:: HERO of KORRIBAN ::
Cambria Zadira
Thyferra still burned behind him.
The glow followed Judah through the trees, staining the low clouds with a dull orange whenever another distant detonation rolled across the ruined countryside. Smoke hung beneath the canopy, caught between branches broad enough to blot out what little remained of the night sky. Every breath tasted like ash and chemicals, with the faint sweetness of Alazhi somehow lingering beneath both.
Or what was left of it.
The fields surrounding the old collection station had been burned nearly to the roots. Blackened stalks bent beneath settling ash while shattered irrigation lines leaked into the mud between them. Pools of contaminated water reflected the firelight in broken strips. The insects had already returned, their constant drone filling the spaces between distant artillery and passing engines.
Judah had no idea how long he had been moving.
His legs had started trembling some time ago. Blood had dried along his wrists. Whatever had carried him away from
Srina Talon
and
Mercy
no longer felt like strength. Maybe it was pure adrenaline now. He kept moving anyway.The facility appeared through the trees slowly, little more than a dark shape tangled beneath vines and collapsed durasteel. Once, it had been used to gather and process material from the surrounding farms before shipments were pushed toward the larger bacta refineries. Now half the structure had folded inward beneath bombardment. One wall was simply gone, exposing cracked storage cylinders and ruined machinery to the jungle.
Judah slipped inside through the breach. A weak blue emergency strip flickered overhead. Another farther down the corridor struggled to remain lit. Somewhere beneath the floor, an aging generator coughed itself awake for several seconds before falling silent again. The building smelled of scorched wiring, stagnant water, and bacta.
That smell almost made him laugh.
Almost.
The motion pulled against the stitches holding his mouth closed. Pain tore across his face immediately.
Judah stopped.
One hand rose carefully toward his jaw, though his fingers never touched the crude line of sutures. The flesh around them was swollen and tight. Dried blood had stiffened along several of the stitches, tugging whenever instinct made him try to move his lips. There was something cruel about finally being free and still being unable to speak.
Judah lowered his hand and kept moving.
Broken transparisteel crunched beneath his boots. Empty medical housings hung open along one wall, their contents stripped long before the fighting reached this place. A fractured bacta cylinder lay across the floor ahead, its contents reduced to a tacky blue film beneath layers of dirt and ash.
Near the rear of the building, Judah found a maintenance hatch hanging open. A narrow ladder descended beneath the facility.
Good enough.
Judah lowered himself into the shaft.
The tunnels beneath the fields were narrow, built for maintenance crews and irrigation access rather than comfort. Pipes ran along the walls beside old control boxes and service conduits. Water dripped somewhere ahead, each impact carrying farther than it should have through the dark. Nothing followed him down.
That was enough.
Judah made it perhaps another thirty meters before his body finally decided the escape was over.
His shoulder struck the wall first. He caught himself badly and slid down the duracrete until he was sitting on the tunnel floor with one knee raised in front of him. His breathing came hard through his nose. Pain settled into places adrenaline had kept quiet until now. For a long moment, Judah simply sat there. No one was touching him or asking questions. That should have been enough to convince his body that he was safe.
It was not.
The tunnel shifted around him in pieces as his mind tried to drag him somewhere else. He remembered a room with restraints. Srina standing over him. Mercy somewhere close enough that he could feel the threat of her even before he saw her.
Judah squeezed his eyes shut.
Malcoma.
That was where he went instead, not because the memory came easily, but because he had spent too long learning how to find it. It was the one memory Srina had yet to taint. Her face had become a place in his head they had never managed to take from him completely. Sometimes it was only the shape of her smile. Sometimes the sound of her voice survived long enough to pull him back from whatever Srina had been trying to make him believe.
He held onto that now.
The cold wall pressed against his back. Water continued dripping somewhere in the darkness. His jaw throbbed with every beat of his heart. Still, this was real. Judah opened his eyes. For the first time since getting free, he allowed himself to believe that Srina was not standing on the other side of the door. There was no door. There was only the tunnel. For now, that was enough.
Judah let his head rest against the wall and closed his eyes again. He reached for the Force.
Even that felt different now. Familiar in shape, but damaged around the edges by everything that had been done to him. Judah pushed past the fear that Srina might somehow still be there waiting for him and searched for something older. Something he trusted.
Cambria.
He did not know if she was close enough to hear him. He did not know whether the connection between master and student still worked the way it once had, or whether captivity had broken something that could not be repaired. Judah reached anyway. He poured everything he could manage into the attempt, not words exactly, but intent. Recognition. Need. A desperate pull toward someone who had known him before all of this.
// Cambria Zadira... where are you? //
The thought carried farther than his voice ever could.
// How come you haven't found me yet? //
Judah held onto the connection for as long as he could, hoping somewhere beyond the ruins of Thyferra she would feel him reaching back.