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“Good. You’re learning. So, you take your spur and split the lambent casing at the top. Go ahead.”

He knelt by the plants and pressed the sharp tip into the yellow bulb. It split, and a pale milky substance oozed out.

“Now cut down the side. It will be difficult.”

It was. The husk was tough. When he had scored three sides, he managed to peel the skin away. The entire time he did this, he was acutely aware of the thing’s telepathic voice, a quiet peeping somehow different from its companions, probably because of Uunu’s “attunement” of it.

The big surprise was the inside. When he had cut it free, Anakin held it up, fascinated.

It looked very much like a gem of some sort.

“What is it?” he asked again.

“Later. Go, now. You will be slower at cutting them than I am at attuning them. You must work to keep up with me. Normally two or three huskers come after the attuner. When you have a rhythm, and I am certain you are not losing ground, then we will try talking. Not before.”

It didn’t happen that day. While Anakin eventually caught the rhythm of the work, it was only after he was far behind Uunu. The lambents distracted him. They could tickle his mind and he could touch them, but not through the Force, not in the conventional sense. He was told that Wurth Skidder had had a similar experience with a Yuuzhan Vong yammosk, the creatures that coordinated the actions of Yuuzhan Vong warcraft. Yammosks bonded telepathically with their daughter ships and with the crews of its fleet. It then protected them as it would its own offspring, directing their battles to minimize loss. Skidder had apparently achieved some sort of metalinkage between the Force and yammosk telepathy, at least according to his surviving companions.

Were these lambents yammosk relatives? Uunu was doing something to them; they changed as she stroked them, became more distant to Anakin. Because she was bonding them to herself? Could Anakin bond with one? Maybe if he did, he would find out what their function was. Were they what they looked like and felt like? They couldn’t be exactly, of course, because they were alive, but still!

He hadn’t realized how much hope he had lost until he started to get some of it back.

He slept in a dormitory for slaves, a low-roofed, creeping building with four sleeping areas carpeted in a spongy, mosslike growth. A total of eighteen slaves occupied the building, sleeping as thick as stintarils. It was nearly impossible to sleep without being in contact with someone.

To Anakin’s relief, they weren’t all Peace Brigade. In fact, Anakin gathered that while most of the Brigaders in the system had indeed been captured, most of those had been sacrificed to the Yuuzhan Vong gods. The slaves he shared his quarters with were from various points along the route of conquest and seemed to represent members of some sort of slave core population, one that the malcontents and firebrands had been largely eliminated from. None of them had the old style of slave implants like those Anakin had seen on Dantooine.

“They use those mostly for the ones they send into battle,” a Twi’lek named Poy told him, when he asked about it. “The thing is, if they fit you with the stuff, it takes a lot out of you. Makes you dumb. The shapers don’t want dumb slaves that keep forgetting directions. The warriors just need bodies to absorb blasterfire, so it doesn’t really matter there.” His lekku twitched pensively. “But act up, or act stupid, and they’ll fit you with it and send you to the front.”

The most comforting thing about the slaves was that Anakin could feel them in the Force, but other than that, he didn’t see much hope for help in them, and indeed, enormous potential for betrayal if they had any hint of who or what he might be. He gave it out that he had been captured on Duro and suggested to the more inquisitive that they didn’t need to know the details.

Uunu collected him for the second morning, while it was still dark. He’d slept sporadically, trying to locate Tahiri in the Force. She was still withdrawn, difficult to find,