Then she began looking, through the Force, for a distant target-a mind she had touched many times and reshaped during those contacts, a mind she had made so familiar and distinct she could find it even halfway across the galaxy.
It helped that she knew on what world the mind was to be found, but even so it was long, wearying minutes before she found it-to her inner eye it was a distinctive yellow glow, surrounded by tiny gleaming sparks of red. Fewer sparks than before; the efforts of the enemy to diminish her influence had apparently been successful in part.
But only in part. Lumiya smiled. The enemy’s techniques were nowhere near as effective as hers.
She approached the mind until it filled her vision, and she planted herself there, making its location an anchor point for her consciousness.
Now for the second phase of this elaborate Sith technique. She drew back from her target mind, seeking other mentalities in the area. And there they were, glows of various hues, none of them, sadly, decorated with the red sparks of her influence.
She sampled each in turn. Most were awake-firm, more resolute than she could affect at this distance. Others were too fragmented; when she touched them they tended to drift apart into smaller, incoherent glows, and she knew that these were the minds of the inmates … the patients.
Then she found one that was firm, grounded, but not so resistant to her touch. Its owner was asleep. Lumiya sampled it further, found it to be the mind of a Quarren female.
Like a spectral parasite, she affixed herself to that mind, forging a connection, drawing energy out of it and the body that sustained it. She could not draw that energy into herself, though she badly needed sustenance now; she could feel her own body begin to shake from the strain. But she could, and would, put the energy to use.
Finally she flowed into the distant Quarren’s mind, flowed out through its memory of its surroundings … and she could see.
She hovered above the Quarren. The amphibious female was dressed in medical scrubs and leaned across a desk, sleeping there. This was a small office packed with, and lit solely by, computer displays. A window looked out over a facing wall of building fronts, and there were, for once, no traffic streams to be seen. A door, ajar, led into a brightly lit corridor.
Lumiya got to work. Into the woman’s sleeping mind, she whispered, “Open your eyes. Stand up. We have work to do. Records to read. Instructions to issue.”
And the Quarren rose, her eyes glazed, her face-tentacles twitching.
Minutes later Lumiya restored the Quarren to her desk and true sleep, then drifted from the chamber to find someone. A very useful someone.
GALACTIC CITY, CORUSCANT,
VETERANS’ MENTAL CARE HOSPITAL
Matric Klauskin, former commander of the Second Fleet’s Corellian task force but for the last several weeks a patient in this too-sympathetic prison, awoke. The small room been given was, as always, dark and quiet, its few items of furniture reflecting white gleams from the city lights filtering in through the transparisteel viewport. Everything was as it should be.
Or perhaps not. The door was open.
He frowned. The door opened only when the doctors or nurses came for him, or when his caseworker from the Alliance’s naval administration visited to reassure him that all was well; they hadn’t forgotten him.
But now the door was open and no one was entering.
He sat up, his sheet falling from his chest, and realized that someone was standing beside his bed. He looked up.
It was Edela. Of course it was Edela. His treatment here was all about his wife. Now she smiled down at him, patient and loving as always. Tonight she wore a shimmering synthsilk gown of burgundy.
She had lost weight, diminishing from the pretty but distinctly overweight woman she had been the last time he’d seen her to a figure he could describe as “pleasingly plump.” The gray was gone from her hair, too, and he realized belatedly that she wasn’t just slimmer, she was younger, she looked as she had a mere five or ten years into their marriage.
“Hello, dear,” he said. “You realize you’re dead.”
Her smile broadened. “Of course I’m dead. I’ve been dead for years. But it doesn’t mean I don’t exist.”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? The doctors all say that you don’t, that your very existence rests only in my mind. But they say I’m getting better.”
“I don’t exist just in your mind. I exist in fact. Phantoms of the mind can’t open a door and free you, can they?”
Klauskin looked again at the door. It remained resolutely open. “That just means I’m dreaming again. It’s really not open.”
“It is, as you’ll find out in a moment.” Her voice became urgent. “Darling, you’ve been lied to, we’ve all been lied to.