Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [148]
Keldor stepped forward.
He was expecting Leia to duck away, so she sprang into his advance, hooked his ankle, and shoulder-blocked him—hard—and as he fell doubled and darted for the door. She’d thought the movement would take Garonnin at least a little by surprise, enough for his first shot to go wild, to give her a chance to get past him, but it didn’t. The stunblast hit her like a blow to the solar plexus, winding her at the same moment that her whole body felt as if it had been pulled inside out.
Even on mildest stun the effect was awful—perhaps worse than a heavier blast, because she didn’t even lose consciousness. She just collapsed to the floor, her legs twitching with pins and needles, and Keldor and Roganda knelt by her side.
“Stupid,” remarked Keldor as the infuser was pressed to the side of Leia’s neck.
A blast of cold. She felt her lungs stop.
She was submerged, she thought, in an ocean of green glass a thousand kilometers deep. Because glass is a liquid it filled her lungs, her veins, her organs; it permeated the tissues of her cells. Though she was sinking, very slowly, the glass was shot through with light from above, and she could hear the voices of Roganda, Keldor, and Garonnin as they left the room.
“… antidote as soon as the reception is over,” Roganda was saying. “We simply haven’t the personnel to keep her under constant guard. But the drug’s effects aren’t as unpredictable as you fear. Everything will be perfectly all right.”
Your cause. Our cause.
Keldor. Elegin.
Irek.
She had to get out.
The Force, thought Leia. Somehow, with her body suspended in this dense, unbreathing, light-filled silence, she could feel the Force all around her, sense it within reach of her fingertips, hear it like music, a tune that she herself could easily learn.
If she touched the Force—if she drew the light of the Force into herself—she could see the room in which she lay on Nasdra Magrody’s bed, one hand resting on her midriff and dark auburn hair tangled around her on the discolored pillow.
Cray’s right, she thought. I really do have to be more diligent about applying that Slootheberry Wrinkle Creme around my eyes.
I wonder if I can get up?
She breathed experimentally, drawing the Force into her like a kind of strange, prickly light, and stood up.
Her body remained on the bed.
Panic seized her, disorienting; she called to mind some of the disciplines Luke had taught her, calming, steadying …
And looked around her at the room.
Everything seemed very different, seen without physical eyes. Other times, other eras were present, as if she viewed through pane after pane of projection glass. An elderly man with graying hair sat writing on the back of green flimsiplast notes at the table, and broke off to lay his head on his arms and weep. A slim blond Jedi Knight lay in the bed—which had been on the other side of the room then—reading stories to her husband, who was curled up next to her with his dark head pillowed on her thigh.
Leia looked at the door, and knew she could walk through it.
I’ll get lost!
Cold panic again, the sense of being naked, unprotected.
No, she thought. She stepped back to the bed, touched the body that lay there. Her own body. The scent of her own flesh, the sound of her own heartbeat, was unmistakable. If she concentrated, she could find her way back to it, even as she’d followed the far fainter and less familiar traces of Elegin and Keldor in the tunnels.
Terror in her heart, she stepped through the door.
Immediately she was conscious of voices. This part of the passageways had been the living quarters of the Jedi, converted from Plett’s endless greenhouse caverns: The dreamy consciousness of the plants and the weary, bittersweet benevolence of the old Ho’Din Master permeated the rock of the walls. She followed the voices to a long chamber illuminated not only by a ceiling full of softly radiant glowpanels, but by half a dozen windows of various sizes, thickly glazed against past storms and, like those of her own chamber, concealed in the rock and