He felt the blaster fire pump into his lowermost heart. Keltin staggered and went down in the sand. The first couple shots were the only ones that penetrated. Once he knew he was being fired at and where the shots were coming from he was able to use his meager talent at energy absorption to prevent more serious damage to his torso.

The clone troopers walked away after they were sure he was dead. Keltin continued to lie still for several minutes more waiting for one of them to come back and finish him off for good. When five minutes later that still had not happened he started to inventory his wounds. His third heart was definitely going to need serious medical attention and his left leg wasn’t much better. He felt the charring all over his chest. It wasn’t very deep but he’d lost a lot of skin. Dehydration would be a big problem especially for someone his size.

The Chadra-Fan Jedi Knight carefully picked himself up and immediately became dizzy. He needed to get off world and quickly. He tried to wave away the scent of burnt fur and realized the effort was not only wasted but extremely painful. Limping he headed for the landing field nearest by. He had practically no skill with healing; he’d need bacta patches and painkillers. The nerves in his left leg jerked and he nearly went back down. It might be the Jedi way to accept the pain as a friend and messenger but pain might slow him down too badly at this point.

***

Keltin scanned the rows of ships for one small and fast enough to get past the ships waiting in orbit. He figured that if the clone troopers had been ordered to kill him then the ships up there would be ordered to shoot down any unauthorized craft and his authorization codes would be worse than useless.

His race wasn’t meant to live with just two hearts. It was taking over half his concentration just to remain conscious. He decided blindly to take the nearest one. The first thing he did was open the med pack up. Many rolls of medical tape and several bacta patches later Keltin approached the piloting controls.

Keltin had been one of the worst pilots in his clan but he could do the theory. He brought up the ship’s nav computer and did his best to plot an erratic course through the space blackside. He also entered instructions that if a ship were to appear along the plotted course to maneuver only as much as necessary to avoid collision. He nearly headed back to the med pack for painkillers before he realized he hadn’t chosen a destination to jump into hyperspace towards.

He opened up the comm. channel to try to contact the Temple and received a message saying that all Jedi were needed to regroup at the Temple. Keltin punched Coruscant’s coordinates into the nav comp and altered his course to come out to the necessary jump point. Once the computer had checked his numbers and started warming up the engines he went back to the head where he had left the med pack.

He grimaced at the mirror. He looked like a mummy in one of those of horror holos his Padawan liked to watch. The medical tape was meant for the clones and didn’t adhere well to what remained of his fur. He smiled thinking of his Padawan. It would be good to see the boy again. Like most of the younger Padawans Sarid lived at the Temple while Keltin fought in the war. It was still too dangerous for a nine year old; even one that matured as quickly as the Bith did.

Keltin was once again frustrated by medical supplies meant for the clones. It took him most of the pre-flight sequence to select a drug that wouldn’t kill him out right and get a dose that was meant for someone of his bodyweight. Judging from the way the room moved when he was standing still he hadn’t gotten the second part quite right.

Somehow he managed to pull himself along the bulkheads and to the helm. After he had strapped into his crash webbing and adjusted once again equipment meant for someone significantly larger he started the take off sequence. He giggled as he realized the camp’s gun emplacements were trained on his ship.

The ship’s computer started evasion as soon as it took off. The guns started firing as soon as they were no longer in danger of accidentally hitting one of the other ships on the field.

Keltin sighed as the sky went from blue to black. The orbiting ships had already moved into position to intercept him. If he had still had enough wits about him he would have been scared out of them. His Jedi calm had long since shattered and now he just watched as his ship skimmed along the under belly of the one in system capital ship. His ship took three solid hits as it juked and rolled towards the jump point before the shields failed. A fourth shot barely missed as he entered hyperspace.

In the flickering light of hyperspace he gathered enough of himself to go into a healing trance. His last waking thoughts were of Sarid.

***

Keltin’s eyes felt sticky when he opened them to find Coruscant on his view port. Keltin dealt with the traffic controllers and got a place in the queue of ships waiting to go blueside. He stared down in wonder at the planet to distract himself from the pain that was once again rising.

The rings of orange light seemed welcoming but when he reached for the Force he found it cold and almost greasy. Nausea rose in him and he realized he was running a fever. He tried to reach out and feel the light of the Temple but it eluded him. Recently that had been becoming more and more common as the dark side clouded everything.

Keltin moved carefully into planetside traffic. He was careful to obey all the speedlimits and signal his turns. Shaking with exhaustion he managed a less than perfect landing at the Temple that put a few new scars in the deck. This close he should be able to feel his fellow Jedi but instead the cold greasiness was even stronger. He decided to leave the ship on standby.

He felt a pair of clones walk by and it was a couple of minutes before he realized what that meant. He could feel clones in the Temple but not Jedi. A strange panic started clawing at his throat. Where was Sarid?

The explosion that destroyed his ship knocked him sprawling behind some crates. Using a mind trick to make one clone think he saw something moving across the pad he bolted for the door. Or moved as quickly as his injuries allowed while blaster fire broke out behind him.

Once he was inside he closed his eyes and took a moment to catch his breath. The painkiller had almost completely worn off and his bacta patches needed to be changed. He also needed to check out what sort of infection he was fighting.

When he opened his eyes it took his mind an eternity to comprehend what they were seeing. Some Padawans and initiates had been having a laundry fight again. The laundry was scattered up and down the hall in clumps. Organized clumps. Organized into a tunic, trousers and pair boots per clump. Despite the pain it caused he sobbed dryly.

"No, no, no," his voice was both shrill and hoarse.

He kept repeating that one word as if it could make the younglings get up and say it had all been a prank. As if it could make them get up and laugh.

Limping down the hall he continued whimpering that one word. Continued until he reached the apartment he had shared with Sarid. As he cradled the dead boy’s head in his lap his mantra changed to two words. "My son, my son."

Reaching out he tried to feel his own master. He felt nothing and knew in his heart that he was alone. He stared around the suddenly unfamiliar apartment. The stacks of holodramas with his documentaries on the left and his Padawan’s horror collection on the right. The small statue on the table that he had given to the boy as his master had given it to him. Its petals were still and forever ivory. The plant from her on the window sill. Her. Her beauty still shone in the Force but she was afraid.

He stood stiffly and his left leg nearly gave way. He slipped the statue into his pocket. He tried to scrape up some hope from the fact that on his master’s homeworld it was a symbol of rebirth because it only bloomed once a human generation.

He grabbed one of Sari- one of his Padawan’s tunics. He used his lightsaber to cut it down to the right size to be a poncho. It covered his burns and bandages well enough for his purposes. Keltin had always insisted on keeping a fully stocked med pack nearby. He had found this to be good sense when it came to his Padawan. He was certain he’d never accumulated so many injuries in such a safe environment as the Temple.

After he was done swapping his bacta patches and had taken a properly measured dose of painkillers he felt some clones conducting a room by room search. Feeling his time slipping away Keltin gave up on figuring out what antibiotics to use or even cleaning the sand out and cut a hole in his bedroom window. He swung out and pulled the curtains over the hole even as he gripped it, knowing how pitifully that hid what he was doing.

Keltin timed his fall carefully to land on the hood of a speeder but still couldn’t help squeaking some very bad words on the way down. From there he made what was meant to be a jump but became more of an angled fall to one of the moving walkways where he quickly faded into the crowd of pedestrians.

***

Keltin stood outside her shop and was struck as always by the beauty that it exuded in the Force. The plants that covered the walls, ceiling, and even most of the floor were all the shades he could think of including many beyond the "normal" spectrum. But she wasn’t in there and to him she was more beautiful than all those plants combined.

He searched for her in the Force. She was strong in it but untrained or at least not trained as a Jedi. He felt that her gift with plants stemmed from her Force sensitivity and was self taught. He’d never been able to bring himself to think of it as less than his calling as a Jedi. Just as he’d never been able to bring himself to think of her as any more than a friend.

Unbidden the image of the dead younglings flashed before him again. Why? cried a plaintive corner of his mind. His problem solving Jedi self made an appearance. The Sith can have no rivals.

Shaking his head to clear it he tried to come up with a plan to find her. She had to be in danger because she practically lived in that shop and would not have left it unattended if given the choice.

The Sith can have no rivals. His brain finally caught up to the message his sub conscious had been sending him through the rising fever. She had enough reputation as a healer to have attracted attention from the wrong people. As he would by standing outside her shop. He quickly wiped his face as he felt himself beginning to drool. Not a good sign.

In case he was wrong he put the statue in a small pile of broken ferrocrete near the door. Someone as tall as she was would see it if they looked and she knew that was his. His more morbid imagination played a trick on him making him see it as a pile of stones gathered together, like a cairn.

He shuddered and turned away, following her psychic scent. He was slowly drawn to an old warehouse. His stomach knotted and he couldn’t help but think of some of the holos his Padawan watched- used to watch- and the antagonists who used them.

***

He was moving barely faster than a crawl by the time he got inside the warehouse. He knew his blood pressure had to be either really high really low by the way his two remaining hearts were hammering away. Panting, he closed his eyes a moment before the knowledge hit him that if he came to a stop then his hearts would stop in a far more permanent sense.

Drunkenly he moved down the halls that had been built inside the warehouse, able to feel the occupants of the "interrogation rooms" as a fever dream. He came to the place she was being held alongside other suspected Jedi sympathizers.

"I’m here to rescue you," he drank in her beauty and allowed an emotion he never dared name to fill his eyes.

"A Jedi does not know love," the Ho’Din woman named the emotion.

"The Jedi are dead." He sagged against the partition.

Adria went by the name her adoptive human parents had given her. Keltin never really saw how she looked physically, so different from anything he could consider attractive. He always saw her through the senses the Force had given him and she was beautiful. Ever since he encountered her giving medical care to runaway children while he and his master searched for a missing senator’s child they had been friends. He wished that she had taken his master’s offer to teach her a few self-defense moves but she was so strongly non-violent she didn’t even own a blaster.

His lightsaber felt heavy in his hand as he cut the lock.

"Run."

"I can smell your blood. I’ll carry you."

Keltin shook his head and empathically sent his feeling of desperation. "They’re coming." He limped in the direction of the guards while she obeyed him and began to run. He blocked two shots before one of his hearts went into arrest. The blaster bolt that killed him hit him in the right eye.

Before he faded into the Force he could feel her leave the doors of the warehouse.

***

The sniper on the roof watched the corpse of the Ho’Din woman for any signs of life. When her chest did not rise again he double clicked his comm. unit to signal all clear.

The clones manning the warehouse hauled in her body and settled in to wait for more would be rescuers. The Jedi had been a surprise but it seemed they had been up to the challenge.