Erno watches the kid do it. The little dum-dum doesn’t even know he’s being watched. Kid creeps up
to the wall like a scuttling spider under the cover of night, then takes the stencil to the pale brick and
pulls out the light painter—he shakes it a few times and gives it a hit, and then it pulses an image onto
the side of the P&S (Peace & Security) station.
An iconic image of a bad, bad man.
Maybe not even a man. Maybe a machine.
VADER LIVES, it says. That, stenciled underneath the all-too-familiar artist rendering of the helmeted
thug.
The kid turns, grinning like he got away with it. He didn’t.
Erno steps into the halo of light from the street-orb overhead, and he clears his throat so the kid in
the dark hood and cloak looks up. Another one of these Acolyte idiots. Erno whistles. “Nice art. A
real original.”
The kid doesn’t say anything. He stands there, quaking in his bare feet. He’s young, dumb, scared.
Erno sighs and levels his blaster. “C’mon, you little roach-rat, turn around, turn around. Let’s get
these binders on.”
Pouting, the boy turns and Erno slaps on a pair of binders, then hauls him around front and in
through the doors of the station.
The new hire at the front desk, a pretty Pantoran named Kiza, says, “Hey, Detective,” and he gives
her a wink and a nod even though she’d probably never have anything to do with a scruffy thick-neck
like him. Erno drags the kid through the station and past the desks and the holoscreens and the peace
officers and into one of the back rooms. He gives the kid a light shove and the boy lands hard in a
chair.
The boy hisses something at him. It isn’t in a language he understands, and he doesn’t care to ask
about it.
“Uh-huh, sure, sure. Whatever, kid.” Erno sits down across from the boy, and pops a cut square of
rubber-root in his mouth, giving it a good chew. It tastes like the underside of a boot but gives his
mouth something to do, and better this than the stimsticks he used to smoke.
He gets the boy’s measure fast. Human punk, maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen. Pale like the others
(they pretend they’re nocturnal). Black hood, black cloak. This one doesn’t have a mask, though. A lot
of these Acolyte freaks, they put together these masks—hammering together plastoid, metal, wood,
goggles, ventilators, whatever—and wear them as they harangue the locals. It’s all pathetic, paltry
stuff. Vandalism, mostly.
“Vader lives,” Erno says, chawing on the rubber-root. “Vader lives, you say. Last I heard, he went
up with the Death Star. Whoom. He’s dead. If he was ever even alive. Empire’s falling apart, and it
wouldn’t be if he were still around, don’t you think?”
“Death isn’t the end.”
“Last I checked, it’s pretty much the final stop, kid.”
The boy grins. His teeth are white, too white. His tongue snakes along them, and for a moment Erno
feels his guts clench. His instincts are telling him something’s wrong here, but he doesn’t know what.
No, this kid’s just getting to you. It’s late. You been on duty for too long now. Get this moron
booked, then head home.
“What’s your name?”
“Oblivion.”
He snorts with derisive laughter. “Oh. That’s a nice name. That a family name?” The loser doesn’t
say anything, he just sits there, chest rising and falling like a cornered, feral animal. “Look, kid. I got
you for vandalism. You can spend a couple nights down in the hole. But I’m feeling friendly. I’m
feeling generous. You roll over on a couple of your Acolyte buddies—you are an Acolyte of the
Beyond, right?—and I’ll get you out of here with a stern finger-wagging and not much else. Hm?”
Still the boy says nothing.
Erno sighs.
“What’s the deal with you pouty little thugs, anyway? You’re, what, a buncha suck-ups for the
Empire?”
“Not the Empire. Something greater than the Empire.”
“Vader.”
The boy grins.
“Not Palpatine?”
Again the boy says nothing. That grin only widens.
Makes sense, Erno figures. Who would think that old withered twig was worth a measure of
twisted hero worship? Vader at least looked like a tough guy. Imposing, dangerous, a real bad bag of
tricks.
“You don’t have a mask?” Erno asks.
“I don’t.”
“Why not? The mask is more of the Vader thing, huh? Trying to look like him? You know he was a
bad guy, right?”
“Are you a decent man?” the boy asks. “A ‘good guy’?”
Hardly, Erno thinks. His wife has left him for a pair of artists in the Teeno Village district. His
neighbors think he’s a slob. Even the fish in his fishtank give him a dubious look every morning when
he leaves for work.
“I asked about your mask.”
The boy shifts in his seat. “You have to earn your mask.”
“Oh. Ho ho. You haven’t earned it yet?”
The kid looks up at the ceiling, then around the room at the bare walls. “This building is very old.”
“Yeah. So?”
“I know what’s downstairs.”
What’s downstairs…? The museum next door uses the shared basement with the P&S building. The
detectives keep evidence locked up down there, and the museum uses the same lockup to keep a
bunch of old musty, dusty artifacts and the like.
Erno’s about to pick this apart because really, why does this snot-dribbling punk care? Maybe it’s a
clue. Maybe the kid’s parents work for the museum. Could be a—
But then someone comes in the room.
It’s a security officer, Spob Rydel, hat in hand. “Erno, you oughta see this.”
Ennnhhh, I’m busy, Rydel, he thinks, but fine, fine, if one of the security ops guys wants him to see
something, so be it. He takes the kid’s wrists and brings them to the tabletop before slapping a button
underneath the surface—the table goes magnetic, and the kid’s binder cuffs thud hard to the tabletop
as the magnetic field pulls them down.
Then he’s up and back through the station, and the holoscreens are turning to CCI—the Coronet City
Info channel—one by one.
It takes Erno a second to gauge what he’s even seeing. Holofeeds from various areas around the
city all show similar scenes: Downtown, in Diadem Square, a horde of hooded and cloaked figures
are mobbing storefronts and leaping on top of the air-tuks to pull the speeders down to the ground; on
the 1-line of the mag-lev subway, they swarm aboard as soon as the train stops at the Juni Street
Station; down by the casinos, they rush those coming out and going in, dark cloaks fluttering in the
night.
They carry sticks.
Sticks painted red.
They have masks.
Some kind of concerted attack. A riot. Or worse.
Already the officers here are mobilizing—streaming out the door or heading up the stairs to the
speeder pad on the roof.
“It’s the kriffin’ Acolytes,” Rydel says. “Ain’t you got one in the back room there? Bring his narrow
can out here. Let’s kick it around a little.”
Yeah. Yeah, Erno thinks. He stomps to the back room he was in, throws the door wide and—
The kid is gone.
Just then: The lights flicker once, then twice, then go out.
Erno is in darkness. Thankfully, a few seconds later the emergency lights come up—they line the
floor and the ceiling, casting everything in a red glow. He curses under his breath and heads back out
into the main room, and already most of the building has cleared out. It’s him, Rydel, a couple of other
detectives like Shreen and Mursey, and—
Wait, wasn’t Kiza here? Where the hell’d she go?
He’s about to say something to Rydel, but then a blaster shot threads the air, clipping the officer
square in the forehead. Rydel falls backward. Two more blasts and Shreen and Mursey fall—Shreen
flips backward over her desk, and Mursey just slumps forward against a hydro-cooler.
Erno fumbles at his back for his own blaster—
But he’s too slow.
There’s Kiza. Kiza, of all the people. She has a standard sec-issued blaster pointed up and at him.
The kid in black is nowhere to be seen.
“Kiza, I don’t…I don’t get what’s happening here, doll.”
“I’m not your doll.” Her voice trembles as she speaks.
“What…what is this?”
She slowly crosses the space between them. Winding her way through the sea of desks, through the
red-lit half dark. “This is a revolution. This is the revenge of the darkness. This is oblivion.”
“Borkin’ hell,” Erno says. “You’re…you’re one of them.”
He figures, she’s not trained. She’s scared—he can hear that much in her voice. So he goes for his
blaster anyway. He’s old, but she’s not a cop. His hand finds his blaster and his arm extends—
The air lights up next to him. The world thrums as a red beam of light whisks upward through open
space—
A searing line of pain across his wrist.
And then, the hand that held the blaster is gone. It thumps against one of the desks, still clutching the
blaster. He watches it fall and tumble away. It’s an absurd thing to see, your own hand coming off like
that.
Next to him, it’s the kid in the cloak.
He has a red-bladed lightsaber in his hand.
“I told you I knew what was in the basement,” he seethes.
“That’s the blade we’ve been looking for?” Kiza asks him.
The Acolyte gives an over-eager nod.
Then—wham.
Kiza clubs Erno in the side of the head. The world spins away from him as he tumbles to the floor.
She bends down and whispers in his ear: “Vader lives. And so do you. Tell everyone the Acolytes are
coming, doll.”