by Claudia Gray
“So Master Jora says.” But Reath didn’t sound as though he believed it—he sounded as if he was judging himself, and falling short.
So Dez rose and put a hand on Reath’s shoulder. “Listen, the Force is about balance, right? Ideally it’s about finding balance within each and every individual Jedi. But that’s not the same as finding balance within the Order, which is just as important. We need Knights who crave adventure and Knights who don’t seek it out. Each individual brings different gifts to the Jedi Order. Our job is to appreciate the value of those gifts, including our own.”
Reath gave him a lopsided grin. “Okay. I’ll try.”
“Good,” Dez said, inwardly adding, I’ll try, too.
“Hey, Dez, I have this one question—”
“Okay. Hit me.”
“Did Master Jora ever ask you—do you know why no Jedi can cross the Kyber Arch alone?”
Dez frowned. “No, she never asked me that. And people cross it alone all the time. It’s not like some insurmountable challenge, just a meditative practice, like walking a labyrinth.”
“I know!” Reath breathed out in frustration. “But Master Jora insists nobody can cross that archway alone, and she wants me to tell her why.”
“I’ve got nothing.” Dez shrugged. “All I can tell you is, Master Jora is wiser than both of us put together. If she’s given you a riddle to solve, it’s worth solving.”
Later, once she’d gotten herself cleaned up and freshened up and returned to the cockpit, Affie was disgruntled. “You’re defending the Aytees?”
“They’re gardeners,” Leox said, stretched out in his chair, feet propped on the cockpit console. His eyes were closed, as though he could chat and nap at the same time. Maybe he could. “Stewards of the soil. You threatened their very reason for being.”
Affie sighed and let it go. Of course the droids were only following their programming. Didn’t mean she had to like them.
Besides, she had more important things to tell Leox.
“Listen,” she began. “Out there on the station, up in the higher rings—I’ve found some lines written in code.”
“Code?” Leox didn’t open his eyes. “Tell me more.”
“It looks like some kind of…of smugglers’ code. Handwritten symbols that give them hints about directions they can travel through hyperspace, that kind of thing.”
Leox finally turned his head and looked at her. “Why would they write that down instead of recording it the usual way?”
“I don’t know,” Affie said, flexing her still-sore wrist. “They just did.”
“That question wasn’t rhetorical. Think about it. Hardly anybody actually writes symbols with their hands anymore—not anywhere in the galaxy, so far as I know, at least not on planets advanced enough to have technology. So why are space pilots scribbling important information on the walls?”
It felt good to have the answer even before he was finished with the question. “Because they’re skimming stuff off the top, and hiding it from Scover.”
Leox sat up straight then, his beads swaying back into place. “Wait. How does Scover come into it?”
“One of the symbols is this.” Affie pointed to the star shape on her coverall pocket. “It’s got to be pilots in the Byne Guild talking to each other, but in a way and in a place my mo—I mean, a place Scover doesn’t know about.”
He weighed her words for a few long moments. Affie couldn’t wait to see him light up with the same astonishment and anger she’d felt. If only Geode were there instead of recrystallizing in his bunk! She wanted her discovery witnessed and confirmed.
But then Leox shook his head. “Not much goes on in the Guild that Scover Byne doesn’t know.”
“Of course not—but she can’t know about this!”
“Why can’t she?” Leox’s pale blue eyes met Affie’s with unaccustomed directness. “The coordinates for this station were preprogrammed into the Vessel, as part of the standard nav download every ship gets when joining the Guild. That’s not coincidence.”
Frustration tugged at Affie’s temper. Why couldn’t he see this? “These thieves inside the Guild, they could’ve tampered with the download. Put in the information they’d need to operate behind Scover’s back—”
“And share it with every single new ship in the Guild, even if they’re not part of this so-called conspiracy?”
Affie folded her arms across her chest. “So how do you explain it?”
Leox took several moments before he answered, his voice low and patient. “I know, and you know, that not every Guild haul is what you would call, in the strictest sense, legal. Scover’s got plenty to hide from the authorities. This seems like a pretty good place to hide it.”
“She wouldn’t hide it from me!” Affie insisted.
There was no reply. Leox just gazed at her, his expression melancholy and yet kind. It was the kindness that infuriated Affie the most—the idea that she needed kindness, that she was some simple gullible fool Scover coddled and humored, instead of a true pilot and Guild official in her own right. So many other pilots looked down on her. Leox never did—or at least he never had, not until that moment.
Without another word, she stalked off the bridge, half hoping Leox would follow her to apologize, but he let her go.
Orla Jareni watched Affie storm down the Vessel’s main corridor, practically trailing black smoke from her rage. Through the cockpit door, Orla caught a glimpse of Leox watching her go, concern written all over his sun-bronzed face.
Not a good time for a chat, she decided.
For the moment, Orla had little else to do. She didn’t intend to venture back toward the ancient idols until Cohmac could go with her. Dez was still strategizing a new way to penetrate the lower rings of the station, and Reath was handling things with the fellow refugees—most particularly Nan, it seemed.
Orla still hoped to have a conversation about spacecraft purchasing. Both Affie and Leox appeared to be distracted at the moment. As for Geode—well, a Vintian probably had different needs for a spaceship than a humanoid would. Orla had to put that conversation on hold.
Besides, she and Cohmac had plenty to talk about besides the idols.
Orla found him on the Vessel’s “observation deck”: a grandly titled meter of corridor that happened to have a small window. Cohmac saw her enter but didn’t speak.
“You’ve got your hood up again,” she said. “Never a positive sign.”
Generally she got Cohmac to sigh within five minutes. This time she’d had him right off the bat. “I suppose asking for privacy on this ship is futile.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. What is futile is expecting old friends not to understand when you’re having trouble.”
“The many problems on this station—”
“Spare me,” she said, not unkindly. “What I’m talking about has been hanging over you since long before the hyperspace disaster.”
Cohmac and Orla’s bond had formed during their Padawan years because of the Eiram–E’ronoh hostage crisis. The mistakes they’d made then—not being cautious enough about responding to signals, not doing enough research before diving into action—had been redeemed at a terrible price.
Sometimes she reminded herself to see the good that had come from it all. If the mission had turned out any other way, would that part of the galaxy ever have trusted the Republic, much less chosen to join it? Would Starlight Beacon have been built? Orla doubted it.
Still. Neither she nor Cohmac could look back on those events without regrets. That was something Orla understood without having to ask. They’d grown up to be two very different individuals—but their bond endured, and always would.
Orla knew her decisions to become a Wayseeker might separate her from many in the Jedi Order. Not from Cohmac.
“I’ve never kept secrets from you,” he admitted.
“You’ve tried,” Orla said. “I just never let you get away with it.”
“Don’t remind me.”
She intended to remind him at regular intervals throughout their lives, but she could drop it for a day. “Are you going to make me interrogate you?”
“Do you have to?” Cohmac’s dark eyes searched hers. “Coming back here, on our way to a place so close to E’ronoh and Eiram—finding ourselves imperiled again, having to guess at the dangers that lie ahead—”
“It’s a very different situation,” Orla hastened to say. The vibrations of that long-ago event were strong enough without delving deeply into it. She wasn’t sure she was ready to bear that.
“I sense that there will be further parallels,” Cohmac said. “There are…other resonances, all around us. Their forms remain unclear, but before this mission is over, we will see them true.”
“Got it.” No mystic, Orla figured it was time to change the subject, but then she felt it. The same shiver of terrible cold that had seized her before—the same bleak place so far away—
“Cohmac!” she called, but he couldn’t hear her. They were both lost in the petrifying vision.
Reath strolled along the perimeter of the arboretum level, almost idly, as if he weren’t keeping a sharp eye on the Mizi, the Orincans, and some of the others who’d tried looting earlier. (He, personally, would’ve waited longer to allow everyone to board freely again, but this was not a point on which he felt comfortable challenging a Master.) While Leox had ably calmed them down and the tunnels to the lower rings provided their own deterrents to entry, it seemed possible that a loner from any of the groups might try something. If they took some equipment from the station—Reath honestly didn’t care. Anybody who needed spaceship parts badly enough to pilfer centuries-old ones could have them. But if they stole one of the ancient idols, they’d just sell it for the precious metals or jewels without even bothering to study it. Sacrilege.
Worst of all would be another kidnapping attempt. Reath again remembered the moment his lightsaber had severed the man’s arm, the faint thump through the blade that told him he’d hit and destroyed bone. He shuddered. Dez’s kind words had helped, but this wasn’t something he could ever totally put behind him. The act of attacking another person with a lightsaber was horrifying, and Reath hoped it would always remain so.
Let me never forget, he thought, that it is another living creature standing opposite my blade.
He looked up into the dark forest arches within the atrium.…
They were gone. Everything was gone. Reath stood alone amid the plants and trees—but not the same ones, or were they just altered somehow?—his lightsaber in his hand, already ignited. Slithering, rustling sounds filled the air on every side, setting him on edge.
Fog, almost steamy in the sudden heat, coiled around him. Reath looked around wildly, trying to understand how the scene had changed. Had he been transported to another part of the station? To another planet? Or had he somehow failed to see the true danger around him all that time?
Ahead of him, he knew, lay the greatest threat of all. Reath didn’t understand how he knew it, but he was as certain of it as anything else he’d ever known in his life. He shifted his body into battle stance, took a deep breath, and tried to brace himself against the threat he couldn’t see.
Then, amid the fog, only steps in front of him, came a sudden streak of blue light. A lightsaber blade.
One that would be used to kill him.
Stumbling forward through the fog, Reath called out, “Why are you doing this?”
That would fix it. No Jedi would willingly harm another. The other Jedi would come close enough to see Reath, realize that they weren’t enemies, and put away his weapon. Reath was so certain of it that his muscles relaxed slightly, ready to declare the emergency a false alarm.
Instead the figure jumped forward at a speed that rendered him (her? it?) nothing but a blur. Reath had no time to focus on his attacker before a booted foot hit him squarely in the chest, knocking him to the ground. He gasped for breath that wouldn’t come; he tried to push himself up, only to sink his hands deeply into warm, oozing mud.
A lightsaber’s hum made his ears prick and sent a shiver along his skin. It wasn’t his own blade—that one had been knocked away from him—so it had to be his opponent’s, rising overhead and then slashing down—
And nothing. Reath found himself on all fours on the floor of the space station, surrounded by nothing more ominous than ferns and a couple of contented 8-T droids. His heart pounded with adrenaline, his whole body still on edge for a fight that was no longer happening, or had never happened.
Reath stood up, took a deep breath, and brought his awareness back to his body. Normally he would have called on the Force to center himself, but not now. They were surrounded by darkness—a darkness that sought to terrify and confuse the Jedi.
To judge by the vision Reath had just had, it also sought to turn them against each other.
The tiny communications area had become the place for the Jedi to confer and plan. Orla wished they’d chosen differently—maybe someplace without a low, arched ceiling, someplace she could actually have stood upright. But the Vessel offered few options, and at least this way she, Cohmac, and Reath had to huddle together, which she found comforting. Long-limbed Dez stood in the doorway, which if not comforting was probably more comfortable for him.
“We know the following,” she said, counting off points on her long fingers. “Darkness resides within this station. It has a very different ‘feel’ from the kind normally sensed from plants deep in the dark side. This means we cannot determine its source.”
Cohmac nodded. His gaze looked into the middle distance, someplace known but unseen. “We’ve all sensed that these warnings are emanating from the idols. From their appearance, they are almost certainly not original to the station. Therefore the idols were placed here later for some significant reason. Orla theorizes that they represented conquered peoples, which if true adds another factor for us to consider. Sealing some defeated darkness within these idols—and setting some kind of psychic warning upon that seal—that could explain it. Of course, this is only a possibility.”
Orla shrugged. “Let’s call it a working hypothesis.”
Reath leaned forward, wordlessly asking for permission to speak, which was given. “The Force emanates from life. Not from inanimate objects. There are legends of powerful Force artifacts created by the ancient Sith. But the Sith wouldn’t have imprisoned darkness, surely. They’d have set it free.”
“You assume,” Cohmac replied, “that because every such artifact we know of has its origin in the Jedi or the Sith, that only Jedi or Sith could create one. We cannot make such assumptions. Others have possessed that power in the Force.”
Orla considered the possibilities. “So what do we do? Continue to ignore their warnings? Because those warnings are intense.”
“Ignoring them would be dangerous,” Cohmac agreed, steepling his fingers together. “If the idols contain and warn against darkness, then that darkness must be examined. Imprisoned even more thoroughly.”
“They’re already pretty isolated out here,” said Dez from the place in the doorway where he stood. “On a station nobody much travels to, in an obscure corner of space.”
“Not necessarily,” Cohmac replied. “Affie has indicated that some traders currently use it from time to time. It wouldn’t be surprising if this station were soon reclaimed by even more travelers. All the more reason to act.”
“I can’t see any harm to the station in removing the idols,” Orla said. “There’s nothing else here but some plants and some gardener droids. So let’s test the hypothesis,” she said.
“How?” Dez asked.
“One of two ways,” Orla said. “Either we try to move and isolate the statues, or we destroy them.”
“But we can’t destroy them. They’re ancient artifacts!” Reath protested. “They’re history!”
Orla gave him a look. “More to the point, if we destroy something that turns out to be a containment system for the dark side
, we wind up setting the darkness loose. So I vote for the first option.”
Dez frowned. “There’s another possibility, one we haven’t even investigated properly yet. What if the darkness that’s confusing our minds is linked to whatever’s protected by the energy field in the station’s lower rings?”
They all exchanged glances. Everyone had thought about this, but apparently with varied conclusions: Reath appeared deeply doubtful, while Cohmac had the look of someone relieved to hear sense for a change. Orla considered herself open to whatever possibility, but not to endless debate. Time to do something.
“Then we test that hypothesis, too,” she said. “But first you have to figure out how to get down there without being scraped by poisonous vines, and without Aytees…pruning you to death.”
That made everyone chuckle, as Orla had intended. Good. Laughter made people relax and smile. It cast the dark side away and brought them closer to the light.
Reath could hardly have blamed Affie, Nan, and the Mizi if they refused to have anything else to do with the station’s lower rings—even if they had managed to pull up the poisonous vines (gently, so as not to disturb the 8-Ts) and cast them harmlessly to the side. However, all three of them rejoined the group to make the next attempt.
“There’s got to be something good down there,” Nan reasoned as she rechecked her field utility belt, glancing up just once to smile at Reath. “No way I’m letting you guys have it all.”
The Mizi nodded in agreement—the difference being, in Reath’s opinion, that Nan was joking with him but the Mizi was completely serious.
Affie was harder to get a read on. Her attention seemed only half-focused on the task at hand. “So what’s our plan? We have a plan, right? Better than the last one?”
“Let’s say we have a plan to make a plan,” Dez began. “Specifically, let’s do recon. Do a more thorough survey of this level and see if we can find any potential points of entry besides the main tunnel, and so on—without setting off the Aytees this time.”