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Yavin eclipsed the sun and then rolled under the sky, and once more Anakin found himself in full darkness. He was slipping into the arms of fatigue, considering a short nap, when he heard an odd noise. At first he thought he was imagining it, for he felt nothing in the Force, but as it grew louder, he opened his eyes, turning carefully to see what it might be.

Pacing him, perhaps fifty meters away, was something large and dark. Something that did not exist in the Force at all.

“Oh, Sithspawn,” he muttered under his breath. Otherwise he froze, watching the thing. It was flying perfectly parallel to him, which couldn’t be an accident. It wasn’t as big as a coralskipper, but not much smaller, either. A speeder analog, maybe? Something better designed for atmospheric flight than the ships he had thus far seen? He couldn’t make out a silhouette, only a tactile impression of size. And there, again, he could be wrong.

Did they think he hadn’t seen them yet, or were they still trying to figure out what he was?

He got his answer a few moments later, when the craft subtly changed course and their flight paths began to converge.

“This is no good,” Anakin muttered.

He turned the lift control down two-thirds and dropped through what felt like a small gap in the treetops. A branch caught under one corner of the speeder and flipped it over, and with no gyro to correct, Anakin found himself hurling toward the ground. Desperately, he wrenched at the craft with the Force, flipping it back over with a very raw, unsubtle use of strength, exactly the kind of thing his brother was always berating him for. “The Force isn’t a torch for you to weld plating with,” Jacen might say.

Of course, without that macrofuser, Anakin would be a bag of broken bones on the forest floor right now. The Force was about everything, wasn’t it?

Stabilizing in the midlevel canopy of the forest, Anakin was in more complete darkness than before, deprived even of starlight. He dropped his speed a little; his rudder was too crude to allow him the kind of hot flying that might take him between the great boles at full throttle. He let the Force guide his hands on the rudder and used his gaze to track the dark for any sign of his pursuer.

But it was his ears, again, that alerted him. Something crashed through the treetops behind him, and all of the hairs on his neck stood up. What was he facing? A living ship? A beast?

He dropped and cut a sharp turn, slipping between two trees, scraping one of them. For an instant, he thought it had worked, but then he heard the whirring turn to follow him.

How does it see? he wondered. Infrared? Or, given that the Yuuzhan Vong used only living technology, maybe it smelled him. Whatever the case, it certainly had a lock on him. It was faster, too, though less maneuverable in the trees due to its greater size.

He thought he was evading it pretty well until something hissed past his ear—not a branch, not anything he could feel in the Force. Desperately he increased his evasive tactics, spinning and rolling, coming as near the trees as he dared, slipping through the narrowest spaces he was able to.

Dark things licked past him, hissing in the leaves, and then something caught the speeder in a grip that stopped it dead in the air.

Anakin didn’t stop, however. With all of the forward momentum that had just been stolen from his craft, he was hurled into the night, a rocket of blood and bone. He tucked and spun, slowing himself with the Force, and dropped onto a branch bigger around than he was.

He turned and found himself facing a hole in the night.

A thin tendril whipped out from the thing and wrapped around his waist, cinching painfully tight. With a hoarse cry, he snapped on his lightsaber and cut, just as the strand started to tighten further, as if reeling him in. Incredibly, the strand—it seemed no thicker than his thumb—resisted the first cut, though it yielded to the second.

By then he had been jerked off the branch, and once again he was falling. Closing