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Luke realized he was proselytizing. Gantoris looked at him with dark, unfathomable eyes. “Empires and republics mean nothing to me. What have they cared for us before? My universe is here, on this world.”

He stopped in front of the wide opening to a geyser and peered into its depths. The creeping stink of rotten eggs wafted into the morning air. From his hip pouch Gantoris withdrew a battered old datapad and consulted a column of numbers that looked to be some sort of timetable. “Here. We will go inside the geyser and harvest.”

Luke blinked. “Harvest what?”

Without answering Gantoris lowered himself over the lip of the geyser hole. Luke shrugged off his Jedi cloak and left it beside the geyser rim, then followed the other man underground. Was Gantoris just trying to see if Luke would follow him down into the belly of the geyser?

The shaft was a narrow, winding chimney through porous rock, a pipeline to gush superheated water. Colorful mineral deposits sparkled white and tan and blue, powdery in his hand. Luke found plenty of footholds as he followed Gantoris into the honeycombed passages. The rock felt warm and slimy. Acrid vapors rising from below stung his eyes.

Gantoris worked his way into a side crevice. Luke asked, “What do you want me to do?”

In answer Gantoris wedged himself deeper into a crack and shrugged the woven pouch off his shoulder. “Look in the dark pockets, the ones protected from the scalding water.” Gantoris dug his fingers into a crevice, felt around, and pulled out a handful of rubbery tendrils. “With the heat and the mineral deposits, the lichens have a rich growing ground. It takes a great deal of processing, but we can make something edible out of this. On our world we don’t have many choices. My people must take what we can find.”

Luke likewise removed his pouch and began to search in the cracks, probing with his prosthetic hand. What if something poisonous lurked in the crevices to sting him? He could read ominous intentions from Gantoris but couldn’t pinpoint them. Was Gantoris looking for a simple way to kill the “dark man” from his dreams? On his third try Luke found a mass of spongy growth and yanked it out.

Gantoris looked over his shoulder at Luke. “It would be better if we split up. If you stay by me, you will find only my leavings. I can never feed our people that way.” Gantoris’s voice changed to a mocking tone, and his forehead crinkled, raising his shaven eyebrows. “Unless your Force can miraculously create a banquet?”

Keeping his handholds, Luke edged over to another crack as Gantoris worked deeper into his own fissure, turning a jagged corner. A flurry of uneasiness shot through him, but Luke began to search among the crevices.

The lichen wasn’t difficult to find, and Luke quickly filled his pouch, crawling through narrow openings. Perhaps Gantoris had expected him to get lost among the fissures. But even disoriented underground, Luke could always retrace his path. He had heard nothing from the other man, and, deciding that he had fulfilled his obligation, Luke began to work his way back to where they had split up.

When he reached the joined passage, Luke saw that Gantoris was no longer there. He crawled deeper into the fissure, looking for the other man, all the while expecting a trap but confident he could deal with it. He would have to impress Gantoris with his Jedi abilities.

The passage ended in a blocked wall of eroded stone. The smells of sulfurous smoke grew stronger, engendering a deep sense of claustrophobia in him. Luke recalled the two children buried under the avalanche, bright blood splashed on the bottoms of the fallen rocks. The ground around him hummed with barely contained murderous energy—what if another earthquake happened while he was wedged in the narrow cracks underground?

Gantoris was nowhere in sight. “Gantoris!” he called, but heard no answer. Looking up the shaft of daylight poking through from the surface, Luke finally saw the man’s silhouette nearly