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“Aeona,” Luke said quietly. “Tell him why you did it.”

“Huh? What does that have to do with anything?”

“It might make a difference. To him.”

She sighed. “I needed your ship, Solo. My—uh, there’s this guy, and we’re kind of together—”

Han’s eyes narrowed, and his lips compressed. “You’re in love with this guy, and he’s in trouble.”

“Actually, he’s in your quad turret.”

Han waved this off. “But you’re in love with him.”

She looked away. “I figured this assault would be my only chance to get him back alive. I couldn’t even make a try without a ship, and I just didn’t have time to play nice about it, okay?”

“You could have asked,” Han growled.

“And if you said no, we’d still have had to fight you—and fight you without having the drop on you. Which, from what I’ve heard about you, isn’t exactly a good idea.”

Han’s flush deepened. “Well …”

“Easier to get forgiveness than permission, right? Isn’t that how you do it when someone you love is in danger? I seem to recall a couple stories …”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Drop it.”

“I’m not asking you two to like each other,” Luke said. “But you have to at least tolerate each other. Any problems between you will have to wait until we all live through this. Understood?”

“Wow,” Han said. “Who put you in charge?”

Aeona snorted. “I asked him the same thing.”

“Let me put it another way,” Luke said patiently. “Every second I have to waste worrying if you two will shoot each other is another second we’re not using to rescue Leia and get us all off this planet and out of this system before the whole thing burns.”

He jumped down to the lift platform. “Aeona, muster your Mindorese and start helping the survivors. Han, you look after Chewie. Make sure he doesn’t kill anybody when he wakes up, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s grumpy in the morning,” Han said. “What are you gonna do now?”

“Me?”

Luke stared down at his left hand, the flesh one. He flexed it into a fist and straightened it again, feeling the unfamiliar energy that trickled through the crystalline shadow web that mirrored his nerves. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed himself into a deeper, more intimate connection with the Force; with the Force to guide him, he touched the shadow web with his mind and bent it to his will. When he opened his eyes again, his hand had sprouted a thin thatch of glistening black crystal threads, finer than human hair.

Han flinched and made a face. “What is that?”

Luke moved off the freight lift and knelt, lowering his palm to the floor. “That,” he said, “is how I’m going to talk with the Melters.”

MAKING CONTACT WITH THE MELTERS WASN’T THE HARD part. Luke simply laid his left hand on the shimmering black stone of the crypt wall. His hand’s sprouted thatch of shadow web melded instantly with the stone’s crystalline structure …

And they were there. He could feel them.

It was an unfamiliar sensation, vaguely analogous to sight—he sensed them in the stone the way one human might see another from a distance.

Getting their attention wasn’t hard, either. They became aware of him in the same instant that he perceived them—and they knew he perceived them. He sensed their instant curiosity and puzzlement, and felt the interchange of lightning-fast pulses of energy between them like a conversation in a language he could not understand.

The hard part was actually talking to them.

They sent tentative, questing pulses toward him in what could have been a cautious hello, and he felt his own shadow web respond, but not like an answer. More like an echo, or a harmonic overtone—as though the dark mirror of his nervous system was warping into some kind of resonance with their signal. To communicate with them, he would have to send his mind fully into the shadow web alongside his nerves, into his internal void that swallowed even the memory of light. He’d have to join them in the dark.

In the Dark.

To bring his consciousness into resonance with the Melters would require that he not only stare into that abyss, but dive into it headfirst. To drown himself