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Streen and Kirana Ti kept their lightsabers crossed, the energy sizzling and searing.

With the Force, Streen touched the winds again. The air inside the grand audience chamber swirled with increasing coriolis force to form a whirlwind. The cyclone grew tighter in an invisible knot around the shredded shadow, trapping it and carrying it up toward the rooftop and out, flinging it into the vast emptiness.

Exar Kun vanished with only a brief, curtailed scream.

The Jedi Knights stood joined together for a final moment, relishing the shared Force. Then, in exhaustion and relief and triumph, they separated from each other. The unearthly glow dissipated around them.

The image of the alien Master Vodo-Siosk Baas stared toward the ceiling, as if to catch a last glimpse of his conquered student, and then he too disappeared.

With a wheezing cough as he expelled long-trapped air from his lungs and drew in a fresh breath, Master Skywalker groaned and sat up on the stone platform.

“You’ve—done it!” Luke said, gaining strength with each lungful of cool, clean air. The new Jedi Knights surged toward him. “You have broken the bonds.”

With squeals of delight Jacen and Jaina ran to their Uncle Luke. He pulled them into his arms. They giggled and hugged him back.

Luke Skywalker smiled out at his students, his face glowing with pride for the group of Jedi Knights he had trained.

“Together,” he said, “you make a formidable team indeed! Perhaps we need no longer fear the darkness.”

16

In the Sun Crusher’s pilot seat Kyp Durron crouched over the controls. He stared at the Millennium Falcon as if it were a demon ready to spring at him. His fingernails scratched down the metallic surface of the navigation panels like claws trying to dig into flesh.

His mind had been swimming with the bittersweet memories of happy times with Han, how the two of them had careened over the ice fields in a frantic turbo-ski run, how they had made friends in the blackness of the spice mines, how Han had pretended not to be all choked up when Kyp left for the Jedi academy. Part of him was appalled at the idea of threatening Han Solo’s life, that he would want to destroy the Millennium Falcon.

It had seemed an easy threat, the obvious thing to do. But it came from a dark shadow in the back of his mind. The whispering voice chewed at his thoughts, haunted him constantly. It was the voice he had heard during his training on Yavin 4 in the deepest night and in the echoing obsidian pyramid far out in the jungles, and on top of the great ziggurat from which Kyp had summoned the Sun Crusher out of the core of Yavin.

Troubled by that voice, Kyp had stolen a ship and fled to the forest moon of Endor to meditate beside the ashes of Darth Vader’s funeral pyre. He had thought to go far enough away to escape Kun’s influence, but he no longer thought that was possible.

Kyp had traveled to the Core Systems, but still he felt the chains binding him to the Dark Lord, the malevolent obligations required by the Sith teachings. If he tried to resist and think for himself, the angry tauntings returned with full force, the snapped words, the coercions, the veiled threats.

But Han Solo’s words tugged at him too—weapons of a different sort that made his heart grow warm, melting the ice of anger. Right now Exar Kun’s voice seemed distracted and distant, as if preoccupied with another challenge.

As Kyp listened to Han’s words, he realized that his friend, knowing little about Jedi teachings, had put his finger on the truth. He was following the dark side. Kyp’s weak justifications crumbled around him in a storm of excuses built on a fragile foundation of revenge.

“Han … I—”

But just as he had been about to speak warmly to Han, to open up and ask his friend to come talk with him—suddenly his controls went dead. An override signal from the Falcon’s computer had shut down the Sun Crusher’s weapons systems, its navigation controls, its life support.

The black net of anger fell over him, smothering his kind intentions. In outrage Kyp found the power to send a burst