Republic-Era Communications Relay, Western Ridge, Lothal6 BBY (48 Hours After the Sea-Port Run)
The relay station had been dead for years, its skeletal frame rising from Lothal's rocky terrain like the ribcage of some mechanical leviathan picked clean by scavengers and time.
Ezra approached it in the grey predawn hours, Ria beside him matching his careful footwork across loose scree that could betray their presence to anyone monitoring the approach. The job was simple, or at least Vizago had presented it that way: extract salvage from the old Republic communications equipment, deliver it to a contact in Kothal who specialized in refurbishing vintage tech for the black market.
Simple, except nothing involving Imperial space was ever truly simple.
"You feel that?" Ria asked, voice pitched low despite the apparent isolation.
Ezra nodded. He'd felt it for the past kilometer, a pressure building against his awareness like atmospheric change before electrical storms.
The Force, speaking in its oblique dialect of sensation and intuition.
They'd been intercepted six kilometers back, an Imperial patrol skimmer materializing from the dust haze with the kind of timing that suggested either extraordinary bad luck or compromised intelligence. The latter seemed more probable. Someone in Vizago's network was feeding information to Imperial security, turning routine smuggling operations into elaborate traps.
The ambush had been brief and vicious. Ria's piloting had kept them alive through the initial engagement, her hands steady on the freighter's controls while Ezra fed her trajectory suggestions that came less from tactical analysis and more from whatever channel connected his awareness to the environment's kinetic future. They'd managed to damage the skimmer's repulsor array, force it into emergency landing protocols, but their own ship had taken hits that transformed controlled flight into barely-managed falling.
The crash landing had destroyed the freighter's hyperdrive and collapsed the landing gear, leaving the Dust Runner a smoking wreck in a canyon three kilometers from their current position. They'd grabbed what salvage they could carry and moved on foot, knowing pursuit would materialize once the downed skimmer transmitted their coordinates.
Now they stood at the relay station's perimeter, mission parameters shattered but survival instincts demanding they keep moving.
"We should just run," Ria said, though her tone carried no real conviction. "Get to ground, wait for extraction, forget the salvage."
"Vizago won't send extraction without the goods. We're expenses, not assets. He'll write us off and move on."
"Comforting thought."
"Truth usually isn't."
Ria shot him a look that might have been amusement or exasperation, difficult to distinguish in the weak light. "You're going to get philosophical on me while we're running from Imperial kill teams?"
"Seemed like appropriate timing."
They moved into the relay station, navigating through corridors where durasteel had oxidized into rust patterns that looked organic, intentional, like someone had designed decay as aesthetic choice. The salvage they needed sat in the main communications hub, equipment racks filled with technology that predated the Empire by decades. Republic-era engineering, built with redundancy and reliability that modern Imperial production had sacrificed for cost efficiency.
Ezra set to work extracting the most valuable components while Ria kept watch at the entrance. His hands moved with confidence that came from months of similar operations, fingers finding the release mechanisms and connection points that separated functional salvage from decorative debris.
That's when he felt them.
Not heard, not saw, just knew with sudden absolute certainty that Imperial forces were closing on their position. Multiple units, moving with coordination that suggested professional military rather than local patrol.
And then...the feeling came.
"We've got company," he said, not looking up from the equipment rack.
"How many?"
"Enough that staying here is suicide."
Ria moved to the window, peered through grimy transparisteel toward the approach vectors. "I don't see anything."
"You will in about ninety seconds."
She looked at him then, really looked, and Ezra saw the moment everything shifted in her expression. She'd suspected before, maybe since the sea-port run when he'd been navigating patrol movements through channels that had no rational basis. But suspicion was different from confirmation, and the look on her face suggested she'd just crossed that threshold.
"Ah...the force..."
"...Yes, the same way I knew about the patrol shifts and the same way I knew which tunnel to take. I just know."
"What else can you do..."
Before Ria could press further, the first blaster bolt shattered the window she'd been looking through, superheated glass spraying across the interior in a rain of molten fragments. She dropped, rolled, came up with her blaster in a two-handed grip while Ezra abandoned the salvage and moved toward the corridor they'd used to enter.
Outside, the Imperial forces had materialized with exactly the timing his instincts had predicted. Ten, maybe twelve troops, spreading into assault formation that spoke of experience and training that transcended standard garrison duty. These were professionals, possibly Imperial Army rather than Stormtrooper Corps, the kind of soldiers who actually knew how to aim and coordinate fire.
"Back exit?" Ria asked, already moving.
"Covered. They've got the building surrounded."
"So we're trapped."
"We're contained. Different problem."
The distinction mattered less than Ezra's tone suggested, but panic served no purpose, and he'd learned that projecting confidence sometimes created the reality it pretended to describe. They moved deeper into the relay station, trading space for time, looking for advantages that architecture might provide against superior numbers.
"The central support column," he said, pointing toward a massive durasteel pillar that ran through the relay station's core. "If it fails, the whole structure comes down."
Ria followed his gaze, understanding dawning with the kind of horror that accompanied recognition of desperate plans. "You want to collapse the building. On us."
"On them. We use the mining tunnels underneath to escape while the debris covers our exit."
"That's insane."
"You have a better option?"
She didn't, which was answer enough. They moved toward the central column while blaster fire chewed through walls and doorframes behind them, Imperial troops advancing with methodical precision that gave no room for error or hesitation. Ezra pulled the last of their explosive charges from his pack, shaped plasma cutters designed for breaching ship hulls but equally effective against structural supports.
The Force showed him where to place them, which points would create cascading failure rather than localized damage.
Behind them, the troops closed in. Thirty meters. Twenty. Close enough that Ezra could hear their communications, the clipped military efficiency of soldiers who'd done this a thousand times and expected this to be no different.
He triggered the charges.
The explosion was smaller than expected, almost disappointing in its modest violence. But the effect rippled through the structure like water disturbed by stone, stress fractures propagating along lines of weakness that decades had carved into metal. The central column groaned, a sound like some massive animal in its death throes, then began its inevitable collapse.
Ezra and Ria were already moving, sprinting toward the access hatch that led to the mining tunnels. Behind them, the relay station folded in on itself with catastrophic inevitability, durasteel and ferrocrete raining down in an avalanche that would bury anything not already underground.
They hit the tunnel entrance as the building's death scream reached crescendo, diving through the hatch and into darkness while tons of debris crashed down where they'd been standing moments before. The impact sent shockwaves through the tunnel system, dust and small rocks raining from the ceiling, but the ancient mining infrastructure held.
For several minutes they just lay there, breathing hard, listening to the settling sounds of destruction overhead. When silence finally returned, it carried the absolute quality of burial, like they'd descended into some space outside normal time and geography.
"That," Ria said eventually, "was the stupidest thing I've ever been part of."
"But it worked."
"Working and being stupid aren't mutually exclusive."
Ezra couldn't argue with that assessment. He pushed himself upright, activating the small glow rod he'd carried for exactly this kind of emergency. The tunnel stretched in both directions, carved from living rock in an era when Lothal's resources had been extracted through manual labor rather than automated industrial process.
And there, barely visible in the glow rod's weak illumination, symbols covered the tunnel walls.
Not random marks or graffiti, but deliberate glyphs carved with precision that suggested religious or cultural significance. Ezra's breath caught as recognition hit him with the force of physical impact. He knew these symbols, had seen them in the show during episodes when Ezra Bridger discovered the hidden Jedi Temple on Lothal.
Jedi script. Ancient, worn nearly smooth by time and moisture, but unmistakably the written language of an order the Empire had spent two decades trying to erase from galactic memory.
"What is that?" Ria asked, moving closer to examine the glyphs.
"Old language. Pre-Imperial." Ezra kept his voice carefully neutral despite the way his heart hammered against his ribs. "Probably just decorative, left over from when these tunnels were active mining operations."
The lie came easily, self-preservation overriding honesty. But inside, his mind raced through implications that stretched far beyond immediate survival. The temple was close, had to be. These glyphs marked a path, a trail left by Jedi who'd used Lothal's underground network to access their hidden sanctuary.
He'd known the temple existed, of course. Canon established that clearly enough. But knowing and experiencing were different categories of understanding, and standing in tunnels marked with proof of the Jedi's historical presence created a visceral connection that secondhand knowledge could never replicate.
The Force hummed beneath his awareness, stronger here than anywhere else on Lothal. Like the temple itself was reaching out, recognizing something in him that resonated with its purpose. Not quite calling, not exactly welcoming, but acknowledging his presence in ways that felt simultaneously ancient and immediate.
"We should keep moving," Ria said, oblivious to the significance of what surrounded them. "Those troops will dig through the rubble eventually, and I'd rather be kilometers away when they do."
Ezra nodded, filing away the glyphs' location in his mental map of Lothal's underground. He'd return later, when Imperial attention had shifted elsewhere and exploration wouldn't risk leading enemies to discoveries that should remain hidden. But the knowledge that the temple was accessible, that he could potentially reach it without waiting for Kanan Jarrus to show him the way, opened possibilities that his earlier planning hadn't accounted for.
The journey passed in near-silence, both of them too exhausted for conversation, too focused on survival to waste energy on anything beyond placing one foot in front of the other.
Eventually the tunnels opened into a familiar chamber, one of the junction points Ezra had mapped during his early exploration of Lothal's underground network. From here, multiple passages led to various surface exits, and they chose one that would bring them out in the industrial district where crowds and infrastructure provided cover that open wasteland couldn't.
They emerged at twilight, the day having burned away while they'd been buried beneath Lothal's surface. The city sprawled around them, indifferent to their survival or death, continuing its mechanical function regardless of individual human drama.
"So," Ria said as they stood at the tunnel exit, both of them filthy and exhausted but alive. "That was insane."
"One way to describe it."
"You saved my life back there. The building collapse, knowing exactly where to place those charges. That wasn't luck or good guessing."
"My grandmother's stories," Ria continued. "About Force-sensitive people. About how they could sense things, do impossible things, survive situations that should kill them. You're one of them, aren't you?"
The question hung between them, heavy with implications that extended beyond this moment. Admitting the truth meant trust or betrayal, depending entirely on how Ria chose to use the information.
Ria seemed like a trustworthy person, but he wouldn't take any chances. The people in this criminal underworld world are scummy to the absolute core. The time for hope and trust was not now...
Ezra made his choice.
"No," he said simply. "I'm not."