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Luke stared into the blackness, willing it to peel back. Gradually light did filter back, a distant gleam of reflected starlight from an opening in the ceiling high above.

“This is an exercise to help you concentrate and attune yourself to the Force,” Luke said. “The water is a perfect temperature: you will float, you will drift, you will reach out and touch the rest of the universe.”

He shed his Jedi robe in the near darkness and slipped without a splash into the spring. He heard the rustle of cloth as the others disrobed and moved toward the edge.

The water’s sudden heat stung his skin, and the foam of rising bubbles tingled against him. Ripples traversed the pool as the Jedi candidates slid in one at a time. He sensed them floating, relaxing, allowing themselves to gasp with pleasure and warmth.

Luke drew slow, deep breaths as he lay back, drifting, purging his mind and body. The bite of sulfur in the air scrubbed his throat raw and clean; the heat and bubbles opened his pores.

“There is no emotion; there is peace,” he said, echoing words from the Jedi Code that Yoda had taught him. “There is no ignorance; there is knowledge. There is no passion; there is serenity. There is no death; there is the Force.”

He heard mingling voices as the twelve others repeated his words. But this was too formal for him, too stiff and stilted—he wanted them to understand him, not memorize mantras. “Right now you are floating in warmth, in near darkness. Imagine yourselves totally immersed, surrounded, free. Let your minds wander of their own accord, travel along the ripples in the Force.”

He swirled his hands, gently stroking back and forth to generate waves in the pool. The other students stirred. He could sense them around him, concentrating, trying too hard.

“Look up,” he said. “First you must find the place where you are before you can journey elsewhere.”

Overhead, high up in the rocky ceiling, a slash of stars spilled through a crack. The pinpoints winked and shimmered with currents in Yavin 4’s atmosphere.

“Feel the Force,” he said in a whisper, then repeated the words with greater strength. “Feel the Force. You are part of it. You can travel with the Force, down into the core of this moon, and out into the stars. Every living thing strengthens the Force, and everything draws strength from it. Concentrate with me and observe the limitless vistas your skills will show you.”

Drifting in the warm water, feeling the fizz of bubbles against his skin, Luke looked up at the confined patch of stars through the broken ceiling, then looked back down to the darkened pool. “Can you see it?” he said.

The bottom of the pool flickered, opening a gateway to the universe. He saw the glory of stars, arms of the galaxy, stars exploding in titanic death throes, nebulae coalescing in a blazing wash of birth.

He heard unbridled gasps as the Jedi candidates saw the same vision. They each seemed to be a self-contained form hovering over the universe, where they could get the ultimate perspective, a true view from a height.

Luke felt the wonder pulsing through him as he identified Coruscant and the Emperor’s Core worlds. He saw the embattled systems where tattered Imperial remnants fought each other in civil warfare; he saw the empty systems that had once been controlled by the Ssi Ruuk Imperium, until they had been defeated by the combined Empire and Rebel forces at Bakura. Luke recognized and named planets he had known, Tatooine, Bespin, Hoth, Endor, Dathomir, and many others—including the secret world of Anoth, where he and Admiral Ackbar had hidden Han and Leia’s third baby.

But then the names and coordinates of the planets soured in his mind, and Luke scolded himself for thinking like a tactician, like a starship pilot. Names meant nothing, positions meant nothing. Every world and every star was a part of the whole of the galaxy, as were Luke and his trainees at the Jedi praxeum. As were the plants and creatures in the jungle above—

His attuned senses picked up a change deep within the subterranean chambers, sleeping volcanic