CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
REPULSION
Immersion in the dark side of the Force can seem stronger, more freeing, more triumphant than existing within balance. But only from the outside. Do not be tempted. Those who are swallowed by the darkness lose not only balance and control. They lose their souls.
—Master Shall Mar, “A Life in Balance,” 7,541 TYA
At the last moment she grasped the Force with everything she had and brought it before her.
Then there was darkness.
In her dreams she chases Dal through the Old City forever. He is always only just ahead of her—a whisper around a corner, a laugh in the next ancient cavern, and on the surface his shadow is just out of reach behind walls or around the sides of dunes. One step ahead, however fast she runs, however slow she walks. But she has no sense that he is teasing her. There’s a repulsion between them, and as she moves toward Dal, he moves away from her. Perhaps that repulsion has always been there, even from when they were children. She remembers many times playing together, but now it also seems to her that those times were shadowed by the knowledge of Dal’s growing wanderlust and his resentment of his family; and her childhood self was able to ignore these aspects of him. She sees his child’s expression with adult eyes, and knows what will come.
“I feel terrible,” the voice said, “but you look worse. Can you open your eyes? Open your eyes. Please, Lanoree.” Lanoree tried, but her eyelids were too heavy, her head throbbing and expanding to squeeze them closed.
“Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.” She tried to squeeze and a white-hot sun of pain exploded in her chest and across her torso, stabbing into her neck, jaw, and skull. She tried to scream, but taking in a deep breath only ignited the pain even more.
“Okay, lie still and …” The voice faded, and Lanoree felt herself falling. The depths below her were dark and filled with malignancy. They might have been in the Gree caverns and halls beneath the surface remnants of the Old City, the stinking sewers of Greenwood Station, or the blazing mines on Sunspot. Where she was did not matter. The darkness promised death.
She swam in the dark, but had no strength to stop her fall.
She was moving. Heat buffeted her from all sides. The stink of burning overrode everything else—an old, deep-set burning, molten rock and singed eons. I’m still in the mines, she thought, and she tried to open her eyes.
Whatever she was lying on struck something and jarred her, and she screamed at the pain that surged through her veins like acid. She tried using the Force to smother some of the agony, but it was only partially successful. Movement ceased and a shadow appeared above her.
“Lanoree?”
She saw Tre Sana’s outline as he bent over her, his lekku silhouetted against the soft red glow of their surroundings. What’s happening? she wanted to ask. Is the mine on fire, is Dal destroying everything behind him again, have they taken the Peacemaker … what are you doing here? But all that emerged from her mouth was a deep groan.
“I’m getting you out,” he said. “Ironholgs is pulling. What did you do to him? He’s not like any droid I’ve ever …”
Senses fading again, Lanoree tried her best to hang on. But she knew that she was gravely wounded. She felt hollowed out, and wondered how much of a hole Dal had blown in her with his blaster.
Dal, her brother, with his blaster …
This time when she fell the Force was there to catch her, and through agony she had a moment of ecstasy as she felt it surround and flow through her.
The roof of the mine was on fire. Tre must have dragged her into a huge open chamber belowground, though she could not remember moving through any on her way down. The high ceiling was a splash of red and orange, yellow and white, swirling so slowly in boiling flame that she could make out shapes and features. Some civilizations worshipped fire, and now she knew why.
But if they didn’t move soon, they would be consumed.
“Almost at the ship,” Tre’s voice said. “Lanoree … you awake? We’re almost at the ship. And for shak’s sake I’m going to need you, then.”
Almost at the ship? she thought. Then she realized what she was seeing, and for a moment the all-encompassing pain was swallowed by a creeping, prickling fear crawling from her mind and across her whole body.
They were on Sunspot’s surface heading for the Peacemaker, and the planet’s sky was ablaze.
Given context, the sheer size and scope of the scene above her made more sense. The air itself appeared to have been ignited, and great swaths of flame rolled in random directions, exploding against one another in cataclysmic impacts. Lightning arced across her vision, purple streaks parting into thousands of white-hot forks. Sheets of lightning waved. Even greater explosions boomed deep within the fiery atmosphere, billowing outward in gouts that must have been ten kilometers in diameter.
“Malterra …” Lanoree whispered, and Tre’s shadow closed on her, lekku twitching frantically.
“What?”
“The other planet … Malterra … draws close.”
“You’re telling me.” He stood again and continued pushing. From somewhere she could not see, Ironholgs clattered and clicked, and she heard the rapid padding steps of the droid’s feet as it helped transport Lanoree back to her ship.
Whose choice was it to come? she thought. But she knew right away. However much personality she projected onto Ironholgs, it was still just a droid. It would have taken a person to make the decision to venture out in this heat and chaos. Tre had come for her … and she had no idea how long it had been.
“Tre.”
“Not now. Almost there.”
“Tre!” She groaned as waves of pain radiated from her chest. But the stretcher stopped again, and he bent down so he could hear her above the lightning and fiery roars. “How long …?”
“Almost half a day,” he said. “On the scanners I saw the other ship take off, and when you didn’t come back …” His lekku shrugged.
“Oh, no …”
“Lanoree … you’ve got a hole in you the size of my fist. I’ve no idea how you’re still alive. So shut up while I get you back to the Peacemaker, and then …” He started pushing again, and she felt suddenly bad for him. He had no idea what to do.
But she did.
She remained silent, floating in a sea of pain as Tre finally reached the Peacemaker and pushed her inside.
As the door hissed shut, Tre struggled to shift her from the makeshift stretcher to her cot. She was hardly any help. She rested her head to one side and examined the stretcher, and she was filled with admiration. It was a door from one of the mine’s elevator cages, one side ragged from where it had been removed from its mount, and at one end was fixed one of Ironholgs’s suspension units. It seemed to be smoking a little, ready to expire.
Lanoree lifted her hand. “Tre. Here.”
He sat next to her on the cot, sweating, exhausted. She remembered how sick he had been when she’d last seen him. Such a short time ago, but already he looked thinner than she remembered, and older.
“Take my hand,” she said. Speaking sent pain lancing through her chest, but some things needed to be said.
He did so, breathing heavily.
“Thank you.” She squeezed his hand and nodded, grimacing at another wave of agony but never breaking eye contact with him. “And now … you have to … trust me.”
Tre’s expression barely changed as she instructed him which cabinet to open and what to bring out. Even when he saw what he brought out, he seemed almost unmoved. Perhaps he had seen more of what Master Dam-Powl could do than Lanoree had first suspected.
“Now help me sit up,” she said. “I don’t have very long.”
In that room long ago with Master Dam-Powl, before the tragedy with Dal and while Lanoree was still wide-eyed with wonder and potential, the lessons she learned had felt amazing.
Your future lies in the alchemy of flesh, Dam-Powl had said. I saw it in you the moment we met, and nothing has dissuaded me from that. It is a talent, for some, that lies on the edges of acceptability. It is a strong, challenging power, and you must be firmly balanced to attempt it. You must not let heavier desires tempt you. The dark side lurks close to what I do here, Lanoree, and I am always vigilant. Don’t be tempted. Don’t be drawn. Maintain your balance.
The words had always remained with her. Remembering them now Lanoree did as instructed, but there was too much pain, too much pressure. Her mind wanted to find balance in the Force, but her heart forged onward. Dal would not wait for her to be ready. Every moment she wasted here brought them all closer to tragedy.
“You might want to turn away,” she told Tre. But Tre only shook his head and sat in the corner of the cabin, eyes half-closed. After she had saved herself, she’d do what she could for him.
The experiment was as she had left it. Traveling alone, she had long spells when she could concentrate on perfecting such alchemies, and though she was still young, she knew that her talent was great. Proof of that lay before her now. She lifted the cover and the flesh throbbed. Blood dribbled from imperfect yet adequate veins. Vestigial limbs waved weakly and without purpose. At one edge a blind eye opened, pupil milky white. Even if it did see, there was no mind to understand.
The iris had her coloring because it was a part of her.
The life that animated this flesh was formed by Lanoree and drawn from the Force. Over time she had molded the single collection of cells—taken from her own arm, a splash of blood, and marrow—into this, an object with a form of life that was all her own. Its movement still troubled her, as did its partial familiarity. But where there was no brain, there was no mind, and without a mind it was meat. That was all. Living, pulsing, replicating meat. She continued to tell herself that even as she wondered whether it felt pain.
The power she sometimes experienced as she molded flesh to her own desires was shocking, but right now she found meaning in her experiments at last. It’s not just alchemy, Dam-Powl had told her. It’s not just learning the art for the sake of it. It’s practicing to be the artist.
Lanoree gathered herself, resting her hands on either side of the experiment’s small pedestal. Her wound was deep and wide, its edges weeping and its depth burning. But at the moment Dal had tried to kill her, she had gathered herself behind the Force, and it had swallowed much of the impact. If she hadn’t done that—an instant, an instinctive action—her heart and lungs would have been blasted across the mine’s floor. Her brother believed her dead. At least she had given herself a chance.
She breathed deeply and welcomed the Force flowing through her. Closed her eyes. Shut away the pain that threatened to make her sick, the tiredness that lured her down to sleep, and death. The Force grew stronger in her, tingling in her fingertips and toes, her neck, her wounded chest, and she directed it into her experiment.
The alchemy came alive within her. It was a burning star with a dark heart. That, I have to watch, she thought, but agonies swept through her, distracting her. The power was wonderful. She smiled.
The flesh before her started to bubble and boil, and without opening her eyes she stripped off her tattered robe and undergarments and leaned forward.
The smell of burning flesh filled the Peacemaker.
She heard a pitiful whine from Tre but did not look. If he was afraid, he could cover his eyes.
Bogan loomed and she opened her mind’s eye to embrace its darkened surface, and at the same time she felt a warm, wet touch between her breasts. It caressed the angry wound and numbed. Lanoree welcomed the contact and sought more, leaning farther forward until she was directly over the pedestal of flesh. My flesh, my experiment, my very own alchemy of self.
She sought and found Ashla, a bright spark within the Force. And experiencing herself in balance, the talents she had been made aware of at Anil Kesh, and which she had been practicing for so long, began to flow.
Flesh flowed with them.
Bogan is in her dreams. She was there before becoming a Ranger, but only briefly in the company of others. A visit, an education. And in her memory Ashla was always a constant light that drew her away from darkness.
But in these dreams there is no Ashla. She stands on a hillside on Bogan, beside the ruins of stone buildings thousands of years old, looking up at another Bogan staring down. Two moons, both of them dark. No hope of light.
Lanoree sprang awake and sat up, clutching her hands to her chest. She was on her cot, still naked but with a thin sheet gathered around her waist. Ironholgs clacked. Tre sat slumped in the corner, head to one side and eyes barely open.
“The sleeper wakes,” he said weakly, and he looked very sick.
Beside her cot, on the floor between her and Tre, was the experiment. It was withered and dry now, the petrified remnants of something long dead. Even the blood that had dripped onto its base was dark, dry, and flaked, as if it had fallen long ago.
She looked down at the wound in her chest and took in a deep, startled breath. Her skin was rough and scarred, and there was a definite depression in her chest. But the blaster hole had vanished. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, twisting to the left and right, and felt no pain inside. Nothing out of place. Nothing missing.
“You look better,” Tre said.
“You look worse.” Lanoree stood from the cot and quickly snatched up her clothes, pulling them on, then knelt beside Tre, resting one hand against his cheek.
“I think whatever poisoned me on Nox has reached somewhere vital,” he said. “My heart staggers. My breathing … light.” His lekku were limp and pale, and she had never seen his red skin so wan.
“I can help you,” she said, but then she frowned. That withered thing, dry and old … there’s nothing left. “Not how I helped myself, but I can use the Force to cleanse your blood, perhaps. To purge you.”
“No time,” Tre said. “I’ll be fine … had worse … no time.”
And Lanoree knew that he was right. There was no time, and perhaps even now they were too late. Dal might not have killed her with the blaster—
But he meant to, he wanted me to die, he shot me to kill me!
—but if he reached the Old City and initiated the device, then he might succeed in killing her anyway.
Lanoree slapped a compartment open and dropped a medpac into Tre’s lap. “Here. Drugs. I’m sorry, Tre. Do what you can for now, and I’ll …” He waved her away.
She rushed into the cockpit and ran her hands across the Peacemaker’s controls. It felt like coming home. She fired the engines and then paused as the ship shuddered around them. “Thank you, Tre,” she said. “For coming to rescue me.”
“Only ’cuz I can’t fly your ship,” he said from behind her. She smiled, pleased that he was nowhere near the bad man he had once been. She only hoped he had more time to make things even better.
The scanners flashed, warning lights chimed. She switched on comm to send a message to Tython, but the flatscreen was a haze of snow and crackles. Nothing manifested, and its level indicator fluctuated rapidly. She could have examined the readings closer, but there was no need. Sometimes instruments gave voice to what was visibly obvious.
Outside, the skies and surface of Sunspot were in turmoil. The fiery clouds and lightning she had witnessed as Tre and Ironholgs pulled her from the mine had increased. Now they looked cataclysmic. Fingers of lightning thrashed down all around, making the ground shudder and the air bend. The skies were deep red and violent orange, streaked here and there with white-hot flame that ignited massive, thundering explosions high up.
Malterra was close. Gravities fought as each planet exerted influence over the other, and it seemed that both sought dominance.
They could retreat underground into the deepest mines, as most of Sunspot’s miners did on every such occasion. For four days they would live down there, feeling the world around them shaking and sensing the great energies being expended above. And then they would climb to the surface to repair any damage, and the mining would begin again.
Dal planned this, Lanoree thought. He must have. Once in a Malterran year, a quarter of a Tythan year; such coincidence can’t be an accident.
But Lanoree knew that she had no choice. If she desired, she could consult the ship’s computer and calculate the odds of her being able to pilot the ship out through such a storm. But she never liked hearing the odds.
“Can you make it up here, strap in?” she asked Tre. She heard a groan, and then his shuffling footsteps as he came to join her. He stank. His breathing was ragged.
“I’ll probably puke again.”
“Don’t worry. Ironholgs, prepare for takeoff.”
The droid clacked and clicked.
Lanoree increased power to the engines. The ship felt strong and confident around her, and as she took in a deep breath, she felt the same. I am renewed, she thought. She knew that the sense of power and superiority she felt was wrong; her alchemies were talents that should be borne lightly.
Ashla and Bogan be damned. She had a more immediate fight on her hands.
“Here goes nothing,” she said, and the Peacemaker blasted from Sunspot’s surface and into cosmic chaos.
The most direct route from Sunspot to Tython would have taken them straight through Malterra. Lanoree programmed the route four times, and each time the ship’s computer threw out a different alternative. So in the end she took manual control, switched on four screens with different scaled space charts, and trusted her instincts.
There is no fear; there is power, she thought, and she worked with the Force to see them through. She felt queasy. She convinced herself that it was the result of her healing, as opposed to an unsettling of her balance. But the flesh was strong. The strength, the potential! She could not hold down the excitement she felt at such arcane alchemies.
“We should wait,” Tre said beside her, weak and scared. She did not answer. He knew as well as she how much was at stake, and how much of a start Dal had on them. They had to travel as fast as they could. There was no other way.
The Peacemaker took a pounding as she curved them up out of Sunspot’s atmosphere, but the craft had been built to last. The noise was tremendous, and she could hardly hear her own shout. The straps cut into her shoulders and chest. The windows shimmered with heat on the outside. Her seat creaked in its mounting, loose panels rattled and shook, and the flight stick vibrated so hard in her hand that soon her fingers and forearm grew numb. She could not let go. She fought the storm through the ship, and calmed herself with the Force, and Dal was large in her mind’s eye.
She remembered his face as he’d pointed the blaster and his eyes as he’d pulled the trigger, and there was nothing there.
Scanners showed that they were almost fifteen kilometers above the planet’s surface, and she increased the power to break them into space. Once there, she hoped the abuse the ship was undergoing might lessen.
But she was wrong. Space itself was being rippled and torn by the forces exerted between the two planets as they rapidly closed on each other. They would pass within half a million kilometers of each other, and that sounded like a comfortable distance. But flying between them felt like dropping a feather into the winds of Talss’s grassy plains. Her instruments went haywire from the magnetic and gravitational chaos dancing between worlds. Ironholgs skittered across the cabin behind her and tipped onto his side, sparks arcing from several slits on his head.
“Your droid’s exploded,” Tre said. Even his voice sounded dismantled, broken into constituent parts by the incredible assault on the ship and everything within it. “How long till the Peacemaker goes, too?”
“The Peacemaker won’t go!” Lanoree shouted. “Your brain will fall from your butt before that happens.”
“I think it already has,” he shouted. She was pleased to hear humor, because perhaps that meant Tre was feeling better. Maybe the medicines he’d taken had helped. But she could not fool herself. She had cured her own terrible wounds using arcane and dangerous Force alchemy, but Tre was different. The poisons eating at him might be slowed, but to stop them would require expert attention.
She tried to communicate with Tython, to warn them, but all comm systems remained down. An hour after the attempt, her own message came back to her, surprising her with its air of desperation. She felt sick, and Tre vomited beside her. At least this time he turned away from her before letting go.
“That’s the second time you’ve done that to my ship!” she shouted. No reply from Tre. She glanced across, and he was sitting with his chin touching his chest. His lekku hung limp and unmoving. She switched on the grav unit, but it was malfunctioning in the storms. Her stomach rose and fell. She pressed back into her seat. Something seemed to have come loose in her chest, and she probed delicately, using the Force to feel out the geography of her wound. It felt fine; her fix had been good. Perhaps it was simply her held breath.
Time moved on, every moment an eternity. The Peacemaker shook and vibrated, and more rattles developed. The ship was being shaken to pieces. Arc lightning struck them three times, the third time such a heavy charge that every seam and hole in the hull, control panel, and structure lit up as if they were being burned apart. Lanoree screamed out loud but could not hear, and she quietly prepared herself for death. I’ll feel nothing, she thought, but she knew what she would see at the moment of death: the madness on her brother’s face.
But the ship held together and they did not die.
When they were a million kilometers out from Sunspot, Malterra passed its closest point to that planet. Lanoree watched the passage on one of her scanner screens, and wondered at the immense forces and pressures being exerted there right now. In those deep mines, miners huddled. She had every respect for them and wished them well.
At last, as the storms seemed to be getting better instead of worse, she ran a full systems check on the ship. Ironholgs was still out of action so she had to do it herself. They had taken a battering. Life support was damaged, but would last them to Tython. One of the laser cannons had been fractured; she shut off the pod supplying it in case of leakage. A fuel rod had ruptured, and she jettisoned it into space. But the hull integrity was good, and all vital systems were functioning. The Peacemaker was well enough to get them to Tython, and that was her only aim.
She plotted the fastest course that would take them to the Old City and handed control to the ship’s computer.
As she unbuckled herself and stood to squeeze back into the main cabin, something struck her.
Lanoree gasped and sank back into the seat. A vision. A blow. A ripple in the Force, far greater than she had ever felt before. A ship, she thought. A battle. Death and chaos, and one among them …
Then the vision was gone, leaving barely an echo in its wake. Dal’s ship? She thought not. There was no sense of recognition at all; indeed, a coldness had taken her, and an alienness seemed to haunt the shadows of her mind. Soon, that too was fading.
Lanoree shook her head. Then she lifted Tre from the copilot’s seat and carried him to the cot. His eyes opened as she lay him down.
“Half a day and we’ll be entering Tython’s atmosphere,” she said.
“Just blast me into space. I’ll feel better that way.” He sat up slowly and squinted at Lanoree.
“How do you feel?”
“How do I look?”
“Covered in vomit.”
“That’s how I feel.”
Lanoree sat next to him, frowning. “Everything feels so strange.”
“Well, you did just heal a hole in your chest. You should be dead.”
She thought of her experiment and the life she had coaxed into it.
“Maybe,” she said. “I need rest.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Wake me when we’re approaching Tython.” Without even hearing Tre’s response she fell into a deep, troubled sleep.
Her dreams are strange. She is aware that they are dreams, yet they are more chilling than ever before. She constantly tries waking herself, but she does not feel in control.
There is a figure. Tall, cloaked, armored, an unmarked helmet hiding its features. In its hand is a weapon the like of which she has never seen before. A sword, but strange, with pure Force as its blade.
The same dream, again and again.
Only hands on her shoulder and a familiar voice bring her up from that vision.
“Lanoree. Tython. But something’s very wrong.”
Approaching Tython, the chaos on the planet’s surface was evident.
“What’s that?” Tre asked.
“Force Storm.” Lanoree had never witnessed one from space, but it looked far more violent and widespread than any she had experienced before. She tried contacting Master Dam-Powl again, but though her comm unit was now functioning, no signals could pierce the storm.
“He’s started already,” Tre said. “Whatever it is your mad brother’s trying to do, it’s begun.”
“Maybe,” Lanoree said. And that was her great fear. If Dal initiated the device, perhaps Tython’s first response would be a shudder of the Force and storms to rip across the planet’s surface. “Maybe I’m too late.”
She jumped into the cockpit and steered them into a dive into the atmosphere that was all but suicidal.
Every moment might be their last. She would make them all count.