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Hallaf rose, and Luke sat. He kept both hands on the girl’s forehead. “The energy clings to the girl like a feeding mynock. It will be dangerous to try to ease it free.”

Ben’s eyes said it all. Dangerous to you, too?

Luke nodded.

Vestara frowned. “We’re losing time. And you might hurt yourself doing this. Let’s just go.”

“I might. But Abeloth had to have been planning, adjusting her goals, when she did this to Fala. Perhaps some sense of what her plans were remains within, bound up in that same energy. This could actually save us time.”

Vestara fell silent. Indifferent or not to Fala’s fate, she clearly recognized the merit in Luke’s tactic.

Luke turned to his son. “Ben, get to the command chamber. Lock everything down, put the Shadow and occupied areas under surveillance. I don’t want to be surprised while we’re doing this.”

Ben nodded. He gave Hallaf a look that spoke volumes: I feel about my father like you feel about your daughter. Mess with him and you won’t like the results. “I’ll need your security codes. Right now.”

“I’ll give them to you.”

BEN AND HALLAF LEFT. VESTARA KEPT HER EYES ON THE SILENT, SULLEN Cardya.

Luke could feel the energy within Fala slowly building, slowly moving its way through her mind, touching and changing everything. She was clearly a Force-sensitive, but without the training to recognize and understand what was happening to her, she would be far more vulnerable to the corrupting influences of the dark side than even a novice Jedi. What Abeloth had done to her might not kill her, but it could transform her into something dangerous and unpredictable, something that influenced beings and situations toward dismay and death.

And there, beneath the feelings and unconscious thoughts of Fala, were others. Touches of memories of the Shelter Jedi Knights, the young Jedi Abeloth had made mad, all of them now recovered. But Abeloth wanted them back, was hoarding her energy to call to them again.

There, too, distant, was the sad, self-sacrificing personality of Callista, with whom he had once shared so much. Luke couldn’t afford to dwell on that now. He went even deeper.

He saw and felt dark places, gems that thought, insects that stole thoughts—

Of course.

Luke was dimly aware of Hallaf’s return to the brig cell. He paid no attention, trusting Vestara to continue to guard him. He turned his mind away from the shadows of Abeloth’s memories for the moment and to Fala, to the alien energies that were wrapped up within her.

He extended himself, a subtle but pure wave of light-side energy, flowing through his body and into hers.

His energies, Abeloth’s energies, light and dark, both of the Force, two sides of the same coin, bonded. And with the infinite care of someone carrying a planet’s last trickle of water in his cupped hands, Luke drew both sets of foreign energy out of Fala’s body. He held them suspended before him, noted Vestara’s quick understanding of what was happening.

Slowly, with meticulous care, he separated the two forms of energy from himself. They had nothing to hold them, nothing living to sustain them, nothing but each other to cling to, and they began to dissipate. In moments they were gone.

He felt weary. Well, wearier. That last fight on Almania had stolen a lot of his strength. Keeping himself going despite his injury had taken more. And now this … What he had sacrificed he would eventually regain, after rest and food and meditation, but for now he felt tired to his bones. He wondered if the same was true of Abeloth.

Fala’s eyes fluttered open. “Papa?” Then her gaze fell on Luke. She lay there, confused for a moment, and then, evidently recognizing him, gasped and drew away.

In a moment Hallaf was by her side, holding her. “It’s all right. You’re all right.”

“It was … I couldn’t think, couldn’t move …”

Luke rose and stepped away from father and daughter. He rejoined Vestara and activated his comlink. “Set the lockdown to continue for ten minutes,” he told Ben. “I don’t want them training their blasters on us or interfering with our departure.