Skyborn

Luke’s eyes shifted toward the mirrored canopy section, and he caught Ben’s gaze. “Is this what bothered you when you were at Shelter?” He was referring to a time that was ancient history to Ben—the last part of the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, when the Jedi had been forced to hide their young at a secret base deep inside the Maw.

“Did you feel like someone was watching you?”

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“How should I know?” Ben asked, suddenly uneasy—and unsure why. By all accounts, he had been an unruly, withdrawn toddler while he was at Shelter, and he recalled being afraid of the Force for years after-ward. But he had no clear memories of Shelter itself, or what it had felt like to be there. “I was two.”

“You didhave feelings when you were two,” his father said mildly. “You didhave a mind.”

Ben sighed, knowing what his father wanted, then said, “You’d better take the ship.”

“I have the ship,” Luke confirmed, reaching for the copilot’s yoke. “Just close your eyes. Let the Force carry your thoughts back to Shelter.”

“I know how to meditate.” Almost instantly, Ben felt bad for grumbling and added, “But thanks for the advice.”

“Don’t mention it,” Luke said in a

good- natured

way. “That’s what fathers do—offer unwanted advice.”

Ben closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and deliberately. Each time he inhaled, he drew the Force into himself, and each time he exhaled, he sent it flowing throughout his body. He had no conscious memories of Shelter that were his own, so he envisioned a holo-graph of the facility that he had seen in the Jedi Archives.

The image showed a handful of habitation modules clinging to the surface of an asteroid fragment, their domes clustered around the looming cylinder of a power core. In his mind’s eye, Ben descended into the gaudy yellow docking bay at the edge of the facility . . . and then he was two years old again, a frightened little boy holding a stranger’s hand as his parents departed in the Jade Shadow.

An unwarranted sense of relief welled up inside Ben as he grew lost in a time when life had seemed so much easier. The last fourteen years began to feel like a long, terrible nightmare. Jacen’s fall to the dark side had mill_9780345519399_2p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 6/4/09 10:1

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never happened, Ben had not been molded into an ado-lescent assassin, and his mother had not died fighting Jacen. All those sad memories were still just bad dreams, the unhappy imaginings of a frightened young mind.

Then the Shadowslipped through the containment field and ignited her engines. In the blink of an eye she dwindled from a trio of blue ion circles into a pinpoint of light to nothing at all, and suddenly Ben was alone in the darkest place in the galaxy, one child among dozens entrusted to a small group of worried adults who—despite their cheerful voices and reassuring presences—had very clammy palms and scary, anxious eyes.

Two- year- old Ben reached toward the Shadowwith his free hand and his heart, and he sensed his mother and father reaching back. Though he was too young to know he was being touched through the Force, he stopped being afraid . . . until a dark tentacle of need began to slither up into the aching tear of his abandonment. He thought for an instant that he was just sad about being left behind, but the tentacle grew as real as his breath, and he began to sense in it an alien loneliness as desperate and profound as his own. It wanted to draw him close and keep him safe, to take the place of his parents and never let him be alone again.

Terrified and confused, young Ben pulled away, simultaneously drawing in on himself and yanking his hand from the grasp of the silver- haired lady who was holding it.

Then suddenly he was back in the cockpit of the Jade Shadow,staring into the

fire- rimmed voids ahead.

Scattered around their perimeter were the smaller whorls of half a dozen more distant rings, their fiery light burning bright and steady against the starless murk of the deep Maw.

“Well?” his father asked. “Anything feel familiar?”

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Ben swallowed. He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself wanting to withdraw from the Force all over again. “Are we sure we need to find these guys?”

Luke raised a brow. “So it isfamiliar.”

“Maybe.” Ben couldn’t say whether the two feelings were related, and at the moment he didn’t care. There was something hungry in the Maw, something that would still be there waiting for him. “I mean, the Aing-Tii call them Mind Drinkers. That can’t be good.”

“Ben, you’re changing the subject.” Luke’s tone was more interested than disapproving, as though Ben’s behavior were only one part of a much larger puzzle.

“Is there something you don’t want to talk about?”

“I wish.” Ben told his father about the dark tentacle that had reached out to him after the Shadowdeparted Shelter so many years ago. “I guess what we’re feeling now might be related. There was definitely some . . . thingkeeping tabs on me at Shelter.”

Luke considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You were pretty attached to your mother.

Maybe you were just feeling abandoned and made up a

‘friend’ to take her place.”

“A tentaclefriend?”

“You said it was a darktentacle,” Luke continued thoughtfully, “and guilt is a dark emotion. Maybe you were feeling guilty about replacing us with an imagi-nary friend.”

“And maybe youdon’t want to believe the tentacle was real because it would mean you left your two- year-old son someplace really dangerous,” Ben countered.

He caught his father’s eye in the mirrored section again.

“I hope you’re not going to try to psychoanalyze this away, because there’s a big hole in your theory.”

Luke frowned. “And that would be?”

“I was two,” Ben reminded him. “And by all accounts, I didn’t feel guilty about anythingat that age.”

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Luke gri

“It’s not mytentacle monster,” Ben retorted, miffed at having his concerns mocked. “You’re the one who made me dredge it up.”

Luke’s expression hardened into admonishment.

“But you’rethe one who’s still afraid of it.”

The observation struck home. Whether or not the dark presence he remembered was real, he had emerged from Shelter wary of abandonment and frightened of the Force. And it had been those fears that had allowed Jacen to lead him into darkness.

Ben sighed. “Right. Whatever this thing is, I’ve got to face it.” After a moment, he asked, “So how do we find these Mind Drinkers?”

“ ‘The Path of True Enlightenment runs through the Chasm of Perfect Darkness.’ ” Luke was quoting Tadar’Ro, the Aing- Tii monk who had told them that Jacen had left the Kathol Rift to search out the Mind Drinkers. “ ‘The way is narrow and treacherous, but if you can follow it, you will find what you seek.’ ”

Ben swung his gaze toward the black holes ahead. The brilliant whorls of their accretion disks were burning hottest and brightest along their i

“Wait. Tadar’Ro said perfectdarkness, right?” Ben started to have a bad feeling about the monk’s instructions. “Like, beyond an event horizon?”