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On a smog-blackened balcony jutting just below the far end of the gangway, stood Anakin.

Jacen muttered, “You’re not real.”

“Come on, Jacen!” Anakin waved, and beckoned. “This way! Come on! You’ll be safe here!”

Jacen closed his eyes. There was no such thing as safe. “You’re not real.”

When he opened them again, Anakin was still there, still beckoning, wearing a loose-fitting tunic and pants in the Corellian style, lightsaber hung loosely at his belt. He waved Jacen on, jittering with urgency. “Jacen, come on! What’s the matter with you? Let’s go, big brother, let’s go!”

“I saw you die,” Jacen said. He opened himself to the throb of the Force around him; the red tide swelled within his chest, but he pushed it down, focusing tightly, reaching out with his feelings …

Uncle Luke had told, sometimes, of getting guidance from his dead Master, the legendary Obi-Wan Kenobi. He had told of seeing his Master, hearing his voice, feeling him in the Force, long after Kenobi’s death—

Jacen could see Anakin. Could hear his voice. But when he reached toward his brother through the Force, he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

“Two out of three,” Jacen said through his teeth. The red tide roared into his ears. He clenched his teeth together to lock his voice in the back of his throat. “Two out of three makes you Vong.”

“Jacen! What are you waiting for? Come on!”

He could put up with a lot. Had put up with a lot. More than anyone should ever have to. But to have some Yuuzhan Vong masque himself as Anakin—

The red tide gathered in a wave of power that spun him into an effortless rising somersault, flipping high above the crumbled catwalk. He landed balanced upon the rope-thin rail, his feet rock-steady, his arms loose, nerveless at his sides. His power would not let him fall.

The shadow worm in the center of his chest shouted for blood.

Two out of three makes you dead.

“All right,” the shadow worm rasped through Jacen’s mouth. “Wait there. I’m on my way.”

He ran along the rail lightly, swiftly, a drumbeat of murder in his heart drowning any thought of the long fall below; he was at the catwalk’s end in seconds, but Anakin had already darted through the balcony door into the building. Jacen spread his arms and let his rage uphold him as he fell forward, kicking off the rail, gliding over the hundred-meter drop onto the balcony.

He landed in a crouch, skidding, left hand splaying onto a smooth cold layer of slime that coated the balcony. Hawk-bats burst out of the doorway, shrieking and clawing, a wheeling cloud of leather and fur and talon.

Jacen made a fist: an instant gale howled around him, sending the hawk-bats scattering, tumbling helplessly away into the darkness. He sprang forward, eating ground like a sand panther running down a paralope, bounding through the ink-black interior of the building with the Force to guide him around and over obstacles. A flash of booted feet disappearing through a doorway into a globe-lit corridor drew him onward. He reached the doorway in one long Force-boosted leap.

Impossibly, Anakin was already a hundred meters away, at the far end of the corridor, looking back over his shoulder. “Come on, Jacen! You have to run! Follow me!”

“Count on it.” Jacen burst into a sprint; the Force lent wings to his heels, driving him inhumanly fast, and faster, and faster still. He covered the hundred meters in an eyeblink, and found Anakin still well ahead, still looking back, beckoning, urging him onward.

Jacen ran.

The pursuit became a dream of flight, of effortless leaps, feet only skimming the floors beneath. The Force rolled through him, a crimson river sweeping him onward, beyond the sterile precincts below the crater. The river not only fed him strength, it spoke the structure of the buildings through which he raced directly into his mind: he could feel twists and turns and doorways ahead and behind, could feel where his path might be blocked with rubble or where the floor might not support his weight. It whispered girders and beams, transparisteel and duracrete beneath