"TK-111? What's your status?"

The voice rang distant, hollow, and tinny, resounding in his skull and the busted shards of his helmet. TK-111 heard a thrumming noise in the room. It came at him from all angles. There was no escaping it. He felt afraid, but he didn't understand why.

Then he heard laughter. His voice and another. A woman. It echoed from the opposite corner of the training room where he was standing. Where he stood, looking at a recollection of himself, bare chested, dressed in a black rijani war skirts and bare feet.

The stunned clone trooper shook the fog from his head, but could not shake away the delusion. He was not himself, dressed in white-on-black armor, staring into a recent memory.

She came at him with a wooden sword. Not him, exactly, but the memory of himself. The blade had been carved from the branch of a lyntern tree. In the right hands, it could shatter duracrete. She spared breaking his ribs, her blow leaving a raised welt.

TK-111 cringed at the sound of it rebounded off his skin and flinched, experiencing the pain as he had that morning during their training session. He felt the bruise beneath his environmental suit.

"Focus, Neftali!" Imanye insisted, her thick lips sternly pursed together. "Mind your footwork."

An expert marksman, TK-111 was the best sniper in the battalion. However, his close quarters combat never measured up in comparison to his fellow clone troopers.

Until he found himself in the service of a Jedi Knight. Though Imanye rarely referred to herself by that name, she fit the role of a sorcerer like the holo-vids depicted them. She was a gaunt woman, over six feet tall with skin as black as any midnight sky. Gray dreadlocks hung from her head and swung from the shoulders of her brown cloak.

From the hood to the hem, the heavy robe was tattered, frayed and repaired in so many places it looked more like a dowdy quilt. She appeared more pauper than sorcerer, but she did not seem to mind. True to her calling, she had no use for material things.

Imanye was a Bronwen, one of the mysterious desert nomads who wandered the black sands of Socorro. Her only worldly possessions were a lightsaber, the ragged clothes on her back, and a bracelet of mojle beads she used for meditation. Still, she was a member of the Jedi Order and to be feared.

"TK-111, get your head out of your ass. Sitrep!" There was fear in the voice over the comm, fear that affirmed his terror.

No, no, no, he thought frantically. Imanye was the closest thing to a mother he had ever known. The only mother since clones had no true parents. Though he had no name, only a designation of letters and numbers, she had given him one, naming Neftali, after the small planet that shared space with her homeworld, Socorro.

A Jedi, but still a friend, an ally, his mentor, even when she took advantage of his errors in judgment on the training floor. Today, he learned a new kata for a throw. She had moved with such speed, he had no time to react. The Jedi threw her hip into his groin, knocking the breath out of him, and flipped him with a devastating foot sweep that left him gasping on the mat.

"You hesitated," she scolded with a smile, offering her too-thin forearm to help him up. "Never waiver when a life hangs in the balance. Life is too precious a gift, whether it is your life or your enemy's. If you must draw your weapon, draw with the intent to kill. Always to kill, never for show. The threads you cut may be the few that hold the tapestry of this existence together." Her words rang with a truth unrivaled by any speech by any drill instructor. "Every death causes a tremor in the Force, a grieving that goes beyond all words."

After a quick breakfast and a shower, he had joined her again in the training room, dressed in his armor for a reconnaissance mission. But in the span of a few hours, something had changed. Something that clicked and fired in his brain, upending reality.

Imanye was a Jedi. Jedi were enemies of the Republic. To be feared. To be put down. For the preservation of the Republic. Against his will or in spite of it, TK-111 raised his blaster rifle and slid his finger into the guard. Her back was turned to him. She trusted him. How could he not remember that he trusted her, too?

"Traitor!" he uttered in a false profanity that brought bile to the back of this throat.

When she turned to him, her hand moving for her lightsaber, he fired on her, point-blank. With her other hand, she channeled the power of the Force, an equally deadly weapon. TK-111 was thrown from his feet and slammed head first into the weapons rack behind him.

The impact was enough to shattered his helm and leave him addled and foggy, semi-conscious, but coherent enough to separate himself from the illogical manifestation of fear and hate inundating his mind.

"Damn it, TK-111. Report!" demanded the voice over comms. "Back up's on the way!"

He was again himself, but the world as he knew it was shattered like the remnants of the helm that fell from his head. The scent of charred flesh provided a grim smelling salt, waking his mind, but not reestablishing the connection to Order 66.

"General Imanye?" TK-111 got to his knee, unable to rise to his feet. A cracked rib stabbed at him, adding further clarity to the sin he had committed, against the one person who mattered more than anything else in the galaxy. "Lady Imanye!"

Gasping in pain, he crawled to where she laid, unmoving, on the mat. "What's wrong me? Why am I so afraid?" He cradled her in his arms and rocked her. "It's like some fatal code going off inside my head."

"We have been betrayed," the Bronwen whispered. She coughed, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth. "Hear me, boy, there is only one code. The one I have taught you. Say it with me...say it and remember it." Her voice grew ever weaker.

"There is no strife, only forgiveness," TK-111 said. "No sorrow, only resilience. In isolation, there is solace. True power lies in obeisance to the Force. One path. One will. One destiny."

Her fingers worked frantically at the mojle beads. Made from the volcanic ash of her homeworld, the black stones rattled in the stillness until her fingers could work them no more. "Neftali, I want to go for a long walk." Her eyes fluttered closed for the last time.

He held her, kissing the top of her head as his tears dampened her hair and scalp. "You will not walk alone."

She was right. He felt her passing through a tremor in the Force, a terrible grieving that went beyond words. But the old woman failed to tell him about the anguish or the weight of it. "Davu, prep the ship," TK-111 said into the comm, "we're leaving."

# # #

The Tydirium shuttle's ramp sank into the black sands, allowing TK-111 to disembark into the Adsila Rifts, an inhospitable region far north of Soco-Jarel starport. A dust storm rose on the horizon, blotting out the dawn horizon and Socorro's fierce red sun. Imanye's body had grown cold and heavy in his arms.

Socorrans were a superstitious people, especially when it came to death. Back on Tipoca at the military training complex, death to a clone trooper was nothing more noteworthy than being—decommissioned. But Imanye had passed on her reverence of life to him in the brief time they were together and given his life meaning beyond a numeric designation.

"Want me to wait while you bury her?" Ensign Davu asked, wringing his hands. He stood in the cargo bay in the rear of the craft.

Like Imanye, he was Socorran, lured to the military with dreams of being a fighter pilot. He had asked no questions about what happened. It was apparent from the reports coming in from all sectors of the galaxy—the Jedi had fallen, slaughtered by their own troops under the execution of Order 66.

"Better hurry. That dust storm's headed straight for us. It'll knock out every onboard interface," Davu said. "I don't want to spend the next week cleaning black ash out of my electrical systems." He followed TK-111 a few paces up the dune crest. "My cousin's with the Black Bha'lir. He can get us papers, new identities, the works. Maybe even a ship and a steady job."

"Doaba ol'val tru, Davu," TK-111 said. He turned toward the open desert and started walking in the direction of the storm.

"I can wait for you until you come back."

Staring down at Imanye's serene face, TK-111 held her tightly against him. "I won't be coming back."