Carve Name

Side by side, Karr and the bully skulked toward the office, neither one speaking or trying to make eye contact. When they finally arrived, the door was closed. After a few minutes it opened and a hand waved Royke inside—leaving Karr to take a seat and await his fate.

Karr sat on a bench in the lobby outside the headmaster’s office, twiddling his thumbs and trying hard to hear what was happening on the other side of the closed office door. The muffled conversation was difficult to understand, but Karr couldn’t help noticing how much it sounded like a regular conversation between the Kitonaks in his biology class. He didn’t speak Kitonese, of course, but there was something about their low voices and the way their cheeks swallowed the words that always made it sound like they were conspiring. Probably not a totally fair judgment, Karr thought, but then again at this school the odds were pretty good that most students were up to no good. Just like the odds were pretty good that Royke was behind that office door convincing the headmaster that Karr was the one to blame for all the commotion.

From where he was sitting, Karr could see across the lobby and into the teacher’s lounge. In there, Moffat worked at a table—reading through a database that was probably filled with job listings for some different career path. The trooper helmet rested beside her screen. She had won the argument as to where it would stay for now, but Karr had gotten what he needed from the object—confirmation that Janu Blenn was either lying or misinformed. Karr had seen no Jedi in his vision, only the blurry images of the Death Star and an explosion. Whatever he was meant to get from the vision was still unclear. It hadn’t shown him any Force wielders, at least none that he was aware of. But still, the eyes of the mask stared back at him from across the way as if they were angry. As if he had stolen something from them. And in a way, he had.

Karr ran his gloved hands along the curve of the bench, wondering if he should add his mark to the graffiti he found there. The Hutts are nuts! Oktar is a Yak face! and his personal favorite, Don’t look away, you’ll never win, if you leave your lunch by a Gamorrean. That one would be tough to beat.

Maybe just his name and the date? It would be proof someday that the sure-to-be-famous Jedi Karr Nuq Sin had been there. What’s the worst the headmaster could do to him?

He pulled a small knife out of his pocket and was busy scratching his first initial onto the bench when a side door slid open.

Kragnotto, the Ankura Gungan teacher in charge of the science program, led a Mirialan girl into the room by her arm. He was hauling her a little too fast and a little too rough to actually be helpful, and she was not playing along very well—dragging her feet and generally making the teacher work for every bit of progress.

When they reached the bench, he thrust her toward it. “You waits here! And the next time meesa find you rummaging through meesa things,” he said, his cheeks shaking and showering anyone within a meter radius with spittle, “yousa gonna get more than just detention.”

The girl smiled like she didn’t care. Maybe she didn’t.

The Gungan left the way he’d come in, letting the door slide shut behind him. Karr kept his head down, minding his own business. He didn’t need extra trouble. He went back to work on his carving like he hadn’t seen a thing.

But after a few seconds, the girl spoke. “Seriously?”

Karr glanced up. He was the only person she could possibly be talking to. “Seriously…what?”

“Are you really writing your name on the bench?”

He held up the small knife and wiggled it for show. “No, I’m carving it on the bench.”

She rolled her eyes. “Leaving graffiti on a seat while you wait for detention? Isn’t that a little on the nose? We get it, you’re a rebel. For your next trick, maybe you could break a window or play some music super loud. That’ll show ’em.”

Karr had no response. Wasn’t picking a fight with someone you don’t know also a little on the nose? But from what Karr knew of the Mirialan species, their skin was usually green like hers or pink, not green or pink with flushed red cheeks, so clearly she was fuming about something other than Karr’s petty vandalism.

Karr had seen Mirialans before, but something was different about this girl beyond the flushed cheeks. Was it her eyes? They were sparkling blue, but almost more than sparkling. Glittering. And did they have specks of gold in them? Maybe. He had never been so close to a Mirialan before, or stared so long at—

“What are you looking at?” she barked.

“Uh, nothing,” he said as he went back to his amateur artwork. There was definitely something different about her, but he was not about to look up again to find out.

He was just starting to make good progress on the K when she asked him, “What did you do?”

“Huh?” He chanced a glance at her.

“What. Are. You. Here. For?” she said slowly, as if teaching him the language.

Karr tried to make his answer casual. “Oh…I tried to choke someone using just my mind.”

[...]

He palmed open the door that separated the school’s public corridors from the administrative offices and once again sat down on the bench and stared at the door to the headmaster’s office. He was alone, right where he’d been around the same time the previous day. Making a habit of it.

He wouldn’t mind making a habit of seeing Maize, but this time she failed to appear. She was either behaving herself in some other classroom or doing such a good job of being bad that no one had caught her yet.

Karr figured the odds were about fifty-fifty either way.

He felt around on the bench until he located the first letter of his name, etched there the day before. Since he didn’t know how long he could expect to wait for whatever scolding or punishment was coming, he considered finishing the job, but before he could fish out his little knife for another go at graffiti, the headmaster’s door slid open.


- Force Collector, Chapters 2 and 5