Remnant: Force Heretic I

by Sean Williams

  Saba stopped in midthought and brought herself to the present. Hunt the moment, one of the elders of her family had once told her. Grip it in your claws and never let it go. Slip too far into the past or the future, and you will be lost.

  Such teachings arose from a barbarous past, in which grief and fear lurked everywhere one looked, but they had echoes in Jedi training. She had learned to strip herself back to a single point of consciousness, focused solely on the task at hand. Applying such meditation techniques was almost second nature to her. Indeed, they were arguably the only things that had saved her mind after the destruction of so much she had held dear.

  Hunt the moment …

  Saba had never regarded herself as being particularly close to Tahiri. They were different—they came from different worlds, had different backgrounds, and held different values. Nevertheless, they were bound simply by virtue of being Jedi. In the short time Saba had known Tahiri, she had struck Saba as a Jedi with a bright future ahead of her. She had come across as young and inexperienced but still full of potential. As with many Jedi, Tahiri was powered by an inner determination. A fire burned in her that had remained undiminished even by the death of the boy she’d loved, Anakin Solo.

  She wondered where that fire was now, in the body of the frail, young human before her. If she, too, was trying in her own way to focus on what lay before her.

  Anakin’s parents were there, looking as concerned as they would for one of their own offspring. Outside, watching through the sterile barrier that cordoned off the room, were a number of other concerned individuals, Jag Fel and Belindi Kalenda among them.

  All attention was on Jaina, as she tried to explain to Master Cilghal what had happened.

  “She collapsed in one of the public halls,” she said, her hands animated in front of her. She was clearly upset by the turn of events. “We traced her there after she called me on her comlink. She sounded—upset. She wasn’t making much sense.”

  Master Cilghal gestured and Tekli handed her the instrument she required. Their unspoken communication was near perfect, obviously the result of a familiarity developed over years of working together.

  “What was she saying?” the healer asked, her moist, webbed hands pressing a nutrient gel to Tahiri’s forehead. Even Saba could tell that Tahiri was malnourished.

  “She—” Again Jaina hesitated. “She said that Anakin was trying to kill her. Like I said, she wasn’t making much sense.”

  Saba wasn’t an expert at reading human body language, but she sensed that Jaina was hiding something.

  “I felt her calling for Anakin through the Force,” Master Skywalker was saying.

  Jacen Solo nodded, exchanging glances with his twin sister. Saba suspected that Tahiri’s grief was touching places uncomfortably close to their own.

  “I see no reason for Tahiri’s collapse,” Master Cilghal concluded upon finishing her scan of the young woman. “Physically her body is under stress, but she isn’t ill. As far as I can tell, all she needs is to rest and eat properly for a couple of weeks. I suggest we let her sleep for the moment. Until she wakes up and we can talk to her, there really is little else we can do.”

  Leia stood to one side, with her husband’s arm around her waist. Her eyes were glistening. “Do everything you can for her,” she said. “I refuse to let her become another victim of this war.”

  Master Cilghal looked up and nodded her head. “I’ll place her in a private ward, under full observation.”

  Leia turned and walked from the room. Han and Mara went with her, followed by Jaina and Jacen. Saba started to go also, but was stopped by Master Skywalker’s voice.

  “Not you, Saba.” He spoke in a way that made it sound like a request, not a command. “Please, stay for a moment.”

  She obeyed, returning to stand with him and the two healers over the supine body of the human girl. Saba’s eyes were most sensitive to the infrared part of the spectrum, so the finer details of Tahiri’s face were lost to her. But something was burning deep within her, that much Saba could tell. Tahiri lay flat on her back, her chest gently rising and falling, eyes roving behind closed lids—to all appearances, the girl was sleeping. But Tahiri was radiating heat like a furnace, as though her body was working overtime even while lying still. And there was something about that fire that raged inside her …

  Now that she was closer, Saba found herself intrigued by it. It wasn’t a fire that needed fuel; if anything, it seemed to be burning itself, as strange as that sounded.

  “What is it you see, Saba?” Master Skywalker asked.

  “This one iz not sure,” she replied.

  “But there is something?” Master Cilghal pressed, her huge eyes rolling inquisitively.

  Saba nodded uncertainly. “There seemz to be, yez.”

  She searched the young woman for any sign of what might be wrong. Her peculiar sensitivity to life wasn’t the same gift as that possessed by Master Cilghal and the other healers. Saba wasn’t attuned the same way they were. Disease, in the form of viruses and bacteria, was a sort of life, too, and deserved respect. She might flinch at a warrior beheading a shenbit and leaving its meat behind, but she could rejoice in the progress of a plague. That hadn’t endeared her to some of her colleagues. The Jedi teachings told them that they should be devoted to preserving life—a philosophy to which she wholeheartedly subscribed. Which life, though, was the question that troubled Saba. Was an intelligent being such as herself, for example, of more intrinsic value to the Force than, say, a swarm of piranha-beetles? She wasn’t as sure as her fellow students had seemed to be that that question had a simple answer.

  This ability to sense life had grown since Barab I. It made her an asset when the healers failed; she saw something that they did not, when the flow of life was imperiled rather than life itself. Her frequenting of the medical wards of Mon Calamari had enabled her to exercise her gift more frequently than was possible on a battlefield, enabling it to grow stronger, more refined. When she looked at Tahiri—really looked at her, not just with her basic sense of smell and sight—she saw the usual human patterns of life swirling through her. If each cell was a star, then her veins were hyperspace trade routes and her nerves were HoloNet channels. What looked like a single, continuous body on the outside was in fact a joyfully chaotic community containing billions of components. The flow of information and energy among those components was what Saba saw when she looked at Tahiri—or anything living, for that matter. Life was a process, not a thing.

  But in Tahiri she saw something else, too. There were disruptions to the flow, strange eddies where it would normally be still, and pools of calm in areas that she was used to seeing active. There was more to this young human than met the eye.

  “I wonder,” Master Skywalker mused. “Jaina is closest to Anakin in temperament, so perhaps that is why Tahiri came to her. And the Yuuzhan Vong have just suffered their greatest losses since the beginning of the war …”

  Master Cilghal looked up inquiringly when he trailed off into silence. “You believe you know what afflicts her, Luke?”

  “For certain?” He shook his head sadly. “No. But if we had the time, I think Saba here could figure it out. Unfortunately, there is vital work that needs to be done—by all of us.” He turned to Saba. His eyes were deep and full of concern and determination in equal measures. “We leave tomorrow. You, too, Tekli.” The healer’s apprentice bowed solemnly and silently. “I would stay to be with Tahiri, given the choice, but …”

  Again he let his words trail off, sentence unfinished.

  Saba felt in Master Skywalker all the weariness of a man who had fought his own father—and a tempting journey to the dark side—for most of his life, and she understood. Sometimes the moment demanded too much of even the greatest hunter.

  “War narrows our choices,” Master Cilghal finished for him.

  “Yes,” Luke said. “Yes, it does.”

  Movement through the cramped tunnel was difficult, and made doubly so
by the presence of the nutrient vines and cloning pods that were impeding her progress. But she kept going regardless of how hopeless she felt her situation was. She attacked the vines and pods falling around her with a vigor generated from desperation and fear. No matter what she did, though, they kept coming at her—they kept growing around her!

  Breaking free of the restrictive passage, she risked a glance back into the dark mouth from which she had just emerged. The vines and pods continued to pulsate steadily, contracting and expanding like a fleshy sphincter. The fine ash pumping from the cave reminded her of blood cells, swirling around her in an almost threatening manner and carrying with it the terrible stench of burning flesh—a smell that served to remind her of what she was running from.

  She fleetingly wondered if her stalkers had been caught in the tangle of vines in the tunnel; but it wasn’t so much a serious thought as a hope—and an empty one at that. The thing with her face would chase her until its last dying breath, and the thing chasing it would never stop. The lizardine god-figure was hot on both their heels. She would never be able to face the two of them. Exhaustion wheezed in her chest with every breath she took. Until she found a chance to collect her strength, confronting these nameless horrors was an inconceivable option.

  She urged herself away from the tunnel mouth, but found only darkness ahead. Taking tentative steps forward, she waved aside the ash that was getting into her eyes and mouth. She wanted to run, but without being able to see where she was going, it was too risky. Her footsteps vanished into the void, sucked away with the light. She stopped and peered ahead. It was only then that she noticed patches in the shadows that were actually darker than others—that there were degrees of blackness. When her eyes had adjusted fully, she could see more clearly the cavernous space she was in.

  It was tall, with massive arches at either end and small alcoves lining the walls to either side of her, only meters away. From these she thought she could make out movement, like that of beasts shifting in their lair. She looked around her with nervous wonder. It all seemed terribly familiar, in a claustrophobic sort of way.

  Before she could isolate the memory, though, the snout of one of the beasts emerged from the shadows, the rest of its lithe body following. She sucked in air, coughing on the ash that went into her throat, as the creature passed by close to her face, the eye on the side of its head glaring out of the dark, examining her as it swept by.

  A voxyn, she was sure—and all alcoves around her were filled with them!

  Her heart beat faster at the thought. As though in sympathy, the vines and pods in the tunnel behind her beat faster also, forcing out even more of the foul-smelling ash into the cavern.

  She edged back from where she felt the voxyn to be, bumping into a ladder as she did so. Unable to go forward or back, she began to climb it. Her progress was hampered by the swirling ash, but the higher she climbed, the easier it seemed to become.

  If I can climb high enough, she thought, I will be free.

  She noticed as she climbed that the walls of the cavern began to glow from the lichen covering them. Dimly at first, but with each rung the luminosity of the lichen intensified, until it became so bright that everything below her was lost to the glare.

  Was she safe now? she wondered. Was she finally free?

  Her silent queries were answered by the ladder vibrating under her fingertips as the thing with her face began to climb after her. She forced back the tears of frustration and continued to ascend; there was no choice now but to go up and out. She climbed higher and higher, until the ash that was blowing about her face was no longer gray ash at all: it had become white, like snow.

  She stretched out her tongue to collect some of the flakes, wanting its wetness to sate her growing thirst. But she winced and spat at the terrible taste. This wasn’t snow; it was too dry. This was dust!

  Her tears flowed unchecked as she continued her climb, disappointment gnawing at her heart. Disappointment quickly turned to terror, however, when the ladder shook again. The reptilian statue had begun its own ascent, roaring out its anger to those above. But there was something new about its roar that made her hesitate …

  She hung there with arms wrapped tightly about the coarse wood of the ladder, listening as the reptile bellowed again. This time she realized it wasn’t just a vague and angry roar as she’d first imagined it to be; it was something much more than that. This creature was crying out a single word over and over again.

  Its howls echoed throughout the dusty cavern, and the ladder she stood on trembled from its bellows. The roar sounded as though its voice had been slowed a thousand times, until it became almost totally unintelligible. But the more intently she listened, the clearer it seemed to become, until she had no doubt whatsoever of what the creature was saying.

  It wasn’t a word. It was a name.

  “Tahiri,” it called out to her, its tone tugging at her heart and the guilt she carried. “Tahiri … Tahiri … Tahiri …”

  Tahiri woke to the sound of someone screaming, realizing only when she found herself being restrained that it was, in fact, herself.

  She felt something cool and scented being pressed against her forehead. Pushing the hand holding it aside, she tried to roll away, but restraints across her chest held her in place. Nevertheless, they didn’t stop her from trying to wriggle free—even when a second hand joined the first, pushing her shoulders firmly back onto the bed. She desperately scrabbled at her side for her lightsaber, only to find it gone. Besides which, the hands were simply too strong. She would never have had the chance to use it even if it had been there.

  “Sith spawn!” she shouted at her assailants. “Let me go!”

  “Tahiri!” Beneath the whip crack of command to the voice, there was something unmistakably familiar to it. She stopped fighting for a moment, trying to make out the figure standing over her, all but blurred through her tears. It couldn’t be, could it—? “Calm down, please!”

  “Jacen?” The fight drained out of her like air from a punctured balloon, and she sagged back into the soft mattress, sobbing. “Oh, Jacen, I’m so sorry. I—I didn’t know it was you. I thought it was—”

  “It’s okay,” he said, his tone warm and reassuring. “Just let it out. Don’t keep it inside where it can hurt you.”

  She frowned at him as he came slowly into focus. His words left her feeling oddly naked. “What do you mean?” she asked, wiping at her eyes with the backs of her hands.

  “Bottling things up,” he explained. “It doesn’t help anyone. Trust me. I should know.”

  He smiled, but she found it difficult to reciprocate the gesture. The residue of the dream still lingered in her thoughts.

  She sat up, this time finding no resistance from either Jacen or the restraints.

  “You feeling any better?” he asked.

  She wasn’t, not really, but she didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, reaching behind her to ease the back of the bed up. It was only then that she looked around and recognized where she was.

  Despite the absence of the usual sensors or equipment, there was no mistaking the small, circular room as belonging to a medical ward. The smell of sopor-moss lingered about her, despite the wide-open viewport off to her left that admitted the fresh air blowing off the Calamarian seas outside. There was a functional edge to the room’s walls and furniture. Also, her own clothes were gone, replaced by a drab hospital smock. A thin sheet covered her on the bed.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked, rubbing her hands across the bandages on her arms.

  “You blacked out.”

  Jacen sat on the edge of the bed beside her, his own hands coming over hers to stop her self-conscious movements. Even though he didn’t say anything, the message was obvious: she shouldn’t worry about what was hidden there, yet.

  “The medics found you in the Water’s Edge market,” he said.

  She concen
trated for a moment, staring at the folds in her sheet. She remembered contacting Jaina, remembered the uncontrollable panic that had disoriented her following the dream of the Yuuzhan Vong cemetery. Then she had found herself in the cavern where the voxyn lay hidden …

  She shuddered at the memory. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked, looking up at Jacen.

  “It’s a bit of a mystery, actually,” he said. “They can’t find anything.”

  His brown eyes were searching hers. She looked away, not sure if she was relieved or disappointed.

  “I guess I must have just fainted, then.”

  “You’ve been unconscious for fifteen standard hours, Tahiri,” he said. “You didn’t just faint.”

  “I-I’ve not been sleeping well lately,” she lied, looking away.

  Fifteen hours? This was the worst episode yet. Maybe it would be for the best, she thought, if the truth finally came out. Even though she wanted to, however she found she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

  He’d hate me if he knew, she thought. They would all hate me!

  “Tahiri?”

  She looked up again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” That, at least, was partly true.

  “That’s okay,” he reassured her. “I’m sure Master Cilghal will work it out sooner or later.”

  “I’m sorry to have been a burden, Jacen.”

  “You’re not,” he said. “Coming here to keep an eye on you was a good excuse to get out of some tedious meetings I’m supposed to attend. Besides, it gave me a chance to get a little bit of shut-eye myself. Things have been pretty hectic these last couple of days.”

  He did look tired, she noted. There were lines around his eyes that she hadn’t noticed the last time she had seen him. But how long ago was that? After his return from Coruscant? During the battle at Ebaq 9? It dismayed her to realize that she couldn’t remember just when that had been. In recent weeks—months, perhaps—her life had become a blur.