Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [138]
“The Empire left you alone,” he said softly. “Alone to be yourself. Alone to do what you wanted, to grow a garden, to embroider flowers on your shirts.” He could almost hear, in the dark of the old man’s mind, the shrill voice of the Will: The Jedi killed your family. They descended on your village in the night, they slew the men in the space among the houses, rounded up the women under the trees. … You fled in the darkness, stumbling in the mud and streams …
“Remember your captain and the other men killing each other?” said Luke, conjuring the green shadows of the shelter, the gleam of those forty-five white helmets on a plank. The crunch of leaves underfoot and the smoky smell they produced. “Remember the camp you made, and the meadow by the stream? You lived there a long time, Triv. And the Empire disappeared.”
“I know you feel loyal to her but she’s a …”
Vines. The earth. A tiny reptile with jewel-colored feathers picking up a thrown breadcrumb in the doorway. The smell of the stream.
The reality of what had been. The years of peace.
“She’s a Rebel and a saboteur …”
His voice trailed off.
What had really been, thought Luke. He held it out to Pothman, shining memories of place and time; memories of those things that he himself had actually seen and knew, like a slice of sunlight piercing the digitalized tape loop in Pothman’s mind.
The light above the door blinked faster. 1559.
“Festering Skybolts!”
Pothman wheeled and dragged on the locking rings of the doors. Luke sprang, scrambled to help him, the rings gripping fast, refusing to budge, as if held from the other side—or from within the walls themselves, by the Will. Nichos seized them, twisted with the sudden, inexorable, mechanical strength of a droid. Air hissed as the seals broke. “It’s fighting me!” yelled Nichos, dragging the door open, and indeed, the heavy steel leaf was pulling visibly at his grip. “It’s trying to close …”
Luke’s lightsaber whined to life in his hands. Cray stood manacled between two support posts, face white with shock and exhaustion in the chalk-opal sheen of the grid’s strange light. She yelled, “It’s too late!” as Luke limped, stumbled in, slashed at the steel that held her wrists. “It’s too late, Luke!”
With the last of his strength Luke blasted at the grid with his mind—misfire, flawed connection, a crucial jump of energy not jumping …
A searing, single bolt of lightning pierced the calf of his bad leg like a white needle as Cray dragged him out through the door.
Chapter 20
Cray said softly, “He was there.” She wrapped her arms around herself, pulling close the thermal blanket he’d brought her, bowed her head until her cheek rested on her drawn-up knees. “He was there the whole time. He kept saying he loved me, he kept saying be brave, be brave … but he didn’t do one damn thing to stop them.” With her chopped-off hair ragged and dirty and her face haggard with exhaustion and emotional ruin, she looked much younger than she had when Luke had seen her on Yavin, or in her home territory at the Institute, or in Nichos’s hospital room.
In all of those places, for all of her life, she had worn her perfection like armor, he saw.
And now that, and all things else, were gone.
Smoky light wavered from the crude lamp in the corner, the only illumination in the room. The air in the cul-de-sac of the quartermaster’s office and the workrooms beyond it had gotten so bad Luke wondered if he should take the time to wire the local fans to cannibalized power cells, provided he could find them …
If there was time.
Heart and bones, he felt there wasn’t.
“He had a restraining bolt—”
“I know he had a scum-eating motherless restraining bolt, you jerk!” She screamed the words, spat them at him, hatred and fury a bitter fire in her