I KNOW PLACES ➶ STAR WARS

Part XVII // Places

Padmé had left. This became increasingly obvious as Obi-Wan frantically searched their apartment. She had gone, with the twins, to a place where not even the Force could see her. Obi-Wan was, for the first time in his life, truly alone. Their absences tore holes in his reality. The apartment was all too quiet without the babies' babbling or their mother's calming coos.

Breathlessly, he wandered from room to room, hoping to find some scrap of her left behind. Even in rooms that he'd already confirmed were devoid of life, he double- triple- quadruple-checked. Surely this was a dream. Surely she had known that he was just looking out for her, for the babies. Surely she hadn't waited until he fell into deep slumber to leave. Surely she loved him more than that.

But he wasn't sure that it had been love at all. The emptiness clawed at his brain, melting facts into fiction. She loved him. She hadn't loved him. She was grateful for him. She was using him for security. This was a last-minute decision. She was planning this all along.  She trusted him. She didn't trust anybody. All the times she had held his hand and kissed his cheek were a ruse. She was too close. She was never farther away. Everything she said was dipped in lies. She had believed every word.

With a roar, he flung a sculpture off the bedroom shelf and crumpled to his knees, his chest heaving with deep sobs. He held his head in his hands. Had he reached his breaking point? Much more dangerous situations had never affected him this way. But this was Padmé. His longtime friend and companion, the most intelligent woman he'd ever known. The woman he loved and risked his life for. She was gone, just utterly gone. And what was he supposed to do about it? She was somewhere deep in intersystemic territory, cloaked in darkness so black that the Force could not light the way to her.

Suddenly, a new, frightening thought came to him: was she out there alone? A woman traveling deep space with two infants on her own was a dangerous situation indeed. This provided him with clarity- he could not waste any more time. He must find her. There were many places she could hide, but only one of him.

On his way to Coruscant, Obi-Wan managed to make contact with several people privy to Padmé's life. However, none of them proved very valuable. Bail provided no useful information on her disappearance. Neither did any of Padmé's friends from Galactic City. But there was one person noticeably absent from the cavalcade of informants: her closest friend, Sabé. She was the one person he knew would drop everything to be at Padmé's side, no matter the situation.

"Arfour, I'm redirecting the destination coordinates to Tatooine. Keep an eye out for Separatist ships and prepare the sand visors on the mech panels."

Obi-Wan had never felt too strongly about Tatooine. Here, the sand would infiltrate every crevice, the dunes would soak up every hot ray of sunlight and melt everything that touched them. The locals were crass and the liquor was already stale after sitting in sun-weathered casks. He laughed at himself as he recalled Anakin making the same complaints.

The city he entered, Mos Espa, was a typical sand city, and although it was the commerce capital of Tatooine, there was not much to distinguish it from the place he remembered as Anakin's hometown.

He ducked into a bazaar tent. The nearest shopkeeper paid no mind as the Jedi scanned her wares. Scrap metal, at least what was leftover from a Jawa raid, was laid out on a table. She was unassuming and uninterested in Obi-Wan. But he knew her.

"Teevin. Teevin Resa," he said gently.

Slowly, she turned to face him. Recognition did not cross her face for a few moments, but when it did, she reached out to embrace him fiercely.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi. It is so good to welcome you back. Tell me, why are you here?"

Teevin was a short, slender old woman of the Lutrillian species. She wore a corrective lens on only one eye, though truthfully she needed two. She wore a breezy tunic fit for the unending heat. Three rings gilded her right hand, glinting with rare, old gems.