Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [10]
Others might have taken the phrase “about a day” and have seen it as a fairly loose measure of time, but to Mirax it was painfully exact. She made her living delivering items of value to various clients, on time and intact. If she had meant twelve standard hours, she’d have said so. If she’d meant twenty-five hours, she’d not have rounded them down to a day, she would have given me her best estimate, to the hour or minute.
As damning and worrisome as that might seem, I knew better than to panic. Any message could have been delayed or misrouted. She could have even stopped off to see her father on the Errant Venture and his communication system could be down again.
A shiver ran down my spine, but I shrugged it off. “Your good news will just have to wait, I guess.” Still feeling a little achy and tired from the run home, I stripped my clothes off, hit the refresher station, cleaned myself up, then dropped into bed. I left the bedroom door open in the hopes that I’d awaken when Mirax returned.
Scant chance of that. I dropped into a deep sleep, dark and black, like the deepest shadows on Coruscant. I realized I was drifting off and tried to seek out the dream about the child, hoping my decision would paint more details onto him, but it eluded me. Consciousness evaporated in a pool of nothingness and I fell into a dreamless sleep.
Corran.
I stirred at the sound of my name but couldn’t recognize the voice.
CORRAN!
Mirax’s shriek ripped me to wakefulness. I sat bolt upright in bed and reached out for her. The image of her face faded from before my eyes as my hands encountered only cold sheets where she should have been. I felt about for her, seeking the warmth that her body should have deposited there, but I found none of it. For all of a heartbeat my brain chastened me with a flash of Mirax’s message, then something more horrible slammed into me. Bile surged up into my throat, choking me.
In one blindingly terrible moment, I knew Mirax was gone!
THREE
I stumbled out of bed on the far side and barked my shin on a low table set there. I kicked out angrily at it. Who would have put that there? I knew I wouldn’t have put it there because even a gentle bump would have toppled it and scattered the datacards stacked there as easily as my kick had.
I looked around the room and in the half-light I saw all manner of things that were wrong about the place. The holographs on the walls were pleasant enough, and were even of scenes from Corellia, but were of locations I’d not known on my homeworld. Who built this parody of my home?
My feet caught in the sheets I’d tossed off and I crashed to my hands and knees. The pain in my shin found an ally in my knees and hands, and just for a moment shocked me into a clarity of mind. The holographs and the table and the datacards, all these little pieces of the apartment that were not mine, they were things Mirax had placed here. Mirax, my wife.
I looked up at everything she’d brought in to make our apartment feel like a home. Somehow she had found replacements for many of the things we had lost when our previous home had been destroyed. Intellectually, as I looked around the room, I could catalog her contributions to the decor, and could even remember the when and where of her finding the items. I looked at the closet and could see her clothes hanging there. I found it easy to recall when she had purchased this gown, or where she had gotten that jacket.
But I could not recall anything about her connections to those items. In looking at the clothes I couldn’t remember which gown was her favorite. I couldn’t remember which jacket she considered slimming, or which blouse and slacks she considered appropriate for business, and which outfit she wore when we were out to have fun.
I studied a holograph of Vreni Island on Corellia. It showed a small island covered with trees, floating in a stormy sea as a thunderstorm approached. Shifting