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Yes, he had studied these two volumes—among others. He supposed that all Padawans studied them at some point in their training, because all entertained questions about the nature of the Force and desired to understand it. Some, he knew, hoped to understand it completely and ultimately; to settle once and for all the millennia-long debate over whether it had one face or two and where the potential for darkness lay—in the Force itself or in the wielder of the Force.

When had he studied these last? What moment had he been returned to in his dream?

Even as he wondered these things, a shadow fell across the objects on the table before him. Someone had come to stand beside him, blocking the light from the windows.

He glanced up.

It was his fellow Padawan and friend Anakin Skywalker. At least he had called Anakin “friend” readily enough, but the truth was that Anakin held himself aloof from the other Padawans. Even in moments of camaraderie he seemed a man apart, as if he had a Force shield around him. Brooding. Jax had called him that once to his face and had drawn laughter that he, through his connection to the Force, had known to be false.

Now Anakin stood above him, his back to the windows, his face in shadow.

“Hey, you’re blocking my light.” The words popped out of Jax’s mouth without his having intended to say them. But he had said them that day, and he knew what was coming next.

Anakin didn’t answer. He simply held out his hand as if to drop something to the tabletop. Jax put out his own hand palm-up to receive it.

“It” was a pyronium nugget the size of the first joint of his thumb. Even in the half-light it pulsed with an opalescence that seemed to arise from deep within, cycling from white through the entire visible spectrum to black, then back again. Somewhere—Jax just couldn’t remember where—he had heard that pyronium was a source of immense power, of almost unlimited power. He had thought that apocryphal and absurd. Power was a vague word and meant many things to many people.

“What’s this for?” he asked now as he had then, looking up into his friend’s face.

“For safekeeping while I’m on Tatooine,” Anakin said. His mouth curved wryly. “Or maybe it’s a gift.”

“Well, which is it?” Jax asked.

The answer then had been a shrug. Now it was a cryptic phrase uttered in a deep, rumbling voice not at all like the Padawan’s own: “With this, journey beyond the Force.”

Jax laughed. “The Force is the beginning, middle, and end of all things. How does one go beyond the infinite?”

Instead of replying, the Anakin of his dream began to laugh. To Jax’s horror, Anakin’s flesh blackened, crisping and shriveling as if from intense heat; peeling away from the muscle and bone beneath. His grin twisted horribly, becoming a skull’s rictus. Worst of all, laughter still tumbled from the seared lips.

Jax woke suddenly and completely, bathed in cold sweat.

With this, journey beyond the Force?

That was impossible. It made no sense—and what was with the burning? He shivered, his skin creeping beneath its clammy film of sweat as he recalled one of the rumors of where and how Anakin was supposed to have died on Mustafar—thrown into the magma stream by … no one knew who.

“Is something wrong, Jax?”

Jax glanced over from his sweat-soaked bed mat to where I-Five stood sentry, his photoreceptors gleaming with muted light.

Jax hesitated for only a moment. It might seem a futile monologue to discuss a dream with a droid, but I-5YQ was no ordinary droid, and even if he were, there was value to talking out the puzzling dream even with a supposedly nonsentient being. If nothing else, Jax reasoned that sorting through the images, actions, and words aloud would help him understand them.

He sat up, leaning against the wall of his small room in the Poloda Place conapt he shared with the rest of his motley team. “I dreamed.”

“I’ve read that all living things do,” I-Five observed blandly.

Jax was seized with sudden curiosity: