However, after Tano found out what the mission was and who Rafa was selling the spice to, the two got into an argument, and Trace, panicking at the thought of losing her starship, impulsively dumped the spice into hyperspace, leaving the three young women in debt to dangerous gangsters. Tano came up with a last-ditch plan to swindle Krim, stealthily using a mind trick on him so the girls could leave with their payment, but Krim's majordomo Fife was not so weak-minded, and had the girls captured after discovering the crates were empty. Now prisoners of the Pykes, Tano, Rafa and Trace made an attempt at escape, but after a run-around through the city near the High fortress of the Pyke Syndicate, they were re-captured, but not before drawing the attention of Mandalorian warrior Bo-Katan Kryze and her Nite Owls, who were scouting the area. Kryze, having encountered Tano before on Carlac, thought she might be a useful ally as they appeared to have an enemy in common.
Tano eventually gave the sisters an opportunity to escape by claiming to want to cut a deal with Krim by herself, asserting that the sisters had hidden the spice offworld and giving them the opportunity to retrieve it, with the threat of retaliation against their family if they failed, Krim being unaware that the sisters had no living relatives. Rafa, touched at the gesture, came up with a plan to steal spice from the Pykes' loading docks to give to the Pykes so they could free Tano. Meanwhile, attempting to escape from their stronghold and destroy their spice refining facility, Tano discovered that the Pykes were working for the Sith Lord Darth Maul. When Tano was recaptured again, Krim and Fife discovered she was a Force-user and assumed she was on an undercover mission for the Jedi and Galactic Republic. When the sisters came back for her, the three were able to escape Oba Diah again, although the truth of Tano's past was revealed to the Martezes. Tano believed that the sisters were safe from retaliation due to her apparent status as a Republic operative. However, after returning to Coruscant, Tano was immediately recruited by Kryze, who had followed them from the Outer Rim, to help deal with Maul.
Ahsoka Tano, appointed as the Padawan of Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker early in the Clone Wars, became disillusioned with the Jedi Order after being framed for treason by her former friend and fellow Padawan Barriss Offee. Having been expelled from the Order prior to her trial, Tano was offered a promotion to the rank of Knight, but rejected it and chose to leave the Order for good.
Tano spent a period of time wandering the city planet of Coruscant, acquiring a junky Joben T-85 speeder bike. Eventually, the bike malfunctioned as she was entering an underworld portal, sending her plummeting all the way down to Level 1313, where she made a crash landing on the landing platform of a repair shop owned by Trace Martez. Tano quickly befriended Trace, but her older sister Rafa Martez, a cynical gambler, remained suspicious of her and her motives, feeling she might be using her somehow. After helping Trace chase down a rampaging Type II loadlifter droid that Rafa had been hired to build, Tano was invited to stick around for as long as she needed to, an offer she eventually accepted when Trace asked her to help test her self-assembled starship, the Silver Angel. Choosing to keep her past secret from the sisters, Tano fudged the truth when asked where she was from and how she had learned things like how to fight and where she had worked on starships, and avoided using her Force powers where they would be noticeable.
Rafa, constantly in need of credits to pay off debts from various criminal schemes, took a job to transport spice from Kessel to Oba Diah on behalf of Marg Krim, leader of the Pyke Syndicate. Despite her sister being an aspiring pilot, Rafa was aware that Trace's flying was "more of a dream than a reality" and her self-assembled ship was untested, so Rafa hired a pilot and crew elsewhere. However, when the pilot backed out and took his ship with him, Rafa was forced to turn to Trace and the Silver Angel as she had no time to look elsewhere. Rafa, suspicious of Tano's (nonexistent) ulterior motives, did not believe the Togruta's explanation that she was just trying to help and possibly keep both sisters out of trouble.
Rafa refused to tell Tano where the job was located. Trace, unaware of the traffic laws of Coruscant's upper levels, flew her ship into restricted military airspace and right past a Venator-class Star Destroyer, only avoiding arrest because the warship was commanded by Skywalker, who sensed his former apprentice aboard the freighter and let it pass, with the Silver Angel then entering hyperspace after Rafa had programmed in the coordinates. When it arrived at its destination, Tano was not appeased to find out they were at Kessel, infamous for its spice mines. Arriving at Kessel Castle, the young women were greeted by Kinash Lock, majordomo of King Yaruba, and invited to a feast. While the inexperienced Trace was excited, Tano was skeptical, noting that spice could be refined into many things besides the medicine that Rafa had mentioned. After the meal, Trace flew the Silver Angel to the mining zone, dismissing Tano's warning about the dangers of flying spice. The spice was loaded onboard the ship, and the Silver Angel departed for Oba Diah.
Prior to Tano's departure from the Jedi, the Pyke Syndicate had voluntarily allied itself with the Shadow Collective, a criminal organization created by the Sith Lord Darth Maul, after Maul and his allies, the Mandalorian warrior faction Death Watch, had intimidated the Hutt clans and Black Sun into joining them. Maul, having been rescued by Death Watch when they found his escape pod drifting in space, had persuaded their leader, Pre Vizsla, that building an army of criminals would allow for the overthrow of the New Mandalorians who currently ruled Mandalore, led by Duchess Satine Kryze.
Vizsla and his lieutenant Bo-Katan — Duchess Satine's estranged sister — intended to betray Maul once he had played his part in the scheme, as Vizsla had no interest in ruling any planet other than Mandalore and had been betrayed by Sith before when they had allied themselves with Count Dooku, leader of the Confederacy of Independent Systems. However, Maul and his apprentice Savage Opress, after using the crime syndicates to create a state of unrest that led to Death Watch being acclaimed as heroes for "saving" Mandalore from them, turned the tables on Vizsla: after recruiting deposed Prime Minister Almec to serve as a puppet ruler, Maul challenged Vizsla to a duel for leadership and defeated him, beheading him with the Darksaber, a symbol of Mandalorian leadership. Bo-Katan, however, refused to accept this, and broke away with a faction of Death Watch, the Nite Owls.
As a civil war ensued, Maul turned his attention to taking his revenge on his old enemy, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, by luring him to Mandalore and forcing him to witness the murder of Satine. However, Maul's activities had drawn the attention of his old master Darth Sidious, publicly known as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine of the Galactic Republic, who felt that what was happening on Mandalore could jeopardize his long-term plans. Traveling to Mandalore personally, Sidious engaged Maul and Savage in a duel, killing the latter and taking the former prisoner. Maul was imprisoned in a Separatist prison called the Spire, taking him out of the picture while the separate factions of the Shadow Collective began to feud with each other due to his absence.
The Shadow Collective briefly collapsed as a result of the machinations of Sidious and Dooku, leading the Pykes to withdraw their support. However, after Maul regained his seat of power, he reformed the Collective, placing the Pykes back under his oversight. Maul was not impressed by what he viewed as Krim's incompetence, and pressured them to continue supplying spice as part of his plans. The loss of a shipment of spice to Galactic Republic authorities further lowered the Pykes in Maul's eyes, and increased the pressure on them.
It was only while travelling from Kessel to Oba Diah that Rafa revealed that Krim was her client, and when Tano turned out to know who he was and what the Pykes did, Rafa demanded to know how she knew so much, Tano answering that she paid attention to the world around her. Tano suggested that they deliver the spice to a place where it would actually be made into medicine instead of a drug, informing Trace that the Pykes were vicious gangsters who might take her ship. As Tano and Rafa argued, Trace, panicking at the thought of the ship she had worked so hard on being taken from her, impulsively dumped the spice into hyperspace.
However, Tano and Rafa both agreed this was a terrible idea, as it left the trio in debt to an intergalactic crime syndicate and with few options. Trace became upset when Rafa suggested that they give the Silver Angel to the Pykes to resolve their debt. As the argument continued, Tano eventually came up with a plan that, while risky, was the best any of the three could come up with, insisting that it would work because of some tricks she wasn't willing to share with the Martezes.
Arriving at Oba Diah, the Silver Angel docked at the Pyke Palace, where they were met by Krim, his majordomo Fife, and a squad of Pyke guards. Rafa introduced herself, but Krim insisted on inspecting their cargo before he would hand over payment. Tano used a mind trick to make him change his mind, and Rafa took the container of credits as the young women went back on their ship, offloading the containers. Trace had Tano go and warm up the engines. Fife, not as weak-minded as his master, was suspicious, and demanded the code to open the crates. Rafa insisted that it must have been transmitted already, beginning to close the cargo bay door. Fife shot open a container and found it empty, not believing Rafa's claim that Kessel must have scammed them. The girls attempted to escape, but the Silver Angel was surrounded by Pyke patrol ships that captured it in their tractor beams.
The three young women were locked in a cell deep in the Pyke Palace, where they argued about their situation. Rafa, refusing to take any blame for the predicament and angry that Tano was trying to talk ethics to her like she was some kind of Jedi, told Tano that the reason she didn't trust the Order or any "topsiders" was because the Jedi had been involved in the deaths of the sisters' parents: during the escape of Ziro Desilijic Tiure, a red-eyed alien protecting the gangster had shot out the engine of a transport ship, which the Jedi had diverted into the portal wall so it wouldn't crash into a crowded landing platform. However, the Martez family's home had been on the other side of the wall, and Trace and Rafa's parents died getting them out. The Jedi who came to speak to them afterwards had offered condolences, but she had come off as patronizing to the sisters, who were not given any other form of help. Tano, horrified, was resolved to further conceal her Force powers.
Pyke guards took Rafa away for interrogation, where she was shocked repeatedly by a torture droid after attempting to convince it of her claim that they had been cheated at Kessel. In the cell, Trace confided to Tano that the way of life Rafa was insistent that they lead, not trusting each other, was not the way their mother had raised them. When Rafa was returned in a barely-conscious state, Trace demanded to know what the guards had done, and she was dragged away as well. Upon reaching the torture chamber, Trace, faced with the droid, pretended to faint before grabbing the blaster of one of her guards and fighting her way out, with the only guard left standing in pursuit.
Running headlong back to the cell to rescue Tano and Rafa, Trace ran into a guard and got into a scuffle with him in front of a cell holding two other prisoners, an Ithorian and a Weequay. The Weequay shouted for Trace to let them out, and, seized by the guard, she managed to eventually hit the button to open the door with her foot. The Ithorian surged out and grabbed the guard as he dropped Trace, who reclaimed her stolen blaster. With more guards approaching, the Ithorian threw the guard at his fellows as he and his cellmate headed to fight the guards. Trace continued on her way to her friends.
Back in their cell, Tano took advantage of the guards running off in response to the ongoing escape and Rafa's unconsciousness to use telekinesis to open the cell door. When she woke up Rafa, the young woman yelled that she didn't know where the spice was before realizing her surroundings. Upon noticing the door was open, Rafa asked how Tano had managed that, and Tano claimed that there had been a freak power outage that had opened the door and deactivated the force field. Rafa quipped that it was about time the girls had some luck. Fleeing the area, Rafa bumped into Trace in the middle of an intersection, and as Tano helped her back up, the sisters exclaimed that they had both been heading to rescue the other. As the two began to argue about which direction they should go while guards approached, Tano proclaimed herself the "tiebreaker" and dragged them both in one direction. The trio managed to flee through a blast door as it closed ahead of the guards.
Running outside, the girls knocked over barrels of explosive fuel behind them to block the path of their pursuers. When the guards emerged, Trace got into a shootout with them, which she eventually ended by shooting one of the barrels, causing a large explosion that took out that group of guards. As the trio ran onto a bridge, Tano, bringing up the rear, used the Force to pull a stack of crates down to block their path. As Rafa, in the lead, approached the other side of the bridge, it began to retract, but she was able to jump the gap. Trace and Tano hesitated at the gap, before Trace eventually went for it. Tano surreptitiously used the Force to propel Trace forward so she was able to grab on to the other side of the gap, where Rafa helped her up. Rafa, noting that Tano appeared to be stuck, attempted to get Trace to ditch her on the grounds that the Togruta would never make it. However, using a running start, Tano easily cleared the gap with a Force jump, landing behind the sisters. Rafa and Trace initially assumed that Tano had fallen to her doom, and were startled when she revealed her presence. Tano attributed her feat to being "more athletic" than she looked, and although Rafa was skeptical, blaster fire from approaching guards made the trio flee before she could ask any questions.
Heading towards the gate out, Rafa got into a scuffle with a guard while trying to seize his stun baton, which led to the guard's death being crushed between the platform of the lift he was standing on and the stair structure after Trace and Tano grabbed a hold of Rafa. Rafa wondered why the Pykes were expending so much effort to capture them, and Tano suggested they had a reputation to uphold, unaware of the Pykes' involvement with Maul and his Shadow Collective. On Rafa's suggestion, the sisters went to distract the guards while Tano climbed up to the guardhouse to open the gate.
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