[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(16)
“It would be helpful for all of us,” Lumiya said carefully, “if you avoided crossing Jacen Solo’s path at the moment. There’s a war on, you know …”
“We have our task, and you have yours. Ours is to have Balance for what the Solos did to us. Leia will still be trying to bring her precious son back to the light, and that means he remains good bait for our purposes.”
“Let me put it another way,” Lumiya said kindly, steering her toward the doors. “Get in my way, and I’ll kill you.”
Alema gave her a curious lopsided smile but allowed herself to be ushered into the living quarters.
“Do you know who you’re dealing with?” Alema asked.
Lumiya probed Alema’s presence again. It felt like shards of broken glass in her mouth, as alien as any being she’d ever encountered. She’d been in the minds of the insane before, but never a Jedi, and never one this deluded. It was almost frightening. It was the sense of us that was most disturbing. She found it hard to pick her way between the hive-mind elements and the fragmented personality of one being.
“Yes, I do,” Lumiya said. “And I’ll still kill you if you let this feud ruin bigger strategies. There’ll be time for you to have your revenge later. Interfere with my plans and I’ll kill the Solos myself, and then you’ll never have your Balance.” Lumiya lowered her voice to a soothing whisper. “And you know I can do that, don’t you?”
Seemingly unperturbed, Alema gazed around Lumiya’s quarters. They were sparsely furnished now because she’d taken most of her necessary possessions back to the safe house on Coruscantor the latest address, anywayexcept for duplicates of the equipment she kept to maintain her cybernetic prosthetics, and basic essentials for a brief stay. Alema had the look of someone sizing up an apartment and deciding whether to buy it.
“No, you can’t stay here,” said Lumiya. Telepathy was beyond her, but she knew a proprietorial look when she saw it. It made sense to keep an eye on Alema: she was so fixated and reckless that she mightjust mightput a hydrospanner in the works, and that wasn’t something Lumiya was prepared to risk. The stakes were too high, the moment too close.
If I had any sense, I’d kill her now before she becomes too much trouble. But …
Alema still had her uses, until her madness became too unmanageable.
“You understand revenge,” said Alema. She settled on a sofa, one arm conspicuously limp, and a petulant frown creased her brow for a moment. “Luke Skywalker destroyed your life. He left you scarred, too.”
“Oh, much more than scarred.” Lumiya pulled her veil from her face and let Alema see the damage to her jaw. Then she placed one boot on a chair, took out a vibroblade, and rammed it into her thigh. There was a metallic scrape. Alema’s expression was suitably surprised.
“I’m actually more machine than organic,” Lumiya went on. “There’s a point, I think, at which a woman ceases to be a human with cybernetic implants and becomes a machine with organic parts. I believe I’ve passed that threshold. And you know what? I’m not unhappy with that.”
“You want to punish Luke, as we want to punish Leia.”
Lumiya leaned over Alema and caught her by her collar, jerking her face close to hers so she couldn’t look away.
“Luke seems to think that, too, which I find staggeringly arrogant.” Was that a little fear in Alema’s eyes? Sometimes it was interesting to play the madwoman herself. “The galaxy revolves around him, he thinks, but then many men think that way. No, I don’t miss my beauty, you fool, because it would have vanished by now anyway. Once I understood that my injuries freed me from worrying about such trivia, I realized I had a task that only I could fulfill.” She tightened her grip on the flimsy fabric at Alema’s throat. “And that task is close to completion, so if you thwart me in any way, I’ll become very focused on you. Do you understand?”
For a moment, Alema lost that oddly demented expression and looked like a normal sane person in fear of her life. Lumiya wasn’t sure what she looked like herself at that moment, but it seemed to work.
“We will … respect your wishes,” Alema said imperiously.
Lumiya decided not to backhand her, but it took an effort. She didn’t have time for this nonsense.
“Do yourself a favor,” she said, and let Alema’s collar slide out of her grasp with a hiss of sheer fabric over her gloves. “Ask yourself what you have against Leia Solo other than the fact that she made you ugly. If there’s nothing beyond that, then your quest for Balance is a waste of time.”