The speeders ate distance and heat in equal measure.

  Kiffu rolled under us in long, dusty breaths — flat stretches where the ground blurred into the horizon, broken by sudden teeth of stone jutting up like the planet was trying to claw its way into the sky. The air tasted metallic, charged in some way my skin noticed before my mind did.

  I had my hand braced on the side rail, hood pulled up, visor down. The fabric hummed faintly where the filaments in it bled static away. It wasn’t enough to make the hairs on my arms lie down, but it helped.

  Ekrin’s speeder led, a few dozen meters ahead, his silhouette hunched over the controls. Tionne sat behind him, her posture straight despite the speed, robe snapping like a banner in the wind. Our own speeder followed in his wake, the engine’s pitch rising and falling with the terrain.

  Talon handled the controls like he was born with them. Not showy. No unnecessary swerves. Just the small, constant adjustments of someone who’d spent a lot of hours learning what this machine liked and what it tolerated. The muscles in his forearms shifted under dusty skin. His eyes never stopped moving — checking the path, the sky, the occasional flicker of blue-white in the distance.

  Meral sat between me and Toran in the back. Her hands rested on her knees, fingers splayed, as if she couldn’t quite convince them not to clench. Her hood’s visor was up; the wind dragged strands of dark hair free and whipped them across her tattoo.

  “How far?” Toran shouted, leaning forward so his voice would carry over the engine and the wind.

  “Half a day if the storm keeps its manners,” Talon called back. “Less if it gets bold.”

  “Define ‘bold,’” Toran said.

  “Close,” Talon said. “Loud. Annoyed we exist.”

  “Sounds like you,” Toran said.

  Talon snorted, but didn’t look away from the horizon.

  I could feel the storm even before I could see it properly. Not as some grand, mystical Force disturbance — just as static in my teeth. The air was wrong. Too thin. It made my lungs work harder.

  “You okay?” I murmured to Meral.

  She nodded, but her shoulders were tight. “I can feel the echoes,” she said, voice just loud enough for me to catch. “All of this. All the cargo and passengers that ever rode in these speeders, all the crashes that almost happened. All the ones that did.”

  I glanced at the back of Talon’s head. “Is that… a lot?” I asked.

  “It’s noise,” she said. “Like being in a crowd where everyone’s talking at once. But it’s… diffuse. Nothing sharp yet.”

  “Tell us if it gets sharp,” Toran said. “Sharp is our cue to panic.”

  “That is not in any grounding technique,” I said.

  “I can improvise,” he replied.

  Meral huffed, which might have been a laugh.

  We skimmed over a shallow canyon, the speeder’s repulsors thrumming as Talon nudged the controls to keep our clearance. The canyon walls were layered in red and orange, streaked with dark seams where mineral veins had caught old lightning. Some of the rock glowed faintly, pulsing with leftover charge.

  “Don’t touch those,” Talon called over his shoulder without turning. “They’ll fry more than your fingers.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” I said.

  “People rarely plan to do something stupid,” he said. “They just do it anyway.”

  “Is that Ranger wisdom?” Toran asked.

  “That’s Talon wisdom,” he said.

  Meral shifted, leaning closer to me. “The rocks remember,” she murmured.

  I followed her gaze. The canyon walls loomed and fell away behind us, full of old burns and carved glyphs half-eroded by storms.

  “Remember what?” I asked.

  “People climbing. Falling. Hiding,” she said. “The first Rangers carving out patrol paths. Their boots. Their fear. Their stubbornness. It’s all in there. Like fingerprints in wet clay.”

  “Is it loud?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But in a… organized way. It’s not attacking me. Just… existing.”

  “That’s something,” Toran said. “We’ll take organized noise over surprise trauma ghosts any day.”

  Meral’s mouth quirked. “Surprise trauma ghosts. There’s a term for the archives.”

  “We’ll file it under ‘K,’” Toran said. “For ‘Kriff this.’”

  The stormline on the horizon fattened as we rode. At first it was just a smear, a darker stripe between land and sky. Then it grew teeth — jagged forks of lightning lacing through a mass of cloud that seemed too low, too dense. The whole thing crawled sideways along the horizon, not rushing toward us so much as stalking.

  Ekrin’s speeder slowed slightly. Ours adjusted to match.

  Talon’s shoulders tightened. “Storm’s picking up speed,” he said. “Didn’t expect it to roll this fast.”

  “Is that a problem?” I asked.

  “Only if you like having hair,” he said.

  “I’m attached to mine,” I said.

  “Then let’s hope Ekrin has a plan,” he replied.

  The comm crackled. Ekrin’s voice came through, flattened by the small speaker near Talon’s knee.

  “Wind shift,” he said. “Storm’s coming in from the east. We cut southwest, use the mesas as cover. Might buy us time.”

  “Copy that,” Talon said. He glanced back at us. “Hang on.”

  He banked the speeder gently, following Ekrin’s lead as we changed course. The ground began to rise in more pronounced ridges, the flat plains giving way to clusters of stone towers. The sky above them flickered intermittently, like the storm’s light was being reflected around corners.

  The air pressure changed. I felt it in my ears.

  “Lightning hotspots,” Talon said. “See the scorch marks?”

  Once he pointed, I did: blackened streaks, spiraled patterns burnt into the stone where strikes had landed again and again, etching themselves into the world.

  “We usually avoid them,” he added. “Today we’re using them as a screen. Storm jumps to what it already knows.”

  Tionne’s voice drifted from the front speeder over the open-link comm. “How close can we safely pass?”

  “Safely?” Ekrin said. “Ask me when we’re through.”

  “Very reassuring,” Toran muttered.

  The wind picked up. Fine grit hissed around us, stinging exposed skin. I lowered my visor fully and tasted dust and metal and something that felt, weirdly, like anticipation.

  Meral’s hand slid toward mine on the bench. I caught it, squeezed once.

  “You’re grounding,” I said quietly. “Breath, body, stone.”

  “Breath, body, stone,” she echoed, like an incantation.

  The storm growled across the sky.

  We rode into it.

  ? ? ?

  It went wrong in the third canyon.

  We’d passed two without incident — just the constant hiss of sand and the occasional hair-prickling pop as static discharged between rock faces. Talon steered us through with quick, efficient corrections, keeping a healthy distance from the most heavily scarred sections. Ekrin’s speeder took the brunt of the navigating; we shadowed his path.

  In the third canyon, the world narrowed. The walls climbed higher, leaning inward slightly, turning the strip of sky above into a jagged wound. Lightning danced in that wound, not striking so much as feeling for places to strike. The air smelled burned. My teeth hurt.

  “Stay close,” Ekrin said over the comm. “But not too close. We don’t want to share a strike.”

  “Comforting as ever,” Talon said.

  I tried not to think about what it would feel like to be hit by that. Spoiler: not good.

  The canyon twisted left, then right. The speeders tilted with it, repulsors humming louder as they compensated for shifts in gravity. Rocks jutted from the walls like accusations. Dust poured down from ledges in thin, continuous curtains.

  Meral squeezed my hand hard enough that my fingers went numb.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Echoes are louder,” she said through clenched teeth. “Rangers who died here. Scouts. One speeder that didn’t make the turn.”

  Her eyes were unfocused, but not gone the way they’d gone in the training hall. For now, she was still here.

  “Remember what Tionne said,” I murmured. “You don’t have to fight every echo. Let them move through. You’re not their home. You’re not their end.”

  She swallowed. “Easy for you to say.”

  “No,” I said. “Not easy. Just… necessary.”

  The canyon bent again. Talon took the curve a little wider, giving the wall more space. Ekrin’s speeder skimmed closer to the inside edge.

  That was when the first big bolt hit.

  It slammed into the canyon rim ahead of us with a sound like a starship breaking in half. Light exploded, white-hot, searing across my visor. For a second I couldn’t see anything but afterimage. The shockwave rolled down the canyon, a physical thing that hit the speeders from above. Our speeder dropped a meter, the repulsors screaming before Talon corrected. Ekrin’s speeder, closer to the impact, dropped farther.

  “Hold on!” Talon yelled.

  The storm found what it liked. Lightning crawled from the scorched rock directly onto Ekrin’s stabilizer vane.

  I saw it hit. I saw the flash. Then his speeder lurched sideways, the nose slamming into the canyon wall at an ugly angle.

  The world turned into noise.

  Our speeder shot forward on momentum alone, Talon fighting the controls to keep us from ramming into the wreck. He hauled us up and over, just clearing the debris as Ekrin’s speeder spun out and crashed into the canyon floor.

  Everything felt slow and too fast at the same time. There was the screech of metal, the spray of shattered rock, Tionne’s shield flaring blue for a second as she tried to cushion the impact with the Force.

  Then it was over. Ekrin’s speeder lay on its side, one repulsor sparking feebly. The storm above us crackled, sensing a new path.

  “Talon, down!” Tionne’s voice snapped through the comm.

  He was already dropping us.

  We hit the ground a few meters from the wreck, repulsors whining as he forced them to cut power. The speeder bounced once and settled hard, jarring my spine.

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  “Everyone out!” he shouted. “Move!”

  We scrambled.

  The air smelled like ozone and burned insulation. Static crawled over my visor, making the edges flicker. I could feel the storm’s attention on us now, like a predator noticing prey had stopped moving.

  Ekrin was half-pinned under the front console of his speeder, one leg twisted at an angle legs weren’t meant to go. His hood had been torn off; his hair stood wild, crackling with residual charge. Tionne knelt by him already, one hand braced on the wreckage, the other extended in a gesture of Force-supported lifting.

  “You two, help me,” she said, voice tight.

  We moved.

  Meral hung back, trembling. I felt her panic spike — less at the crash and more at the echoes screaming off twisted metal and spilled blood. I met her eyes as I slid my hands under the console. “Ground,” I mouthed.

  She nodded jerkily, dragged her hood down, and sank to her knees a few meters away, palms pressing into the stone.

  “On three,” Tionne said. “One, two, three.”

  We lifted.

  The console came up heavier than it had any right to be. The Force moved through my muscles, more conduit than engine, but even with it, my arms shook. Toran grunted, teeth bared. Tionne’s face beaded with sweat.

  Ekrin groaned as the pressure eased. Talon grabbed him under the shoulders and dragged him clear, careful of the ruined leg.

  “Down,” Tionne said.

  We let the console drop. It slammed back into the wreck with a thud that made the canyon walls shiver.

  Lightning danced along the rim again, closer.

  “His leg’s broken,” Talon said, voice clipped. “Possible internal damage. We have to move him out of the canyon before the storm decides to turn us into a grounding rod.”

  “Agreed,” Tionne said. “Kae, Toran — field kit.”

  Toran was already digging in the nearest pack. I slid to Ekrin’s side with Tionne. Blood soaked through his pants around the fracture, dark against the fabric. His face was gray with pain, jaw clenched so hard I worried he’d break teeth.

  “This is the part where you tell me you’re fine,” he rasped.

  “This is the part where you don’t talk,” Tionne said calmly. “Breathe.”

  She pressed her palm lightly over his chest and closed her eyes. Not healing, not really —she didn’t have that kind of training— but lending him steadiness. His heartbeat under her hand slowed a little.

  “Splint,” she said.

  Toran handed me two rigid supports and a roll of binding. I tried not to think too hard about what the leg looked like under the cloth as we wrapped it, every shift earning a grunt or sucked-in breath from Ekrin.

  Meral stayed where she was, hands flat on the stone. I could feel her in the Force, eyes squeezed shut, echoes clawing at her like wind at a door.

  “You’re okay,” I sent toward her, not words so much as intent. “You’re here. You’re with us.”

  Her breath hitched, then steadied.

  Lightning found a new path on the far wall, streaking down and away from us. For now.

  “We can’t stay down here,” Talon said. “Storm will flood the canyon with charge. We’ll be cooked.”

  “Is there shelter above?” Tionne asked.

  He nodded, already scanning the lip of the canyon. “Old relay outpost about a kilometer ahead. We can’t get the speeders there — the path’s too narrow. But we can make it on foot if we leave the wrecks.”

  Ekrin swore under his breath. “I just rebuilt that stabilizer.”

  “We’ll hold a funeral for it later,” Talon said. “Right now, I need you alive.”

  Ekrin gave a harsh laugh that turned into a groan. “Fine. You’re lead.”

  Lightning flashed again, closer. The hair on my arms stood up under the hood.

  “We move,” Tionne said. “Now.”

  ? ? ?

  We left the speeders where they were, wreckage and all. There wasn’t time to salvage anything beyond essentials. Toran grabbed the medkit and one water pack. I snagged an extra hood in case someone’s got ripped. Talon hauled Ekrin up with an arm around his shoulders, taking most of his weight. The older man hissed but didn’t complain.

  “Path’s this way,” Talon said. “Stay close. Don’t touch the walls unless you have to.”

  The canyon narrowed, then pinched. The “path” turned out to be a steep, uneven incline carved into the rock, half-natural, half-chiseled by human hands. Old Ranger marks had been cut into the stone at intervals — small, subtle symbols indicating safe handholds, warning of loose footing.

  Lightning flickered above, bathing everything in stuttering white.

  The climb would’ve been annoying under the best conditions. With Ekrin half-conscious and the storm chewing at the sky, it turned into the kind of exercise your muscles remember for days.

  Tionne went first, light on her feet despite the terrain. I followed, then Toran, then Talon with Ekrin leaning heavily on him. Meral brought up the rear, one hand occasionally brushing the wall, flinching each time an echo got too loud.

  Halfway up, a particularly strong crack of thunder rolled overhead. The sound hit us like a shove. Dust rained down. A small rock dislodged and bounced past Talon’s shoulder.

  “Everyone keep moving,” Tionne called. Her voice didn’t rise to a shout; it didn’t need to. It carried.

  Meral’s breathing turned sharp. I could feel her teetering at the edge of another overload.

  “Meral,” I called down. “What’s happening?”

  “Too many,” she gasped. “The stone — Rangers fell here. One during a storm. He hit his head on that corner.” Her voice shook. “He died alone. It’s in the rock. It’s in my hands.”

  “Look at me,” I said.

  She forced her gaze up.

  “Breath,” I said. “Body. Stone. Not their stone. This stone. This moment. Your hands. Not his.”

  Her fingers whitened on the rock. “Breath,” she repeated. “Body. Stone.”

  Toran twisted enough to glance back, nearly losing his footing. “Hey,” he said. “If the rock’s going to talk, make it say something useful. Like the winning numbers for a sabacc table.”

  She let out a strangled snort and kept moving.

  We reached the rim in a staggered line — Tionne first, then me, then Toran, then Talon dragging Ekrin, then Meral. The wind hit harder up top, unfiltered by the canyon walls. The storm looked bigger, closer. Lightning arced between cloud layers, searching.

  “Outpost is that way,” Talon said, nodding toward a cluster of low shapes barely visible through the hazy air. “We’ve got maybe twenty minutes before this thing’s right on us. Less if it jumps.”

  “Then we don’t stroll,” Tionne said.

  We did not stroll.

  The ground between the canyon rim and the outpost was uneven but mostly flat. Scrub plants clung in clusters to the rock, leaves turned in on themselves to conserve moisture. The air thrummed. Static crawled along my visor in little crawling lines.

  Ekrin tried to take more of his own weight, nearly collapsed, and swore creatively in three languages.

  “Stop that,” Talon said. “You’re not impressing anyone.”

  “I am absolutely impressed,” Toran said. “I’m taking notes.”

  “Focus,” Tionne said.

  Lightning struck somewhere to our left. The flash turned the world monochrome for a heartbeat. The following crack of thunder felt like it rattled my bones.

  Meral stumbled, hand flying to her temple.

  “Too much,” she whispered. “Storms remember, too.”

  I grabbed her elbow. “Stay with us.”

  She blinked fast, lashes wet from the wind. “I’m trying.”

  “We’re almost there,” I said, even though the outpost still looked far away.

  Close enough that we could see it now: a low, wedge-shaped structure built half into the rock, comm tower skeleton jutting up like a snapped bone. Some of its panels were missing. Others hung loose, rattling.

  “Old relay,” Talon panted. “There were plans for a new station just a couple klicks east, so we mothballed it a few years ago. Except there's no new station."

  "What happened?" Meral asked.

  I was thinking the same. A well-stocked safehouse could be a matter of life and death in a place like this.

  "Budget cuts," he replied simply.

  "Bad enough that we couldn't even revive the old station. But the walls still hold. Mostly.”

  “Mostly?” Toran echoed.

  Talon grinned, wild around the edges. “You’ll see.”

  The first fat drops of charged rain hit us then — not wet, not really. More like beads of cool, dense air that tingled painfully wherever they struck exposed skin.

  “Move!” Tionne said.

  We ran.

  By the time we reached the outpost’s door, my lungs were burning and my thighs felt like they belonged to someone else. Talon half-jogged, half-dragged Ekrin through the entrance. Tionne slapped her hand against the control panel. It sparked, then grudgingly cycled.

  The heavy door slid open just enough for us to squeeze through, then shuddered as if it resented the effort. We tumbled inside and shoved it closed behind us.

  The storm hit the outpost a few seconds later.

  ? ? ?

  Inside, everything felt wrong in a different way.

  The outpost was one big main room with a half-walled-off section in the back where a bunk and an old kitchen unit huddled together. Dust lay thick on surfaces. Old equipment sat in neat rows on shelves, all tagged and covered as if someone had intended to come back soon and then never did.

  When the storm rolled fully overhead, the walls shook.

  Lightning found the comm tower and climbed it like a ladder, slamming into the building’s grounding rods with a sound that made my teeth ring. The lights flickered, steadied, flickered again. Every metal object hummed faintly, like it remembered when it had been part of something larger.

  Meral flinched, hands flying to her ears even though the noise wasn’t really sound. Her eyes went glassy for a second.

  Tionne moved to her instantly, placing both hands lightly on her shoulders. “With me,” she said. “Breath. Body. Stone.”

  Meral’s breathing stuttered. She squeezed her eyes shut.

  “Feel your feet,” Tionne said. “Feel the floor. This floor. Not the one from the past. Your heartbeat. Not theirs. Your name.”

  “Meral,” she whispered.

  “Again.”

  “Meral Tesska,” she said, voice stronger. “I am here.”

  The echoes around her didn’t disappear. I could still feel them pressing, whispering. But they lost some of their teeth.

  Toran slumped against a crate, flinging his hood back. “Remind me to send a strongly worded letter to whoever designed this planet,” he said.

  Talon eased Ekrin down onto the floor near the half-wall. “You good?” he asked.

  “No,” Ekrin said. “But I’m not dead. So that’s something.”

  Tionne knelt beside him again, checking his pulse, his pupils, the line of his mouth. “He’ll need proper care,” she said. “But for now, the splint is holding. We keep him warm and hydrated, and we wait out the worst of the storm.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Hours,” Talon said. “Maybe longer. Storm season doesn’t check schedules.”

  “Can the outpost take it?” Toran asked, glancing up as another lightning strike rattled the comm tower.

  “It’s lived through worse,” Talon said. “Probably.”

  He moved around the room with an ease that said he’d been here before, checking grounding rods, flipping a few manual switches, making sure nothing essential had corroded into uselessness.

  Meral sank down onto a crate near the far wall, pulling her knees up. Her hands trembled, but less than before.

  I sat beside her. Wind howled faintly through some crack in the structure. The outside world flashed white every few seconds when the storm found something new to hit.

  “Welcome to Kiffu hospitality,” she said weakly.

  “I’ve had worse,” I said.

  “Name one.”

  “Yavin jungle fever,” I said. “At least this doesn’t come with hallucinations of singing mynocks.”

  “That was just you,” Toran called from across the room. “The rest of us didn’t get the mynocks.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Very helpful.”

  Talon rummaged through a locker and produced a sealed crate of emergency rations. He popped it open, tossed a packet to Toran, one to me, one to Meral.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “You get to experience the finest in dehydrated Ranger cuisine.”

  Meral eyed the packet suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “Don’t ask,” he said. “Just eat it.”

  She tore it open, sniffed, and made a face. “It smells like if dirt decided to be food.”

  “That’s how you know it’s authentic,” he said.

  Toran took a bite of his and chewed thoughtfully. “Could be worse,” he said finally.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Could be moving,” he said.

  Talon barked a laugh. “See? This one gets it.”

  For a little while, the tiny bubble of bad food and worse jokes was enough to keep the fear outside with the storm.

  Later, when the worst of the adrenaline had ebbed and Ekrin had dozed off under a thermal blanket, the room settled into a quieter rhythm.

  Tionne sat near the center on an upturned crate, lute in her lap. The notes she plucked this time were different than the ones she’d played under the Kiffu sky — lower, rounder, carrying a warmth the flickering lights couldn’t provide. The storm provided its own percussion, rumbling and cracking in irregular intervals.

  Toran and Talon ended up near each other by the wall, trading stories like contraband.

  “So there I was,” Toran said, “six meters up a tree, clinging to a vine that absolutely was not rated for my weight, while Kae the Fearless down there insists we’re not lost.”

  “We weren’t lost,” I said. “We just didn’t know exactly where we were.”

  “That’s the definition of lost,” he said.

  Talon chuckled. “You Jedi,” he said. “Always so precise with your words.”

  “Says the man who described ‘not dying’ as ‘maybe we’ll be fine,’” I said.

  “Optimism,” he replied. “It’s a Ranger survival trait.”

  Meral had edged closer to where he sat, drawn in by the conversation despite herself. There was a looseness creeping back into her shoulders, the kind that comes when you’re too tired to keep every defence up.

  “You ever been out in a storm this bad before?” she asked him.

  Talon tilted his head, considering. “Twice,” he said. “Once as a trainee. Once… not long after that. Both times I thought I was going to end up as a scorch mark. Didn’t.”

  “What changed the second time?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “The first time, I fought it. Tried to out-stare the sky. The second time, I remembered the storm wasn’t personal. It doesn’t care who you are. It just is. My job was to move with it, not against it.”

  “That sounds like something Tionne would say,” I said.

  “Don’t blame me for other people’s wisdom,” Tionne murmured, fingers dancing lightly on the strings.

  Meral hugged her knees a little tighter, but there was a small, complicated smile on her face as she watched Talon. Something like… curiosity. Recognition. A sense of someone else who understood what it was to live in a world that shouted all the time.

  I felt it like a small spark in the air between them. Not big enough to catch yet. Just enough to notice.

  The storm raged on, slamming against the outpost’s walls, trying to remind us the galaxy was big and harsh and not particularly interested in our little problems. Inside, we had bad food, tired bodies, a half-broken Ranger, a Kiffar whose mind was full of other people’s ghosts, a Knight with a lute, two padawans who pretended jokes could fix everything, and one more Ranger who hid his worry under a grin.

  It was almost enough to feel safe.

  Almost.

  I lay back on the cold floor later, staring up at the ceiling as the lights flickered again.

  We were nowhere near the Darrun temple yet. We had no guarantee the keepers there would help Meral, or even open their door.

  But she was still here. Still breathing. Still holding her own name against the storm.

  For tonight, that had to be enough.

  Outside, lightning clawed at the sky.

  Inside, in the crackle and the dark, we waited.