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  Finally, Cree’Ar stepped toward her. His large red eyes seemed to glow. “Why have you honored me with a visit, Baroness?”

  “Even on other worlds,” she said, “word has reached us of your fine work, your dedication. Indeed, Administrator Organa Solo calls you a miracle worker.”

  He spread his hands modestly.

  “Duro,” she said, “has obviously been made a dumping ground for other species. My people may face a similar fate. Contacts whom I met up in Bburru City say that you are a close disciple of someone who is trying to turn that tide, on behalf of your own people.” In the baroness role, she usually got further by piling flattery on a subject than by bullying.

  She piled it deeper.

  From the moment they entered the chamber, Jaina had sensed something odd. She hadn’t encountered any Duros here—her med runner had been cleared directly to ground, without stopping in orbit—but she didn’t like this guy.

  Hesitantly, she reached out with a flicker of the Force. How hostile was he, really?

  She felt nothing. She couldn’t even find him.

  She kept her eyes lowered with an effort. She hadn’t heard of Yuuzhan Vong masquerading as Duros, but if they could breed creatures that made them look convincingly human, this would be only a small step further. The only way she’d know for sure would be to unmask him.

  One problem. The masquers’ activating spot was alongside the nose, and Duros had no noses.

  Cree’Ar’s face was only a blur, anyway. Jaina hesitantly directed a flicker of the Force toward it. She stroked the spot on his face where she thought his nose would be, if he were human.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried stroking another spot, slightly left, away from the blur’s center.

  Still nothing. Meanwhile, her mind raced. What if she needed to draw her lightsaber? She could hardly see the guy!

  He batted his face distractedly, the way a nerf herder might flick away summergnats.

  But she’d practiced endlessly against remotes, sometimes blindfolded. Remotes had no more Force presence than a Yuuzhan Vong.

  She pressed outward again.

  Mara sat stiff-backed on Cree’Ar’s shipping crate, as if it were a baronial throne. Dr. Cree’Ar had finally consented to explain some of his philosophy.

  “… undermine local jurisdictions, and … ai!”

  He flung up both knobby hands, but not before Mara saw something horribly familiar. Just below one of the dark folds that crossed his face, his gray hide rippled. A corner peeled back, exposing pale skin and the edge of a black tattoo.

  She sprang to her feet, seized her lightsaber out of her amethyst-colored tunic’s folds, and activated it. Instantly, Jaina jumped back, whipping her own lightsaber from her dark, heavy sleeve.

  Blue-gray skin kept shrinking, revealing a skeletal face with bluish eye sacs. As if his hide had turned to liquid, the loose flap melted down inside his laboratory coat.

  Cree’Ar stood his ground, laughing. For all Mara could see, he was unarmed.

  “Don’t move,” she warned him. “You’re not wearing armor, and you’re vulnerable.”

  Cree’Ar’s laughter died, and his pale lip curled. “Mara Jade Skywalker, is it? Why aren’t you dead?”

  Caught off guard, Mara demanded, “Have we met?”

  The Yuuzhan Vong tossed back his hideous head. “No wonder the New Republic can’t hold on to a galaxy. Even its so-called heroes are stupid. Yes, we have met. I’ve nearly killed you.”

  Jaina took one step closer. “I know that voice,” she muttered.

  “You should,” the alien growled. “Let me give you a hint—”

  “Rhommamool.” Jaina held her lightsaber low. “You’re Nom Anor! You tricked people into believing you were human, then you tricked them into thinking you were killed.”

  He inclined his head. “You, at least, approach worthiness. But you are not worthy yet.”

  Mara gripped her lightsaber, thinking back to another meeting with Nom Anor, at Monor II. The native Sunesi had invited several hundred diplomats to the accession of their tenth priest-prince, Agapos the Tenth. Some trigger-poppy splinter group had threatened a minor diplomat from Coruscant, so Mara went along as a bodyguard. She’d also wanted to see Monor II’s glittering, cirrifog-laden atmosphere.

  “You wore a black mask and black robes,” Jaina said. “What happened to your slave, that mousy little man?”

  The creature’s lips peeled back in a sneer. “Shok Tinoktin was well rewarded for faithful service.”

  Mara glanced around the laboratory. Even if Anor had biological weapons in plain sight, she might not recognize them—but she would love to catch him alive. She’d made a science of stomping on massive egos, of throwing people off guard and probing for their weaknesses.

  “So the petty troublemaker is making petty trouble again,” she said, raising one eyebrow.

  “Petty?” He reached toward the lab bench.

  “Freeze,” she ordered. “Pick anything up and you’re dead.”

  His fingers twitched toward the flask, the one he had been holding when she entered the room. “You couldn’t reach me before I threw this. It’s full of coomb spores, Jade Skywalker. The spores I painted on a hundred abominable breath masks, before that outdoor ceremony.”

  Mara’s stomach lurched. “They didn’t all sicken right away,” she recalled. She’d fallen ill two months later. “The epidemiologists eventually concluded multiple causes.” But that occasion had been fingered as the single time all those sick people were in one place.

  He laughed. “They were meant to conclude that. The coomb spore’s sheath dissolves at different rates in different species. This is your worst fear, Jedi.” His fingers twitched again. “Relapse. Weakness. Death. A much higher dose than before, and that was fatal in all other cases. All species.”

  In that instant, she realized how vulnerable she was. If she got sick now, her child could be destroyed—if he wasn’t already doomed.

  Anor could infect Jaina, too. Jaina had other senses than eyesight, but she was in no shape for hand-to-hand combat against someone who couldn’t be sensed through the Force—and whose weapon was suspended in a liquid.

  “You never answered my question,” he called. “Why are you still alive?”

  “You’re the last one I’d tell.” Vergere was still out there—somewhere. “Get back, Jaina.”

  Then Mara lunged, slicing low with her lightsaber. Only a feint, but instead of returning her attack, he turned and fled—not up the passage where they’d come, but beyond the lab counter, toward a smaller door.

  He left the flask on the countertop.

  Her impulse was to chase him down. Trap! her instincts shrieked. Don’t follow!

  Then her danger sense went off like a siren. She hesitated as Jaina sprinted around the laboratory bench. She had to make the right call. Three lives were at stake, and only one was in fighting trim.

  “Blast,” she muttered, kicking the elevated heels off her fancy shoes. “Jaina, this way!” She spun toward the passage where they’d come in.

  Three retorts like ricocheting projectile shots sounded overhead. Startled, she glanced up. A crack opened in the stony ceiling. It branched, branched again, and again.

  She waved Jaina toward the tunnel, crying, “Run!” A chunk of stone hit the floor beside her.

  Jaina reached the doorway. All around them—ceiling, walls—soft rock crumbled. Mara pushed Jaina ahead of her, reaching deep inside herself, trying to divert each stone as it fell. She split a dozen with her lightsaber.

  But they fell too thickly. As rock dust choked off the light ahead and behind her, she pushed Jaina down, fell on her, and pushed out with the Force. She kept the presence of mind to extinguish her lightsaber.

  The noise went on, like a powerful waterfall, for several age-long seconds.

  Jaina rolled out from under her. She’d killed her lightsaber, too. In utter darkness, Mara couldn’t see what Jaina was doing, but she
did hear a plaintive “Ow!”

  “Hit your head?” Mara asked quietly.

  “Slightly.” Momentary silence. “You’re keeping that up with the Force?”

  “No. Just my radiant personality.” She softened her voice. “Do you still have the rebreathers?”

  “Yes. Here.”

  “Keep mine for now.”

  Mara rose to a crouch, planted her hands against hard stone, and tried pushing up harder with the Force. If only a small stone-fall surrounded them, it ought to move. Or shift, at least.

  It didn’t.

  “Ten to one,” she grumbled, “he brought his own kind of rock chewers here to Duro. He dug out his own side tunnel—and while he did, he set traps for Leia’s security people.”

  Jaina’s voice sounded sour. “You retreated because of me, didn’t you? We could’ve taken him. We could’ve killed him, right there.”

  “I’ll get that creature if it’s the last thing I do.” Mara hadn’t hated anyone this desperately since …

  Well, since Luke Skywalker. A lifetime ago.

  Luke? She stretched out and felt his concern. I’m all right, she assured him, for now. Don’t drop what you’re doing just yet. He wouldn’t catch words, only sensation—but he would catch a lot of that.

  Jaina said, “There’s a good chance the rockfall’s shorter, back the way he went.”

  “Point,” Mara said. “And that it’s also the way he wanted us to go.” Her instincts had warned her, and she would face a hundred other horrors before she let that Sithspawn expose her child to his deadly spores.

  Maybe the flask held something else, this time, but she’d heard truth in his boast. He had infected her.

  The same instincts were finally blaring, loud and clear, that it was no Yuuzhan Vong bioweapon deep inside her body. It was a normal, defenseless child. A Skycrawler, as Leia had teased optimistically, shortly after her wedding.

  She thumbed her comlink, though she didn’t have much hope. “Leia? Do you copy?”

  Silence.

  “Hello, Gateway. This is an emergency. Does anyone read me?”

  Nothing. The stone was too thick.

  “I think the air smells strange, Aunt Mara.”

  “Put your rebreather on.” Had that flask on the countertop shattered? “We’re not getting any dust through this Force bubble. I don’t honestly know what else might get through, but probably not microbes.” Then she said, “I need you to join with me, so I can nudge the bubble higher in the direction we want to go. I’ll try to slide rocks off the back of the bubble while I lift other rocks ahead of us, and I’ll fill in those gaps before the ceiling collapses any lower. Do you see what I’ve got in mind?”

  “Do you think it’ll work?” Jaina sounded dubious.

  Mara frowned. “I’d love to hear your better plan.”

  After several seconds, Jaina answered glumly. “Can you picture what it is you want to do?”

  “I’m working on it.” Visualizing this wrong would flatten their bubble of safety. She needed to move about a hundred rocks simultaneously, up, over, and behind them. Then another hundred, and another. It could take hours. “Open to me, Jaina. The way you used to do in training.”

  She was glad they’d grabbed the masks.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Still wearing his Kubaz disguise, Luke paused in a tall residential tower’s hallway, where Jacen had been escorted. Another sudden crisis had caught Mara unawares. Again, adrenaline gusted through him. Again, he had to fight the urge to drop everything, dash to the docks, and go to her. Instead, he reached deep and listened.

  Details didn’t reach him. Her alert level dropped rapidly to her usual deadly calm under fire. He couldn’t make out much else.

  Anakin hurried back toward him. “What?” he demanded.

  “Your aunt.”

  Luke shut his eyes, alert for details. Earlier, he’d caught the sense of danger, then anger, then a moment of painful decision, of shoving aside her considerable pride. It was harder to flee than to stand and fight. Didn’t he know it …

  Now he plainly caught her flicker of assurance, focused toward him. Unbeaten, she was exerting herself powerfully. He caught the image of darkness, and thousands of stones, and the daunting job of repositioning them.

  He formed a query. It would take him hours to reach her. He wouldn’t hesitate to get to his X-wing, though.

  He’d barely shaped the thought when he felt Jaina’s presence alongside Mara’s. With Jaina’s help, she felt confident that she had her situation under control.

  And his child’s!

  He sensed her gratitude, though. That fortified him like few things he’d ever felt. Reluctantly, he turned to follow Anakin through the twisting halls of the massive residential complex’s twelfth story. As he did, he tried threading some of his own strength—love, and calm power—into the bond that joined him with Mara. He had no idea if that would give her more energy, but he sensed she was drawing something. She could need everything Jaina had, and more. It comforted him to try, even if he had no assurance this would work—no assurance but his faith in Mara, and in the Force itself.

  Concluding his business with Vice-Director Brarun hadn’t taken long. Brarun had nothing to sell, and that seemed to confirm the theory that some of the Duros were stockpiling goods, hoping to take one of their orbital cities and leave Duro entirely.

  Luke could see them doing that only if they’d sold out the rest of the system, particularly the refugees dirtside, laboring to build a new world. He’d sent R2-D2, plugged in back at the hostel, another message: Search CorDuro records for anything that smacked of Peace Brigade involvement with CorDuro or SELCORE itself. He hadn’t forgotten Karrde’s warning that there were suspicions that the Intelligence division, maybe even the Advisory Council itself, had been infiltrated. Maybe SELCORE had, too. Unfortunately, he hadn’t had the opportunity to evaluate the different councilors during that last meeting.

  He glanced at the tiny heads-up display inside his goggles. If R2-D2 found anything, he could send an alert, then a message that would repeat until Luke signaled him by comlink.

  First, though, he had to find Jacen. Luke had seen clearly, in Brarun’s office, that Jacen stood at a major junction on his journey. Forsaking the Force might not be as deadly as turning to the dark side, but that wasn’t the future Luke wanted for his nephew.

  Evening had arrived, and Bburru City’s big lights dimmed outside the hallway viewbubbles. Two tall Duros in CorDuro uniforms waited on either side of an unmarked door around the next bend.

  “Take the near one,” Luke murmured.

  Gently, almost tenderly, Luke pushed the farther guard down into a deep sleep. The Duros sagged against the synthplas-mosaic wall. The other guard followed him down.

  “Good,” he told Anakin. “Stay out here. If anyone else shows up, put them down the same way. I shouldn’t be long.”

  Jacen’s host had left him in a bedroom with a large, round transparisteel window and two hallway guards. Standing beside the window, he’d watched the big lights fade on Bburru’s central plaza. The open space was almost large enough to create the illusion of a living planet, with diagonal bracing struts that ran from street level to the faintly blue artificial ceiling. As in the avenues, raised planters supported massive trees that were layered with vines. It was a far cry from the jungles of Yavin 4, but Jacen was starting to understand why the Duros would rather live here than down in the murk.

  Now he lay on a soft bed in semidarkness, wondering if he’d done the right thing after all. Brarun didn’t seem to be in any hurry to finish negotiating tariffs.

  The hall door opened silently.

  Jacen slid his hand under his pillow and got a grip on his lightsaber. A dark form slipped through. Jacen saw the short trunk and goggles of a Kubaz, then heard as the door slid shut, “Jacen, it’s me.”

  Jacen knew the voice. He would’ve sensed the presence, if he’d been alert to the Force. He let go of his lightsaber,
but he didn’t wave on a light.

  “Master Skywalker, there could be listening devices—”

  “Not at the moment.” Luke sank onto his bed’s foot, moving as silently as a shadow. He pulled off his trunked mask and laid it on the bed beside him. “What is it you’re trying to accomplish, Jacen? How can I help?”

  Jacen didn’t need any further encouragement. He poured out his vision, relating every detail he could remember. When he got to the parts about Luke in shining white robes, a magnificent warrior of the light, his uncle’s cheek twitched and he looked away, seemingly embarrassed. Most vivid of all was the voice, though—and the command to stand firm.

  “I didn’t,” Jacen said. “I slipped. I fell, barely on the dark side of … of the balance point. Everything started to slide. Everything.” He shuddered, remembering the stars turning dark. “Do we have the right,” he asked, “to use this … magnificent, terrifying light … as if we were in charge of the universe?”

  Faintly lit through the window, Luke frowned. “Jacen, the Force is our heritage. Unless we use it, we have no better way to safeguard peace and justice than any police group.”

  “Many Jedi are misusing their powers.”

  “Not all,” Luke answered softly.

  “I want to reach them,” Jacen said. “I’ve finally had time to think this through. I’m marginally famous, just because of you and Mom and Dad … and Anakin,” he admitted, “and Jaina. If I go out on a limb, if I refuse to channel the Force in aggressive ways, other Jedi would have to pay attention.”

  “It’s a noble cause.” Luke’s weight shifted on the bed. “But are you ready to stake your life on it?”

  Jacen had thought about just that. “Yes,” he said. “Even if I died, my death might wake up the rest of the Jedi. It might prick their consciences into realizing they can’t just blast around with all the power at their disposal, without suffering consequences.”

  “But it’s you,” Luke said gently, “who would suffer the consequences. Not any of the others.”

  “I can’t do anything about them. I can only offer myself.”