Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 02_ Omen - Christie Golden [25]
Ben paused and turned around to see both the holographic Cilghal and his father staring at him. He flushed a little, wondering if he’d been babbling, but he saw approval in his father’s blue eyes.
“Agreed,” Cilghal said. “Your decision to explore the connection with Jacen appears, tragically, to continue to be validated. We still have no indication that Jacen had any sort of contact with these three Jedi Knights.”
“But there’s got to be a link,” Ben blurted, then amended, “Well … logic dictates that there should be anyway.”
“The Baran Do Sages weren’t able to shed any light on this,” Luke said. “I wonder if we’re not herding the wrong nerf. Chasing the wrong lead.” He leaned back in his chair, his eyes narrowed, thinking. “A link with Jacen—” Luke’s eyes widened. “No. Not Jacen … at least, not with the physical one.”
“But … there’s been no trace of him in the Force,” Ben reminded his father. As always, the thought saddened him. For all the rage he had once borne toward his late cousin, Ben had learned to forgive him, although like Luke, he still needed to understand what had happened to him. For a few seconds at the end, Jaina had assured them all he’d been Jacen again, not Darth Caedus. And Ben had loved Jacen. Ben felt an uncomfortable, slightly awkward sorrow, as of something left forever unresolved, at the thought of never sensing his presence again.
Luke shook his head. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, and his voice held a trace of the same sorrow that Ben was feeling. “I was wondering if Caedus somehow was able to see that his reign as a Sith would eventually come to an end. And if he saw that … maybe this entire situation is something he set up by flow-walking into the past.”
Ben stared at his father, wide-eyed. “You can do that?”
Luke’s face showed disapproval. “You can influence the future, to a certain degree, yes. Caedus didn’t have the chance to find and train an apprentice to carry on his work after he was killed. He couldn’t break you, and he wasn’t able to fully corrupt Tahiri. Maybe he took this route to leave a legacy of some sort.”
Ben had followed Jacen more than a slight way down a very dark path, but he had not gone to the dark side. He knew that Caedus had thought him too weak. In the end, though, he’d learned to realize that what Caedus had dismissed as weakness was that which the Jedi realized was their greatest, truest strength.
“I—I imagine it would be possible,” Cilghal was saying, distaste evident in her voice. “It certainly bears investigation, unsettling an idea as it is.”
“He did study with the Aing-Tii,” Ben offered. At one point, he’d known just about every place Jacen had been during his five-year galaxy-hopping adventure. He’d desperately wanted to emulate it, and now it was beginning to look as though he was going to, under far different and much sadder circumstances. “Maybe we should go talk to them.”
Cilghal gave a raspy, gurgling laugh. “That will be much easier said than done. The Aing-Tii are notoriously unwelcoming of strangers, and there’s very little information about them even in the Temple files.”
“I think Ben is right,” Luke said. “It’s more than just investigating a Force trick that Jacen used. The flow-walking could be the key to understanding the entire situation. If Caedus flow-walked and laid this … this mental instability as some sort of bomb rigged to go off if he failed, then understanding how he did it may help us understand how to undo it. I know we don’t have a lot of information on the Aing-Tii, but please send me whatever you find.”
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