My sight came back first, though at first I thought I’d gone blind.
But no — a dim, barely-there light was pushing through something covering my eyes.
My breath felt stale, and there was a rubber taste in my mouth.
A mask.
My body was slowly coming back to life.
I could feel a pleasant tingling spreading out from my chest through the rest of me.
It felt like I’d slept in some brutally awkward position and everything had gone stiff.
My arms and legs were the last to wake up.
Something cold and wet enveloped me.
There was no floor — I was floating in some unknown void.
Fear surfaced at the edge of my mind and then receded.
All that was left was total indifference to everything happening around me.
Flashes of recent events lit up one after another and died out.
Like I was watching a movie, and some invisible screen separated me from all the fear, the pain, the hatred that had swallowed my mind back then.
I wanted my heart to react to the death of the person I loved most in the whole galaxy.
Part of me wanted to sob, to thrash and scream, mourning something that could never be fixed.
But there was nothing in my chest except a scorched, empty desert.
Where my emotions used to live, there was only a void now.
No matter how badly I wanted to, I couldn’t feel a thing.
A voice reached me through the haze of apathy, but not right away.
“…Seth.
Seth!
Come in, can you hear me?
If you can, nod, move your hand, anything.
Seth.
Come in, please respond.
This is the Boss.”
The earpiece distorted his voice badly, and there was no telling who it was just from that.
But I didn’t need to guess.
I could feel life around me clearly now.
Not far off, but close enough to understand who was there.
Someone unfamiliar stood in the far corner, but I could feel from his emotions that he was glad I’d woken up.
The Boss and the Old Man stood closer, relief and joy rolling off both of them in waves.
I moved my hand, the way they’d asked.
“Thank the Force.
I’ll tell you what’s going on.
Just — don’t panic, okay?”
Heh.
Words like that are usually what makes people start panicking.
“That cursed night, I wanted to take the whole hit myself.
It didn’t work out.”
Even through the speaker, I could feel the grief underneath his voice.
It was hoarse, clipped — like he’d been eating sand by the fistful and then tried to sing an aria on top of it.
“The bastard didn’t show.
He sent his whole personal pack instead.
I figured I was done for, and I wanted to take as many of those degenerates with me as I could — lucky I always carry grenades.
But before I could arm them, blaster fire came down on us like hail, off every rooftop around.
It was over in three minutes.
Some of them tried running for the alleys, but this city’s ours, and we know it better than they ever will.
Two hundred scumbags.
Not one got out.
Guess everyone knows now the rumors about my good nature were exaggerated.”
His voice cracked and broke off.
A long pause followed.
“When the distress call came in from the brothel, we moved out right away.
We were too late.
You were lying there like a corpse — pulse barely there — and everyone from our side who’d been nearby was out cold.
The enemy was dead.
And your mother… I think you remember that part yourself.”
There was an ugly crack.
I didn’t understand what it was at first.
Only the taste of blood in my mouth told me it had been my own jaw.
“When we found you, we thought you were done for.
Your whole body was covered in blood, your shoulder shot clean through, and your arms and legs looked like something had torn the muscle apart from the inside.
In my whole life I’ve never seen anything like it.
So we loaded you onto a speeder and took you to the Chemists — they’re the only ones with a bacta tank in our part of the dump.
Word of our win must’ve already gotten around, because they let us through without any trouble.
And here you are, a week later.
Muscle torn in fifteen places alone.
Your organs came through it, at least.
Eh… you’ll be stuck in there another day, minimum.
Everything’s healed up, you just only came to now.
Once we get you out, I’m hoping you’ll tell us what happened over there.
Get well, Seth.
See you soon.”
I guess they pumped some kind of gas through the mask, because I fell asleep way too fast after that.
Or maybe my brain still hadn’t recovered from the shock.
I don’t know.
Time passed.
Once I’d fully recovered, I threw myself into the work.
There was plenty of it — every resource, every credit, every scrap of property that had belonged to our enemies was ours now.
The Boss, back at full strength, was aggressively moving into new territory.
People were in catastrophically short supply.
A lot of us had died, and some had walked away from the group on their own.
The Boss never held anyone by force — he paid generous severance, and when he could, he helped them get settled somewhere new.
Naturally, there were also people who tried to tear off a fatter piece of us for themselves.
And for a while, they actually had the chance.
Fighters who knew which end of a blaster to hold numbered barely two hundred.
But most of them didn’t account for one new fact: we had a monster on our side now.
Me.
The Force felt far more real to me now than it used to — my control still lagged, but the moment I let myself remember that night, rage and hatred flooded through me and made me stronger.
My arsenal was thin, but more than enough for wiping out ordinary people.
When some inexplicable force starts sowing death and destruction, dying is the last thing anyone wants to do.
The Boss took me fully under his wing.
We had an important talk that changed my life completely.
I wasn’t just some street kid anymore, a future member of one more gang.
I was a grim symbol of our power.
We sat in his office.
Tall — close to two meters — a sentient with red skin and two horns on his head, and a small human child sitting across from him.
A perfect illustration for “sell your soul to the devil.” I huffed at my own thought and focused on the conversation ahead.
The Force was telling me this was going to matter.
“Listen, Seth.
I’m asking for your help.
You’re our chance to make this city clean — we take the lead, we set things right.
We’ve known each other a while now, you know exactly how I run things.
I promise to teach you everything I know about the Force, and if any information crosses my desk that could make you stronger, it goes straight to you.
Pay like a senior officer, and you answer directly to me.
We need your strength.
I need it.”
We looked each other in the eye.
He hadn’t convinced me.
I meant to keep the promise I’d made to my mother.
Find that bastard and tear him apart.
The wooden chair under me split with a crack — the Force was slipping out of my control.
I wanted to go smash everything in reach all over again.
I held myself back.
Barely.
The Boss let the silence sit, then went on.
“I understand what you want.
Please — think it over carefully.
Where are you going to get money for information?
For a ship?
For food, even?
You’re eight years old.
Are you going to steal and kill for it?
Believe me, for every beast out there, there’s a bigger one waiting.
You could die in some pointless fight, or pirates could blow your ship out of the sky before you even clear the system.
Your mother wouldn’t have wanted this life for you, not in the end.
Don’t worry — I promise part of what you earn goes toward finding that bastard.
I’d love to twist his head off myself, but right now we need to focus on the here and now, or there might not be a later.
Please, think about my offer.
If you still decide to go, come say goodbye first, and I’ll see you get paid.
I know roughly what your mother had saved up — you’ll get that, and a little more besides.”
I spent the whole night torn between staying and leaving, but common sense won out over the raw hunger for revenge.
Now I was the fearsome executioner of anyone who stood in our organization’s way.
The Shaman — that’s what they’d started calling me in Low City.
The moment the Boss had my agreement, he asked me to start using his name.
It was hard at first, but I got used to it.
Koven gave me a mask that hid my face and disguised my voice, a black cloak to cover my frame, boots with a raised sole, and two trusty DC-17 blasters for my belt. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping . com.
Nobody could recognize my real face now.
Only a handful of people knew who was under the mask.
He hadn’t lied about the training, either.
Koven dug up Jedi manuscripts on controlling the Force from somewhere.
There were some basic swordsmanship drills too, but those never took.
The Jedi’s lightsaber sat in my room — a trophy, a reminder of the goal I was bound to reach.
My attempts to use it went nowhere.
A miserably uncomfortable weapon, for me at least.
The balance was wrong, the hilt too long, and just holding it brought on this creeping revulsion — like grabbing a worm that wouldn’t stop twisting in my hand.
Disgusting.
So all I had left to practice was what I already knew — precognition, and the basics of moving things with the Force: lift, drop, crush.
That had its own problems too.
I kept remembering that night — how I’d moved, what I’d done.
Next to that, whatever I could manage now was child’s play.
I could barely lift a chair and shift it a few feet.
Forget anything bigger.
Precognition training had its own problems.
If the rate of fire went above average, or there was more than one bolt coming at once, dodging just didn’t happen.
Dodge one, and the next one caught me anyway.
And I knew exactly where the shot was going to land — I just couldn’t get out of its way.
Such an infuriating feeling of helplessness.
It was the only thing that kept me training for hours on end without a break.
The training paid off, but it was all slow.
Too slow.
It genuinely drove me out of my mind.
Uncontrollable fury would take hold of me, and I’d start smashing everything within reach.
Everyone in the group started keeping their distance from me now.
Koven said it was because they could feel the pressure coming off me — the thirst for blood — and it scared them.
I tried to keep myself in check.
But it got harder every day.
Every time I fed myself on hatred, rage, the urge to kill in a fight, the Darkness wrapped tighter around me, and I liked it.
Such power.
Such strength.
It felt like falling down a deep well with the light already gone, nothing left but darkness, and the sense that the bottom was still a long way down.
It was an intoxicating feeling of power — dizzying, magnetic.
Every time, I wanted more, and more.
I knew this wasn’t the limit.
But by some miracle I still managed to stop myself from an endless fall into the abyss.
As part of training, I tried meditating — calming my feelings, taking control of myself.
But every time, memories of that cursed night rose up in front of my eyes.
My senses sharpened, my anger grew, my body demanded a release of all that energy.
Once, during meditation, I had an outburst — just like that night.
The metal plating around me was ground to dust.
Lucky the load-bearing beams weren’t badly damaged.
After that, I stopped trying to control myself through meditation altogether.
But despite all my flaws, I made a wonderful, terrifying weapon against our enemies.
That’s how we lived — building our influence back up, reclaiming our old standing.
Within a year, we’d taken back everything we’d lost.
They feared us.
They respected us.
Everyone wanted to work for us.
Money kept landing in my bank account.
A stack of untraceable chips worth several thousand sat in a hidden cache.
By now, I could have covered every expense I had and just walked away.
But I kept putting it off.
Why?
Why was I running from the one thing that actually mattered to me?
The answer scared me.
At some point, I realized I wanted to stay here.
I liked the fear that surrounded me, the awe people looked at me with, the power sitting in my hands.
Koven catered to my every whim.
I was losing myself, turning into a wild animal — uncontrollable, always hungry.
With no major fights to keep me occupied, restlessness gnawed at me.
I wanted to test my strength again, to dive back into the dance of death.
There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t take my temper out on somebody.
By then, only Koven could hold me back at all.
A little more, and I’m sure I would’ve snapped and started a bloodbath.
But then something happened that kept me from losing myself completely.