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  But what caught Luke’s eye, what drew him closer to the pool’s edge, was the tall, redheaded woman at the center of the crowd. She had Tenel Ka’s thin arcing brows and full-lipped mouth, but her nose was her grandmother’s, small and not too long, with just a hint of a button at the end.

  Allana.

  Luke did not say the name aloud—he felt guilty for even thinking it—but there could be no doubt. He was looking at a vision of Jacen’s daughter, perhaps thirty years in the future. And she was preparing to take a throne, surrounded not by the usual treachery and intrigue so common to Hapan politics, but by friends from all across the galaxy, in a time of unprecedented comradery and trust.

  “I don’t understand,” Luke said, turning to Ryontarr. “Why would Jacen be troubled by a vision of his daughter assuming her throne?”

  “Because that’s not what he saw.” It was the Givin, Feryl, who rasped this answer. “He saw a dark man in dark armor, sitting on a golden throne and surrounded by acolytes in dark robes.”

  Luke went cold inside. “A dark man?” he asked, thinking of the visions of the dark man he had experienced as Jacen was rising to become a Sith Lord. “Himself?”

  Ryontarr scowled over at Luke. “I doubt a vision of his own future would have sent him fleeing back to the galaxy,” he said. “It had to be someone else’s face your nephew saw.”

  A terrible thought occurred to Luke, as painful as a vibrodagger to the gut and just as frightening. “Me?”

  Ryontarr shrugged. “Who can say?”

  “We didn’t see the face behind the mask,” Feryl added. “But Jacen did, and he turned as pale as my exoskeleton.”

  “Then what?” Luke demanded. “Did he return to the Font of Power? Did he change his mind and bathe in the Pool of Knowledge?”

  The two Mind Walkers looked to each other and shook their heads in disgust, as though Luke’s obtuseness were a great disappointment. Then Ryontarr said, “He left.”

  “He left the Pool?” Luke asked, still struggling to see what had pushed his nephew toward the dark side. “Or do you mean Jacen returned to his body?”

  “He left the Maw,” Ryontarr explained. “He said that he had to finish his training.”

  “He said he had to change what he had seen in the pool,” Feryl added. “He said it was probably going to kill him.”

  THE ALERT STROBING, BEN COULD TAKE. AND THE CHIRPING AND wailing of the alarms, he had already silenced with a few well-placed blaster bolts. But the acrid smoke rising out of the equipment cabinets—that he could not stop. No matter how poorly the control room’s air exchangers worked, no matter how badly the fumes stung his eyes or burned his throat, he did not dare tamper with such alien technology. There was no telling what he might blow up: himself, the entire habitat … even the Maw itself.

  And there were some things a good Jedi just did not risk.

  Deciding he had made every preparation possible, Ben turned back to the entry hatch. He made one last inspection of his spot-welds, then nodded in satisfaction and shut off the energy feed to his plasma torch. No one would be sneaking through that door when he wasn’t watching.

  Tossing the welding mask and gloves aside as he walked, Ben descended to the front of the trilevel control room. There, bathed in the flickering purple light from the writhing radiance beyond the view port, his emaciated father lay strapped to a hovergurney from the Shadow’s medbay. Both arms had fresh IV catheters in them, one delivering hydration and the other nutrients, but Ben did not know how much longer the fluid drips could keep his father alive. Both of the guides had died more than a week ago, the Givin because Ben had no idea how to insert an intravenous catheter through an exoskeleton, the other one because the Shadow simply did not carry the saline-free drips necessary to avoid poisoning a Gotal.

  Several meters away sat Rhondi Tremaine, looking human again with fairly clean yellow hair and cheeks that were only slightly hollow. A pair of stun cuffs from the Shadow’s security stores connected her wrist to a metal floor beam that Ben had exposed for the purpose. Her brows were arched in fear, and her eyes were rimmed in red from weeping.

  “Ben, please,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  Ben did not answer because he wasn’t sure yet. His father’s orders had been clear: under no circumstances was Ben to go beyond shadows. If something went wrong, he was to report back to the Masters and make sure the Jedi knew about the dark power hiding in the Maw.

  But that had been before Ben had started to go barvy.

  He knew the symptoms of paranoid delusional disorder, and he realized he was suffering from most of them: the unshakable belief that his life and his father’s were in danger, the all-consuming fear that haunted his every thought, the reasons he could always find to dismiss any fact that did not support his own convictions. And yet the Mind Walkers were trying to kill him. While he might doubt his own sanity, that Ben did not doubt at all.

  No one had attacked him directly, of course. The Mind Walkers were too clever for that. Instead, they had depleted the Shadow’s medbay to the point that he could no longer treat even a simple infection. They had consumed so much nutripaste that Ben had been reduced to foraging old dehydros from other vessels in the hangar. And the Shadow’s recycling system had lost so much water to the people who drank and left that it was having trouble purifying itself.

  “Ben,” Rhondi said. “You can’t leave Rolund in that little room to die. That’s just …sick.”

  Though Ben did not say so, he thought Rhondi was probably right. It was certainly not normal to leave a man welded inside a sleeping cabin. It wasn’t normal to trap the door with a thermite tamper guard, either.

  But it was necessary, should Ben decide to go through with his plan. And he was beginning to realize he probably had no choice. As bad as it was that both of Master Horn’s children had lost their minds, to have Ben Skywalker return to Coruscant alone, delusional, and paranoid would be a catastrophe for the Jedi Order matched only by Luke Skywalker’s death. And it could easily get worse. In Ben’s demented state, he might fail to report what he and his father had found in the Maw …or he might not be believed.

  Rhondi seemed to take Ben’s silence as a statement of intention. “Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “If Rolund starves in there, he’ll be lost until his presence disperses into the Force. At least bring him in here, where he can see the meditation chamber and find his way back beyond shadows.”

  Ben frowned and asked, “Didn’t I explain this to you earlier?”

  Despite the cynical edge, Ben’s question was sincere. He had been under a lot of stress lately, trying everything he could think of to bring his father back to his body, and it just seemed possible that he had forgotten to execute this critical part of his plan.

  Instead of replying, Rhondi started to cry. Ben decided he needed to phrase his question a little more gently. He reached out with the Force and turned her head toward him.

  “Did I explain this to you?” he asked.

  Rhondi nodded and began to cry harder. Her tears made him feel a little hollow and guilty about what he was doing to her and to her brother … but she was one of the people trying to kill him.

  “And do you remember what I said?” Ben demanded. There was no sense risking any miscommunication. “Tell me.”

  “You said that if you die beyond shadows, Rolund dies in that cabin,” Rhondi croaked.

  “That’s right,” Ben said, and he realized that he had finally made his decision. Rhondi was trying to trick him, to remove the threat to her brother so that she would be free to kill Ben. “And am I going to die while we’re beyond shadows?”

  Rhondi shook her head. “Not if I can help it.”

  “Good,” Ben said. He climbed onto a hovergurney adjacent to his father’s and quickly strapped his legs in place. “Then we have nothing to worry about.”

  Ben set the drip on his IV bags, then lay down on the gurney and used the Force to secure the straps over his chest.

&nbs
p; “Rolund has enough food and water to last a month,” Ben said, reassuring himself as much as Rhondi. “He’ll be fine.”

  Rhondi appeared less than convinced, but she merely looked away and did not bother to argue. “Are you ready?”

  Ben nodded. “More than,” he said. “What do I do?”

  “Just turn toward the light,” Rhondi told him. “Listen to my voice and breathe. We’ll go together.”

  Ben turned toward the purple light.

  “There is no life,” Rhondi began.

  More than familiar with the techniques of Force meditation, Ben inhaled as she spoke, then, during the silent pause that followed, exhaled into the purple light writhing beyond the viewport.

  “There is only the Force.”

  Ben exhaled again, and felt himself drifting toward the light. “Picture the number one in your mind,” Rhondi said. “That is the first level of ascension. There is no life …” Again, Ben exhaled into the light. “There is only the Force.” Ben exhaled again.

  “Now you see the number two,” Rhondi said. “There is no time …”

  Ben exhaled once more.

  A few minutes later—or it might have been a few hours—they reached the number 7, and Ben felt himself slip free. He had a thousand questions about what was happening to him, about how long they had been gone and what would become of his abandoned body. But when Rhondi appeared next to him, looking more refreshed and beautiful than she ever had before, he had only one question on his mind.

  “How do we find my father?”

  Rhondi extended her hand. “Take my hand,” she said. “Think of your father and walk with me into the light.”

  Ben did as she instructed, and together they walked into the crackling purple radiance beyond the viewport. At once, he was filled with an eternal, boundless bliss beyond anything he had ever experienced. He became one with the Force, melted into it and was filled with a calm joy as vast as the galaxy itself. How long he and Rhondi hung there together, Ben would never know. It was less than an eyeblink, as long as eternity.

  Then a voice said, Come.

  And suddenly Ben was looking out on a narrow mountain lake with a surface as still as black glass. From one shore rose a face of sheer granite, sloping up toward a domed summit lit in the lazuline light of a blue sun. Along the other shore lay a boulder-strewn meadow filled with hummocks of knee-high moss and rivulets of purling water. Directly ahead, his father stood next to Ryontarr and the Givin, looking toward a half-hidden female form floating in the silver mists that concealed the far end of the lake.

  Ben released Rhondi’s hand and started forward, no longer consumed by the same sense of urgency that had been troubling him back on the station. True, his father had grown perilously weak over the last couple of weeks. And true, his own life was also in peril, since the Mind Walkers were trying to kill him. But Ben had left such mundane concerns behind with his body. He had swum in the incomprehensible infinity of the universe, drunk of the pure joy of eternal existence, and now he understood.

  Life and death were the same, because moments did not vanish, could not be consumed like air or water or nutripaste. They existed at once and forever, spread across the entire continuity of being, the same way atoms were scattered across the vastness of the universe. Just as atoms gathered together in clumps of energy, which living beings perceived as matter, moments gathered in packets of minutes and hours, which mortal creatures perceived as time passing.

  But those packets were no more the essence of time than sunlight was the essence of a star, or heat the essence of fire. They were simply the perceptions through which the minds of finite beings experienced infinity, the sensations through which their bodies detected the existence of themselves and everything around them.

  Ben reached the lake and halted at his father’s side, opposite Ryontarr and the Givin. The female form was no more than fifty paces distant, close enough for Ben to see that she was not quite human, with a cascade of saffron hair that seemed to hang down to the water, and a pair of tiny bright eyes set in sockets so deep they looked like wells.

  When his father did not immediately seem to notice him, Ben said, “Whoa, Dad …that was some trip.”

  Luke snorted in amusement, then turned to Ben with a wry smile. “You weren’t supposed to find that out.”

  Ben nodded, and suddenly felt like he had made the wrong decision. If time and life were illusions, what did it matter if he went mad? What did it matter if his father died and Ben never reported to the Masters? Both had already happened, or they never would. In the end, all he had done was disobey an order.

  Ben dropped his gaze. “Sorry about that,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been a good idea for me to go back to Coruscant—not with things the way they are, thanks to Daala.”

  Luke frowned. “Because?”

  “Think about where we are, Dad,” Ben said, forcing himself to meet his father’s gaze. “Or at least where our bodies are, and what everyone who’s gone barvy has in common.”

  Luke nodded. “Shelter.” He cocked his head and studied Ben for a moment. “Where you …?”

  “I think so.” Ben glanced over at Rhondi, then lowered his voice, “Dad, nobody ever actually attacked me. But I have this feeling—this really strong feeling—that they’re trying to kill us.”

  Luke gave him a smile. “Ben, it’s not paranoid if it’s true.” He tipped his head toward his two escorts. “These two have been leading me into one trap after another since we left the station.”

  Ben felt his eyes widen, then he frowned over at Ryontarr and the Givin. “And you’re still here? Why?”

  Luke shrugged, then looked back toward the woman in the mist. “I still have a few questions.”

  “Your questions can wait.” It wasn’t Ben who said this, but Rhondi. She reached forward from behind Ben and took his arm. “Get your father. I kept my side of the bargain; now we need to go.”

  “Bargain?” Ryontarr leaned out to glare past the Skywalkers, while the Givin slipped around behind Rhondi. “Why would you do that?”

  The clear hostility in the Gotal’s voice brought to mind the urgency Ben had felt back in the station.

  “That’s right, Dad.” He took his father’s arm and started to pull. “You’re pretty close to dying. We’ve got to go.”

  Luke gently pulled his arm free. “In a minute, Ben.” He turned to Ryontarr, then added, “I’ve known for a while that you’re trying to stall me. What I haven’t been able to figure out is why.”

  “And you expect me to tell you?” the Gotal asked. “Because we were both Jedi …once?”

  “That would be the courteous thing,” Luke confirmed. “But the reason you’re going to tell me is because I’m leaving if you don’t.”

  Ryontarr shot Rhondi a withering scowl, then nodded and reluctantly pointed a taloned finger toward the woman in the mist. “Because she desires it.”

  Luke turned back toward the lake. “The lady in the mist?”

  As his father asked this, Ben looked toward the woman and instantly felt a chill of danger sense. Hers was the same needy presence that he had sensed on the way into the Maw …and the grasping touch from which he had retreated as a two-year-old.

  Ben took his father’s arm again. “Dad, I really think it’s time to go. I’m pretty sure she’s what was reaching for me when I was at Shelter.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” Luke said, not allowing Ben to pull him away. He turned to Ryontarr. “We’ll leave as soon as we know what she wants with us.”

  “I have no idea,” Ryontarr said, spreading his hands. “Perhaps you should walk out and ask her.”

  Rhondi said, “Ben, that’s not a good …” but she let her sentence trail away as the Givin stepped close behind her. Ben tried again to pull his father away from the lake, but Luke seemed almost Force-rooted in place.

  “I need to figure this out. This lady … I think she knows what corrupted Jacen, maybe even what’s been driving our Jedi Knights ma
d.” Luke stepped into the shallow water close to shore. “I won’t be long, Ben. You go on back.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you.” Ben looked back at Rhondi, then added, “And you’re not going anywhere without me—and a better guide than Ryontarr.”

  Rhondi shook her head in dismay, but she stepped forward and grasped his wrist. “Take your father’s arm.”

  Ben followed her into the water and did as she instructed. When his father did not object, she began to lead them forward, sticking close to the meadow. To Ben’s surprise—and unease—the boulders and hummocks along the shore cast reflections not of themselves, but of Wookiees, Barabels, humans, Chadra-Fan, and a few species Ben did not even recognize. These reflections, however, did not seem to lie directly on the surface. Instead, they appeared about a dozen centimeters below, just where the water grew too dark to see any deeper.

  “This is the Lake of Apparitions,” Ryontarr said, following behind Ben. “Perhaps you see why.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. Actually, he would have been just as happy not knowing the name—but he was pretty certain the Gotal realized that. “Thanks for the hint.”

  “My pleasure,” Ryontarr said. “And this end, we call the Mirror of Remembrance.”

  “Catchy names,” Ben said. “I’ll make a note of them for the guidebook.”

  As they waded forward, they did not make any sloshing sounds, or even disturb the surface of the lake. And why should they have? They were there only in spirit and not in body, and Force presences did not normally impact the physical world … assuming this was a physical world.

  It sure seemed like one. The water was no more than calf-deep, but it was dark, and he could not see his feet. After only a few steps, he stepped on a submerged stone and stumbled, and Rhondi quickly ordered, “Step only where I step. The lake is generally shallow, but there are places where it drops off.”