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“I was just—surprised, that’s all. Now that I know what to expect, I won’t be.”

Luke shrugged. “We know the spiders and the mysterious beings are typical hallucinations. They might not be the only ones. We should be cautious. Anything distressing, out of the ordinary—we shouldn’t automatically assume it’s real.”

“Agreed.”

Ben decided not to try to pick up where they had been interrupted on the conversation about flow-walking. He did not think he was in a strong position to argue that he was ready to learn such a discipline when he’d just been taken aback—even momentarily—by an illusionary bunch of spiders.

They continued on for several hours, carefully planning short jumps. Luke’s hassat-durr technique proved consistently useful, although it did seem to drain him. Ben started to get a sense for navigating the corridors, extending himself in the Force to assist his father in determining which way felt right in a place where everything was constantly changing.

The series of short jumps that sometimes felt like one step forward, two steps back, eventually led them to planets. The concentration of corridors was greatest here; it was what permitted life to evolve at all. But each planet proved to be a disappointment. What life there was was primitive and stunted. And a sick suspicion rose in Ben.

He was reluctant to voice it, but he knew he had to. “Dad,” he ventured at one point, “what if we’re completely wrong?”

“I’m always prepared to entertain that suggestion,” Luke said. “The universe is nothing if not humbling. What do you think we might be wrong about?”

“Well—everything we have says that the Aing-Tii live inside the Kathol Rift. But what if they don’t? What if everyone is just assuming that?”

“Good question. But you taught me the importance of following the evidence, remember? If everything points to them being here, clearly this is the first place we should look.”

“Well, yeah, under normal circumstances,” said Ben. “But ‘looking around’ here is not good for the Jade Shadow or her crew.”

Luke eyed him. “That’s true. Do have a better suggestion?”

“ … uh. No.” Ben was inordinately pleased that Luke freely admitted that he, Ben, had taught him something. He was less pleased that he hadn’t been able to come up with a better idea. “I guess we follow the evidence.”

Luke grinned. “Then let’s be about it. It’ll take as long as it takes. After all, Ben, we’ve got a decade to kill.”

Ben grimaced.

This time Luke let him plot the jump, checking to make sure Ben had calculated properly. The planet they found, though, could be almost immediately ruled out. Ben took a break to eat and drop into a healing meditation for about twenty minutes, then he and his father traded off.

Luke rose from the pilot’s seat and Ben slipped into it. His dad patted his shoulder as he headed back to the galley to get a bite to eat.

Ben didn’t like to admit it, but he was starting to get bored. He re-focused his attention on what he was doing, because he was wise enough to know that when you got bored, you got careless, and when you got careless Bad Things often happened. He was refreshed, fed, and alert, and his mind wasn’t wandering, but he really, really wished they’d hurry up and find the Aing-Tii. Despite Luke’s quip earlier, and despite the beauty of the Rift, he didn’t want to spend the next several years hopping from corridor to corridor.

Suddenly there came a harsh beeping sound. The lights on the console began chasing one another around like lampflies in summer. The vessel began to shake, but there was no storm—

“What the—” yelped Ben. He stabbed at the controls, damping down a quick spike of fear and harnessing the adrenaline to sharpen his reflexes instead. But his reflexes suddenly didn’t matter.

He was staring at readings that told him that he was not inside the Kathol Rift, but in orbit around Coruscant. A blink of an eye later, the readings insisted that the ship was in imminent danger of tearing itself apart. Then they were picking up signs of a ship that wasn’t there.