Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [122]
Time passed. In the stillness Ben began to hear the voices again.
“Eat girl.”
“Grow strong.”
“You used to want me to protect her.”
Ben had thought his words inaudible, but Kiara spoke up. “Who are you talking to?”
“No one.”
“Eat girl.”
Why were the voices different now? That was a puzzle, and Jacen had always said that puzzles should always be solved, because then they became information that could be used.
He tried to look at the voices’ suggestion rationally. It made sense on a purely logical level. If he killed, cooked, and ate Kiara, he would have several days’ worth of food. His mind tried to veer away from that line of thought—cannibalism had almost always been discussed in his presence in cautionary tales of stranded crash survivors and people driven mad—but he forced himself to consider the matter.
“Eat girl.”
“Grow strong.”
If he did kill and eat her, he’d never be caught, never be punished. Even if he confessed to Jacen, his mentor would analyze the data and determine that it was the correct survival choice.
In fact, just about every logical argument Ben could come up with suggested that eating Kiara was the most appropriate action. The plan Ben had just set into motion might not work. It might take days to complete. He could be dead before then.
Every logical argument—
Ben frowned. But not all arguments had to be logical. Kiara was a little girl, and one who had just lost her father. Her daddy. Never mind that her daddy seemed to have been a small-time criminal and the odds, supported by files of data Ben had seen on the Guard computers, were that Kiara would grow up to be a small-time criminal or another type of drain on society. She might grow up to invent a medicine better than bacta, or to write songs or act in holodramas that made things better for people. Or she might have children who did these things, or teach children to do these things.
But not if she died now.
He wasn’t even sure he liked her; they hadn’t had energy enough to talk very often on their long walk. But he felt bad for her, he felt protective of her—
He felt.
And it seemed to him that neither thinking nor feeling needed to be the boss of the other. In a Jedi, they should be mixed, partners. He wondered if that was the case with Guards as well.
None of that answered the question of why the voices had started by suggesting that he protect Kiara and now insisted that he eat her. But the answer—a possible answer, anyway—came to him.
They had told him to protect her because that’s what he had decided to do, and he hadn’t known how. In suggesting that they could get Ben and Kiara off this planet alive, they had made Ben listen to them. He had begun to understand them…and then had begun to think the way they thought. And now they could suggest different things. They could suggest what they’d wanted all along.
He felt a burst of anger, but clamped down on it. He didn’t have the energy to be angry right now.
He noticed that the voices had grown quiet.
And in that quietness, Ben told Kiara the story of a young Force-sensitive slave boy who won a Podrace on Tatooine and earned his freedom.
“Did they feed him when he won?” Kiara asked.
“All he could eat, and even more,” Ben assured her.
Not long afterward, Ben sensed the eye in the sky. He looked up into the clouds and pulled his all-weather cloak even tighter around them.
“Is he there?”
“Yes, he is.”
This pilot was not subtle. He sent the TIE fighter into a screaming dive that ended up with the vehicle a mere twenty meters above the ground. Then he had to slow and circle, because Ben’s dummy was not visible from the open spaces around the citadel. He had to climb and then drop into the gap between outer and inner wall…and then he lined his lasers up on Ben’s dummy.
Now. Through the Force, Ben exerted himself against the stones at the top of the inner wall, all along the course of wall above the starfighter.
It was hard going. He felt so tired, and it was almost impossible to focus. But an understanding that this might be the