She set the sphere on the table, spun it with her fingers, the light gleaming wetly off its whirling sides. "I wish... I wish I could show you."
It had been last night, when Leia, Han, and Callista had come down to the toy room, that they'd discovered that Callista was no longer able to use or touch the Force.
Luke had been taken to the Brathflen Corporation's Medcenter, to spend most of the night in the glass tank of viscous bacta fluid. It had occurred to Leia that this young woman--who despite her strong superficial physical resemblance to Cray now seemed no more like her than some distant cousin--would know the nature and uses of the toys in their room in the vaults beneath Plett's House.
Armed with tranquilizers, stunguns, and massive restraints, Jevax and Mara Jade had led parties of searchers to round up the remaining insane guardians of the crypts, so it was fairly safe to enter through the tunnels from Roganda's house on Painted Door Street. At the sight of them Mara's cold anger was revived. Many of them were people she knew.
In addition to the team from Diplomatic, a group of psychologists and healers was due to arrive tomorrow from Ithor to help deal with rehabilitation, using the techniques that, Tomla El had informed Leia over subspace, seemed at last to be working on Drub McKumb. The two shuttlecraft and the lander had been brought in safely and their occupants--with the exception of the Sand People, who were drugged and under firm restraint--were in protective custody, to be reoriented, deprogrammed, and returned to their home planets. Both Klaggs and Gakfedds had adamantly refused reorientation and were currently negotiating with Drost Elegin to be taken on as a bodyguard.
Only when Callista had attempted the first, most simple demonstrations of the toys--separating the colored fluids within the sphere, setting to motion the delicately poised levers and wheels of the Dynamitron--had the truth become clear.
She had lost all ability to use the Force.
"It wasn't something I even thought about," she said now, turning one of the mind mazes over in her hands. She did not meet Leia's eyes, shy with her and a little hesitant, not because she was the Chief of State of the New Republic, Leia guessed, but because she was Luke's sister.
"Cray had the Force in her very strongly. If she hadn't, she wouldn't have been able to...to leave her body the way she did. To guide me into it. To give it to me." She glanced up, her rain-colored eyes anxious. "You were her friend, weren't you?"
Leia nodded, remembering that cool, stylish, intellectual young woman whose height and natural elegance she'd so envied. "We weren't close," she said, "but yes, we were friends." She reached out and put her hand briefly over Callista's. "Close enough for me to guess months ago that she didn't want to live without Nichos."
Callista gave her fingers a quick squeeze. ”He was... sweet. Kind," she said. "I don't want you to be angry that I'm me, and not her. She was the one who... who offered. Whose idea it was. We didn't even know it would work."
Leia gave a quick shake of her head. "No. It's all right. I'm glad it did."
"The Force is something that's been in me, a part of me, since I was small. Djinn--my old Master--said..." She hesitated, and looked away again, suddenly silent about what it was her Master had said to her, unwilling to pass it on.
"Well, anyway," she took up a moment later, "I never thought there would be a time when I... when it wouldn't be part of me."
Leia remembered how this young woman had fled this room last night without a word, vanishing into the lightless mazes of the geothermic caves. She herself had spent a harrowing few hours, wondering if there was anything she could or should be doing--in between a dozen subspace calls to Ithor and the Diplomatic Corps--until Han had reminded her, "She probably knows those crypts better than anyone here."
In the small hours of the morning, when Leia had gone to Luke's room at the Brathflen Medcenter, she had found Callista there, stretched out on the bed beside the sleeping Luke, her head pillowed on his arm.
"What will you do now?" Leia asked softly.
Callista shook her head. "I don't know."
Sometimes there is nothing you can do.
Leaning on the broken frame of the gateway arch, Luke remembered the words Callista had said in the darkness of the Eye of Palpatine.
Sometimes justice is best served by knowing when to fold one's hands.
That, too, was the wisdom of the Jedi.
Maybe the hardest wisdom he'd heard.
She sat with folded hands now, gazing out into the weird shimmer of mist and the gray shadows of trees. The crack in the dome had done strange things to the weather in the rift, and odd little currents of fidgety cool whispered through the heavy warmth of the fog.
She had known this place, he thought, before the dome had been built, before the orchards had been planted, when it had been part jungle, part volcanic barrens around acrid mudflats. She remembered it when the only settlement had been that little group of lava-rock houses clustered up against the rising benches of land at the end of the narrow valley, truly little more than a fingernail gouge in the marble wastelands of eternal ice.
She had grown up in another world, a universe separated from the present by centuries' worth of events packed into a single life span.
Like Triv Pothman--who had been enchanted with the quiet community of Plawal and was already signed up for training as a horticulturist--Callista had spent a long time as a hermit, to return to a world unfamiliar and empty of anyone she knew.
He was silent, but she turned her head as if he'd spoken her name.
It was good to walk again, without limping, without fear, without pain.
It was good to be in daylight again, and in real air.
"Are you all right?" There was quick concern in her eyes as she spoke, held out her hand to him. The tissue regeneration of the bacta therapy had left him shaky, and he knew he shouldn't be up yet.
"I should ask you that." She had been there, lying at his side, when he'd drifted to consciousness close to dawn. Later, when he'd waked fully, she'd been gone. Leia had told him what had taken place in the toy room, but it was as if Luke had known it already. He wondered if he'd been there, seen it in some now forgotten dream. Certainly when she'd wept, silently, on his shoulder in the predawn darkness, he'd known what it was she had lost.
She shook her head, not in denial, but in a kind of wonderment. "I keep thinking about Nichos," she said. "About being "another Corellian of the same name."" She turned her hands over, as she had when she'd waked in the Hunter's Luck, feeling the shape of them, their long strength and the pattern of the veins and muscles beneath the porcelain-fine skin. Hefted in them the lightsaber she had once had the skill to make. His head close to hers, Luke could see the brown color already visible at the roots of her cornsilk hair, and knew that within a few months the whole would be that heavy, malt-colored mane he remembered from visions and dreams.
"I keep wondering if I shouldn't have stayed where I was."
"No," said Luke, meaning it, knowing it, from the bottom of his heart. "No."
She replaced the weapon at her belt. ”Even if I'd known... this," she said softly. ”Even if I'd guessed... been able to see into the future... once Cray asked me if I wanted to... to take her place... I couldn't have said no. Luke, I..."
He brought her into his arms, and their mouths met hard: giving, forgetting, remembering, knowing. Telling her without speech how groundless were the doubts that she didn't dare put into words.
"It isn't the Force in you that I love," he said softly, when at last they eased apart. "It's you."
She bent her head forward, rested her forehead on his shoulder; they were much of a height. "It's not going to be easy for me," she said softly. ”Maybe it's not going to be easy for us. Sometimes last night, wandering in the caves, I blamed you for this. I was angry--I think I'm still angry, deep down. I don't know how you could have been responsible, but I blamed you anyway."
Luke nodded, though the words hurt. In a curious way he understood that they weren't pe
rsonal, and it was better to know. "I understand."
She moved her head and looked at him with a wry quirk of smile. "Oh, good. Explain it to me?"
He kissed her again instead.
"Will you come to Yavin with me?" When she hesitated, he said, "You don't have to. And you don't have to make up your mind now. Leia tells me you've written out all the names you can remember of people who were here... She says you'll be welcome on Coruscant, for however long you want to stay. And I know it won't be easy to be... to be around students, adepts in the Force. But your knowledge of the old methods of teaching, the old ways of training, would help me..."
His voice fumbled with the words, and in the stillness of her face he saw her effort not to trouble him with her own pain, her own uncertainty.
Oh, the hell with it...
"I need you," he said softly. "I love you, and I want you with me. Forever, if we can manage it."
Her mouth moved in a smile. "Forever." The gray eyes met his, darker than the fog around them, but equally suffused with light. "I love you, Luke, but... it's not going to be easy. But I think... I feel that we're going to be in each other's lives for a long time."
"We have time," he said. "There's no hurry.”
“But there is--and there always will be--my love for you."
They were still clinched tight in each other's arms, cheeks resting on each other's shoulders, when Han and Leia, Chewie, Threepio, and Artoo appeared in the broken gateway. Leia said softly, "Let them be for a while."
"He can kiss her on the ship," said Han good-naturedly. "Jevax has finally got the landing silos repaired, and we've got those gizmos from the toy room loaded up, and I for one want to get off this rock before something else happens."
"This would be advisable, Your Excellency," added Threepio. "Admiral Ackbar did mention concentrations of Grand Admiral Harrsk's troops in the Atravis Sector, and we have no idea where or with whom Roganda and her son have taken refuge. Given the necessity of implementing small but significant changes in the schematic of every ship in the fleet--or of finding adequate shielding where schematic change is impracticable--it would perhaps be expedient to get under way as soon as we can."
"You're right." Leia looked around her for a last time at Plett's House, or the ruin that the Empire had left of it: broken walls, shattered arches, the metal slab replaced over the well. The echoes of its ancient peace filled her, covering the pain and ruin as the exuberance of the rift's ubiquitous vines covered the scars of that ancient shelling. Somewhere she seemed to hear children's voices again, singing that old song about the forgotten Queen and her magic birds.
Callista had given her a partial list of names, all she could remember, though she herself had only visited the place briefly and didn't know most of the Jedi there. But it was a start. And she had something of those forgotten children, something of the old Jedi who had lived here, who had offered them refuge...
Movement flickered in the corner of her vision. A ghost? she thought. Or the echo of a memory? The shadows of two tiny children chased each other over the thick olive-tinted grass, and faded into a stray drift of fog.
Nichos? she wondered. Roganda? One running toward the light, the other toward the dark?
Someone whose name she did not yet know?
Or were they shadows from the future, not the children who had been there, but the children who were to come?
"Hey, kid!" yelled Han, and Leia poked him in the ribs.
"C'mon," she said. "Luke deserves a break."
It had been, for him, a long, long time.
The couple on the bench turned their heads.
"We're blowin' out of this jerkwater rock," called out Han. "Can we drop you anyplace?"
They looked at each other, their faces reflecting a curious kinship, for a moment more like brother and sister than lovers: people who have known each other for lifetimes past. Then Callista said, "Yavin. If it's on your way."
Han grinned. "I think we can manage that."
Luke and Callista crossed the grass to them hand in hand.
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