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He stood anxious and alone, feeling like a prodigal son outside the ramshackle, collapsed hut that had once been the home of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Han waited by his repaired swoop, drinking the last of their water. Luke had forgone his share, building up his mental energy through concentration. They would be at the Mos Eisley Spaceport soon, no matter what happened at the ruins of Obi-Wan’s dwelling.

Luke swallowed and stepped forward, his footsteps crunching in the silence. He had not been here in many years. The door had fallen off its hinges; part of the clay front wall had fallen in. Boulders and crumbled adobe jammed the entrance. A pair of small, screeching desert rodents snapped at him and fled for cover; Luke ignored them.

Gingerly, he ducked low and stepped into the home of his first mentor.

Light slanted in from cracks in the walls. Dust motes drifted like gold dust through the sunbeams. The place smelled of mustiness, empty shadows, and ghosts. Unlike Jabba’s palace, however, scavengers had had no qualms about cleaning Ben Kenobi’s abode of everything of the slightest value. The stove and heater units had been removed, leaving only vacant notches in the clay walls. Ben’s sleeping pallet had been stripped down to its splintered frame. Shreds of cloth, long since turned into nests for rodents and insects, lay wadded in the corners.

Luke stood in the middle of the room breathing deeply, turning around, trying to sense the presence he desperately needed to see. This was the place where Obi-Wan Kenobi had told Luke of the Force. Here, the old man had first given Luke his lightsaber and hinted at the truth about his father, “from a certain point of view,” dispelling the diversionary story that Uncle Owen had told, at the same time planting seeds of his own deceptions.

Luke pulled out his lightsaber and gripped the handle, but did not switch it on. After he had lost his father’s weapon on Cloud City, Luke had built a new lightsaber that belonged to him and no one else—not an artifact from the past. He had forged his own path in the absence of his teachers.

It seemed that Obi-Wan and Yoda had begun to prepare him, but had left Luke with so many questions, so much knowledge unlearned … and the insane Joruus C’baoth could tell him only perversions of what a true Jedi needed to know. The Emperor had shown Luke dark side ways, but Luke needed to understand so much more.

He needed to know how to save Callista.

“Ben,” he said and closed his eyes, calling out with his mind as well as his voice. He tried to penetrate the invisible walls of the Force and reach to the luminous being of Obi-Wan Kenobi who had visited him numerous times, before saying he could never speak with Luke again.

“Ben, I need you,” Luke said. Circumstances had changed. He could think of no other way past the obstacles he faced. Obi-Wan had to answer. It wouldn’t take long, but it could give him the key he needed with all his heart.

Luke paused and listened and sensed—

But felt nothing. If he could not summon Obi-Wan’s spirit here in the empty dwelling where the old man had lived in exile for so many years, Luke didn’t believe he could find his former teacher ever again.

He echoed the words Leia had used more than a decade earlier, beseeching him, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Luke whispered, “you’re my only hope.”

Luke waited again, trembling faintly. He had tried everything he knew. Callista had undergone other training in her own years as a Jedi. She knew things Luke had never imagined—but even she knew of no way to tear away the smothering blanket around her, the blindness that prevented her from using the Force.

“Ben, please!” Luke cried. His body shivered with the intensity of his desperation and dwindling hope. The empty hut sat around him holding only memories.

Nothing.

Silence.

Emptiness.

Obi-Wan was not there. The old Jedi teacher would not come. Luke knelt down in the dirt on the floor, scrabbling in the dust for some sign, some other message, as realization sank in.

He would get no help from Obi-Wan after all.

Luke swallowed his