Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 06_ Vortex - Denning Troy [56]
Once Ben had passed beneath the jungle canopy, he felt a warning prickle from his father and responded by flooding his aura with confidence and reassurance. An instant later he slipped free and dropped the last twenty meters to the ground, using the Force to break his fall.
He landed in a tangle of shoulder-high ferns whose barbed fronds were coated with a sticky digestive acid. He quickly used telekinesis to push them aside, then joined Vestara over on the bank of the stream.
It was larger than it had looked from above, easily four meters across and close to half that in depth. The water was more amber than brown, and clearer than Ben had thought, allowing him to see a meter or so below the surface. Vestara was staring into the stream, her lightsaber in hand and her knees ready to spring. But he could tell by her tense shoulders that she hated being in this place as much as he did, that her memories of Abeloth frightened her even more than the half-recalled terrors he had felt during his time at Shelter.
Ben stopped beside her and peered down into the water. He could see a handful of ribbon-like weeds bending against the current, stretching in their direction.
“I really hate this planet,” he said. “How you survived all those weeks marooned here, I can’t imagine.”
“It wasn’t all that difficult, as long as you were with Abeloth.” Vestara did not remove her eyes from the water while she spoke. “The hard part was knowing what she was—as much as that’s possible—and convincing yourself to stay close to her anyway.”
Ben thought back to his own early brushes with Abeloth and shuddered. It had always been her need that had frightened him before, the impulse to draw other beings closer and smother them in the all-consuming furnace of her own dark energy. But now that she had been killed—or wounded, or driven back into her true form of existence, or whatever had happened to her—he had a bad feeling she just wanted them dead.
A deep rumble sounded someplace far back inside the mountain, then Ben saw a ripple running upstream and felt the soft jungle soil beginning to settle beneath his feet.
“Yeah, well, I don’t think Abeloth is going to give us much choice in the matter this time,” Ben said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward a gorge wall hidden somewhere in the jungle behind him. “What do you say we start looking over back there?”
Vestara shook her head, then finally lifted her chin and peered across the stream. “We’ll have better luck over there.” She pointed to the other side. “Can’t you smell it?”
Ben took a deep whiff of jungle air and smelled nothing but decaying vegetation. “Smell what?”
“The breeze.” Vestara Force-jumped across the stream and began to sniff. “It’s cool, and it smells like a cave.”
“It can’t be that easy.”
Vestara glanced over her shoulder. “That mean you aren’t coming, Jedi?”
Ben flushed. “I’m coming.” He gathered the Force and sprang across the stream, alighting on the bank next to her. “Someone needs to keep you out of trouble.”
Instead of making a comeback, Vestara surprised Ben by turning to contemplate him. She lowered her brow and gazed into his eyes for a moment, almost challenging him to challenge her, then finally shrugged and shook her head in disappointment.
“That’s why you Jedi are going to lose this galaxy to us,” she informed him. “You’re afraid of trouble.”
With that, she spun away and began to march through the jungle, using the Force and her lightsaber to clear a path. Ben fell in behind her—though not too close behind her, lest she not be paying attention on a backswing. He wanted to make some retort, of course, but he understood the ways of the Sith too well to fall into that trap. Emotions were dangerous, unpredictable