OBI-WAN KENOBI

The next morning on Coruscant, Anakin and Obi-Wan turned a street corner and walked down an alleyway. It had taken them more time than they had anticipated, because they had been called back to the Jedi Temple. It was concerning a security flaw that they were to look into the previous evening.

 Obi-Wan had noticed that his former apprentice had been almost feverishly determined to find his lost apprentice. It had happened before when a Trandoshian hunting party had captured her, and Anakin hadn’t slept in almost three days. He had holed himself up in the Temple’s Briefing Room with a variety of star maps, so determined to find her that he had refused to rest or eat.

  The older Jedi didn’t really know what it felt like, to lose your apprentice like that. But, more and more, Anakin seemed to be detached, and to be avoided at all costs if he was in one of his moods. He could only hope that finding her would stop his friend’s strange behavior.

  Breaking away from his reflections, Obi-Wan studied the alley around him. It was a narrow causeway between two old, abandoned houses, and the sole streetlight shining over them kept flickering. Vulgar graffiti adorned almost all of the flat surfaces available.

 Suddenly, he was hit by the unmistakable wave of a presence. He bent down, and saw footprints of about Ahsoka’s size in footwear in the dust, leading to the end of the alley.

 “What is it? What do you see, Master?” asked Anakin, who then must have felt the presence.

  “Her footprints. Both they and her presence are a day old. But look at this.” Obi-Wan pointed to a takeout box with Dex’s Diner written on one side. “She must have gotten something to eat there.”

  “Ugh! We missed her again,” he said, sitting down on a crate. Suddenly he looked up again. “When did you get so good at tracking?”

  “My skills at this are nothing more than acceptable. Quinlan Vos showed me a few tricks at regular and Force-tracking when we were on Nal Hutta tracking Ziro the Hutt a while back. I assume, now that the need arises, that I’m remembering some of them.”

  Then he noticed something about the crate that Anakin was sitting on. “Can you get off of that for a moment?”

  He gave his old Master a questioning look, but he did what he asked. Obi-Wan pushed the lid off of it. Inside, there were shredded bits of cloth, and a dent as if someone had curled up and gone to sleep inside it. There was also a strong concentration with the Force around the box.

  “She spent the night here.”

  “In a crate?” He looked disgusted.

  “I’m afraid so.” Then he noticed the writing in the dust beside it, as if Ahsoka had wanted to write her plan of action out before she made another move. It said,

  Docks – board a ship to

  A leaky pipe had washed the rest away. Anakin stared at the writing for a moment, then said, “Then let’s get to the Docks.”