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By Root 1706 0

Sith might be approaching from a less obvious direction—then, finally, he saw a curtain of fronds shudder. Vestara appeared an instant later, running swiftly and in Force-enhanced silence. The arm beneath her injured shoulder was once again hanging limp, and her face was swollen, bloody, and mottled with bruises. Luke felt a pang of pity for her. Whether inflicted in anger or as part of a stratagem, the beating she had taken had clearly been real. Of course, he found it suspicious that none of her traumas was disabling or disfiguring—but then again, he might have dismissed even severe injuries as little more than a ploy to win Ben’s sympathy.

Vestara raced past his hiding place and stopped at the jungle’s edge, her shoulders sagging as she peered down on the river beach. Luke could not test her Force aura without running the risk that she would sense his presence, but the way she braced her hands on her hips and kicked at the ground suggested she was more angry at the Shadow’s absence than frightened by it. Still, she was hardly the kind to panic, and her apparent calmness did not necessarily mean her flight had been a ruse.

But when Vestara uttered what he assumed was a Keshiri curse and remained on the edge of the bank, awaiting her pursuers, Luke knew her life had never been in danger. The beating had been a ploy designed to play on his son’s affections, and it made Luke’s stomach churn to know how hurt Ben would be when he learned how callously the girl was trying to manipulate him. Sadly, that was not a wound Luke dared help his son avoid. Ben would understand beguilement only after he had been exploited by it; he would accept the weakness of the human heart only after his own heart had betrayed him. Before he could be the truly great Jedi he was destined to become, Ben needed to learn these lessons in his gut as much as in his mind. It tore Luke up, but as a father all he could do was watch and be there to catch Ben when he fell.

Vestara had been standing at the jungle’s edge for only a moment when the muffled thud of running boots sounded in the foliage behind her. She turned and, as High Lord Taalon emerged from the fronds, she began to speak in Keshiri. To Luke’s astonishment, Taalon replied with a fork of Force-lightning that caught Vestara square in the chest and sent her tumbling over the sandy bank and out of sight.

Luke waited until Taalon had stepped more clearly into view, with the half-hidden form of Gavar Khai moving through the jungle behind him, then disengaged his blaster’s safety. The two Sith must have sensed their danger, for by the time Luke had depressed the trigger and sent a flurry of bolts screaming toward them, both were already diving for cover. On the way down, Taalon took a bolt under the collarbone and a second along his neck, but Khai simply vanished into the undergrowth.

Continuing to lay suppression fire with one hand, Luke pulled the detonator off his equipment harness and set a three-second arming delay, then switched the fuse to MOTION and tossed it onto the ground about a meter in front of him. He backed away still firing, and by the time the two Sith began to return fire, he was already leaving the jungle. He reached out to Ben in the Force, felt only impatient alarm in response, and realized that his son was having trouble overriding the Emiax’s hatch security. Luke sprayed a dozen more bolts back into the jungle, then stopped firing and hazarded a glance down toward the shuttle.

Ben was standing on the near side of the craft, his lock slicer pressed to the hull just above the hatch controls. He was frantically punching keys and watching the slicer’s screen, searching for some clue to the security scheme. Halfway down the embankment, Vestara was just beginning to recover from the effects of the Force lightning, her body still trembling and jerking as she struggled to her knees. A thin wisp of smoke was rising from her torso, where the heat of the attack had burned a hole in her robes.

Luke returned his attention to the jungle, and a few moments later a frond shuddered. He