[Junior Jedi Knights] - 02(6)

Still, her sobs caught in her throat as she left the Grand Audience Chamber.

“Lyric,” Tahiri called out. “We didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but we were worried about you. How can we help?” she asked.

Lyric shook her head.

“You can’t,” she answered sadly. “This is something I have to do alone.”

“Why?” Anakin asked suddenly. “Why can’t Tahiri and I go with you to Yavin 8 and help you through the changing ceremony?”

“Your place is at the academy,” Lyric murmured.

“Our place is with our friend,” Tahiri replied.

The battered supply ship, the Lightning Rod, slid silently through the morning sky. Its courier and message runner-a longhaired pilot named Peckhum-navigated the ship past Yavin’s moons. Old Peckhum would not only take Anakin, Tahiri, and Lyric to Yavin 8, but would accompany them throughout their journey. Lyric’s world was too dangerous a place for the children to be alone. Anakin and Tahiri sat side by side. Anakin stared out his window. As they passed Yavin 13, he found himself wondering about the moon. It was said to be inhabited by reptilian creatures called slith. He’d read that the slith were meat - eating creatures with enormous jaws lined with spiked teeth. Anakin shook off his thoughts and rose from his seat to check on Lyric, who was sitting up front with Old Peckhum.

Since they’d left the academy, she hadn’t spoken. And, while Anakin knew that she was relieved to have him and Tahiri with her, he could also sense her apprehension and fear. Persuading Luke Skywalker to allow them to accompany their friend to Yavin 8 had been difficult. Anakin thought about the conversation they’d had that morning with his uncle.

“She needs us!” Tahiri had cried. “Please let us go to Yavin 8 with Lyric. Anakin and I can help her survive her changing, I know we can! And Peckhum will be there to protect us.”

Luke Skywalker had been unmoved.

“I can’t send students into a potentially hazardous situation,” he had said.

“Uncle Luke, you’re the one who said that we can’t learn to become Jedi Knights by listening to words. Experience is the best teacher, right?” Anakin had asked innocently, his ice blue eyes meeting his uncle’s pale ones. “Please let us help Lyric.”

Finally, Luke Skywalker had agreed. Anakin stared out the window as the supply shuttle sped through the silent sky. He thought about that morning. As he’d packed his academy jumpsuit and some extra socks, Ikrit, the Jedi Master they’d found in the palace, had climbed through the open window of his room.

“Where are you going, young Anakin?” Ikrit had asked in his raspy voice.

Anakin had explained the situation.

“Are we wrong to leave now, when we haven’t solved the riddle of the golden globe?” Anakin asked.

Ikrit had only replied, “You must go where you are needed. You must go where you are drawn.”

Then the Master had swung off the window ledge and scampered down the pyramid-shaped stone wall of the Great Temple. Anakin hadn’t expected him to be much help. Ikrit had already explained that if an adult Jedi Knight or Master tried to break the curse, the globe would shatter into a thousand pieces of crystal. Anakin understood that he and Tahiri were on their own. His thoughts were interrupted.

“Anakin, have you thought much about the globe?” Tahiri whispered. She didn’t wait for an answer.

“I have. I don’t know how, but we’ve got to understand what the symbols carved in the palace and in the mountain on Lyric’s planet mean. It’s the only way I can think to figure out how to break the curse.”

The curse. Ikrit had come to Anakin’s room the night he’d returned from the Palace of the Woolamander. He’d explained to Anakin that four hundred years ago he’d discovered the globe in the ruins of the palace, which had been built thousands of years earlier by an ancient race called the Massassi.

Ikrit said that he couldn’t break the curse, so he’d curled up at the base of the globe to wait for the people who could. Those people were Anakin and Tahiri. When Anakin had told Tahiri what Ikrit had said, she’d agreed that they had to work together to break into the crystal sphere that was locked with a riddle and filled with glittering golden sands and the cries of trapped Massassi children.

“I think you’re right,” Anakin said to Tahiri now. “Understanding what the Massassi wrote in their palace will help us to unravel the riddle of the globe. But right now, we’ve got to concentrate on helping Lyric.”

He didn’t add that he’d seen Ikrit. Or tell Tahiri Ikrit’s words. It was enough to feel that what he and Tahiri were doing was right. And to know that he felt drawn both to Lyric and her moon. The shuttle dipped toward Yavin 8. Anakin watched the moon grow in size as they sped toward its surface. He could see that it was covered with brown and green tundra and a ridge of purple mountains that jutted from its surface.