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placated, as if still awaiting a formal apology. Honestly, Zo didn’t mind its presence in her thoughts; the bond that they shared was, after all, part of her identity, a Jedi in the Agricultural Corps, one of the talented handful whose psychic green thumb kept her here in the nurseries and labs of the Marfa facility.
    Marfa was a hothouse, its varying atmospheres, temperatures, and moisture levels all carefully maintained to foster the widest variety of interstellar fauna in this part of the Core Worlds. But it was the Force sensitivity of Zo and her fellow Jedi that drove the different species to their fullest potential. At twenty-five, Zo understood that there was innate value, even a kind of nobility in such things, nurturing every form of botanical life and encouraging every facet of its development and exploration.
    Rousing herself fully from the last lingering vestiges of sleep, she slipped into her robe and headed up the corridor to the refresher. The faint sense of unease followed her, an unwelcome remnant of some other unremembered dream. She dressed for the day, choosing her lab frock and hood from a rack of identical uniforms, attributing the tinge of restlessness to that same nameless malaise that sometimes waited for her upon awakening here on Marfa.
    Opting out of breakfast, she followed the concourse up to Beta Level Seven. Marfa’s planetary status was constantly shifting with the position of solar activity and galactic cloud patterns, but B-7 was currently the busiest and most vibrant of the various cultivation and growth bays honeycombing Marfa’s surface. Usually most of her fellow Jedi could be found there in the mornings, starting their day with de facto meetings to update one another on progress and research, and share their immediate plans for the future.
    The turbolift doors opened on an eye-watering expanse of green, and Zo stopped there as she always did, letting the great familiar cloud of humid warmth wash over her. The smells of countless different plants competed for her attention—sap, fruit, and flower mingling in a mind-boggling banquet of fragrances.
    Tilting her head back, she looked up on 150 standard meters of high-ceilinged vines and dangling root systems. All around were narrow, self-sustaining forests of succulents and subspecies and high trellises overrun with loops and whorls of growth so varied in color and size that only through sheer day-after-day familiarity was she able to process it all.
    She could already feel them.
    Her mind tuned instantly to the internal hum of hundreds of different vegetative life forces, each vibrating according to its own particular emotion, some low and oscillating, others pulsing high and bright to match the explosions of flowers that sprang from their stems. Many of the plants were local enough that she recognized their greetings in her mind, as she passed by. Zo walked among them, allowing their rustling enthusiasm of leaves and stalks to distract her from the nagging tug of unease that had followed her up from below.
    “Good morning, Hestizo.” Wall Bennis was the first actual voice she’d heard this morning. A tall, soft-spoken man with calm brown eyes, the Jedi ag-lab director was waiting for her behind the thick red stalks of a malpaso tree with an extra cup of caf. “Sleep well?”
    “Until the orchid woke me.”
    Bennis handed her the cup. “Any idea what’s going on?”
    “I’ve got a pretty good guess.”
    “You do?”
    “Mm-hm.”
    “That’s good, then.” He went distractedly back to his own work and then seemed to remember something. “Oh, and Zo? When you get a minute, would you mind taking a look at the pulsifarian moss colonies on B-Two? There seems to be some kind of secondary parasite growing in the soil.”
    “You always save the glamorous stuff for me.”
    “You’re the only one who can understand it.”
    “The moss or the parasite?”
    “Both, I think.”
    “I’ll take a look.” She carried the caf across