Beatrice hadn’t thought that was the point of a Force bond, but she didn’t say it. “I suppose it would be useful to know if your ally was hurt or captured or-”

“Ally?” Her words, echoed in the parting of a mouth Beatrice was becoming too familiar with. She remembers looking away from it, out the window, and then back after a while. Fingertips scrubbing lightly at the inside of her wrist, the way she liked it. “What other word should I use?”

She’d been a coward, not darling to look away from their entangled hands until they were untangling, the girl next to her squirming out of bed. Standing, turned away so that Beatrice could once again see the strange constellation of scars that peeked up from the back of her shirt. Springing like starbursts up to the tip of her spine.

“Is that really what you want, Beatrice?”

Behind her, at her, Beatrice had frowned in response. She could see the real question hiding behind those words, but what was she supposed to say? This was the cost of holding a lightsaber.

“I want to be a Jedi.”

A low noise, like a hum with something breaking underneath it. A face turning back, the over-shoulder glance she always stole when she rushed into the classroom ahead of Beatrice. “Yeah. Me too.”

That night, Beatrice left the Temple for the last time, and when she arrived in the hanger bay there was no shape hiding in among the starships this time to see her off.

She’d searched, her duffel hanging off one shoulder, pressing into a bruise high on her arm made in the shape of teeth, but there were only droids moving back and forth with fuel lines and new screws and a certain anxious air haloed around their dull metal bodies. Beatrice had asked the other padawans about sensing droids like this, but apparently it didn’t happen and it wasn’t real, so she kept quiet.

Her Master had limped into the hanger with a look almost identical to Beatrice’s and swept her up with a wave of her arm. “Let’s get out of here kiddo. I think we’ve done enough damage for one rotation.”

“Master?”

“Don’t worry about it. Did you pack your books this time?”

Beatrice touched the blocky shapes through the fabric of her duffel, “Yes Master, but wh-”

“Just a feeling, kiddo. Probably nothing.” They walked toward their ship, Beatrice squinting at the back of her Master’s head. Her braids looked a little more unkempt than usual, like someone had tangled a hand in them once, or twice, or many more times than that.

She reached the ship and put her hand against the paintjob – dark skin on polished durasteel – “You learn, as you get older, that some people won’t betray themselves, or what they think they are, no matter how hard you try to convince them.” 

“Yes Master.”

Beatrice followed her into the ship, putting her bag in its secure locker and trudging up into the cockpit. She didn’t exactly slump into her co-pilot’s seat, but her Master wasn’t a Jedi for nothing.

“Something wrong?”

Beatrice turned her chair around and pressed a few buttons to test the flight stabilisers, the manoeuvring thrusters. She tapped the fuel gauge, sighed, and shook her head. “Nothing important. It looks like they fixed the rear nitrogen jets this time, Master.”

A pause. “Looks like it.”

And then the hum of the engines, Beatrice settling back into her seat and sweeping her eyes over the hanger bay once last time, checking for stray PIT droids left idle on the launchpad. As she cut from the polished floor up toward the decommissioned ships propped on struts along the walls, her eye caught a flash of sun-kissed brown.

Blinking, just in case, she looked again. Scanning between Lambda-class shuttles folded up into skinny triangles and a T-6 propped a bit lopsidedly with its big fin-shaped body resting on a strut above, to an ETA-2 ACTIS with red and yellow racing stripes.

Beatrice has heard about this particular ship at length, lying on her bed with an astonishing weight resting on her hips – so casual, so breath-taking – listening with her eyes closed to how the ACTIS can reach a top speed of 1,500 kilometres in atmosphere and how its seats are soft leather and how this one, specifically, is fresh off the assembly line and just begging to be assigned to the most gifted pilot on Coruscant.

“That’s me, Bea, in case you need reminding.”

Beatrice did not need reminding. She’d seen this girl fly.

There she was, tucked under one of the raised-up radiator panels that sat on the outermost edge of each wing, her hand pressed to one of the panels and the other resting down by her leg as she crouched, grinning. Beatrice stared at her and thought of the colour yellow and of the feeling deep in the pit of her stomach that they were leaving this time.

She felt like putting that feeling to language would be like putting it up to a flame.

Around her, the starship hummed to life and Beatrice pressed what she needed to press, functioning on autopilot without looking away from the girl crouched on the shiny wing of the ACTIS fighter. Maybe they would give it to her after all, when the war was over and such things were mostly artefacts and mere modes of conveyance.

As the ship lifted away, she watched as the girl, still above her with the decommissioned or not-yet-assigned starships, raised a hand.

She waved, and Beatrice thought again of Force-bonds and what it would be like to feel that hand from lightyears away.

With all her thinking, she forgot to wave back.

And then they were gone, gathering speed to escape from Coruscant’s gravity, the ship getting darker as they turned from the starward side of Coruscant, to wherever it was Jedi were needed.