The Jedi arrived on a transport that looked too small to have come from anywhere important.

  No markings, no escort. Just a single shuttle dropping through the bruised clouds, hull scorched from re-entry. It settled on the landing pad with a soft hiss, like someone exhaling after holding their breath for too long.

  People gathered to watch. Scientists in gray coveralls, children half-hidden behind them. The colony hadn’t had a visitor in months—certainly not one with robes instead of a worn jumpsuit. The man who stepped out looked ordinary enough: lean, pale, with military cut and the kind of stillness that makes movement seem unnecessary. His cloak was the color of dust, his boots scuffed. Only his eyes gave him away—clear, steady, too bright for the world around him.

  He introduced himself as Kam Solusar, envoy from the New Jedi Order.

  Most people didn’t know what that meant. The Empire had made the word Jedi sound like a fairytale, or a disease.

  Father shook his hand anyway.

  “Arkanian offshoot?” Kam asked politely, glancing at Father’s white eyes.

  “Arkanian,” Father corrected, too quickly. “And scientists, not mystics.”

  Kam only smiled. “Science and mysticism are cousins, Doctor. They argue, but they share the same blood.”

  Father cocked his head, the way he did when a lab sample defied his hypothesis. “I may disagree on that, but I won’t stand in your way,” he said finally.

  “That’s all I would ask for anyway.”

  Father nodded curtly and walked back to the council building, each step deliberate and precisely measured. He stopped just short of the door.

  “The council would like to hear what the Jedi,” he tasted the rarely used word, “would have to do with us.”

  The Jedi hoisted a backpack over one shoulder with practiced ease while the shuttle door closed, and followed.

  “Much has changed in a very short time that I think the council would like to know,” he replied evenly, not rising to the bait.

  ? ? ?

  Like most, I wasn’t privy to whatever went on inside the council chamber. But when they left the building, Father wore a frown on his face, the Jedi kept his neutral expression, and other members of the council seemed rather pleased.

  Father had someone take the Jedi to a house we used for visitors who required privacy, and the crowd eventually dispersed.

  The whispers and speculations didn’t.

  By the end of the day, the entire colony was talking about news from all across the galaxy. The Empire was only a shadow of its former power. The New Republic replaced it. There was general amnesty - save for violent crimes - which brought great relief to many. And last but not least, someone had decided to bring back the Jedi.

  One of the valuable gifts Kam Solusar brought were datacores with summary of news over the past several years. Being my Father’s daughter, I had a way of getting around the decent but somewhat rudimentary security of the council’s mainframe, and I spent the following night devouring every bit of information I came across.

  ? ? ?

  Kam lingered for three days. No one could say with certainty what he did during those hours, or if the man ever slept. He drifted through the colony like a shadow, never calling attention to himself, yet impossible to ignore—his presence registered in a room the way a change in air pressure signaled a coming storm. People gave him a wide berth, even the young ones who’d never heard the word Jedi before last week. Occasionally, the children would follow Kam at a distance, trailing him through the battered prefab halls and along the cracked duracrete walkways. He never acknowledged them, but sometimes, when they ducked behind corner or alcove, he would pause and glance upward, as if privately amused by the game.

  He had no entourage, no holstered blaster, not even a data-slate. The only clue to his identity was a faint, metallic smell—like ozone, or rain on hot wire—that lingered in the air after he passed. It was this scent that made Mother joke, “He’s not a Jedi, he’s a walking power surge.” The engineers started calling him “the breaker,” and took bets on which environmental system he’d short out first. But systems all ran normally. If anything, the generators and pumps sounded less erratic, as if the colony’s infrastructure itself felt compelled to behave in the presence of a Jedi.

  Most of Kam’s time was spent wandering: he’d be seen at sunrise standing on the north perimeter, eyes fixed on the horizon where the dust storms never fully left; at midday he’d be in the biolab, silent amid the thrum of hydroponic pumps, hands clasped as if in prayer or calculation.

  Once, at dusk, he was spotted on the roof of the admin dome, staring into the cooling sky with a look reminiscent of old satellites searching for their orbital partners. He never entered the workshops or the mess hall while crowded; somehow, he always appeared in the quiet intervals between shifts, or in the early hours when no one else was around.

  I saw him first at breakfast, sitting at the long metal table where the scientists usually argued about carbon isotopes. He wasn’t eating—just stirring his ration porridge as though the motion mattered more than the food. When I came in, he looked up and said, “You were in the storm.”

  I froze. “I didn’t mean to,” I whispered.

  He smiled, not unkindly. “No one ever does.”

  ? ? ?

  That afternoon he asked Father if he could “speak with the girl privately.”

  Mother insisted on staying. Father folded his arms and said nothing.

  Kam led us to the observation dome, where the glass still bore spider cracks from the storm months ago. Outside, the desert shimmered like a sheet of molten silver. Inside, the air was cool and humming with the life-support systems’ low thrum.

  We sat down around a table beneath a patched canopy.

  He placed a small, opaque cube on the table—a relic, older than any tech in the colony.

  “Close your eyes, Kae’rin,” he said. “Tell me what you hear.”

  I wanted to laugh. “There’s nothing to hear. It’s a box.”

  But I knew I wasn’t truthful. And I knew there was one piece of tech in the colony that could be older than Kam’s mysterious box. Much older. And it sang to me.

  “Boxes make sounds,” he replied. “You just have to listen long enough.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  So I closed my eyes. At first there was only the hum of air filters and the faint ticking of a data reader in the corner. Then, slowly, the silence thickened—like the moment before rain. Inside that silence, something else moved: a pulse, not sound exactly, more like the idea of sound. It reminded me of the data prism, and of the storm, and of my own heartbeat all tangled together.

  “It’s humming,” I said softly.

  Kam nodded. “What does it say?”

  I frowned, listening harder. “It’s not words. Thoughts. Memories. It’s…awake.”

  When I opened my eyes, he was studying me with that same calm intensity, as if he’d been waiting for a specific note in a long-forgotten song.

  “Do you know what the Force is?” he asked.

  I hesitated. “Father says it’s superstition. Mother says it’s physics we don’t understand yet.”

  “And what do you say?”

  I thought about the humming in my bones, the way the world sometimes sang back when I whispered to it.

  “I think it’s the part of things that listens,” I said finally.

  Kam smiled faintly, leaning back. “As good an answer as any.”

  ? ? ?

  That evening, Kam met privately with my parents. I wasn’t supposed to hear, but the walls of the buildings were thin enough. I sat on the stairwell just out of sight, pretending to polish a datapad.

  “She’s strong,” Kam said. “Not in the way we used to measure. The old tests are gone — machines can’t see this. But I can feel it. She bends the air around her. She listens to the world, and the world listens back.”

  “She’s still a child,” Father replied. “And I’ve seen what happens to people who claim to hear the world.”

  “So have I,” Kam said softly. “I once was one.”

  Silence covered the room, waiting to be broken. Mother did.

  “You want to take her away.”

  “Not take. That’s what the old Order used to do. We invite. The Jedi Praxeum is a place to learn control, not worship. We are students of the Force, not a cult. She’ll be taught how to choose when to listen — and when not to.”

  There was a long silence, filled only by the sound of the air recycler coughing dust.

  “We lost too much to the Empire,” Mother said quietly. “If she leaves—”

  “If she stays—” Kam interrupted, “Look, I know you have protected her this long. But if she stays, worse — things — than the Empire could come for her.”

  The words hung there, heavy and true.

  ? ? ?

  Later, they called me into the lab. The lights were dim, soft reflections glinting off the glass jars that lined the shelves. Father stood by his console, hands clasped behind his back. Mother was sitting, eyes red.

  “Do you want to go?” Father asked.

  I thought of the prism locked away in the drawers, of the storm that had sung to me, of Kam’s quiet eyes.

  “I think it wants me to,” I said.

  He exhaled through his nose, slow and sharp. “The universe is not kind to people who stand out.”

  “I know,” I said. “But maybe it needs people who can listen.”

  ? ? ?

  I had less than a day to pack and say my goodbyes. Less than a day was plenty of time. Even after several years I haven’t truly bonded with anyone. The few friends I had would forget about me soon enough; a fleeting goodbye was enough.

  I only spent some time with Miss Widinis, the elderly teacher with empty birdcage. I waited for her at the one place I knew she would come: her classroom.

  I heard, before I saw, Miss Widinis in the corridor. The teacher’s step was unmistakable, a soft but determined shuffle punctuated by the subtle rattle of her cane. She wore the same brown woven shawl as always, despite the morning humidity, and her hair was pinned back with a bit of copper wire. In her hand she clutched a worn book, the edges softened by use.

  We sat down on a bench next to each other, and for a while neither of us spoke.

  She tapped the floor with her cane and looked at me sideways.

  “I heard you’re leaving. For that school. For something more.”

  The words caught me by surprise, as if the news had always belonged to someone else.

  “Yes,” I managed, “for training—” I hesitated, then added, “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  Widinis smiled, and it was not the sad smile I had expected. The lines around her eyes deepened, the way they always did when she talked about constellations or old poetry.

  “You will come back. Places like this, they echo inside you. If not now, then years from now, you’ll find yourself thinking of the dust, or the way the sunset bleeds through those ridiculous plasticrete domes.”

  “Will you look after the others?” I asked, surprised with the ache in my throat.

  Miss Widinis gave me a look that was part amusement, part rebuke. “Of course. The colony is growing. There’s always another batch that needs tending, you know that.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, and I tried to fix the moment in my mind: the smell of cheap cleaning solution, the faint static buzz from the corridor light, the steady presence of someone who had never asked for anything more than attention in return.

  “Write to me, if you can,” said Miss Widinis at last, rising with a creak of her knees. “Tell me what you find. Or what finds you.”

  “I will,” I replied, and meant it.

  I watched her shuffle away, her cane quietly clacking against the hard tiles like ticking of the clock. I knew that out of all the people who weren’t my family, I would miss her the most.

  ? ? ?

  The rest of the goodbyes were brief and half-hearted. I visited the data library, returning a borrowed reader I’d never finished. I wandered the engineering wing, stood for a full minute outside the sealed door to the reactor core, and thought about the familiar hum I would not hear again anytime soon.

  Mother was waiting when I got back, sitting on the bunk with her hands folded in her lap. There was a tightness around her mouth, the same expression she wore when patching a pressure suit or settling a family argument. She patted the mattress, and waited for me to sit beside her. I felt suddenly ten years old again and afraid that I’d done something terribly wrong.

  “I helped you pack,” said Mother, gesturing to the duffel. “But you should check, in case I missed something important.”

  I unzipped the bag and found, nestled among the clothes, a familiar crystal cube. The sight of it caught me off guard. It hummed quietly as if greeting an old friend.

  “I thought you might be old enough for that now,” said Mother, her voice softer now. “It’s the only thing we have to give you, really.”

  I nodded, fighting an urge to cry. “Thank you.”

  We sat together for a while, neither willing to break the silence. Finally, Mother reached out and brushed a strand of hair from my eyes. “You know your Father loves you,” she said.

  For a moment I wondered if Father would appear to say goodbye, or if he had decided, as always, that the best way to show love was through absence. In the end, it didn’t matter. I understood that about him, now.

  Mother leaned over and wrapped her arms around me. Her voice trembled like a leaf caught in a gentle breeze, “Remember who you are. Not who they tell you to be.”

  ? ? ?

  As I walked out of the door with Kam by my side, Father was waiting by the shuttle.

  Tidy white hair combed back, coat buttoned up, arms clasped behind his back.

  He looked down at me, scanning me with his milky white gaze.

  “Father,” I started, but he interrupted me.

  “You —will— come back,” he said, and made the future tense do a whole lot of lifting. It wasn’t certainty I heard. It was inevitability.

  I looked up at him, catching the tremor beneath his stern tone—that painful pulse of a heart trying to armor itself against loss.

  “I will.”

  “Good.”

  Then he embraced me suddenly — a clumsy, powerful hug that squeezed the air out of me. In a quiet, quivering voice that only I could hear, he whispered: “Power without knowledge is noise. Knowledge without compassion is silence. Don’t forget either.”

  ? ? ?

  The shuttle rose from Theta-9’s sand like a silver needle, climbing toward a pale dusk. Kam sat beside me, hands steady on the controls. Through the viewport, I watched the colony shrink until it looked like a handful of bright dust scattered across the blue-gray moon.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No. Just…loud inside.”

  He smiled faintly. “That’s what it feels like at the beginning. Later, you’ll learn which part of the noise is you.”

  I turned to look back at the moon that was the world I knew these past years. Shrouded in night, it stood dark against the hazy blue of the gas giant it orbited. Like a pupil of an eye.

  The eye of the universe itself, watching us leave.

  The stars outside flared and stretched as the ship jumped to hyperspace. For a moment, the hum of the engines matched the hum in my bones, and I thought I could almost hear words forming out of it—something vast and gentle and terribly old.

  Then the watchful eye vanished, and the only sound left was the quiet breathing of two travelers leaving everything behind.