Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [111]
Outside the medical facility he found Mirax, Booster, Valin, Jysella, and half a dozen other people jittering around. When Anakin burst onto the scene, all eyes turned toward him.
“Aunt Mara!” he gasped. “What’s wrong with Aunt Mara?”
Mirax embraced him. “Mara is fine,” she said. “Where in space have you been? Is Corran with you?”
Anakin brushed off the question. “But the pain …” he began.
“It’s normal,” Mirax replied. “Corran?”
“Corran’s fine,” Anakin said. “He’ll be right here. Mirax, I felt her dying.”
“She was. Now she’s not. Somehow, in the Force, she and Luke … We don’t know how. But the Yuuzhan Vong disease is gone. Completely.”
“Then the pain—”
“Natural. Hideous, overwhelming, but natural. Believe me, I’ve experienced it twice.”
“You mean …?”
A few moments later the door sighed open. Cilghal stood there, looking very, very tired.
“You can come in now,” she said. “A few at a time, please.”
Anakin and Mirax went in first.
Mara still looked sick. Her face was sallow, and sweat sheened her brow. But she was smiling, her jade eyes filled with an unfamiliar sort of happiness. Luke knelt at the bedside, holding her hand.
“Luke, Mara,” Mirax said. “Look who I’ve brought.”
“Anakin!” Luke said. “You’re okay! Are Corran and Tahiri with you?”
“Yeah,” Anakin said absently, his attention fixed on the small bundle in the crook of Mara’s arm. He stepped closer. Small dark eyes glanced vaguely in his direction, passing over him as if he didn’t exist.
“Wow,” he breathed.
“Hello, Anakin,” Mara said weakly. “I knew you’d be here.”
“I thought you were … Can I come closer?”
“Sure.”
Anakin stared down at the newborn. “Are they all that ugly?” he blurted.
“You’ll want to rephrase that,” Mara said, “after what I just went through. Think in the general direction of antonyms.”
“I mean, he’s—”
“His name is Ben,” Luke said.
“He’s beautiful. In the Force, and … But he’s all sort of squinched and wrinkly.”
“Just like you were,” Mara said.
“And you’re really okay?”
“I’ve never, ever been better,” Mara told him. “Everything is perfect.” She looked down at her child. “Perfect.” As weary as it was, her smile had enough wattage to light all of Coruscant.
FORTY-SEVEN
Nen Yim walked with bowed head through the labyrinthine corridors of the great ship. Sculpted pylons of ancient but living bone raised the vast ceilings, and choirs of rainbow qaana hummed hymns to the gods through their chitinous mandibles. Rare paaloc incense—forbidden to all but the highest of the high—remembered the ancient homeworld of the Yuuzhan Vong to the hindmost recesses of her brain.
Kae Kwaad slunk beside her, strangely subdued.
In the center of the vast chamber, they came to a raised dais of pulsing, fibrous hau polyps, and atop it, shrouded in darkness and translucent lamina, reclined an enormous figure. Only his eyes were clearly visible, glowing maa’it implants that shifted through the colors of the spectrum. Other than that was only an irregular shadow that sent shivers of worship aching through her body. For a terrible moment she believed she had been brought into the very presence of Yun-Yuuzhan himself.
Kae Kwaad prostrated himself. “I have brought her, Dread Shimrra.”
The eyes burned into her, but it was long, tremulous heartbeats before the figure spoke.
“Would you look upon me, Adept?” he said, his whispered voice surely as majestic and terrible as that of the god he resembled. “Would you look upon me and die?”
Nen Yim supplicated. “I would if you wish it, Dread Lord.”
“You are a heretic, Nen Yim. Bred of heretics.”
“I have done what I thought I must for the Yuuzhan Vong. I am prepared to die for my transgressions.”
Shimrra made a noise, then—a rustling, vaporous noise that she only gradually recognized as laughter.
“You have seen the eighth cortex.”
“I have gazed within it, Lord.”
“And what did you see there?