[Legacy Of The Force] - 03(105)

And time was something Luke did not have. He could feel that in the fire eating his lungs, in the raw nettling of his flesh. His breath came in inadequate gasps, and his blood was bubbling from his side in a pink froth. He was calling on the Force to keep fighting, drawing it through himself faster than his body could endure, literally boiling his own cells. At most, he had another minute of fight in him … maybe less.

Luke had to end this now.

He blocked a pair of crackling energy strands with his lightsaber and flung them aside, then launched himself across a daqball table toward Lumiya. She countered by pivoting away, bringing between them a Twi’lek serving girl. He could have continued the attack, slicing through the chests of both shield and captor, but even desperate, he could not kill a hostage. He threw himself into an aerial cartwheel and came down on a slick, utensil-strewn floor squarely facing Lumiya.

Her hand flicked, and the ligjitwhip came arcing toward his head. Luke dropped to his haunches and let it crackle past overhead. Then, when Lumiya started to back away from the expected lunge at her midsection, he hit her hard with a Force shove and spun her half around. She crashed into a drink table and nearly fell, but quickly brought her hostage around to protect her from an attack.

Luke smiled and raised his arm, pointing his lightsaber toward the serving girl, then using the Force to wrench her free of Lumiya’s grasp, he sent her flying across the claqball table. She crashed down on the other side in a heap, screaming in terror but far safer than she had been a moment earlier.

By then Lumiya had recovered from her stumble, and the lightwhip was snaking back toward Luke. He sprang into a round-off, wrapping the tip of his blade into the crackling strands as he passed over upside down. He landed on the claqball table’s squishy surface and jerked backward with all his might.

And that was when his mangled body failed him. Instead of yanking the weapon from Lumiya’s hand, his lightsaber slipped out of his own grasp and went flying into the shadows. Luke cursed in disbelief-then rolled off the table in a backward somersault.

Even that turned into a disaster. He landed on the body of one of Lumiya’s original victims and-too weak to steady himself-hit the floor with an audible thump. He could sense Mara out in the corridor, concentrating intently on something, very frightened and urging him to wait for her, not to press the attack until she was there.

There was no chance of that. Luke’s strength was failing so fast that he feared Jacen’s betrayal would cost him his life. And when Lumiya was done with him, she would be free to go attack Mara, as well. His chest tightened with an emotion that might have been anger or sorrow or fear-and was probably all those things at once. Jacen had betrayed them … which could only mean that somewhere along the line, Luke had failed Jacen.

Lumiya must have suspected a trap, because when Luke failed to rise immediately, she did not rush to attack. Instead, she called, “It’s not too late, Skywalker. Let me kill you now, and everyone else survives. Even Mara.”

“Very generous.” As Luke replied, he was inspecting the cantina floor, searching for the shoto he had lost when Lumiya took his cybernetic hand. “But I don’t… think so. You can’t have … Jacen.”

“Jacen?” Lumiya let out a cold laugh. “What makes you think this is about him?”

“Your involvement with GAG.” He wasn’t having much success looking for his lightsabers; the blades had deactivated as soon as they left his grasp, and the cantina floor was too littered in debris and shadow for him to find anything. “Who else could give you … an apartment? Who else could give you access to … their files?”

Again, that cruel laugh. “Indeed.” The lightwhip’s crackling grew deeper as Lumiya shortened the strands for easier control. “Who else has access to Jacen’s codes? Who else could give orders to GAG officers in Jacen’s name?”

The questions caught Luke like a kick in the stomach. He knew that Lumiya was only trying to hurt him, that her implications were likely more false than true. But the possibility explained too much … and now that he thought back on Ben’s behavior over the last several months, he had to admit that he had seen too much of that possibility himself.

Something crunched on the floor as Lumiya circled the base of the claqball table. Luke gave up his search for his shoto and began to look for another weapon. He had not brought his own blaster into the cantina, prefering light blades instead, but the body he had fallen on was almost certainly a spacer, and spacers always carried blasters.

“You’re lying.” Luke found the spacer’s belt and followed it to a holster. “Just saying that… to hurt me!”