Teneniel Djo had been even more pleased when her daughter had decided to attend the academy and take instruction to become a Jedi. She had enrolled simply as Tenel Ka of Dathomir, not wanting the other trainees to treat her differently because of her royal upbringing.
At the academy, only Master Skywalker—who was an old friend of her mother’s, and the man Teneniel Djo most admired—knew Tenel Ka’s true background. She had not even told Jacen and Jaina, her closest friends on Yavin 4.
Jacen and Jaina. The twins trusted her. They needed her help now. She shivered in the cave. She had to stay safe for the night and then get back to the academy in the morning to bring reinforcements.
Tenel Ka heard a faint rustling, slapping, and hissing in the darkness behind her. She looked back into the undulating shadows, blinking to clear her eyes. Had the shadows really moved? Perhaps she had been foolish to spend the night in an unexplored cave, but cold and fatigue had overruled her natural caution. She looked up and thought she could discern glossy dark shapes clinging to the ceiling, moving like waves on an inverted black sea.
Don’t be a child, she chided herself. She had always tried to show her friends how self-sufficient and reliable she was. Right now, she was cold and bruised and miserable. What would Jacen say if he could see her? He’d probably tell some dumb joke.
Tenel Ka gritted her teeth. She would just have to build a fire without the flash heater, using skills she had been taught on Dathomir.
It took an agonizingly long time for her strong arms to produce enough friction twirling one smooth stick of wood against a flat branch. Finally, she managed to coax forth a glowing ember and a tendril of smoke. Working quickly, she touched a dried leaf to it and blew. A tiny golden flame licked its way up the leaf. With mounting excitement she added another and then another, and then a few twigs.
A gust of wind threatened to extinguish the struggling flame, so she encircled her fire with a tiny earthen berm to protect it. She added more tinder, and soon the snapping blaze was large enough to warm her and cast a comforting circle of light.
Tenel Ka soon realized that the restless sounds of scratching and stirring she had heard earlier had grown louder—much louder.
Suddenly, a shrieking reptilian form plummeted from the ceiling, its leathery wings outstretched. Twin serpentine heads snapped and a scorpion tail lashed, razor-sharp claws outstretched. Tenel Ka raised an arm to protect her face as the thing drove directly at her. Talons raked her arm as she pushed herself backward toward the cave wall. Sharp fangs opened a gash in her bare leg, and she kicked fiercely, striking one of the creature’s two heads with her scaled boot. In the flickering light from the tiny fire, Tenel Ka watched in horror as an entire flock of the hideous creatures—each with a wingspan wider than she was tall—dropped from the shadowy recesses of the cave and swarmed toward her.
She struggled for purchase on the sandy cave floor and pushed her feet against the stone wall. Tenel Ka propelled herself toward the mouth of the cave on her hands and knees.
She kicked the embers of her fire at the flapping beasts as she scrambled past, hardly noticing the bits of charred wood leaf that singed her own legs. One of the reptilian creatures shrieked in pain.
Tenel Ka smiled with grim satisfaction and launched herself through the cave opening, back out into the pitch blackness of the jungle night.
The monsters followed.
14
At gunpoint, the TIE pilot led his captives back to the clearing with the small, crude shelter where he had lived for some time.
“So this is why you came running,” Jaina said to her brother. “You found where he lives.” Jacen nodded.
“Silence!” the Imperial soldier said in a brusque voice.
Jaina, her throat tight and dry, swallowed hard and looked around at the small, cleared site in the gathering evening shadows. Beside them a shallow stream trickled past. She couldn’t imagine how the TIE pilot had survived all alone, without any human contact, for so many years.
The climate of Yavin 4 was warm and hospitable, placing few demands on the home the TIE pilot had created for himself. He had carved out a large shelter from the bole of a half-burned Massassi tree, in front of which he had lashed a lean-to of split branches. Altogether, it provided him with a simple but comfortable room, like a living cave. Jaina tried to imagine how long it had taken the Imperial, scraping with a sharp implement—possibly a piece of wreckage from his crashed ship—to widen the area under the gnarled overhang.
The TIE pilot had rigged a system of plumbing made from hollow reeds joined together, drawing water from the nearby stream into catch basins inside his hut. He had made rough utensils from wood, forest gourds, and petrified fungus slabs. The man had maintained a lonely existence, unchallenged, simply surviving and waiting for further orders, hoping someone would come to retrieve him—but no one ever had.
The Imperial soldier stopped outside the hut. “On the ground,” he said. “Both of you. Hands above your heads.”
Jaina looked at Jacen as they lay belly-down on the ground of the clearing. She could think of no way to escape. The TIE pilot went to the thick foliage and rummaged among the branches with his good hand. He wrapped his fingers around some thin, purplish vines that dangled from dazzlingly bright Nebula orchids in the branches above his head. With a jerk he snapped the strands free.
The vine tendrils flopped and writhed in his grip as if they were alive and trying to squirm away. The TIE pilot rapidly used them to lash Jaina’s wrists together, then Jacen’s. As the deep violet sap leaked from the broken ends of the vines, the plant’s thrashing slowed, and the flexible, rubbery vines contracted, tightening into knots that were impossible to break.
Jacen and Jaina looked at each other, their liquid-brown eyes meeting as a host of thoughts gleamed unspoken between them. But they said nothing, afraid to anger their captor.
Marching clumsily through the humid jungle had made them hot and sticky, and Jaina was still covered with grime from her repairs on the TIE fighters engines. Now the cool jungle evening chilled her perspiration and made her shiver. Her hands tingled and throbbed, as the tight vines cutting into her wrists made her even more miserable.
In the hour or so since their capture, neither of the twins had heard any further sign of Lowie or Tenel Ka. Jaina was afraid that something had happened to them, that her two friends were even now stranded and lost somewhere in the jungle. But then she realized that her own situation was probably a lot more dangerous than theirs.
Without a word, the TIE pilot nudged them to their feet, then over to the large lava-rock boulders near the fire pit he used outside his shelter. They squatted there together, The stone chairs had been polished smooth, their sharp edges chipped away slowly and patiently over the course of years by the lost Imperial.
The last coppery rays of light from huge orange planet Yavin disappeared, as the rapidly rotating moon covered the jungle with night. Through the densely laced treetops, thick shadows gathered, making the forest floor darker than the deepest night on Jacen and Jaina’s glittering home planet of Coruscant.
The Imperial pilot walked over to the splintered chunks of dry, moss-covered wood he had painstakingly gathered, one-armed, and stacked near his shelter. He carried them back and dropped one branch at a time into the fire pit, stacking the wood in formation to make a small campfire.
The pilot withdrew a battered igniter from a storage bin inside his shelter and pointed it at the campfire. Its charge had been nearly depleted, and the silvery nozzle showered only a few hot sparks onto the kindling; but he seemed accustomed to such difficulties. He toiled in silence, never cursing, never complaining, simply focused on the task of getting the campfire lit. And when he succeeded, he showed no satisfaction, no joy.