Loden Greatstorm was a Jedi, and yet he was as helpless as a newborn.

The indignity burned at him night and day.

He had spent the endless days since his capture in a laboratory, strapped to a metal rack. A strict regimen of drugs had robbed him of both his strength and the ability to sleep. Whenever he began to slip away, as he had done minutes before, a hypo was pressed against his neck. The same click. The same hiss. The same rush through his veins, snapping him awake. Not that he could close his eyes. They had been clamped permanently open, his head held in an immovable vice. He couldn’t turn his neck, couldn’t even look away as lights strobed in front of him, a shifting kaleidoscope of colors, some he recognized, while others seemed new, almost as if he had forgotten their hue. And all the time a cacophony of screams and static was blasted from floating speakers, discordant sounds both organic and synthesized. Loden caught one of the speakers during the early days of his confinement, a glorious giddying moment when he managed to center himself, to reach out with the Force. He’d squeezed, shattering the unit, shards of sharp plastic cutting his cheek. That pain he didn’t mind. It meant he had changed his environment, made a difference. It proved he still had a modicum of control.

The punishment had come later that night. He knew it would, although he had expected more than a simple surgical saw in his doctor’s hands. Really? That was it? After everything else his captors had done to him? After the lights and the sounds and the madness. What did he have to fear from a saw?

The answer, it turned out, was nothing. The door had slid open, and the man he’d learned was called Ro walked into the lab. The Chadra-Fan had offered him the saw, but the Nihil leader had shaken his head, pulling instead a familiar weapon from his belt. Loden’s saber. Loden’s saber in the hand of his torturer. His blood had burned with outrage until Ro had ignited the lightsaber and reached for Loden’s lekku.

Loden had no idea how much time had passed since then. Every day was the same.

Lights.

Screams.

Injections.

Blood.

Lights.

Screams.

Injections.

Blood.

And all the time, Ro stood on the other side of the observation window, watching, his dark eyes cold and unreadable. He never entered the laboratory again, never talked to his prisoner. The Chadra-Fan’s squeaking rasp was the only voice he ever heard.

Until one day there was another.

Who are you?

I do not know you.

Loden thought he’d imagined it. Dreamed it maybe, wondering if the stimulants had stopped working or if he was one step closer to the end.

Are you even real?

Loden could ask the same of her.

“I don’t know.”