TAG:
Connel Vanagor
Judah gave a small nod when Connel offered to reach out to Valery.
“I’d appreciate that, but maybe I should try the old frequency first.”
He wanted to see her. There were questions Judah needed answered, but more than that, hearing Valery was alive had exposed how badly he needed to see some of these people with his own eyes. Too much of the galaxy he remembered had apparently disappeared while he was gone.
The suggestion that followed was harder to accept.
Judah listened without interrupting as Connel talked about leadership, Thyferra, and what the Order needed. His gaze remained on the path ahead while they walked. He understood the argument. Maybe once he would have accepted it without giving the matter much thought. If there was work to be done, Judah did it.
Things were different now.
“Ala has good people around her. You just named some of them.”
Judah glanced toward Connel before looking ahead again.
“And there are plenty you didn’t name. The Order doesn’t need me swooping in because I came back from the dead. I’m one Jedi, Connel. I’ve always been one Jedi.”
That was how Judah preferred to think of himself. The galaxy had a habit of turning people into something larger than they were, especially after they disappeared. Stories grew in the absence of the people they belonged to. Judah had never cared much for the attention when he was around to argue with those stories. He certainly was not interested in becoming whatever legend a year of absence had created.
Then Connel called him the
Shadow of Shadows.
Judah groaned.
“Oh, no.”
The title was bad enough. Everything that followed made it worse. Allyson. The bar. Showing the way. Apparently being a badass again was somewhere in his future too.
For one brief moment, the memory of a
red blade flashed through his mind.
Not the weapon itself, but the feeling of it in his hand. The weight. The heat. The terrible ease with which the line had disappeared beneath his feet.
Judah had always believed there were things he would never do. He had been wrong about how far away those things were. The distance between a Jedi and something darker was not as wide as he had once wanted to believe.
He buried the thought before it could show on his face.
Judah stopped walking and stared at Connel. There was a moment of silence before one eyebrow slowly climbed.
“Did you just say karking?”
A grin started to pull at Judah’s mouth despite everything they had been talking about. Then the second word registered.
“And badass?”
Judah looked genuinely impressed now.
“Connel Vanagor, I disappear for a year and you develop a vocabulary.”
The laugh that escaped him was brief, but it was real. Judah shook his head and started walking again.
“I appreciate what you’re saying. I do. But Allyson and I weren’t some bar everyone else had to reach. We were good at what we did, and we made plenty of mistakes doing it.”
Judah shoved his hands into his pockets.
“If I can help Ala, I will. If I can teach someone something useful, I’ll do that too. Right now, though, I think the Order deserves somebody whose brain isn’t held together with bad jokes and stubbornness.”
He glanced toward Connel.
“Besides, if everyone starts calling me the Shadow of Shadows, I may have to disappear again.”
Judah made it several more steps before his own joke sparked a thought. He slowed, and the humor faded into consideration.
“Which reminds me there is actually, there is something you could help me with.”
Coming back had mostly meant finding people. Cambria. Malcoma. His family. Judah had been so occupied with putting the human pieces of his life back together that he had barely started thinking about everything else he had left behind.
After what Connel had just told him about the Alliance, that suddenly seemed like a mistake.
“I had safe houses scattered around the Core and a few farther out. Equipment caches, dead drops, emergency credits, clean identities. Most of it was compartmentalized.”
Some locations had been maintained through the Alliance. Others were Judah's alone, accumulated across years of work that depended on having somewhere to disappear when a mission went wrong. A year ago he would have known every location and every access code without needing to think about it.
Now he was not entirely certain what his own mind would give him when he went looking.
Judah rubbed absently at his jaw.
“With the Alliance gone, I have no idea what happened to any of it. Some of the locations could have been discovered. Others might have been abandoned, and anything connected to Alliance intelligence is probably something I should assume has been burned until I know otherwise.”
He looked toward Connel.
“I need to figure out what’s still secure before I start using any of it again. I can give you the locations I remember and the old identifiers. Quietly check them out. Don’t access anything and don’t try to recover anything if it looks wrong. I just need to know what’s still there.”
Judah paused before a faint grin returned.
“You wanted to help the Shadow of Shadows?”
He shook his head at the title.
“Help me find out whether he still owns anything.”
Ala Quin
his findings in regards to the assignment that she had asked him to undertake. So this would be short. He wasn’t going to stay on the planet for long, just long enough to report in, and then he would be on his way home. Of course “The Force has a way of getting in the way of your plans”. 
Judah Lesan
