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Luke glanced at the image, shook his head, then frowned and narrowed his eyes. He tapped the stovetop. “That saucepan. It’s identical to the one in her memories.”

Taru snapped the datapad shut. “Not of local manufacture. And a distinctive design, unusual scrollwork on the handle. So this girl leaves her home, moves into her new husband’s dwelling, he has a saucepan identical to one she last saw in association with her mother’s death …”

“And memories start surfacing.” Luke considered. “What do you do now?”

“Just the revelation of the source of her terrors would probably suffice if she wanted to confront them. She could take that knowledge to a Newcomer mind doctor and spend the years, credits, and effort necessary to diminish those terrors. But we spoke of this earlier. She knows something awful had to have befallen her mother and doesn’t want to live with that. So we will be doing the vein routing.” Taru leaned toward Thei again. “Normally it takes months or years to learn the beginnings of this technique. But I suspect you constitute a very advanced student. Still, you’ll need to join with me to the extent you can, a melding through the Force …”

“One of my specialties.” Luke closed his eyes and extended his awareness through the living energy that surrounded them.

Once again, he was rocked by the sense that he stood in a crowd of giant, impassive observers. But he ignored them, shoved aside the self-consciousness that this world’s Force presence invariably produced, and sought Taru.

He found the man’s presence in the Force almost instantly—his, Ben’s, Vestara’s, and that of the girl Thei. Thei’s presence was shining, as if illuminated by a bank of industrial-strength glow rods.

Within the Force, Luke reached out for Taru and Thei, his energy connecting with, interacting with, theirs. He opened his eyes.

Taru shook his head, clearly impressed with Luke’s speed and skill. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Now you see the portions of her memory that I have outlined and surrounded. Join me, find the same borders.”

Luke tried. It was diabolically complicated. He could see Taru’s energy, see its parameters, but not the memories themselves—as if, told to look at a river, he could only estimate its course by looking at dry riverbanks. Working with memories was not like working with Force energy …

Wait, it was. For all these memories had a distinctive characteristic, the primal terror experienced by a little girl. Emotion could flavor the Force, and he sought out that emotion, tasting its flavors, sensing where it turned more benign at the boundary of other experiences.

There was a recollection of the twelve-year-old Thei catching sight of herself in a mirror, gauging the changes time was making, reflecting that ever more she was coming to resemble her mother—and then, a blast of terror inexplicable to the adolescent Thei. But it was explicable to Luke, to Taru, for her eyes in the mirror had the same pleading quality as Thei’s mother in that final moment and were suddenly bound up forevermore with fear. They surrounded that memory.

Another memory, this one by the then-teenage Thei, seeing a fallen cu-pa wailing in a corral, victim of a broken leg. Again, there was terror the girl did not understand. Again, Luke and Taru did, seeing in the scene a reflection of Sparkle’s final moments. Again, they encapsulated the recollection.

Luke and Taru flowed along the contours of Thei’s terror until they could find no more matching the flavor of fear they sought. There were other terrors in the girl’s life, other tragedies, but none connected even peripherally with her mother’s death.

“Very good, Master Skywalker. Now, ever so gently, we pull.”

They did, together.

Luke had trained in many combat styles, against masters of many arts, and one thing he had learned early on was that the holodramas vastly exaggerated the ease with which a simple blade could be drawn from a body into which it had been thrust. Organic