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“Leia,” he called in his echoing otherworldly voice. “Leia!” he screamed as loud as he could, trying to break through the other-dimensional walls that restrained him.

Leia flinched, but didn’t seem to hear. She reached forward to grip the arm of his cold body. He heard her whisper, “I don’t know if you can hear me, Luke, but I know you’re not dead. I can sense you’re still here. We’ll find a way to help you. We’ll keep trying.”

She squeezed his limp hand and turned away quickly. She blinked to cast away the tears welling up within her eyes.

“Leia …,” he sighed. He watched as the other Jedi candidates followed her back to the turbolift. Once again he found himself all alone with his paralyzed body, staring at the echoing walls of the Massassi temple.

“All right,” he said, looking for another solution. If Artoo couldn’t hear him, and if Leia or the other Jedi trainees could not identify his presence, then perhaps Luke could communicate with someone on his own plane of existence—another glistening Jedi spirit he had spoken to many times before.

“Ben!” Luke called. “Obi-Wan Kenobi, can you hear me?”

His voice hummed through the ether. With all the emotional firepower he could dredge from the bottom of his soul, Luke shouted into the silence. “Ben!”

Growing more concerned at hearing no answer, he called for others. “Yoda! Father—Anakin Skywalker!”

He waited, but there was no response.… Until he sensed a coldness ripple through the air like an icicle slowly melting. Words trembled from the walls. “They can’t hear you, Skywalker—but I can.”

Luke spun around and saw a crack form in the stone walls. It grew darker as a tarlike silhouette oozed out and congealed into the shape of a cowled man whose features were distinct now that Luke could see him in the spirit plane. The stranger had long black hair, shadowed skin, and the tattoo of a black sun emblazoned on his forehead. His eyes were like chips of obsidian and just as sharp. His mouth bore a cruel scowl, the expression of one who has been betrayed and has had much time to think bitter thoughts.

“Exar Kun,” Luke said, and the dark spirit understood him perfectly well.

“Do you enjoy having your spirit trapped away from your body, Skywalker?” Kun said in a mocking voice. “I have had four thousand years to get accustomed to it. The first century or two are the worst.”

Luke glared at him. “You corrupted my students, Exar Kun. You caused the death of Gantoris. You turned Kyp Durron against me.”

Kun laughed. “Perhaps it was your own failings as a teacher. Or their own delusions.”

“What makes you think I’ll stay like this for thousands of years?” Luke said.

“You will have no choice,” Kun answered, “once I have destroyed your physical body. Trapping my own spirit inside these temples was the only way I could survive when the final holocaust came. The allied Jedi Knights devastated the surface of Yavin 4. They killed off the few Massassi people I had kept alive, and they destroyed my own body in the inferno.

“My spirit was forced to wait and wait and wait until finally you brought your Jedi students here, students who could hear my voice once they learned how to listen.”

An echo of fear rang through Luke’s mind, but he forced himself to sound calm and brave. “You can’t harm my body, Kun. You can’t touch anything physical. I’ve tried it myself.”

“Ah, but I know other ways to fight,” Kun’s spirit said. “And I have had endless millennia to practice. Rest assured, Skywalker, I will destroy you.”

As if finished with his taunting, Kun sank like smoke through the cracks in the polished flagstones, descending to the heart of the Great Temple. In his wake he left Luke alone but more determined than ever to break free from his ethereal prison.

He would find a way. A Jedi could always find a way.

When the twins suddenly started crying on their cots beside her, Leia woke up with a feeling of dread.

“It’s Uncle Luke!” Jaina said.

“He’s gonna be hurt,” Jacen said.

Leia bolted