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  “Captain Solo.” Even through the electronic speaker that relayed the words to the catwalk, Natua’s voice was soft and cajoling. Leia was just glad that the Falleen’s powerful attraction pheromones were safely trapped inside her own cell. “Please …get me out of here. They’re hurting me.”

  “Not as much as you’re hurting yourself,” Han said, pointing to the crimson streaks that her bloody fingertips were leaving on the wall. “Sorry, Nat. You need to stay here and let them help you.”

  “This isn’t help!” Natua slapped the wall so hard that the resulting pung caused C-3PO to stumble back into the safety rail. She began to curse in the strange hissing language Tekli had mentioned earlier. “Sse-orhstki hsuzma sahaslatho Shi’ido hsesstivaph!”

  “Oh my!” exclaimed C-3PO. “Jedi Wan is promising to kill Captain Solo and his fellow imposters in a terribly unpleasant way. Fortunately, it appears that she hasn’t thought through her plan very well. I don’t even have intestines.”

  “Then you recognize the language?” Leia asked.

  “Of course,” C-3PO said. “Ancient Hsoosh is still the Language of Ceremony in the best houses of Falleen.”

  “Language of Ceremony?” Han echoed. “Like one they’d use to make formal vows?”

  “Precisely,” C-3PO said. “The elite classes have kept it alive for more than two thousand standard years to distinguish—”

  “Threepio, that’s not important at the moment,” Leia interrupted. She could tell by the way Han was clenching his jaw that he was truly disturbed to have a mad Jedi making death vows against them. A lecture on the history of ancient Hsoosh just might be enough to make him yank out C-3PO’s inner machinery. “Wait here and let us know what else Natua has to say.”

  C-3PO acknowledged the command, and Leia and Han followed Cilghal to the next cell. Seff had moved to the far corner, where he was kneeling, facing away from the door with his battered hands on his thighs. The barely perceptible rise and fall of his shoulders suggested that he was meditating, perhaps trying to calm his troubled mind and make sense of what had been happening to him.

  Cilghal glanced back down the catwalk toward the turbolift, where Tekli was waiting with what looked like a meter-long recording rod that ended in a large parabolic antenna. When the Chadra-Fan nodded her readiness, Cilghal stepped closer to Seff’s cell and rapped gently on the wall.

  Seff, a sturdily built young man with square shoulders and light curly hair, answered without looking away from the corner. “Yes, Master Cilghal?”

  His voice came from the small relay speaker near the door, and when Cilghal answered, she angled her mouth toward the tiny microphone beneath it.

  “How did you know it was me?” she asked.

  “It’s …” Seff struggled for an explanation, then finally said, “It’s always you …or Tekli. And Tekli wouldn’t reach that high when she knocked.” He shrugged. “So, to answer the question clearly on your mind: no, I have not yet developed the ability to touch the Force through an ysalamiri void-bubble.”

  “But you do seem to be feeling better,” Cilghal said.

  “I’ll have to take your word for it.” Seff remained facing the corner, but his tone softened. “I don’t have a clear memory of how I was feeling before.”

  Cilghal rolled a hopeful eye in Leia’s direction, then spoke to Seff again. “Do you remember why you’re here?”

  “That would depend on the meaning of here. I remember trying to rescue Valin Horn from a GA Security facility. And I remember being ambushed by someone who looked a lot like Jaina Solo.” Seff stopped and shook his head. “I assume that I’m in the Jedi Temple detention center’s Asylum Block, but none of it makes much sense.”

  “It probably shouldn’t make sense,” Cilghal said. She smiled with a relief that Leia did not quite share. “I’m afraid you’ve been suffering paranoid delusions lately.”

  Seff’s head and shoulders slumped in a fairly convincing manner, and he continued to look into the corner without speaking.

  “Seff, you’re going to get better,” Cilghal said. It was something any good mind-healer would say to a patient, whether or not it was true. “This is an encouraging sign.”

  Leia couldn’t read Mon Calamari faces well enough to know whether Cilghal was sincere. But she did know that she herself wasn’t convinced. Leia didn’t like the way Seff continued to hide his face. And if he was having trouble remembering what had happened to him, how had he known earlier that it was always Cilghal or Tekli who visited?

  Cilghal continued speaking into the relay microphone. “Seff, you have visitors. Would it be okay if we came inside?”

  “Visitors?” Seff finally looked away from his corner, his pale eyes gleaming in curiosity. “Absolutely. Come inside.”

  Before Leia could express her concerns, Cilghal reached over and entered a code to deactivate the lock. As the door slid aside, Leia glanced toward Han and was relieved to see the same wariness in his eyes that she felt in her gut. If Cilghal was being too optimistic, at least there would be someone else ready to jump on Seff.

  “Jedi Solo, Captain Solo …” Cilghal waved them into the cell. “After you.”

  “The Solos?”

  Sounding more cynical than delighted, Seff rose and turned toward them. To Leia’s surprise, there were no alarming glints in his eyes or twitches on his lips, nor anything obvious to suggest that Cilghal’s relief was anything but warranted. But his brow rose just a little too slowly for his astonishment to be sincere.

  “What are you two doing here?”

  “We just wanted to check up on you,” Han said. To prevent Seff from approaching the door, he held out his hand and crossed to the corner. “Good to see you’re feeling better.”

  As Seff reached out in return, Leia readied herself to spring into action at the first hint of trouble. But Seff merely remained in the corner and looked slightly bewildered as the two shook hands.

  Leia moved her own hand away from the stun stick in the small of her back and went to stand with Han. “You do look much better than the last time we saw you.”

  Seff’s eyes shifted in her direction. “From what I’m gathering, that wouldn’t be difficult.”

  He flashed a self-deprecating smile, and Leia began to wonder if all the betrayals and disappointments she had suffered over the decades were beginning to make her too suspicious.

  “Do you remember when you saw the Solos?” Cilghal asked. She remained just inside the door, as though her presence was an unpleasant requirement and she didn’t want to intrude. “Aside from here on Coruscant, I mean.”

  Seff frowned for a moment, and Leia thought he was going to say that he couldn’t recall.

  But then he flashed that awkward smile again and said, “Wasn’t it on Taris, at that pet show?”

  “That’s right,” Han said. He clapped a hand on Seff’s shoulder and slipped smoothly around into the corner, so the young Jedi would have to face away from the door as they spoke. “The one where the ornuk took the grand prize.”

  “Han, it wasn’t the ornuk,” Leia said in a reproachful tone. She slipped around to Seff’s other side and stood opposite Han, so they had the young Jedi flanked on both sides and could quickly redirect his attention with a gentle touch. “It was the chitlik.”

  Han scowled. “What are you talking about? It was that big ornuk. I should know. It nearly bit off my ankle!”

  Leia rolled her eyes and—seeing by Seff’s slack jaw that their distraction was working—shook her head vehemently. “That was the cannus solix! You would’ve known that if you hadn’t been off starting fights when the judges explained the difference.”

  “Hey, I didn’t start that fight,” Han countered, the edge in his voice so sharp that even Leia wasn’t sure he was acting. “Is it my fault if—”

  “How many times have I heard that?” Leia interrupted. Across the cell, she could see Tekli standing in the door, pointing the funnel-shaped antenna of the portable encephaloscanner at the back of
Seff’s head. “According to you, it’s never your fault.”

  “That’s right—it never is.” Han turned to Seff. “You were at the show, kid. Who did they arrest?”

  But Seff was no longer paying attention to Han. He was looking at the same corner he had been facing when they arrived, staring at a wavy blur in the transparisteel that Leia did not recognize as a reflection—until she realized why Seff had known it was Cilghal knocking earlier. Hoping to draw his attention back to her, Leia laid a hand on his shoulder.

  “Seff, please forgive us,” she said. When he continued to watch the reflection, she squeezed hard. “After you’ve lived together as long as Han and I have, you develop a few tender—”

  Leia did not realize Seff was attacking until she felt his arm snaking over hers, trapping her elbow in a painful lock that she could not slip without snapping the joint. She whirled away, screaming in alarm, and barely managed to keep him from grabbing the stun stick secured in the back of her belt. In the next instant, Han was between them, bringing his own stun stick down across Seff’s shoulder.

  Seff pulled back, dragging Leia into the path of the strike. He still took most of the blow across his biceps, but she was jolted so hard that her knees locked and her teeth sank deep into her tongue.

  Incredibly, Seff did not drop. He drove Han back with an elbow to the face, then sent him slamming into the wall with a side kick to the gut. Spinning toward the door, he finally released Leia’s arm and launched himself at Tekli and Cilghal.

  “No, you don’t!” Seff yelled, landing two meters away. “I won’t be copied!”

  Both of Leia’s legs and one arm had turned to noodles, but she still had one good hand with which to grab her stun stick.

  By that time, Seff was only a pace from Tekli and Cilghal.

  The phoot-phoot of a tranquilizer gun sounded from the doorway. Seff stumbled, one arm trying to slap the darts from his chest as he struggled to keep his balance. He took one more step, then Leia activated her stun stick and sent it spinning into the back of his legs. He crashed to the floor just centimeters from Cilghal’s feet, then lay there twitching and drooling.

  Cilghal turned to Tekli, then let out a gurgling sigh. “You may as well deactivate the scanner,” she said. “I think we’ve learned what we need to know.”

  IN THE JADE SHADOW’S FORWARD CANOPY HUNG TWIN BLACK HOLES, their perfect darkness surrounded by fiery whorls of accretion gas. Because the Shadow was approaching at an angle, the two holes had the oblong appearance of a pair of fire-rimmed eyes—and Ben Skywalker was half tempted to believe that’s what they were. He had begun to feel like he was being watched the instant he and his father had entered the Maw cluster, and the deeper they advanced, the stronger the sensation grew. Now, at the very heart of the concentration of black holes, the feeling was a constant chill at the base of his skull.

  “I sense it, too,” his father said. He was sitting behind Ben in the copilot’s seat, up on the primary flight deck. “We’re not alone in here.”

  No longer surprised that the Grand Master of the Jedi order always seemed to know his thoughts, Ben glanced at an activation reticle in the front of the cockpit. A small section of canopy opaqued into a mirror, and he saw his father’s reflection staring out the side of the canopy.

  Luke Skywalker looked more alone and pensive than Ben ever remembered seeing him—thoughtful, but not sad or frightened, as though he were merely trying to understand what had brought him to such a dark and isolated place, banished from an order he had founded, and exiled from a society he had spent his life fighting to defend.

  Trying not to dwell on the injustice of the situation, Ben said, “So maybe we’re closing in. Not that I’m all that eager to meet a bunch of beings called the Mind Drinkers.”

  His father thought for a moment, then said, “Well, I am.”

  He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t need to. Ben and his father were on a mission to retrace Jacen Solo’s five-year odyssey of Force exploration. At their last stop, they had learned from an Aing-Tii monk that Jacen had been bound for the Maw when he departed the Kathol Rift. Since one purpose of their journey was to determine whether Jacen had been nudged toward the dark side by something on his voyage, it only made sense that Luke would want to investigate a mysterious Maw-dwelling group known as the Mind Drinkers.

  What impressed Ben, however, was how calm his father seemed about it all. Ben was privately terrified of falling victim to the same darkness that had claimed his cousin. Yet his father seemed eager to step into its depth and strike a flame. And why shouldn’t he be? After everything that Luke Skywalker had suffered and achieved in his lifetime, there was no power in the galaxy that could draw him into darkness. It was a strength that both awed Ben and inspired him, one that he wondered if he would ever find himself.

  Luke’s eyes shifted toward the mirrored canopy section, and he caught Ben’s gaze. “Is this what bothered you when you were at Shelter?” He was referring to a time that was ancient history to Ben—the last part of the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, when the Jedi had been forced to hide their young at a secret base deep inside the Maw. “Did you feel like someone was watching you?”

  “How should I know?” Ben asked, suddenly uneasy—and unsure why. By all accounts, he had been an unruly, withdrawn toddler while he was at Shelter, and he recalled being afraid of the Force for years afterward. But he had no clear memories of Shelter itself, or what it had felt like to be there. “I was two.”

  “You did have feelings when you were two,” his father said mildly. “You did have a mind.”

  Ben sighed, knowing what his father wanted, then said, “You’d better take the ship.”

  “I have the ship,” Luke confirmed, reaching for the copilot’s yoke. “Just close your eyes. Let the Force carry your thoughts back to Shelter.”

  “I know how to meditate.” Almost instantly, Ben felt bad for grumbling and added, “But thanks for the advice.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Luke said in a good-natured way. “That’s what fathers do—offer unwanted advice.”

  Ben closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and deliberately. Each time he inhaled, he drew the Force into himself, and each time he exhaled, he sent it flowing throughout his body. He had no conscious memories of Shelter that were his own, so he envisioned a holograph of the facility that he had seen in the Jedi Archives. The image showed a handful of habitation modules clinging to the surface of an asteroid fragment, their domes clustered around the looming cylinder of a power core. In his mind’s eye, Ben descended into the gaudy yellow docking bay at the edge of the facility …and then he was two years old again, a frightened little boy holding a stranger’s hand as his parents departed in the Jade Shadow.

  An unwarranted sense of relief welled up inside Ben as he grew lost in a time when life had seemed so much easier. The last fourteen years began to feel like a long, terrible nightmare. Jacen’s fall to the dark side had never happened, Ben had not been molded into an adolescent assassin, and his mother had not died fighting Jacen. All those sad memories were still just bad dreams, the unhappy imaginings of a frightened young mind.

  Then the Shadow slipped through the containment field and ignited her engines. In the blink of an eye she dwindled from a trio of blue ion circles into a pinpoint of light to nothing at all, and suddenly Ben was alone in the darkest place in the galaxy, one child among dozens entrusted to a small group of worried adults who—despite their cheerful voices and reassuring presences—had very clammy palms and scary anxious eyes.

  Two-year-old Ben reached toward the Shadow with his free hand and his heart, and he sensed his mother and father reaching back. Though he was too young to know he was being touched through the Force, he stopped being afraid … until a dark tentacle of need began to slither up into the aching tear of his abandonment. He thought for an instant that he was just sad about being left behind, but the tentacle grew as real as his breath, and he began to sense in it an alien loneliness as despera
te and profound as his own. It wanted to draw him close and keep him safe, to take the place of his parents and never let him be alone again.

  Terrified and confused, young Ben pulled away, simultaneously drawing in on himself and yanking his hand from the grasp of the silver-haired lady who was holding it.

  Then suddenly he was back in the cockpit of the Jade Shadow, staring into the fire-rimmed voids ahead. Scattered around their perimeter were the smaller whorls of half a dozen more distant rings, their fiery light burning bright and steady against the starless murk of the deep Maw.

  “Well?” his father asked. “Anything feel familiar?”

  Ben swallowed. He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself wanting to withdraw from the Force all over again. “Are we sure we need to find these guys?”

  Luke raised a brow. “So it is familiar.”

  “Maybe.” Ben couldn’t say whether the two feelings were related, and at the moment he didn’t care. There was something hungry in the Maw, something that would still be there waiting for him. “I mean, the Aing-Tii call them Mind Drinkers. That can’t be good.”

  “Ben, you’re changing the subject.” Luke’s tone was more interested than disapproving, as though Ben’s behavior were only one part of a much larger puzzle. “Is there something you don’t want to talk about?”

  “I wish.” Ben told his father about the dark tentacle that had reached out to him after the Shadow departed Shelter so many years ago. “I guess what we’re feeling now might be related. There was definitely some … thing keeping tabs on me at Shelter.”

  Luke considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You were pretty attached to your mother. Maybe you were just feeling abandoned and made up a ‘friend’ to take her place.”

  “A tentacle friend?”

  “You said it was a dark tentacle,” Luke continued thoughtfully, “and guilt is a dark emotion. Maybe you were feeling guilty about replacing us with an imaginary friend.”

  “And maybe you don’t want to believe the tentacle was real because it would mean you left your two-year-old son someplace really dangerous,” Ben countered. He caught his father’s eye in the mirrored section again. “I hope you’re not going to try to psychoanalyze this away, because there’s a big hole in your theory.”