He was lying on a bed, still in his flight suit, in a small but comfortably furnished room. Directly across from him was an open window, the source of the aroma-laden breezes he’d already noted. Through the window, too, he could see the edge of a forest fifty meters or so away, above which a yellowish-orange sun hovered-rising or setting, he didn’t know which. The furnishings of the room itself didn’t look much like those of a prison cell-
“Finally awake, are you?” a woman’s voice said from the side.
Startled, Luke twisted his head toward the voice. His first, instantaneous thought was that he had somehow missed sensing whoever was over there; his second, following on the heels of the first, was that that was clearly ridiculous and that the voice must be coming instead from an intercom or comlink.
He finished his turn, to discover that the first thought had indeed been correct.
She was sitting in a high-backed chair, her arms draped loosely over the arms in a posture that seemed strangely familiar: a slender woman about Luke’s own age, with brilliant red-gold hair and equally brilliant green eyes. Her legs were casually crossed; a compact but wicked-looking blaster lay on her lap.
A genuine, living human being … and yet, impossibly, he couldn’t sense her.
The confusion must have shown in his face. “That’s right,” she said, favoring him with a smile. Not a friendly or even a polite smile, but one that seemed to be made up of equal parts bitterness and malicious amusement. “Welcome back to the world of mere mortals.”
-and with a surge of adrenaline, Luke realized that the strange mental veiling wasn’t limited to just her. He couldn’t sense anything. Not people, not droids, not even the forest beyond his window.
It was like suddenly going blind.
“Don’t like it, do you?” the woman mocked. “It’s not easy to suddenly lose everything that once made you special, is it?”
Slowly, carefully, Luke eased his legs over the side of the bed and sat up, giving his body plenty of time to get used to moving again. The woman watched him, her right hand dropping to her lap to rest on top of the blaster. “If the purpose of all this activity is to impress me with your remarkable powers of recuperation,” she offered, “you don’t need to bother.”
“Nothing so devious,” Luke advised, breathing hard and trying not to wheeze. “The purpose of all this activity is to get me back on my feet.” He looked her hard in the eye, wondering if she would flinch away from his gaze. She didn’t even twitch. “Don’t tell me; let me guess. You’re Mara Jade.”
“That doesn’t impress me, either,” she said coldly. “Karrde already told me he’d mentioned my name to you.”
Luke nodded. “He also told me that you were the one who found my X-wing. Thank you.”
Her eyes flashed. “Save your gratitude,” she bit out. “As far as I’m concerned, the only question left is whether we turn you over to the Imperials or kill you ourselves.”
Abruptly she stood up, the blaster ready in her hand. “On your feet. Karrde wants to see you.”
Carefully, Luke stood up, and as he did so, he noticed for the first time that Mara had attached his lightsaber to her own belt. Was she, then, a Jedi herself? Powerful enough, perhaps, to smother Luke’s abilities? “I can’t say that either of those options sounds appealing,” he commented.
“There’s one other one.” She took half a step forward, moving close enough that he could have reached out and touched her. Lifting the blaster, she pointed it directly at his face. “You try to escape … and I kill you right here and now.”
For a long moment they stood there, frozen. The bitter hatred was blazing again in those eyes … but even as Luke gazed back at her, he saw something else along with the anger. Something that looked like a deep and lingering pain.
He stood quietly, not moving; and almost reluctantly, she lowered the weapon. “Move. Karrde’s waiting.”
Luke’s room was at the end of a long hallway with identical doors spaced at regular intervals along its length. A barracks of sorts, he decided, as they left it and started across a grassy clearing toward a large, high-roofed building. Several other structures clustered around the latter, including another barracks building, a handful that looked like storehouses, and one that was clearly a servicing hangar. Grouped around the hangar on both sides were over a dozen starships, including at least two bulk cruisers like the Wild Karrde and several smaller craft, some of them hidden a ways back into the forest that pressed closely in on the compound from all sides. Tucked away behind one of the bulk cruisers, he could just see the nose of his X-wing. For a moment he considered asking Mara what had happened to Artoo, decided he’d do better to save the question for Karrde.