The bacta patch wouldn’t take on the worst of it, and Kael pressed the edges down anyway, working by the single lamp in the back of the supply depot while Mara sat rigid on an overturned crate and stared at the wall like it owed her an explanation.
Outside, the ravine’s noise had mostly gone quiet, replaced by the settlement’s own low murmur waking up to something wrong.
Someone would find the bodies before the suns cleared the ridge.
Someone always did.
For now the depot held only lamp-light, the smell of scorched synth-skin, and two people who had just watched the same truth from opposite ends of it.
“This is going to scar,” he said.
“The nerve damage might not heal all the way.” “I know what a cauterized wound looks like.” Her voice was flat, controlled, the same register she used on foremen and investigators.
“I’ve dressed enough of them.” He finished the last strip of synth-skin and sat back on his heels.
For a moment neither of them said anything, and the depot’s ordinary sounds filled the space instead: wind against the corrugated wall, the construct’s damaged servo ticking somewhere in the dark where it had folded itself down to rest.
“You didn’t care,” Mara said.
It wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t an accusation either.
It came out the way she delivered every hard fact she’d ever handed an investigator: level, precise, offered rather than thrown.
“No,” Kael said.
“I didn’t.” “Say the rest of it.” “In the second the lightning left my hand, I wanted him dead more than I wanted anything else to survive.
You.
The construct.
The settlement up on the ridge.
None of it weighed anything against wanting Tharos in the ground.
If the arc had gone through you instead of past you, I don’t know that I would have felt it happen until after.” “That’s an honest answer.” “It’s the only kind I owe you.” She looked at him then, really looked, the wounded shoulder held stiff against her side.
“Most men would lie about that.
Tell me it was an accident with no shape to it, nothing they chose.” “It had a shape.
The shape was mine.
Lying about it wouldn’t heal your shoulder any faster, and it would mean the next time it happens, you wouldn’t see it coming because I’d have trained you not to look.” He looked down at his hands, turning them in the lamplight without meaning to, and stopped.
The burn from the ravine on Drest’s night had healed into a web of pale scarring across the right forearm, old news by now, a scar he’d stopped noticing weeks ago.
What stopped him was the skin at the edges of it.
A faint gray had crept into the scar tissue, subtle enough that a week ago he would have called it a trick of the lamp.
It wasn’t a trick.
It was new, and it hadn’t been there before tonight, and some part of him that had been waiting for exactly this moment recognized it instantly for what it was.
He’d read about marks like it in the holocron’s fragments, always in passing, always from a dead voice too proud to dwell on its own decay.
He had assumed, the way a man assumes anything he hasn’t personally suffered yet, that the marks belonged to other people.
Older Sith.
Careless ones.
Not a miner two months removed from a collapsed shaft who was still learning which hand to lift a fork with when the burns ached.
“What?” Mara asked, following his stare.
“Nothing.” He closed his hand.
“A mark.” “Let me see.” He opened it again, because refusing would have told her more than showing did.
She took his wrist in her good hand and turned it toward the lamp, and whatever she saw there, she didn’t flinch from it.
That said something about her he intended to remember.
“That wasn’t there before Varn’s Reach,” she said.
“No.” “Is it going to spread?” “I don’t know.
I know what it means, though.
The stories in the holocron aren’t shy about it.
This is what the dark side leaves on a man who uses it and doesn’t pay the debt in full.” ⟦ASCENDANT⟧ ASCENT — FORGE-HEAT II RESERVE — 9 / 55 TELL — FAINT GRAYING AT THE HANDS COST.
IN THE SLIP HE DID NOT CARE WHO DIED GATE.
CONVERT, OR BECOME THE THING Mara pulled her hand back slowly, not in fear, something closer to weighing.
Her thumb pressed once against the bandage on her own shoulder, an unconscious tally of what the same night had already cost them both.
“So what happens if you don’t pay it.” “I stop being able to tell the difference between the man who wanted Tharos dead and the man standing here dressing your shoulder.
Eventually there’s only the one who wanted him dead, and he doesn’t care whose shoulder he’s dressing anymore, or whether it needs dressing at all.” “That’s not an answer either.
That’s a warning.” “It’s both.” Kael held his own gaze on the gray at his wrist a moment longer, then let his hand fall.
“I am going to master it.
Every part of it, the conversion, the cost, all of it, until a slip like tonight can’t happen twice.
Or I’m going to become the thing the gray is turning me into.
There’s no third door.
I’ve looked.” “And if mastering it isn’t possible?
If this is just what the power costs, and there’s no clean version of you standing on the other end of enough years using it?” “Then I find that out the hard way, same as everyone before me apparently did.
But I’m not going to find it out by refusing to look at what already happened tonight.” She was quiet a long moment, turning something over that had nothing to do with the wound.
“I keep asking myself if I can keep doing this.
Watching you become whatever this is going to make you.
Some nights I think yes.
Tonight I’m not sure.” “That’s fair.” “You’re not going to argue with me?” “No.
You’ve earned the right to be unsure.
I’d rather you tell me the truth about that than pretend you’re certain when you’re not.” He met her eyes.
“Stay or go.
Either way, I’m not going to lie to you again about what tonight cost, mine or yours.” She didn’t answer right away.
In the lamplight her face had none of the flatness she wore for foremen, none of the calm she’d sold to investigators for months to keep him breathing.
What was left looked younger than he’d ever seen her look, and more tired, and somehow steadier for both.
“I watched you kill two men tonight.
One of them I understood.
The other I’m still deciding whether I forgive you for, and it isn’t even the one that put a hole in me.” “Renn.” “Renn.” She said the name like it cost her something to spend it.
“He was a coward and a thief and he’d have sold both of us the second it bought him another week of breathing.
I know all of that.
I still watched a blade go into a man who was begging, and some part of me keeps waiting to feel something other than tired about it.” “You don’t have to feel anything you don’t feel.
I’m not going to tell you what the right reaction is.” “I know.
That’s almost worse.” Outside, the settlement’s noise had changed since sundown, a lower, meaner register moving through the streets: two dead men, a hunter’s ship still sitting on the pad, and a stranger everyone’s questions kept circling back to without ever quite landing on his name yet.
Lamps were coming on in windows that should have stayed dark until shift change.
A dog somewhere was barking at nothing, or at everything, the way dogs did when a settlement’s people had started being afraid of their own neighbors.
By the time the twin suns cleared the ridge, that circling would have a target, and neither of them intended to be standing on Varn’s Reach to answer for it.
Mara was already up, favoring the shoulder, checking the depot’s back exit with the same flat competence she brought to everything else, crisis or not.
“The hauler leaves before first light,” she said.
“If we’re going.” “We’re going.” Kael pulled his sleeve down over the gray at his wrist, and the two of them moved out into the dark together, past the cooling hulk of the construct settling itself for the walk ahead, past a settlement that would wake in a few hours to two bodies and a stranger’s name it still didn’t quite have.
Neither of them looked back at the depot.
There was nothing behind it worth carrying that they hadn’t already picked up: one debt for what the lightning had cost, one for what the blade had, and a ledger between them that neither one had finished reading.