Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [175]
She had lost all ability to use the Force.
“It wasn’t something I even thought about,” she said now, turning one of the mind mazes over in her hands. She did not meet Leia’s eyes, shy with her and a little hesitant, not because she was the Chief of State of the New Republic, Leia guessed, but because she was Luke’s sister.
“Cray had the Force in her very strongly. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to … to leave her body the way she did. To guide me into it. To give it to me.” She glanced up, her rain-colored eyes anxious. “You were her friend, weren’t you?”
Leia nodded, remembering that cool, stylish, intellectual young woman whose height and natural elegance she’d so envied. “We weren’t close,” she said, “but yes, we were friends.” She reached out and put her hand briefly over Callista’s. “Close enough for me to guess months ago that she didn’t want to live without Nichos.”
Callista gave her fingers a quick squeeze. “He was … sweet. Kind,” she said. “I don’t want you to be angry that I’m me, and not her. She was the one who … who offered. Whose idea it was. We didn’t even know it would work.”
Leia gave a quick shake of her head. “No. It’s all right. I’m glad it did.”
“The Force is something that’s been in me, a part of me, since I was small. Djinn—my old Master—said …” She hesitated, and looked away again, suddenly silent about what it was her Master had said to her, unwilling to pass it on.
“Well, anyway,” she took up a moment later, “I never thought there would be a time when I … when it wouldn’t be part of me.”
Leia remembered how this young woman had fled this room last night without a word, vanishing into the lightless mazes of the geothermic caves. She herself had spent a harrowing few hours, wondering if there was anything she could or should be doing—in between a dozen subspace calls to Ithor and the Diplomatic Corps—until Han had reminded her, “She probably knows those crypts better than anyone here.”
In the small hours of the morning, when Leia had gone to Luke’s room at the Brathflen Medcenter, she had found Callista there, stretched out on the bed beside the sleeping Luke, her head pillowed on his arm.
“What will you do now?” Leia asked softly.
Callista shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Sometimes there is nothing you can do.
Leaning on the broken frame of the gateway arch, Luke remembered the words Callista had said in the darkness of the Eye of Palpatine.
Sometimes justice is best served by knowing when to fold one’s hands.
That, too, was the wisdom of the Jedi.
Maybe the hardest wisdom he’d heard.
She sat with folded hands now, gazing out into the weird shimmer of mist and the gray shadows of trees. The crack in the dome had done strange things to the weather in the rift, and odd little currents of fidgety cool whispered through the heavy warmth of the fog.
She had known this place, he thought, before the dome had been built, before the orchards had been planted, when it had been part jungle, part volcanic barrens around acrid mudflats. She remembered it when the only settlement had been that little group of lava-rock houses clustered up against the rising benches of land at the end of the narrow valley, truly little more than a fingernail gouge in the marble wastelands of eternal ice.
She had grown up in another world, a universe separated from the present by centuries’ worth of events packed into a single life span.
Like Triv Pothman—who had been enchanted with the quiet community of Plawal and was already signed up for training as a horticulturist—Callista had spent a long time as a hermit, to return to a world unfamiliar and empty of anyone she knew.
He was silent, but she turned her head as if he’d spoken her name.
It was good to walk again, without limping, without fear, without pain.
It was good to be in daylight again, and in real air.
“Are you all right?” There was quick concern in her eyes as she spoke, held out her hand to him. The tissue regeneration of the bacta therapy had left him shaky, and he knew he shouldn’t be up yet.
“I should