Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [87]
As I mounted the final flight of steps, new sensations cascaded down from the top of the pyramid. I sensed the other students up there, and their emotions ran from shock and outrage to sorrow and despair. I crested the edge of the Temple and saw the Mon Calamari, Cilghal, cradling Luke’s head in her lap. Streen, his eyes wide with fear, stood over her.
“Is he alive? I can’t hear him.”
The Mon Cal concentrated on Luke, then shook her orange and algae-green head. She reported finding a heartbeat and I could see his chest moving with shallow respiration. “But I can’t find him inside. When I touch him with the Force, all I find is a great empty spot.…”
I reached out with my senses and tried to find what she could not. Pushing hard, I wove some of the external Force with my internal energy and tried to see if I could find a spark of Master Skywalker in his body. I recalled his noting that he had been taught we were luminous beings, not creatures of crude matter, but I found it hard to accept his having abandoned his body. Still, the evidence of that very thing was right there, since I could not feel him at all.
Kirana Ti pulled her robe tightly closed at her throat. “What can we do?”
Cilghal blinked her eyes. “We are all alone now.”
The despair in her voice found an ally in the fear writhing into my belly. It had never seemed odd to me that Kyp had been able to slam me into a wall because he had always been more powerful than me. Even when I felt the other presence reinforcing him and got hammered by the combination of them, I never imagined that they could be more powerful than Luke Skywalker. I had even rationalized away the dark man’s ability to avoid detection as his being talented in that area, just as I was talented in the area of image projection.
Had I even dreamed Luke was in danger I would have worked harder to convince him we had to act. The saliva in my mouth soured. When we start handing out citations for failure, let me get in the front of the line. I’d told Luke we were dealing with a sociopathic murderer, but I’d not convinced him of the gravity of that situation. He seemed to be in a position to handle it and all he wanted from me was information that would have given him a direction.
And I let him do just that. I closed my eyes for a moment and wanted to smack my head with the heel of my hand. What had I been thinking? I was the one who had experience with such monsters, not Luke Skywalker. I surrendered responsibility for such things to him when he was no more able to deal with it than he felt we were ready to deal with the fate of the universe. My mistake was the reverse of his, yet mine compounded his.
The pure arrogance and stupidity of those ideas slammed hard into me. Luke Skywalker had dealt with Darth Vader and the Emperor, even the Emperor Reborn. If they weren’t monsters, monsters didn’t exist. Master Skywalker was more than capable of dealing with them, which made his condition now that much more stunning and terrifying.
I looked down at his body as Cilghal straightened his limbs. I’d screwed up badly, and because of it he was lying there. If I’d done things differently, there was no guarantee he wouldn’t have ended up in the same place, but things might have taken another turn, one for the better. I’d failed him, and I’d had the arrogance to suggest he was failing us.
Failure stops here and now. Muscles bunched at the corners of my jaw. “We’re not alone. We have each other. We may not be Jedi, but we’re not helpless either.”
The Dathomiri witch looked at me and restated her question. “What can we do?”
“We can do the obvious, can’t we?” I jerked a thumb back down toward the Headhunter. “Kyp was here and, if I had to guess, I’d say he was responsible for what happened to Master Skywalker. First thing we need to do is to let Coruscant know Luke has been hurt and that Kyp Durron was involved.”
The Mon Calamari Ambassador looked up. “Until