Capítulo 43: SENTINEL - Chapter 43
"A Jedi named Revan," he said. "When I lived there, Revan was like us—trying to rally the Jedi against a great enemy." Jelph swallowed, finding his mouth dry.
"From the sound of it, something's gone wrong. The Jedi Order has split. It's at war with itself."
Jelph replayed the recorded message for her. A fragment of a warning from a Republic admiral, it cautioned listeners that no Jedi could be trusted. The ages-old compact between Republic and Jedi had been sundered.
Now there was only war.
The message ended.
Shaken, Jelph deactivated the device. "This … is our fault. The Covenant."
"The Jedi sect you belonged to?"
"Yes." He looked up in the twilight, unable to find any evening stars through the foliage. "And that's the trouble. There aren't supposed to be any Jedi sects. The Order is divided now—but we divided it first." He shook his head. "May the Force help them all."
He turned his gaze to the wilderness again. Ori let him sit in silence. It occurred to her that during all her days of complaining about the world she had lost, Jelph was living with the loss of a whole galaxy. And he was losing it again now.
At last, he stood and spoke. "I don't know what to do, Ori. We kept the Tribe from discovering a way off Kesh. But I always held out hope that with the transmitter, I could make contact one day. Make contact," he said, looking back at her for a moment, "to get us out of this place."
"And to warn them about my people," Ori said.
Jelph looked away. There was no avoiding the truth. "Yes."
Ori touched his shoulder. "It's only fair. I tried to warn my people about you."
"Well, it's pointless now," he said, stooping to lift a stone from their future front garden.
"If the Jedi are divided—or, worse, if Revan or someone else has fallen to the dark side—then bringing a planetful of Sith to their attention is the worst thing I could possibly do for the galaxy."
"You don't know that," she said. "You could be wrong. The Jedi could still come here and wipe everyone out."
"Yes, I could be wrong." Laughing to himself, he looked at her. "You know, that's the first time anyone's heard me say that. Maybe if I'd said it more often back home, I wouldn't be here now." He tossed the stone into the stream and knelt again.
"I've lived my whole life thinking I knew what I was supposed to do. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do now."
Watching him, Ori saw the look she'd seen in him in her previous visits to the farm. It was the expression he'd worn when toiling in the muck. Then he had been doing something unpleasant, but he'd been doing it because he had to do it, to keep his garden alive and his customers happy. His duty.
Duty. The term didn't mean the same thing to the Sith. In the Sabers, Ori had had missions she was charged to perform—but she had taken them on as personal challenges, not out of some loyalty to a higher order. The galaxy didn't have the right to give her odd jobs. Truly free beings had lives. Slaves had duties.
And now Jelph was suffering, certain that he had some duty to perform, but unsure what it was. What service did he owe the galaxy—a galaxy that had already cast him out?
"Maybe," Ori said, "maybe Sith philosophy has the answer for you."
"What?"
"We're taught to be self-centered. We don't think us and them. It's just you, versus everyone else. No one else matters." Placing her arms around him from behind, she looked out at the dark stream, burbling quietly past on its way to feed the Marisota River. "The Sith cast me out. The Jedi cast you out. Maybe neither side deserves our help."
"The only side worth saving," he said, turning toward her, "is ours?"
She smiled up at him. Yes, she had been right from the beginning. He was so much more than a slave. "Give it a try, Jedi," she said. "If I can do something selfless—then maybe it's time for you to do something selfish."
He looked at her for a long moment, a twinkle in his eye. Wordlessly, he broke the embrace and stepped over to the receiver. Uprooting it, he grinned at her. "Shall we?"
Ori watched him cradle the blinking machine for a moment before she realized what he intended. Exhaling, she stepped over and helped him carry the transmitter to the side of the stream. With one great heave, they tossed it in.
Striking a shoal beneath the current, the contraption splintered noisily into shards. They watched together for a moment as bits of casing bobbed and vanished into the darkness. Then they turned back toward their house.
The cords were cut.
It was time to live.
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