It had almost been fifteen evacuees, but Antilles’s medical staff had been able to save Vartan. He and Selda were a matched pair now, the Togruta had joked, with four limbs and four prosthetics between them, but at least they were both alive. She’d left them on Captain Antilles’s ship with Kaeden and Miara. They were all impressed by the capabilities of real medical technology. Kaeden’s arm was almost as good as new, which freed up Miara to prowl the ship, looking for A-wing pilots to pester. When they found out how good she was at explosives, they took quite an interest in her.
“I’m glad it wasn’t worse,” Ahsoka said. “I took out that gray creature before my backup arrived. I got the impression he wasn’t the only one of his kind.”
“Was he talented?” Bail asked. “Or does he just carry the lightsaber for show?”
“He’s had some training,” Ahsoka said. “He mostly relies on brute strength. If he was going to be facing Jedi, or someone with my level of training, I’d say he wouldn’t be much of a threat. I defeated him without my lightsabers. But the others like him won’t be facing Jedi.”
Bail nodded. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “What about Raada?”
“Well, the farmers can’t go back,” Ahsoka said. She slumped down a little bit in her chair. They’d won, but the cost had been high. “If they tried, the Empire would wipe them off the moon’s surface without even landing first.”
“I can resettle them on Alderaan, perhaps,” Bail said. “There aren’t that many of them, and there are enough refugees in the galaxy right now that Alderaan’s taking in a few hundred won’t raise any eyebrows.”
“They don’t want to be resettled,” Ahsoka said. She straightened her shoulders. “They want to join up.”
She could see Bail considering it. She knew he could use the extra people, but there were some obvious downsides. The Empire had no trouble using poorly trained people as cannon fodder, but Bail would refuse to do the same.
“They’re farmers, Ahsoka,” he pointed out. “They have only the training you gave them.”
“They’re resourceful,” she said. “And anyway, your rebels have to eat, don’t they?”
Bail laughed.
“I’ll have someone talk to them, and we’ll see what we can do,” he said. “There are a few planets that would suit us for an agricultural base, and we can start training anyone who is interested in piloting or weapons use.”
They sat quietly for a moment, and then Bail leaned forward.
“They told me your new lightsabers are white,” he said, and she heard awe in his voice. “May I see them?”
It was safe enough in Bail’s office, surrounded by the void of space. Ahsoka stood up and unclipped her lightsabers from her side. She activated them, and Bail’s office was filled with a soft white light, gleaming off the windows and reflecting the stars. The office was much smaller than a training room, being shipboard, but she did a few of the basic forms for him anyway. She would never get tired of the way they glowed. She hadn’t thought she’d ever replace her original green ones, and she still had to finish the handles, but these were all right.
“They’re beautiful, Ahsoka,” he said.
She turned them off, bowed slightly, and sat back down.
“I’ve never seen white ones before,” Bail mused.
“They used to be red,” Ahsoka said. “When the creature had them, they were red. But I heard them before I ever saw him on Raada, and knew that they were meant for me.”
“You changed their nature?” he asked.
“I restored them,” Ahsoka replied. “I freed them. The red crystals were corrupted by the dark side when those who wielded them bent them to their will. They call it making the crystal bleed. That’s why the blade is red.”
“I had wondered about that,” Bail said. “I spent a lot of time with the Jedi, but I never asked questions about where their lightsabers came from. I don’t suppose they would have told me anyway.”
“These feel familiar,” Ahsoka said. “If I had to guess, I would say they were looted from the Jedi Temple itself.”
“That raises some very uncomfortable possibilities,” Bail said. “Not to mention a host of potential dangers for a Jedi Padawan.”
“I’m not a Padawan anymore, Senator, and it’s not safe to be Ahsoka Tano,” she said. “Barriss Offee was wrong about a lot of things. She let her anger cloud her judgment and she tried to justify her actions without considering their wider effects. She was afraid of the war and she didn’t trust people she should have listened to. But she had a point about the Republic and the Jedi. There was something wrong with them, and we were too locked into our traditions to see what it was. Barriss should have done something else. She shouldn’t have killed anyone, and she definitely shouldn’t have framed me for it, but if we’d listened to her—really listened—we might have been able to stop Palpatine before he took power.”
“The Chancellor played his hand very well,” Bail said. He spoke the word chancellor with some venom, and Ahsoka knew it gave him great satisfaction not to say emperor when they were in private. “He kept us so busy jumping at shadows that we didn’t notice which of the shadows was real.”
“I thought I was done with the war, but maybe I don’t know how to do anything else,” Ahsoka said. “I tried to cut myself off, but I kept getting drawn back in.”
Bail thought of Obi-Wan, sitting by himself on some Outer Rim world. His sacrifice was to take himself out of the way, to focus only on the future and not give any thought to the present. It would be a lonely way to live, even if it was peaceful, and Bail did not envy him at all.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that you and I are meant to focus on the present.”
“What do you mean?” Ahsoka asked.
“In this fight, there will be people like Barriss who are focused on the past,” he said. “And there will be other people who focus strongly on the future. Neither of them is wrong, exactly, but even if we don’t always walk the same path as one another, ours must be the middle road.”
Ahsoka smiled.
“That’s what I thought when I was trying to find the crystals that power my lightsabers,” she told him. “I didn’t want to be alone, but I didn’t want to be a general or even a Padawan anymore. I want something in the middle of that, still useful but different than before.”
The ship dropped out of hyperspace. They were still some distance from the planet, but Bail liked to look out at the system when he was returning home.
“I was thinking about what I did on Raada,” Ahsoka said. “At first it was hard, because no one would listen to me. You told me later that you were aware that something was going on but you couldn’t step in. And I couldn’t figure out how to communicate with them. They had different priorities, and because I couldn’t explain myself, a lot of people died.”
“That’s not your fault,” Bail told her.
“I know,” she said. “But it feels kind of like it is.”
He nodded. She suspected he was also good at blaming himself for things.
“Then it happened again when you sent Chardri Tage and Tamsin after me,” Ahsoka said. “They didn’t have enough information, and I didn’t know the priorities. All I saw was a tractor beam and two strangers with blasters.”
“Chardri is never going to forgive me for that,” Bail admitted. “I slipped up.”
“My point is, both of those things could have been avoided if you had better channels of communication,” she said.