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Anor could infect Jaina, too. Jaina had other senses than eyesight, but she was in no shape for hand-to-hand combat against someone who couldn’t be sensed through the Force—and whose weapon was suspended in a liquid.

“You never answered my question,” he called. “Why are you still alive?”

“You’re the last one I’d tell.” Vergere was still out there—somewhere. “Get back, Jaina.”

Then Mara lunged, slicing low with her lightsaber. Only a feint, but instead of returning her attack, he turned and fled—not up the passage where they’d come, but beyond the lab counter, toward a smaller door.

He left the flask on the countertop.

Her impulse was to chase him down. Trap! her instincts shrieked. Don’t follow!

Then her danger sense went off like a siren. She hesitated as Jaina sprinted around the laboratory bench. She had to make the right call. Three lives were at stake, and only one was in fighting trim.

“Blast,” she muttered, kicking the elevated heels off her fancy shoes. “Jaina, this way!” She spun toward the passage where they’d come in.

Three retorts like ricocheting projectile shots sounded overhead. Startled, she glanced up. A crack opened in the stony ceiling. It branched, branched again, and again.

She waved Jaina toward the tunnel, crying, “Run!” A chunk of stone hit the floor beside her.

Jaina reached the doorway. All around them—ceiling, walls—soft rock crumbled. Mara pushed Jaina ahead of her, reaching deep inside herself, trying to divert each stone as it fell. She split a dozen with her lightsaber.

But they fell too thickly. As rock dust choked off the light ahead and behind her, she pushed Jaina down, fell on her, and pushed out with the Force. She kept the presence of mind to extinguish her lightsaber.

The noise went on, like a powerful waterfall, for several age-long seconds.

Jaina rolled out from under her. She’d killed her lightsaber, too. In utter darkness, Mara couldn’t see what Jaina was doing, but she did hear a plaintive “Ow!”

“Hit your head?” Mara asked quietly.

“Slightly.” Momentary silence. “You’re keeping that up with the Force?”

“No. Just my radiant personality.” She softened her voice. “Do you still have the rebreathers?”

“Yes. Here.”

“Keep mine for now.”

Mara rose to a crouch, planted her hands against hard stone, and tried pushing up harder with the Force. If only a small stone-fall surrounded them, it ought to move. Or shift, at least.

It didn’t.

“Ten to one,” she grumbled, “he brought his own kind of rock chewers here to Duro. He dug out his own side tunnel—and while he did, he set traps for Leia’s security people.”

Jaina’s voice sounded sour. “You retreated because of me, didn’t you? We could’ve taken him. We could’ve killed him, right there.”

“I’ll get that creature if it’s the last thing I do.” Mara hadn’t hated anyone this desperately since …

Well, since Luke Skywalker. A lifetime ago.

Luke? She stretched out and felt his concern. I’m all right, she assured him, for now. Don’t drop what you’re doing just yet. He wouldn’t catch words, only sensation—but he would catch a lot of that.

Jaina said, “There’s a good chance the rockfall’s shorter, back the way he went.”

“Point,” Mara said. “And that it’s also the way he wanted us to go.” Her instincts had warned her, and she would face a hundred other horrors before she let that Sithspawn expose her child to his deadly spores.

Maybe the flask held something else, this time, but she’d heard truth in his boast. He had infected her.

The same instincts were finally blaring, loud and clear, that it was no Yuuzhan Vong bioweapon deep inside her body. It was a normal, defenseless child. A Skycrawler, as Leia had teased optimistically, shortly after her wedding.

She thumbed her comlink, though she didn’t have much hope. “Leia? Do you copy?”

Silence.

“Hello, Gateway. This is an emergency. Does anyone read me?”

Nothing. The stone was too thick.

“I think the air smells strange, Aunt Mara.”

“Put your rebreather on.” Had that flask on the countertop