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And then there she was. Her booted feet bruised grasses and lichen growing on rock outcroppings as she strung cord, turning a patch of ill-balanced boulders on a hillside into a dangerous deadfall.

She was unhappy about that, Luke could tell, unhappy that this trap was so much more dangerous than the previous ones. She didn’t want to hurt them. She wanted, absolutely needed them to go away.

Luke felt her tense. He backed away on his contact. More dimly, he could sense her looking around in sudden paranoia, but her emotions gradually settled.

She had sensed him but not identified him. Her control of the Force was limited in certain areas, clearly.

Sure now where her rockfall trap lay and where she intended to wait, Luke withdrew and opened his eyes.

He looked up at his son. Ben stared at him, a worried expression on his face.

“What is it?”

“You’re pale, Dad.”

“Am I?” Luke tried to get a sense of his condition.

He was tired, more tired than he should be after such a mundane effort in the Force. Clearly, he was not yet recovered from his exertions in the Maw. He needed days of uninterrupted rest, and he wasn’t getting them.

Well, that was all right. He could go on for some considerable time this way.

He rose, demonstrating, for Ben’s sake, more vigor than he actually felt. “Let’s go.”

“Did you find the crash site?”

“Eh?”

“It occurred to me after you went into the trance. The Sith girl crashed her ship out there somewhere. I assume that would have left the kind of damage you were looking for.”

“It would have, yes.” Luke frowned. “But I found no sign of the crash.”

“Maybe she crashed into a lake. Then there’d be no surface damage.”

“And that would be a good reason why the search party found no sign of the site.” Luke turned toward the northwest. “Let’s find her and ask her.”

Within the hour, they had the Dathomiri woman’s rockfall trap in sight. The ground here rose into mountain foothills, and the eastern slope of a narrow pass, cut in some distant time by a now vanished creek, was dense with irregular white stones.

The woman’s sabotage of that slope was not visible. Whatever arrangement she had made with trip cords was well hidden.

Luke and Ben lay on a jagged slab of rock a few hundred meters from the pass. They had crept up on the area so quietly and carefully that Luke believed the woman lying in wait could not have detected them. Still, the minutes they spent surveying the area offered them no advantage. They’d have to deal with the trap directly and physically.

“I have our tactic.” Ben’s voice was unexpectedly deep and mature.

“Yes?”

“When the rocks fall, we get out of the way.”

“Thank you for reducing our task to its basic components. Come on.” Luke rose and began trotting toward the rockfall.

He could not feel the woman in the Force. She had to be concealing herself. No, more than that. If she was nearby, she could not even be watching the rockfall. To watch it would be to experience increased anticipation as her intended victims approached, which was likely to tip off Force-users … and she had to know that her opponents were well versed in the Force. So she would be nearby, but would pay no attention until she heard the rocks fall.

Luke and Ben crossed the distance from their hiding place to the pass with its snare in moments.

“Not so muggy here.” Ben’s tone was cheerful, and it did not sound forced.

“Eh?”

“Making conversation.” Ben lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Sounding natural.”

“Of course.” With his next step, Luke’s foot landed on a rock that shifted under his weight.

If his senses in the Force had not been tuned to detect any stirring, any remote hint of danger, he would not have felt the tripping of the trap. Far over his head, boulders perched on an overhang leaned out and dropped toward their heads. Luke could feel other, more subtle shiftings take place in the rock wall to his right, but so far the only threat came from that first set of rocks, now gathering speed and building kinetic energy.

Luke leapt