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looking for us. Then we’ll find another. But…” Dex paused.
“It’s time to join the fight, my friends. To fight means you have to risk exposure. We need to resurface.”
    Curran nodded. “I was thinking the same thing.”
    “I’ve still got my contacts in the Senate,” Keets said.
    “And there are a few even in the Imperial Army officer corps who don’t like where they are,” Oryon added. “They might talk.”
    “I’ve got friends I can ask, too,” Dex said. “If we do this, we could attract the notice of the Inquisitors. They’ll come looking, no doubt about that.”
    The others nodded. They would accept that risk.
    “But why?” Trever asked them. “You hardly know Ferus. You just met him a few days ago.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Dex said. “We’re all soldiers in the same fight now. We’ll risk what we have to for our own.”
    Trever looked at Dex gratefully. He knew Ferus would be touched by their help. He only hoped Ferus would live long enough to see it.

That night, Ferus’s cell door slid open and the guards threw a body inside. Ferus sat up, leaning on his elbows. The door slid shut and Clive unfolded himself from his
tucked position. He dusted off his dirty prison coveralls.
    “I don’t know why they have to do that,” he said.
    “How’d you manage it?” Ferus whispered.
    “There’s a creepy logic to this regime,” Clive answered in a low tone, settling himself next to Ferus. It had been at least two years since Ferus had last seen him. He was
thinner, and his thick black hair was cut close to his head. His blue eyes had dark smudges underneath them. Then again, they all looked older.
    “When you rule by fear, everyone is afraid of you,” Clive said, lying back and crossing one ankle over his knee. “This can have its advantages. Obviously. I mean, they’re
in control of the galaxy, right? But it can offer windows of opportunity for fellows like me. Hence. There’s a chap in the data-works section—not an Imperial guy, just a civilian with a
job. He had a slight problem with his program, and I saw him sweat. If you mess up on the job here, you get a boot in the face and a transfer to someplace worse. Does that concept boggle the mind
or what? So I fixed it for him on the sly. He owed me a favor. This is it.”
    “So what are you in for?” Ferus asked.
    Clive stretched out his legs. “I was lying low under one of your excellent false identities—thanks for never charging me, by the way—when I saw an opportunity I couldn’t
pass up.”
    “Don’t tell me. A little espionage? A tiny theft of an industrial secret?”
    Clive grinned. “Something along those lines. The next thing I knew, I was being arrested. They threw me against a wall and put stun cuffs on me. They traced my ID docs and somehow in a
burst of their usual efficiency they discovered who I was. That was act three of this space opera, mate. Once they had my real name, they had me. Into the slammer I went. The End.”
    But it wasn’t the end. Ferus knew enough about Clive to know that. He’d met Flax in the time before the Clone Wars, when he was still operating his business, Olin/Lands. He and his
partner Roan offered their services to whistleblowers, beings who exposed corruption and then found the law did not protect them. Roan and Ferus created new identities for the whistleblowers and
their families and also offered protection while they established themselves on new worlds. Clive hadn’t needed their protection—he had honed his own style of defense, with amazing
skills Ferus had never seen outside of the Temple.
    Using his abilities as a musician, he had often gone unnoticed in bars or parties while he was gathering information or stealing it. It was a living, he would say with a shrug. Once the Clone
Wars started, he saw his skills as marketable. Ferus had thought of him immediately after he had been put in charge of an operation on the planet of Jabor. He had recruited Clive and