“We can get it, sonny. Talon Karrde or Booster Terrik will give it to us, if no one else. But first we’ll have to get aboard …” Han tried to prevent himself from grimacing, but couldn’t, not quite. “Aboard the Anakin Solo. Get a crack at the colonel’s shuttle. Planning session?”
Jag nodded. “A couple of hours. You can comm around and get that computer time for us. We all need some downtime for our brains. Zekk and Jaina wanted to get in some lightsaber training for when we do run Alema down.”
“Two hours.” Han rose, bent to kiss his wife, and marched toward the Falcon, feeling slightly better than he had when the talk had started-better because things now made a little more sense, better because he now had a direction.
Then, vision still faulty, he stumbled over the bottom of the boarding ramp and was reminded that not everything was back to normal yet.
Jaina and Zekk left moments later. Leia debated going with them, getting in some additional training, but decided she’d had enough lightsaber work for one day.
Jag stared a moment at Han’s chair, then sat in it. He glanced at Leia, his posture typically rigid. “Don’t tell anybody I’m doing this.”
“Doing what?”
Slowly, methodically, he leaned back in a typically Han Solo-esque slouch. Once his back was flush against the angled back of the aged chair, he put his elbow up on the table, propped his head against his hand.
Leia laughed at him. “How does it feel?”
“So wrong, I can barely describe it. How has your husband managed not to sustain spinal damage all these years?”
“Stubbornness.”
“Jaina’s certainly inherited it. Stubbornness, I mean. Not bad posture.”
“She got her posture from my side of the family.” Leia sobered. “What did you mean about not being convinced Brisha Syo actually existed?”
Jag took a deep breath before answering. “I can’t say I have all the skills of a security investigator like Corran Horn. But I’m suspicious of anyone who seems to have only one purpose in life and then immediately dies.” He looked off into the distance, past the Falcon, past the walls of the hangar, past the smoke clouds and the burning horizons of Kashyyyk. “Nobody had ever heard of her before she showed up on Lorrd. We’ve been able to trace a few of her movements and have a single garbled message that suggests she was Lumiya’s daughter. She died-according to Jacen, who has never turned in a detailed report of what went on at the asteroid and is no longer available for debriefing. And the only consequence of her death seems to be that it provided motivation for Lumiya to be on Coruscant, breaking into Galactic Alliance Guard security and shadowing Ben, who may or may not have killed Brisha Syo-he certainly doesn’t remember doing so. That’s the sum total of her existence.” He held out a cupped hand as though to catch a falling raindrop. “There’s nothing there.
People tend to leave more traces, more memories. It seems more likely that she was a fiction. An agent of, or an alternate identity of, Lumiya herself.”
Leia studied him. Focused on some distant place, Jag seemed unaware of her presence, and in his eyes Leia saw a bleakness, an emptiness she had not previously noticed.
“Jag, you’re leaving memories.”
Startled, he looked at her. “What?”
“You were comparing yourself to her, weren’t you? To Brisha Syo. You have one purpose left to you, and when that’s done you wonder if you’re just going to vanish, leaving no trace behind.”
Jag’s expression darkened. He sat upright, his posture once again rigidly military. “Jedi mind tricks.”
“I wasn’t reading your mind, Jag. Just your face.”
Jag rose. His voice became cordial but impersonal. “I need to see about commissioning the building of some specialized gear.” He spun on his heel and strode from the hangar, boot heels clicking.
Chapter 4
SANCTUARY MOON OF ENDOR, JEDI OUTPOST
The flat top of the outpost had once been a landing pad for shuttles and TIE fighters, and now, some forty standard years later, relics of that era still littered the pad-a discarded wheel from a shuttle’s landing gear, a rusty rolling cart that had once held tools, a scattering of corroded nuts and bolts that neither wind nor time had managed to scour from the surface.
They met there, Jedi Masters in exile: Luke Skywalker, Kyle Katarn, the Mon Cal healer Cilghal, Kyp Durron, Corran Horn, the fierce reptilian Saba Sebatyne, and Octa Ramis of Chandrila. Octa, trained by Kam and Tionne Solusar, both still recovering from their near-fatal wounds at the hands of Jacen Solo’s soldiers, was more subdued than the rest, her stillness in the Force clearly a consequence of rigid self-control rather than inner peace.