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After a few minutes, she became aware of something not too far away. It felt different from people and animals; it was a stillness, unlike anything she had felt before. Cautious, she headed toward it, moving as quietly as she could.

A few dozen meters later, the ground became white and flat again. She moved out into an oval clearing surrounding a building. It was not tall, barely twice her height, and since the clearing was in a depression in the ground, she doubted that its slightly peaked roof would poke up above the surrounding rocks.

It was made of gray-white stone. It had four walls and was not large enough to be a house—perhaps more the size of a storage shed. She circled it and found that there were no viewports, just beveled depressions in the stone suggesting where viewports might someday be cut out, and no door, though on the west face the outlines of a door had been incised in the solid stone. The edges of the bevels and incisions, the corners of the walls and roof were worn and rounded, giving the building the impression of tremendous age.

Allana took a deep breath. This was a storage shed of a sort—a storage shed for dead people. A tomb. It did not need a working door or viewports, but whoever had constructed it had given it the semblance of such things, as if the dead needed them.

Dead things did not worry her, but she had seen, when she was not supposed to be awake, parts of many holodramas in which dead things in tombs turned out not to be dead after all, and it took brave, roguish heroes with big blasters to save the day. She shrugged. Grandpa Han was a brave, roguish hero with a big blaster, but he wasn't here, so she had to make sure she didn't cause any trouble she couldn't handle herself.

Why had she felt this place? Grandma Leia said the Force was an energy of living things, and there would be nothing living in the tomb. She reached out toward it with her senses, again feeling that oppressive stillness.

And then the stillness was no longer still. She felt something stirring within. Not life, just motion—energy. She froze in place, willing herself to become as small and as still as possible.

It waited, whatever it was, on the other side of that wall, waited with a stillness that matched hers. In the distance, Allana could hear C-3PO calling for her, and she desperately wished that she was with the droids.

She took a slow step backward. The thing in the tomb did not react. She took another, and another, and bumped into the rough surface of a rock outcropping, and still nothing came bursting out of the tomb. Barely breathing, she moved into the outcroppings, not even beginning to relax until the tomb was out of sight.

I can feel you.

The words crept quietly into her mind. Allana almost shrieked.

They were not from the tomb. She stared up into the pinkish sky, seeing only the distant sun and a sliver of the former garrison moon. The thought came from there.

Who is there? I felt you. Please … please … There was such a yearning desperation to the words, such a hunger, that Allana wanted to reply, wanted to reassure whoever was there. But caution and fear and a hundred lessons she had learned at her mother's knee kept her from doing so.

What is your name? The question sent a tingle of dread down Al-lana's spine. She had the eerie sensation that if she responded, if she offered her name, it would be snatched away and never returned, leaving her to wander forever not knowing who she was. She hugged herself for warmth and, keeping her head low, reined her senses in.

The voice did not return, and a couple of minutes later Allana no longer felt any hint of it. She breathed a sigh of relief.

She almost bumped into C-3PO. As she rounded a particularly wide stone rise, he was suddenly there, splendidly metallic and modern, R2-D2 beside him. The astromech whistled a musical greeting, sounding not at all perturbed.

“Miss Amelia! You really mustn't go off alone.”

She nodded and, not slowing, began heading back toward where she thought the mine