went wide, suppression rather than precision, designed to force them into predictable evasion patterns. But one bolt clipped the starboard engine housing, sending alarms shrieking through the cockpit and filling the air with the acrid smell of burning insulation.
"We need to lose them in the dust storms," Ria said, fighting the controls as the ship tried to yaw toward the damaged side. "Sensors get scrambled in heavy particulate, gives us maybe two minutes to disappear."
Ezra barely heard her, his attention focused on the sensation building beneath his conscious thoughts. Not quite precognition, more like probability collapse, the Force showing him trajectories and outcomes in patterns that his mind struggled to process at conscious speed.
"Bank left in three seconds," he said.
"What?"
"Just do it!"
Ria banked left. A skimmer that had been positioning for a kill shot overcompensated, its pilot anticipating a different evasion pattern. The miss bought them five seconds, distance measured in meters that felt like kilometers when survival hung in the balance.
They plunged into the dust storm, visibility dropping to near-zero, the freighter's sensors painting ghost images across displays designed for stellar navigation rather than atmospheric flight.
Ria flew by instrument and instinct, trusting readings that could be wrong and instincts that could be fatally optimistic.
But somehow they threaded through the storm, emerged on the far side with pursuit temporarily lost, and dove for the deck. The spice-fields spread beneath them, agricultural plots transformed into cover as they skimmed meters above the grain.
"There," Ezra said, pointing toward a structure barely visible through the haze. "Mining tunnel entrance. We can lose them in the underground network."
"Are you insane? This ship wasn't designed for tunnel flying."
"Neither were the skimmers, but they've got better maneuverability. Our only advantage is knowing the tunnels exist."
She angled toward the tunnel entrance, a black mouth in the landscape that looked designed to swallow ships whole.
They hit the tunnel at speed that turned caution into suicide. The freighter's hull scraped against stone walls, throwing sparks that illuminated the darkness in stuttering flashes. Behind them, two skimmers followed, the third apparently deciding discretion beat valor when it came to underground pursuit.
The tunnel branched. Ria went right on pure instinct. The passage narrowed, widened, twisted through geological layers that predated Imperial occupation by millennia. Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped with the patience of stone, and the Force whispered directions that Ezra translated into navigational suggestions that probably sounded insane but somehow kept them alive.
They emerged into a cavern large enough to accommodate ships ten times the Dust Runner's size, some ancient mining operation long since abandoned to darkness and time. Ria killed the engines, letting momentum carry them to a landing on stone worn smooth by centuries of water flow.
Silence crashed down, broken only by cooling metal and their own labored breathing.
"What the hell was that?" Ria finally asked.
Ezra could have lied, could have attributed their survival to luck or superior tactics or any explanation that didn't involve admitting he'd been sensing Imperial movements through channels that had no rational basis. But something about the way Ria looked at him suggested she already knew the answer, had maybe known it since the canyon job when he'd done things thirteen-year-olds shouldn't be capable of.
"I got lucky reading their patterns," he said instead, which was true enough while remaining comfortably vague.
Ria studied him for a long moment, then laughed. The sound carried an edge of hysteria that adrenaline crash made inevitable. "Lucky. Right. Kid, I've been flying smuggling runs for fifteen years, and I've never seen anyone get that lucky that consistently."
She stood, moved to the cargo bay to assess damage. Ezra followed, finding her already running diagnostics on the engine housing where the blaster bolt had struck.
"Repairable," she said after a moment. "But we're grounded for at least two hours while the self-seal compound does its work. And we still need to deliver this cargo before the buyer assumes we've been captured and liquidates his operation."
"The tunnels connect to the western port," Ezra said. "Old mining highways, mostly flooded but some passages are still navigable. We can reach the delivery point underwater, bypass surface patrols entirely."
"You know this how?"
Because Ezra Bridger, before his death, had spent months exploring these tunnels, mapping routes that would later prove crucial for Rebel operations.
"I get around," he said.
Ria laughed again, shorter this time, less hysteria and more genuine amusement. "Yeah. I'm starting to see that."
They spent the next two hours working on repairs, conversation flowing easier now that imminent death had been postponed. Ria told stories about jobs gone wrong in ways that became funny through temporal distance and survival. Ezra found himself responding with his own experiences, carefully edited to remove elements that would raise uncomfortable questions.
At some point, the conversation drifted into something resembling flirting, though Ezra's emotional awareness wasn't quite sophisticated enough to recognize it as such. Ria made a joke about kids these days having more nerve than sense. Ezra countered that sense was overrated when it got you killed through hesitation. She smiled in a way that suggested he'd said something right without quite understanding what.
When the repairs finished, they navigated the flooded tunnels with Ria at the controls and Ezra providing directions. The journey took another hour, emerging finally at the western port through a submerged exit that had probably been designed for exactly this kind of clandestine arrival.
The delivery went smoothly, the buyer asking no questions about why they were late or emerging from underwater rather than atmospheric approach. Credits transferred, spare parts loaded, farewells exchanged with the perfunctory efficiency of criminals who understood that connection meant liability.
They lifted from the port at dusk, Lothal's twin moons rising over water that reflected their light in broken patterns. Ria set course for Capital City, the Dust Runner handling better now that the cargo weight had been replaced with legitimate salvage.
"So," she said after they'd been flying for ten minutes. "You going to tell me how you really knew about those patrol shifts?"
Ezra considered his options, decided truth served him better than evasion. "I get feelings sometimes. Like I know something's about to happen before it does. Not always, and not perfectly, but enough that ignoring it seems stupid."
"Feelings." Ria's tone was carefully neutral.
"Yeah."
She was quiet for a long moment, eyes fixed on the horizon where Capital City's lights were beginning to emerge from the gathering darkness. "My grandmother used to tell stories about people like that. Force-sensitive, she called them. Said they could sense things normal folks couldn't, do things that looked like magic until you understood it was just connection to something bigger than yourself."
"Your grandmother sounds smart."
"She was. Empire killed her for it. Turns out talking about the Force in public is sedition these days." Ria glanced at him, something complex moving behind her expression. "If that's what you are, you need to be more careful. ISB has standing orders to detain anyone showing Force abilities, and detention usually means disappearance."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Do. Because you're useful, kid, and it'd be a waste to lose you to Imperial paranoia."
They landed at the western sea-port as full night descended, the transaction complete and both of them richer by enough credits to make the near-death experience feel almost worthwhile. Ria transferred his share with efficient professionalism, then paused before disembarking.
"Vizago's probably got more work if you're interested. I might be around for some of it." She smiled, and this time Ezra definitely recognized the expression as something beyond professional courtesy. "Try not to get yourself killed before then."
"I'll see what I can do."
She left, and Ezra stood alone on the pier watching the Dust Runner lift into the night sky. His body ached pleasantly, exhaustion mixing with satisfaction in ways that felt earned. They'd survived impossible odds, delivered the cargo, and walked away with reputation enhanced rather than destroyed.
The walk back to his tower carried him through sectors that had started feeling less like hostile territory and more like home, that being good or bad was up for debate, honestly.
Ezra climbed his tower, collapsed onto his makeshift bed, and fell asleep still wearing clothes that smelled like saltwater and engine exhaust.