Star Wars: A New Era.Part 1: Memory Games

Chapter 3: Chased on Taris

When Ben woke up, he was in a small, dingy room. The walls were dark gray concrete and there was a singular window in the room. The wall behind him was nothing but locked iron bars. He was in a prison. The guard that he was with was outside of the cell staring at him. His expression was hard to read because the only visible was his eyes and the bridge of his nose. The group had been betrayed by one of their own.

Helpless, for he had no weapon, Ben began to devise a plan for escape. He had no idea what part of the city he was in so it would be hard to find the other group. The guard saw that he was awake and left. Ben's hands were cuffed together and his left leg was chained to the bed which was bolted to the floor. He stood up and looked around the cell and out the window. He had an internal feeling that it was around noon. There was a set of keys down the hall. Ben focused on the keys. He closed his eyes and reached out. He imagineed the keys coming off of the hook and floating down the hall toward him. He soon felt the cold metal ring in his hand. He opened his eyes and examined each lock carefully. He tried several keys for his handcuffs before he found the right one. Once his hands were free, he began to move faster. He found the key to his ankle cuff and was soon scrambling to get off of the floor to unlock the cell door. The iron gate swung outward as the lock clicked open. Ben was free.

He saw that the only way out was either through the door that the guard had left from or a manhole to the sewers, the predecessor to the hatches they used to get in the pipes that took the city's waste away. He decided to go for the door because there was no telling where the pipes would lead from there. He put his ear to the door to listen for any activity. When the coast was clear, he opened the door. It retreated into the ceiling revealing a wide room decorated with racks of light armor and blasters. There was no one in the room apart from Ben. He wandered around the room looking for a way out without going through the next door which most likely had people in it due to the noise he heard when he was scouting out an escape route. He eventually found an air duct hidden behind a rack of helmets. It was barely visible in the dim light and the helmets that covered it. He moved the rack aside and opened the hinged vent. It was big enough for him to crawl through but too small for the average adult to follow.

Once inside, he closed the vent but had to leave the rack. After several minutes of crawling, he eventually heard the noise of speedor traffic. He headed towards the sound and found an exit. It was a deserted alleyway between two tall buildings. He was on ground level so it was easy to get out. When he closed the vent behind him, the building alarm went off. Someone had discovered that he was missing, but it was already too late. Ben made a dash for the nearest fire escape which was on the building opposite the one he had just escaped from. He couldn't reach the ladder but he used the force to enhance his jump which got him to the second landing of the fire escape. He scrambled up the stairs and just when he was two stories away from the roof, a group of men started shouting and firing at him. The blaster bolts all missed him but one. It grazed his left shoulder. It stung as if the wound was constantly on fire. He finally made it to the roof. He ran clutching his wound trying to stop the bleeding but he knew he couldn't stay up there forever.

He ran until he had enough momentum to jump from the roof of one building to the next. Run and jump. Run and jump. He eventually got to a building with roof access. He busted inside and ran down the steps. Once he was on the ground floor he ran for the back entrance of what he could now tell was an apartment building. He came into another alleyway not unlike the one he found himself in before. He ran through the alleys until he was in the street right in front of the government building. He stumbled up the two-hundred fifty steps as the wound and the nonstop running began to catch up to him. He made it inside and the twenty-four of the twenty-five politicians on the planet stood there looking at him. Three of them, once they had grasped the gravity of the situation immediately called for a medic. They had noticed his blood stained robes and knew something was up. The politicians were also briefed on the mission on a secret holo-channel, so when the two men and the woman realized that he was the padawan of the Jedi who had told them the plan, they knew something went wrong.