Jaden's arms were deadwood hanging off his shoulders. As he lost strength, the clone's lightsaber moved closer to his throat. The sparks from the unstable blade struck Jaden's face and arm, pock marking his skin with tiny scorch marks, igniting little flashes of pain. His heart banged in his ears. He was failing. He was going to die.
The realization summoned something from deep within the dark crevices of his mind where he kept secrets even from himself. Force lightning exploded from his hand, squeezed out by the exigency of his circumstances. The blue lines spiraled around the clone's hand and lightsaber.
The clone gasped with surprise, loosened his grip, disengaged. Jaden gulped a lungful of air while the darkness within him swelled and the outburst of Force lightning intensified. Jaden knew that fear had unlocked the darkest part of himself, knew, too, that he could free that part, surrender to it, and save his body while destroying himself.
But he thought of Kyle, of his training, of Relin, and denied the impulse. The Force lightning died.
The clone recovered, growled, raised his lightsaber high.
Jaden reached behind his back, pulled out the lightsaber he had built in his youth, his ignorant youth, a lightsaber not so different from that held by the clone.
The clone lunged forward.
Jaden activated his lightsaber and drove the point into and through the clone's abdomen.
The clone's roar turned to a groan, but his momentum carried him forward along Jaden's blade, and as death turned his eyes glassy, he completed his overhand stroke.
The sparking red blade cleaved the bodies beside Jaden and fell from the clone's hand. It lay there, a red line spitting sparks. It had no auto-off, and its energy burned into the corpses and sank part way into the muck. Jaden stared at its red swirl a long time, the dead eyes of the clone fixed on his face all the while.
Finally Jaden thumbed off his lightsaber and the clone's body fell free. He pushed the corpse to the side. Grunting with pain, he bent and picked up the clone's lightsaber, held it beside his own purple blade as best he could with his damaged hand.
Purple and red lines-two lines, two choices.
He deactivated both weapons, slowly stood. Exhaustion made his body shake. Pain turned his vision blurry. He limped to the edge of the cloning cylinder, of Mother.
Desiccated skulls and empty eye sockets bore witness to his passage. Open mouths screamed at him to cast himself in, to join them. The stink made him wince. At least he thought it was the stink.
With effort, grunting with pain, he slowly climbed out of the pit.
When he reached the top, he turned and stared down at the chaotic mass of bodies, all of them twisted together, contorted, as if frozen in a struggle to move over and past one another, or perhaps just pressed into one common mass where struggle no longer mattered. He thought all of it must be a metaphor for something, but his pain- and fatigue-addled mind could not decide for what.
He started to cast the clone's lightsaber back into the mass of flesh at the bottom of the pit, put it to rest beside his own, but decided against it. Instead, he latched it to his belt, turned, and found himself staring into the eyes of an Anzat. Surprise almost caused him to step back and fall again into the pit.
In the silence of the cargo bay, drenched in the power of the Lignan, Relin dwelled on his failures. He had failed Saes, failed Drev, failed the Order. He'd even failed Marr, awakening him to the Force so that his first experience with it was the touch of the Lignan.
Anger turned to rage turned to hate. He welcomed it. The proximity to the Lignan intensified the feelings.
His world zeroed down to three things only-himself, his hate, and the object of his hate, Saes. His life had been nothing more than a series of failures. He intended to end it by rectifying the worst of them-Saes.
The hum of the cargo bay lift penetrated the haze of his emotional state. He stood, lightsaber in hand, Lignan in his being, and waited. He heard the lift doors open, heard the sound of boots on the cargo bay floor, and felt Saes's presence through the Force, the black hole into which Relin had poured his early life. The stacked cargo crates blocked Saes from view, but Relin knew he was there.
Saes's voice carried from somewhere behind the containers. "Your anger pleases me. Your handiwork in the lift would earn admiration even from the most savage of my Massassi. Well done, Master."
The last word struck Relin like a punch in the stomach, and he knew Saes intended it to do exactly that. "I am not your Master."
"No, but you taught me everything I know. Perhaps not the way you intended, but it is to you that I owe my freedom from the slavery of the light side."
Through the Force, Relin tried to pinpoint Saes's location. Augmenting a jump with the power of the Force, he leapt atop one of the storage containers. The vantage gave him a better view of the cargo bay. Above the maze of storage containers, he saw the closed lift doors. But no Saes.
"Show yourself," he said. "Let us finish this."
The overhead lights flickered, dimmed, casting the bay in shadow.
Saes's voice carried from behind him. "Do you know what has happened, Relin? Do you know where we are? When we are?"
Relin turned toward the sound of the voice, his body coiled. "I know. It does not matter. Nothing matters now."
"Because your Padawan is dead?"
Rage clenched Relin's jaw so tightly his teeth ached.
Saes chuckled. "Your anger runs deep, not just about your Padawan, but about… me."
Relin swallowed the fist that formed in his throat. Words rushed up from deep inside, words he'd never said even to himself-Your betrayal broke my heart-but he held them behind the wall of his gritted teeth. He saw now that his descent had begun with the doubt that had rooted in him after Saes had turned to the dark side. His slide had simply been slow but, ultimately, inexorable.
"Come out," he said. "It is time we finished things."
Saes's voice came from Relin's left. "It is not too late. Join me. This is a new time, a new place, ripe for a new beginning."
Relin was already shaking his head.
But Saes continued: "Have you considered that it was never the purpose of the Force that you save me, but that I save you instead? Join me, Relin."
The idea pulled at Relin. He felt rudderless, lost. He could join with Saes- "If you do not, your Padawan will have died in vain."
And with those words, Saes overstepped. Relin's rage bubbled over into action. He took telekinetic hold of the storage containers near the sound of Saes's voice and slammed two of them together. Metal twisted, crashed; the doors of the containers broke open from the impact and more Lignan ore spilled out onto the deck.
He slid another container into them, then another. He realized he was shouting, an incoherent roar of rage with its provenance in a life he now deemed wasted. He stopped, his breath coming hard.
"Come out!"
Saes leapt atop a storage container opposite the one on which Relin stood. A sea of Lignan covered the deck between them, dividing them. Shadows played over the ridges on Saes's bone mask. His lightsaber hung from his belt.
"You stink of rage," Saes said. "Where is the calm of the Force of which you so often spoke? The placidity of combat? Or perhaps that was all a lie, as so much you said and believed was?"
Relin let his anger consume his spirit, fill him entirely, and with it he drew on the Force, adding to his strength, his speed.
"Addictive, is it not?" Saes said. "The Lignan, I mean."
With that, Saes raised his hand and blue Force lightning exploded from his fist. Relin did not try to avoid it. Instead, drawing on the Lignan and fueled with hate, he interposed his lightsaber, drew the lightning to it like iron to a magnet, then spun the blade once over his head and flung the dark side energy back at Saes. More Lignan flared on the floor below as Saes drew on it and absorbed his own Force lightning to no visible effect.