CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL

HALF AN HOUR LATER—A TIME THAT WAS MERCIFULLY UNINTERRUPTED by energy spiders—the bogey's residual energies that had crippled their electronics began to dissipate. The monitors in the speeder came up with patches of static; Leia tested her lightsaber and it came on, fitfully in the first few seconds and then reassuringly steady. Han got behind the speeder's controls and tried to coax the vehicle into life; a few minutes later, its repulsors kicked in and lifted the vehicle off the floor.

As Leia climbed in, Han mopped imaginary sweat from his brow. “Ready to go back up?”

“No, we haven't really found anything.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

“While we were waiting, I felt more of them in the Force.”

“Bogeys?”

She nodded. “Deep, deep down. Maybe they're somehow related to the groundquake phenomenon. I've also traced paths of lower life-forms that I think correspond to tunnels.”

“Going down, I assume.”

“That's the direction I was looking.”

He sighed and put the speeder into motion. “Point the way.”

Kilometers up and to the southeast, in the surface buildings of the Calrissian-Nunb Mines, Allana sat in a secondary conference room that had been pressed into service as a playroom. Chance was gone, having been bundled off by Nanna for a nap. Allana was alone with C-3PO and R2-D2.

She wanted to glare at them, but that would be showing her true feelings, and her mother—her real mother—had always said that only loved ones deserved or needed to see your true emotions. And not even them, if you needed to convince them of something.

“I'm tired of waiting,” she told the droids. “I want to do something.”

C-3PO looked down at her where she sat on the carpeted floor. “Why, you are doing something. You're reading on your datapad.”

She closed the electronic device with a definitive snap. “No, I want to do something good. Something nobody's ever done before.”

“I have done things that no one has ever done before, and I can assure you, it is usually a dangerous and alarming sort of activity. Not suited to little girls.”

“What have you done?”

“Well, I have been mistaken for a golden god, and in so doing helped strike down the Galactic Empire. Let me tell you that story—”

“No.” She grapped her backpack, tossed in her datapad, and dragged out her breath mask. “Let's go outside.”

“Not advisable, young miss. Every new world is a place of new, un-cataloged dangers—”

R2-D2 interrupted him with a series of notes.

“What did he say?” Allana asked.

“He asserted that we could protect you in the unlikely event of danger. In short, he undermined my already precarious authority. Oh, very well. The outside offers no comfort, you know.”

“Maybe, but I like to bounce.” Kessel's gravity, lower than that of most worlds where humans settled, had given her the opportunity to make some extraordinarily high leaps on the short walk from the Falcon to this building.

Not that bounding had anything to do with her desire to go outside.

Quietly, so as not to alert the Calrissians, Nien Nunb, or any of the occasionally glimpsed members of the skeleton crew Lando had on duty in the building, Allana led the droids down corridors that were so echoingly empty and dimly lit that they all but had signs pointing out that they were off-limits to little girls. Eventually, she found a hatch exit to the exterior, and moments later she stepped out into the bracing chill of Kessel's atmosphere. “Time to bounce,” she announced.

“As we are rather ill suited to bouncing, and even more poorly engineered to land in a nondamaging fashion, I believe that Artoo and I will simply watch from a safe distance.”

Allana shrugged. She began moving in a straight line away from the main building, sometimes running with long steps, sometimes jumping for the fun of it, always heading away from the perceptions of adults. Soon her shoes and the lower parts of her pant legs were covered in the white powder that seemed to be everywhere.

Now it was time to do as Leia had begun to teach her, to open her mind and feelings. It was hard for her, because she had always had reason and usually encouragement to stay bottled up. Sometimes her life had depended on it. Scary people were less likely to sense weakness or fear if you remained bottled up.

The ground ahead and to the left was darker. She changed direction to head that way, and soon found herself at the edge of what looked like a series of stone outcroppings, jagged brown rocks protruding from the white dust. The ground was jumbled, rising and falling.

This area wasn't pretty, but it was better than more white sand. Cautiously, she moved out among the broken stones.

“Miss Ameeeeeelia …” she heard C-3PO cry plaintively. She turned and saw the golden droid, R2-D2 beside him, a couple of hundred meters back. She waved to them, as though she welcomed their presence and had absolutely no intention of keeping clear of them, then headed farther into the outcroppings, picking up her pace.

Deeper in, the rocks were taller, some as tall as she was. She gracefully moved among them and soon was completely out of sight of the droids. Occasionally she would hear C-3PO calling or R2-D2 tweet-ling, and she would extend a hand above the level of the rocks, wave, and shout—then immediately head off to some other spot.

After a few minutes, she became aware of something not too far away. It felt different from people and animals; it was a stillness, unlike anything she had felt before. Cautious, she headed toward it, moving as quietly as she could.

A few dozen meters later, the ground became white and flat again. She moved out into an oval clearing surrounding a building. It was not tall, barely twice her height, and since the clearing was in a depression in the ground, she doubted that its slightly peaked roof would poke up above the surrounding rocks.

It was made of gray-white stone. It had four walls and was not large enough to be a house—perhaps more the size of a storage shed. She circled it and found that there were no viewports, just beveled depressions in the stone suggesting where viewports might someday be cut out, and no door, though on the west face the outlines of a door had been incised in the solid stone. The edges of the bevels and incisions, the corners of the walls and roof were worn and rounded, giving the building the impression of tremendous age.

Allana took a deep breath. This was a storage shed of a sort—a storage shed for dead people. A tomb. It did not need a working door or viewports, but whoever had constructed it had given it the semblance of such things, as if the dead needed them.

Dead things did not worry her, but she had seen, when she was not supposed to be awake, parts of many holodramas in which dead things in tombs turned out not to be dead after all, and it took brave, roguish heroes with big blasters to save the day. She shrugged. Grandpa Han was a brave, roguish hero with a big blaster, but he wasn't here, so she had to make sure she didn't cause any trouble she couldn't handle herself.

Why had she felt this place? Grandma Leia said the Force was an energy of living things, and there would be nothing living in the tomb. She reached out toward it with her senses, again feeling that oppressive stillness.

And then the stillness was no longer still. She felt something stirring within. Not life, just motion—energy. She froze in place, willing herself to become as small and as still as possible.

It waited, whatever it was, on the other side of that wall, waited with a stillness that matched hers. In the distance, Allana could hear C-3PO calling for her, and she desperately wished that she was with the droids.

She took a slow step backward. The thing in the tomb did not react. She took another, and another, and bumped into the rough surface of a rock outcropping, and still nothing came bursting out of the tomb. Barely breathing, she moved into the outcroppings, not even beginning to relax until the tomb was out of sight.

I can feel you.

The words crept quietly into her mind. Allana almost shrieked.

They were not from the tomb. She stared up into the pinkish sky, seeing only the distant sun and a sliver of the former garrison moon. The thought came from there.

Who is there? I felt you. Please … please … There was such a yearning desperation to the words, such a hunger, that Allana wanted to reply, wanted to reassure whoever was there. But caution and fear and a hundred lessons she had learned at her mother's knee kept her from doing so.

What is your name? The question sent a tingle of dread down Al-lana's spine. She had the eerie sensation that if she responded, if she offered her name, it would be snatched away and never returned, leaving her to wander forever not knowing who she was. She hugged herself for warmth and, keeping her head low, reined her senses in.

The voice did not return, and a couple of minutes later Allana no longer felt any hint of it. She breathed a sigh of relief.

She almost bumped into C-3PO. As she rounded a particularly wide stone rise, he was suddenly there, splendidly metallic and modern, R2-D2 beside him. The astromech whistled a musical greeting, sounding not at all perturbed.

“Miss Amelia! You really mustn't go off alone.”

She nodded and, not slowing, began heading back toward where she thought the mine buildings must be. “I know, I know.”

C-3PO hurried to keep up, the faint whining sound of his arm and leg servos increasing as he did so. “Thank the maker you're unhurt. If I'd had to report to Master Han and Mistress Leia that you had come to some harm, I'm sure I'd find myself doomed to an eternity of opening ale bottles in the filthiest taproom in Coruscant's sublevels—”

“You keep talking about a maker. Who made you?”

“Actually, I don't quite recall. But I was made, so the existence of my maker is beyond question. And since I consider my existence to be a good thing, he was without a doubt benevolent and forward thinking.”

“I guess.”

In a large natural cave, one with several tunnels splitting off at various angles, Leia studied the sensor board, considered their options, and shook her head. She pointed straight up. “That way.”

Han looked up as though he could see through both the speeder's opaque roof and the impenetrable darkness, then turned his attention to the sensors. They showed a recess in the ceiling, one that could easily be interpreted just as a natural depression in the rock. But Leia had sensed otherwise. Han put the speeder into a careful vertical ascent.

The cleft was easily wide enough to accommodate the speeder at its base, but it narrowed, becoming a not-quite-straight chimney of sorts. As they rose, something bumped onto the roof, then scrambled free with a skittering noise. Han froze for a moment, then realized it could not have been one of the energy spiders—a spider would have attacked rather than fled.

Twenty meters up, the chimney widened into a broad cave, one that sloped downward to the southwest. At Leia's nod, he put the speeder on a slow, gentle course down that decline.

Leia returned her attention to the sensor board, where topographic lines, constantly changing, showed the irregularities of the channel they were following. “I swear, this is all natural caves and tunnels. Worn by water.”

“Do you think Kessel had more water once upon a time?”

She shook her head. “I think Kessel used to be a chunk of some other planet, a much bigger one, with seas and a thicker atmosphere. The life-forms we know of here, the spiders and the avians, must have developed at that time—can you imagine a big avian developing on this world, with an atmosphere so thin they can barely fly? But then some calamity destroyed that world, and the chunk that became Kessel is all that remains of it.”

“Maybe the rest of the debris fell into the Maw.”

The tunnel they followed continued laterally and downward for several kilometers. It was a winding course but remained broad, clearly the remains of a long-dead underground river. Eventually, Leia spotted signs on the sensor screen of fissures, vertical cracks in the rock. They shone the speeder headlights on those spots and saw that the breaks in the rock were far more recent than the surrounding stone. “Groundquakes,” Han said.

As if in response, an ominous vibration filled the air. Small rocks dislodged themselves from the tunnel roof overhead and began clattering down all around the speeder and onto its roof. The rumbling, like the galaxy's largest giant tucking into a big bowl full of boulders for his breakfast, did not diminish—it intensified, the rocks crashing down onto the speeder growing from pebble-sized to fist-sized to head-sized. Han kept his hands tight on the yoke, knuckles white, ready to duck one way or another if he had enough warning of disaster.

The flooring beneath them gave way. The speeder's repulsors, set to maintain an altitude of a meter above the ground, were not strong enough. Han, Leia, and their vehicle dropped into pitch blackness, with more stones and boulders following them.

CITY OF DOR'SHAN, DORIN

Luke could tell that Ben was finding the temple of the Baran Do both alien and comfortably familiar. The décor was characteristic of the Kel Dors, a constant barrage of symbols and metaphors stylistically representing their natural surroundings and forces of nature, but the chambers had obvious purposes he instantly understood. Training halls. Classrooms. Meditation rooms. Dining halls. It all operated on a much smaller scale than the Jedi Temple; Luke did not ask Tistura Paan, their student guide, but estimated that there were perhaps six Masters here and no more than twenty students of various ranks.

The combat training hall was comparatively small and very lightly equipped. Staves rested on weapon racks; padded body armor hung on wall hooks. There were padded mats on the floor for practice. The hall could accommodate perhaps two sets of sparring pairs at a time.

Ben asked Tistura Paan, “Don't all your students train in combat?”

“No. The Baran Do are not a militant order like the Jedi.”

“We're not that militant.”

She offered him a smile, showing her grinding palates. “You all study fighting. That's militant. Our role is one of advice and advance warning. The first Baran Do were village seers who had a heightened weather sense and could warn their fellows of impending storms. Over the centuries, they and their descendants corresponded with one another, exchanging techniques and philosophies. The best became personal advisers to the rulers of our kind. Eventually the order became a scholarly one, collecting and cataloging knowledge of the arts and sciences, as well as of the ways of the Force.”

They passed through an angled archway into a meditation chamber furnished only with small circular mats on the floor. The chamber had no viewports and the walls were a soothing, rough-textured gray-white, like the inside of a cloud.

Luke asked, “I've been assuming, but did not ask yesterday, that Master Plo Koon was once a member of your order.”

Tistura Paan nodded. She sat on one of the foam circles and, by gesture, invited Luke and Ben to do likewise. They complied. She said, “Over the centuries, many of the Koon family have been Baran Do. The Force runs strong in that line, as, it is said, in the Skywalker line. It is said of Plo Koon that he never grew weary of living among oxygen breathers, of having to cope with claustrophobic masks and strange faces. Me, I would grow weary of it within weeks or months.”

Ben tapped the transparisteel mask over his own face. “I know how you feel.”

“Your father will be instructed by Master Tila Mong in the hassat-durr technique, which I understand you are not learning. Would you like to get in some fighting practice?”

“You promise not to yank my mask off this time?”

“No promises.”

“Oh, well. Sure.”

Once the two were gone, Luke did not have long to wait. Tila Mong entered, gestured for Luke not to rise, and sat on a pad opposite his. “One Master to another,” she said. “You will not object to an accelerated course, devoid of learning rituals and training artifacts?”

“That would be most agreeable.”

“Well, then. The technique you asked to learn is the ayna-seff technique of the hassat-durr family. In our language, the term hassat-durr means ‘lightning rod.’”

“Why do you call it that?”

“Because if you are not absolutely perfect in your mastery of the technique and perform hassat-durr during a storm, you will be repeatedly struck by lightning and killed.”

Despite himself, Luke laughed. “You're kidding. Right?”

She shook her head. “The hassat-durr techniques suffuse your body with a very low level of electromagnetic radiation. You produce the radiation as an interaction between the Force and your own mental influence over your central nervous system. The energies a student produces early in his study of the technique attract lightning much like a lightning rod. It is for this reason that this skill, like that of dismantling high explosives, is best perfected before it is ever attempted in the field.”

“Other than scrambling brain scans and permitting a rather difficult-to-solve form of suicide by lightning, what do the other hassat-durr techniques do?”

“They can disable one's own prosthetics and electronic implants, can interfere with shock shackles, can cause one to be perceived by animal senses as something terrible or something inoffensive, and can allow one to act as a very effective range-boosting antenna for com-links. And there are other uses.”

From a pocket in her robes, she drew out two objects. One looked like an ordinary sphere of durasteel-gray metal about four centimeters in diameter. The other was a flat plate of the same material; it had a rimmed depression that was clearly intended to accommodate the ball. An insulated cable was attached to the edge of the plate. About a meter long, it ended in an elastic strap with an electrical lead embedded in it.

She set the plate down in front of Luke, put the ball in the depression, and handed him the elastic band. “Please attach that to your hand, placing the lead in your palm.”

Luke began to comply, then thought better of it and put the strap on his flesh hand instead of the prosthetic one.

“This device,” Tila Mong said, “is a simple teaching tool. It is attuned to the precise intensities and frequencies of electromagnetic energy produced by someone correctly practicing the ayna-seff technique.”

“How, by the way, does ayna-seff translate?”

“Dead brain.”

Luke grinned. “You Baran Do have very practical naming conventions.”

“Our artistic senses lean toward the tactile and visual, not verbal. For us, learning Basic is always a ritual of discovery of colorful adjectives and breathtaking arrays of synonyms. Anyway, your first step is to learn to channel energies that will cause the ball to lift off the plate.”

Luke looked at the ball. He allowed himself to sink into a meditative state. He resisted the urge to push at the ball with the Force; he could certainly lift it telekinetically, but that would not benefit his training. Instead, one by one, he cycled through all the Force techniques he had learned, not utilizing them but putting himself in the mental state required by each.

Half a minute later, as he prepared for a technique that caused holocams briefly to go to static, a method by which Jedi could bypass many security setups, the ball sprang up and began spinning, bobbing up and down between ten and twenty centimeters above the plate.

Tila Mong nodded. “Well, that's about eight weeks of apprentice training bypassed.”

“But that's only the first stage. What are the others?”

“You learn to stop the ball from spinning. That means you have found the exact form of energy necessary for the dead brain technique. You learn to maintain the ball at an altitude of about one centimeter. That means you have found the correct amount of energy to exert, an amount that makes it hard for any but the most delicate and most correctly attuned devices to discover that there is any anomaly in your electromagnetic energy output. And you learn to sustain the output without tiring yourself—for days, weeks, or even longer.”

“Is this how Jacen Solo learned the technique from Koro Ziil?”

Immediately, something shut down in Tila Mong's mind.

Luke wasn't sure whether someone who was not a Jedi Master would have noticed it. He wasn't even sure most Masters would have detected it. But something, the equivalent of a durasteel vault door, slid shut within Tila Mong's consciousness.

Her face and manner betrayed no sign of it. She just said, “Yes.”

“How long did it take him?”

“As I recall, about three days.”

Luke smiled. “It's very un-Jedi-like of me, but I want to break his record.”