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I whirled away and stood, looking down at him. “I would have thought you’d be better than this.”

Luke slowly got up and wiped a trickle of blood from his split lip away with his left hand. “Never had much rough and tumble growing up. My friends and I were more involved in racing than fighting.”

“Then maybe you should be a Jedi Racer, not a Knight.”

“You don’t understand.” Luke spat out some bloody saliva. “There are things in play here, forces shifting.”

“Maybe I could understand, if you’d talk about it.” I lowered my blade. “You’re the Jedi Master but that doesn’t mean you should shoulder all the responsibility. You know that already: you’ve been letting Tionne learn and share history. Kam’s been handling some of the instruction and you’ve had me working on the dark man problem—and I think I have Exar Kun’s temple pegged from Dorsk 81’s survey logs, by the way. Figured I’d check it later this afternoon.”

“No.” Luke shook his head adamantly. “You’re not to go there alone. I don’t want any of the students going there.”

“So you go and I’ll back you up.”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “Can’t, not now.”

“Why not?”

Luke closed his eyes and sighed. “Do you recall how I told you of knowing my friends were in trouble on Bespin?”

“Yes. You said that was a vision of the future.” I narrowed my eyes. “You said Darth Vader allowed you to sense it to lure you into a trap.”

“I have had other visions, other feelings.” Pain tightened Luke’s expression. “There is disaster in the offing. It remained a bit more distant when Mara was here, but now I feel it is much closer.”

“Do something about it.”

“What?” Luke’s question came almost as a plea. “I have this oppressive sense of doom approaching. It touches on everyone and everything. All the things I think about doing don’t seem to make it go away.”

I swiped at more blood from my nose with my left hand. “Slow down for a moment. Do you know if this doom, this future, is locked in holo, or is it morphable?”

“The future is always morphable, but nothing I think to do will change it.”

“Two things you’re overlooking here, Master Skywalker. First, thinking is closer to trying than doing, if you catch my drift. Changing the future has got to require action, not just planning for action. While a Jedi acts in defense and not out of aggression, that doesn’t mean aggressively putting a defense into place is bad.”

Luke nodded slowly. “And the second thing?”

“Maybe you’re not the one who has to act. Maybe it’s me or Kam or all of us together.” I sighed. “You’re teaching us how to use the Force, you’re opening us up to new powers, and you’ve established that we are heirs to a Jedi tradition full of responsibility. Fact is, though, that you’ve not given us any responsibility. Defeating this disaster you feel coming, getting rid of Exar Kun or whoever the dark man is might just require all of us finally accepting our responsibilities as Jedi.

“Right now you’re accepting every scrap of responsibility here. You’re getting buried under the weight of what you see as a string of failures. Mara Jade didn’t leave here because you failed her, she left because you succeeded. She learned what she needed to learn—which might not have been what you thought she needed to learn. She left because she didn’t want to fail others to whom she felt responsible.”

He opened his eyes. “You think I’ve been treating all of you like children.”

“Closer to the mark than you want to know.”

“I haven’t meant to, but you are children within the Force.”

“That’s fine, Master Skywalker, and true; but we’re also a disparate group of adults. Kyp was what, our youngest, and he was the age you were when you started your training? He was the age I was when I went into the CorSec Academy. We’re pretty well formed at that point, personality-wise. Those who have come here to learn from you have already made a decision to explore a new life. You need to let us do that. You need to challenge us, and challenges aren’t just the size of rocks or the range of a vision