Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [84]
“My name is Tahiri!” she screamed at them. “I am Jedi! Tahiri!”
Then a tidal wave of dazzling anguish crawled up every single nerve, centipedes with legs of fire, and she lost consciousness.
“What did it say?” Tsun asked.
“That was Basic, the language of the infidels,” Nen Yim told him.
“Should she be able to access that?”
“No. She still resists. We found that she somehow reroutes to nerve clusters we have not mined. However, the provoker spineray follows the reroutes and stimulates them, as well. In time, she will have no way into or out of those memories save through the embrace of pain. By that time it will not matter. She will be infidel no longer, and will welcome the challenge.”
“Thank you for explaining,” he said.
Nen Yim acknowledged him with a twist of her headdress, returning to her work.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The damutek root was a hollow tube, and when Anakin and Vua Rapuung entered it, it was almost a meter in diameter. Close, but not claustrophobic.
As soon as it sensed their presence, it constricted, hugging the contours of their bodies with insistent strength. Anakin had to straighten his arms in front of him and drag himself downward with the strength of his fingers.
He felt as if he was suffocating. He couldn’t go backwards, not with Vua Rapuung behind him. To make matters worse, he was moving against a gentle but unrelenting current. When the pressure against him grew too great he would curl his body into a fetal position, something that took almost every bit of strength he had. When he released and straightened his body, it took several seconds for the root walls to contract and conform to his body again. It felt like trying to crawl up the esophagus of a snake intent on swallowing. The only problem with that analogy was that if he were doing that, he would be assured of light at the end of the mucilaginous tunnel. Here he was crawling toward darkness, maybe nothingness. What if the root ended in a sealed aquifer? How long would the breather shoved down his windpipe continue to work? Until he starved, probably.
If he ever got off Yavin 4, he promised himself, he would visit his uncle’s homeworld, Tatooine, or some other similarly desiccated place. He had had more than enough of water and other fluids on this trip to last him decades.
Fighting a nattering little panic, Anakin continued dragging himself forward. Minutes piled into hours.
He thought of sunlight, wind, infinite space.
He thought of Tahiri. Was he wrong to try to rebuild his lightsaber? Should he have gone on charging after her without it? The strong, early contacts in the Force had faded to occasional brushes, most powerfully when she was in agony. Anakin had the clear impression that Tahiri was actually avoiding contact, shoving him away.
Despite this, an image of her prison had assembled itself in his mind—a small chamber divided from a larger one by a thin but unbreakable membrane. Her jailers were Yuuzhan Vong like the one he had seen by the succession pool, the one with the tentacled headdress. Several other cells like the one she was in were visible, but these were empty and dark, presumably waiting for more young Jedi captives.
The other thing he was certain of was that Tahiri was in a great deal of confusion. Not only did she not respond to his touch, she sometimes didn’t even recognize it.
If he thought he could save her without his lightsaber …
But he couldn’t. Even the insanely reckless Vua Rapuung thought so, or they would never be squeezing themselves down a kilometer of small intestine.
Tahiri could hang in there for another two days. She had to. And to save her, he could crawl through anything.
Muscles trembling, even when he freshened them with the Force, he moved on.
When he finally emerged into a space large enough that he could float free and touch nothing, he silently celebrated it by stretching, bending, kicking his arms,