Whirling through the jungle was a blizzard of bird-moths. They were as bright as jewels, saballine blue and rardo red and coratyl yellow, and they were squeaking and chirping like a thousand tiny astromechs during an ion barrage. Some were as small as a human fingernail, but a few were the size of a Bith’s head, and nothing was trying to eat any of them. The stalks of the club mosses had grown knobby with tree turtles, and the ferns sagged with the weight of dangling wing-snakes. Most disconcerting of all, the ground tremors had stopped and the volcano had ceased rumbling.

It was, as the saying went, all too calm. And as Luke reached the jungle’s edge, where a sandy bank descended to the beach, he saw why.

Dozens of huge drendek lizards were wheeling over the river, their great wings blotting out the blue sun. Closer to shore, a colony of long-legged reptiles that looked like a cross between eopies and emaciated nerfs stood ankle-deep in the crimson water, drinking in peace while a carpet of golden smotherpads floated nearby. Thirty meters from the shore, the Sith’s Emiax sat squatting on its S-shaped landing struts, its drooping wingtips hanging down so far they almost touched the azure sand.

“Hey!” Ben said, stopping at the jungle’s edge beside Luke. “The Shadow’s gone!”

“Very observant, Jedi Skywalker,” Luke said. “But if you expect to impress me, tell me who took her.”

“Too easy, old man.” Ben looked high into the sky, suggesting that he had come to the same conclusion Luke had—that Abeloth had stolen the ship and escaped the planet. “I suppose this makes me a Master?”

“Not quite.” Luke glanced over, quietly checking to make sure Ben’s wound had not come unglued—and that he was holding up okay after their long run from the Pool of Knowledge. “To make Master, you’d have to bring her back.”

“The ship? Or just Ab—?”

Ben’s question was cut short by a muffled crackle of Force-lightning coming from deep in the jungle behind them. They dropped over the sandy bank and whirled around to peer back through the foliage. Even drawing on the Force to sharpen his vision, Luke could see only twenty meters or so through the bird-moth blizzard and tangled curtain of fronds. He extended his Force awareness in the direction from which the sound had come and sensed only the planet’s primordial miasma of life, voracious and alien and tinged with darkness. Fortunately, both Skywalkers were already hiding in the Force, so it seemed unlikely the Sith could sense their location any better than he could theirs. But with Ben injured, the Shadow gone, and Abeloth on the loose, that was not much comfort.

“Sith,” Ben whispered. “Probably chasing Vestara.”

“Or wanting us to think they are,” Luke replied. He pulled a thermal detonator off his equipment harness and started back up the bank. “Go prep the Emiax.”

Ben grabbed his elbow. “Dad … no.”

Luke looked back, saw the concern in his son’s eyes, and sighed. “You’re worried about the girl?”

“I saw Taalon hit her during the fight,” Ben said. “They might believe her interference was on purpose.”

“If they believed that, she’d be dead already,” Luke replied. “Ben, I know you like bringing pretty girls to the light side, but Vestara isn’t like Tahiri. She was raised Sith.”

“Dad, that Force lightning was meant for someone, and it wasn’t us,” Ben replied. “It has to be Vestara.”

“No argument there. They’re trying to set her up to infiltrate.”

“They already did that,” Ben replied. “How many times do you think they’re going to use the same old trick?”

“Until we quit falling for it.”

Ben winced, but seemed to recognize the truth of what Luke was saying and nodded. “Okay, maybe it is the same trick,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t matter. Vestara is still a Sith, she still knows where Kesh is, and that makes her the best intelligence we have on the enemy. Can we really afford to give that up?”

Luke dropped his chin in surrender. “I suppose not,” he admitted. “But I’m not taking a chance with that girl. Any false moves and—”

“I know: blast her.” Ben nodded. “I just think she deserves a chance.”

“A last chance.” Luke returned the detonator to his equipment harness, then pointed his son toward Emiax again. “You’re going to have to bypass hatch security, so try to enter from the far side of the ship. It may buy you a couple of extra minutes if the Sith arrive before you’re in.”

“Will do,” Ben said, smiling. “That’s what I admire about you, Dad.”

“Always thinking?”

Ben shook his head. “So much confidence in your son.” He started down the bank in leaps in bounds. “How long do you think it’ll take me to pop a hatch lock older than you are?”

Luke would have made a retort about older locks being better engineered, but his audience was already at the bottom of the bank. He returned the detonator to his equipment harness, watching as his son rushed across the beach toward the Emiax. The young Jedi’s robes were ripped open, revealing an entire flank and hip stained brown with dried blood, and a puckered line showed where the wound had been closed with first-aid glue. The reminder of how close Ben had come to being killed made Luke ache with fear, but it also filled him with tremendous pride to see his son handling the injury with such humor and grace. And—though he remained convinced that forbearance was wasted on Vestara or any of the Lost Tribe Sith—Luke could not help admiring the young man’s compassion and determination to give others a second chance, or even a third.

Luke pulled his blaster, then crawled up over the bank and took a hiding place in the undergrowth. The jungle remained still, and for several minutes he lay smelling the musty soil, half expecting his ankle to cramp beneath the crushing pain of a constrictor vine, or his throat to fill with the venomous blossom of a fangthorn. But nothing attacked, and he was smart enough to understand just how frightening that was. Abeloth had played them, Jedi and Sith alike.

How far back her plan extended, Luke could not say. Perhaps escape had been her intention even during the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, when she had reached out to Ben and the other younglings at Shelter. Or perhaps she had fled her planet only in desperation, to escape those who had come to enslave or destroy her. The only thing Luke knew for certain was that her “death” had been a ruse—and that now she was aboard the Jade Shadow, flying out into the galaxy, alone and free.

Luke began to worry that the Sith might be approaching from a less obvious direction—then, finally, he saw a curtain of fronds shudder. Vestara appeared an instant later, running swiftly and in Force-enhanced silence. The arm beneath her injured shoulder was once again hanging limp, and her face was swollen, bloody, and mottled with bruises. Luke felt a pang of pity for her. Whether inflicted in anger or as part of a stratagem, the beating she had taken had clearly been real. Of course, he found it suspicious that none of her traumas was disabling or disfiguring—but then again, he might have dismissed even severe injuries as little more than a ploy to win Ben’s sympathy.

Vestara raced past his hiding place and stopped at the jungle’s edge, her shoulders sagging as she peered down on the river beach. Luke could not test her Force aura without running the risk that she would sense his presence, but the way she braced her hands on her hips and kicked at the ground suggested she was more angry at the Shadow’s absence than frightened by it. Still, she was hardly the kind to panic, and her apparent calmness did not necessarily mean her flight had been a ruse.

But when Vestara uttered what he assumed was a Keshiri curse and remained on the edge of the bank, awaiting her pursuers, Luke knew her life had never been in danger. The beating had been a ploy designed to play on his son’s affections, and it made Luke’s stomach churn to know how hurt Ben would be when he learned how callously the girl was trying to manipulate him. Sadly, that was not a wound Luke dared help his son avoid. Ben would understand beguilement only after he had been exploited by it; he would accept the weakness of the human heart only after his own heart had betrayed him. Before he could be the truly great Jedi he was destined to become, Ben needed to learn these lessons in his gut as much as in his mind. It tore Luke up, but as a father all he could do was watch and be there to catch Ben when he fell.

Vestara had been standing at the jungle’s edge for only a moment when the muffled thud of running boots sounded in the foliage behind her. She turned and, as High Lord Taalon emerged from the fronds, she began to speak in Keshiri. To Luke’s astonishment, Taalon replied with a fork of Force-lightning that caught Vestara square in the chest and sent her tumbling over the sandy bank and out of sight.

Luke waited until Taalon had stepped more clearly into view, with the half-hidden form of Gavar Khai moving through the jungle behind him, then disengaged his blaster’s safety. The two Sith must have sensed their danger, for by the time Luke had depressed the trigger and sent a flurry of bolts screaming toward them, both were already diving for cover. On the way down, Taalon took a bolt under the collarbone and a second along his neck, but Khai simply vanished into the undergrowth.

Continuing to lay suppression fire with one hand, Luke pulled the detonator off his equipment harness and set a three-second arming delay, then switched the fuse to MOTION and tossed it onto the ground about a meter in front of him. He backed away still firing, and by the time the two Sith began to return fire, he was already leaving the jungle. He reached out to Ben in the Force, felt only impatient alarm in response, and realized that his son was having trouble overriding the Emiax’s hatch security. Luke sprayed a dozen more bolts back into the jungle, then stopped firing and hazarded a glance down toward the shuttle.

Ben was standing on the near side of the craft, his lock slicer pressed to the hull just above the hatch controls. He was frantically punching keys and watching the slicer’s screen, searching for some clue to the security scheme. Halfway down the embankment, Vestara was just beginning to recover from the effects of the Force lightning, her body still trembling and jerking as she struggled to her knees. A thin wisp of smoke was rising from her torso, where the heat of the attack had burned a hole in her robes.

Luke returned his attention to the jungle, and a few moments later a frond shuddered. He sent a flurry of bolts flying toward the movement, fell quiet for a few seconds, then opened fire at a shadow that might—or might not—have been a figure lying in the undergrowth. He was rewarded with a loud Keshiri curse, and the shadow rolled out of view.

Deciding the Sith would now grow cautious and approach more slowly, Luke retreated a couple of meters down the bank, then bounded to Vestara’s side. Her face was battered, a trio of lightning burns showed through a hole in her robes, and the odor of charred cloth filled the air around her. She certainly appeared to be someone in dire need of Jedi protection.

Luke wasn’t fooled, of course … but he did feel sorry for her. He pulled her to her feet and started across the beach toward the Emiax, where Ben had grown so frustrated that he had stuffed the lock slicer back into his equipment belt and was now examining the hatch seam with his lightsaber in hand.

“Abeloth stole the Shadow,” Luke explained, dragging the still-shaky Vestara along by an elbow. “So you’re going to help us borrow the Emiax.”

“I … I’m not sure I can,” Vestara said. “High Lord Taalon is the only one who knows—”

The thunderous crackle of a thermal detonator sounded from atop the sandy bank. They glanced back in time to see a ten-meter sphere of jungle vanishing in a crackling ball of white. Once the dazzle had faded from Luke’s eyes—revealing only a glassy, rimless crater where an instant before there had been towering tree ferns and club mosses—he looked back to Vestara.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Did that trap get Taalon and your father?”

Vestara raised her chin. “Would it have gotten you?”

“Not even close.” Luke smiled and started across the beach again, this time dragging her along at a run. “Which leaves you with a choice—help us with the Emiax, or stay behind and explain to High Lord Taalon why you failed at your assignment.”

“Assignment?” Vestara echoed. Like any good spy, she was playing innocent until the last. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw your reaction when you realized the Shadow was gone.” Luke reached down and plucked the lightsaber off her belt. “And if it’s going to come to another fight, I’d be a fool to let it start with uneven odds.”

Always a quick thinker, Vestara needed only two steps to make up her mind. She turned toward the Emiax, where Ben had ignited his lightsaber and was just preparing to plunge the blade into the hatch seam.

“Put that lightsaber away, you nerf-brain!” She pulled free of Luke and sprang across the last ten paces to the shuttle. “All you need is the Force.”

“It has an internal latch?” Ben asked, brow rising. “Like the Shadow?”

Vestara rolled her eyes. “Nothing that complicated, Ben.” She shifted her gaze to the control panel, and the hatch seal broke with a soft hiss. “You just needed to disengage the cabin lockouts.”

As the boarding ramp dropped into place, Ben’s face reddened. “That was next on my list.”

“Sure it was.”

Vestara grabbed Ben’s hand and started up the ramp with him. In the same instant a prickle of danger sense raced down Luke’s spine, and he turned to see Taalon and Khai standing in the crater left by the thermal detonator. He opened fire immediately, forcing them to drop for cover, and retreated toward the boarding ramp.

Luke had not even reached the bottom when he felt himself being lifted with the Force and carried aboard the Emiax.

“You Jedi,” Vestara said. Luke dropped to the deck at her feet, then watched as the ramp-toggle rocked into the RAISED position. “Don’t you use the Force for anything?”