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“A friend kept it safe for me.” Jacen squinted as though mildly surprised to hear those words come out of his mouth—then he nodded, reluctantly agreeing with himself. “A friend.”

Ganner could only stare, drop-jawed. Dazzled. Awed. “And you want to give it to me?”

“You might need one. Since I destroyed yours.”

Ganner’s hand shook as he took the lightsaber. It was warm in his hand, warm with Jacen’s body heat, smooth and gleaming. He could feel its structure in the Force, could feel the way it fit together, the individuality of design that made it Anakin’s. He could feel Anakin in the handle.

And he could feel a gap: where his own lightsaber had held a Corusca gem, this one had only a void, an empty space in the Force—but to his eye and hand, the handgrip held a shining amethyst that seemed to flicker with its own interior light.

He triggered the activator and the blade snarled out to full extension, brilliant, eye-burning, buzzing with a hum he could feel in his teeth.

It lit the whole room with a vivid, unnatural purple glow.

“What about you? Where’s yours?”

Jacen shook his head. “I haven’t seen my lightsaber since Myrkr. For what I have to do, weapons are irrelevant.”

“But—but—”

A dull thudding penetrated one wall, a wall dominated by a huge knurled pucker like a pursed mouth carved from wood. Voices came thinly from outside, snarling in the guttural retching hacks of the Yuuzhan Vong tongue.

“They’re here,” Jacen said. He nodded toward the lightsaber in Ganner’s hand. “Better put that away. If they find it on you, they’ll kill us both.” A gently ironic smile quirked his lips. “I mean, they’ll kill us both too soon.”

Ganner was floundering, choking on unreality. His dream had made a great deal more sense than did his waking. He waved Anakin’s lightsaber as though he’d forgotten what it was. “You have to help me understand—!”

“Just remember: ‘I have seen the Light of the True Way,’ ” Jacen repeated firmly, meaningfully, “ ‘and I go to the Gods with joy in my heart, full of gratitude for Their Third Gift.’ ”

As Ganner stood gaping helplessly, the puckered mouth on the wall suddenly yawned into a hatchway that opened on an enormous vaulted hall beyond. He jerked, nearly dropping Anakin’s lightsaber in his haste to deactivate it and stuff it into one of his white robe’s voluminous sleeves.

The hall was full of scarified Yuuzhan Vong warriors standing rigidly at attention, weapons extended in present arms.

Just beyond the opening stood a pair of nervous, sweating Yuuzhan Vong of a caste Ganner did not recognize. Both held leashes attached to reptilian creatures the size of banthas; the reptilian creatures crouched on their haunches while their taloned forelimbs forced the hatch sphincter to full dilation. Several steps farther in, a dozen or more impressively costumed Yuuzhan Vong, caparisoned in identically fantastic arrays of clothing that shone and shimmered and writhed with restless life, formed a half circle that framed two individuals.

One of these wore the immense spiny headdress Ganner had heard was favored by shaper masters; the other wore a long black robe, and grinned a lipless, needle-toothed smile Ganner recognized from his dream.

Nom Anor.

Jacen faced them without the slightest appearance of concern. “What signifies this interruption?” he intoned, once more in the rolling-thunder mode of his Avatar-of-God voice. “How do you dare disturb Me as I share the Light?”

Nom Anor stepped forward, and leaned close to Jacen to murmur, astonishingly, “Very good, Jacen Solo. You wear the mantle impressively.” Then he stepped back, and said more loudly, so that those nearby could hear, “The monitor creatures suddenly lost consciousness. We were concerned. Is all well?”

“Your concern is an insult,” Jacen snapped with magnificent arrogance.

Nom Anor’s eyebrows quirked as though he struggled to suppress a smile, but the master shaper and the ring of fancy-dress Yuuzhan Vong—priestly caste, Ganner guessed—seemed to take him considerably more seriously. Several of them flinched openly.

“Nothing