Brakiss clapped his hands at the troopers. “We will go to their quarters now,” he said. “Their training must begin soon. The Second Imperium has a great need for Dark Jedi Knights.”
“You’ll never turn us,” Jaina said. “You’re wasting your time.”
Brakiss looked at her, smiled indulgently, and stood in silence for a long moment. “You may find that your mind will change,” he said. “Why don’t we wait and see.”
The stormtroopers formed an armed escort around them as they marched along the clanking metal deck plates.
The Shadow Academy was not comfortable and soft like Lando’s GemDiver Station. The walls were not painted with pastel colors; there were no soothing strains of music or nature sounds over the loudspeaker systems, only harsh status reports and chronometer tones that chimed every quarter hour. Stenciled labels marked the doors. Occasional computer terminals mounted to the walls displayed maps of the station and complicated simulations in progress.
“This is an austere station,” Tamith Kai said as Jacen stared at the cold, heartless walls. “We don’t bother with luxury accommodations like your jungle academy. However, we have made sure that you each have a private chamber so you can conduct your meditation exercises, practice your assignments, and concentrate on developing your Force skills.”
“No!” Jaina said.
“We’d rather stay together,” Jacen added.
Lowbacca roared in agreement.
Tamith Kai came to an abrupt stop and looked down at them. “I did not ask your preference!” she said, her violet eyes blazing. “You will do as you are told.”
They reached an intersection of corridors, and here they split into three groups. Brakiss led the cluster of stormtroopers that surrounded Jaina, taking them down a corridor to the right. A larger group of guards, tense and with weapons at the ready, helped Tamith Kai to escort Lowbacca. The remaining guards closed around Jacen and led him off to the left.
“Wait!” Jacen cried, and turned to look at his twin sister for what felt to him like the last time. Jaina stared back at him, her brandy-brown eyes wide with anxiety, but when she bravely lifted her chin, Jacen felt a surge of courage himself. They would find some way out of this.
The guards hustled him down a long corridor until they stopped at one door in a line of identical-seeming doors. Student chambers, he thought.
The door whisked open, and the stormtroopers herded Jacen into a small cubicle, bare-walled and uncomfortable. He saw no speaker panel on the wall, no controls, nothing that would let him communicate with anybody.
“I’m staying in here?” he said in disbelief.
“Yes,” the lead stormtrooper said.
“But what if I need something? How am I supposed to call out?” Jacen said.
The trooper turned his skull-like plasteel mask to look directly at him. “Then you will endure until someone comes for you.” The stormtroopers stepped back, and the door shut behind Jacen, closing him in, weaponless and alone.
Then, to make things worse, all the lights went out.
9
Tenel Ka woke to pitch-darkness, cramped and confined, surrounded by a dull vibration. Her heart drummed a rapid cadence, and perspiration prickled her skin. An urgency, a feeling that something was terribly wrong, nudged the back of her mind. She tried to sit up and bumped her head—hard—against the unyielding bottom of the bunk above her. Stifling an exclamation of annoyance, she remembered that she was aboard the Off Chance. She relaxed slightly—but only slightly.
When they had finished with the Hutt information broker on Borgo Prime, Luke and Tenel Ka decided their best hope for finding Jacen, Jaina, and Lowbacca lay in going directly to Dathomir, homeworld of the original Nightsisters. Their only clue was the mysterious Nightsister, and they had to find out who she was and whether she had the twins and Lowbacca.
Luke had urged Tenel Ka to get some sleep while they made their journey. It was the first opportunity she had had to rest since her friends had been kidnapped, and Tenel Ka gratefully accepted.
And so she had slept, sealed away from light and sound, in one of the berths aboard the Off Chance, but her rest had again been disturbed by shadowy dreams. She touched a switch by her head and winced as bright cabin light flooded the sleeping cubicle. She rolled onto her stomach, swung her legs over the side of the bunk, and dropped a meter and a half to the floor of the cabin. Shaking back her tumble of loose red-gold hair, Tenel Ka stretched to her full height and noted with pleasure the freedom of movement that her tough, supple lizard-hide armor afforded her. She was glad to be dressed as a warrior again.
The uneasy feeling left by her dream persisted as Tenel Ka made her way to the cockpit and lowered herself into the copilots seat next to Luke. She gazed through the front viewport at the swirling colors that indicated the Off Chance was traveling through hyperspace.
Luke looked up from the controls. “Did you get some sleep?”
“This is a fact.” She fastened the crash webbing around her, then grabbed a thick clump of her hair and began plaiting it into a braid, adding a few feathers and beads that she kept in a pouch attached to her belt.
“But you didn’t sleep well?”
She blinked at this, somehow surprised that he had noticed. “This is also a fact.”
Luke did not reply. He simply waited, and with growing discomfort she realized he was waiting for her to explain.
“I … had a dream,” she said. “It is not important.
His intense blue eyes searched her face. When he spoke, it was in a low voice. “I feel fear in you.”
She grimaced and shrugged. “It is a dream I have had before.”
His eyelids fluttered shut briefly, and he tilted his head as he might have done had he been studying her with his eyes open. “… the Nightsisters?” he said at last.
“Yes. It is childish,” she admitted as color rushed to her cheeks, staining them with embarrassment.
“Strange … I dreamt about them, too,” Luke said.
Tenel Ka looked at him in disbelief. “I used to think they were just a story that mothers and grandmothers on Dathomir told to scare children. But the Nightsisters were all destroyed. How could there be any left?”
“The people of Dathomir are often strong in the Force, and it would not be difficult for someone else to train them in the ways of evil,” he said. He leaned back in the pilot’s seat and stared out at hyperspace as if summoning an old memory. “In fact, many years ago—before you were born—I traveled to Dathomir searching for Jacen and Jaina’s parents, Han and Leia. That was when I met your mother and father, and we all joined forces to defeat the last of the Nightsisters.”
Tenel Ka looked at him curiously. This was a part of the story her parents spoke little about. “My mother thinks very highly of you,” she said, hoping he would elaborate.
Luke slid her a teasing glance. “But did she ever tell you how we met? That she captured me?”
“You don’t mean—” Tenel Ka began. “She couldn’t have expected …”
Luke chuckled at her discomfiture. “This is a fact.”
“Oh, Master Skywalker!” Tenel Ka gasped in chagrin at the very idea of Luke submitting to the primitive marriage customs she had always viewed as quaint and provincial. On Dathomir, a woman selected and captured the man she wanted to marry. Her mother, Teneniel Djo, had done that to Luke Skywalker?
It brought a renewed flush of embarrassment to her face to realize that her mother had captured the greatest Jedi Master in the galaxy and had expected him to marry her and father her children. Then, all at once, the situation struck her as so ridiculous that she let loose with what was, for her, a rare sound indeed—a giggle.
“My mother has always taught me to have respect for Jedi, and most of all for you, Master Skywalker, but … please do not be offended”—she gasped, tears of mirth rising to her eyes—“I am certainly glad she did not succeed.”