Northern Mining Settlement, Lothal6 BBY (One Month After the Gray Syndicate Meeting)
The first sign something had shifted came through absence rather than presence, but now Ezra recognized it through the Force's musical language. The settlement's song had changed, fear and anger replacing the complex harmonies that characterized functioning communities.
He noticed it during a routine supply run, the kind of operation he'd been delegating but had decided to personally oversee after the Gray Syndicate partnership complicated everything. The streets sat empty, the normal symphony of human activity compressed into silence that spoke volumes about Imperial presence.
The wrongness registered across multiple channels. Visual showed locked doors where commerce should thrive. The Force carried emotional residue that tasted like terror. And his new awareness heard the discord, the way fear disrupted natural harmonies until individual melodies became indistinguishable from ambient noise.
Crackdown. The word manifested with absolute certainty.
Three hours of inquiry through his circuit connections painted worse pictures than anticipated. The Empire had shut down mining operations across Lothal's northern sectors with sudden totality that characterized their approach when subtlety became expendable. Official explanations cited maintenance requirements, bureaucratic language that meant nothing.
Unofficial channels told different stories. ISB officers interviewing residents. Mining Guild officials coordinating with Imperial security. Someone had connected dots between recent sabotage and the criminal infrastructure supporting it.
They were hunting systematically, and Ezra's Force Resonance let him feel the net tightening like discord creeping through a symphony.
The confirmation arrived through a contact in Capital City's administrative sector. The ISB had assigned an officer to investigate the "Shadow Kid" incidents, patterns connecting multiple operations without names or faces attached yet.
Lieutenant Aker Draxen. The name came with a file that painted pictures of methodical investigation, counterinsurgency expertise, the kind of opponent who built comprehensive intelligence before surgical dismantling of rebel networks.
Exactly the threat Ezra couldn't afford, not when his operation depended on remaining beneath recognition threshold.
His comm chirped days later, Jari's voice tight with controlled panic carrying harmonics that spoke to fear she was trying to suppress.
"They took Kol. Imperial scav-troopers hit the Kothal safe house. Tem escaped, but Kol was captured."
The words registered with peculiar clarity, his Force Resonance showing him Jari's emotional state, Kol's fading melody as distance and Imperial suppression field technology dampened his presence. Captured meant interrogation, meant everything Kol knew becoming leverage to dismantle the circuit.
"Where?" Ezra asked, his voice steady despite how his heart hammered.
"Imperial factory complex. Labor camp underneath. They're moving him to Capital City detention tomorrow for formal interrogation."
Tomorrow. The timeline was impossible, but his enhanced awareness showed him possibilities that existed in spaces between probable and achievable. The factory sat on terrain he'd mapped through months of exploration. Tunnels honeycombed beneath it, paths that his musical perception of the Force could navigate even in darkness.
If he moved fast, if fortune held, if the Force provided advantages that had kept him alive this long, extraction remained possible.
Might. The word carried weight planning couldn't account for.
"I'm going in tonight," Ezra said.
...
....
...
Four hours later, Ezra stood at the edge of the factory district, darkness settling across Lothal like a shroud while his mind turned over what he was about to attempt. Not just infiltration, not just extraction, but something that crossed a threshold he couldn't quite articulate but felt like standing at the edge of an abyss that would fundamentally alter who he was.
He had two blasters, both charged. A combat knife, the good one taken from a dead stormtrooper. Shaped charges for breaching. Medkit, because optimism was for people who expected plans to survive contact with reality.
But beneath the tactical preparation ran something else, a current of transformation that Avar's teachings had catalyzed but not created. His Force Resonance painted the world in symphonic layers now, each person a melody, each emotion a harmony or discord that rippled through the greater composition. The labor camp sat beneath the factory like a festering wound in the Force's song, its prisoners' melodies compressed into survival notes that made his chest tighten with rage he hadn't known he was capable of feeling.
Ezra moved.
The tunnel entrance yielded to his approach, a service hatch half-buried in industrial debris that most people would walk past without noticing.
Ezra paused at the final access point, extending his awareness to map what waited beyond. Twenty prisoners scattered across dormitory spaces that prioritized capacity over humanity. Six guards visible, probably another four in rotation. And somewhere in that configuration, Kol waited for tomorrow's transport and everything that followed.
Finding him required moving through the camp itself, and Ezra's new abilities made infiltration feel less like stealth and more like conducting. He could sense each guard's attention patterns through their individual melodies, find the gaps where perception failed, move through spaces that existed between awareness.
The first guard never detected him. One moment the man was conducting routine patrol, the next Ezra's blade found the gap between helmet and chest plate, severing the carotid with precision that ended consciousness before pain could register. The body dropped, and Ezra caught it, lowered it gently to minimize noise.
Two more guards fell similarly, their melodies ceasing with finality that his awareness registered as notes interrupted before resolution.
But the fourth detected something. Maybe a sound Ezra hadn't noticed making, maybe just instinct honed through years of garrison duty. The guard turned at precisely the wrong moment, his eyes widening as he registered the impossibility of a teenager materializing from shadows with a blade already moving toward lethal conclusion.
His shout died as Ezra's knife found his throat, but the damage was done. Alarms shrieked through the facility, and suddenly quiet infiltration became loud extraction.
Ezra ran. His Force Resonance painted tactical pictures across perception, showing him guard positions through their aggressive discord, their convergence patterns, the spaces between immediate threat and eventual safety. His body moved with enhancement that transcended normal capability, each step finding purchase in gaps between physical limitation and Force-amplified potential.
This was what Avar had taught him, though he suspected she'd never intended it for this application. Using the Force's song not for meditation or enlightenment, but for violence rendered impossibly efficient through symphonic awareness of everything around him.
He found Kol in a holding cell near the camp's center, the boy's face swollen from preliminary interrogation but his eyes still sharp with desperate hope that preceded either rescue or final disappointment. Their gazes met, and Ezra saw recognition flash across Kol's features, disbelief warring with relief.
The cell door yielded to plasma cutter application, metal parting under directed heat that made locks designed for containment irrelevant. Ezra pulled it open, gestured urgently.
"E-Ezra..?"
"Can you run?" he asked, already sensing the answer through Kol's pained melody, the way broken ribs sang their own discordant note in his personal symphony.
"Fast enough," Kol gasped, pushing himself upright with visible effort. "Just get me out of here."
They moved, but extraction proved messier than infiltration. Guards had sealed primary access points, forcing them through the factory proper rather than the relative safety of underground tunnels. The space was chaos incarnate, machinery and personnel and constant industrial noise that made communication impossible except through gesture and desperate hope.
Blaster fire erupted from multiple vectors, Imperial security responding with overwhelming force that characterized their approach to everything. Ezra returned fire, his shots finding targets through combination of training and Force-guided intuition that showed him exactly where each guard's melody would place them in the next heartbeat. Bodies dropped, and with each one the accounting in his mind tallied higher.
Five dead. Seven. Ten.
More than any previous operation, more than he'd killed in total before tonight. Regardless, he just kept moving, kept shooting, kept trusting his Force Resonance to show paths through impossible situations while Kol limped beside him, and behind them the Empire mobilized an overwhelming response.
They almost made it clean. The tunnel entrance was visible twenty meters ahead, salvation measured in distance that felt simultaneously infinite and achievable. Ezra allowed himself to believe, just for a moment, that survival remained possible. That they'd actually pull this off.
The vibroblade caught him from his blind side.
His Force Resonance had detected the attack a fraction-second before impact, enough warning that lethal became merely catastrophic. But not enough to avoid it entirely. The Imperial officer, someone with actual combat training rather than garrison mediocrity, had positioned perfectly. The blade carved a line from forehead through eyebrow and across cheek, pain exploding hot and immediate and disorienting.
Blood flooded his vision. Shock threatened to fragment consciousness into static and darkness, but the Force kept him aware, kept him moving through channels that bypassed normal biological limitations.
He felt rather than saw his blaster come up, and fired...
The shot took the officer through the chest. The man's melody cut off instantly, that final moment of surprise frozen in his expression as he dropped.
Ezra staggered, pressed his hand against his face where blood seemed determined to empty his body through the wound.
Kol grabbed his arm, pulled him toward the tunnel entrance. They stumbled into darkness, blood painting trails any competent tracker could follow but buying enough distance that immediate pursuit fell behind. They ran until running became staggering, staggered until exhaustion forced them to stop in a junction chamber where multiple passages offered escape in every direction.
"We made it," Kol gasped, his melody carrying disbelief and gratitude in equal measure. "You actually did it. You got me out."
"Yeah," Ezra managed, still pressing his hand against his face. "We made it."
"Come on," he said finally, pushing himself upright despite how his body protested. "We need to keep moving."
The journey to the surface took another hour, both of them moving with careful deliberation of people pushed beyond safe operational parameters. They emerged in the industrial district far enough that immediate pursuit wouldn't find them.
Ezra got Kol to a safe house, called Jari to handle medical attention and extraction to a location the Empire wouldn't connect to their network. Then he made his own way back to the tower, moving through Capital City's nighttime emptiness while his face throbbed with each heartbeat and his Force Resonance painted the city's sleeping symphony across his awareness.
The mirror in his tower showed damage worse than feared but not catastrophic. The wound ran diagonally from hairline through eyebrow down across cheek, a slash that would heal into exactly the kind of scar that drew attention and invited questions.
Great...
Anakin had borne a similar scar, he remembered from the Clone Wars series. A mark of combat that had become iconic, part of how the galaxy recognized the Hero With No Fear.
The parallel felt uncomfortably apt, though whether that augured well or poorly remained unclear.