Sʜᴀᴅᴏᴡ Lᴏʀᴅ
The polluted, overcrowded industrial world of Chandaar was not somewhere Braze would have typically visited of his own accord. Yet he had followed another thread in a long chain of tangled truths, pursuing the elusive figure he had glimpsed only through fractured impressions caught by Psychometry.
He squeezed through the narrow passages of Ambaril's salvage quarter, ducking beneath tangled wiring while the edge of his darkened cloak scraped against stacked crates and hanging machine parts. For hours, he had been scouring repair shops, salvage stalls, and cramped workshops half-buried beneath the district's industrial refuse.
A damaged system log recovered from New Cov had preserved the identification signature of an obsolete droid-diagnostic interface, one used to bypass the console's protections. That particular model remained common among Chandaar's mining and industrial repair crews. More importantly, its access key had been rebuilt using scavenged components traced somewhere within Ambaril's salvage quarter.
Braze pressed his way into another small shop, carrying a compact droid tucked beneath one arm. He approached the counter and carefully set the machine down upon it.
"Hey, do you happen to have a compatible micro-servo regulator?" he asked. One gloved finger tapped lightly against the droid's casing. "Its left stabilizer keeps locking whenever it tries to turn."
It was not entirely a lie. The fault was minor, but genuine enough to give him an excuse to linger, study the equipment, and listen for anything useful or even query the shop keepers a bit.
Braze was far from home, though there was every chance that news of his supposed betrayal had already leaked outward and spread among those who remained connected to the Order. He had, after all, been one of the Temple's better-known young "problem prodigies," earning notoriety for both his talent and his refusal to behave quietly.
That reputation had only grown when Councilor
Jasper Kai'el
took him as his Padawan… long before the fall of the New Jedi Order, and before the Sentinels' concealed deeds began crawling into the Light. Somehow, exposing those deeds had done Braze no favors among the Jedi of Coruscant. The chase and trial that followed left him partially expelled from the New Jedi Order and set him upon the path he now walked: a lone, renegade Jedi Knight without Council to answer to.He had no idea just whom he was about to find tucked away in this forgotten corner of Chandaar…