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Silent, unseen.

If you’re going to attack me, attack me, he thought, his mind slipping into a darkness and dreams of stormtroopers and Jawas again. If you’re going to have me, go ahead.

And then, on the borderlands of consciousness, he remembered the pattern of the tsils, coming in from high above: remembered his dreams when they’d loomed in the background remembered the voices that spoke to him in those dreams, like the Listeners said the rocks spoke to them.

You’re alive, he said, enormously surprised—more surprised than he’d been about anything in his life.

Assent flowed out over him, colors in his mind, as blue as the crystalline core of the tsils, the green of the Spook clusters high on the rocks. Alive alive alive alive … like an echo.

And his dream of the Jawas came back.

They’d only used, after all, the images they could find in his mind: the indigenous inhabitant, brain gutted and forced to work for the stormtroopers.

You’ve been alive all this time.

All this time, they agreed, a gentle vibration like music, rising from the crystals beneath him, from the tsils, from the mountains; rising up into his bones. From all time. For all time. Thinking and dreaming and speaking and singing. The sea formed us, and the sea went away. The planet fed us, from the fires of her heart. Little people here and there but not important. Not until they took us. Took our … and the word was impossible to translate in his mind, “brother/self” he thought—a part of their minds.

The deep tide of their anger flowed over him, anger for their kidnapped kin.

Taken and enslaved, zapped with the horrible electronic realignment, as the Jawas had been zapped in his dream, so that they became slaves. Through the minds of the tsils Luke saw those enslaved ones, imprisoned both in the Needles and in the synthdroids; slaves but still kindred, still tsils in their hearts. He sensed the incomprehension of those slow timeless beings about what it was that they saw, but he himself understood.

The cabin of the Reliant. Two synthdroids lying dazed, eyes staring, on the floor, their flesh a rotting mass but their minds receiving impressions, still and calm, without pain. Seti Ashgad sat at the controls, his face a welted, bleeding mass, gasping, fighting for breath. His hair, his clothing, his body crawled with drochs, freed of their fear of the crystal-imbued light of Nam Chorios; while Luke, through the eyes of the synthdroids, watched, he saw a thumb-size brown insect crawl into Ashgad’s mouth.

And Dzym stood behind him. Dzym with his robe open to the waist, every pulsing orifice and squirming pendule moving, while Dzym himself stared at the Imperial carrack’s approach in the main screen with hungry delight in his eyes.

“Reliant?” crackled a voice over the comm system. “Reliant, this is Grand Admiral Larm of the Antemeridian sector.”

Luke was so startled, so dazzled by the vision, that he could barely gather his thoughts. Can you still talk to them?

Confusion, murmuring—a dim comprehension of the horror, the pain, of those enslaved and taken away. But no focus. No direction or guide. They could see this, but could not understand, as Luke had not understood the dream that the tsils—the planet’s Guardian inhabitants—had sent to him.

A second vision flashed in his mind, of the Reliant rising against the great glowing purple-white gem of the planet, seen from space. Of the carrack drawing closer to it, and, weirdly, of the voices transmitted between them, picked up over the electronic consciousness of the Needles themselves and relayed back to their kindred tsils.

“This is Grand Admiral Larm, of the Antemeridian sector Imperial Fleet. In the name of Moff Getelles, I am empowered to greet you personally.”

With doubled vision he saw the square gray ship, the silvery carrack, and in the same consciousness saw the Reliant’s bridge again. Seti Ashgad raised his head like a drunken man, barely conscious of what was being said.

Dzym threw back his head and laughed, his eyes sparking in the darkness with two flames of unholy