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She drew a deep breath of the tainted air. “Leave me alone with her. Mon Mothma and I will fight this together.” She swallowed. “If we can.”

Murmuring warm wishes and reassurances, Ackbar and Leia faded into the background. Cilghal paid little attention to them as they departed.

Her shimmering blue ambassadorial robes flowed around her like ethereal waves. She knelt to stare at Mon Mothma’s motionless form. Reaching out with the Force, but at a loss for what exactly she was supposed to do, she tried to assess the scope of damage inside Mon Mothma’s body.

As she began to see deeper, the extent of the poison’s ravages astounded her. She could not comprehend how Mon Mothma had managed to stay alive for so long. Uncertainty fluttered in Cilghal’s mind like gathering shadows.

How could she possibly combat such a disease? She did not understand how working with the Force could heal living things, how it could strengthen the life of someone as devastated as Mon Mothma. The best available medical droids had not been able to remove the malicious poison. No medicines had been able to cure her.

Cilghal knew only what Master Skywalker had taught her—how to sense with the Force, how to feel living things, how to move objects. She touched Mon Mothma with glowing currents of the Force, searching for some kind of answer, or at least an idea.

Could she use her Jedi skills but in a different manner that might strengthen Mon Mothma? Help her body to heal? Find some method to remove the poison?

Cilghal hesitated as a possibility struck like a meteor. The magnitude of the effort stunned her, and she wanted to dismiss the thought automatically—but she forced herself to study the idea.

Master Skywalker had explained Yoda’s teachings, his insistence that “size matters not.” Yoda had claimed that lifting Luke’s entire X-wing fighter was no different from lifting a pebble.

But could Cilghal turn it the other way around? Could she use her precise control of the Force to move something so small?

She blinked her round Calamarian eyes. Millions of the tiny nano-destroyers saturated Mon Mothma’s body.

Size matters not.

But if Cilghal could remove the destructive poison molecules, if she could somehow keep Mon Mothma from toppling over the abyss into death—then her body could restore itself, in time.

Cilghal refused to let her thoughts overwhelm her with visions of the sheer number of poison molecules. She would have to move them one by one, tugging each nano-destroyer through cell walls and out of the dying leader’s body.

Cilghal placed her broad fins on Mon Mothma’s bare skin. She picked up the leader’s left hand and raised it over the side of the bed frame, letting the woman’s fingertips rest in a small crystal dish that had once been used to dispense medications. Even this gentle touch was enough to cause red bruises to bloom on the woman’s fragile skin.

Cilghal opened her mental doors, freeing her thoughts, allowing currents of the Force to flow into Mon Mothma’s form. She let the nictitating membranes slide over her Calamarian eyes as she began to see with an inner vision, traveling through the cellular pathways of Mon Mothma’s body.

She found herself in a strange universe of rushing blood cells, electrically firing neurons, contracting muscle fibers, laboring organs that could no longer perform their functions. Cilghal couldn’t exactly comprehend what she saw, but somehow she understood instinctively which parts were healthy, which molecules were sustaining Mon Mothma, and which were the black scourge.

With the Force, Cilghal could touch with fingers infinitely small, infinitely precise, to grasp one of the nano-destroyers and send it careening out of the dying body.

Cilghal found other microscopic destroyers and nudged them, pushed them, herding the poison away from healthy cells, preventing further damage.

The task was incomprehensibly large. The poison had spread and replicated, scattering itself through the billions and billions of cells in Mon Mothma’s body. Cilghal would have to search and remove every