Star Wars: Skywalker's Rebellion

Chapter Fourteen: Reunited As Hostages

When Cade regained consciousness, his first thought was about how he hated getting knocked out. It seemed to be happening frequently, and it was not a good thing. Cade came to to the pain of being thrown on a hard, messy floor and he immediately knew where he was. The sound of another body being thrown somewhere close to him told him that Calixte wasn't far away.

Cade felt the urge to let the pain consume him and fall back into unconsciousness, but he remembered that the last time he did that he had been out for months. So instead he focused on getting the sack off his head and finding his bearings. Sure enough, he was in a cell all by himself. In the front of the cell, there were bars. The other three sides of the cell was pure, thick wall, so he couldn't see who was near him. In his cell, there was a miserable clump of hay that was obviously supposed to be a bed and a sorry excuse for a toilet.

"Nyna!" he called out into the nothingness that surrounded him. "Nyna?"

"Cade?" said an excited voice from a surrounding cell.

It took Cade a good moment to realize who was speaking. Shado Vao. The padawan that had accompanied him on the trip to Wayland. Hearing Shado's voice sounding so different from what Cade remembered made him really consider for the first time that he had been asleep for months. "Shado?"

"Yeah, it's me! Thank goodness you found us. What took you so long?"

Cade was about to respond, when he heard another voice.

"Who's Nyna?" it was a gruff, disgruntled voice. Wolf Sazen.

"Master? Is that you?"

"You wouldn't think so, would you?" Sazen replied. "I'm guessing you're a hostage, too, and not outside waiting for a good time to open my cell door."

"We were captured, too," Cade said. "But we did come to find you."

"We?" Sazen asked, as if that was the only part of the sentence he heard.

"Yeah, I met a... well, an acquaintance on the way. She helped me find you guys," Cade explained.

"And look at all the good that did us," Sazen muttered. "So what's her name? Her full name."

"Nyna Calixte," said Nyna from the opposite direction.

"Never heard of you," Wolf said, sounding unimpressed. "But your voice seems familiar."

"I'm afraid I don't know why," Nyna said. "I don't tend to hang around Jedi."

Sazen paused for a moment. "You apparently hung around Cade. And how did you know I was a Jedi?"

Nyna paused too. "I... well, Cade told me you were his master, so I just assumed. And I was only around Cade because I was saving his life."

"Ah," Wolf said, as if this explained a lot. "He needs that pretty frequently. So what do you do, if you have no affiliation with Jedi?"

Nyna didn't say anything, so Cade took the opportunity to change the subject, since Sazen knowing Nyna was an Imperial agent wouldn't work out well for anyone. "So, how do we get out of here?"

"Well, gee," Sazen sounded angry. "The thought never occurred to us to try to escape, did it Shado?"

Shado didn't answer.

"What did you already try?" Cade asked, looking around at the walls and feeling them. They were made of hardened mud and wouldn't budge. Cade tried using his force powers, but nothing happened. Not that he thought anything would. Sazen had probably tried that, and his force powers were greater. Cade traced the walls looking for fault lines, which was also no use.

"We've tried everything, kid," Sazen said. "We've been in here forever and we found out a long time ago that there's no way out."

But Cade kept searching for an escape. He couldn't give up right after he'd found Wolf and Shado. They had to get off Wayland and back to Ossus. So Cade spent the following hours testing every inch off the walls and floor to see if there was any faults. He ignored Wolf, Nyna, and Shado's attempts to get him to stop wasting his time and didn't stop until he had checked everything.

Finally, Cade felt like he had tried everything. He didn't know how long it had been, maybe hours or maybe even days.

"You're right," Cade said to his friends, slumping back against the wall in defeat. "There's no way out."

"Took you long enough," Sazen grumbled. "I had that figured out in half the time you took."

"At least not forcefully," Cade continued. "But I think I have an idea. It's a little... unorthodox."