A Much Longer Time Ago

by sanjay.d

The first volume of a trilogy that tells a story of the origins of the Jedi Order and the Lords of the Sith, on a small world at the edge of the galaxy, over 35,000 years before the fall of the Galactic Empire. It reveals how thousands of years of galactic conflict and Imperial expansion began with the conflict between two royal twin brothers on an isolated planet.

CHAPTER I

It was a time of youthful innocence in the galaxy.

Both the galaxy, and the millions of worlds populating it, were much younger than now. Although many planets had developed civilizations, cultures and technologies that allowed them to leave the confines of their planetary atmospheres to discover, explore and interact with other worlds, far more planets had not yet done so, remaining at a variety of levels of cultural, technological and planetary evolution.

Because space-faring cultures were still a relatively small percentage of the vast number of galactic worlds, interstellar conflicts such as would occur under conditions of scarcity and competition over limited resources for survival, were unknown. Space-faring cultures were content traveling space, discovering new uninhabited worlds to exploit for natural resources and/or colonize; as well as discovering inhabited worlds with which to interact, trade, and exchange knowledge. Uncovering alien cultures was still a new-enough phenomenon back then, that when encounters did occur, they were characterized by a sense of joy at the wonders contained in discovering alien environments and cultures that space travel had made possible, and an eagerness for mutually-beneficial interaction and exchange.

This is not to imply there weren't dark corners in the bright and sunny young galaxy; dark worlds where the level of collective enlightenment necessary to develop technologies that reached the stars had not yet been attained—worlds all over that were embroiled in conflict, where the veil of darkness still lay over hearts and minds. But such worlds, although also significant in number as a proportion of the galactic whole—and because they suffered from the symptoms of violent conflict—remained isolated. The galaxy was consequently littered with dead worlds, unfortunate desert balls of rock, victims of species that just couldn't stop the slide down the slope to committing wholesale planicide.

So, with their energies focused on pursuits that inevitably led toward mutually assured destruction and planetary calamity, none of the worlds still on the way to that destination had risen to the level of developing technologies for space travel.

Yet.

Whenever worlds such as these were inadvertently discovered by space-faring cultures, they were promptly avoided. Because the space travelers were as a whole mostly interested in exploration and exploiting an abundance of planetary resources, their interaction, whenever it took place, needed to be cooperative, not confrontational.

As a whole, the galaxy, then, was a vast sparkling network of stars and worlds, peppered by wondrous or frightening—or wondrous and frightening—astrophysical phenomena, with curious cultures still not having given up the innocence of being lost in childlike glee among all the possibilities presented by a slow uncovering of the infinite mysteries contained in deep space.

It was a quiet place, where you still could see the planets for the galaxy.

It was before a harsher, darker, more aggressively belligerent expansion began, that would take a few short millennia to turn the sparkling network of stars and worlds from a wondrous—if even sometimes dangerous and frightening—playground, into an even more dangerous and frightening web of greed, deceit, inter-species supremacism, xenophobia, conquest, exploitation and conflict that would eventually grow into the diseased amalgam of almost terminally cancerous cultures and worlds currently known as the Galactic Empire.

The Empire that really began a much longer time ago, on a tiny world far, far away ...

CHAPTER II

The indigenous inhabitants called their world Krai.

In their language, it meant simply: "The Land."

Krai was the single planetary satellite orbiting a twin star on the outer reaches of the galactic disk: a rogue ball of rock that had been launched on a galactic trajectory eons ago when its giant mother star went supernova and blasted some of the worlds on the outer edge of its vast planetary system out into space, sending them rocketing through the void until they either collided with something and were annihilated—unfortunately, sometimes along with inhabited worlds—or passed close enough to be attracted into the gravitational orbit of one star or another. Krai was one of those lucky few, finally coming to rest in orbit around a lonely pair of stars, which originally arrived at their remote position in the galactic disk still as remnants of the prime force that created the known universe and once sent a pinpoint of matter and energy scattering across the vastness of space in the form of stars and planets.

Krai was a world three-quarters covered by water, broken by a single land mass consisting of a vast continent spanning from the planet's north pole to just above the most southern point of its axis. The continent, Krai—from whence the world's name derived, once the inhabitants became aware they were on a world—boasted a rich mixture of climates and natural resources.

The dominant sentient and sapient Kraian species was descendant of a single humanoid tribe of green-skinned bipeds, the Nareed (which in the Kraian language means "The People"). The Nareed developed the belief that their progenitors had been given birth in the "heavenly" realm beyond what they understood as the "sky," by The Mother-and-Father of creation; which is how for millennia the Nareed interpreted the twin suns burning in their sky. The heavenly parents of their world set the original "children" down in a tropical zone near the center of the continent, in what was called Rai: "The Cradle"—a rich, fertile, deep, oblong valley surrounded on all sides first by rolling green hills, and then by treacherous mountain peaks—through which only a single passage, Eed, "The Pass," offered entrance or exit into the cloistered valley within. It was a secluded, naturally defendable base with a rich ecosystem: an ideal environment for the evolution of a flourishing culture and people.

The Nareed evolved, expanded beyond the confines of Rai, and over millennia developed into a civilization spanning the entire continent. Only a vast, inhospitable jungle wilderness near the southern end of Krai remained undeveloped. The thickness of the jungle, replete with a variety of very dangerous—and very large—natural predators, made development of these lands both impossible and undesirable. Only small bands of fringe Nareed—malcontents, escaped criminals, political dissidents, half-crazed adventurers and fully crazed mystics—braved the harsh conditions of the jungles. The overwhelming majority of Nareed, numbering by that time around seven billion, lived either in modern cities or settlements spanning the whole land mass and connected by a complex network of transportation and communications lines.

The Nareed developed an efficient and planet-friendly mix of industrial and technological endeavor: they harvested the land mindfully, and the rivers, lakes and ocean as well. Their culture was rich in trade and commerce, arts and leisure, and besides a civilian police authority, there was no need for any armed forces on Krai, because the entire continent was occupied by a single, mostly peaceful and harmoniously living nation. Consequently, besides professional security officers, nobody was engaged in the use of physical violence.

Every municipal and regional police authority had a special unit attached to it to respond to the occasional raids from Za, which is what the Nareed called the jungles beyond the southern plains. But these raids were few and far between, and aside from one occasion in Nareed history, never in any large numbers; usually confined to only small, desperate and hungry bands roaming around and stealing supplies.

For now.

There were underground criminal operations in the cities. However, because Nareed culture was on the whole benign and permissive in most social aspects, there was not a great demand for the kinds of goods and services usually provided by criminal organizations. Therefore any socially aberrant behavior associated with organized criminality remained buried deep beneath the cultural surface.

For now.

Their level of technological development saw the Nareed in a digital communications age. In addition to photonics, their science had reached a level that allowed them to exploit electromagnetic and gravitic energy. Because Krai had no neighboring planets to act as a stimulus to inspire space travel, they had limited their exploitation of power for propulsion to developing highly advanced ground, air and water transport. It had not occurred to anybody on Krai to employ energy as an armament.

Yet.

Because Krai had no visible neighboring celestial bodies to inspire wonder and act as a stimulus for space travel, the Nareed had never before had reason to develop a galactic awareness, let alone an awareness of a populated galaxy, and understood the "space" above their world to be a finite void, beyond which was what they understood as a dimension that could only exist outside of this life.

The Nareed were curious about what was "out there," but they lacked the notion of being able to travel "out there," deprived as they were of the possibility of the consideration of such a concept by the planet's isolation as the solitary satellite of a twin star.

Therefore, their contact with "out there" was limited to observation of whatever they could see from the surface of their world and explain however they could—mostly in the form of colorful and fantastic mythology. Because Krai was a lone planet with no satellites, circling a lone pair of stars in an empty, isolated corner on the extreme edge of the galactic disk, the Kraian night sky was pitch black and empty, save for a barely perceptible cloudiness that was the distant rest of the galactic mass of stars and planets. The Nareed saw nothing of galactic space but blackness from the surface of their world. As far as the Nareed knew, they and the world on which they lived were all there was in what they understood as "the known universe." Without the "lights in the sky" to make them wonder, the Nareed hadn't developed the impulse to venture off their planet and satisfy their curiosity.

Until the beginning of the end of the innocence for Krai.

The Nareed mind was characterized by both compelling curiosity and practical ingenuity. It wasn't long after developing monitoring devices to try and learn the composition of the world's twin suns that they discovered the immense energy potential of photonic energy when harnessed and directed through the ubiquitous crystal presence in Kraian culture and technology. At the same time, observation finally led Nareed scientists to uncover their sun's composition as kilns of burning celestial gas. Discovering that what for millennia was accepted as an unfathomable manifestation of deity was no more "out of this world" than the same gaseous elements found deep inside the planet on which they lived, Nareed common consciousness had taken the first step on a road of deconstruction that would eventually lead to a cultural questioning of the fundamental principles of their perception and understanding of reality as a whole.

Not long after, the notion was put forth by Temple High Theosopher VeedTash that if a pair of burning gas giants hanging in a spatial void around their world were the case here, then it was conceivable that in all the infinite vastness that must exist either in or beyond the dark void, there could be more giant kilns of burning celestial gas could exist somewhere, with worlds around them hosting Nareed of their own.

Once the debate over the effects such a possibility would have on Nareed civilization as a whole spilled over from the private-scientific to a globally public scale, Nareed society was immediately rocked by the implications this had for their theory of their origins, as well as their understanding of what "the world" was. While many marveled in excitement at the possibilities represented by acceptance of such a notion, equally as many became fearful of the challenge such "wild" new ideas might pose to a theory of origins that had stood unquestioned for millennia. The Nareed found themselves in a polarized twitter of both wonder and fear, as the notion—that there may be more than what they had been conditioned by millennia to know as "what is"—spread and slowly became popularly assumed and accepted as true.

How much more there was, no Nareed could have envisioned in their wildest imaginations.

Yet.

But the greatest single characteristic of the phenomenon of nascent comprehension rolling across Nareed society like a runaway boulder down a mountain toward a village at the bottom, was that Nareed all over—realizing for the first time, in a history too long to remember consciously, that existence may include more than just Krai—were beginning to experience, collectively and individually, a deeper awareness associated with the vastness of possibilities they imagined and felt. It was a feeling that was spreading and deepening, and about which everybody who was feeling it was talking.

With that deeper awareness of a deeper nature of how much deeper what is is, the Nareed were in reality beginning to awaken to their own deeper nature, and experience the first brief glimpses of the power contained in that connection to that "greater-ness" that all of Krai was beginning to feel a part of beyond itself—but that nobody on the planet could coherently explain or express.

Yet.

Nareed society was governed by a constitutional binarchy. In addition to their royal status, the Queen and King were the official Heads of State and as Presiders of the Yedina, acted as the speakers and final arbiters in the parliament, as well as being chief executives of planetary administration.

The royal family was descended from a legendary warrior man-and-wife couple, Zavoi and Atmi of Hordi. In their time Hordi was a settlement on the edge of Za, which has now become the city of Yula, the capital of a southern province by the same name. It was over seven-thousand Kraian cycles ago (a Kraian solar cycle is approximately three-quarters of a Galactic Standard Year), that the legendary pair succeeded in uniting the settlements spread out all over Krai, and led a force that drove a marauding army of outlaws from Za—the one time in Kraian history they attempted an organized invasion—back into the jungles.

Following their triumphant return from the long war, and having suffered many losses—including the personal one when their only son, Rur, was killed in battle—Zavoi and Atmi were unanimously selected to serve as King and Queen of a proposed unified alliance of Nareed settlements. A vast castle was built for the royal couple in the Rai Valley. Rai became the natural capital city and the celebrated jewel of Krai. inside which eventually an urban sprawl evolved, harmoniously distributed throughout The Valley to maintain as best as possible the pristine beauty of The Cradle: creating the Rai Valley Metroplex with The Castle, towering over the city in its emerald crystal and stone magnificence, dwarfing even the massive Temple Hill, downtown.

Since that time, the royal line of the House of Rai—as the ruling house of all the Noble Houses of Krai—had been established, and had presided over the evolution and development of a thriving Nareed society that knew over seven thousand cycles of great leaps in material advancement, scientific knowledge and cognitive understanding, characterized by peace and prosperity.

CHAPTER III

Until now.

It was cycle 7291 on Krai.

The Nareed employed a calendar dating from the time of the official inception of the Yedina, which in Nareed means "The Union": the official name given to the political institution made up of representatives of the various Kraian city-states.

Before that time, Nareed culture—consisting of a large number of settlements—was evolving along independently diverse lines, providing the newly created Yedina with the rich characteristics and benefits of a cooperative and interactive multicultural unit, united by a common heritage to a single national origin. Settlements before the advent of the Yedina all kept separate calendars according to their own designations—usually counting from the time of settlement. It was only under the Yedina that a common calendar was adopted.

Thus, in the early Harvest Season of 7290, the Queen, Deleb, and her husband, King Eloh, conceived. In the Rebirth Season of the next year, Deleb gave birth to a set of identical twin boys.

Nareed all over Krai welcomed the birth with rejoicing and fanfare, culminating in a ten-day- long, continent-wide festival ending on the day of Savit: the longest day in the middle of the Kraian solar cycle.

It was at the official presentation on that day of the cooing infant boys before the world—transcommunicated live, including on illegally pirated transcom feeds snatched by denizens of Za—that Deleb and Eloh announced the names of the latest additions to the Nareed royal line:

Jedi and Sith.

CHAPTER IV

One Nareed watching the ceremony on a pirated transcom feed from his hideout deep in Za, was a former-bio electromagnetic-field-researcher-turned-mystic-hermit, named Lekh.

Lekh had decided to leave the civilized world for Za forty cycles before the current revolution in Nareed awareness and the sweeping effects it was having all over Krai. He left soon after he experienced a stirring in himself as the result of something he was convinced was not just "not a dream," but an experience more real than anything he could explain in any way he knew.

It was as if he had experienced being connected to something so vast, so much more than anything yet ever imagined in any Nareed conception or perception of reality. It was somehow not just having had the idea that there was something so much more, and another something so much more than that, that tied to a reality so vast as to be incomprehensible altogether—but having experienced that idea as a reality and being in connection with it.

The disturbing episode left Lekh with the lingering conviction that "It All" was so much more than just the Nareed and Krai. Until then, all Nareed knowledge, wisdom and experience were limited to considerations revolving around "Krai: the Land" and "Nareed: the People." For its entire history, any mystic or occult conceptions or practices on Krai were limited to exploring and worshipping the natural, physical, visible and measurable forces the Nareed could comprehend and exploit.

Restlessly compelled by his experience, Lekh left civilization for Za in search of a way to recreate the experience he had had, because it had incontrovertibly and irrefutably demonstrated to him that there was a vast reality beyond Krai that was not even conceived yet, let alone explored or understood. If a greater reality existed outside of Nareed conception, Lekh concluded he had to leave all that the Nareed and Krai represented and expressed—embodied in what Nareed civilization and culture were—in order to break the conscious bond that was keeping him tied to the obstacles limiting a more encompassing experience of that reality; and somehow along the way, learn to open his consciousness and awareness to the knowledge and experience of whatever more there was out there to connect with, experience and know.

Lekh dedicated his forty cycles of mystic pursuit in Za to attempting to re-experience his original encounter, during which he stumbled upon something incredibly compelling and powerful while reaching out into the vast "allness."

It was something he could only explain to himself as a feeling he had at the time it had happened. A feeling that the vast "allness" wasn't empty: there was a connection of everything to everything in which existed an awesome power. It was the same power Lekh had glimpsed during his original experience, and he deduced from his subsequent efforts that it was contained in the very fabric that bound the complex of visible and invisible reality together. Maybe it was the very fabric that bound the complex of visible and invisible reality together. Lekh understood it powered and moved all of reality, and his studies and considerations eventually led him to conclude it could also somehow be connected to and harnessed by the mind—which interacted with physical reality with the directed application of conscious energy—and put to use by the sheer force of directed intent to affect reality.

Lekh diligently continued developing and experimenting with mystic practices, and by trial and error finally succeeded in recreating the conditions that finally allowed him to re-experience his original episode in full, from which he learned how to regularly access that experience so that he could repeat it to learn all that he could understand from it.

That effort finally led him to understand that it was an energy that bound the vastness between all spaces together—a vastness of space that not only existed "out there," between here and whatever other "there" there may have been outside of Krai, but between the individual particles of matter that made up physical reality. Soon after that discovery Lekh came to understand how, in fact everything—visible and invisible reality—was not simply connected by that energy, but in essence was that energy.

The power Lekh had felt in his original encounter—and his consequent exploration of that experience and cycles-worth of contemplations of it—taught him that he had literally experienced being in connection with the energy that not only bound and drove the workings, but also composed, all of reality. He concluded that in reality, then, all of whatever could be understood as truly "real" was in actuality defined by the dynamics of that energy.

Reality was, therefore—Lekh concluded somewhat flippantly—a matter of energy.

And knowing what to do with it.

Everything was simultaneously that energy, and everything-connected-to-everything by that energy. So that energy was not only the source of everything visible and invisible, but it's manifestation as well. How that energy moved and manifested in "the world," determined how perceivable reality was accepted and understood. It also meant that matter, the things that could be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled, was in essence just another form of that primal energy showing up as what could be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled.

It was the feeling and knowledge of being in conscious and aware connection with this energy—which meant being in connection with what reality on the essential level of pure truth was really like—and the awesome knowledge he had subconsciously retained from the brief connections, that Lekh had experienced in his original episode.

His tireless studies and practices led him to discover that the binding, omnipresent energy was the essential state of being and could be experienced and felt by achieving a certain physical state of being. While in that state of being, awareness and knowledge were somehow transmitted through that energy directly into the consciousness.

It was only through intense dedication to connecting with it, and repeated practice in accessing that state of physical, mental and emotional being that the connection could occur. Connecting over and over again more and more profoundly with that energy led Lekh to understand that it was an energy that made meaningful communication and interaction between all things—visible and invisible—possible; communication and interaction that included that between an individual's consciousness and awareness, and any and every part of the vastness of all the "more" to reality that was beyond what any Nareed on Krai had yet to either define or understand.

Lekh learned that since it could be consciously accessed, and since it both contained and communicated information about the nature and operation of all of reality, it followed that as an energy, it could be consciously harnessed and directed, a prospect which he admitted represented an ineffable potential for the most wondrous creation imaginable ...

... or the most horrific destruction that could ever be feared.

Outside of learning how to intentionally connect with the energy, Lekh's forty cycles of diligent study and practice had not succeeded in revealing to him exactly how to harness that energy and consciously direct it.

Yet.

Now, watching the celebrations of the new royal twins' birth on a transcom screen hanging from the ceiling of his treehouse complex in the jungles of Za, Lekh was only mildly interested with the pomp and circumstance and global revelry, glancing at the transcom only occasionally as he pored over some calculations and figures from his studies and observations.

The spectacle finally culminated in the official presentation of the royal twins to the whole world. Lekh couldn't help being as curious as all of Krai was to see the latest additions to the regal line, and paused from his notes to have a look.

As soon as he set eyes on the pair of cooing infants cradled in the arms of Queen Deleb and King Eloh, though, Lekh was suddenly seized by a painful shock of energy that rattled him on the inside, as if a giant fist had clenched his bones and rattled them with painful vibrations.

At first reeling from pain and confusion, Lekh soon noted that the energy, exactly like the occasional glimpses he had experienced in his mystic endeavors—only infinitely more intense—seemed to surge directly from the baby boys and right into him.

And in that moment of realization, like a bolt of light too bright to be seen by the eye, Lekh instantly knew—without cognitively recognizing the details or their explanation and meaning, but just knowing—what his forty cycles of seeking, learning and experiencing had all been leading him to understand.

He finally knew why he'd been so compelled to seek—without knowing for what—for the past forty cycles.

Knew without a doubt.

It had something to do with what some would call "Destiny".

He was excited. Overwhelmed. His body was still tingling as much from excitement as from the energy's aftershock.

He knew.

He was hopeful.

But because now he knew ...

He was also afraid.

It didn't take Lekh long to cast his fears aside in favor of the fresh excitement now compelling him, and after a few moments of consideration, an appropriate plan of action that should have taken fantastic leaps of logic to arrive at, seemed to flow into Lekh's mind effortlessly all at once. An ancillary beauty and benefit of establishing a connection with the ubiquitous, he thought.

There was neither the time nor even the need for wondering why. There was only the time or the need to do.

Lekh spent the rest of the day and evening gathering everything he would need for travel, took the hardcopy backup of forty cycles worth of work contained on his collection of transcom datacubes, used a pirated ID and a fabricated credit account to book a seat on a skybus to Rai.

CHAPTER V

The day after their presentation to the world, the royal infants—in size as large as a year-old human child—were spending the quiet, warm and sunny morning playing in an open-air nursery in The Castle, supervised by their Governess.

The two boys were plopped on the ground amidst a scattering of toys, rolling a ball back and forth to each other, giggling with delight.

The Governess, seated on a bench under the shade of a bright and pleasantly perfumed flowering tree, was occupied programming the boys' lunch preparations into a handheld transcom unit that was communicating with a unit in The Royal Kitchen. She paid scant attention to the occasional squeals from the boys, until the squeals took on a regularity that forced the Governess to look up from her mobile at the toddlers.

At first the Governess didn't understand what she was seeing. The boys were squealing in unrestrained delight as the ball rolled back and forth between them, each boy shattering the air with piercing peals as the ball changed direction and rolled back toward the other.

It wasn't until the Governess noticed that the boys weren't touching the ball at all that she began to sense something strange. She watched for a few more seconds and her mind confirmed what her eyes were telling it they were witnessing: the ball was rolling back and forth between the twins, as if of its own accord, without either of the boys laying a hand on it.

The Governess stared in blank incomprehension.

When on one roll the ball reached little Jedi—distinguished from his twin brother by his blue-and-orange jumper, while Sith was in black-and-blue—it suddenly halted. The two boys stopped their giggling and fell silent.

All of a sudden, the ball lifted straight into the air and hovered in front of Jedi's face. The two twins squealed once again in delight.

The Governess dropped her jaw in astonishment.

Jedi let out a sharp squeal, the soft ball launched through the air from its hovering position, and then bounced harmlessly off the giggling Sith's forehead.

Jedi and Sith both squealed.

The ball rolled away from Sith.

Seated on the ground, Sith leaned toward it as if to grab for it, waving his tiny hand through empty air. The ball suddenly stopped rolling away, wobbled back and forth on the carpet-like grass for a few seconds, then rose like it had in front of Jedi, and once more launched through the air, striking the giggling Jedi in the chest and bouncing away.

Jedi and Sith both squealed.

The Governess dropped the transcom mobile and cried out.

The twins delight was interrupted by the Governess' cry. They both turned to look with blank expressions at the dismay in her cry. Jedi, the closer of the two to the Governess, noticed the fallen transcom unit on the ground and giggled. He waved a tiny arm, and the transcom mobile rose from the ground, floated up through the air, and came to a gentle rest on the Governess' lap.

Jedi and Sith both squealed.

The Governess clutched the mobile, then let it go as if in terror of it, and cried out again.

Suddenly, toys all around the nursery began to move around of their own accord, some rolling, some tumbling, some hovering in the air, some floating around the nursery.

Jedi and Sith both squealed.

The Governess snatched the mobile up from her lap and frantically punched in a code on the touch screen, placing an urgent call to Queen Deleb.

Queen Deleb and King Eloh, in The Castle together for the remaining days of the holiday—on one of those rare occasions when their official duties didn't have them otherwise engaged and separated from one another—came immediately upon the Governess' insistent and desperate urging. When they arrived, the Governess shushed them both and led them silently off to the side.

Quietly and inconspicuously observing from a corner of the nursery as Jedi and Sith continued to play, an astonished royal couple repeatedly witnessed the bizarre spectacle of seemingly self-animating toys bouncing, rolling, tumbling, hovering and flying all around the nursery amidst a consistent, delightful squealing and laughter from the twins. Neither the stunned mother and father, nor the shaken Governess, were able to explain the astoundingly incredible ability the royal infants seemed to display to be able to move objects around at will. Yet to dispute what they all had no choice but to admit they were witnessing, none of them was able.

Deleb and Eloh concluded after quick deliberation that whatever was responsible for this phenomenon, news of it could not go beyond the royal couple and the Governess, unless and until they were able to both explain it, and decide how to deal with it.

Right now, they were still barely able to accept it.

Nothing of this kind—the ability to affect physical matter by the apparent conscious power of the mind or will—had ever been considered possible by even Nareed mythology, let alone science. Deleb, Eloh and the Governess were as equally struck with wondrous awe as with fear.

That night Deleb and Eloh suffered sleepless hours of discussion of the fantastic occurrence, along with the potential implications they understood it to hold: not just for the twins or the royal family, but for the Nareed as a species of being as a whole. They understood that if it turned out the twins were capable of actually affecting physical reality with nothing but the power of their minds, news of that would be as turbulent to the Nareed as the recent shock waves rippling through their collective consciousness and leading their world into a future that by now the whole world could not yet define except by the feeling that it would be as dramatically transforming as it would be turbulent.

CHAPTER VI

The next morning, Queen Deleb was sitting down to a sunsrise breakfast with King Eloh on one of The Castle's outdoor patios that overlooked The Valley. Their appreciation of the breathtaking site of the giant, golden twin globes in the sky splashing radiance all over the amalgam of foliage and urbanity that was bisected by a weaving ribbon of river below them, was marred by their continued worried discussion inspired by the previous day's astounding incident with the boys.

Eloh's transcom mobile, lying on the table amongst platters and bowls of food, a large pitcher of vegetable juice and cups of a steamed herbal brew, began chirping. The King picked up the unit and saw it was one of the perimeter security checkpoints, manned by the Royal Guard—whose job was security for the Royal Family and The Castle—with an urgent communication. Eloh was the Commander-in-Chief of the Kraian Security Force, and in charge of the day-today running of global security services. While he was on the premises, all Castle security reported directly to him. Whenever the King was away on official duties, Castle security was the responsibility of the resident Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Guard.

Eloh absently tapped the connection code into the screen, and a glyphwindow popped up containing the face of an annoyed but apologetic-looking Royal Guard.

The guard informed the King that a man refusing to identify himself to anybody but the Queen and King, was outside the East Gate security station, insisting he be allowed to meet with them immediately to discuss an urgent matter.

Both Deleb and Eloh froze and stared at each other, horrified, faces drained of all color, when the guard explained that the man would only say it had to do with something he knew about the royal children.

Once Deleb and Eloh were over the initial shock of the coincidence between the previous day's episode and a mysterious stranger's appearance with some urgent knowledge about the children, Eloh had the man brought to one of The Castle's reception rooms: a huge, tall, glass-domed combination arboretum/aquarium, with both formal conference tables and informal lounge areas interspersed throughout the verdant and fragrant lushness.

While they waited for the man to be brought to them, Deleb and Eloh struggled frightfully over how to explain, and even whether to accept, that it was possible the appearance of a stranger with something urgent to discuss about their children, might by some inconceivable—or inconceivably ominous—coincidence, be connected to the twins' incredible episode from the day before.

They discounted the possibility of the Governess. She had been vigorously screened by Royal Guard Intelligence and her trustworthiness had been tested and proven on numerous occasions.

How could anybody possibly have known about yesterday's display in the nursery?

CHAPTER VII

After the guards arrived with the enigmatic yet powerfully insistent stranger, Eloh dismissed the security, desiring complete privacy in case his and Deleb's suspicions and fears that the stranger might somehow inexplicably know about the twins astonishing "ability," proved to be well-founded.

Seated with the two royals in a softly shimmering lounge set under a sweetly scented flowering tree, on the bank of a brook bubbling by on its way to a large lagoon in the centre of the huge room, Lekh drank in the almost palpably radiant presences of the Queen and King of Krai.

The Queen—dressed in a loose, flowing, sleeveless, powder-blue-and-gold-embroidered wrap and open sandals on her feet—was a curvaceous, ravishing woman with a body that was the envy of women all over Krai. Her soft facial features were dominated by a pair of piercing and disarming, turquoise eyes, and her face was framed by long, dark hair tied loosely with a thick, gold braid at the small of her back. Her skin was a creamy, sweetly fragrant hue of the dark emerald Raian skin, and she was adorned with rings on her fingers, large hoop rings in her ears, and gold-and jewel bracelets up her forearms.

King Eloh was an imposing figure: tall, muscular and with the rugged features common to his Ayolan heritage. His thick arms bulged through the velvety violet silk of his atruk, the three-quarter length tunic he wore over his loose green trousers. He wore rings on a number of fingers, and each of his eye teeth were gold. His indigo, shoulder-length hair hung loosely, and he wore a neatly trimmed, pointed beard under a thin mustache. Although his violet eyes burned brightly and their green irises with challenge and intensity, there was a gentleness around their edges that belied the naturally tender core of his famously courageous and generous heart.

Lekh quickly proceeded to gain Queen Deleb's and King Eloh's confidence by charmingly assuaging their mistrust of his apparent origin being from Za. Despite his disheveled look and his madly shining and penetratively captivating eyes, the idioms and rhythmic cadence of the local dialect from his native Colombo—a central province—with which Lekh spoke, announced to the royal couple their interlocutor's cosmopolitan roots, and they dismissed their fears that he may represent some far more dangerous threat to them or to their children, or the entire world, than that posed by a lone, harmless-looking but inexplicably compelling hermit from Za just wandering his way into The Castle.

He briefly related his story, along with some of what he had experienced and come to know, the brief glimpses and glimmers of dawning understanding he'd been able to glean about the nature of true reality over the past forty cycles away from Nareed civilization.

Deleb and Eloh were mesmerized by what Lekh explained to them about space, time, energy and how they all actually relate to one another in ways previously unconsidered on Krai. The recent mania of curiosity, conjecture, desire to explore an explosion of ideas bursting forth from the dawning of a new awareness that was sweeping across all of Krai; that inexplicable but irresistible, almost possessively compelling common curiosity for all things mystic or spiritual to explain the current state of common being—and all possible combinations of all the above—that had slowly built into a frenzy over the past few cycles, hadn't avoided Deleb and Eloh.

Enraptured by Lekh's peaceful and infectiously calming and soothing persona, they listened as awestruck as little children when, for example, Lekh explained to them how he had once during his practices experienced being in two places at one time while also traveling between them, and how such a phenomenon could be rationally explained, if not yet empirically demonstrable for now.

As fascinated as they were with Lekh's exposition, both Deleb and Eloh were nevertheless bursting to confirm whether it was possible he knew about the twins' display from the day before. They exchanged worried looks throughout his monologue, anxious for a chance to draw out from the man what he had to say about the children to see if it confirmed their suspicions and fears.

As finely aware of and sensitive as he was to mystic vibrations, Lekh couldn't miss picking up the dis-ease in the subtle, barely perceptible tension between the Queen and King. He sensed there was some connection between what he was currently telling them, what he had yet to tell them, and something they weren't telling him. That realization alone supported Lekh's conviction that the need he felt to come to Rai and speak to the royal couple about what he had uncovered, was somehow connected to them and more precisely, their two baby boys.

It was Eloh who finally felt comfortable, or courageous—or both—enough to finally ask out loud the question burning on both the Queen and the King's minds:

What did Lekh know about the children?

He began by relating the experience he had felt when he first laid eyes on the twins during their presentation to the world. It was then that the resulting instinct he had had told him the twins were a crucial key to the future of the Nareed, their world, and perhaps to all they knew to be real.

When asked how he knew this and what made him so sure, Lekh explained his discovery (through directly having experienced it in his mystic practices), of the field of energy that bound all of reality—both physical and non-physical—together, where the infinite and the ephemeral met. Lekh was convinced that it was possible to access this energy with the directed power of the mind and create a connection between the individual and the vast network of connections that bound all things together with its ... the only word Lekh could come up with was ...

Force.

Being more sensitive and in tune with higher vibrational energy frequencies, Lekh explained, and getting that way through committed meditative and other physical practices, gave one a deeper access to information through instant awareness, which then immediately translated into directed consciousness and made more profound action possible. When united with this energy in a state of pure awareness, an individual could not only experience that energy's awesome power and receive information encoded in that energy, but could learn to use the " force" of that energy by employing the creative capacity of the mind and directed intent to effect action with that energy within physical reality. He explained it as something you simply had to feel, and its "force" could be felt pulsing with a distinct, rhythmic celestial signature in everything within physically manifested reality.

Lekh admitted that in all his forty cycles of practice, even though he had managed to achieve a compatible vibrational frequency with that of "The Force" enough to be aware of it and receive information through it, he had not yet managed to understand how to harness it, consciously access it and intentionally manipulate it, now that he had learned of its existence and how to unite with it.

Fascinated, awed, humbled, excited and frightened, Deleb suddenly had a thought. She wondered aloud—with Eloh shooting her frightened glances once he understood where she was going—whether that meant access to The Force could allow physical objects to be directly manipulated by nothing but the power of the mind.

When Lekh replied that he couldn't see why not, the terrified looks exchanged by the royal couple were unmistakable and blatant. Lekh immediately re-experienced the feeling he had earlier, stemming from his suspicion that the pair was withholding something crucial and urged the Queen and King to tell him anything they might know, by reiterating the importance of this might have—with all the current events—to the future of the Nareed.

After exchanging glances with her partner and King to silently confirm their concurrence on trusting Lekh, Queen Deleb told Lekh they thought it would be more effective if they showed him instead of told him.

That, and the fact that neither of them, especially after the events of the last day, knew where to start explaining.

Or how.

CHAPTER VIII

It was a different outdoor nursery this time. This one was on a stone patio one deck below the breakfast balcony, taking in the same breathtaking view, level with the top of the thin ropes of waterfall that constantly poured down out of the rock adjacent to The Castle's perimeter to the right of the grassy nursery. A chest-high, thick stone wall ran around the patio, to prevent either of the twins, or any of the grown ups, for that matter, from plunging the ten levels down that it was to the shallow lagoon below. The lagoon was fed by the waterfall, surrounded by thick foliage, and emptied out into the Eed River that then ran through The Valley.

The boys were rolling around, laughing in the grass, chasing and pawing at one another, play-fighting. Colorful toys and amusements of all shapes and sizes were scattered all around. Holding the instrument a little excessively tightly today, the Governess, like the day before, performed her electronic duties via remote transcom on her lap, while seated under one of the parasol-like trees peppering the nursery and offering shade from the powerful mid-afternoon suns.

As royal duo and mystic loner left the shady coolness of the corridor and entered the open air of the nursery, Lekh winced slightly, unused as his eyes were to being in such direct exposure to the suns, since he was more used to squinting in the thick, shaded jungles of Za. He shielded his eyes momentarily with one hand, and when they adjusted to the brightness, finally dropped his hand and got his first good look at the royal twins.

He froze.

It wasn't a metaphorical, emotional, mental or in any way physically describable freeze. Not like ice in his veins.

As if everything were frozen.

Lekh felt like a point of dust pasted in place in the centre of a whirlwind. As if everything around him that he could see with his eyes were taking place, but he was stopped, removed from it completely, only being attached to it through another sense that was of something beyond and larger, and experiencing himself experiencing it all from that other "without."

His vision swam, or rather, everything around him became fluid and swam around him, while his vision remained perfectly clear. From some place in the otherness beyond the swirling fluidity surrounding his physical body, Lekh felt two other presences with him that he immediately concluded were the infant Jedi and Sith.

The presences were immensely powerful—but oblivious—and in their play were unwittingly sending ripples through Lekh's awareness like a high-frequency electric shock would go through a body of matter; identical to the energy surge he'd felt when he first saw them on the transcom.

Focusing on these shocks, however, knocked Lekh out of the vast otherness and reattached his awareness to his physical body and its place in normal space, making him realize he was swooning and about to fall over while the Queen and the King both stopped and turned to look at his sudden odd behavior.

King Eloh extended a hand and steadied Lekh, until the hermit finally came completely back to himself and was in full sensual connection with his physical surroundings again. Everything felt and looked the way it had originally felt and looked when he first stepped out onto the patio platform:

Normal.

But nothing was normal about any of it.

Lekh took a tentative step before he could be confident he was in full motor control of his body, and then thanked the King for his help.

Transfixed, but still present enough to be cautious, Lekh approached the two boys playing on the grass. Deleb and Eloh stood silently watching, while the Governess looked up from her transcom, startled slightly by Lekh's wild appearance, and watched as well.

At first it all felt completely innocent. Like he was just walking up to a pair of young children, playing on a sunny, outdoor patio.

Then suddenly, both twins squealed in unison with an incredibly sharp shriek, everything started swimming around Lekh again, and he experienced the connection to the vast otherness inside and outside of everything. Just like it did seconds ago, the twins' presence in the complex connections of the otherness radiated powerfully. Unlike in the first episode, the radiance wasn't as sharp, pulsing now through Lekh's awareness like a thickly vibrating throb instead of the previous series of debilitating shocks. This time he felt no paralytic effect, but was moving with complete clarity through the swirling mass of the physical everything else swimming around him.

Everything else swimming around him except Jedi and Sith, who remained completely clear, solid, oblivious and continuing to roll around wrestling with each other while Lekh moved toward them through the whirlpooling reality—

Until the twin in the blue-and-orange jumper suddenly stopped giggling and rolling and wrestling, and turned his head and attention to the approaching Lekh.

Lekh halted.

He was overwhelmed by a warmth and brilliance that radiated along lines of luminous energy that exploded from the boy's eyes and heart and connected to his own.

Blinded by the brilliance, the only sound Lekh was aware of was the rushing of the nearby waterfall. The sound was accompanied not just by the feeling of a constant rush of warm, flowing water coursing through him, but even more; like the feeling of being a constant rush of warm flowing water. Lekh became instantly lost in the awareness and feeling of a vast, immeasurable elation unlike any joy or bliss or other mantic moment he had ever experienced. All he could see was an ocean of endless light.

He felt as if he were that ocean. Luminous. Endless.

It felt as if everything were suspended in and connected by pleasantly cool and peaceful, lambent water.

Through sparkling and shimmering luminosity, Lekh suddenly made out a silhouette of slightly less brilliance than the surrounding light, in the shape of a child. It quickly solidified into a clear image of Jedi, suspended in the pulsing light as if floating on air.

Jedi reached out with both hands toward Lekh.

Lekh reached out with both hands toward the child.

Deleb, Eloh and the Governess were startled when all of a sudden, while approaching the playing children, Lekh swooned again as if his knees were going to buckle, and then began staggering around. He was on the verge of falling when he suddenly straightened up stiffly and froze in place.

The three witnesses all cried out in unison as the infant Jedi, from his prone position in the grass, suddenly began rising, and floated upright in the air until he hovered at the mystic's eye-level.

They cried out again when Lekh, a few steps away from all of them, suddenly began to rise from the ground and float about five hands above the grass. He wore an expression of some sort of blissful catatonia, with his eyes fluttering under closed lids, while Jedi was gently giggling, bobbing up and down in the air in a hovering position in front of Lekh's face.

They cried out yet again—this time with some greater measure of alarm—when a clap of thunder seemed to slam out of the clear blue sky and shook the patio, the rumbling of which was superseded only by a vicious, frightening roar, like the roars of the giant jungle predators of Za.

Then they all noticed Sith was on his hands and knees in the process of righting himself. When he finally straightened, they saw pinpricks of flashing, blood-red, fiery light flaming in the green irises of his golden yellow eyes.

The flash was immediately followed by a pair of crackling, blood-red light bolts that shot out from Sith's eyes, and pummeled into the floating Lekh, shaking his body violently in mid air, causing his face to contort in some agony that cut into him via the connection with Sith.

Lekh was on fire.

Not literally on fire, but on fire in a way he couldn't describe being on fire.

Whereas the moment of contact with Jedi had given Lekh a warming joy, the cold burning being conducted into him and coming from Sith crushed him with it's cold burn until all of him began to feel like a fine powder of consciousnesses, fractured, separated, and about to forever be lost to any last connection to a unified whole of any kind, scattered by a raging wind forever.

In that freezing burn that brought with it the forlorn, desperate, despondent feeling of separation isolation, loneliness, Lekh also felt a tormenting, cold terror—

And then it was gone.

CHAPTER IX

The mystic madman opened his eyes slowly, as if he hadn't quite finished completely returning from the experience he'd just had. Queen and King and Governess were gathered around him and the two prone children, all three of whom had been stunned after a white blast of light from Jedi's heart had exploded, and all the fireworks came to an end with the floating Jedi and mystic madman crumpling to the ground next to the stunned Sith.

Queen and Governess attended to distressed infants. Jedi quickly scampered toward the Queen face screwed up, startled, silent, sheepish. The Queen immediately rushed to him, snatched him up, and pressed him intensely into her bosom, cradling him, swinging him gently in her arms, cooing in his ear to soothe him.

Sith began wailing.

The Governess, stealing a discreetly scornful glance at the doting Queen, rushed to scoop up the squirming Sith, and attempted to calm him down while he tried to escape her arms, struggling to get to Deleb.

The Queen looked away from Jedi to Sith and her face clouded even more with empathy for her other suffering child.

"Give him to me," she said to the Governess, and motioned with her left arm while balancing Jedi with a skillful bounce into the crook of her right.

It was all the Governess could do to conceal the fact that she even considered hesitating. She immediately handed Sith over to his mother, whispering a sympathetic coo of her own into the baby's ear as she did so.

After Deleb took Sith from her and she stepped back a few feet to give the Queen some room to get a good hold of him, the Governess watched mother and children until she could no longer hold in a barely perceptible—yet unmistakeable—hint of a resentful sniff; but then she got a hold of herself when she remembered she was the attentive and obedient Royal Governess, and quickly re-assumed an appropriate face.

The Governess couldn't help but feel a sharp pang of resentment. It was her job to take care of the children, not the Queen's. She should have been the one holding both of them and cooing gently into their ears to soothe them, not Deleb.

She immediately reminded herself that she would only have until the boys' tenth cycle to endure the Queen's intrusions onto her duties. When the twins turned ten, her contract with the Royal Family would expire and her services would no longer be required. She would be issued a handsome compensation package that would leave her materially wealthy for the rest of her natural life.

Until then, her job, her life, was the lives and safety of those two boys. She coveted here role in both the infants' cases, but because Deleb seemed to favor Jedi, the Governess naturally became more empathetically inclined towards Sith.

It broke the Governess' heart to think of how Sith would always be—because through no doing of his own, he had been born second—overlooked; how he would never get the recognition and acknowledgment that he would deserve; and how angry it made her feel when she saw how the Queen naturally gravitated dotingly toward Jedi while sometimes giving Sith scant notice.

Watching Deleb handle to two boys clinging to her, the Governess vowed to herself she would fill the hole in Sith's heart she was convinced his mother's already-evident negligence would eventually create.

Until the age of ten, it would be to her that the Governess would teach Sith to turn as if to a mother, and not to the Queen.

Then the bitch could let him suckle her breasts all she wanted, the Governess laughed in her mind.

CHAPTER X

The King attended to the dazed Lekh, who by now had begun to sit up wobbily and prop himself on his elbows. When it finally looked like the man's eyes had focused enough for him to recognize his surroundings, the King immediately detected two unmistakeable emotions in the man's eyes:

Awe and dread.

CHAPTER XI

It was a time of both birth and death.

Or rather, it was a time of death and birth.

Or, even more optimistically speaking, a time of rebirth.

That was how Lekh—with what the royal couple had by now noted seemed to be a characteristic tendency for brief, bold pronouncements—began his explanation to Deleb and Eloh over a lavish dinner under the glass dome that was retracted for the warm early evening in the Arborarium, to which the King suggested the trio retire after the Queen and the Governess had taken the still-troubled infants back to their chamber and calmed them down enough to put them to sleep. It had been immediately apparent to the adults that the intensity of whatever experience they had just witnessed required such tiny, new bodies to rest in the aftermath. It had also been apparent that even the big, markedly less new body of Lekh also required a short period to come completely to himself, although he appeared to be physically undamaged, if albeit a little shaken. The silky smooth, syrupy Rai Valley wine he'd shared with Eloh before dinner took the edge off completely.

For both of them.

Now the royals once again sat fascinated, listening as Lekh explained to them everything that he had come to know.

It was far too late for either of them, or for Lekh for that matter, to be entertaining any more doubts about the credibility of what they'd now all witnessed. In the last day, there had been a concentrated enough concatenation of coincidences of such fantastic improbability of all of them occurring randomly and without connection in the first place—let alone all at once and all surrounding an ever-tightening growing vortex—that left no more room for mistrust of their senses or of each other.

Over periodic helpings of roasted and spiced whole vegetables, steaming fruit mashes, creamy consommes, fleshy and saucy fungi—the Nareed were herbivores— Lekh continued his exposition. The Queen and the Prince listened while they ate.

The Nareed, Lekh said, had reached a point in their common conscious evolution, where by virtue of their discovery and growing acceptance of understandings of certain new truths and realities, a new awareness about the nature of being was attracted and attached to the "new" Nareed common consciousness. The whirlwind of civilization-shaking events, that "feeling" everybody seemed to be experiencing all over the world—that something was happening that was rapidly changing reality itself as they watched—was but the first manifestation of this process.

The twins' inexplicable but undeniable power, was another.

At this time, Lekh could only speculate as to how or why abilities suddenly appeared in a pair of royal twins. The "how" he attributed to genetic mutation, either randomly or somehow intentionally directed. The "why" was a piece in a puzzle still scattered all over the table.

The abilities exhibited by the infant Jedi and Sith—to consciously direct an apparently universal energy Lekh has called The Force, and manipulate physical reality—was the first physical manifestation of the natural potential to which the Nareed now had access, and another sign they were in the midst of an advancement of the species' evolutionary process itself.

The boys' antics with the toys and corporeal levitation, along with the more frightening displays of powerfully awesome biophotonic projection, were precisely the kinds of manifestations made possible by conscious connection with The Force. Lekh explained to Deleb and Eloh that The Force also made connection and interaction on a non-physical level between individuals a reality. Connection and interaction with all of reality on a complexity of non-physical levels also meant connection and interaction with each other on those same levels; in mind, in heart, and in what Lekh could only describe as the essential breath that all of common reality breathed and whose essence resided in the non-physical "heart" of every physical thing, as well as in every Nareed; the heart in everything and everybody, that acted as the connection node to the Force.

Jedi and Sith would grow, Lekh opined, learn to harness and direct The Force, and when they reproduced, their abilities, enhanced by the experience that learning and practice would bring, would be passed on to their offspring, starting the process that would eventually spread those abilities to the Nareed as a whole, thus eventually imparting the ability to more profoundly affect, and therefore commonly create, reality.

A process that would eventually bring an end to everything the Nareed now knew as being and existence until now, while at the same time giving birth to a new kind of being and existence: one in which, Lekh claimed, they would be bale to create a new reality, one filled with awe-inspiring potential that no Nareed alive could yet imagine.

A process that also contained within it the equal potential for a destruciton so painful and terrible that no Nareed would want to contemplate it.

In his encounter with the twins, Lekh learned that when applied with innocence, love, courage, discipline and positive intent, an individual could use The Force to positive, creative ends. In his connection with Jedi, Lekh had experienced the awesome potential for creative action that The Force represented under such motivation. Jedi had reached out to Lekh using The Force with warmth, love, and a complete lack of fear of either Lekh or the connection with him. The resultant power Lekh had experienced was the feeling that the positive application of The Force created within an individual. Using it in this manner would bring both positive results and a positive state of being to an individual and the world.

But when Sith had lashed out at Lekh, it was a with a motivation of fear that he had directed The Force. Sith had become afraid that he had lost his connection with his twin brother when Jedi used The Force to connect with Lekh.

Afraid that he'd become separated from Jedi.

Until Lekh appeared, Jedi had been Sith's only connection on the level of The Force, and the only other connection to anything outside himself he had known to that point in his infant life. As such, when that connection was temporarily interrupted by Jedi's playful connection with Lekh, Sith had become afraid he'd been left all alone. On the level of The Force—connected as it was to the infinite vastness of all that was—that loneliness had an intensity of feeling proportionate to that vastness.

And it had made Sith experience that proportionate fear, whose intensity could only be described as feeling as if all that could ever be felt were fear.

Lekh explained that fear had a myriad effect on behavior. It could lead to paralysis, inaction. It could lead to positive reaction, characterized by a courageous effort to overcome the faced adversity with a beneficial outcome. It could also, however, lead to a host of negative reactions, characterized by a destructive, not creative, motivation. The first of the most commonly instinctive of these negative reactions emanating from fear was anger. Sith's fear had immediately led him to anger: anger at Lekh, whom Sith regarded as the cause of his perceived loss of connection to his brother.

The experience with the different reactions of the twins led Lekh to the general conclusion that if fear—fear of losing connection to everything from the past, of losing the comfortable assurance of certainty about what reality was and what was real, of facing the uncertainty of the as-yet unfathomable scope of the power to affect reality that this new state of common awareness would bring—were to become the accepted and overriding intent behind the use of such power as The Force, it could cause the Nareed to tragically choose a common path that would lead to an unleashing of an unlimited potential for destruction, instead of the universal creation it could be channeled to affect.

That would be the path they would inevitably embark upon as a species if the power of The Force were to be motivated by negative, harmful, fearful intent.

The path that would lead not to a constantly swelling and spreading wave of creation of positive, infinitely possible reality, but to a crushing tide of destruction that would roll off out of control and eventually create the conditions for an unstoppable slide toward eventual complete destruction.

Destruction of the Nareed? Of Krai?

No.

Destruction of existence.

Everywhere. Forever.

Because of the infiniteness and connectivity that characterized true reality, and the potential that conscious, intentional and directed access to The Force represented (especially when executed as a collective effort), actions that were directed to affect reality characterized by a particular intent would naturally and eventually affect all of physical reality according to the characteristics of that intent. Assisted and fueled by the energy of The Force, if the intent were to create conditions for creative balance and harmony, The Force could be used for increasing enlightenment and promoting the continued evolutionary growth of both the Nareed and all of reality.

As a result of the painful torment he experienced while in the throes of Sith's angry, supra-natural outburst, Lekh had come to understand that assisted and fueled by the energy of The Force, if the intent were to create conditions for destructive imbalance and discord, the result would be to produce conditions that would plunge the Nareed and all of reality into the dark depths that could lead to eventual, total annihilation.

So when Lekh had made his time-of-birth/time-of-death pronouncement, implying it was both a beginning and an end, what he really meant was that it was the beginning of either the beginning or the end for the Nareedand all of the infinite vastness of any conceivable—or inconceivable—reality that might ever develop.

The mystic, slurping a foamy sweet and spicy soup out of a large, dark, hard shell cut in half, silhouetted in the leafy, open-air shade of the Arborarium by playful shadows dancing across his features in the light breeze, and illuminated by the glow of the light crystal activated in the center of the table, chose this point in his narrative to inform the royal couple that he believed their two twins were the vehicles through and between which the struggle over the first, both literal and figurative, baby steps onto either of those two possible paths, would be played out and decided.

It would be in their lives, what they each choose to do with them, and what they each choose to do with the power with which they'd been born—direct, intentional access to The Force—that the Nareed common experience would take initial direction.

When Deleb asked Lekh "Why now?" "Why their two children?"—he simply said it was because "now" was the time.

Why them?

Why not, he said.

However, as to how such a phenomenon was possible, Lekh requested that any of the twins' genetic records be made available to him. As a bio-electromagnetic researcher, he was sure he'd be able to discover some physiological explanation behind the twins' abilities. The Queen and King agreed, and the King set up a security clearance for Lekh to access any available data via the transcom in the quarters and office being arranged for him in The Castle. Both the Queen and the King insisted that whatever the foreseeable future decided, Lekh's help right now in guiding them in how to deal with this matter was invaluable, and the Queen told him he would be welcome in The Castle as long as the need persisted.

Lekh thanked the Queen for her offer, and suggested they retire for the evening. He wanted to have a preliminary look at Jedi and Sith's genetic records before getting some rest.

CHAPTER XII

The next morning, on the same breathtaking deck where Deleb and Eloh had breakfasted the previous day, over a light meal with warm beverages that gave one a pleasant hum in all the physical senses, Lekh delivered even more to the already overladen table full of astounding information and credibility-defying occurrence of the past two days.

He told the royal couple he had launched a global analysis of the twins' genetic records, scanning for any anomalous coding not conforming to any Nareed genetic information already known. Pulling out a portable transcom unit from his robe, he tapped his way through menus and glyphwindows until he had an image on the screen of a complexly intertwined spiral; a genetic double-helix with a particular point on one tendril of it highlighted and flashing. He handed the unit to the Queen, who examined the image as Lekh began to explain. The King left his seat to lean on the table over his partner's shoulder and looked along with her.

Leaning in closer as he explained, Lekh indicated that the highlighted figures attached directly to the genetic matrix of both twins, represented something for which no science known on Krai provided account. The anomalous "presences," as he called them for lack of a better word, were of a nature unknown. They looked like individual genes, yet behaved with what Lekh felt was a conscious purpose. He offered up the possibility that either this was a spontaneous genetic mutation, or it was the manifestation of something, possibly even a life form, that had for some unexplained reason become attracted by something in the twins' genetic matrices and attached itself to them. There would have to be a lot more study of the behavioral patterns of the foreign presences before any kind of conclusion could be considered. The entities were attached, Lekh made note, in precisely the areas of the boys' genetic coding responsible for the kinds of abilities they manifested, so it was their presence that could be reasonably assumed to be responsible for those manifestations.

Their confidence buoyed by the progress Lekh had made, and so quickly—and by their impression with both his diligence and ingenuity—Deleb told Lekh they had already agreed that they both felt it would be necessary for Lekh, given his demonstrated qualifications, to live in The Castle and be both officially and personally responsible for directing the twins' education and training in the ways and skills of their new abilities, until they reached adulthood in the capacity of Royal Guardian.

Honored by the offer, Lekh concurred, telling the Queen he'd reached the same conclusion last night while falling asleep, and was going to suggest his services to that end himself. Without a trace of arrogance, he proclaimed he was probably the only person on all of Krai who was qualified enough to help the royal couple best protect and guide their children, and thereby, the fate of the whole world, through this experience of their lives, whatever it might turn out to be.

It was decided the children would have to be cloistered, of course, for several cycles, until they could be taught not only to control the use of their abilities on command, but to understand why it was important for them to do so.

Along with making sure nobody on Krai outside of the royal couple, the Governess, and Lekh found out about the twins' abilities by rumor, they all also had to ensure the twins wouldn't inadvertently display their abilities in front of anybody else. Until such a time as they were old enough to understand, accept and practice conscious control, the children would have to be kept isolated, regrettable as it was to be forced to deprive them of the benefits of social interaction with other Nareed and other Nareed children.

Preventing news of their abilities from leaking out to the general populace—and something like this wouldn't take very long to spread—was necessary to avoid any uncontrolled speculation, or attracting unwanted attention, or worse, any possible threats to Jedi and Sith, especially in the volatile environment that gripped most of Krai at that time. They couldn't let their children come to be regarded as either curiosity-attracting freaks, or fear-inspiring monsters.

They would, however, eventually have to allow the twins to socialize and interact with the outside world, or else that in itself would give cause to rumor and speculation. The King also made it clear that offering Lekh the option to live in The Castle was more than a courtesy. Since the demands of the children's safety, as first and second Heirs-to-the-Throne, was a matter of global security, they couldn't let him leave even now, if he had refused to stay and help them.

While Lekh would oversee their general education and coordinate their learning with a dedicated staff of instructors, Lekh and only Lekh would be responsible for their education and training with their Force abilities. His knowledge and experience made him the only natural choice.

In this way, the Queen concluded, the twins safety and proper guidance were ensured. The global attention on the children, along with the effect should such news get out to the population, would be prevented. Their upbringing—in the context of their abilities and what those abilities represented not only to the twins' lives, or to the royal family and lineage, but to the world as a whole—would be under careful, caring and diligent, but discreet direction.

There was an ineffable quality about Lekh, something strangely and compellingly attractive. It was more a feeling one received in his presence that just seemed to inspire instant trust in him.

Most importantly, the royal couple felt that in Lekh, The Force that they now accepted as indisputably real, had somehow provided them with a source of knowledge and advice that would be invaluable not just to the process of raising the children wisely and safely, but in helping unlock the meaning and purpose of the boys abilities—which would no doubt eventually be revealed either by cumulative observation or epiphanous flash, or both—and how they could be used for the benefit of the Nareed and their world.

CHAPTER XIII

It was seventeen cycles later.

Sith—tall, muscled but lanky, with shoulder-length, dark hair, a narrow face, angular features and the bottom half of a goatee sticking out like straw from under his chin—had radiating, deep yellow eyes rimmed in pale crimson, with emerald irises. Despite his imposing presence, he gave the impression of being just a little uncomfortable and awkward in his body, as if he felt claustrophobically compressed into a space that was too small to hold all of him in.

Jedi, on the other hand, was the archetype of cool and collected. A complete naturalness emanated from him, most likely from the comfortable way in which he seemed at peace with himself and applied that serenity to a pursuit of personal excellence in every detail of his being. As a regal of global note, his strongly attractive personality alone had won him a great deal of admiration and respect.

Along with enemies that he couldn't yet even imagine.

Like Sith, Jedi was tall, but he was a little more muscular and athletic than his fraternal twin. He had a messy mop of auburn hair and a clean shaven face featuring eyes of a shimmering cobalt and sparkling, emerald irises that somehow disarmed everybody who looked into them with their powerful and indomitable innocence. Although he was technically older than Sith by a few minutes, Jedi had the appearance of a much older Sith's boyish baby brother.

Both twins, lifelong portraits in polarity since the very moment of their birth, were standing side by side, alone at the bottom of the enormous stone bowl carved into the centre of the N'yot K'wha Magboard Park.

"... back live, in case you just joined us, on this crystal clear day from the beautiful west-coast oceanside resort of Mawinu, for the 33rd Annual Kraian Magboard Championships. And yes, this cycle, folks, we've been treated to an even bigger bonus with not one, no, but two, that's right, two royal family members, with Jedi and Sith, Princes of Rai, Heirs-to-the-Throne of Krai, in the competition! This has been, frankly, by far the most exciting KMCs I've personally ever seen!"

In the top-left corner of millions of transcom screens all over the world, an in-picture vidwindow showed two scantily clad, muscular Nareed men seated on high chairs in a sports transcast studio. Beneath them, the rest of the screen was filled with a running montage sequence of shots displaying astounding feats of magboarding magnificence from the two-day competition now at its climax. A thundering, hard-driving, fast-paced musical soundtrack accompanied it. In the lower right corner, a large in-picture window displayed a shot from the live event at the park.

"THAT'S RIGHT ULBIK. And by the sound of the crowd gathered here at N'yot K'hwa—all seventy-seven thousand of them—they agree! YOU CAN TELL IT'S SO LOUD HERE THAT WE HAVE TO ALMOST SHOUT TO BE HEARD!"

"I don't have to shout."

"WELL I DO, ULBO! I'M EX-CITED AND EX-STATIC! I have to say, what a treat you've missed if you're just tuning in!"

"It's been a fierce competition, Zahb'go, and it's come down to the last two standing in the final event: The Freestyle Bowl Grav-Off. There isn't a magboarder in the world that hasn't been dreaming all season long of precisely what we're seeing happening right now: a final Grav-Off for the overall competition champion between the last two standing in "The Pit," both of whom also happen to be the first pair of royals and twins to ever compete against one another in the KMC's."

"And you know Ul, our viewers out there would certainly agree. And you can hear what the crowd thinks right now as we wait for the judges to get ready."

"Absolutely insane!"

"WELL, This hasn't been the tame, politically correct competition, you know, with participants holding back in deference to the royals, that some members of the media feared it would be in all the transcom buzz before the event!"

"No, definitely not, Zahbbie. In fact, I would say it turned out to be the exact opposite. Both Princes' presence in this cycle's championship has definitely pushed the envelope, raised the bar, given the gears and motivated all the participants to put on their best performance. And both Jedi and Sith, I have to admit, have been simply incredible and have proven beyond a doubt that they are indeed champion gravvers. I'd say what we've seen from them today has been a great pleasure. Sith's execution is a liiiiiiittle off. He seems to be nervous and preoccupied. But otherwise, he's been pushing the stick allllllll the way to the dash. Jedi's execution has been a little smoother, a little more rhythmic and natural, but then again, he hasn't tried, yet, I should hope, some of the kinds of demanding stunts Sith has managed to pull off, albeit with sketchy edges, so far. But you're right, Zahbbo, I can't remember ever seeing as much intensity and sheer amazing displays of talent all 'round at a KMC event in my entire life."

"And now it's down to the last two standing in an exciting Freestyle Bowling grav-off to cap off what's already been a banner event in KGC history. And what could be ..."

"... Uh ... Zahbgo, Hoob's just motioning me to ... Oh. I see. The judges are coming out now and ..."

A Freestyle Bowling Grav-Off.

The timed event lasted three minutes. Two gravvers simultaneously glided the sides of "The Pit" and had to remain on their boards and in motion while accomplishing tricks of varying degrees of difficulty and often sense-defying spectacle—the more difficult and spectacular, the more entertaining for the spectator; but also important in scoring. In the event both gravvers made it the full three minutes without falling off their boards, judges had to award points for style to determine the winner in a final round.

A gravver immediately lost the round if falling off their board at any time. Protective armor helped minimize the risk of injury in cases of a fall or collision. If both gravvers fell off their boards as a result of a collision, they both got on their boards and the round continued. If during the collision only one gravver fell or was injured and unable to continue, the one remaining aloft won.

Otherwise, a gravver couldn't come to more than three second's complete rest at any time during the round. Stopping too long resulted in a Three-Second Violation which didn't disqualify a gravver, but counted against overall points in the event of a tie.

Down in "The Pit," however, stopping at speeds corresponding to the steep, seven-storey deep, stadium-wide bowl, on a frictionless gravitic field, was irrelevant. The only way you would be stopped at the nag's-eye in the bottom of "The Pit"—as the N'yot K'hwa Park's bowl was affectionately called in the magboarding world—was if you fell off your board and slid on your rear, or your head, down to the bottom and either got up again, or didn't for a little while.

For gravvers all over Krai, this was the crown-jewel event of the 33rd Annual Kraian Magboarding Championships.

The whole competition had been transcast all over Krai on the KSN network. With the prospect of seeing a pair of royal heirs fighting it out for the championship of an annual, globally popular sporting extravaganza, there probably wasn't a transcom screen on Krai that wasn't tuned in.

And right now, eyes all around the world were on two seventeen-cycle old twin brothers, Heirs-to-the-Throne of Krai, standing at the bottom of the vast, polished stone pit that shimmered in the sunsshine.

Magboarding was a popular sport among Nareed youth. The principles were simple. A fish-shaped, arm's length board of polished wood, wider in the middle and tapered at each end, was imbedded with a polarity microgenerator and rode on a magnetic field dynamically polarized to counteract the gravitic attraction of any given terrain or contour, keeping the board afloat on a frictionless field a hand above the ground. The rider pushed off with one foot while the other was on the board, got it up to speed, then got on and rode the momentum while floating on a gravitic wave. The faster you went over more elaborate obstacles or contours, the more spectacular the tricks you could do.

And the harder you fell if you didn't get it right.

And the more it hurt, too.

But that was the whole point of the sport.

To beat that challenge.

When the craze had caught on a decacycle ago, architectured and sculpted magboard parks went up all over Krai. Some took advantage of natural surroundings while others were totally artificial. The N'yot K'hwa Park in Mawinu was a combination of the two.

A massive natural amphitheater—a dozen city blocks wide and dozens of stories deep—overlooked a treed park bounded by a pristine golden beach on the Kraian sunsrise coast. N'yot K'hwa was a magboard park both built around natural landscape and containing artificially constructed obstacles and courses. The naturally and plushly grassed sides of the titanic amphitheater surrounding the park provided comfortable seating for the seventy-seven thousand spectators of the annual world competition.

The park was used for periodic competitions, but otherwise it was a public facility filled daily with enthusiastic gravvers from all over Krai enjoying some challenging runs in some of the world's most luxurious weather at the world's premier magboard park.

The centerpiece of which was, incidentally enough, The Pit: a deep, stadium-sized circular bowl carved out of the ground at the center of the park, covered with a shiny obsidian slate that was marbled with glowing azure veins that matched the color of the shallow, sandy ocean water off the coast of which the stone was harvested.

In the center of which, standing on their magboards at the bottom of The Pit, were the finalists and top two point leaders in the competition: the royal twins Jedi and Sith.

Sith, his hair tied back behind his head and trailing from under his helmet, stood with one leg up on his deck, head down, panting somewhat, pushed far beyond any physical horizons he'd ever reached before.

He had only been magboarding for a few years; Jedi had been doing it much longer.

It wasn't until Sith had seen how impressed some girls were by gravvers that he began to take an interest in the activity. It was when he realized how difficult it was and how fearless his brother was at it, and with such natural ease, style and finesse, that magboarding became the latest compulsion that drove Sith in his relentless, lifelong obsession with besting his brother.

Now, with the stakes like the KMCs up for grabs and the whole world watching, Sith didn't want the distraction of focusing with envy on his brother's cool and natural ease to take him away from his own performance.

Sith was poised to win the competition. He was tied in total points with Jedi, although he had won one event more than his brother. Should it come down to a tie in this final, the title would go to Sith based on that.

But he didn't want to win on a technicality.

He wanted to win the competition and beat his brother in this event—and beat him good—with his superior performance. He almost as desperately wanted to win the adulation of the people. Sith's obsession, though, to capture the style that Jedi had, in order to copy it so that he could be better than him at it, meant that he was denying his true self and preventing his own strengths and powers from manifesting, forcing him to have to struggle and be constantly disappointed just chasing his brother's shadow and failing to catch it instead of casting one of his own.

Sith was a seventeen-cycle old kid, though, and although he was intelligent and self-critical enough to understand these things, he simply didn't care.

All he knew was that Jedi was circling casually around him on his board, basking in the roar of the crowd and the attention he always got.

Without having to actually look at him, Sith could feel his brother's presence through The Force, passing by like hot flashes burning through him as Jedi hovered around the bottom of The Pit, gently gliding, smiling and acting as if he didn't care about anything at all while they waited for the judges to come out and for the final Grav-Off to commence.

This event, the closing one of every KMCs because of its high excitement factor, consisted of two gravvers squaring off against one another in The Pit.

What you essentially faced as a gravver with a Freestyle Bowling Grav-Off was having to shoot up and down and around a gargantuan stone pit on a magboard and do amazing and physics-defying aerial tricks at mind-numbing speeds while all the time trying not to fall off your own board or fly head-on at a full-clip into the other gravver, who was doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time in exactly the same bowl.

And survive for three minutes.

It was the prospect of not surviving the round—and an intense fear of that prospect—on which Sith was trying desperately right now not to focus. The fear, however, was powerful enough that it seemed to draw the very possibility he was trying not to see more frighteningly closer to clarity in his mind.

He opened his eyes and looked up in time to note the thirteen judges—one from each Kraian province—emerge from their ready-room to take their posts in the circle surrounding the outside of The Pit.

The crowd roared.

The blood rushed through Sith's veins.

The moment was here.

He looked over to the huge, luminous, crystal chrono-display behind and above The Pit as the three minutes' time for the event flashed on. A loud klaxon called the competitors to their starting positions on opposite sides of the top rim of The Pit; from which, at the sound of the starting klaxon, they would push off and down into its unforgiving, stone maw.

Glancing over, Sith saw Jedi pushing off and circling wide and low around the bottom, picking up speed in order to mount to the top.

All lingering ruminations on what-was-yet-to-come cast off, Sith immediately pushed off himself, determined to beat Jedi to the top and get in position before him as if it were an issue more important than the championship itself. He leaned into the wall and rode his deck up a short way, turned it a hundred-eighty degrees and glided back down, picking up speed. He gravved downward and increased momentum, gliding and pushing his way across the bottom of The Pit, rushing up onto the wall again on the other side of its centre, barely missing Jedi as he continued gravving his wide, casual, circular climb toward the top while amidst the cheers and roars from the crowd, the judges walked to their respective places.

Sith rode the wall as high as his momentum could take him, glanced over to check Jedi's position so he could place and time his own next trajectory, and then flipped the board around, plunging deeper and more quickly back down the wall. He raced toward the opposite side through the centre while Jedi made his casual, wider, up-and-down circles. While his brother was carefreely taking his sweet time, Sith would try to cut as straight a line as possible, going up and down opposite walls until he'd get to the top in a styling flash that he was sure would get a huge roar of appreciation from the crowd.

The two gravving brothers crossed paths like that several more times on the way to getting enough speed to make it back to the top.

Finally, Sith felt he had enough momentum to make it to the top after his next pass downward, and prepared himself for what he planned would be a spectacular landing.

The air rushed about his ears as he made the final turn and plunged his board down the steep wall. The bottom of The Pit came up at him with frightening quickness, forcing him to keep adjusting his weight and center of gravity to both go with the downward flow as well as with the curvature of the wall and the angle of his trajectory over it. One small misplacement of a foot on his deck, or even the slightest lean too far over and—

No sooner had he had that thought, than it almost manifested in reality, when the blurry whoosh of Jedi—on his own final plunge before mounting to the top—speeding by Sith within an arm's reach, almost knocked Sith off his board. Sith's equilibrium was thrown off by the blur and the shadow that trailed behind it, and he leaned far back enough out of his own ride to almost let the board shoot out from under him in protest; but he righted himself just in time to hit the upturn into the opposite wall, still at full speed, and he shot toward the top.

Then the front of his board hit the lip of The Pit's rim.

The crowd roared madly.

Sith punched down hard with his back foot into the board, knocking its tail end into the gravitic field between the bottom of the deck and the stone of The Pit, and causing the nose to flip upward as it shot out over the bowl's rim. While jumping into a crouch and drawing his knees into his chest, he twisted at the waist over his shoulder, back toward the ground, which was now below and behind him, while holding the bottom of the board fast to his feet with a free hand. Then he rode the board up and then around into a midair, hundred-eighty degree turn, straight back down at the ground now below and ahead of him. Finally, flattening his deck out smoothly, he came to a horizontal glide back above the stone rim of The Pit only a few steps away from his assigned starting position.

When he looked across to see where Jedi was, Sith at first flushed with victorious elation when he saw his brother's empty starting position.

But Jedi had just passed Sith on his last downward plunge and seemed to have been ahead of Sith at the time and so he should have—

Sith glanced quickly down into The Pit.

It was empty.

Another loud rise from the crowd captured Sith's attention.

He turned and looked at some of the spectators behind him, trying to follow their gazes to see what the focus of all the excitement was.

Then he saw where Jedi had disappeared to, and what the crowd had really been cheering about.

It wasn't Sith's flashy arrival at the starting position.

While Sith had been busy trying to put on a flashy show to impress the crowd before the event had even started, Jedi had managed to beat him out of The Pit after all. Now, Sith watched with equal amounts of envy and rage as Jedi was coasting slowly in a wide arc across the stone gravway between The Pit and the spectators lining the edge of the park. The monitors were all on Jedi, and his giant image filled the JumboTrans—a massive, crystal transcom screen towering above the park and used to focus in gargantuan close-up on specific highlights during the event or to replay spectacular performances. Sith, along with all of Krai, saw Jedi tip up his helmet and wink playfully at a beautiful, long-and-dark haired girl sitting with some friends, who all giggled excitedly as she smiled and waved encouragingly back at the magboarding Prince.

The crowd roared again.

Sith's deep, yellow eyes saw and briefly flashed red.

His nostrils flared.

He balled his hands into tight fists.

He began breathing heavily.

He stared as his brother glided casually back to his starting position on the far side of The Pit.

Anger filled Sith's mind ...

... And then, more crucially, his heart.

The five second countdown—a deep, loud gonging that rang throughout the vast amphitheater—began, and seventy-seven thousand voices fell silent as all eyes were on the two young men on either side of The Pit, standing poised on their magboards while hanging over the giant crater's edge, ready to take the plunge.

Gooooooooooong!

Five.

Sith began to panic. He didn't know what he was going to do first, next, last, anything, everything all at once.

Gooooooooooong!

Four.

He steadied himself as he nearly leaned over too far and plunged down ahead of the starting klaxon, waving his arms and trying not to make it look too erratic and clumsy while desperately trying to stay in place.

Gooooooooooong!

Three.

Sith looked across at the giant JumboTrans screen facing the crowd, and saw with a flash of anger that it was on Jedi that the monitors were focused yet again.

His brother was casually standing on his board, knees slightly bent, waving the nose of the board back and forth rhythmically to whatever music he had on the head-plugs he wore under his helmet, as he balanced on the back of his gravboard while hanging over the edge.

Gooooooooooong!

Two.

A coldness flashed out of the pit of Sith's stomach and shattered its way through his body explosively with an intensity that was like a burning.

He shivered.

Gooooooooooong!

One.

Sith nearly jumped out of his skin in sheer terror.

The klaxon was about to—

The klaxon sounded!

The crowd roared to their feet.

Sith stood, momentarily paralyzed, and watched helplessly as Jedi plunged into The Pit.

"there they go folks! and Here we go with three of the most exciting minutes in Kraian sport!"

"Ohhhhhhh Zahbbo! Sith got off to a late start! He seemed to freeze for a moment, but he's just gone down and ..."

Sith shot down into The Pit.

As he sped down the wall, he glanced over at Jedi who ...

The crowd thundered!

... Just completed a high, aerial two-hundred-seventy-degree roll-over, landed it smoothly along the wall and was now speeding back down.

Sith steered wide of his brother. He didn't want to chance a collision this early.

He also didn't even know what he was going to do for his first trick yet. It had to be spectacular to beat Jedi's easy enough but still-impressive roll-over.

Leaning into the opposite wall as his board shot up along it, Sith saw the blur that was Jedi pass out of his sight on his own way up the opposite side.

The lip was coming.

The crowed roared deafeningly.

Jedi must have done another ...

The lip was coming fast.

... Trick and—

The lip was right there.

THE LIP'S HERE! ... WHAT AM I GONNA?—

The nose of Sith's board left the lip. There was nothing but air rushing up under his board.

He was clear of the wall and sailed straight up into the air.

"... He's up in the air and ..."

Sith twisted at the waist as he sailed upwards and brought himself and his deck around.

"A simple aerial one-eighty to open! Sith's gonna have to do better than that, Ul! ..."

Sith shot back into The Pit.

Jedi was coming down from the opposite side, wide of his brother.

What's he doing?

Sith crouched and prepared to absorb the change in angle as the bottom of The Pit came up on him from the steep downward curve ahead and below.

He went horizontal, bending his knees low, and raced through the nag's-eye at the center of The Pit.

The opposite wall came up at him.

He rode into it and up.

Another thunderous roar from the crowd.

Jedi again.

What's he doing NOW?

The rim of The Pit was coming up fast again.

Sith crouched low, arms spread wide.

The tip of his board cleared the stone lip.

He closed his eyes.

"And the crowd goes WILD as Sith does a spectacular backside aerial one-eighty with a back-flip!"

"Now thaaaat's more like it!"

Sith hurled back down into The Pit fully pumped, heart racing, mind racing even faster.

Where was Jedi?

He watched the bottom come up on him and rode into it.

Yet another eruption from the crowd.

"Beautiful, Zahbbie!

"A FULL SEVEN-TWENTY WITH A TWIST FROM JEDI!"

NOW WHAT'S HE DONE?

WHERE WAS JEDI?

Sith concluded his brother must have been somewhere behind and above him.

He glanced up at the giant chrono-display.

One-hundred-fifty seconds.

Still two-and-a-half minutes.

Sith leaned into the upcoming angle of the wall and rocketed upward.

WHERE WAS JEDI? WHAT WAS HE DOING?

The crowd roared madly.

Sith couldn't understand what the crowd could have been excited about. Jedi couldn't have been doing any tricks while shooting down The Pit behind him and—

Sith hit air.

"I can't believe my eyes!"

"SITH ONE-EIGHTY'S BACK DOWN AND JEDI, ONLY AN ARM'S REACH BEHIND HIM, LANDS A MIND-BLOWING FRONTSIDE ONE EIGHTY WITH A BACKFLIP!"

WHAT WAS HAPPENING?

Sith's mind was screaming.

He didn't understand what the crowd was so wild about.

The bottom of The Pit shot upwards at him.

He leaned into it in a deep crouch, arms balancing outward ahead and behind him.

The board shot across the bottom.

The crowd went crazy!

Sith couldn't even feel his heart that he knew was furiously pounding in his chest because of the thunder coming from the roaring crowd.

WHERE WAS JEDI? WHAT WAS HE DOING?

Sith raced into the opposite wall.

This time he had to do something big. One-eighties that little children could land weren't going to win him this event.

He focused on the top of The Pit, coming up fast on him.

He decided what he was going to do.

He saw a blur of movement off to his right and almost level with him, just the blink of an eye below and behind.

He closed his eyes.

In an explosive flash he saw himself sail through air

He wrenched his body with all his strength.

Sith hit air just as a loud gong sounded throughout the amphitheater to indicate one minute elapsed.

"UNBELIEVABLE! UNBELIEVABLE!"

"Sith delivers and astounding back-flip, twists out of it into a forward roll-over—"

"AND JEDI NAILS THE EXACT SAME TRICK JUST A SECOND BEHIND AND ONLY A COUPLE OF LENGTHS APART FROM SITH! I'VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING ..."

Sith sped into the drop.

He now at least knew Jedi was not only behind him, but close behind, too.

WHAT WAS HE UP TO?

His mind screamed again at him to look over his shoulder behind him to see—

The bottom was coming up fast.

He couldn't take the time to—

He rode into the bottom.

The crowd gasped.

Leaning a little too far back, while focused on Jedi and feeling the anger rising within himself, Sith suddenly lost his balance with the change in angle from a sharp incline to a horizontal plane. He waved his arms frantically as he teetered precariously on his board while it rocketed across the bottom of The Pit.

"Woah! Sith almost loses it, Ulbo! He just about fell off but seems to have gotten his balance back."

"And just in time, too! He just hit the far wall and is racing up it now with Jedi right behind him!"

Regaining balance and control on his board and fighting the fear that almost falling off threatened to awaken in him at a time when he knew he could least afford it to, Sith fought just as furiously to regain control of his concentration and his thoughts, but he couldn't keep his anger down.

What was Jedi trying to prove?

Sith decided he was going to find out.

He crouched down low and leaned hard into the wall as he rode it up at nearly frictionless high speed.

The rim was coming up quickly.

Sith resisted the urge to glance over his right shoulder, to where he could peripherally see Jedi keeping pace with him up the wall only a few lengths away.

Sith suddenly slammed his back foot into the tail of the board, grinding it hard into the gravitic field.

He slowed down radically as he approached the top of The Pit.

As the rim came up above him, Sith leaned forward while twisting his body at the waist and gradually turned himself and his board almost parallel to the rim, riding his forward momentum to change his approach from straight at it to a parallel merge with the run of the rim.

The board shot out.

By widening his approach angle, Sith was able to land the board right onto the rim of The Pit as he came out of it. He stood fully upright as he faced back down into the gaping bowl below, while gliding along the edge of the rim.

"Sith hits the top and goes into a long board slide along the rim ..."

"And Jedi follows with exactly the same move! Now both of them are riding the rim around the top of The Pit ..."

Sith rode the rim.

The roaring of the crowd thundered in his ears.

He looked to his left and saw Jedi, sliding along beside him, grinning madly.

"WHAT THE KROK ARE YOU DOING?" Sith shouted at his brother over the roaring of the crowd.

Jedi winked playfully at Sith, held up his hand to him and curled his index and middle finger around one another, giving Sith the Nareed hand signal for unity—

And plunged back down into The Pit with a loud whoop.

He's mocking me!

Sith was livid.

He finally understood what his brother had been doing.

Using The Force, the adept mind was able to connect with the thoughts of another. Jedi was sensing Sith's thoughts through The Force connection, knowing almost as soon as Sith did what his brother was going to do. He was mimicking him move-for-move while chasing him around The Pit to show off for the judges and the crowd.

Sith glanced quickly at the chrono while he still rode the rim: Ninety seconds to go.

"JEDI!" Sith screamed out with all the rage that was boiling inside him.

He plunged after Jedi into The Pit.

Sith saw Jedi was already shooting up the far side.

As Sith still rocketed downward, on the other side of The Pit, Jedi launched over the top of the rim.

"OH MY ... I DON'T BELIEVE IT!"

"JEDI JUST COMPLETED A TEN-EIGHTY WITH A TWIST-FLIP!"

Sith heard the crowd thunder as he watched Jedi come out of his spectacular—

The bottom was coming up fast.

He crouched down to absorb the angle change, sped across the bottom and hit the climb upwards just as Jedi was shooting down towards him but wide and to the right.

Sith was determined to make his next trick send the crowd into a frenzy, but—

WHAT AM I GONNA DO?

Jedi passed out of Sith's view.

Sith leaned into the climb and prepared for the top of The Pit, racing towards it at mind-bending speed.

He had one last trick in his arsenal.

His best one.

He crouched and braced himself for the rim of The Pit.

He closed his eyes.

He tried to picture himself sailing through the air and landing a heavy-grav trick, but all he could see was Jedi, grinning malevolently and winking at him.

Sith's eyes shot open.

He hit air.

"The crowd goes wild as Sith completes a mi-raculous seven-twenty with a double-cork!"

"AND ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PIT, JEDI JUST LANDS AN EVEN MORE MIRACULOUS PARALLEL TRIPLE-CORK!"

Sith shot back down into The Pit.

He searched his feelings and reached out with his mind to try to find Jedi's thoughts, but he could sense nothing from his brother through the hazy connection to The Force energy that Sith's anger and envy afforded him.

Even hotter anger flashed wildly throughout his mind.

All of a sudden, though, Sith knew what he was going to do next.

He grinned wildly. The anger he was feeling in his heart was now also burning in his eyes, along with something else:

The taste of impending victory.

Sith crouched low and leaned forward as his deck hurled downward.

He tucked his arms close to his body.

Jedi was coming down the opposite side.

Sith steered directly at Jedi.

On this pass, only one of them was going to be left standing on his board.

And it wasn't going to be Jedi.

Sith prepared to absorb the shock as his board came hard at the bottom.

He glanced at Jedi to check his brother's position, and was momentarily confused as Jedi—who couldn't have not seen that the two of them were rocketing right at one another—was leaning hard into his own descent and coming straight at Sith, and didn't appear to be taking any evasive action to avoid a collision.

"WHAT IS HE DOING?

Sith hit the bottom and leveled out.

Jedi hit the bottom on the opposite side and leveled out.

Sith crouched low and held both hands in an almost martial pose in front of him, making a special effort to guard his thoughts lest they betray his intentions to his more-acutely-sensitive brother. He braced himself, preparing to steer clear of Jedi in the last second.

In his mind's eye, Sith conjured the image of Jedi speeding toward him. At the moment they would pass each other, Sith would project a giant hand at his mental image of Jedi, and use the hand to knock Jedi off the board. Projecting that energy at Jedi would, through The Force connection, cause it to enter Jedi's mind at the speed of thought, destabilize his equilibrium, and make him take a spill off his deck seemingly of his own accord. Sith would have to fire the mental shot off precisely as the two speeding gravvers passed each other, so that to the entire world, it would only appear that Jedi lost his balance and fell off his board as a result of the close brush with Sith.

Sith focused on Jedi as he sped toward him.

Jedi was crouched low on his deck, arms spread out ahead and behind him as he shot towards Sith. He was grinning wildly, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

Rage exploded in Sith's heart.

"What the ...?"

"I don't know ulbik, it looks like they're HEADED FOR A COLL—"

Sith's heart raced as he shot directly at Jedi.

The anger was screaming in his mind.

He saw Jedi's grinning face floating hideously before his eyes in a red haze.

He felt a surge of power flush through his body.

He prepared to—

Suddenly, Jedi was gone.

"OH MY ... I DON'T BELIEVE ..."

The crowd roared.

"... WHAT I JUST SAW!

"INCREDIBLE! IT LOOKED LIKE THE TWO PRINCES WERE ABOUT TO COLLIDE, BUT AT THE LAST SECOND, JEDI JUMPS INTO THE AIR AND AT A FULL CLIP EXECUTES A DOUBLE SOMERSAULT RIGHT OVER SITH—WHILE HIS BOARD SLIDES UNDER SITH'S—AND THEN NAILS A PERFECT LANDING BACK ONTO HIS OWN SPEEDING BOARD!"

Sith was stunned.

He had no idea what had just happened.

All he had seen was a blur before Jedi disappeared—

And was now rocketing, back on his board, up the wall behind him.

Careening across the bottom of The Pit toward the opposite wall, Sith straightened out of his crouch, looked over his shoulder, and watched in incredulity through a burning, angry haze as his brother's back quickly receded away from him.

Then his mind exploded with a fiery rage unlike any he'd ever felt before.

JED—

All of a sudden, Sith came up hard and fast against the upward curve of the opposite wall.

While watching Jedi over his shoulder, he had forgotten about his forward motion at breakneck speed, and was unprepared to absorb the angle of the upturning and quickly approaching wall.

He went into the wall standing too tall and not leaning into the incline.

The upward angle of the wall hit his board hard, punching him back with unbelievable force at such high speed.

Because he was standing straight and now leaning away from the incline, Sith had neither the strength nor the balance to absorb the shock of the drastic angle change to ride smoothly up into it.

The force punched his upper body.

His gravboard rocketed out from under him as he flew backwards up into the air, seeing nothing but the gargantuan image of himself on the JumboTrans high above him, falling backwards off his deck, adding a mocking, transcast insult to the injury Sith knew he was about to sustain.

For a split second, he felt nothing but air all around him, heard nothing but the pounding of his heartbeat and his labored panting.

Then he hit the cold, hard, obsidian stone of The Pit, and everything went black.

"OH MY ... SITH GOES DOWN! SITH HAS GONE DOWN!"

"There goes the klaxon! The round ... is ... over!"

CHAPTER XIV

It was midmorning the day after the competition, and the hallways of The Castle were quiet with most of the staff behind closed doors in administrative wings attending to all the daily royal business.

Sith strode down one of the long, highly arched corridors. He had the entire morning and most of the afternoon free, until a martial arts session with Jedi and Master Lekh before dinner.

He was still incensed over the outcome of the KMCs yesterday. He wasn't angry with himself or his own lack of concentration and control, though. Through a fitful, sleepless night, all he had been able to think about was how he had lost the competition; how once again he had come in second.

To Jedi.

Sith had learned to really like feeling angry ever since he could remember. He learned to really like feeling angry ever since, while still a toddler, he had discovered that he could make what he wanted to happen, seem to just happen, by directing the full energy of that anger into his mental projections onto physical reality using The Force connection.

He just couldn't understand why it always didn't work!

Like with the Grav-Off yesterday.

The fall had knocked him unconscious, but he hadn't been seriously hurt. When he had finally come back to his senses, lying on the stone after having slid down the wall into the bottom of The Pit, he was surrounded by the medics trying to revive him.

The first thing he had seen as he sat up was a megalithic Jedi on the JumboTrans, pompously gliding around the top of The Pit on his magboard, waving to the crowd, which showed him their admiration with thunderous cheering and applause.

The medics had quickly determined there were no broken bones. Thanks to the considerably solid protective gear he was wearing, the only pain Sith felt was in his heart. He was crushed by his failure.

He was livid.

So much so that by the time the medics had escorted the fallen Sith out of The Pit, he didn't stop to congratulate his pompously strutting brother, who was basking in the waves of adulation raining down on him from the crowd.

Then Jedi had glided over to the edge of the crowd in the direction of the same, long and dark-haired girl he had gravved over to before the start of the final round, and this time took off his helmet and blew her a kiss with a flourishing hand.

Sith stormed off, shaking not so much from the shock of his fall anymore as from being barely able to contain his anger.

He was being given a thorough examination at the park's medical center, when Jedi, surrounded by media with transcast monitors, arrived, deeply concerned to see if his brother was all right. With the eyes of the world watching them live, Sith had been left with no choice but to congratulate his brother on his victory, and did so cordially enough in front of the monitors, even if somewhat coolly for the loving sibling the whole world believed Sith to be.

He didn't show up at the KMC after-party that was held at the Mawinu Royal Resort. He didn't want to watch and listen to everybody fawning all over Jedi, while the sting of his own defeat still burned hotly inside his heart and filled his mind with nothing but vengeful thoughts.

He also didn't want to face the prospect of the beautiful, long-and-dark-haired Pyarran girl Jedi had saluted during the competition, hanging devotedly off Jedi's arm all night, the way Sith had longingly pictured she should have been hanging off his.

The girl who, as soon as she had displayed the first outward signs of romantic interest in Jedi a couple of cycles ago, had immediately become the object of Sith's most profound—and most profoundly desperate—yet unrequited desire.

While it seemed to him that all of Krai was celebrating yet another of Jedi's victories over his brother, Sith had taken a late skybus flight back home to Rai, seething with anger, hatred, rage, and disappointment.

This morning, he was looking forward to forgetting yesterday's tragic defeat by going to see the one person on Krai he knew could occupy his attention to the point of exclusion of all else, including the boiling rage he felt because of Jedi.

The one person who offered Sith the hope that one day—and his Force sense told him that day was approaching quickly, perhaps even more quickly than Sith dared dream—Sith would triumph over his brother once and for all.

But he wouldn't be able to see that person until later tonight.

First there was the matter of this afternoon's martial arts sparring session with Jedi.

Sith's heart jumped with excitement at the prospect of taking out some of his repressed frustrations in a contest of physical force with his brother.

Suddenly, his transcom chimed with three quick, successive chirps, indicating to him first that he had just received a message, and second, that it was urgent.

He pulled his transcom mobile out of a pocket in his black cloak and stopped in the hallway, examining the screen as he navigated and scrolled through tiny glyphwindows until he arrived at the message.

"Jst hrd Xjuicy news frm the prty lst nite. Gues whos getng married!"

It had been sent by the very person who had just been on Sith's mind when the message came through.

As Sith read the message, his face ran a quick gamut of expressions, morphing first from one of confusion into recognition; then from recognition to astonishment; then from astonishment to a painful frown that looked like a prelude to a grief-stricken cry; finally building into a red-faced indignation bordering on a barely containable rage.

"WHAT?" he shouted out, the anger in his voice bouncing sharply off the thick stone walls of the hallway with an almost stone-cleaving intensity.

A long way down the corridor from him, a door slid open and a head popped out, looking up and down the hallway in search of the source of the sharp outburst. Upon discovering it to be Prince Sith, the head quickly disappeared into its office with the hiss of the door sliding closed behind it.

Sith read the message again.

He didn't have to guess.

He knew.

"NO ... WAY!" he declared venomously, storming off as he frantically punched a code into his transcom unit to place a connection request.

CHAPTER XV

Later that afternoon, Jedi and Sith were in a castle courtyard, practicing at their martial arts training, sparring with long, polished hardwood sticks that could either be wielded like swords or spun and thrust as with a jousting stick.

As always, Master Lekh—as the former bio-electromagnetic-researcher-turned-mad-mystic-seeker-turned-mentor-to-the-royal-twins-of Kraihad come to be called by everyone—had the twins eyes masked and ears blocked, forcing them to rely solely on their feeling of The Force to guide their senses and actions.

Watching them spar, he remarked at how they had grown and developed well, becoming strong, handsome young men. While twins, they were fraternal, not identical. Contrasting Sith's angular, awkward, and shadowy features, Jedi was muscular in an athletic way, with shoulder-length auburn hair and a boyish face that made him look much younger than he actually was. Sith seemed to radiate an energy that made people feel nervous around him. In contrast, there was an almost palpable glow about Jedi that seemed to give off an energy that instantly made people feel completely relaxed, at ease, and that they wanted to be around him.

Throughout their growing years, Master Lekh watched as Jedi and Sith's characters and personalities evolved and developed, and noted how their behaviors manifested what those characters and personalities held in store for the twins as they grew and developed. Master Lekh's own magnetic and caring personality, along with his profound hermetic knowledge, allowed for a deep bond to form between teacher and pupils, and the two twins quickly learned to regard and revere him as more than just a mentor. They both felt about him as toward a close friend, a brother, and in the frequent absences of their royal patriarch whose duties often called him away, almost as a father.

Jedi's was a kind and gentle character. He was compassionate and caring, often offering himself up in the service to others without being asked or without expecting anything in return. He was always quick to empathize, slow to anger, and displayed a quiet but unwavering confidence in himself that gave him the courage to accept tasks and challenges with an enthusiastic determination to triumph no matter what adversity he faced. He shared of himself and of his material affluence openly and without arrogance. He was skilled in many sporting and physical endeavors, enjoyed nature, and had a remarkable creative talent, displaying amazing prowess in the visual and musical arts.

Among all of these positive qualities, absent were what could have been expected to be a smugness bordering on arrogance that sometimes characterized a personality with so many strong characteristics combined with the kind of ego-stroking reverence, whether merited or not, that was often showered unquestioningly upon royalty. Jedi was humble almost to a fault, never seeking attention, often embarrassed when praised, dedicated not to proving anything to anybody, or competing to be better than anybody else, but to simply being the best and doing the best that he always possibly could.

In Jedi, Master Lekh had no worries. He had grown into a strong and well-disciplined young man, a skilled adept in the use of The Force, and pure of heart. As the first of the twins to have been born, by Kraian custom he was the Heir-to-the-Throne, and displayed all the qualities of a good, right and just ruler of Krai. He was well-loved and respected as a strong yet benevolent personality who would make a fine leader when his time came. Jedi's awesome displays of power and prowess with The Force, especially because of his well-disciplined mind and good heart, gave Master Lekh every confidence that he would, if he continued in this direction, be an immensely important—potentially the single-most influential—focus of the possibility for the change that was coming to Krai becoming a positive and glorious one.

It was because of Sith that Master Lekh feared at times.

Unlike Jedi, Sith was undisciplined, unfocused, and easily frustrated both in his practice with The Force, and with life overall. He often wanted too much, too quickly, and grew angry with the disappointment over the failure of instant gratification or easy achievement. This led him to seek all the easiest paths, regardless of whether they were right or good, as long as they got him what he wanted. He lacked the patience that dedicated effort demanded. That tendency led him often to react in inappropriate and harmful ways. Where Jedi was humble and meek, especially in social interaction, Sith was bold, often acting with an overbearing confidence that bordered on arrogance, springing from his conviction that his abilities made him somehow ... superior to others. He felt his abilities entitled him to successful results, and failed to fully accept that it was only positive intent and dedicated and disciplined effort that were the guarantors of successful being, let alone masterful manipulation of The Force. Therefore, despite his power, or perhaps because of it, he always seemed to look nervous, as if something he was afraid of happening was somehow suddenly about to.

Sith was Jedi's equal in physical prowess and intellectual acumen, yet he was intensely competitive and often craved both attention to and praise for his actions. He accepted criticism poorly, interpreting it as a personal affront rather than the constructive guidance with which it was always intended. His competitiveness, especially with Jedi, often led him to display aggression, and a vindictiveness following defeat that threatened to unleash extremely negative, destructive results if allowed to go unchecked by Master Lekh's constant ministrations. Sith's nevertheless awesome displays of power and skill with The Force were tainted and corrupted by his poorly disciplined mind and envious heart, and caused him to struggle at times for control of himself, his mind, his feelings, and of The Force itself. His tendency to react in anger and envy, to surrender to the temptations of his negative passions, meant that he was often polarizing his connection to The Force in negative, destructive ways, and the threat that he would harm himself or somebody else in an uncontrolled, angry outburst of Force energy always lurked not far below the surface of his personality's wafer-thin veneer. All this left Master Lekh often in fear that Sith would, if he continued in this direction, be an immensely dangerous—potentially the single-most destructive—focus of the possibility for the change that was coming to Krai becoming a negative and tragic one.

In his private thoughts, Lekh seriously entertained the possibility that the direction of the change coming to Krai would be determined by some conflict of global proportions precipitated by the two apparently polar opposite personalities of Jedi and Sith.

In all his time helping raise the twins, never once had Master Lekh revealed to either of them the conviction imparted to him by his own feelings of The Force, about the pivotal role either or both of the two twins represented in the current processes and changes engulfing all of Krai. To do so would be to burden them with a responsibility and pressure that he felt, and the Queen and King agreed, could eventually crush either or both of them, possibly fatally. With all they had to learn, assimilate, practice, accept and understand about themselves, their abilities, and about the power and use of the Force, the added pressure of knowing that their abilities also made them the potential pivotal factors in the future evolution of the entire Kraian world, would undoubtedly end up being more than their young minds and hearts could handle.

In spite of all the negative qualities of his character, it was Sith's predilection for the sciences that had made him an invaluable assistant in Master Lekh's research into the nature of the entities discovered in the twins' genetic material. With Sith's help, Master Lekh eventually learned that they were conscious, intelligent entities manifested as genetic energy attached to the twins' own genetic material. They multiplied and grew along with the boys, incorporating themselves directly into the twins' genetic matrices and replicating throughout the cellular structures of the boys' bodies. The pattern of the entities' behavior gave all indications that they affected connection with The Force by either instinct, conscious intent, intelligent design, or a combination of all three; and attached themselves to the genetic data strings specifically related to all the physical, conscious and subconscious faculties associated with using The Force. They were the agents through which Jedi and Sith were able to interact with physical reality with the powers of their mind in seemingly inexplicable, extrasensory ways; the catalysts that made it possible for the twins to use The Force, rather than just sensing it the way Master Lekh or any other practiced Kraian mystic might only be able to do.

Master Lekh learned that the entities enabled active communication with The Force, acting like a bridge, or the completion of a circuit: one that had been incomplete in the genetic make-up of the Nareed before for the birth of the royal twins. They augmented the normal range of Nareed natural vibrational frequency to a level compatible with the spectrum of vibrational frequencies occupied by Force energy.

He also realized with a small measure of wistful regret, that meant that without these entities attached to his own genetic matrices, he could feel The Force, learn about it and understand it, but he would never be able to consciously use it the way Jedi and Sith were learning how to do.

His observation had also led Master Lekh to deduce that the relationship of the entities to the host body was symbiotic, when he discovered that it was Force energy itself that fed the entities' existence and fueled their Force-enabling capacities.

Both Jedi and Sith displayed keen and acute natural inclinations to skillfully manipulate The Force. Guided by Master Lekh, they had spent their childhood and youth under a strict regimen of education and physical training, mixed with well-supervised social interaction. They had learned very early about why it was important their abilities needed to be kept hidden, a theme reinforced through constant reminders and warnings against the temptations of juvenile brazenness to manifest their abilities in public or private outside of their training with Master Lekh. Neither of the two had ever transgressed on that account, to the gratefulness of Queen, King and Teacher.

That they had know of, that is.

In Lekh's first personal encounter with the twins that day at The Castle all those cycles ago, he had been overwhelmed by both the awesome power and beauty of The Force flowing through Jedi, while having had an equally awesome yet terrible experience with the agony in the wake of Sith's angry outburst of what Master Lekh had come to call the "Dark Side" of The Force.

While guiding them through their education and training, Master Lekh had become as much student as teacher, discovering possibilities through the abilities both his pupils displayed and practiced. He was learning as much about The Force, how to interact with it and how to use it, as he was teaching them.

In the process, he learned that skill in using The Force to interact with physical reality depended directly on the individual's degree of clarity of mind. It was for that reason that Master Lekh taught the twins from an early age all that he himself had learned about meditation practices that were designed for precisely that purpose: to teach them to clear their minds of distracting thoughts that interfered with the conscious direction of Force energy.

Jedi had seemed to have grasped the paradox that in order to conduct The Force most effectively and positively, one had to surrender one's very will completely to its energy flow by letting go of one's attachment to the limits of physical reality.

Sith, on the other hand, was essentially tempted by his attachment to his power, and that gave birth to the fear that created his obsession over controlling it. He had not, like Jedi, mastered the essential paradox underlying the understanding and the use of The Force to its full positive potential.

While infants still not attached to complex thoughts and feelings, the twins' Force sensitivity had been extremely high, which was what had made the tele/photo-kinetic displays like on that first day seventeen-cycles ago, possible. However, as their thought processes and emotional states grew more complex while the boys themselves grew, they became conditioned to their attachment to certain thoughts and feelings, which inhibited the more powerful connection to The Force that telekinetic action required. As the royal siblings grew, their telekinetic abilities weakened until they completely disappeared by the time they had started to speak.

Their early training had focused on conditioning them to use The Force to act and react within physical reality with seemingly super-Nareed abilities. It was only within the last couple of years, as their meditation practice had begun to condition and discipline their minds, that the boys graduated from astounding feats of physical or cognitive prowess, to using their minds to employ The Force connection for sensing the thoughts and feelings of others, and the development of rudimentary telepathic interaction and projection. Master Lekh felt that both boys required a great deal more study and practice before they might be able to reconnect to the more pure state of being that in their infancy had given their Force sense astounding potency.

Furthermore, study and practice with the boys had revealed that the efficacy of Force energy manipulation was directly influenced by the degree of rightness and goodness in the intention behind it's use. That intention, in turn, was affected by the emotional state at the time of directing Force energy. A positive emotional intention would manifest in physical reality as a positive result. A negative emotional intention, such as the anger and jealousy with which the infant Sith had struck out that day all those years ago, led only to negative, painful, and eventually, if uncontrolled, uncontrollably destructive results.

It was that first outburst of Sith's that had alerted Master Lekh to the danger lurking deep within Sith's character. It was a latent tendency to the aggressive that lay buried deep in the Nareed genetic memory, but was mostly well under control in the average, socially skilled Nareed; an evolutionary relic of an ancient, wilder, primal nature of theNareed. From an early age, Sith had displayed signs of an all-too-ready willingness to succumb to that angry aggressiveness, allowing his negative emotional states to dictate his actions, invariably with negative results. It was these displays of the negative, destructive power, these negative states unleashed, that had led Master Lekh to conclude that The Force had a Dark Side, and it was such because, as he observed over the years, if unchecked and not consciously controlled and avoided, would eventually lead the individual to being consumed by its destructive power and turned into nothing but the darkness that follows naturally from total annihilation. That danger made Master Lekh pay special attention to that tendency whenever he saw it emerging in Sith.

With that handicap to his detriment, Sith was always treated by Master Lekh with a special compassion, the teacher leading the student gently away from dangerous tendencies and attempting to instill in him a discipline over his negative thoughts to prevent them from leading him to succumbing to the Dark Side and its destructiveness. He often reminded Sith that because The Force magnified his ability to interact with physical reality, the consequences of those actions were also magnified. While positively intended use of The Force unleashed multiples of positive result, its negative use also did the same for destructiveness. Master Lekh tirelessly endeavored to teach Sith to control his angry and negatively aggressive emotions, but at times the young Sith simply couldn't hold back the overwhelming force of his frustrations that were born of his fear-inspired anger.

So much so that frequently, Master Lekh had caught Sith giving in to his angry and spiteful, negative emotions, sometimes allowing himself to get carried away, especially in the martial arts training with Jedi, where on several occasions over the years, Master Lekh had had to intervene to prevent Sith from unleashing the full fury of his anger into The Force and seriously hurting his brother—and himself—in the process.

Today was about to become one such occasion.

The young men had been set to spar for the rest of the afternoon, which they would normally do until breaking for dinner.

Sith had arrived late at the session, in a foul mood. He was agitated, was curt in his conversation with Master Lekh, and completely ignored Jedi's cheerful greeting. He wanted to get down to the sparring right away, and Master Lekh suspected, because of the almost palpable fog of negative energy that hung about him, that he was eager to take out some frustrations in a negative way that would lead to no good end if not preempted.

Master Lekh spent extra time sitting with the twins in meditation before beginning the session, gently coaxing them to clear their minds of all thought, to let go of negative feelings, to flood their hearts with goodness and allow the energy of The Force to flow freely through them with complete clarity, detachment, and positive intent.

During the meditation, Master Lekh noted that Jedi was at ease, with a peaceful, calm expression on his face and his closed eyes relaxed. Sith, however, was having difficulty settling, and Master Lekh felt his disturbance as a faint agitation within himself. Unable to affect The Force, Master Lekh was unable to render Sith the assistance he could have given him by gently prodding him away from its darker potentials. This constant struggle within Sith against giving in to the destructive power of the Dark Side of the Force was one which the young man would have to win on his own. All Master Lekh could hope for and do was to continue to guide him as best he could away from such dangerous temptations.

Jedi and Sith, arms, legs and torsos padded, eyes covered by metallic masks, and heads adorned with protective helmets including sound-deadening earphones, circled each other, backs to one another, sticks raised at the ready, searching for one another with their feelings instead of their senses, striving to see one another with The Force; to see with The Force—using the mind—what possibilities were most probable, and then to take action; to anticipate by seeing the action before it happened and to know how to react to it. Master Lekh, through Jedi and Sith, discovered this to be one of the properties of The Force: because of it's temporal non-locality, The Force offered the user the ability to foresee actions and events before they unfolded physically, and anticipate them with an appropriate directed action, allowing a skilled user to be proactive on reality, instead of merely reacting to already manifested phenomena.

Jedi was well-focused and strongly in tune with The Force flowing through him this afternoon. He was anticipating all of Sith's moves, adroitly countering Sith's attacks and deflecting them harmlessly away, while landing well-placed pokes and jabs through Sith's erratic, increasingly frustrated defensive patterns. Jedi's consistent thwarting of Sith's efforts was causing an anger to rise in Sith, augmenting the already-angry fog in which he had originally arrived at the training session, and upgrading it to "menacing storm cloud" status.

Sitting cross-legged while leaning comfortably against the trunk of a tree with soft, sweet-smelling green wood, Master Lekh suddenly felt a disturbance within himself as a troubling tightness in his stomach, and he immediately recognized it as the first warning sign of the energetic spiral of uncontrolled negativity he knew was emanating from, and threatening to seize, Sith.

While Master Lekh was noticing this disturbing energy coming from Sith, Jedi suddenly swung around at the waist.

Master Lekh abruptly sat up when a sudden feeling of impending—

Spinning with arms spread wide open, Jedi dropped to a crouch as he brought the fighting stick around in a wide sweep, landing a solid hit across the back of Sith's knees.

Sith was facing away from Jedi and showed no sign that he felt the attack was coming.

He cried out as his knees buckled and he was knocked off balance, sent tumbling backwards. He lost grip on his fighting stick, and it rolled off to the side, out of reach.

Jedi, meanwhile, had anticipated Sith's fall, and from his crouched position, smoothly flowed into a shoulder-roll out of his brother's way and came to a standing crouch with his fighting stick on guard, holding it loosely in his right hand. He swung it once in a wide arc over his shoulder, spun around in a complete circle, and by the time a bewildered and stunned Sith had hit the ground, Jedi stood above him, straddling his torso with both legs while plunging his fighting stick playfully into his sprawled brother's chest.

Jedi let out a triumphant howl.

Sith suddenly let out a cry that startled both the victorious Jedi and the observing Master Lekh with it's raw viciousness. Except for that first day seventeen-cycles ago, in all of Master Lekh's experience with the twins, he had never seen Sith unleash such a powerful burst of darkly tainted energy. The energy's rippling wake thumped into Master Lekh like a hard punch to the stomach, and he winced from its force, losing his breath momentarily.

Jedi flipped up his eye mask and looked with confusion at his supine brother.

Then suddenly, he shuddered, as if an invisible hand had just violently shook his entire body.

Through the searing pain in his stomach that was making his eyes swim, Master Lekh's attention was nevertheless drawn to something strange about Sith's shadow. He swore it was shimmering slightly, and it appeared to be moving independently, almost seeming to hover slightly above the ground where it should have naturally fallen and rested with the immobile Sith.

But this shadow was moving, while Sith was not.

Before Master Lekh could say anything, a blinding flash seemed to erupt from somewhere underneath one of Sith's sleeves.

Jedi had only time to wince as a searing hot pain, burning him straight through to his bones, shot through his arm.

He dropped his fighting stick and cried out.

The protective padding on his forearm smoldered and smoked.

He looked back down at Sith, who had by this time rolled out from under Jedi's legs, over his own back, and now stood facing his brother, eye mask also up, a cold, violent anger burning in his eyes.

What both Jedi and Master Lekh were more astounded, startled and frightened by than the mad anger in Sith's eyes, was the burning hot spear of light that emanated from a black-and silver tubular handle he stood holding in one hand like a sword. The tip of the crackling, humming blade of burning light was now pointed directly at Jedi's throat, a few hair breadths away from his skin, which was starting to burn from the heat of the weapon's intensity.

Master Lekh bolted from the tree and shouted for Sith to stop.

The young Sith was breathing heavily. His face was twisted in an angry scowl, which morphed into a devious and menacing grin as he noted the hint of fear in Jedi's eyes at the unseen-and-unheard-of-before weapon.

Sith twirled the buzzing blade of light tauntingly at Jedi's throat.

Master Lekh finally reached the two and sharply flung aside the poised and trancelike Sith, captured in the throes of a burning anger whose energy wake threatened to clench Master Lekh's stomach in a crushing grip. The burning light blade crackled and throbbed with energy as it swung in Sith's hand. The devious smile was gone, replaced by a momentary bewilderment, as if Sith had been somewhere else and had just become aware again of his surroundings.

But the cold fire in his eyes was not completely gone from the glare he gave Master Lekh. It was a menacing glare. One that seemed to challenge the master, silently threatening him to give Sith an excuse to use the extraordinary weapon once again.

Master Lekh cried out once more for Sith to stop, to come back to himself and release the anger that was burning in him. Eyes locked by Master Lekh's magnetic and penetrating, calming gaze, Sith's breathing slowed, and the arm brandishing the mysterious weapon fell loosely to his side. He moved a finger over a glowing red button in the handle of the weapon. With a loud hum punctuated by a sudden, crisp crackle, the blade of fiery light disappeared, and Sith was left standing with only the handle in his hand.

The question came from an astounded Master Lekh and Jedi in unison:

"What is that?"

CHAPTER XVI

Master Lekh had accompanied the shaken Jedi to Castle Medical Center to have the burn on his arm treated, following which he was advised by his mentor to go to his chambers and meditate back into a calmed state.

After Jedi was admitted to the CMC, Master Lekh returned to his office, located in a wing of The Castle dedicated to the administrative bureaus associated with official royal affairs.

The door slid open and he walked in, seeing his other pupil waiting for him just as he had been firmly instructed to do so by the perturbed teacher.

As Master Lekh entered the office, he immediately felt a disturbance faintly tease his senses before it quickly faded. He didn't turn more attention to it, however, because a movement, or a shadow simply cast by some movement, caught his eye, skittering across the office behind the seated Sith. By the time he focused on the spot where he thought he had noticed it, though, he saw nothing there that would have accounted for it, except that for a split moment he thought he had heard what sounded like a faint, suckingly-wet something quickly slipping away.

Besides the firm couch on which Sith was casually sprawled, Master Lekh's office was sparsely appointed. It contained only a desk with a chair in the center of the wide, high-ceilinged room, an elaborate transcom station with several monitors and data drives occupying the space beneath the transcom's screen wall; and a round, plush meditation cushion in another corner, all splashed by rays of golden sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling, arched set of single-paned windows. For access to the balcony, the windows could be made to recede into the walls completely or as little as desired. This afternoon, Master Lekh had partially opened them to let the warm, fragrant, tropical valley breeze freshen the spacious room.

Backlit by the still-brightly illuminated expanse of The Valley behind him, Sith's features were shrouded entirely in shadow; and until his eyes adjusted to the harshness of the light contrast between the brilliant Valley without and the dim office within, it appeared briefly to Master Lekh that he was looking at a formless silhouette seated on his couch instead of the familiar figure of Sith.

As soon as Master Lekh had focused back on Sith, he abruptly forgot about mysterious shadow sightings, because a cold draught rippled its way through his bones, causing him to shudder. The shudder was amplified by the realization that the coldness was coming to him almost as palpably as an actual draught of air, directly from Sith.

Master Lekh had expected Sith to be sheepish in light of the admittedly angry tone with which he had been instructed by his teacher to wait for him in his office. When he had entered the office, he expected the Prince to avoid meeting his gaze and to be uncomfortable.

Contrary to that expectation, the young man sat radiating open defiance, confidently sprawled in the corner of the couch. He greeted Master Lekh with silence, a defiant gleam in his eyes and a smug grin spread unabashedly across his lips, challenging the teacher with a menace he had never before felt or seen from the young adept.

Master Lekh felt the same tightness in his stomach he had experienced out in the training courtyard just prior to Sith's outburst. He was disturbed by the energy emanating from Sith. In every instance in the past, whenever Sith's negative passions had threatened to carry him away, Master Lekh had always managed to bring the struggling student back from the brink of being consumed, even if only momentarily, by those passions.

This time, though, Master Lekh felt intuitively, through his albeit incomplete connection to The Force, like an animal sensing a coming storm out of a clear blue sky, that some kind of threshold had been crossed. A threshold over which Sith had somehow and for some reason finally been pushed, and over which Master Lekh feared the young man might not be able—or willing—to cross back.

An almost irresistible wave of inexplicable anger pulsed through Master Lekh, and he was about to unleash his wrath on Sith when he realized he was feeling the negative energetic fallout from Sith's own mysterious, seething negativity. Fighting the urge to blast the youth, Master Lekh chose instead to be understanding and compassionate, while still firm.

It wasn't just some new toy under consideration at the moment.

Master Lekh felt somewhere deep inside that the appearance of a weapon of unheard of design and apparently extraordinary destructive potential, in Sith's hands, at this particular time in Kraian history, and more relevantly, at this particular time in Sith's own elevated emotional and mental distress—at the highest Master Lekh had ever sensed it in Sith—was a portent.

A menacing one.

"Give me that thing," he said, strolling casually with his arm outstretched toward the smug Sith seated on the couch. When the youth showed no sign of complying with the request, Master Lekh ordered sternly. "Now!"

It was perhaps the brief, reflective flash of his own angry fire that Sith detected for a second burning in his teacher's eyes that finally wiped the smug grin off his lips and caused him to obey. In all their time with Master Lekh, never once had their teacher displayed even a hint of the kind of anger that Sith saw smoldering in his mentor's pupils. By the time he had reached into his wide-brimmed left sleeve and withdrew the tubular handle of the weapon, however, the fire in Master Lekh's eyes was gone, replaced by his customary peacefulness.

But not before Sith was sure he saw a brief hint of something else he had never before seen in his lifelong teacher's eyes:

Fear.

Sith, his earlier smugness returned, smiled deviously and defiantly as he handed the weapon to Master Lekh.

The teacher took the smooth, black-and-silver metallic handle and, standing above Sith in front of the couch, examined it carefully, turning it in his hands, running his fingers along the smooth surface, touching the small, circular, crystalline plate that capped one end of the handle—the source from which the deadly, fiery blade of light had emanated.

While Sith watched with curious amusement, Master Lekh brandished the handle like a sword, and doing as he had seen the young Prince do earlier, fingered the glowing red crystal button.

The handle of the weapon suddenly hummed to life in his hand. He felt it vibrate strongly, and a pulse of energy shot briefly up his arm, tickling his muscles gently. He started slightly as the hum pulsed loudly and crackled, and was then followed by a bolt of fiery, red light that shot out from the crystalline lens at the end of the handle. The bolt of light, about an arm's length, crackled and hummed as Master Lekh slowly swung the blade back and forth through the air in front of him.

Sith watched with undisguised, wicked delight as Master Lekh considered the weapon in his hand.

Master Lekh fingered the button on the handle, and with yet another crackling hum, the fiery light blade disappeared and the weapon fell silent, cooling its considerable but not uncomfortable heat in its deactivation. Master Lekh walked back to his desk, dropped the weapon onto it, leaned against the corner of the table and folded his arms across his chest, regarding his pupil with deep consideration and concern for a long, awkward silence during which Sith neither ceased smugly grinning nor failed to maintain eye contact with his master. After a moment, the Master finally spoke, concern unmistakably evident in his tone.

"Where did you get such a weapon?"

"Built it. Myself," Sith replied, with smug pride.

"How?" Master Lekh asked, in wonder. He was well aware of Sith's talent for science, especially in bio and geo-engineering and design. He had never suspected that these talents would ever lead Sith to such an unheard-of creation of great destructive potential. He supposed now that given all he knew of Sith's character, though, perhaps he should have expected something like this.

Master Lekh needed to understand as much what motivated the young adept to employ those talents for this kind of creation, as how he accomplished it; because the same feeling that had earlier told him today represented a dangerous threshold that Sith had crossed, was now telling him this weapon may be the first manifestation of the potential danger toward which Sith's darker temptations drew him; a sure sign that whatever it was that was going to threaten the future of Krai, it was coming soon and coming quickly.

"Easy," Sith replied casually, letting one arm hang loosely over the back of the couch as he put a leg up on the seat cushion and reclined comfortably, confidently, arrogantly, while explaining.

"Directed photonic energy. Almaz crystals are the most potent of all known natural light capacitors, conductors and amplifiers, collecting and storing potent charges of photonic energy that can be amplified and directed. I thought of our medical lasers and wondered why a weapon like the standard batons issued to the KSF couldn't employ the same principle. So I fashioned a handle and placed the crystals in it. The crystals collect photons from the atmosphere by polarized electromagnetic attraction, and store them. The crystal chamber in the handle is connected to the conductor lens at the end of the handle by a fiber-optic transfer conduit. The circuit is broken when the unit is inactive. When activated, the circuit completes, photonic energy is sent along the conduit to the conductor lens, whose crystal is calibrated to amplify the energy and project it outward until the beam folds back on itself and returns. The lens is encircled by a dynamic, high-energy flux aperture, which regulates the tightness and length of the beam and gives it its shape and integrity"

The use of photonic energy in Kraian medicine had been commonplace for over two centuries. Directed light energy was widely used as a surgical instrument, facilitating precise and non-intrusive procedures that were previously unimaginable by Kraian technology. To Master Lekh's knowledge, or anybody else's, as far as he could guess, nobody on Krai had ever thought of applying this technology in a martial purpose.

Until, evidently, now.

"But ... why?" was all Master Lekh could ask next. "What could ever make you feel that you, or anybody, ever, would need such energy for a weapon of such potentially harmful power?"

It had been a constantly reinforced principle in the twins' training, that their abilities, that the power of The Force, if it was to be creative and not destructive, must be employed only with positive intent, and that The Force used as a facilitator of physical action was only to be done so with a defensive—never offensive—intent. The Force represented above all a power that could be used for bringing balance and harmony to circumstances of imbalance and discord, on both macro and micro scales, in the world outside, as well as in that within the individual. However, because of its awesome power, when unleashed in the uncontrolled, destructive mayhem made possible by negative intent, The Dark Side of the Force, if invoked by such negative intent, posed the potential for as-yet unimagined destructiveness.

The precise direction in which it appeared Sith was currently heading.

Furthermore, in all of Kraian history since the rout of the invasion from Za and the inception of the Yedina over seven-thousand cycles ago, the martial arts and military purpose had always been defined and employed in a defensive, preemptive spirit. Kraian social relations were benign. The level of Kraian abundance was such that the material scarcity which often led to violent, competitive social dynamics was absent. Kraian security forces were trained and managed exclusively as a peacekeeping force; as a resource in case of natural disaster relief; as a prophylactic against an unthinkable yet always possible unrest that could lead to the spread of violence; as protection against the occasional incursions that still came from Za; or to keep at bay the threat to social stability constantly posed by the criminal underground run from Za by Exiles who covertly fed any of the aberrant needs nominally evident in Kraian society.

And so the question of "Why?" in this instance, at this particular juncture in Kraian history, with all the changes enveloping the world and the collective Kraian consciousness, was of paramount importance if Master Lekh had any hope of guiding this development in the most benign direction possible.

If that were still possible.

"Hmm? Why?" Master Lekh asked his silent pupil again.

For the first time since Master Lekh had entered the office, Sith suddenly lost his smugness, and his face clouded with a momentary dismay, a fear of something that played across his eyes and that Master Lekh could feel emanating from Sith and manifesting in himself as a tightness in his own throat. The fleeting moment of weakness, however, was quickly replaced by a fiery anger burning from Sith that again flashed as a tightness, only now in Master Lekh's stomach.

"Because I finally wanted to be known as something else besides Jedi's brother," he spat out bitterly.

Master Lekh sighed heavily.

This had been a topic of frequent, long discussion between master and tortured pupil over recent cycles: Sith's obsession with his feelings of inadequacy and lack of validation due to his perception that people regarded him as less of a man because of what he considered his inferior position to his twin sibling, older than him by mere moments, and thus legal Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai by a simple stroke of fate.

"I'm tired of the 'Jedi Is So-oooo Wonderful' cult," Sith continued, the force of the anger firing his words, an anger Master Lekh knew had been latently simmering deep inside his disturbed psyche for cycles. "'Isn't Jedi just so talented?' 'Isn't Jedi so kind?' 'Isn't Jedi so strong? So confident?' 'Isn't Jedi just going to make the most wonderful king Krai has ever known?'"

Sith paused for a moment, obviously fighting a compelling impulse to release all the anger at a rolling boil inside him. Then he spat out once again with emphasized venom:

"'Isn't Jedi just the most handsome?'" he proclaimed, with angry irony. "'Isn't he just every girl's dream?'"

Master Lekh felt an acute tightening in his stomach, and knowing the energy affecting it emanated from Sith, deduced they were close to the crux of the matter. He prodded gently, unwilling to agitate or provoke the precarious emotional balance in which Sith currently teetered.

"What do you mean ..." he asked Sith. "Exactly?"

Sith looked away from his teacher for a moment, and glared out the window with a scowl at the glorious Kraian afternoon.

"Zita," he said simply.

That was it.

Master Lekh had finally gotten to the heart of Sith's current plunge into the temptations of the Dark Side. Although he knew all too well of Sith's struggle to control his thoughts and emotions so they wouldn't control him and direct him toward harmful behavior and destructive employment of The Force, he had not foreseen that something like this might end up being the single push that might knock the poor young man over the dark precipice.

It was the plague of countless tortured and despondent youths throughout all of known history:

Unrequited desire.

Zita was the eldest daughter of one of Krai's most prominent Noble Houses, hailing from Pyarr. She was the same age as the twins, a beautiful, radiant young woman with long, flowing and slightly curly black hair, soft but penetrating eyes that belied a deep strength and confidence combined with humility, and a lithe but slightly voluptuous, well-curved figure for which Pyarran women were famously known.

Master Lekh guessed from frequent discussions with both Jedi and Sith, confirmed later by information gleaned from Queen Deleb, Prince Eloh, and royal courtesans replete with all the latest social gossip, that Zita, through her acquaintance with Jedi and Sith as fellow students at the Royal Institute of Higher Learning, had become an object of affection for both brothers. In fact, Master Lekh had himself also observed at many social functions, and at the occasional sporting events in which the brothers participated, that both youths went to great pains and efforts to impress the captivating young woman.

It had been no secret on the royal courtesan gossip circuit that Zita had developed a deep, heartfelt love toward Jedi, and that the two had been—discreetly, in order to avoid media attention—romantically involved for some time now.

"What about Zita?" Master Lekh asked cautiously, treading delicately now that he understood the source of Sith's current despair.

Sith continued staring out the window and scowling. He began to breathe heavily, and clenched his teeth tightly. He sat up, still looking away from his teacher and out the window, balling both hands into fists.

Then he abruptly slammed his fist into the window behind the couch with such force that the rattle startled Master Lekh, and cracked the considerably thick, polished silicate pane with a small web of thread-thin fissures.

"THEY'RE GETTING MARRIED!" the tortured youth shouted with a volume and intensity that rung in Master Lekh's ears almost as acutely as the burst of angry energy from Sith's heart that clenched the startled teacher's innards at the same time.

Despite the sudden acute pain, Master Lekh had to fight to suppress the smile that struggled to show on his face.

He had heard the news earlier that morning during a transcom newscast, and had immediately rushed to Queen Deleb and King Eloh, both of whom confirmed it amidst beaming smiles over breakfast. Jedi and Zita were getting married, so that by the time he turned eighteen next cycle and would be eligible for The Throne, the qualification of marriage would already have been fulfilled.

Jedi was walking the right path, and he was starting to build a life that would put him in the position of leading all of Krai along that path with him. It appeared the arcs of the two boys' lives had finally taken their own, independent—and polar opposite—directions, and despite the momentary joy he felt for Jedi, it seemed to Master Lekh the saga of the two boys' lives was coming to what he had always latently feared was destined to be inevitable:

Confrontation.

That the confrontation was not only inevitable but—due to the intensity of Sith's negative feelings and the influence the Dark Side of the Force had already begun to have on his mind and on the direction of his actions—alarmingly imminent, Master Lekh had no way of guessing at this time. What he did know was that any confrontation between the two young men would take place in the larger context of a confrontation between the competing, polar opposite forces currently struggling for control over the direction of Krai's future.

This process would not end—both in the of with the twins and in the larger scheme—without one of the two being completely victorious over the other, and then and only then would the direction the Nareed were to take into the future, probably the long future, be decided.

Right now, Master Lekh had to calm down an angry but arrogant, quasi-maniacal, inventively brilliant, seventeen-cycle old genius all worked up into a teenage froth and lather over a girl who didn't love him and the brother he was beginning to despise with almost homicidal tendencies. He had no doubt Sith had constructed the weapon with the intention of making himself invulnerable to Jedi while also giving him a deadly advantage over his light-weaponless brother.

The matter at hand, though—a young man dangerously unbalanced by a romantic blow—was a little more delicate.

Master Lekh sighed.

Finally:

"How did you find out?"

Sith remained silent, breathing heavily, not looking at Master Lekh but staring out over the back of the couch through the window. Master Lekh saw this was going to be like pulling eyelashes out one at a time.

"Sith?" Master Lekh prompted again a little more forcefully, and waited.

The burning sensation present in the tightness in Master Lekh's stomach clearly told him that right now, Sith was a raging, barely contained inferno inside, waiting to explode like the lava fountains of Herin.

"They announced it at the KMC after-party last night," Sith was unable to hide the anguish in his voice, but he quickly regained his angry, indignant composure. "I got the whole story from my mother as soon as I heard. He asked her two weeks ago at the Rebirth Festival, and she said 'Yes.' Then he went to Pyarr to ask her parents for her hand. Remember how he dropped out of the hoverball tournament? This was why. And they accepted the proposal! Apparently, Zita's parents were at the after-party last night in Mawinu for the announcement. That's why mom and dad were hosting the after-party, too. At the end of the semester, right after graduation from the Royal, the official engagement ceremony, a parade, and a huge party's going down right here in The Castle."

In his thoughts and in his heart, Master Lekh was genuinely elated for Jedi.

Jedi—his life and the good path along which he'd chosen to walk—would appear to represent the right path for the Nareed into their future in this precarious time of change.

At the same time and with the same intensity, he was also equally as empathetic with and fearful for Sith; fearful that the cumulative effect of all his negative feelings was leading him towards representing the threat that could lead the Nareed down the wrong path: a difficult, darker, immeasurably but undoubtedly more painful one.

From all that he could sense and had been able to observe over the course of the youth's lifetime, Master Lekh began to fear that maybe Sith had crossed the threshold beyond anyone's or anybody's influence outside his own, burning negative feelings and the hold they had over him.

The path that inevitably led to the dominion of the Dark Side.

"Well, then," Master Lekh declared, as he finally rose from leaning against his desk and began pacing thoughtfully back and forth in a circle. "If that's the news, we should be happy, shouldn't we? The world will now not only be getting a new king when the time comes, but a beautiful and worthy queen as well."

Appealing to any sense of altruism that may have been left in Sith's pained heart, Master Lekh tried to evoke as much of that sentiment within him as he could.

"Sith," Master Lekh began tenderly. "I know how it feels. We've all been in the unrequited love cage. But as much as it hurts, you have to let go of whatever personal feelings you may have about this, and think of how you could be assisting in guiding the future of our world and our people in the right direction—"

"Yeah, right under Jedi's direction!" Sith almost shouted at the window.

"There's nothing you can ever do about that and you know it." Master Lekh was truly empathizing with the tormented boy. "Fate chooses some things and that's just the way it is."

"That's right. But some things I can change," Sith said sharply. "And I will."

Master Lekh felt a slight disturbance at this pronouncement. He wasn't in any position right now to even guess what the youth might have meant by the statement, but he knew it could mean nothing good.

"Sith," Master Lekh stopped his pacing right in front of the seated youth. He gazed at him for a long, silent moment, while the sulking young man refused to look up at his teacher. "Sith."

Master Lekh's tone, the simple, quiet, empathetic appeal, without any hint of patronizing at all, made Sith finally look up at his teacher, but only from under a furrowed brow and over a menacing scowl on his lips.

"What?"

"Listen to me. You have an important role to play in the future of our people," Master Lekh explained.

Sith snickered.

"You do," Master Lekh quietly prodded the seething and sulking student. "Look. It was you who helped me discover the nature of the beings incorporated into your DNA. It was you who devised, however ill-advisedly, this, this ..." Master Lekh pointed to the light-projecting device lying on his desk.

"Lightsaber!" Sith shouted. "It's a lightsaber!"

Master Lekh was taken aback by the intensity of Sith's emotional projection.

"Lightsaber," Master Lekh acknowledged, reassuring the agitated youth as if he were a child. There was no other way right now. Sith was acting out an issue that had been plaguing him since childhood: his inability to come terms with having been born second, and all that meant for him for the rest of his life. "And it was you who headed the design team on the northern MagNet expansion project. And think of everything else you've accomplished as you, Sith, just as you ..."

Master Lekh waited a moment to let the full force of that one sink in.

"... And that 'you' is the 'you' that all of Krai needs right now, to help us go smoothly into our future, by what you can contribute to building the structure of all that's going to carry us into that future, with your brilliance, determination and genius."

Master Lekh saw it was working. Sith's breathing started to become a little less labored. The only way he could help the youth kill his tragically overblown ego, was to vigorously stroke it.

Then:

"Why couldn't she love me!" Sith sobbed with such ferocious lament that Master Lekh was taken aback by the momentum of the young man's emotional force.

"Sith," Master Lekh immediately got a hold of himself. "You can't make somebody love you—"

"So Jedi gets it all, huh? And that's that?" Sith was half shouting and half sobbing now. "Why couldn't I just have her? Let him be king! Fine. Let him be who everybody talks about and gawks at like he's something so special! I could've lived with all that if I could've only had Zita! I would've been happy with just her and nothing else!"

Master Lekh was torn by the young man's anguish, but he had to ignore that feeling and steer the youth as straightly and delicately as he could right now.

"You can't make somebody love you and want you, Sith," Master Lekh repeated sympathetically. "It just has to happen. If it doesn't, you can't force it, because then it's not, and never will be, real. And having a partner isn't like having a possession. It's sharing a mutual relationship with somebody on equal terms. That's what union is all about. Do you understand what I'm telling you."

"Yeah, sure," Sith looked back out the window. "Jedi gets everything and the girl, too."

Master Lekh tried a different tack.

"Did you ever make your feelings about Zita clear to her?" Master Lekh tried logic. "Did she know how you felt about her?"

That arrow seemed to have struck very close to the heart. Sith remained silent, breathing heavily again, clenching his teeth tightly enough to make his temples throb visibly.

"Well," Master Lekh repeated. "Did you ever tell her that—"

"NO!" Sith exploded. "No, I never did! I never got the chance! How the krok could I? Jedi was always around her no matter what I did! Always! She was always paying attention to him. Never to me! Anytime I tried to get her alone, she'd blow me off! The only reason anybody ever pays any attention to him is because he gets to be king and ..."

"Sith," Master Lekh interrupted. "Do you really believe Zita is the kind of woman who would fall for a man because of his position? Or that Jedi is the kind of man who would accept a woman like that?"

The abruptly blank expression that fell over Sith's agitated facial features was all the answer Master Lekh needed to know that the young Prince was beginning to at least acknowledge, if not yet accept, reason.

"Let it go, Sith," Master Lekh implored. "There are other women. A whole world full of them. Let yourself be yourself and the right one will come into your life. There's nothing you can do about what Zita chooses to feel or about who—"

"That's enough!"

Master Lekh was halted in mid-sentence as Sith flung his arm out and up at him from his seated position with the palm directed openly outwards, causing the Master against all effort to stagger back another step. It felt as if Sith had really struck him in the chest; but Sith's hand had not touched him, It was some force projecting from the very core of Sith's tortured feelings, out through his outstretched arm, across the space that separated the two men, that slammed into the stunned teacher.

He had no idea that Sith had advanced his projective capacities so far. To be able to direct Force energy so powerfully as to be able to affect physical objects was an ability Master Lekh had been convinced both twins had lost as they had grown. Apparently, Sith had found some way to regain that lost ability, on his own and despite the obstacle Master Lekh supposed his constant negative state would pose to the resurgence of that ability.

But it was the palm of Sith's outstretched hand at which Master Lekh, while fighting off the aftershock of his assault, strove to get a good look, to confirm that he had actually seen what he thought he had seen prominently emblazoned there as the youth's arm shot up at him.

The young Prince looked up at his startled teacher slowly and menacingly with a radiant burning in his eyes, and finally lowered his outstretched arm.

Master Lekh was sure he had seen a tattoo on that palm, and unless he was mistaken, he was also sure it was the symbol of The Utàr (which literally meant "beneath the surface"): the Exile criminal organization of Za.

"I said," Sith, now slowly standing up, challenged Master Lekh. The youth lowered his arm slowly and stared intently into his mentor's eyes. "Some things I can change ... And I will."

"Don't chase after shadows, Sith," Master Lekh finally said, in barely above a whisper while collecting himself from the dual shock of the energy blast and the tattoo and all that both meant. "They'll only lead you to the Dark Side. There is no good there, only suffering ..."

"Yeah, yeah," Sith, now almost schizophrenically transposed into a giddy mania, retorted. "Shadows. Dark Side. No good. Suffering. Whatever, Old Man ..."

Master Lekh was yet again startled, this time by the disrespectful addressing Sith just delivered to him for the first time in his life, along with the intensity of anger and hatred behind it.

"Can I have my lightsaber?"

"What?" Master Lekh came back suddenly from his racing thoughts and focused on the angry young man before him.

"My lightsaber!"

Master Lekh shot a quick glance to his desk where the deadly, metallic cylinder lay.

"No," he replied flatly. "No. I'd better keep it for now." Master Lekh paused when he saw the expression on Sith's face start to inflame. "But I won't tell your father about it."

That stopped the fire cold in it's tracks. Master Lekh knew Sith was powerless before the discipline his father commanded by sheer force of his strong and unyielding—but always fair and just—character.

"Yet," Master Lekh concluded, buoyed by his apparent recovery of his command over Sith's runaway sensibilities, "I'll keep it here where it can't do any damage. Now please return to your chambers and meditate on everything that's happened. That's not a suggestion, that's a command."

"Yeah, anything you say, Old Man!" Sith laughed hauntingly as he got up off the couch and pushed past Master Lekh. "You can't make me do anything I don't want to anymore." He sneered casually. "And soon I'll be the one making things happen. Like you'd never believe!"

He made his way to the office door just as it slid open, and disappeared, his laughter echoing off the hard, stone walls behind him.

As the echoing laughter receded down the hallway, Sith's startling, contemptuous challenge felt to Master Lekh like it went deeper beyond the youth's momentary anguish.

Master Lekh stopped for a moment to consider just how far it appeared Sith had gone down the dark path. His behavior, his attitude, and what's more, his unabashed courage in expressing them for some reason openly now, told Master Lekh that perhaps there was more behind Sith's brazen and wanton display of force than just a single, angry tortured teenage heart.

Much more.

There was the brief glimpse of the tattoo. Sith, a royal heir representing the apex of Kraian civilization, wouldn't have dared adorn himself with that had he not had an actual association with The Utàr that afforded him the confidence needed for such a brazen display of criminal affiliation. That in itself was both startling and alarming. Master Lekh had no idea how Sith could have developed a relationship with anybody from Za while keeping that association hidden from Master Lekh, the Queen and King, or the protective services of the KSF.

But that wasn't all.

Throughout the exchange with Sith, Master Lekh had felt the unmistakeable presence of something ... else; something disturbing like nothing he'd ever felt before in any of his wildest and farthest-out, induced transcendental wanderings.

It felt like there had been another presence in the room with them. Cold. Dark. Menacing.

Frightening.

Unseen, unheard, but nevertheless as unmistakably sensed as if there had been somebody or something else physically with them in the office the whole time they had talked.

That movement he thought he'd seen. The fleeting shadow he thought he had perceived, accompanied by the coldness that had rippled through him when he entered his office. Back in the moment, he had dismissed it subconsciously as a hallucination provoked by the smoldering, negative energy from Sith that still lingered around and emanated from him, and saturated the atmosphere in Master Lekh's office while Sith had been there.

Now, he considered that it may not have been his imagination, but something that had really been there.

Master Lekh suddenly grew afraid that however far Sith had already travelled down the path of the Dark Side, he may not be traveling it alone.

CHAPTER XVII

After leaving Master Lekh's office and the administrative wing of The Castle, Sith did not, as he had been instructed to do so by his teacher, return to the wing where his and Jedi's chambers were.

Instead, still fuming, he turned right and headed toward The Castle's Atrium, which led out to the main courtyard. One of the many passageways intersecting at the Atrium led to a smaller private courtyard, where in a corner, on it's own ornamental charging pad, stood his personal magrider: a sleek, black, fully-souped, brand new Wanderer series.

Crossing the open space of the courtyard, Sith took a transcom mobile out of a pocket and tapped out commands on the handheld's touch-screen.

In a moment, he was alerted by a melodious electronic chime that the connection was made.

"Okay," he spoke quietly, but with an intensity no amount of volume control could have suppressed. "I'm coming to see you right now. What? Yeah, I'm just leaving The Castle. I'll meet you at your place sometime after sunsdown. And have a few bottles of froth on hand, too. Huh? Yeah. Later."

Sith logged off. He wasn't worried about his com being intercepted. His mobile had the best deflector/encryptionware you could get on Krai ...

... But get only from underground Utàr agents operating illegally in the cities.

CHAPTER XVIII

Master Lekh went to his desk, sat down in the plush but firm chair, leaned his elbows on the armrest, put his head in his hands and rubbed his temples vigorously. The entire incident with Sith, from his arrival for session this afternoon until storming out of here in an incomprehensible display of demonic whirlwind, had disturbed Master Lekh as deeply as his first encounter with the infant Sith's dangerous imbalance had all those cycles ago.

Only now Master Lekh was far more profoundly aware of the immediacy of the consequences facing them all as a result of this imbalance; especially since those consequences were no longer far off inklings of feelings about what may or may not happen cycles from now, but had coalesced into blurry magtrains of meaning coming at them, and at the rest of the world, too, at full speed.

He thought how he was getting either too old, or too weak to feel this drastically overwhelmed and at least temporarily, he hoped, incapacitated by such emotional strain.

Either that, or Sith had become so unbelievably powerful and skillful in his manipulation of The Force, that part of that skill was apparently the ability to have done so while right under Master Lekh's unsuspecting nose, without the teacher having had the slightest clue he was so steadily and irretrievably losing his pupil all that time.

He could forgive himself not seeing the signs, because part of the Dark Side was the skill it gave the practitioner at deception and duplicity.

But the Dark Side's true nature, just like that of a good application of The Force, always ended up revealing itself. It was an inevitable truth that Master Lekh had seen demonstrated over and over again to small extents in the twins' behavior over the cycles.

He saw that truth again today, and understood what it meant this time. The true nature of this Dark Side manipulation was about to be revealed. It's cause would appear to have been set in motion.

By choice.

It was apparent to Master Lekh that Sith must have made a series of terrible choices on his own, perhaps over as much as a number of cycles. What happened today was proof of that. Master Lekh had no doubt anymore that the actions set in motion today would accelerate the process of change already in full swing all over the world. Instead of pointing the world in the direction of positive confluence, it now appeared the changes about to take place were going to lead the world towards confrontation and conflict instead. Sith's revelations in Master Lekh's office were but the first visible indications that the negative feelings gripping him in their control had finally boiled over—and him with them—into a complete loss of self-control, and subservience to manipulating the powers of The Force for selfish, harmful, irrational ...

... Dark intentions.

Master Lekh's remaining hope for Sith's salvation may have been somewhat stronger had he not, during Sith's outburst in their exchange in the office, caught a glimpse of what he knew to be incontrovertible evidence of Sith's choice to ally himself with the Dark Side, the forces it commanded, and the kinds of individuals it instinctively attracted.

The tattoo on the palm of the Prince's hand that Master Lekh had noticed, was a circular representation of the world of Krai, with a fanged fire-serpent coiled around it.

It was, Master Lekh knew, the symbol of The Utàr, a recently consolidated umbrella organization of the criminal underground operating out of Za; which he—along with the Queen, the King and the Kraian Security Council—also knew harbored aspirations of ultimate global hegemony.

That The Utàr had somehow managed to associate itself with a royal heir, and precisely at this time in Kraian history, profoundly disturbed Master Lekh. He was, however, now beginning to see how numerous pieces of the grand puzzle, whose connections had previously been unapparent, were being forced by the course of events to come together and make the connections with which the big picture began to take on a nebulous shape.

In other words, Master Lekh was beginning to see what pieces were fitting in with what pieces. He just couldn't figure out yet what the connections meant for the whole picture.

For instance, The Utàr.

The criminal underground that ran Za had always been a loosely cobbled coalition of Exile factions who cooperated only reluctantly out of the recognized need for their common survival in the jungles. There had always been a constant, usually violent struggle amongst Exiles for influence and for control over the limited resources of the jungles. Centuries of internecine warfare finally led to the advent of The Utàr: a board of directors containing representatives from every Exile faction, that acted as coordinators, facilitators of cooperation amongst the factions, and mediators of disputes.

During its now almost sixty cycles of existence, The Utar's main significance lay in its keeping competing factions from destroying one another and the Exile social structure along with them. They had previously enjoyed little success in mounting and directing any strategic operations involving the cooperation of the entire underground.

Having spent so much time in Za, Master Lekh could not have helped but encounter The Utàr in one way or another. He knew that their operations were in the main dedicated to survival and self-sufficiency under the circumstances of existing outside the law.

Yet, even during his time there, he had been aware of a fringe element found amongst all the factions of Za, that was not just committed to survival, but had also developed an ideological framework that spawned an effort to disrupt Kraian social structures by eroding traditional Kraian values through the subtle, surreptitious promotion of harmful, destructive ideas and behaviors in Kraian cities, especially among impressionable youth; all with the ultimate aim of destroying Kraian social cohesion, it's power structures, and installing ultimate Utàr control over all of weakened Krai.

Master Lekh had known this element existed, but it had been a fringe movement of madmen with not much popularity or support in Za during all his cycles there. Through his contacts still in the jungles, however, he'd learned that the element representing this kind of aim had recently evolved and gained strength, making inroads into the highest levels of The Utàr power structure itself. The result was an exponential rise of The Utar's authority in the underground in the wake of a confluence of factional ideologies under one Utàr-inspired aim. It now had far more power than it had ever enjoyed, and employed it towards directing the overall operations of the criminal underground both within Exile society, and on the "Outside" as well.

It had therefore become evident that this element and, the ideas and aims—and threat—it represented, was no longer as latent or as fringe, or as seemingly inconsequential, as it had once been. Master Lekh had always been plagued by the instinctive feeling that the temptations of the Dark Side of the Force were most strongly felt in some context associated with Za, and that the threat to Krai's smooth transition to a positive future in this time of crucial and drastic change lay dormant and concealed in its jungle midst. The rise of The Utar's power, combined with its infiltration and domination by radical hegemonists, pointed to the inescapable conclusion that whatever was coming, it seemed to be getting ready to pounce.

It would also appear, if what Master Lekh suspected now were true—with Sith not only having seemed to have been pushed by his rampant negative feelings to take the complete plunge over the edge into the Dark Side, but also having chosen to openly ally himself with a criminal organization whose declared aim was to seize absolute control of Kraian society for destructive purposes—that The Utàr had made a crucial inroad into the highest level of Kraian society, tradition and authority: the Royal Family itself.

That magtrain of meaning carrying the load of consequences for Krai at high speed was now bearing down on the world at even higher speed. It seemed the closer the time was getting, the faster everything moved.

But moving toward what?

In any case, Master Lekh decided that neither Deleb nor Eloh could be told about Sith just yet, because they might be provoked by uncontrollable emotion to do something irrational that could cause greater and more serious harm than good. He also didn't know how he could possibly break to them the news that their son would appear to have allied himself—by means and for reasons as yet unfathomable—with forces on Krai dedicated to violently seizing absolute control of the world.

Master Lekh knew that nobody, not the Queen, nor the King, nor anybody within close proximity to the Royal Family, could have in their wildest nightmares imagined that Sith had turned so far off the good path.

Especially his trusting, oblivious, apparently blissfully ignorant brother and future King of Krai.

It was now, for the first time that he stopped thinking about the implications of all this on a global scale, that Master Lekh reminded himself there was a personal variable involved in this increasingly convoluting equation as well.

Jedi was by no means naive. He consistently demonstrated a keen analytical mind and was skilled at seeing through the machinations that went into the political maneuvering he was exposed to in his capacity as his father's son as well as Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai.

However, Jedi's innocent nature meant that when he trusted, he did so totally and unconditionally. While in itself a strong virtue, it also made him susceptible to being fooled by anybody skilled in the art of deceptive manipulation who managed to gain Jedi's trust.

An art in which it was becoming clear Sith may be a master of as yet undetermined talent and threat.

The twins' relationship had never been an intimate one. The demands placed on them because of their station in the Kraian social structure meant that much of their cycles growing up was spent apart from one another. In addition to their formal education and social obligations as members of the Royal House, Jedi was constantly being groomed for his role as future king, while Sith was a little freer but nevertheless had duties to perform and obligations on behalf of the Royal House to which he had to constantly attend. It was only at times like their training with Master Lekh, or other infrequent opportunities, that the youths had any chance to share common experience of any substance during which meaningful bonding could take place.

The infrequency and short duration of any free time they had to spend together, along with Sith's issues regarding Jedi, precluded their relationship from ever evolving beyond one more appropriately associated with common acquaintances, instead of into one of loving siblings inextricably involved in each other's lives.

Master Lekh was irrefutably convinced that the young Jedi, simply by having chosen to live his life according to being the best he could possibly be in all aspects in every possible moment, while ignoring anything not contributing to that purpose, was now in great danger.

If, as Master Lekh surmised, Sith was becoming the focal point around which dark forces on Krai were coalescing, Jedi represented a similar point around which forces of balance and harmony were coalescing. Whatever else that meant for the world as a whole and for Jedi personally, it also meant that Jedi would be a target, and an easy one if he weren't made aware of exactly what was going on around him and why.

There could be no other reason Sith—either intentionally or incidentally—would have so openly displayed a close association with The Utàr at precisely this time, unless they had gained enough confidence to show themselves as a prelude to making a move.

Master Lekh wasn't sure whether the rise of the militant wing within The Utàr was somehow caused by Sith's choice to affiliate himself with it; or his choice to somehow affiliate himself with The Utàr was an effect of some design on the part of The Utar's militant wing in its desire to seize global control.

It was bad news either way, but if Master Lekh could only figure out the direction of the energy flow in the relation, he could follow it to its source and then take the appropriate action necessary.

Any hope now depended on Master Lekh doing everything possible to make the young, unsuspecting Jedi aware of exactly what he was facing, and of how fast it may have been running right at him. There would appear to be no pulling Sith back, if the intensity and power of his feelings—displayed in that brief, dark manipulation of The Force that had knocked Master Lekh staggering earlier—were any indication.

Master Lekh thought briefly of telling Jedi about Sith's regrettable, apparent collapse under the influence of the Dark Side, but then chose against it. He didn't want to place the kind of cloud over Jedi's judgment that telling him about Sith would do. The feelings it might inspire in Jedi could make him tragically err at some crucial moment. It would be best if Jedi remained ignorant of Sith's true evolution, so that any actions he would ever be forced to take in defense against his brother would at least be motivated not by either anger or vindictiveness, but by good intent and the unconditional and pure love of one brother for another: the only guarantee that Jedi would avoid falling into the pit into which Sith already appeared to have plunged.

Jedi needed to find or be provided with all the tools he would need to defend himself. To defend himself from whatever Sith would be launching his way.

Master Lekh had a feeling that Launch Day had been today.

The problem Master Lekh had was to figure out how to introduce to Jedi the idea of his urgent need for a defensive proficiency, without inadvertently making him aware of the source necessitating that need.

Where could he—

He felt a warm tingle on the back of his neck.

Master Lekh suddenly stopped rubbing his temples and opened his eyes.

And then he knew.

Lying on his desk before him was the answer:

Sith's lightsaber.

He abruptly rose and headed over to the wall perpendicular to the corner of the transcom wall. The surface was smooth except for columns of colored crystals lining it. He touched a blue crystal in one column, and a drawer slid out. He withdrew a metallic box from the drawer, touched the crystal on the cupboard face, and the whole assembly slid back into the wall, where it seamlessly disappeared into the stone.

Master Lekh sat back down at his desk and opened the box. Inside, lined up in neat rows, was a large number of fine tools. He took Sith's incredible weapon in his hands and turned it over several times, examining it closely.

He then selected a micromagnetic retrodriver and began the process of taking the lightsaber completely apart.

CHAPTER XIX

After leaving the Rai Valley in his Wanderer, Sith had cruised down the sixteen lane, Greater Transcontinental Network (GTN) route from The Valley all the way down south to Yula, situated a little to the west of the Prime Meridian and on the northern edge of the plains that separated the rest of the continent from Za.

He berthed his Wanderer at a public docking facility on the outskirts of the city, and then went to a nearby depot and rented a sleek, silver Arrow series magrider.

To keep prying electronic eyes and ears off his scent, before setting out from the rental lot Sith had used special securityware installed on his transcom mobile, that when interfaced with the craft's onboard systems, would scramble the rental's transponder, while projecting a false signal that could be programmed to seem to originate from anywhere in the world.

Now, immense wall of jungle loomed ahead of him.

He pulled up on the stick and the Arrow climbed gently to clear the top of the towering canopy, smoothly skimming over the overhanging lip of thick green foliage with a rush of rustling greenery, and launching out over the top of the vast expanse of Za. It was dusk, and the suns were setting; only the tops of their glowing, crimson orbs added a vibrantly violet tint to the lower atmosphere, which itself melted above into a cool, almost crystalline sapphire sky that faded behind Sith into indigo and finally black.

Flying so low that it seemed to Sith the faintly glowing green foliage—most of whose leaves had a natural luminescence in their veins charged by the suns—was gently brushing the bottom of the rider, he thought to himself that it was going to be a beautiful trip. He set the thrust control to CRUISE mode, poured himself a drink into a glass goblet from a crystal carafe which he then stowed in a magnetic tray station under the dash, sat back, took a nice, long sip of yushka, the psychotropic fruit wine commonly drunk and only available in Za or illegally in the cities, and prepared to enjoy the ride.

An hour later, with the last remnants of Kraian civilization far behind him beyond a darkened horizon, deep over the center of Za, Sith brought the rider out of CRUISE, and ...

... Then steered it into an abrupt plunge through a clearing in the canopy that suddenly appeared ahead; cut out of the tree tops, the wide, gaping, dark square was a gateway into the ZaNet, a web of travel lanes running beneath the tree-line of the entire jungle: the Za analogue of the global MagNet.

Sith switched on the craft's running lights—which he had turned off to avoid detection by the high-altitude surveillance skyriders he knew the KSF constantly flew over Za—and the sleek Arrow was outlined in beads of lambent crimson. He checked his rear-view and accelerated into the darkness, whose lanes were delineated by strings of luminous crystals embedded in trees, outlining the series of lanes in the network. Like it's counterpart on the "Outside," the ZaNet contained vertical lanes, only these ran between, around and at times, through, the towering jungle trees.

The lane system here operated under the same rules as the MagNet: slower vehicles limited themselves to the lower lanes, while faster traffic kept to the upper levels.

Settlements were built directly into the leviathan trees of the jungle. The higher up one climbed in Za—either literally or figuratively—the more exclusive the atmosphere. Faster moving vehicles, and even faster moving Exiles, occupied the highest lanes and topmost residences of the "civilization" under the jungle canopy.

Sith sped along the High Ring, weaving and banking along the lane of luminous crystals lighting the way through the sparse traffic at this, the highest level. He activated his mobile and punched a code into the touch-screen.

After a brief pause, an electronic chime alerted him of the connection.

"Yeah?" a female voice answered.

"It's me!" Sith declared with a jocular familiarity. "I'm about ten minutes from your place," he informed his interlocutor without waiting for any response, while staying carefully intent on navigating the rider through the lane that cleaved the darkness beneath the Byzantine surface of the jungle.

"Make sure those froths are nice and chilled!" he laughed.

Having docked the Arrow in a berth carved into the side of a gargantuan branch emanating from the even more immense trunk of one of the ancient, giant dhoob trees that served in this area of Za as a condominium structure, Sith climbed out and walked along the lit, marble-tiled pathway, flanked on either side by protective balustrades topped by incandescent rails, that led along the top of the branch toward the private entrance to the condo unit housed at this level of the tree's trunk. The condo windows, darkened slightly by light-dampening screens embedded in the glass, were nevertheless well-lit from inside, and Sith could see by shadows of movement from within, that the occupant was home.

His anger over the news of Jedi's impending nuptials had died down soon after the third yushka while still on his way to Yula. He decided it would appear there was nothing he could do about the two of them getting married. Despite all his own efforts to impress Zita, she was still fooled by Jedi's act, Sith concluded.

He spat off to the side as he walked along toward the trunk.

Displacing the anger in which he should still have been reeling, was instead an almost excited anticipation of what was to come next. He had no time to waste wallowing in a cesspool of self-pity, wailing like one of those whining little snivelers in some of the popular vidoperas all over the transcom's entertainment networks.

Not when there was a plan to set in motion.

Not when that plan would ultimately make every dream Sith ever had for himself come true.

He made it to the base of the giant dhoob's trunk and placed his hand on a glowing crystal plate embedded in the emerald green and luminescent-vein-tinted wood of the tree, to the right of a bright pink, metallic door adorned with bubble-like, concave windows.

A muffled chime sounded inside the condo.

Sith waited.

A moment later, a series of electronic chirps told Sith the door was being opened. An airy hiss issued as the magnetic seals released the door from its locked position, and it swung inward.

In the doorway, standing with her hands on her hips, a devious grin on her lips and a lustful fire in her eyes, was Jedi and Sith's former Governess.

CHAPTER XX

MantharVana was no longer the familiarly demure nurse she had been for ten cycles during her service at The Castle.

Her duties as Royal Governess expired seven cycles ago. Ties to an Exile former-lover and her disillusionment with Kraian society as a result of what she saw at its apex, led her naturally to Za once the House of Rai no longer required her services. She'd used her considerable compensation package to buy her way into both a comfortable living in an exclusive level and region of the jungles; and through her ex-lover, also into the hierarchy of The Utàr, quickly becoming one of its Board members. Her former position in The Castle and all the knowledge that experience had given her, made her an invaluable asset to The Utar's daily operations as well as to its strategic plans.

It also had made Manthi a very rich and powerful woman on the "Inside."

And now she had both the affluence and the freedom to afford the tight-fitting, silky, black sleeveless sheath she wore, clinging creasingly to her lithe figure, cut low enough to let her ample bosoms fill it in just before the point of spilling out of their concealment, ending above her bare feet, whose ankles were adorned with shiny, metallic rings inlaid with colorful gems.

"Baby ..." she purred, opening her arms and gazing intently from under her brow at him with a lustful pout.

"Manthi," Sith growled, grinning.

He stepped into the condo. As the door swung shut behind him, he grabbed her harshly, and pulled her in to him tightly.

Manthi responded, clutching Sith with animal-like desperation behind the neck with both arms, drawing his mouth hungrily to hers.

Sith and Manthi left a trail of discarded clothing along the way through the living room on the lower level, up the stairs, and into the open second level master sleeping suite that spanned and overlooked the entire lower storey of the condo. Manthi didn't bother engaging the shutter wall to close off the bedroom nor were the low floor lights fully extinguished.

She had her hands full of Sith.

Clutching, tearing and devouring one another with animal-like ferocity, they made it toward the immense bed along the length of a floor-to-ceiling picture window that overlooked the sparsely and faintly lit jungle darkness surrounding the gargantuan arboreal residence complex.

As they fell onto the bed, however, a shadow, a dark silhouette of their bodies, remained imprinted on the air with a shimmering sheen; whose skin slightly throbbed and welled with an audible moan of pleasure that added itself to and surmounted the growling and moaning of Sith and his childhood nurse, while they rolled naked and entwined on the bed.

The living shadow that hung in the air above them groaned, swelled once again, and shimmered even more perceptibly, especially around its outlines.

Then with an un-worldly, ecstatic shriek, the shadow flung itself down upon the writhing couple and enveloped them in a moaning, writhing, shimmering blackness that consumed both their entire forms with its formlessness, and Sith and Manthi became blacknesses themselves.

CHAPTER XXI

Jedi stared in shock:

He was as much incredulous at the spectacle of his brother having passionate relations with the woman who had raised them as children, as at the strange, shimmering blackness he had just witnessed remain in the air behind them as they had fallen onto the bed, after which it then plunged downward to envelope the two of their bodies in its rippling, dark sheen.

He kept staring, only now no longer so much in shock as in curiosity, and at a haunting, half-faded after-image that had left what Jedi could only describe as a burning coldness radiating out from somewhere deep in his stomach and gripping his while body, forcing him to shiver slightly.

Then he looked away from the condo window.

He didn't want to see any more of this.

He tucked himself back into the crook of one of the "twigs" of the giant dhoob tree, a piece of lumber as thick as an arm that could easily support the weight of a man, and whose thick and large, umbrella-sized leaves provided ample cover and shadow.

Jedi decided he could do without the mental imagery of this ... "union" ... that would haunt him for a long time. He receded into the shadow of the crook and closed his eyes for a moment's rest.

The shivers subsided and the coldness ebbed away until it was just a slight knot in the pit of his stomach.

It had been a whirlwind, long, strange, adventurous and tiring trip from this afternoon until now.

Coming off the high of the consent of all the "grown-up" parties involved after they agreed to his and Zita's marriage, Jedi was about to break the news to Sith, whom he noted had been absent from the KMC party last night, when he was thrown for a sharp and sudden loop first by Sith's strange behavior before—and then the attack during—training this afternoon. Jedi had been too preoccupied until now to think of emphatic enough words to convey his complete, baffled wonder, awe, and slight dread of the weapon Sith had produced.

It had been a life-shattering loop whose scale and scope and impact on his life Jedi had no time to consider right now; the bizarre, violent incident with Sith had ambushed Jedi, walking through his entire life completely unaware that the bottom of all the tension he'd always experienced with his brother was Sith's intense ... resentment of him; completely unaware that that resentment must have evolved over years into a hatred that must have been deep enough to motivate him to express it with violent anger and an intent to do serious harm to Jedi.

Why Sith hated Jedi with such a passion, Jedi couldn't understand. He'd never wished his brother any harm nor had he ever done anything to Sith but treat him with no less love than a brother in his position could give.

But that Sith did hate, Jedi no longer questioned. Not after what they had seen Sith display this afternoon.

He pulled that ... weapon on Jedi with purpose. Jedi couldn't deny that. Sith had meant to hurt Jedi.

Was that a right thought?—Jedi considered. Could Sith have felt so negatively about Jedi that he might ever want to kill him? Or, he considered, was that just a tempting whisper sent out from the opaque sea of the Dark Side meant to lure him down an easy path to anger and dark intent through unsubstantiated paranoia?

Was that how easy it was for the Dark Side?

Jedi thought about it for a moment.

Was the Dark Side an expression of a part of Force consciousness that was somehow separated from its balancing and harmonizing properties? No, Jedi concluded. The Force was the energy that bound everything together and gave it strength and cohesion and the power to not only survive, but thrive. The Dark Side could not be an inherent element of The Force; but rather, it had to be elements of the unbalanced individual mind—like selfishness, greed, lust, disregard for others—that forced a particular mind to become separated from the sense of conscious connection that The Force provided. Without that sense—which Jedi surmised was simply inherent in all living things regardless of their degree of Force sensitivity—the individual inevitably felt lost, then frightened, then angry, and ultimately self-destructive. It wasn't therefore, The Force that caused the destructiveness, but the fear that came with separation from the unity of all things. A mind with conscious Force sensitivity, that was nevertheless "polluted" by a perpetual state of fear, loneliness, isolation, and the anger to which they ultimately led, would also be prone to using the powers made possible by conscious connection with The Force for destructiveness, when unchecked by the empowering sense of connectedness that pure Force sensitivity provided.

All the philosophy behind the mechanics of The Force aside, it was now completely clear to Jedi that Sith had slipped into the clutches of something that had gained its control over him and his good judgment.

Jedi now understood why Master Lekh always warned them about giving in to the temptations of the Dark Side. Because unlike with the good and right use of the power of The Force, which resulted in the individual being freed from the restrictions of limited choice by becoming tuned into a view of reality with limitless possibilities and an intuition strong enough to know how to follow the right one; the Dark Side only seemed to result in harm and destructiveness, and the awakening of a strong desire to manifest them.

That's what Jedi learned from what he had witnessed in his brother's behavior this afternoon in training session; what he learned from what he witnessed from following his brother to this of all places, and into the arms of that woman of all people on Krai; and from what he had just witnessed that was beginning now on the bed beyond the beautiful picture window spanning the entire length of the condo only a loud whisper away from where Jedi hid.

Earlier that afternoon, soon after he had just settled in his chambers into a good breathing rhythm and had started drifting into the trance that came before the warm rush of tingles all over the body that always accompanied connection with the Force—Jedi had been buzzed by Master Lekh, who had urgently called him to his office.

When Jedi arrived there, he found the agitated teacher at his desk, hunched over what looked like the half dismantled handle of the strange weapon Sith had produced. Master Lekh, continuing his work on the handle and without looking at Jedi as the youth stood behind his chair and watched curiously, had told Jedi that he was worried about Sith. His possession of such a weapon—never-before conceived of—was cause to be concerned that Sith may have some "worrisome" connections.

Appealing to Jedi's brotherly love, in order, as he explained, to find out if Sith was in any kind of trouble, his teacher had urged Jedi to keep a close eye on Sith this afternoon.

A very close eye.

In fact, he had explicitly said that Jedi shouldn't let Sith out of his sight.

When Jedi asked Master Lekh what it was all about, his teacher's only reply was to state that a feeling told him that Jedi would find out everything he would need to know for himself. Master Lekh said he was in no position to give Jedi any clear answers. He could only point him in the right direction. Jedi, after a lifetime of nothing but consistently manifested good intentions yielding positive results from Master Lekh's guidance, knew enough to trust his teacher.

And yet there had been so many questions he wanted to ask about this afternoon.

But before Jedi could ask any one of the dozens of questions that immediately had come to mind, Master Lekh stopped his work, looked up at Jedi for the first time since Jedi had walked into the office, and urged him to hurry in a voice filled with something that Jedi had never before detected in any of his lifelong mentor's expressions:

Fear.

Then it was gone, and Master Lekh had smiled gently and advised Jedi to find out what he could but to keep discreet about it and stay safe.

The fact that Master Lekh felt such action was warranted had wiped away Jedi's last doubts that the matter with Sith, whatever it was, was a serious one enough to warrant such urgently expressed concern.

Jedi, Sith and Master Lekh had come to learn that connection with The Force increased the scope and magnitude of the powers of observation. One could "see" far more deeply—into and through time and space as well as into individuals and their behaviors—than was possible with just the unassisted physical senses.

So Jedi knew, because he could feel it, that Master Lekh was worried. He was worried big time. He was worried big time for Sith, and even more so ...

... For Jedi.

Jedi had been able to tell Master Lekh was working very hard to conceal that feeling during the meeting in his office, but once Jedi had sensed it, it was easy to trace it back to the thought Master Lekh was trying so hard to hide but that to Jedi was as loud as a bell ringing in his own head:

The thought that Jedi was personally in great danger.

That's what had finally convinced him to trust in Master Lekh's insistence.

Jedi was no naive whelp. He knew he was in line to become king, and as such, there would be people coming into his life, if they already weren't there, who would want to manipulate him for their own interests because of his position. He had begun paying close attention to how everybody treated and acted around him for the last couple of cycles, to be thoroughly convinced of who was who on his way to The Throne; so he'd know how to deal with them once he was on it.

He was in line to become king, and much sooner, rather than the later many people around the Royals would have liked to have seen. The kind of people, Jedi's powers of observation had assisted him in discovering, who would have preferred to have had more time to influence an elderly queen and king rather than have to suddenly deal, in less than a cycle, with a strong, young couple like Jedi and Zita, with heads full of ideas of their own and the will and confidence to put them into action.

But only Jedi, through his connection with the augurial powers of The Force, knew that the nervous disease slumbering in his mother's body would suddenly erupt and consume her before the end of the next cycle.

This particular disease, when it went active, was quick. The deterioration would be tough for the family to watch, but Deleb wouldn't suffer much or for very long. It was an airborne virus launched by some of the more sentient and aggressive plant life in Za, a biological response to the Nareed encroachment of the natural ecosystem of the jungle. It attacked the nervous system and severed nerve pathways until there was nothing left to transmit the information necessary to keep the organism functioning; at which point it simply expired.

There was no known cure, because the defense against such an attack would require the electromagnetic shielding of a network as complex as that of the bioelectric web of the Nareed nervous system. There was no technology on all of Krai that involved and precise yet, and nothing to date has succeed in either preventing the virus from attacking when it did, or from ridding an infected organism of it once it has attacked.

That his mother had it was something Jedi knew but had shared with nobody. Not even the Queen herself. He wanted her to live the rest of whatever time she had left with joy rather than with the cloud of impending doom that such foreknowledge would put over the remainder of her days.

Jedi forced himself to put his thoughts of his mother out of his mind right now. As important as his mother and her life was to him, the feelings those thoughts would lead him to feel right now would only cloud his judgment in this moment.

So he considered instead that knowing who was who and what was what in the power corridors of Krai had abruptly taken on greater importance and immediacy to Jedi; and now that knowledge was going to pay off in providing him with a good program with which to follow all the players in the Royal Court in which he would soon take center stage.

His awareness of his mother's condition, as much as it tore him apart with grief, would give him a practical advantage: he would come The Throne far more prepared than any of the circles who liked to exploit their regal connections and influences might have expected or preferred.

It appeared to Jedi right then and there, that the dress rehearsal the first seventeen-cycles of his life had been, was over for good, and had now become the real show.

And the spotlights were approaching, searching, wanting to capture him in their beams.

That Sith might have some possible connections with any of the more troubling elements on Krai—as Master Lekh had clearly implied—was indeed a cause for concern. Although the royal life precluded time for any intimate closeness, Jedi thought he had at least known Sith well enough all these cycles.

It was becoming evident that maybe he didn't really know him at all.

He concluded after quick consideration that it was probably his own willingness to always unconditionally look for, find, and appeal to the good he knew was in Sith, that forced him to ignore the fact that Sith's resentment may have had a stronger hold over his emotions—and with Sith, that meant therefore, over his actions, too—than did Master Lekh's efforts to keep Sith from succumbing to the temptation to use The Force for dark intent.

In Master Lekh's office earlier today, as Jedi suddenly had turned and rushed out of the room to set off about tracking down his brother, Master Lekh called after Jedi to tell him Sith probably wasn't in his chambers as he had been instructed to be.

The office door swooshed shut behind him before Jedi could ask how Master Lekh knew that. But in the same way he suspected Master Lekh had known Sith wouldn't be in his chambers, Jedi suddenly had a feeling of his own, and abruptly bolted down the corridor straight for the courtyard where Sith kept his Wanderer.

When he'd arrived there, his brother's magrider was gone.

Alarmed, Jedi then raced through the maze of corridors and courts until he made it to his own rider, a polished, deep orange Explorer series, berthed comfortably in the large and thickly verdant garden suspended over the huge stone patio that adjoined his chambers. He hopped in, fired it up and checked the navigator for the quickest route to the nearest Rai Belt on-ramp.

He figured he'd decide which where to go on the way to the Rai Belt, the high-speed MagNet track that ran around the urban center and suburbs of Rai Valley, with its exit at the southern end, behind The Towers District, through The Eed Pass and out onto the GTN. He had to catch up with Sith before Sith got too far away to be caught up with.

Jedi had called up the onboard tracking system and it came onto the screen in the dash.

First he tried Sith's mobile signal. Even were his mobile turned off, every transcom mobile contained a Micro-Frequency Identification Chip that put out a constant ID signal. Jedi found nothing. Then he tried to locate his Wanderer via its transponder ID signature. Again nothing. Then he tried Sith's personal transponder—the subcutaneous circuit with which both Jedi and Sith were implanted so they could be located in case of urgency or emergency no matter where they were.

Nothing there, either.

All of those coming up negative meant that Sith was masking himself, somehow; because Sith had taken his magrider, Jedi had seen that it was gone, and so Sith and or it should have been in contact somewhere.

That had struck Jedi as odd at the time, but not as significant then as it was now, sitting in the crook of the giant dhoob tree waiting for Sith and the woman who had been their wet nurse to finish ravaging one another in her bedroom in an exclusive condo somewhere in Za.

Exclusive, Jedi thought, to Utàr types, the only kind of people in Za he imagined could afford such opulent exclusivity.

Sith had come here. What could he possibly have to do with anybody who was in any way associated with Za or The Utàr? What could Manthi, the woman who had breast fed both of them and bounced them on her knees and fed them and tucked them in at night with sweet lullabies have to do with Za or The Utàr?

After she had left The Castle seven years ago, they had lost track of Manthi, and on the few occasions Jedi had endeavored to seek her out, his searches proved fruitless: it had been as if Manthi had simply disappeared off the face of Krai.

Now he was beginning to understand why.

Anyway, still back in his Explorer late this afternoon, anxious to pick up his brother's trail before it went cold, it had been a voice that had simply said, from somewhere deep inside Jedi, so deep inside him it felt outside of him.

It was neither male nor female, nor like any voice Jedi had ever heard or could even recognize.

It had said, simply:

"Za."

And then Jedi just knew which way to go.

That voice had come to him as a thought in his head, but it was loud and clear enough that he swore he had actually, audibly experienced it, and the warm rush of tingles that swept his body at the time told him he was connected and getting his input from The Force.

That was all he needed to trust its direction.

With his Explorer gliding along, Jedi finally left The Castle District, sped through Government District and toward the nearest Rai Belt on-ramp. He was going to take the GTN to the southernmost city before the jungles of Za: Yula.

The same voice that had pointed him in that direction then exhorted him to drive as fast as he could to get there.

So when he'd finally got on the GTN after leaving The Valley through The Eed exit off the Rai Belt, he pushed the stick all the way forward and shot along the magnetic track at a nearly frictionless fury.

After an hour of driving at maximum legal thrust, Jedi couldn't believe his luck when, ahead of and seven lanes below his Explorer, slowing down and signaling to exit at a trackside Off-Trak complex, he spotted Sith's Wanderer. Jedi sped down quickly, close enough to get a look at the registration plate on the back of the suspected vehicle, and confirmed that it was Sith. He could read the Luminus1 he knew was Sith's favorite transcom handle, and that also served as his personalized magrider registration plate.

Jedi then had dropped a few vehicles back and eased slowly into the exit lane three vehicles behind Sith. He followed his brother's rider into the Off-Trak lot and discovered him parking in front of a night club, getting out and, carrying an empty crystal carafe, entering the club.

Obscured while taking cover behind a few rows of parked riders, he slowly glided his Explorer along the parking lanes.

Just as he had been about to decide to find an inconspicuous spot and park, Sith suddenly burst out of the club's entrance, waving the crystal carafe—now full with some kind of drink— through the air wildly as he spun around, in a clearly intoxicated state. He grabbed the arm of the girl who was pawing at him as he fell out the door, yanked her forcefully out the doorway to him, and thrust her face into his for a wet, sloppy, hungry kiss.

As suddenly as he had grabbed for her, Sith pushed himself away and giggled while bouncing off back to his Wanderer. He got in and lifted off.

Jedi had then followed Sith from the Off-Trak the rest of the way down the GTN route to it's terminus in a southern suburb of Yula, where still some time before sunsdown, he watched his brother leave his Wanderer at a berthing station in a parkplex, and then cross the magway on foot to a rental agency on the ground floor of the complex there. There was only one reason Jedi could think Sith would be going into a rental agency: he was switching vehicles.

His Force instinct strongly suggested to Jedi that if he wanted to stay on his brother's tail, he would have to ditch his own vehicle, too.

He followed his instinct.

While Sith had gone inside the rental outlet, Jedi quickly berthed his Explorer in the same parkplex as Sith had, using his personal transcard to secure a bay.

He made sure Sith had still been inside the rental agency by peering around the corner of the parkplex's pedestrian entrance, from where he could see across the magway to the rental agency building. Catching sight of the back of his brother's head through the glass facade of the outlet, he saw Sith was at the counter with a rental agent. Jedi quickly ran across to the rental agency's lot, crouched behind a row of riders, and waited there until he knew Sith would come out of the building into the lot with the rental agent. Jedi also knew they would do the walk-around to check for any pre-existing damages that wouldn't be declared against Sith upon return of whichever rental he ended up taking.

Jedi rubbed his sweaty palms against the fabric of his earth-brown cloak and waited for the two to emerge from the building.

When they finally came out, Sith—waving around the now only half-full crystal carafe in one hand and a glass with swilling liquid in the other while relating something humorous apparently only to him and gesticulating madly as he did so—had followed the agent to a silver Arrow series rider a row down from where Jedi crouched behind a metallic-blue Interceptor.

Using the row of riders as cover, Jedi scrambled soundlessly over and then crouched at the bumper of the rider behind the one Sith and the agent circled.

Jedi peered from around the rider's front parking-pad well and saw Sith thanking the agent while handing him a gold card—the highest-rated transcard containing a wasteload of a lot of credits. The agent had looked nervously around, accepted the card from Sith, and stuffed it hurriedly into the breast pocket of his tunic.

Then the agent parted while Sith used the remote to unlock the vehicle. It pipped and chirped electronically, and a soft hiss told Jedi that the rider's doors, including that of the cargo trunk, had popped free of their magnetic locks.

Jedi had waited for a moment while Sith stopped at the driver-side door to take a long swig out of the carafe before climbing in. As some of the liquid spilled out and splashed all over the violet tunic under his black cloak and Sith laughed with abandon, Jedi sneaked up along the opposite side of his covering rider and positioned himself in a crouch at the foot of the rear passenger-side parking-pad well of Sith's rental.

When he'd heard Sith finally climbing in, Jedi slipped into the open rear cargo hold. As soon as Jedi had scrambled silently into the hold, all the doors of the vehicle hissed closed and clicked shut, including that of the hold, leaving Jedi in total darkness. Wherever they were headed, Jedi was in it for the long haul now no matter what.

He had then used a pocket igniter, whose flame was so intense it could be configured tightly enough to allow him to drill miniscule air holes in the back of the cargo hold's wall, which sat flush with the backs of the rear passenger seats of the sedan and separated the hold from the main cab.

From that moment, until he had extracted himself from the Arrow's hold after Sith had berthed at the giant dhoob condo complex in Za, Jedi hadn't had any clue as to where they had traveled.

When it became clear they had arrived at wherever their destination was, Jedi had been faced with an alarming dilemma: getting out of the locked cargo hold.

There was no way of demagnetizing the hold's locks from the inside.

Panic began to rise in him as he realized he might lose Sith while stuck in the Arrow.

His mind raced desperately, seeking a solution to his oppressive confinement, while the fear of losing Sith's trail began to take a strong hold on his thoughts and feelings.

Then suddenly, the same voice he had "heard" earlier in his Explorer, spoke to him mysteriously again.

It told him to relax his body, clear his mind of all thoughts, let go of all his feelings, and picture the lid of the Arrow's cargo hold popping open.

He breathed deeply until his heart slowed to an infrequent tap. He calmed himself and relaxed his body. He cleared his mind of all thoughts, except for the image of the cargo hold lid popping open.

He felt a warm tingle on the back of his neck.

Then Jedi was startled out of his nearly catatonic trance by a series of clanks around the rim of the cargo hold's lid.

The maglocks were disengaging!

Then Jedi watched in astonishment as the lid of the cargo hold simply clicked open, and he saw a thin line of light from outside.

He was free!

Jedi had had to pause for a moment to marvel.

I can do stuff like that?—he had thought while doing mental cartwheels.

The Force is heavy-grav, 'nar.

The mysterious voice once again chimed in, reminding Jedi there was scant time for marvel right then with the risk of Sith slipping away.

He carefully pushed the cargo hold's lid up a crack and peered outside.

With nobody in sight and no stirrings about, he determined it would be safe to climb out. It was when he opened the lid enough to let himself out that he first noticed the strange sounds, smelled the strange scents in the air, got a look at the strange darkness illuminated by even stranger light, and immediately guessed by the foreignness of all he sensed and felt, that he indeed was somewhere deep in the jungles of Za.

Jedi hadn't wanted to believe that Sith had any kind of connection to anybody in Za, because any such connections at all, let alone covert ones, could have meant nothing of any good for anybody.

But here they were. In Za.

He had climbed out of the vehicle, pressed down the trunk lid and proceeded to flit silently from shadow to shadow between the man-tall leaf stalks sticking out of the giant tree's branch atop which the path to the condo entrance led, along which Sith, a short distance ahead, casually strolled. On the outside of the branch's protective railing, hanging on to a thick stalk and hiding in the shadow of a giant leaf, Jedi watched Sith paw the condo's crystal chime plate.

A few moments later, the door opened and then Jedi saw their childhood Governess standing in the doorway.

Okay, whatever. It was going to take him a little while to get over that one, Jedi figured. As the couple had fallen inside the condo through the door while in each other's amorous clutches and the door closed shut, Jedi had scampered around the base of the trunk of the giant tree and through the maze of outcropping thick stalks and twig branches that to a man were as thick as an arm, and climbed and jumped around to the back of the condo, which consisted of a long and luxuriously furnished, suspended patio garden one level below the picture window that had moments ago briefly offered Jedi the glimpse of his brother and their childhood nurse getting nasty with each other in her bed.

There was for Jedi—now that he had had time to pause to consider it—so much feeling of all kinds over this, that he was lost amongst it all, as detached and ungrounded as a thistle in a breeze. He wanted to explore all the reasons for the feelings he'd been having since this afternoon, but events had moved with such a rapid concatenation of mind-blowing revelations that there hadn't been the time that this kind of reflection would take.

Until now.

But then there were Sith and Manthi all over, under, inside-and-out of each other in her condo a couple of arms' lengths away; an image set, compounded by the occasional sounds of pleasure filtering through the window, that Jedi was intent on preventing from coming to life in his imagination to further fuel his confused feelings.

Jedi focused on the sounds of the jungle coming at him from all around the darkness and began to focus on absorbing the energy and feeling of Za. Buzzings, chirpings, grunts, growls, far off, close, closer; the whoosh of the occasional late-night magrider. Below that, fainter echoes of activity occasionally wandered up from the dimly lit darkness over three-hundred man-lengths down all the way to where the giant dhoob trees rooted to the ground.

Everything that Jedi knew of Za he had accumulated from Master Lekh or from senior KSF operatives who had been under cover here. Although in this darkness he didn't have much hope of getting a visual appreciation for what Za looked like, his imagination, fueled by the little he was able to see right now and the stories and descriptions he had heard, painted a picture of an oppressive and dangerous environment, where predators—mammalian, saurian, amphibian, arthropod, avian or Nareed—ruled in an atmosphere of constant unease in which fear must have reigned over the jungle and the individual heart.

In the absence of any light except for faint splashes of glow coming from the occasional condo window above and below, Jedi noticed the heaviness that seemed to permeate the very physical fabric of Za. It was an oppressive ... feeling that seemed to come from the air and weigh heavily on the heart with every breath. The air, the sounds, the sheer, dense mass of the jungle in Za all radiated an energy that Jedi, by extending his extrasensory perception with The Force, could feel flowing around everything in Za. It left a constant tightness in the stomach, as if a fist were squeezing the intestines and making physical, mental and emotional discomfort a persistent condition. It caused a feeling of uneasiness within, as if simply being in Za acted upon the thoughts and feelings of the individual with some sort of inexplicable, invisible but definitely tangible—

Darkness.

And then he remembered the shadow, the weird, shimmering blackness that he swore he could feel in the same way his Force senses were aware of Sith's and Manthi's presences right now on levels beyond what was apparent to the eyes and ears.

It was a feeling he had never before experienced in his life, except in that one brief flash of shivering cold that shot through him seconds before Sith attacked him this afternoon. Now that he had the time to consider it, he realized this feeling now was the same feeling that had coursed through him then, right before Sith flashed the weapon on Jedi. Only then he didn't know whether the energy that had caused that feeling had emanated from Sith, or was somehow attached to and influencing him, while still being separate from him. Jedi only knew that he had felt it then, and he felt it upon perceiving the dark shadow enveloping the copulating Sith and Manthi.

He had felt it then, felt it again moments ago when he saw the shadow over Manthi's bed, was feeling it now, and it felt ...

Dark.

As soon as he thought that, Jedi felt it stab viciously into him again.

But the feeling wasn't coming from his memory.

Something was making him feel it right now.

It was something real and present, just like it had felt the first time he had consciously attempted to touch it with his mind when he sensed and then saw it through the bedroom window. It was both a part of and something completely separate from Sith. In any case, it was connected to him and his presence. It currently surged with an elevated excitement that stirred an immediate disease in the pit of Jedi's stomach. He tried to focus on the darkness to see if he could sense its true source. Leaning ahead slightly while holding onto the thick branch, he looked to the condo window, but could see no sign of Sith or Manthi, even though he could still hear the muffled sounds of their coital activities.

Then it occurred to Jedi that if he could sense this ineffable, mysterious darkness' presence—and if what he had seen was not just his imagination, a mysterious darkness with consciousness and the ability to direct willful intent—it might be able to sense him, and he panicked for a moment when he considered that through it, maybe Sith could somehow be alerted to Jedi's presence here; or even more sinisterly, knew of it all along.

Jedi's good reason quickly dismissed that fear, because he concluded that the darkness seemed to somehow connect with and thrive only on negative mental or emotional energy vibrations. As intense as he guessed Manthi's and Sith's passion for one another was at the moment, Jedi reasoned the darkness, if it had conscious sentience, was too preoccupied with Manthi and Sith to notice Jedi.

He hoped.

Through the condo window over which hung the branch on which he hid, Jedi could hear what must have been the excruciatingly loud approach to the climax of Sith's and Manthi's ravaging of one another.

He cringed.

Then he noted that the unease accompanying his fear of just a moment ago had not dissipated. Sith and Manthi's coupling had merely distracted him from it.

As he tried to clear the image of them out of his thoughts—

There it was again:

A burning freeze deep in the pit of his stomach, suddenly spreading quickly all over his body with an intensity rising in correspondence to the increasingly audible frenzy of Sith and Manthi's frantic and savage coitus as they approached its completion.

Then he heard a voice.

Unlike the previous voice he'd "heard" in his Explorer or while locked in the Arrow, this voice was undoubtedly coming from somewhere outside himself.

It was as if the air around him were whispering into his ear.

Except while the earlier voice had been soft, gentle and kind, this one was raspy, phlegmatic, and filled with an intimidating menace.

It was saying:

"Jump!"

Then the whisper suddenly became a shout; a shout that seemed to come from the darkness all around him, that seemed to pierce the air, startling Jedi with its convincing semblance of physical presence, and almost forcing him to resign helplessly in obedience to it's dark command:

"JUMP!"

All of a sudden, some part of Jedi's mind persuasively shouted out to him to accept the authority of the voice and the validity of its command.

And his mind could see no reason why he shouldn't obey.

Jedi abruptly found himself increasingly unable to resist the desire, for no explicable or sane reason, to jump off the branch he was hiding on and plunge down to the dark depths below, without caring that that's what he would be doing.

Not only not caring, but loving it. Desiring it.

As soon as he'd had these thoughts, but before he had enough time to wonder why he had suddenly had them, the desire blossomed into an almost irresistible compulsion. One that he found himself having to fight to resist, as if something were trying to take control of his mind while he was losing his ability to translate what he knew was rationality into physical action. He held on tightly to the branch now with both arms, kept his eyes closed, and focused on his breathing to try to force from his mind the mad desire to jump.

But he still kept wanting to let go and jump into the black abyss below. He felt his hands involuntarily loosening their grip on the branch, despite his mind willing them not to do so and to hang on for his life.

In a trance, as if separated from command of his own senses, Jedi felt himself let go of the branch and start to lean forward, peering down into the darkness into which the giant tree disappeared below.

Then he heard yet another voice.

It was calling out to him faintly and desperately from somewhere far away in the back of his mind.

He tried to zero in on it through the mesmerizing coercion of the voice from the darkness, straining to hear what this new voice was saying.

As he struggled to focus on it, the new voice grew steadily louder and louder, until he could hear that it was unmistakably the sweet, soft and melodious voice of his beloved Zita.

She was desperately calling his name.

He wanted to reach out to her. Suddenly, he was struck by the thought that Zita was down there in the darkness, in danger, and that he had to let go and plunge down to save her.

His pulse quickened.

He broke out in a sweat.

He began to shake.

His body began to lean more radically forward and Jedi began to feel himself slip out of the crouch in which he was perched on the giant tree branch.

"JUMP!" the dark voice screamed at him again.

"Zita," Jedi whispered.

"JEDI! DON'T! HOLD ON!"

It was Zita's cry that finally reached the deepest reserves of Jedi's self-control through the darkness that was blinding his will and urging his desire to jump.

"Zita!" he sobbed ...

... And suddenly, the darkness, the fire inside him, the voice filled with anger and hatred commanding him to jump, the irresistible compulsion to let go and fall into the deep darkness below—

Were all gone.

Jedi came back to himself as if from a dream, the reality of his physical surroundings shimmering into solidity and clarity around him as if he had just traversed some frontier separating his consciousness from physical reality. The feelings he had had of helplessly being under the control of some force outside of him and not being able to stop himself from obeying its dark commands—

Were all gone.

Before he slipped irretrievably forward, Jedi quickly reached out and grasped the branch he had been holding onto previously.

His hard breathing started to subside.

He stopped shaking.

He fell back into the crook of the branch and exhaled forcefully, relieved and physically, mentally and emotionally spent as if he had just finished a monster gravving session.

Jedi closed his eyes and began to regulate, steady and deepen his breathing, his mind and senses reasserting their command of his being.

It was the whining drone of a downshifting magrider—and by the sound of it, a big one—that suddenly commanded his attention this time.

He focused on that sound and peered down below to see the head, tail and running markers outlining the rider as it began it's winding, weaving assent alongside the trunk of the giant tree's condo complex.

The rider, a large, tan Convoy series, glided up to level with one of the branches on the other side of Manthi's condo, and parked above Sith's rental. Peeking out from where he was hiding, Jedi could see the gleaming rider well enough as it docked. He was off to the side of the main trunk, and could see clearly around its massive hulk to the front of the condo. The crystal illumination splashing from the parking bays and the condo walkway out front provided enough light for him to clearly make out the whole scene.

Then Jedi saw something he would never forget no matter how many lifetimes he would still have to live—if you bought that sort of thing; and from what little Jedi had learned and experienced of The Force in his seventeen cycles, Jedi bought it completely.

What he couldn't quite buy, or believe just yet, what he was witnessing.

The driver-side door of the Convoy hissed open, and out of the vehicle emerged a creature that not even any of the most adventurously macabre Nareed mythology could have imagined.

Jedi was frozen for a moment; too frozen by the difficulty he was having trying to accept the creature's very existence, let alone it existing right here, right now, before his very eyes.

What was it?

In the first place, it was huge. It spilled out of the open door of the rider onto the well-lit pad of the landing branch and it slithered, slithered, like a gigantic, fat, worm ... thing, with tiny arms just below its huge head, which it held upright as it slid, trailing a fat, juicy tail tapered to a long point. Huge slits revealed almost drugged-looking, bulbous, yellow-tinted eyes over a crusty and wide gash for a mouth. It was laughing a lot in a deep voice as it related somehow in something that sounded to Jedi like talking but that he couldn't recognize as anything he'd ever heard before.

To whom it was relating was irrelevant to Jedi at the moment, and he couldn't see who—or what, or what else—it was anyway, because the passenger side of the rider was facing away from his view. He was focused still on the phantasmic phenomenon he couldn't deny his senses were registering as real. So much so he almost let go of the branch he was holding on to yet again.

The worm-thing laughed at a bellowingly low enough frequency that Jedi swore he could feel the rumble of it from all the way over in his hiding spot on the other side of the condo. But he may have imagined that; or also felt it through The Force as an aftershock of the thing's own energy emanations. Or a combination of both.

It glistened with some sort of ooze all over its tan-hued body, and its slit-like mouth was encrusted with what to Jedi looked like the remnants of a number of recent meals of both vegetable and animal matter.

He was watching a worm-thing with eyes and a mouth and arms that flew a rider and was now sliding down the landing pad and spilling into the staircase that led down to the main branch that led to Manthi's condo entrance.

Heavy krokin' grav, 'nar!

The passenger-side door of the Convoy suddenly hissed open, and then closed after a brief moment. Jedi took his eyes off the phantasmic creature for a moment to notice that it was a Nareed girl to which the thing had been ... speaking?

The long-long haired Nareed woman giggled loudly and bounced around the front of the rider, revealing that she was clad only in a pair of what appeared to be pastel-colored marshmallows somehow attached to each of the nipples of her perky breasts, and a gold chain around the waist of her otherwise naked and barefoot body.

Jedi took a moment to reflect on what the inside of that rider must smell like with a naked, slimy ... worm-thing (he didn't know what else to call what he saw), in it along with a naked, drunk, sweaty Nareed girl.

He watched her; she displaying all the symptoms of advanced, raucous intoxication, catching up to the worm-thing on the main-level branch. Jedi shivered as she slung her arms around what he guessed was the worm thing's neck, or at least around part of one of the folds of fat that surrounded it, and arched her back in ecstatic pleasure as the worm-thing ran a giant, crusted, trembling tongue over her breasts and plucked the marshmallows off her nipples with the tip of the vile-looking appendage. While she moaned in pleasure, he gobbled the marshmallows up.

Jedi gagged.

The worm-thing laughed its guttural bellow and continued to slither along the path to the condo entrance while the Nareed girl slipped up onto his back, held onto the back of his neck and, straddling him with her thighs, rode him while writhing around and moaning and giggling as the worm-thing slid toward the condo entrance, until the front side of the condo obscured them from Jedi's view.

The persistent knot in Jedi's stomach tightened significantly.

A few moments later, the faintly glowing crystal floor lights in the darkened bedroom of Manthi's condo lit up gradually. Jedi, peeking out from the shadows, could see the worm-thing in the bedroom now—carrying and drunkenly swinging a huge crystal carafe filled with some liquid in his tiny, claw-like hands; the Nareed girl still on his back and a naked Manthi coming over and dropping next to a seated Sith on the bed, all of them eerily lit from below so that they cast long, flickering shadows up into the ceiling.

And then Jedi watched in shock and horror as the worm-thing poured some of the liquid into the open and waiting mouths of Sith and Manthi—Manthi with a caressing hand on the meaty proboscis flopping around stiffly between Sith's legs while he played with her breasts—splashing the liquid all over their deep, forest emerald skin as well, following which it and the Nareed girl slipped into the huge bed and joined Sith and Manthi.

And then Jedi couldn't watch any more anymore.

He slammed back into the branch against which he leaned as if pushed back forcefully by the aftershock of what he'd just seen and what it made him feel. He felt that this may have been the last point before losing his mind completely. A living worm-thing with a naked Nareed girl in tow arriving at the condo and joining Jedi's brother and their childhood nurse in bed, was—

The throbbing, throaty cackle of the worm-thing penetrated Jedi's synaesthetic fugue, and in his mind's eye he was once again back in that bed with all of them, hearing the worm-thing grunting and cackling while two Nareed women moaned and squealed in delight as his brother, Sith, in there with them, was groaning in a frenzied, enthusiastic ecstasy of his own.

The dark, cold fire began to burn in the knot in the pit of Jedi's stomach, quickly spreading once again to his body and head, and it was making him woozy.

He began to shake.

Jedi told himself he had to get out of there.

He couldn't take what this was doing to his mind and his senses. Whatever else was going on here, he didn't want to know right now, or else he would simply lose his ability to navigate physical reality. Master Lekh said all he'd need to know he would find out tonight? Jedi wondered if he'd ever live long enough to figure out what he had just witnessed:

Yeah. He had to get out of there, right now, before what he was feeling and thinking and seeing and imagining and even more beyond all that, would end up distracting him enough to make him, both figuratively and literally, lose grip this high up off the ground in the giant branches of a tree that would surpass in height many urban office towers in any Kraian city, and take the plunge he so narrowly avoided only moments ago.

Despite the cold burning spreading through him, Jedi summoned all his concentration and glanced around quickly to take stock of his surroundings—poking his head out of the shadows—and through a somewhat swimming fog eventually focused on the riders berthed in the landing bays on the far side of the condo.

And then he suddenly knew how he would make his getaway:

Steal Sith's rental.

He was confident he could get into the vehicle and take control of it using The Force. All he'd have to do was conjure the image of the rider opening and powering up for him, in the same way the voice had guided him into doing when he opened the locked cargo hold.

Like a swing through the trees, right?

The voice spoke up from his inner aether and told him to forget about moral dilemmas and focus on the task at hand: getting from where he was hiding over the patio overlooking the back of the condo, around the main trunk again, and onto the path that led down the branch running from the condo's front entrance to the rider bays.

And then into Sith's rider and away from here.

Yeah, no problem. A swing through the trees.

Jedi slipped out of the complete shadow of the giant leaf behind which he was hiding, and dropped with a gentle pat onto the hardwood flooring of the condo's patio, level with the main floor of the condo and below the sex circus from hell going on in Manthi's bedroom—

What in the name of The Mother-and-The Father was that worm-thing?

Jedi's mind screamed out to him as he dashed among the shadows of the furnishings and hanging and standing plant life of the garden, around to the side of the condo at the base of the giant dhoob's trunk.

There, where the protective rails that ran about chest high around the perimeter of the patio joined with wall of the tree trunk, he hopped up noiselessly and balanced effortlessly on the top rail in a vigilant crouch.

Running down the middle of this side of the massive tree trunk was what Jedi had imagined it to be when he encountered it the first time getting around to the back of the condo. It was the laddered emergency escape ran all the way of the of the one-hundred fifty stories-length it must have been down to the ground. There were doorways opening onto the ladderway from each condo.

Right now the ladderway served as the halfway house between Jedi's journey from the back patio of the condo to the front patio connected to the walk that led to the parked riders. He would have to jump from the rail, grab hold of one of the rails of the ladderway, swing himself around while stopping his forward motion, and get his feet onto a rung.

With a hundred-fifty storey drop below him if he missed.

From there, it was another jump from the ladderway running down the massive tree trunk, to the front patio.

And he had no more light to do it in than the lambent glow splashing around this side of the condo.

Too much thinking!

The Force was for doing, not for thinking. Just feel and act, Jedi told himself as he breathed deeply, tuned himself in, focused on the railing of the ladderway, and—

Jumped.

He sailed through the darkness surrounding the trunk of the tree and just when he thought its curvature was going to prove to be too wide for him to have made it, he was able to grab on to the ladderway railing with his right hand as the rest of him nearly flew past it, momentum almost carrying him off into the dark but lively abyss below.

Jedi gripped the railing and then willed his body to swing around the rail. Then he stuck his feet out from under his flying crouch so that they caught one of the rungs of the metallic ladderway, and he was able to grip both rails with both hands and steady himself.

It would take a minute to compose himself enough to make the next jump from the ladderway to the top rail of the front patio. Jedi was as equally elated at the feat he'd just performed successfully as he was slightly daunted by the one that still lay immediately ahead.

He still had to get to the front patio from here.

Or else plunge the probable hundred-fifty stories to the ground.

In the dark.

And bounce painfully off who knows what on the way down.

He just had to focus on the top rail of the front patio, where it attached to the trunk of the tree. If he overshot, positively thinking, he'd land on the patio surface and that would be okay, too, if a little noisy. But with all the festivities going on in Manthi's bedroom—

Ugh!—he took a moment to shudder.

—Jedi figured they wouldn't hear a dragosaur, let alone a seventeen cycle-old boy landing clumsily on the patio floor of the condo where right this very moment his brother, along with two Nareed women and a slimy worm-thing, were having sex—

You had to think of that again, didn't you?

Jedi tried to wash the bad taste out of his mind by focusing on the top rail of the front patio.

He saw it, registered it, and closed his eyes and then saw it in his mind's eye; and then breathed in deeply and told himself to land gently and gracefully on the top rail of the patio; and then told himself he was thinking too much again and braced himself against the ladderway, pushed off and—

JUMPED!

And opened his eyes while flying through the air and darkness below him toward the top rail of the front patio—

Then over the front rail of the the patio—

Except for his left ankle, which caught the top rail as he sailed over it.

He toppled over forward, landing painfully on the patio floor on his shoulder instead of in the perfect crouch on top of the railing that he had imagined himself landing.

He rolled out of the fall, onto his back and then immediately up on his feet into an alert crouch, looking around and, both physically and through The Force, scanning for any sign of any attention being paid to him.

Jedi felt the coldness in the pit of his stomach, but it was extremely faint now, as if it were far away or preoccupied more intently with something besides eating him up on the inside. He suspected now the darkness emitting that negative energy gained a stronger hold on his mind the more deeply he focused his thoughts on it, which served to forge a connection that made it easier for it to penetrate him. Focusing on the process and action of escaping seemed to have constricted that connection and the darknesses' physical, mental and emotional influence on him.

So, Jedi concluded, it was a matter of attraction.

He was confident nothing seemed to have paid any note to his somewhat clumsy landing with the albeit graceful finish. He was just grateful, he thought as he set off down the path toward the riders at a run, that he had made it at all, and was now on his feet here instead of being a messy blot on the dense jungle floor of Za.

He was also grateful for the lesson he just learned from stumbling and falling over the patio rail: the one about not celebrating your victories before they're actually won.

Ooooooh! Spanked by the Force!—Jedi thought, grinning.

He ran the length of the tree branch out to the Arrow, where it was tethered magnetically to the parking bay. He took another quick look around to make sure nobody was around. Standing beside the vehicle, he let his arms fall loosely to his sides, bowed his head, and took a few deep breaths. He brought his hands together and intertwined his fingers, using the thumbs and forefingers of each hand to create two linked circles.

Closing his eyes, continuing to breathe deeply and slowly, he let his body relax completely.

He cleared his mind of all thoughts and then visualized the Arrow, doors unlocking, systems powering up.

Then he directed the energy of his thoughts outwards, like sending a burst of light into a dark pool.

Suddenly, the Arrow clicked and chirped.

The security system was disabled.

Jedi kept his eyes closed and continued to hold the image of the powering-up rider in his mind.

A low hum abruptly thrummed, and the rider's main systems started powering up.

Jedi opened his eyes.

Then he smiled.

The vehicle's running markers quickly lit up, outlining its body lines, windows and head and rear bumper assemblies in three dimensions. A gentle hiss emitted as the driver-side door, which Jedi stood facing, broke loose of its magnetic locks and slid pneumatically up.

"This is gonna come in soooooo handy," he quipped quietly, his voice equal parts wondrous awe and confident excitement, a twinkle of amazement in his eyes..

He quickly hopped into the Arrow's driver seat. The systems continued coming online in a harmony of humming as the driver-side door hissed closed.

Jedi examined the dashboard screen ahead of the directional/thrust control stick. The glowing rainbow of variously sized glyphwindows on the black touch-screen, depicting rates and levels and system interactions, told him the vehicle was fully powered up with all systems showing normal and ready. Having disabled the vehicle's security systems while breaking in—The Force was hard-grav for multitasking—he was confident that there would have been no intruder alert on the Arrow's remote control unit that Sith would most likely have had with him; or that was at least somewhere in the condo, if not exactly with him at the moment.

With all systems go and a last quick look around out the rider's windows to confirm nobody or nothing was about, Jedi punched up the power to the polarity generators. This high off the ground, he'd probably need the polarity generators on full crank. The vehicle disengaged from the landing bay's maglock system with an echoing thud, and the vehicle floated freely in the air, as the polarity generators' calibrated their gravitic repulsion to the attractive force of the planetary gravitic constant.

Jedi used the stick to regulate the rider's height. Pushing down or pulling up on the stick made the generators increase or decrease the polarity, allowing the vehicle go up or down. Pushing to either side steered the vehicle. Pushing the stick forward or back determined the vehicle's direction and velocity—the further forward or back, the faster the pneumatic thrusters would make the rider go.

He would maneuver the Arrow down, guessing that must be the way to the ZaNet.

The rider hummed and throbbed quietly throughout the cab as Jedi maneuvered it away from the landing bay and dropped it below the walkway branch of the giant dhoob. The vehicle floated downward and swung from side to side as he controlled its descent.

There would be no way any travel network in Za would appear in the Kraian transport grid database. The thickness of the jungle and something in the strange energy vibrations surrounding them prevented the navigation systems from working, and they were offline. He guessed he'd just have to—

Feel—

—his way out of here.

As the Arrow floated down, Jedi counted the number of condos past which he was dropping, and when he reached twenty-five he saw a marker on the side of the dhoob tree, outlined in light crystals, which, with light-crystal iconoglyphs, informed: High Ring On-Ramp: 10 Levels.

Jedi guessed hopefully that meant the ZaNet, of which he assumed the High Ring would be a part, was ten condo-levels below. He peered out the driver-side window, down over the side of the vehicle, squinting into the darkness below, and saw brightening strings of lights outlining lanes along which Jedi now noticed the occasionally lit-and-outlined rider whoosh by.

He'd get on it, he thought, and hope that there would be some kind of signs he could follow to get out of Za, or if barring that, at least find some way out of the canopied darkness of the gargantuan arboreal thickness and back to some connection with physical Kraian familiarity.

Guiding the rider in its descent, Jedi noted that the vertical drop lane began to slope out of its direct descent into a gently curving horizontal run outlined by the crystal light network, downward toward the brightness of the more intensely lit lanes of the High Ring, parallel to and only a few levels above which Jedi now guided the vehicle, while moving completely clear and away from the giant tree/condo complex.

Jedi figured that "High Ring" also meant "high speed." He could tell, now that he was gliding forward with a gentle gradual drop, that the condo's descent lane was horizontally reorienting in order to merge with the upcoming lanes of the High Ring. As such, it would serve from here as an acceleration lane.

With that in mind, Jedi peered ahead along the crystal-light outlined lane down and ahead, and could see where the parallel light strings narrowed with the distance as they curved into and merged with the thicker and brighter strings of the High Ring's crystal-light network.

A pair of riders whizzed by a couple of lanes below Jedi and sped off into the darkness. Another one came towards him from the opposite direction, sped below the Arrow and out of sight. He noted that the crystal lights outlining the lanes of the High Ring with which he was about to merge were a glowing blue, while those of the lanes carrying traffic in the opposite direction were red.

The rider would have to be up to speed by the time it reached the High Ring in order to merge with any traffic, which by appearances looked to Jedi like it wasn't thick, but still populous enough to pose a threat to carelessness. Jedi hoped he'd be able to navigate a high-speed route with what looked from here like multiple, vertically arranged lanes just like on the MagNet everywhere else on Krai; except here it was in a pitch blackness, with no guidance but for strings of crystal lights rimming the lanes and no idea where it would be taking him.

A swing through the krokin' trees, right?

The acceleration lane began to merge more quickly with the High Ring's lanes, now just below and to the left of his rider.

Well, his stolen rider—Jedi mused

Jedi could now more clearly see the direction into which the High Ring's top lane led.

A rider whooshed under him and sped off along the top lane, and a moment later Jedi saw a second one, two lanes below, scoot by and disappear into the darkness between curving, banking, rising and dropping strips of lights.

While guiding the rider toward the approaching highway, Jedi slowly eased the stick forward to increase thrust towards maximum.

He checked over his shoulder. Behind him, the top lane was clear. A rider swooshed by one lane below. He eased the stick down and the Arrow dropped toward the highway's top lane just as he hit top speed. He glanced once more over his shoulder, pulled up slightly on the stick and leveled the vehicle off. The High Ring lane was coming up quickly, and he prepared to merge with it.

At this speed, it took a disorienting few seconds for Jedi to get his eyes used to following the crystal lights outlining the lane. He relaxed and felt his way into all of it with the guidance of The Force, and soon he could clearly focus on and follow the lane ahead, brightly marked, dipping, curving slightly to the left and then gradually dimming as it disappeared into the darkness of nighttime Za.

Jedi steered the Arrow along the lane and banked and dropped with it as the light strings zoomed by each side of the vehicle and out of view behind him. He was intensely focused on the lane's vanishing point in the darkness, in order to be prepared for where it would lead, while guiding the vehicle with peripheral vision and instinct. Driving like this, in the dark, was not unlike playing on a magride simulator. You focused on the horizon because at maximum thrust, what was coming up beside you was already too close to worry about if it was going to hit you anyway, and you needed to keep a good eye on what was coming up from way ahead. Staying focused on the horizon let you see anything that might be a danger in enough time to avoid it. Steering through where you were traveling was accomplished by peripheral sense and instinct.

Jedi didn't have to worry about oncoming traffic from the neighboring bank of lanes moving in the opposite direction, since it was separated by enough distance not to present the threat of head-on collision. He did have to worry, though about anything coming up from behind or below him, as well as making sure not to steer out of the lane and end up a fatal, metal encrusted bug splat on a giant tree's black but faintly incandescent-veined trunk.

He could see the head and running lights outlining the riders traveling the opposite lanes below. He checked his rear-view mirror and saw a set of headlights approach quickly, drop away into the lane below him, pass under the Arrow and speed off into the darkness ahead.

It quickly got easier and easier to follow the lane through the daunting darkness. He soon became comfortable guiding the vehicle along the lane's rises and falls, banks and curves and combinations of all the above, without paying too much attention to the fact that in this darkness, he had absolutely no idea what he was speeding so quickly through and what he could so quickly, easily and without warning slam into.

He decided to stay in the top lane because he figured that if there was a way out of Za from the High Ring, it would either have to be through the tree canopy, in which case he would emerge above Za, or through the side of the massively tall jungle. In that case, he would emerge on the outskirts of Za and closer to civilization.

Although he hadn't the faintest clue as to where he was, the directional-indicator window on the dash-screen told him he was currently heading north-by-northeast. Since Za sprawled across the whole southern edge of the continent, it followed that as long as he kept to a northerly direction, he would eventually emerge on the side of Za facing the plains separating the jungles from the southern cities. Emerging on the south side of Za would put him on the edge of the South Polar Sea.

In any case, guessing by the amount of time it had taken them to travel from the rental agency to Manthi's condo, Jedi estimated he was at least two hours away from civilization. He would rather find a topside exit than shoot the tubes through an unrelentingly perilous rat maze in total darkness. That way he could at least make his way over the top of Za, instead of weaving between the massive trees of the jungle in almost complete blackness, He wondered how the denizens of Za managed their way around in this darkness.

Then he considered maybe it was meant to be that way: to discourage intrusion or at least complicate it when it occurred.

Given how even a cursory contact with Za—like Jedi's right now—made one feel, Jedi couldn't think why anybody would choose to live in Za, even though he knew there was a society here as evolved, if a little more materially primitive, than the rest of Krai. Exiles, outcasts by choice, would naturally feel a subconscious psychological fear of infiltration, especially by the KSF trying to bust up any Utàr operations from within the jungles.

Until tonight, Jedi had never been to Za, and never even had the inkling of a reason to want to go. He knew what life in Za was like only from what he had seen, read and heard—and now by being here, felt—and he knew it wasn't anything he liked.

Life in Za felt like it was all about hiding, Jedi had concluded, both for its natural inhabitants as well as for The Exiles who chose to physically separate themselves from civil society. The natural inhabitants were constantly running and hiding from one another, either on the prowl for food while hiding from predators; or, as in the case of the carnivores, hiding from each other while hunting for food or one another.

In the case of The Exiles, they weren't only hiding from the gigantic carnivorous predatory mammals, avians, amphibians, saurians, arthropods and flora, but also from the society that they chose to leave.

In order to survive, The Exiles still needed to avail themselves of the material benefits of that same society, like technology and consumer goods. Things they could only get from civil society covertly, because separating themselves from civil society also meant separating themselves from access to the mechanisms of legal exchange for material necessity and prosperity available to participating members of civil society.

All membership in civil society took, Jedi understood, was being responsible and accountable for your own actions, responsible to your Nareed brother or sister by being not harmful to them and helpful in need, and agreeing that organized living required a modicum of rules to protect every individual's free pursuit and maintenance of well-being and prosperity.

Jedi couldn't understand what about that there was to reject. But then he thought of what he now understood must have been the tortured feelings manacling Sith's sensibilities, and he suddenly saw—not just saw but now suddenly understood and felt—the irrational lengths to which the dichotomous, simultaneous attachment to and fear of pain could drive an individual. He suspected it was Sith's pain, which Jedi was only now beginning to sense and fathom, that drove him to abandon whatever connection he felt to his family and Nareed society in general, in favor of whatever connection he must have had to and in Za.

Jedi understood that a person could become so controlled by their pain that they could wantonly abandon themselves to the destructive influence of fear, rather than do what was necessary to conquer it and remain in control of one's self.

He understood it was weakness and fear that drove such an individual, and therefore it was weakness and fear to which such a person was enslaved, being forced to make choices with destructive consequences without having the strength to resist doing so.

After everything revealed to him today, he now also understood the extent to which Sith's pain had evidently taken him so quickly down so dark a path—and Jedi could only imagine how far down that path Sith had traveled, since an entire lifetime of his own complete ignorance of this side of his twin brother had only begun to be illuminated for him earlier this afternoon.

In one mystic flash, Jedi understood and saw all of that, and then he understood and saw what life in Za must turn a person into, with nothing but fear and pain and hiding and fighting against—and taking—life in order to survive.

But what was it that Sith could be so afraid of that it caused him so much pain?

The irony of it all, Jedi considered, lay in the fact that whatever fear or pain an individual thought they were fleeing by leaving civil society for the jungles, it was only into an environment of even more intense fear, potentially greater pain, and a constant state-of-being in both, to which The Exiles ended up running.

Then Jedi considered Master Lekh.

He came from Za.

But that thought led Jedi to the consideration that Master Lekh went to Za not to reject, run, or hide from anything, but to seek and find something he felt he couldn't find because of certain constraints to such discovery in civilization. He went to Za not to run from anything, but towards something; not to avoid anything of which he was afraid, but to actively seek out that which he didn't know, in a place any average civilized Nareed was wise to fear.

That proved to Jedi it wasn't Za itself that defined the Exile plight.

It was their individual choices that did.

Right now, Jedi chose to pay attention to the lane as it suddenly dipped steeply and then banked sharply to the right. He steered the rider into the bank as he pushed down on the stick to follow the drop.

He also decided it would be a good time to start looking for a way out.

Za denizens had to have a way to exit the jungle thickness somewhere. The High Ring couldn't run this high up without access points to and from above. By the lavish style of the condos he saw at that level, Jedi guessed the High Ring serviced the most affluent Exiles, while lower Rings or other Ways serviced the lower level of the Exile social structure.

WHAT WAS THAT WORM-THING!

When he thought, "jungle inhabitants," he reminded himself that it wasn't only Exile Nareed in the jungles. Some pretty strange creatures must also live in the jungle that no civilized Nareed had ever imagined; and that led him to the talking, laughing, drinking and copulating worm-thing:

Definitely a strange creature.

The vast, thick jungles of Za had not been penetrated or explored by any civilized Nareed to any extent. Throughout all of known Kraian history, nobody who had ever set out for an exploration of the jungle had ever returned or had ever been heard of again. It was only since the advent of the Utàr and stepped-up criminal activity in the cities over the last sixty cycles that forced the issue, when the KSF began sending operatives to gather intelligence on The Utàr from within.

While the rest of the world still had all its speculation and mythos about Za, the KSF at least now had a pretty good picture of what went on in the jungles.

But no KSF agent Jedi had ever heard of was ever known to have encountered a giant talking, laughing, drinking and copulating worm-thing.

Jedi steered the Arrow out of the bank as it rose and then straightened and flattened out for some distance ahead.

How was it that word of such an evidently sentient life form such as the worm-thing had never got out? Nareed civilization was seven-thousand cycles old, and Nareed had chosen exile in Za for thousands of cycles before that.

But no word Jedi had ever heard spoken of what was or might be in Za was ever known to have told of a giant talking, laughing, drinking and copulating worm-thing.

Added to that was the fact that science estimated that the Nareed have existed on their world for approximately twenty-three thousand cycles. That estimate was based on the discovery of the Protos, the oldest DNA-dated Nareed physical remains known, uncovered during archeological digs in Rai last century.

Jedi didn't doubt that Za—with its gigantic trees, the shadows and darkness, humidity, and the depth and richness of the flora and the earth closer to the ground—must have created a thickness of growth with a dampness that would lead to some incredibly strange decomposition and bio-fecundity that could have spawned something as weird as a worm-thing two Nareed-lengths long.

But one that could communicate with Nareed and fly a magrider?

If the jungles of Za were wellspring to a species of sentient being in the form of a giant worm, then why has there never been—well, until now, apparently—any contact between two sentient species sharing the same planet for at least twenty-three thousand cycles, when both of them would appear—as giant worm-things flying riders would indicate—to have the cognitive and technological capabilities of doing so?

Suddenly, ahead in the darkness, aside from the occasional distant glows from some kind of suspended settlements under and past which the High Ring ran, Jedi noticed the first sign of a sign approaching, outlined and written in light, suspended in the darkness to the right outside the still-straight and flat lane.

As he sped forward and the lane grew larger, Jedi could make out that in glowing green crystal iconoglyphs, the marker read: OUT-RAMP AHEAD.

He peered up through the Arrow's glass sunsroof, searching through the darkness as it sped by, focusing his vision as deeply into the blackness as he could, forcing his vision to slice through the obsidian nothingness and let his senses get a bead on where the underside of the jungle canopy might be.

He saw no way out above.

Jedi looked back down and his heart jumped a beat as he noticed the lane ahead dipped slightly and then forked to the right and left. The left side curved off and continued on as the rest of the High Ring, disappearing in the darkness as strings of luminescent points outlining layered lanes along which the occasional set of lights whooshed in relative gravitic silence in opposite directions.

The right side, however, was a single lane that veered off and curved steeply straight up into the darkness.

There were no lambent fogs of light off and up anywhere around to where the right forking lane rose. Chances were it wasn't an off-ramp to another treetop community. That sign, therefore, couldn't have meant anything else but an exit out of the jungle.

Jedi didn't have time to analyze though, because the correlation of high velocity to rapidly decreasing physical distance meant it was time to chose and do, not think.

Trusting his instincts and letting himself be guided by The Force, Jedi chose and did.

He quickly checked all his mirrors and glanced out the window to make sure nothing was coming up on him from the lane behind or below.

The lane dipped down.

Jedi eased the vehicle into the downslope.

A rider whined by in the lane underneath him, followed by another immediately after it, two lanes below. They banked left, away from the solitary, rising lane on the right.

The lane started to level out ahead.

Jedi prepared to steer the Arrow toward the exit lane coming up quickly.

In the corner of his eye, he noticed the two riders disappearing into the darkness off to the left.

He was almost at the fork in the lanes.

It was coming at him unbelievably fast.

He checked his mirrors. Seeing no quickly approaching lights behind him, he determined it was safe to ease the stick back slowly from full-forward. The retro-thrusters kicked in and the vehicle began to reduce speed.

The right fork continued flat for a short distance past the split, before it curved up into its eventual completely vertical rise.

Jedi steered the decelerating rider into the right fork.

The Arrow flew along into the rising curve of the out-ramp.

He pulled back and up on the stick and the rider rose with the upward curve while continuing its deceleration. By the time the exit lane went fully vertical, Jedi had the rider at minimum thrust. He pulled up on the stick and the vehicle made a smooth transition from the curve to the vertical until he was no longer moving forward but straight up.

Jedi looked out the driver-side window and could see the streams of light below him that were the High Ring off to the left.

He looked through the sunsroof while keeping the stick pulled all the way up as the Arrow floated upward.

He suddenly noticed the cubical, luminous tunnel of the out-ramp that was outlined by crystal marker lights came to an end not too much further above him, beyond which there was just the otherwise ubiquitous darkness.

But, he surmised hopefully, this would be the darkness which would lead to escape, while the darkness below had presented a speedy, harrowing thrill ride with a potentially painful end only seconds ago.

Jedi took a breath and wiped the back of his free hand across his brow when he noticed he had been sweating the whole ride.

The vehicle continued floating upward. The crystal marker lights of the lane passed away on either side of Jedi and disappeared from his view below the rising rider.

He looked back up through the sunsroof and still saw nothing but blackness above.

Then it occurred to him that if you couldn't see, you could hear.

Jedi activated the driver-side window, and the pane slid away into the body. He poked his head out and listened.

There was and intensely thick and deep din, with all it's piercings, chirpings, shriekings, roarings, scratchings and whooshings, bouncing in echo all around the rider as it rose through the darkness of the massive jungle trees.

And then, suddenly, the darkness went silent.

Jedi started and quickly popped his head back into the cab when the sounds of the Arrow's navigation system coming online broke through that moment of pure stillness Jedi had experienced while floating upwards.

That meant the system had locked onto the nearest signal generator of the Global Positioning Net ...

That meant he was clear of the jungle canopy and in the open air above it.

That meant he was out of Za!

He popped the stick out of the shift track and the vehicle stopped rising and hovered, the polarity generators locked in a holding repulsion rate.

Quite a ride!—Jedi thought, relief finally washing over all of him.

He looked through the forward windshield and scanned the horizon quickly.

It was dark.

However, unlike the menacing, unfamiliar, strange-vibration darkness of the jungles, which seemed to be permeated with a faint but omniaudient, echoing and disturbing throb, this was a familiar darkness:

The darkness of the open, Kraian night sky.

The only visuals Jedi could make out were the slight dips or gashes in darkness that was the irregular surface of the jungle canopy below the hovering rider, distinguishable from the total blackness above and around by the movement of the treetop leaves in the gentle wind. The jungle canopy was like a vast, wavy fabric above which Jedi found himself floating; somewhere where he was surrounded by a sea of jungle in the sunsless Kraian night.

The only thing Jedi could hear was the humming of the Arrow's polarity generators.

While taking quick stock of his sensory state, Jedi noted that along with the persistent cold fire, the tenseness that had clenched his stomach the whole time he had been in Za was gone. Being free of the jungle somehow meant being free of some negative energy influence associated with whatever darkness had its home there.

A darkness that included bizarre, giant, talking worm-things that flew riders and copulated with Nareed, he reminded himself reluctantly for the uncounted time.

Jedi felt light, floating in the air above the jungle ceiling, under the inky blackness of the Kraian night sky, with the inky blackness of Za rolling off into the inky blackness below in all directions around him.

But at least now he didn't have a forest of giant trees to navigate at high speed through that darkness; giant trees into which at any second he could have slammed and been done in before he would have been able to blink one last time.

He was exhausted.

Right now, after the hellish thrill-ride through Za; talking, copulating worm-things; a copulating Sith and their former childhood nurse copulating with giant, copulating worm-things; discovering his brother must be somehow connected to The Utàr, or in the best case, at the least in some way connected to somebody involved in some underground criminal structures and activity; a training session this afternoon in which his brother had attacked him with an obvious intent to do serious harm with a mysterious and dangerous weapon ...

He just wanted to get home and get to bed.

He'd go to Master Lekh with all of what he'd seen and learned tonight only after at least a few hours' sleep. He'd need some time to completely shut down and recharge after all this plus the night of travel he still had ahead of him; and all the mind-blowing that was going to go on along the way as he contemplated all the mind-blowing that had gone on since this afternoon, a time that now seemed half an age, not half a day, ago.

Jedi felt like all this had punched him halfway around the world from maintaining a steady grip on his mind right now.

That's why he didn't want to spend the next six or so hours it would take to reach The Valley contemplating Za, Sith and Manthi in Za, Sith and Manthi in Za having sex with a giant, talking worm-thing that flew riders, nor any of what any of that might mean.

If he did, he was afraid his brain might fizz out from the overload.

But how the hell would he keep his mind off what he'd just been through?

Suddenly, Jedi shook with a start as, either in his mind or somehow projected out into the blackness of the night ahead of him, he saw the fait outlines of a face forming.

Then a warm flood washed over his entire body when he saw it happened to form the one thing he could focus on in all the world that had a connection to his essential being powerful enough to keep him distracted from his thoughts and feelings on the bizarre last twelve or so hours:

Zita.

He'd think of her all the way home.

For a second, he thought of using the Arrow's onboard transcom to call her, but then decided it wouldn't be a good idea for there to be a record of a communication to her from a vehicle rented to Sith or, now that Jedi thought of it, whatever alias he might have operated under when he did whatever it was he did when he was on his own time, apparently in some pretty strange and illicit company. In the rush to catch up to Sith earlier this afternoon, Jedi had only now realized he hadn't had the time think of stopping to get his mobile from his chambers.

He raised the driver-side window while glancing at the navigator readout on the dash, and saw that he was southeast of Yula, near the center between the northern edge of Za and its coastal side along the bottom of the continent.

In other words, somewhere right in the middle of the jungle.

At full thrust, it would be—as he had estimated earlier and the navigator window now confirmed—about two hours before he'd reach the suburbs of Yula where he'd left his Explorer.

He'd have to figure out how and where to ditch the Arrow first, before he could get his magrider and take the GTN back home to Rai.

He wouldn't be in bed before dawn—

Then it suddenly dawned on him that he could ditch the Arrow right in the rental agency parking lot. That would do them a service, get a headache off his shoulders, and leave Sith with some explaining to do: first of all, to himself as he tries to figure out what happened to his rental when he wakes up in the morning, or gets wakened by a transcom from the rental agency asking him how his rental vehicle got back on the lot without him.

Jedi smiled at the thought of that.

Not very mindful to take pleasure from that thought, he reminded himself.

But he couldn't deny that on some base level, way below what he knew was right and good, sticking it to his brother did feel heavy-grav.

He took a deep, calming breath, exhaled, and leaned back into the seat as he popped the stick out of neutral and swung the Arrow around to match the vector that the navigator window was showing for the vehicle to take to Yula.

The navigator chirped, and the tiny vehicle icon in the center of the circular navigator window lit up brightly when the rider was oriented.

Jedi pushed the stick forward, the thrusters engaged, and the Arrow accelerated gradually.

Not wanting to attract any attention either from the jungles or the KSF surveillance skyriders he knew regularly flew over Za, Jedi switched off all the vehicle's external lighting. Gaining speed, the Arrow rocketed off like a silhouette across a thick, syrupy ocean of gravitic and air waves, urgently through the darkness of the trees below and the sky above.

CHAPTER XXII

Out of the same, black hole in the opaque waviness of the jungle canopy from which the Arrow had just emerged and sped away, the thrumming of polarity generators broke into the silence above the trees a moment before the dark silhouette of a magrider, all of it's external lighting also shut down, rose almost imperceptibly into the inky air beneath the open Kraian night sky.

Inside the vehicle, in the glow of the dash-screen, a Nareed male with a long scar across his cheek squinted ahead and was just able to make out the ripple of darkness receding into the night that was the Arrow he'd been following since he had seen it leave the condo complex.

The butt of a thick, smoking a rooti—a fragrant herb found growing on the bark of some trees in Za—hung from the side of his mouth. He took one long drag, exhaled forcefully while tossing the butt out the open driver-side window, then turned his head and spat after it.

He took out his mobile and punched in a few commands.

CHAPTER XXIII

The mobile's chirping woke Manthi up.

She didn't know how long it had been sounding off, but it wasn't stopping.

Somebody was anxious to get a hold of her.

In a narcotized, post-coital haze, she slipped out of the bed over passed-out bodies and stumbled in the dark through whatever mess was on the floor until she reached the stairs that led down to the lower level.

She staggered down the stairs and then, finding the living room table by the front picture window, fumbled through the mess all over it until she grabbed hold of the mobile.

She punched in the connection and the irritating chirping ceased.

A face appeared on the screen.

It was OkarJood, one of Manthi's personal security operatives.

"Whaddaya want, Jood?" an irritated Manthi slurred sleepily while rubbing her throbbing head.

"You got heavy-grav problems, Boss," the face proclaimed, while ironically smiling.

Manthi was in no condition or mood for mind games.

"Whaddaya talking about, Jood? Do you know what time it is?" she growled impatiently, swaying slightly as she stood naked in the living room window.

"Take a look out your front window," Jood advised, cryptically.

"Jood, I—"

"Tell me if you notice anything missing," he chuckled.

"Missing?" Manthi asked, now suddenly peering out the window auto-post-suggestively. "Missing from what?"

"You don't see?" Jood asked in reply.

Manthi saw nothing but the lit patio in front of her condo, the lit walkway to the parking bays where her green Tigris was parked, above which was also berthed a tan Convoy and—

Huh?

Then it hit her:

"Where's Sith's rider?" Manthi questioned herself aloud, squinting in narcotic confusion at the empty magnetic docking berth where Sith's silver Arrow rental should have been—

But wasn't!

"I don't know," OkarJood answered. "But you'll never guess in a million cycles who I just saw flying off in it."

CHAPTER XXIV

"... sky above."

Jedi sat back, exhausted from reliving his experience in Za while relating every last detail of it to his teacher.

Master Lekh sat silently.

He was staring off into the stream as it bubbled softly by.

He didn't look up at all after Jedi finished telling him the last of everything that had transpired on his long, strange trip into Za.

It seemed his gentle old mentor was almost unaware that Jedi had stopped speaking.

After the long ride home across half a continent, Jedi had put down his Explorer into its berth on the patio that overlooked the courtyard outside his chambers deep in the castle complex just before dawn.

He had slipped into bed and slept most of the morning, until somewhat disturbing dreams that were gently prodding him all through his fitful rest, had suddenly grown more disturbing and less gentle, and Jedi woke just before noon.

While he breakfasted in his chambers, a visibly perturbed Master Lekh had arrived unannounced at his door. The teacher appeared and felt to Jedi anxious and preoccupied, and Jedi immediately sensed a tension in him that was putting a great strain on his usually well-calibrated and balanced feelings.

Without any pleasantries, Master Lekh suggested Jedi finish up quickly and they take a walk down into the Royal Botanical Gardens just outside The Castle.

Master Lekh stood silently looking out the window into the courtyard as Jedi cleaned up, and then they left. He also led Jedi silently all along their way through the labyrinth of corridors out of The Castle. Before leaving Jedi's chambers, all the worried and agitated teacher had said was that they should wait until they could sit down somewhere and have a good talk.

Once clear of The Castle and in the thickly forested, tropical pathways leading through The Gardens, Jedi had sensed Master Lekh had relaxed somewhat, even though by his appearance any relaxed state wasn't physically perceptible. His energy seemed to have calmed to Jedi, but his features remained strained, as if in aftershock of some stress that had obviously shaken him; or still was.

It wasn't until they had made it deep into the living monument to Krai's floral splendor, and sat on some plush grass underneath a giant fern on the banks of a gushing stream, that Master Lekh had begun by telling Jedi that he had been awakened in the middle of the night by a fear so intense it had felt as if it were tearing at him right through his subconsciousness and into him in his sleep.

It had been the feeling of a dark and crushingly imposing presence that Master Lekh sensed had surrounded the entire Castle, but that had seemed especially concentrated around him.

And now, Master Lekh had said, it was focused around Jedi, too.

"How come I can't feel it?" the young Prince, with slightly bloodshot eyes and a mildly haggard expression on his face, had asked.

"Because it's hiding from you," the teacher had replied. "But not from me. So I can see it. Now concentrate your awareness on my energy," Master Lekh had said.

Jedi did.

A moment after he focused on connecting with the vibrational frequency of Master Lekh's essential energy fields, Jedi felt the same cold, burning stabbing as he had last night in Za, like a dagger lightly jabbing into his stomach. Only now it felt weaker, as if it was originating from somewhere far off, from across some long distance. Then he had noticed a dark-gray shadow faintly outlining Master Lekh's own body—a pale superimposition shimmering darkly in the air along the outlines of his teacher's figure—that resembled in look and in feel the more opaque darkness Jedi had seen and felt outside Manthi's condo.

"You can feel it and even see it, can't you?" Master Lekh had asked.

Jedi confirmed, silently nodding with a stupefied expression.

"Be wary from now on, Jedi," Master Lekh had warned, making a deliberate effort to be simultaneously economical, concise and acute with his words. "About everything. Down to what you choose to think about at times. You'll recognize how safe it is for you to freely act if you stay in tune with The Force. I believe all it can do is sense our energy, but nothing of the substance of what we think, feel, say or do. For now. I believe it soon may be able to do even that. I wanted to make sure we were clear enough away from The Castle and out somewhere where we'd be less likely to be overheard anyhow. Now—"

The teacher heaved a heavy sigh and leaned back against the thick stem of the fern.

"Tell me everything that happened last night."

Master Lekh had reached inside his robe and pulled out a pouch of baydl, a green leaf chewed for it's mildly narcotic and calming effect.

Jedi had begun, and for over an hour related to his teacher the tale that had ended moments ago with the teacher's silent, almost non-reaction to the entire fantastic episode of Jedi's adventure in Za. During the whole time, Master Lekh had spoken only to ask some clarifications about the worm-thing, but nothing else.

Jedi couldn't take it anymore. He was so hopped up on adrenaline from the excitement of having so vividly relived all of his experiences of the night before in the re-telling of them to Master Lekh, he was on overload.

"Master!" he called out to his ruminating teacher who looked as if he were some distance away. "What's going on?"

Master Lekh finally looked up from the burbling stream into which he had been staring so distantly and obviously preoccupied in deep considerations.

Without looking at the Prince, he sighed heavily once more, smiled and said:

"Now let me tell you a story."

He then proceeded for the next two hours to tell Jedi everything—everything—he had told the Queen and the Prince when he had first come to them that one very strange day seventeen cycles ago.

Told them, and now Jedi, about what he knew beyond a doubt was happening on Krai, to the Nareed, and everything—everything—he knew about Jedi and Sith's apparent roles in the future of perhaps a whole much more than just the world they knew as Krai.

CHAPTER XXV

It was early one morning, a week after that and three before Jedi and Zita's engagement ceremony, that Master Lekh summoned Jedi to his office in the predawn twilight before anybody in The Castle would be up and liable to take note of their meeting.

There had been no word from or about Sith or his whereabouts since his what only Master Lekh and Jedi knew had been his disappearance into Za. While whatever danger or threat was gathering, Master Lekh advised, Jedi shouldn't preoccupy himself too much with worry, but should lead a normal, daily life as he would under any other circumstances.

Except that under any other circumstances, he wouldn't have been facing some cataclysmic conflict in which he was one of two evident focal points while doing so.

Jedi arrived at his teacher's office promptly—if tired and bewildered-looking—having taken the time only to wash his face and dress after being awakened by the transcom. When he walked in, blinking at the brightness of the overhead lightbank in Master Lekh's office, he hadn't the faintest idea of what was waiting for him, except the inkling he'd got of an irrepressible excitement in his teacher's voice when he called, which told Jedi that something big was coming.

It was what he liked to call one of his "Jedi Mind Tricks." Using The Force to pre-experience intuitively what will happen before it does, so that you could be prepared to act when it did.

Jedi was completely unprepared for what Master Lekh did as soon as he walked into the office.

"Here!" Master Lekh turned from the window through which he'd been admiring the dawn, and without warning, tossed something metallically tubular to Jedi that the young Prince caught instinctively in one hand despite the surprise.

"I thought you might like one of these, too," Master Lekh announced.

Jedi stared down at the device as the teacher came up next to him.

"What's ..." Jedi asked, slightly disarmed. "This looks like—"

"I'm told it's called a lightsaber," the beaming Master Lekh said.

Jedi was stunned, staring with awe and wonder at the weapon in his hands, turning it over, examining it.

"Is this ... Is it Sith's?" he asked Master Lekh, finally looking away from the weapon and at his teacher.

"No, I told you," Master Lekh replied. "It's yours. I confiscated Sith's from him, took it apart, saw how it worked, and built you one myself. I think I may even have boosted the fiber-optic conduit capacity by installing medical-grade fiber-optics instead of the net-grade conduits Sith used."

Jedi looked up at Master Lekh quizzically.

"That means," the teacher smiled. "It's frequencies are more concentrated and sharper, and will cut through much more than just skin and bone."

Jedi looked down again at the weapon—a lightsaber?—in his hand.

His mind was swooning in awe and wonder. He recalled the shocking, burning sting the incredible blade of fiery light had delivered through his whole body with just the cursory glance Sith had given him last week. Now, with the same kind of weapon in his hand, all he felt was a warm energy flowing from the cool, metal handle, up into his arm and warming his whole being with the characteristic tingles of a strong, positive Force connection.

"You like it?" Master Lekh asked.

Jedi broke out of his wonder, and concentrated on how the weapon felt as he handled the cylinder, and whether he did like it.

He decided he did.

"It's mine? I can keep it?" Jedi gushed with almost childlike glee and fascination—tempered by a hint of innocent skepticism—as he looked to Master Lekh hopefully.

The teacher chuckled. "Yes. Yours," he replied.

A wide grin broke out on Jedi's face that matched intensity with the admiring and excited gleam in his eyes.

"Before you get too excited," Master Lekh sobered Jedi a little. "Remember, this is something like nothing you've ever seen or handled before. Using the power of light as a weapon, a deadly weapon, isn't like swinging a baton or even wielding a vegetable carver."

Jedi fingered the clear crystal button on the handle.

Master Lekh spoke out in warning. "You'll have to learn how to use it properly, and how to incorporate your connection with The Force into ..."

Jedi pressed the crystal with his thumb.

A piercing, sapphire-blue blade of light shot out the circular crystal plate at the top of the handle, startling Master Lekh. It formed a tight beam that held its integrity for about an arm's length.

Jedi stared, open mouthed, in amazement at the bolt of light pulsing with a hypnotic rhythm not just through his whole hand, but throughout his whole body. Through his mind. It was as if his entire being and all the energy he had access to through The Force were in perfectly balanced union with the light energy emanating from the weapon's handle. It made him feel warm all over. It made him feel like he could do anything while fearing nothing.

He looked up at Master Lekh and smiled ...

... Then quickly twirled the lightsaber so that the handle swung around his open palm, under his hand, over his wrist and came to a rest back in his closed hand, with the crackling, humming and throbbing light blade cutting a fiery crystalline arc through the air and coming to a rest in a ready position in front of Jedi's torso.

Then Jedi looked away from Master Lekh and closed his eyes.

He crouched into a defensive stance, feet shoulder width apart, left foot slightly ahead, weight balanced, his left forearm up and guarding his chest and midriff.

A smile crept onto Jedi's face as he began slowly swinging the handle of the lightsaber just as he had previously done. He circled his wrist while his open hand directed the handle by pivoting it around the wrist in a circular motion. The lightsaber spun faster and faster and faster, the blade of light soon becoming a luminous, streaky blur, occasionally crackling sharply while emanating a humming throb at a slightly elevated frequency than it did when it was at rest.

With the saber up to speed, Jedi began moving his right hand toward his center while continuing the spinning, and the lightsaber twirled from its forward arc on his right side to an arc right in front of and circling him.

Master Lekh, transfixed in fascination at Jedi's almost magical and immediate prowess with something he had only briefly once seen and never before either touched or handled, took a cautionary few steps back, putting himself out of the deadly light blade's path.

Jedi began moving his arm back and forth across his chest laterally and diagonally, making the weapon spin around on either side of his body.

Then he changed hands in mid spin, and repeated the same patterns again, only with his left hand.

Then he began alternating the lightsaber handle between hands, tossing it casually from left to right and back while in mid spin, always catching it without breaking the smooth momentum.

Then he abruptly threw the lightsaber in the air with the blade twirling end-over handle while he spun around in place, and caught the weapon behind his back in his right hand as the lightsaber fell back down while he came out of his turn.

Sweeping the lightsaber out from behind his back and bringing the weapon straight up in front of him with both hands, Jedi fingered the power crystal on the handle, and the light blade disappeared with a loud and sharp "CRACK!"

He opened his eyes and saw a bewildered Master Lekh.

"You mean like that?" the grinning youth asked his mentor while casually flipping the handle over and over in his hand.

Master Lekh lost his astonished expression and broke out into a wide grin of his own.

"Yeah. Yeah." He nodded, while laughing quietly in disbelief. "Like that."

CHAPTER XXVI

It was the night before the engagement party.

Three weeks ...

And still no word from Sith.

Even though Queen Deleb and King Eloh had kept a celebratory public face, they were nevertheless privately anxious about the worrisome disappearance of their son on such an imminently auspicious occasion and amongst the growing rumblings of courtesan gossipers.

It tore Master Lekh apart to keep them in the dark, so to speak. But he was convinced beyond any doubt that letting them know all that he knew would only complicate matters by potentially inspiring them to interfere in a way disadvantageous to much more than they may have understood.

Finishing off some transcom correspondence before going to prepare for a private dinner engagement, Master Lekh was startled out of his concentration when his office door suddenly slid open with an airy hiss.

It took him by surprise because he distinctly recalled having set the door for CHIME RESPONSE ACTIVATION ONLY. It shouldn't have opened without his verbal command, after he determined any visitor's identity by monitor, and instructed the security system to allow entry.

He flushed with hot and cold and froze down to the level of thought, when he realized it was Sith he was watching stroll casually into the office, strutting with a cocky grin on his face and a menacing twinkle in his fiery, bloodshot, yellow eyes.

It took several seconds for it to even register in Master Lekh's mind that it was Sith, and it didn't hit him until he focused on what was an even bigger and more astounding surprise than the abrupt, unannounced intrusion:

"Your hair ..." was all Master Lekh could say as he stared, trying to assess what he thought of what he was seeing. "Your face ..."

"Oh? You like it?" Sith asked playfully, and twirled around in place with his arms open wide to give Master Lekh the complete impression. "Just had it done ..." he said, paused pregnantly, then burst out laughing with a disturbed edge to his voice.

"Sith, are you ..."

"... Specially," he cackled. "For Jedi's big party tomorrow. I think it looks pretty sharp!"

Sith suddenly swung on his heels and stopped, grinning madly, directly facing the seated, completely agape Master Lekh, who thought he detected what appeared to be a disturbing glow around the eyes of the youth, whom he now barely recognized in any sense as the boy he had spent seventeen cycles assiduously mentoring.

But it was the complete absence of Sith's once long hair, and the intricate tattoo-work that covered his bald head and face that had captured Master Lekh's fascination while taking him so aback. Aside from the same black cloak, violet tunic and black trousers in which he had last seen the boy three weeks ago, Master Lekh couldn't see much of anything that he had known so well for so long as Sith.

He didn't know what to think.

"I can see you don't know what to think," Sith, still grinning, expressed the thought. "Never mind the style critique now. Where's Jedi?" he asked, almost commandingly.

"Jedi ...?" Master Lekh repeated blankly, still transfixed by Sith's completely bald, tattooed pate.

"Uh huh," Sith nodded, with hammed up encouragement. "My brother? You know? The one getting engaged tomorrow? I have to take my brother for a night on the town before he makes the biggest mistake of his life!"

Before having the chance to even think, Master Lekh felt himself strangely compelled to answer, as if while Sith were talking, a hand were reaching into Master Lekh's mind and pushing the information out of his brain and into his mouth, while he was powerless to resist. "He's in The Gardens ..."

"... With Zita." Sith finished the sentence. He suddenly became bitter and screwed up his face as if he had just tasted something very sour.

As abruptly as the look had appeared, though, it melted away, and was replaced by the former spiteful irreverence burning in his eyes and oozing out the spaces between the syllables of his words.

"Thanks, Old Man," Sith winked at Master Lekh. "See you at the party tomorrow!"

He paused for a moment as if just recalling something.

"Oh yeah," Sith exclaimed. "I just remembered something, Old Man!"

He reached into his cloak, pulled out a black cylindrical handle with a red crystal encrusted in it and a crystal plate on it's end, and tossed it casually and playfully in his hand a few times, catching it with a loud "SNAP!" in front of Master Lekh's face.

"You can keep that lightsaber you took from me. I built myself another one!" Sith laughed and slipped the weapon back under his cloak, where it clung magnetically to his belt.

He noted the look of surprise on his teacher's face. Within that, though, he detected something more.

Quickly reaching out with his senses and into Master Lekh's thoughts, he got a faint sense of what it was the old mystic was attempting to hide from him.

"Or you can give it to Jedi, for all I care!" he declared with a knowing laugh.

Master Lekh paled. "Sith, where have you been all—"

Sith cut him off with a wild cackle.

"See you at the par-teeeee!" he sing-songed, turned, and strolled out of the office as casually as he had entered, not even pausing his stride while the door slid open in perfect timing to let him pass through.

The door slid closed again, cutting Sith's laughter off from the ears of a still-stunned Master Lekh, who sat swaying weakly at his desk as if just having been pummeled repeatedly in the face.

CHAPTER XXVII

"—cause mom said it was bad luck for a groom to see her bride the night before a wedding."

Jedi smiled mischievously.

"This isn't a wedding, it's an engagement party," he toyed with Zita. "And what is it with you women? Do you all have the same "bad luck to see the bride before the wedding" thing? I must've heard this one in every province at every wedding I've ever had to—"

"Us women?" Zita interjected, indignant.

"Yeah, you women," Jedi agreed with her. "Not us men—you women!" He laughed. "What is it you women don't want us to see going on before a wedding, huh?"

Zita boiled over. A scowl fell across her face. She looked up from the path along which they walked and was about to let him have it, until she saw he was grinning at her and his cobalt eyes were sparkling like jewels in the sunslight.

Jedi punched Zita playfully on the shoulder and broke out laughing.

"You little DRIK!" she pushed him back with an angry pout she couldn't keep from breaking into a smile.

"That glorious smile," Jedi said.

"Shut up!" Zita scolded him.

He laughed again.

She pushed him a little harder this time, and Jedi tottered, laughing, off the path—

Until he suddenly lost his balance and teetered on the edge of the bank that dropped down a rocky ten lengths to the swiftly running creek below.

"Jedi!" Zita rushed forward.

Jedi fell forward over the bank.

Zita screamed.

He flung his left arm behind him, grabbed hold of a thin palm trunk on the bank, and proceeded to swing in a wide circle around the plant, whooping madly, legs flailing wildly, until he landed back on the path, on the other side of the palm and behind Zita.

She stared at him, dumb.

He stared at her, blankly.

Then he burst out laughing.

"You wastehole!" she yelled.

Jedi was always playing pranks on Zita. Not to be mean. It was always harmless fun. She knew that.

But it still got her every time.

Like with the "You women."

Zita came from the province of Pyarr, a region of Krai whose culture had a long tradition of male dominance until only recently and only through great struggles on the part of a great deal of many Pyarran women.

Zita's mother, Lady of the House of Pyarr, a prominent figure among the Pyarran Nobility, was one of them. She was a leader in the Pyarran women's movement.

Zita was just like her mother.

Gentle, kind, caring, forgiving.

But also fiery and strong when aroused—in both bad and good ways.

And that's precisely why Jedi loved her, and loved to tease her.

He liked her a little fiery and strong when aroused.

Pyarran women were known all over Krai for their unique and miraculous harmonization of a profound gentleness that was almost childlike in innocence, with a nearly savage fierceness in their passions.

"Don't you ever do that again!" she shouted at him, gasping for breath. She stamped menacingly at him with her foot.

Jedi jumped back and laughed harder.

"You scared the krok outta me!"

Jedi howled.

"It's not FUNNY!" she shouted. "I thought you were gonna fall over the bank and hurt yourself!"

Jedi stoppped staggering backward down the path.

"Or KILL yourself!"

Jedi stopped laughing.

"Then what would I—"

"I'm sorry," Jedi, alarm on his face, ran back to Zita and touched her bare arm softly. "I was just having fun."

"You were being stupid!" she said with reproach, all the while unable to hide the tears welling in the corners of her stunning, blazing bronze eyes that smoldered with waning anger and washed over with a sudden sadness.

"I'm sorry," Jedi whispered apologetically, brushing a lock of her silky, shimmering, slightly curled, jet black hair back from her face. "I didn't think of it that way."

With The Force, Jedi couldn't help but feel what Zita was feeling and sense what she was thinking.

She didn't know that, though.

Zita knew nothing of the true ... uniqueness that gave Jedi his ability to be so mindfully sensitive, especially to her because of how he cared for her.

She just thought that he was the most compassionate—if, at times like now, infuriating—man she could ever have imagined meeting.

He was that.

And more.

She would soon learn how much more.

Jedi was waiting for the right time to tell her everything, because he didn't want any secrets between them. He had discussed it with Master Lekh and the teacher had agreed. As his partner, it would not only be considerate of him to be truthful with her, but necessary for Zita to know the whole truth because their children would be born with Jedi's "gift."

But Zita still didn't know any of that. All she did know was—

"I love you so much," Zita said, interrupting his thoughts. "I couldn't stand losing you. Not yet. Not before ... Not right after finally finding you."

"Zita," Jedi took her face in his hands and looked gently into her eyes. The bronze in them had cooled. It now swam in pools of shimmering tears.

One rolled out of the corner of her eye and down her cheek.

Jedi caught the tear on the tip of his finger, brought his finger to his lips and kissed it, then pressed his finger gently to Zita's slightly trembling lips.

A few more tears rolled down her cheeks.

She threw her arms around his neck.

He hugged her.

"I couldn't bare to lose you!" Zita said as she pressed her head into Jedi's shoulder.

"I won't leave you," Jedi said. "Ever. You know what they say. When two lovers who are each other's true half meet, their souls go together into each of the suns when they die and become one in the Heavenly Mother-and-Father. As long as there are suns in the sky, you and I will be together."

Zita looked up from Jedi's shoulder into his sparkling eyes.

"You're too much," she laughed, choking back her tears.

"I am, aren't I," Jedi grinned back, and hugged her even more tightly.

Sith left The Castle by the West Gate and entered The Gardens.

The Royal Botanical Gardens were a complex of flora from around the world on the west bank of the Eed River. The river—here, near it's source, just a wide creek cutting through a shallow, rocky and plushly verdant gorge—ran along the outside of The Castle's western wall and spilled over a sheer drop into the lagoon at the foot of the immense, multi-stone Castle, from where it continued on to wind its way through The Valley and finally out the Eed Pass.

Lavishly landscaped and ornamented paths ran through The Gardens and along the bank of the gorge. Nareed from all over the continent came all cycle 'round to visit The Gardens. They were the seventh of the Thirteen Splendors of Krai as much for the intensely good energy that seemed to radiate from and around them, as for the wonder of their beauty.

That good energy pool was slightly stirred and muddied when the darkness that was attached to Sith entered The Gardens along with him, sending ripples of disturbance outwards like a stone dropped into a puddle.

Jedi and Zita were walking hand in hand, still on the path running along the bank of the gorge. In the tropical, late-afternoon heat of the Rebirth Season suns, The Gardens were cool. The humidity was such, nevertheless, that Jedi had his silk tunic slung casually over his shoulder and his bare chest was refreshed by the fragrant, light breeze wafting through the greenery all around them.

Jedi was listening and laughing along as Zita was telling him about the night she and a friend had snuck into the lab of a science instructor at the Royal—who was from the Shadu province and had made a rude, offhand remark about Pyarrans during class one day—and set all his running experiments to explode at once during the next day's instruction.

While usually comfortable in the trendy and modern attire popular amongst Nareed youth, this was an auspicious occasion, and Zita was deeply in the spirit of it. She was wearing a rongthi, the traditional Pyarran dress consisting of a tight-fitting—a very tight-fitting—almost sheer, embroidered and patterned silk wrap, the skirt of which hung suggestively off the hips and hugged the legs until flaring out in frilly pleats just above the ankles. Cut off at the midriff—actually, well above the midriff and really just below the breasts—was an even tighter-fitting, sleeveless halter of matching silk and embroidery. The two pieces were connected by a long, matching silk scarf connected to the top of the skirt and wrapped around the hips. The scarf's tail trailed down one side of the skirt, while the other end was thrown gently over the opposite shoulder.

Pyarran women were renowned for their love of adornment, and Zita was no exception. Her wrists tinkled with silver and gold bangles, some of which were crystal-encrusted and sparkled with different hues of light. There were toe rings on her bare feet, and gold and silver anklets matching her bangles clacked around her ankles. Large, gold hoop rings hung from her ears, and she wore a string of light, gold chains around her waist just below her pierced and ringed bellybutton. There were gold rings with jewels on some of the fingers of both hands.

Only Zita's neck remained unadorned; and it would continue to be until their wedding day, when Jedi and Zita would fasten the galsoo—a gold necklace that held a deep crimson kameen jewel, the ancient, traditional Nareed symbol of marital union—around each other's necks.

Thinking of the way in which those gold chains hung enticingly around Zita's waist, Jedi snuck a peek over her shoulder as she talked, and peered down the luscious curve of her bare back where, in the small upturn at the base of her spine and into the curve of her buttocks, just above her skirt line, tiny beads of sweat sparkled like wet, silky, emerald pearls.

Jedi felt a warm stirring inside him—

Then, suddenly, he went intensely cold.

Sith stood just inside the main gate to The Gardens.

He relaxed his physical senses, cleared his mind and allowed himself to connect with the flowing energy of The Force.

After a moment, he was aware of a faint throbbing deep inside him, accompanied by the whisper of a ringing in his ears, which he recognized as the pulse and vibrational frequencies of The Force emanating from everything around him.

Jedi and Sith, with Master Lekh's guidance, learned over the years how everything in physical reality was surrounded by energy frequencies. Those coming through mineral, vegetable and animal life were easy to identify in the perceptible din of The Force—like that now cascading around Sith's awareness—and dismiss. Their patterns were far less complex and of a far lower frequency than those of more advanced sentient and cognizant species.

The Gardens were unusually busy today, with Nareed from all over Krai who were lucky enough to procure invitations, flooding into Rai for any one of a number of engagement parties taking place tomorrow all over The Valley, in conjunction with the official royal celebration.

Sith stood with his head tilted up, head and eyes slightly darting from side to side as he "sniffed the air" of The Force the way a hunting animal would search among forest scents for the spoor of prey. He concentrated on finding one particular Nareed vibrational frequency among the many he could sense in The Gardens. One that he could pick out easily from the vibrating energy flow of The Force, because he was as familiar with it as he was with his own:

That of his twin brother, Jedi.

As soon as he focused on his brother, and before the anger that almost immediately always rose within him and muddied his perceptions every time he thought of Jedi—

There!

Sith sensed Jedi's high-pitched, high-frequency vibration.

He turned from the gate and casually headed through The Gardens toward the path that ran along the bank of the Eed, following the attraction coming from the direction of Jedi's energy emanations.

A sharp pain cleaved through Jedi's head.

He let go of Zita's hand and stopped.

Zita halted in mid-story. She looked at him and was startled by how pale he suddenly appeared.

Jedi slumped into a crouch.

"Jedi! What is it?"

"I don't know!" he exclaimed, pushing the heels of his palms hard into his temples. "This sharp pain just shot through my head."

He sensed an anger directed at him so intense that its fire licked at the edges of the energy field surrounding his body like hot pin pricks on the skin.

The pain suddenly cleared. He dropped his hands to his sides and let out a gasp of relief. His tensed body began to relax, and as his mind did—

"Is it gone?" Zita asked, concerned, crouching down beside him and putting a hand comfortingly on his shoulder.

"Yeah," Jedi answered. "It's gone."

But the hot pin pricks weren't. And neither was the burning cold knot faintly but sharply pulsing in his stomach. The same burning cold Jedi recognized from that night in Za three weeks ago with—

"Sith." Jedi said aloud.

Zita's hand dropped from Jedi's shoulder and she followed him as he stood up.

"Sith?" she asked.

"He's back." Jedi announced, trailing off as if he were suddenly very, very far from her.

Sith rushed along the path, ignoring the calming, musical burble of the Eed's rushing water, the intoxicatingly sweet, perfumed fragrances mingling in the air around the thick jungle of green and flowering plant life in The Gardens, the melodious and joyful singing of the multitudes of birds, the occasional children's laughter, the sight of lovers walking through the enchanting pathways—

And focused on the high-pitched ringing in his ears that was growing louder.

Jedi.

Sith's anger quickly collapsed from its mountainous peak into an avalanche of silent rage rolling through him.

He quickened his pace and hurried down the stone walkway that wound casually toward the soft, earthen path he knew ran along the bank of the Eed.

"What do you mean he's back? How do you know he's back? Back where?" Zita asked, her curiosity aroused more by how Jedi arrived at the conviction than the actual abruptness and apparently ominous import of his declaration. "And what's the big rush for?"

Jedi caught himself sharply as he was about to tell her that he just sensed his brother—along with an intensely dark presence surrounding him—extremely close by.

Suddenly, all the weight of Jedi's entire life, concentrated into the last anxious three weeks, pressed unbelievably heavily down on his heart. The weight of all the pressures he already faced all his life as Heir-to-the-Throne; as one of the two focal points in a struggle of metaphysical proportions that involved the entire Nareed species, their whole world, and much more that was not yet completely clear but could be sensed looming on the horizon and casting its shadow all the way from the future back to now; coupled with the revelations from the trip into Za about what forces were gathering around the world and around him and Sith; and the realizations to which discussions of those discoveries led throughout all the talks he'd been having with Master Lekh about all of everything over the last three weeks; of what it meant for Jedi the man, Jedi the Heir, Jedi the archetype that might lead his world into the next phase of their collective physical and metaphysical existence, or preside over it's enslavement to a cycle of pain and suffering that would escalate beyond the measures of Kraian reality, whatever they may have been—

Jedi, the soul partner of Zita, he then thought.

"Zitaaaaaaa," he moaned.

"What is it?" she asked, more concerned now, sensing his perturbation acutely the way only a devoted soul partner can.

Jedi was silent, breathing heavily.

"Jedi, what?" Zita pleaded, panic creeping into her voice.

Jedi finally came back to himself completely.

"C'mon let's go," he touched her shoulder while looking decisively into her searching eyes. "Not here. I can't tell you here. I promise I'll explain. But not right now."

Jedi grabbed the tunic hanging off his shoulder with one hand, Zita's hand with his other, and pulled her after him as he started off back up the path in the direction from which they'd just come.

"Tell me what?" Zita protested while hurrying to keep up with him. "Where are we going?"

Jedi didn't answer. All he knew was he had to get Zita out of The Gardens, and quickly. Before—

Before what?

He didn't know. He just didn't want Sith to find the two of them together here. Not like this. Not the night before tomorrow's huge day. Not after everything Jedi and Master Lekh had pieced together from all they knew with the rest from intelligence resources in the KSF, from the scientific community and The Temple, Krai's ancient spiritual institution.

And definitely not after everything else Jedi now knew about Sith and his feelings for Zita that Master Lekh had let him in on when he told Jedi about the talk the teacher had had with Sith the day he disappeared.

After everything Jedi had come to know about the brother he felt like he'd just be meeting now for real for the first time in his life, the only thing he knew about his brother was he didn't know who his brother was.

Or would turn out to be.

And he didn't want to find out with Zita around.

What Jedi did know for sure was that anything was possible now.

And probably would be if Jedi didn't get Zita out of The Gardens right away.

Sith glanced behind him to make sure the path was free of any visitors.

There was nobody around who would see him suddenly take off as the ringing in his ears that he was using to home in on Jedi topped out at an excruciating shriek piercing him in the temples and urging him on to hurry in a way that he couldn't even tell he was powerless to resist.

His brother was close.

Sith took off at a run.

The path running along the river was coming up onto an intersecting stone path just around a flowery corner ahead to the left.

Jedi suddenly pulled on Zita's hand.

"C'mon!" he said to her, from over a shoulder and broke into a run.

"Jedi, where—"

Something dark slammed into Zita hard.

Sith saw the opening of the path he was on just up ahead. He could hear the faint rumble of the waterfall down at the front of The Castle.

His temples felt like they were stuck with hot pokers boring deep into his skull.

Through the fire he saw burning before his eyes, Sith sensed a luminous flash rush past the opening of the path.

Suddenly a voice called out.

"Jedi, where—"

Zita!

As Sith slid out of the opening of the path behind Jedi, he slammed hard into Zita just as the image of her in his mind stepped into his way a second before she actually did.

Jedi, his stomach on fire, ran past the opening of the stone path that led away from the river.

He felt something cold and dark shoot past behind him.

Then suddenly, Zita was gone.

He stopped and turned.

"Zita!" Jedi shouted.

Zita tumbled backward, away from him and toward the bank of the river.

Throwing himself with desperate abandon, Jedi took off through the air.

In mid-flight, he caught Zita by the arm and flung her back onto the path just before she stepped off the bank, right into the arms of ...

"Sith!" Jedi yelled.

... Who stood and watched with Zita in horror while Jedi landed, and the momentum from having swung her back to safety carried him backward and toward the bank.

Then Jedi went over the edge and disappeared down into the steep, rocky-green gorge.

"Jedi!" Zita shrieked in terror, rushing forward out of Sith's arms, not even recognizing that she had been in his grasp, all the terror she never thought possible to feel at once propelling her forward to the edge of the bank just in time to see Jedi tumbling head over heels down the rocky slope—

Then smash his head on a grassy rock and tumble lifelessly into the river that started carrying him away toward the waterfall.

"Jedi!" she screamed again and was about to jump down the slope after him when she felt a hand—a shockingly cold hand—pull her back by the arm, and once again she felt that same cold and dark something push hard and quickly past her as she watched Sith drop down the bank and into the gorge.

Sith was terrified as he bounced painfully down the slope of the gorge, through the crags and crevasses between the lumpy, mossy rocks.

It was like he was on fire. He couldn't stop the burning that pulled him downward and into the river, that felt like a magnet strong enough to pull the iron from his liver.

He was powerless to resist it.

And that terrified him.

Not because he was afraid of it.

Because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to control it.

He couldn't let Jedi die like this right now. Nothing else mattered. That purpose alone propelled him madly down and into the water.

As he plunged into the cool, bubbling river, he saw Jedi's head bobbing between the gentle currents which would in a matter of a few seconds turn into not so gentle rapids in the pull of the ten-storey plunge at the edge of The Castle's front wall.

Sith would never reach Jedi in time to be able to pull him out of the waterfall's sucking draw, and he would plunge over the—

This isn't how...!—Sith's mind screamed out through the fire he was on, despite the water's naturally pleasing coolness.

He paddled forward, glancing up the bank where Zita was running along, calling out for Jedi, nearly in hysterics.

Sith had no choice.

She'd never know. She wouldn't be able to tell what would be happening through all her hysterics and the rushing of the river.

Her whole being was fixed on the image of her ... man floating away from her and over a waterfall. Sith shuddered mentally at the thought of Jedi and Zita's union, but pushed the image out of his mind. He needed to concentrate hard now.

He focused his mind on the image of Jedi afloat in the water ahead of him, and held it steady with all the will he could direct—

He paddled frantically downriver toward his brother.

He projected a long rope in his mind that fastened onto the image he saw of Jedi, and used the rope to hold the image of Jedi in place in the water.

Sith paddled faster and drew closer to Jedi, whose limp body, now over on its stomach and face down in the water, slowed and seemed to be held in place in the current that started to rush around it as if it were a rock stuck in the midst of the flow.

Zita stopped running and calling madly out for Jedi, sliding to a halt on the pebbly, dry earthen path.

She was still crushed in the grip of the terror seizing her heart and making it pound painfully in her chest, with every beat like a stab—

Wait!

There was something ...

Jedi's body stopped flowing with the river, and seemed to hang in place in the water below and just ahead of Zita from where she watched Sith swim quickly up to his brother.

When she saw him pulling the inert body of Jedi slowly toward the bank, a warm flood of relief washed through her that weakened her knees so she had to grab hold of a thick, green hanging plant above her head before slumping to the ground.

As Sith pulled Jedi closer to the bank and out of danger, Zita saw Jedi's shirt—that he must have dropped during his plunge—now wash up on one of the grassy rocks at the side of the river just below her.

She started to cry, all the terror she felt over a gratefully averted grief now flushing out of her with an intense rush.

Suddenly, she felt that same, dark coldness once again push past her, and she shivered.

Zita focused through wavy, watery vision and finally zeroed in on Sith enough to notice he was yelling something at her; but she couldn't make out what he was shouting over the din of the waterfall.

"What?" she yelled back down at Sith. "I can't hear you!"

Sith finally shouted loud enough for Zita to make out that he wanted her to call for help.

Zita took her mobile from under her scarf and on the colorful, touch-screen keypad punched and held the "9" for instant transcom to Emergency Services, just as Sith reached the bank with Jedi in tow.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Jedi woke up.

Where?—he thought, blinking painfully in the soft lighting.

He felt Zita.

Then his mother.

And father.

"Welcome back," he heard Zita's shaky voice.

He tried to focus on her through swimming vision. Her face finally solidified into a clear image before his eyes.

"Zita?" Jedi asked. "Where am I?" He felt her take his hand in both of hers. Her hands were warm and made him feel warm, too.

"You're in Castle Medical," another voice.

Mom.

"Is everything okay?" his mother asked and leaned in closer.

He swung his head around until he focused his stunned eyes on her. "Okay? Why? What happened?"

"You fell into the river and hit your head on a rock—"

"Saving me!" Zita cried out.

King Eloh put a consoling hand on her shoulder. "I told you. It wasn't because of you this happened. It was for you he did it."

"Saving you?" Jedi turned to Zita, his vision almost completely clear and his mind focused enough again to notice that he was in a bed—a podlike, smooth metallic construction resembling a large, cut-open egg resting on it's side, covered with numerous monitoring screens, interactive panels and peripheral connections—located in the center of the medical complex's private recovery room reserved exclusively for immediate Royal Family.

A gentle, emerald light glowed underneath the lining of the inside of the cocoon. The rest of the earth-tone-colored room was dimly lit from low key sconces in the rounded corners. A large window looked out onto The Valley, lit brightly in the late evening darkness.

"Saving you? From what?" Jedi asked Zita.

"You don't remember what happened?" Jedi heard a new voice, from behind everybody else.

Master Lekh turned from the window and stepped into view above the bed. "At the river?" he asked again. "You don't remember anything?"

"I was walking with Zita ..."

Jedi trailed off, his face screwed up as he suddenly realized that he was having trouble recalling what came next, as if there were a wall of mud he had to see through between then and now.

"You were walking with Zita ..."

"Dad?" Jedi asked, suddenly confused.

"You said 'I was walking with Zita,'" Jedi's father prompted him while exchanging worried glances with everybody else. "And ... What next?"

Jedi struggled up onto his elbows, but the blood rush from doing so made him woozy and he swooned and flopped back down into the pleasantly throbbing comfort of the bed.

"Careful. You're pretty heavily sedated," Jedi's mother said, sweeping some of Jedi's hair off his forehead

"I was walking with Zita?" Jedi asked.

"You just said you were," Deleb said softly, worried. She straightened up and motioned Master Lekh over to her.

"I said, 'I was walking with Zita?'" Jedi asked now. "I was walking with Zita? Was I? So what happened next?"

"Com the doctor," the Queen whispered to her son's mentor, and he disappeared behind them into a sit-down alcove that housed a transcom station in the wall of the room. Jedi could see the back of his head outlined against the transcom menu screen over Deleb's shoulder, and he could hear him murmuring softly.

"Do you remember that we went for a walk in The—"

Zita.

"Thaaaaaaat's riiiiiiight!" Jedi exclaimed as the complete memory suddenly flooded into him all at once. "I was walking with Zita."

"Right." Zita rolled her eyes. "We already got that. Then Sith ran into me and ..." she trailed off when she saw the disturbing look that suddenly fell over Jedi's face. He stared back at her blankly.

"What is it?" Zita asked, squeezing his hand gently in hers with concern.

The lost look on Jedi's face disappeared, and Zita realized Jedi was suddenly completely back and fully clear. That same, peaceful and gentle certainty in knowing what was at all times that he exuded, that only she knew in him so well, was back in his eyes.

"Is it cold in here?" Jedi asked, talking directly to Zita.

Zita looked into the eyes of the man she loved, and knowing them as well as she did—the way she remembered them vividly from the first time their eyes had ever met—she knew he meant something more, but not what that something more was.

And then she felt it.

She shuddered, as if from a touch.

It suddenly felt as if Jedi's hand were somehow reaching in and touching her on the inside: a warm, gentle push that she simply knew was him, really him, inside her thoughts, drawing her toward where he was showing her would be the thoughts responsible for understanding what he wanted; as if he were guiding her through her own mind, leading her to the hidden place where the truth he wanted her to discover lay waiting buried beneath the intense feelings surrounding her memory.

She'd felt a slight shock as soon as she perceived that warmth inside her, as if a gentle current had passed through her.

Zita suddenly felt a strong rush of euphoria as she realized that somehow, her soon-to-be partner and already-was friend and lover was somehow present inside her in a way that may have defied understanding right now, but certainly not knowing. It was a connection that flooded her with such joyful bliss, she wished the way it made her feel would never end.

And then she remembered.

And suddenly, she knew.

The dark coldness.

It had been present seconds just before Sith's abrupt arrival in The Gardens. She'd never felt anything remotely similar before: frighteningly repelling yet at once somehow drawing, as if sucking all the warmth from the heart while you felt helpless to stop it and surrendered to it in despair.

And when she focused her thoughts on it, she felt it push past her again as if it were an icy, invisible presence hastily retreating into some hidden corner of ethereality for fear of being sensed.

The coldness Jedi was asking about was Sith.

She didn't quite understand how she knew that. She just knew that she knew.

And she trusted what she knew because she knew it was Jedi somehow leading her to it.

Zita quickly snapped back to herself. Although her reverie lasted only a few blinks—that's how quick and intense the flood of feeling and realization had been—she felt like she'd somehow just arrived back from traveling across a great deal of time

"No, it's not cold," Zita answered him, letting him know with her eyes she knew he had covertly asked her if Sith was in the room. "It's a little cool outside, though, in the hallway," she said with her eyes as well as with her words. She turned and disappeared.

The King stepped around the bed and tapped out a few instructions on one of the touch-screens. "I'll turn the bed temperature up a little."

Jedi heard the whoosh of a closing door.

"Jedi." It was Master Lekh. He was back, and in usual style, all business. "You fell over the bank and into the river. You hit your head on a rock on the way and were knocked unconscious. Sith jumped into the river and pulled you out."

"That's right!" Jedi exclaimed. He looked at Zita, who just returned to the bedside after having closed the door. Then the lost look confusion was back in his eyes. "I was walking with Zita."

Zita rolled her eyes and groaned this time. "Then we ran into Sith and he knocked into me—"

"I grabbed for you!" Jedi's eyes suddenly lit up as his mind caught the glimpse of a moment.

"You flew through the air!" How did you—"

"Then I was falling ..." Jedi cut her off, but then trailed off himself as he struggled to string disjointed moments in his memory into coherent, persistent vision. "Then—" Jedi broke off as his recollection grew thick and cloudy and finally faded into black. "That's it. Sorry. I don't know. Then I woke up here."

"The doctor said he may experience some memory problems with that traumatic a blow," Master Lekh explained to everyone. Then he turned to Jedi. "Do you remember anything else now? Why you were there?"

"Why you took off so quickly, all of a sudden—" Zita said.

"Yeah, now I remember!" Jedi exclaimed with excitement. "I was walking with Zita... I grabbed for her... I was falling... Then what happened?"

"You hit your head on a rock and were knocked out, sport," Eloh finished for him. "Master Lekh just told you."

He did?" Jedi asked, receiving concerned looks in return from everybody gathered around the bed.

"The doctor also said," Master Lekh addressed everybody, including Jedi. "That because of the part of his brain that was traumatized by the blow, his instant recall may take a while to get back up to speed. The spectrotherapy succeeded in repairing and recalibrating the damaged neural pathways in the area of the blow, and there's very little risk of any permanent damage, thankfully and by what miracle we'll probably never know." Master Lekh looked at Jedi with covert nuance in his eyes. "But it may take a little while for the neuroelectric shock from the blow to subside. You might be asking a lot of repetitive questions for a little while, Jedi, until your brain gets over the shock."

"Shock from what?" Jedi asked, as if he were hearing of it for the first time.

"From hitting your head on the rock," the Queen replied, then smiled to herself at the slight humor in the situation. Now that she was sure her son was safely out of danger, including permanent brain damage, she allowed herself to sigh with relief.

Deleb was the portrait of a woman and a mother and the leader of a world being pulled in two directions by the polar opposite paths of her two sons. She felt herself walking a razor's edge along the line between elation for Jedi's good fortune and despair the misfortune into which Sith had apparently fallen.

But only inwardly. Outwardly, she was the complete business end of a mother and queen who knew there was so much more going on, and understood a great deal of what that so much more meant for Jedi because of who and what he had become, and more importantly, who he would soon become: the King of Krai.

By ancient tradition, passed down from Zavoi and Atmi, the progenitors of the royal line, and translated into constitutional process—the Heir-to-the-Throne officially took over the reins of power on their eighteenth birthday. Jedi and Zita were to be married during Rebirth Season next cycle, on the twins' birthday, making the marriage ceremony simultaneously a marriage and a coronation.

With everything that she knew about everything that was going on, both on and with Krai and with her two sons; and with the rest that she and Eloh had already guessed, especially about Sith; the Sith they all thought they'd known but who turned out to have been a volatile and angry and radically delinquent Sith cleverly hidden from them all this time, the Queen now found herself trembling from the fear that came with hoping that Jedi would just live long enough to pass the Throne on to the Heir she wished with all her heart he and Zita would be able to produce.

Before the whirlwind of changes happening to Krai and spinning around the foci of her two sons took both of them away from her.

She was just starting to come to terms with the fact that Sith was lost. Both her and Eloh saw that as soon as they had laid eyes on him when they arrived at the CMC after the accident a few hours ago and saw his frightening appearance. Much darker, wilder and—if her interpretations of the hideous tattoos with which he had scarred his face and shaved head—astonishingly, unthinkably allied in some way with some of the very forces on Krai that represented the potential darkness that the wrong path in this time of extreme change on Krai could take the world and its people.

The abrupt way he had disappeared without word for three weeks, on the day he had come to her so desperately despondent to confirm the news of the engagement, and after she saw how her confirmation seemed to have crushed something inside him with a totality she only sensed then but fully understood now to be tied to Sith's feelings about Jedi's marriage to Zita; and his as sudden and equally shocking, startlingly and openly defiant appearance on the eve of the engagement, all disturbed the Queen. She feared the future Jedi could enjoy would only be bright if he triumphed against what was revealing itself to be some very great conflict. The future of her other son, it was appearing to look inevitably so, was destined to be a tragic one by his own choice—

He would become Jedi's enemy in that conflict.

She feared it meant a painful future for both of them:

One son who would only ever have a normal life if he managed to come out on top in some cataclysmic struggle; the other destined to at best destroy only himself while at worst, his brother and possibly a whole world along with him.

The time of death and birth that was coming to Krai, that Master Lekh had warned them of all those years ago, was not going to be painless or smooth.

Or quick.

For anybody.

Except for me—she reminded herself painfully, but put the thought out of her mind as soon as it arose, before it caused her to do or say something that betrayed the tortured feelings that went along with it.

She sighed, audibly, a bare whisper of grief and despair in her voice so subtle that only her husband was close enough to her to notice. Eloh took her hand and held it fast.

"The medevacs brought you straight here, to the CMC," he explained to Jedi. "They did all the scans for any broken bones or internal injuries or bleeding. Nothing. Not a scratch or a bruise. Just the hit on the head. The spectrotherapy lasted ten minutes. You've been asleep since, well, since you hit your head until just now. Three hours."

"Thank The Mother-and-Father," Jedi proclaimed softly and smiled. "I thought I slept through my own engagement tomorrow."

"You're not getting out if that easily!" Zita exclaimed, pushed him playfully in the shoulder and left her hand lingering there.

"Did I look funny falling down?" he joked back at her. "Like some anivid character?"

"Yeah," Zita laughed halfheartedly, then pouted her lips as her eyes suddenly welled up with tears. "Real funny, you—"

"Never mind." Deleb placed a hand on her future daughter-in-law's shoulder and smiled. Zita grinned back at her. The Queen was pleased that her son was in such good hands. Gentle and caring, but strong, too.

Just what her wildly and wantonly adventurous son needed to help balance him out before he ended up killing himself with some crazy antic.

"I don't feel any pain," Jedi said, as if in answer to his mother's thoughts about her concern for his safety and well-being. "But shouldn't I be if I hit my head hard enough to knock me out for three hours?"

"Oh you woke up," Zita said, and suddenly the color drained from her face. "Right after the medevacs arrived. They brought you out of it, and you started screaming in pain."

"I was screaming?" Jedi's face went ashen.

"Yeah," Zita replied. "Cursing like a magtrain driver."

He smiled.

"Then they put you back out."

"Who put me back out?"

"The medevacs." Zita answered. "I just told you."

"You did?"

"Like I said," Master Lekh assured everybody. "It'll take a while. The doctor said he'd be perfectly fine after a good night's rest."

"Why?" Jedi asked, unable to completely keep the grin from escaping the corners of his mouth. "What's tomorrow?" He looked at Zita blankly for a moment, then the full grin broke out and he winked at her.

"You kr—" Zita stopped herself and looked apologetically at each of her parents-in-law, both of whom were smiling warmly.

"The fourth best day of my life" Jedi laughed, and reached out for Zita.

She took his hand in hers and held them to her lips. Then suddenly: "Waitam—Whadda ya mean, 'fourth best day?'" She dropped his hand angrily.

"The third best was the day we met," Jedi said, looking straight into Zita's eyes. "The day you changed my destiny forever by becoming it."

Zita blushed. Then she suddenly flushed with indignation. "Fourth best?" she exclaimed.

Jedi smiled tenderly. "The second was the day you said 'Yes.' The best will be the day you and I become man and wife."

Zita's eyes went wide, she dropped them briefly and flushed again, with a warm glow, then stole quick, shy glances at the beaming Queen and King.

Then she grinned at Jedi. "You're too much." She laughed softly, trying to conceal her blush by looking at the floor.

"Of course I am," he said, looking up at her with his azure eyes, their green-irises almost blazing with sparkle. He touched her chin with his hand and lifted her face until her eyes met his. "That's why I need you."

Master Lekh coughed loudly, and gestured with his eyes to Jedi's mother and father.

"Yes, uh, let's leave you two alone for a while," the Queen declared.

"Where's Sith?" Jedi asked abruptly.

"He's outside," King Eloh answered. He exchanged quick, meaningful glances with Deleb and Master Lekh. "You want to see him?"

"No-oh" Jedi considered for a moment. Then, more decisively: "No. Not right now," he said casually. "Is he okay?"

"He's fine," the Queen replied, although a little stiffly.

Jedi stared blankly at her. "who's fine?" he finally asked.

"Get some sleep, baby," Deleb kissed her son on the forehead, while laughing softly. "See you tomorrow."

"Take it easy, kid," King Eloh squeezed his son's shoulder and turned to leave with Deleb. "We'll see you in the morning," he said over his shoulder as they headed for the door.

"Oh, Lekh," the King called out over his shoulder, then stopped and turned in the doorway. "Come join us for breakfast tomorrow in our chambers. There's something we need to discuss."

"Dawn?" Master Lekh offered.

"See you then," the King agreed, turned, and disappeared out the door to catch up with Deleb.

"Are you going to stay overnight?" Master Lekh turned to Zita.

She looked to Jedi. "Do you want me to?"

"Uh-huh," Jedi said, nodding enthusiastically.

"You need to rest," Master Lekh warned Jedi with mock-recrimination, while smiling. "He needs to rest," he said, this time to Zita, with more gentle insistence.

"I know," she said, not taking her eyes off Jedi as she rubbed his forearm softly.

"Stay, too please, Master," Jedi said as Master Lekh turned to leave.

The teacher stopped and turned back around as the door whooshed open for him and then closed when he didn't exit.

"I want to tell you everything, Sweetness," Jedi suddenly said to Zita with a tremulous flood of emotion that shook through his voice. "So that you understand it all—me—completely. You have to know it all because you've become a part of me. My destiny is yours and yours is mine and our paths are now one. You need to know where we're going."

"I don't care," Zita whispered, a tear rolling down her cheek. "As long as it's with you." She leaned down and kissed him softly on the lips.

"You sure you need me to stay?" Master Lekh asked jocularly, with only the slightest hint of an uncomfortable intruder in his voice. "Sounds like you're doing just fine on your own."

"You want to stay? Stay for what?" Jedi asked in sincere, memory-impaired confusion, as if the suggestion were just being first made.

Master Lekh rolled his eyes and smiled. It was going to be a long night, no matter how much rest Jedi—they all—needed to get.

"You just asked me to stay," he recapped for Jedi, with a touch of amused exasperation.

"I did?" Jedi questioned. "Why would I ask you to—" Jedi's face clouded over as he fell silent.

Then:

"Oh yeah! That's right, I did!" he exclaimed, snapping his finger in the air above the bed as the recollection of a moment ago came back suddenly.

Jedi turned to Master Lekh. "You told me she'd have to know everything. You have to help me tell her. I'm tired and I need help thinking. Stay for a while and help me tell her. Please. I need her to understand everything."

Master Lekh looked at Zita and smiled with a mix of soothing empathy and a strong hint of undisguised worry.

"You better get comfortable for the next few hours," Master Lekh said to her, as he went to get a couple of plush chairs from a dark corner. "Something tells me you're not going to get a chance to be comfortable much after what you learn tonight."

He returned with the chairs.

"Ever."

Zita folded her arms over her chest and regarded Master Lekh with scrutiny.

"I get the feeling there's something way more that we're going to be discussing here than just that I'm marrying into the Royal Family and what my table manners are supposed to be at official state functions," she declared, looking from the supine Jedi in his gently humming cocoon to Master Lekh as he pulled the pair of chairs up to the bed and offered one to her. "Like how Sith stopped you from going over the falls?" she looked penetratingly at both men as each of them looked dumbstruck back at her. "Your legs didn't get caught on any rock like Sith said."

"Is, uh, that what Sith told you?" Master Lekh asked.

"Yeah," Zita answered. "And I knew it was a load of krok right away." From their expressions Zita was confident that she was onto something. She just didn't know—and would never in her wildest dreams ever have been able to imagine—what. "There was no rock there. I could see from that high above pretty clearly. Jedi's body just suddenly stopped and floated in the middle of the river until Sith got to him. How?" She glared at both of them as she dropped her arms challengingly from over her chest to her hips.

Master Lekh sighed heavily. He put a hand up and stopped Jedi from whatever it was the youth was about to blurt out excitedly.

"Easy there, pup. Calm down. Let me start ..." Master Lekh smiled gently first at Jedi, pacifying the agitated young man. Then he looked to Zita and motioned for her to join him in sitting down. Then, as they did: "... As far back as I know this all goes. As Jedi's soon-to-be wife and partner, you deserve to know everything we know. As the soon-to-be Queen of Krai, you need to know everything we know. Let me start by asking you this: do you love Jedi with your life?"

"Yes," Zita replied without hesitation, while looking confidently into Jedi's eyes. Their eyes remained locked, although not dry.

"Good," replied Master Lekh. "Because after understanding everything you're about to hear, you're going to need that kind of strength. You may have guessed that being the wife of a regent wouldn't be an easy ride. You have no idea, my beautiful young Princess of Pyarr, how rough that ride is going to get."

"Master," Zita, paling, whispered timidly. "You're scaring me."

"You should be frightened. Both of you should," Master Lekh said ominously, and then his voice softened. "But don't be. Whatever will happen to the two of you, it will happen to the two of you together. You have each other's love and strength to help you through it, and in fact, it will be your very love for each other that will turn everything in the right direction. It will be a painful path, but the rewards for both of you and for all of Krai will eventually prove worth the painful birth of this new age."

Master Lekh paused and glanced at the two of their anxious faces. He sighed again. As weary as his old age and many years of assiduous work and study preparing for this time had made him in body and mind, his spirit was elated and energized with the knowledge that in Jedi and Zita and the events that their union would set in motion, the eventual evolution of the Nareed would contribute to a much greater evolution of which the Nareed and the world of Krai were only a tiny part. He made a note to himself to make sure both of them understood that while what might happen to them in their lifetimes may be at times difficult to suffer, they would be experiencing all that they will as part of a much larger reality that Master Lekh knew would reach out further and for much longer than any of them, even with all that Master Lekh and his two pupils knew and understood, could imagine. Zita needed to understand the crucial role Jedi and his life played in that process, and the equally crucial role she would play as the soul partner accompanying him in that role.

But first, she had to understand why Jedi—and Sith, Master Lekh reminded himself—was ... were ... special.

"Seventeen-cycles ago, on the day Jedi and Sith were announced to the world, I was living in Za when I had an ... experience ..." the old master, instructor, mentor, and faithful friend of the Royal Family began, as Zita listened with wide eyes.

Jedi closed his eyes and relaxed his head into the firm cushioning of the bed.

CHAPTER XXIX

Sith may have been angry and bitter, but at least he had style, he thought to himself and smiled as his Wanderer touched down and went through all the shutdown sequences in the rented parking bay he'd reserved for the night in the Pyarran capital.

One of The Utàr's executives, The Worm's personal financial advisor, ran an illegal, underground nightclub in Pyarr's east-end, where Utàr presence was especially thick despite consistent KSF surveillance.

The club was a vast, deep, underground cavern that held the ruins of an ancient Temple from the pre-Yedina era, on top of which was built a modern shopping complex. The cover of the shopping mall was ideal for camouflaging the large numbers of patrons that swarmed to the club on most nights: closeted, malcontent youth fallen prey to the subtly increasing influences of a philosophy of narcissistic nihilism aggressively promoted by Utàr-inspired, controlled-and-financed cultural conditioning, covertly but unmistakably creeping into Kraian youth culture and drawing growing numbers of Nareed youth into the secret, dark and destructive world and lifestyles exported from Za by The Utàr.

Sith chuckled as he thought how the KSF, all the egghead Royal Experts On Krok-Knows-This-That-And-Everything, the Queen, the King, the Royal Court of Noble Houses, even the ever-resourceful Know-It-All "Master" Lekh—hadn't the faintest clue of the extent of the social subversion that was going on right under their noses.

He laughed even harder when he thought how his mother and father would react if they knew that their son, second in line to the Throne of Krai, had become a leading figure in that movement.

It was always known there was a small percentage of Kraian society that was covertly engaged in what the eggheads called "anti-social" behavior. Kraian social norms were extremely open and permissive, and the social contract for millennia among Nareed had been that a small amount of anti-social presence as a dark footnote to Kraian society would be tolerable as a necessary price to pay for the generally harmonious, balanced, organized violence-and-conflict-free Nareed social order.

Authorities were unwilling to take drastic measures to shut Utàr-supported cultural subversion operations down because of the potential for public outcry over what might be perceived—by a generally peaceful, compassionate populace—as an excessive violation of personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. Everybody knew that if you were unhappy with your life or with Kraian society, there was Exile life in Za. Everybody knew Za and a vaguely understood (at least popularly) organization called "The Utàr" operated illegally in cities all over Krai supplying emotional, mental, social, political, economic or whatever-other-kind of malcontents with whatever they needed to feed their fixations that was unavailable to them through normal, legal means. If that meant that fewer youths would choose flight to Za, it was accepted as a tolerable if unfortunate price to pay.

The authorities walked a fine line with Za and The Utàr. Kraian collective consciousness still vividly remembered the death and destruction of the "The Wild Crusades"—what historians named the one and only time an organized military effort was mounted by Za Exiles to seize power of the entire Kraian continent, over seven-thousand cycles ago. If the KSF came down too hard on Utàr operations, conventional thinking feared that that might provoke a resurging Exile populace, under direction of the equally surging Utàr, to start another such war. Official state policy towards the phenomenon became, as a result, one of containment: keep it quiet, keep it underground, keep it out of the media spotlight, keep it under control, keep it from spreading, keep it from surfacing—and keep the peace, balance, harmony, happiness and prosperity enjoyed by the vast majority of Nareed for the last seven millennia.

That was all about to change, Sith giggled to himself as he got out of the Wanderer and locked it down with his remote.

So what more convincing statement of Sith's style, he thought proudly, once again, than to hold the celebration marking this impending global change right here in the Pyarran capital, literally and figuratively right under the noses of the Noble House from which the ostensible next Queen of Krai would come.

Sith felt a quick and acute flash of rage explode inside him as he thought of Zita at Jedi's side. He was, however, on his way to a party, and didn't want to spoil his festive mood ruminating on pains from the past.

Besides, he was one of a handful of people on all of Krai who knew that the blessed union the world was all agog over would not be taking place anyway.

He headed for the maglift station with an irrepressibly satisfied grin.

Zita was Sith's past. She chose Jedi over Sith and that was her misfortune now, not Sith's failure. The future of the Nareed, Sith's future, lay with him as the ruler at the head of a New Kraian Order. There was no room for weakness such as hers by his side in that future.

She wanted to live with Jedi?

She'd have to die with him, too.

Sith grinned wickedly in anticipation, as images of Zita faded from his mind, replaced by the thoughts of the Pyarran girls he would make a point of seducing tonight.

Jedi settled for one woman. Sith wouldn't settle for any less than all the rest.

"Things are about to get a whole lot louder on peaceful and quiet Krai," Sith laughed to himself, as the doors to the maglift whooshed open and he stepped in.

The doors slid shut, Sith pushed STREET on the call panel, and the maglift took him down.

It all started, Manthi had told Sith, with The Worm's arrival.

It was the Worm who convinced leading Exile figures that the Royal Family and the Yedina were the greatest oppressors of Nareed freedom imaginable: denying Nareed who "dared to be different" the right to enjoy their freedom in Kraian society along with everybody else, forcing them to flee to Za and a life of struggling to survive in the jungles as the only alternative.

It was The Worm who organized The Utàr, creating it for the sole purpose of uniting warring Exile factions fighting one another for survival and for territories, into a single monolith with the combined strategic, financial, technological and logistical strength to finally pose a credible threat to the "tyranny" of the Royals and the Yedina.

It was The Worm who taught The Utàr leaders that in order to defeat the combined forces of Kraian society and the KSF, the first order of business had to be the erosion of Kraian social cohesion from within, in order to weaken their ability to withstand a seizure of power by The Utàr when it was ready to do so. The best way to do that, The Worm had taught, was to subtly dilute Kraian social norms with the promotion of "anti-social" behavior: anything that increased personal confusion, unclarity, ambiguity, self-destructiveness and the temptation to harm oneself, the world, or others, was an aggressive promotional instrument, especially amongst the part of the Nareed that was most impressionable, and therefore, most manipulable:

The youth.

It was The Worm who had taught The Utàr that if you poisoned a sufficient number of "normal" Nareed youth, you'd create a self-perpetuating base with which to weaken Kraian society from within by quietly spreading the attitudes and making available the means for escalating social self-destructiveness—generational conflict, gender conflict, sexual promiscuity, material addiction, substance abuse, violence, anger, and generally promoting any negative state of being or behavior. This covert social group, once cultivated to large enough proportions, would act as a cadre of popular activists when the time came to openly promote, support, and put into action the plan for The Utàr takeover of Krai.

It was The Worm who taught The Utàr that the mistake The Exiles made seven-thousand years ago was that they went to war because they had to: and if you had no choice but to go to war, you'd already lost the fight.

It was the Worm who taught The Exiles that the best way to win a fight was not having to fight at all.

It was Manthi who had always told Sith, as far back into his childhood as he could remember, that Sith was destined for a greatness that would far outweigh anything that his coddled brother Jedi would ever even aspire to.

It was Manthi who had convinced Sith to come to her in Za three years ago because she knew a way that Sith could become the greatest leader Krai had ever known by being the one who would lead the forces that would finally bring true freedom to all Nareed, so that no Nareed would ever have to live in exile on their own world again.

Just a handful of Exiles—only the most trusted inner-circle of The Utàr's Directorate—knew of The Worm's existence. The true nature of The Worm's origins and his appearance in Za was the single most important secret guarded feverishly by The Utàr. It was The Worm who had promised to pave for The Exiles the path to power.

It was also The Worm to whom Sith was immediately introduced by Manthi right after she reestablished contact with Sith three years ago.

It was The Worm—with a great deal of irresistibly seductive persuasion by Manthi—who convinced both Sith and The Utàr Directorate that their cause could dream of no better validation than the installation of an heir to the Throne of Krai at the head of their movement. Sith—The Worm had taught him—as second-in-line to The Throne, would never be anything more than a flea in the shadow of his brother; constantly overlooked, ignored, belittled, patronized, and eventually marginalized into insignificance and remembered by nobody, including Nareed history. It was The Worm who showed Sith that the way to his own personal salvation from an inglorious existence was as the head of The Utàr's movement.

It was The Worm who consistently and without ever asking for anything in return, provided Sith with all the money, all the best drugs, all the best women, and all the invitations to all the wildest parties both Inside and Outside.

It was The Worm, Sith thought, to whom he owed everything he had become.

So it was with a chest bursting with pride that Sith rode the maglift as he thought of the grand way in which he chose to celebrate, along with the rest of Krai, the announcement of the impending nuptials of his brother.

Sith bubbled and almost trembled with anticipation of the new, glorious era into which he was about to help lead Krai, almost as much as he bubbled and trembled with anticipation of the wild party into which he was about to walk right now.

The maglift arrived at STREET, and the doors whooshed open.

Sith stepped into the night.

CHAPTER XXX

The Cavern was on fire.

Not literally, of course.

Tonight, on the eve of Jedi and Zita's engagement ceremony, a special party was being held in honor of Sith, Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai, on the occasion of his impending ascendance as the one who would lead Krai and all Nareed into a new age of freedom from the tyranny of the Royalty and the Yedina.

The party had been suggested by The Worm. In attendance were all The Utàr's closest and most loyal friends, along with a couple of thousand covert Utàr sympathizers from amongst Nareed youth from all over the continent, who, as far as they knew, were just there for a wild party.

The hottest underground band, Death to Exile!, was engaged for the evening festivities, and at the moment were blasting the reveling crowd with atonal, contrapuntal, discordant music from the flashing stage set up at the far end of the huge, domed, columned, pillared and altared, ancient Temple ruins.

The partyers were amok, wildly and wantonly lost in the pursuit of loud, aggressive, violent, self-and-mutally flagellant, extreme pleasures of every kind imaginable, and some kinds never before dreamed of in many Nareed's worst nightmares. A number of bars situated along the walls of The Cavern supplied the writhing, dancing, thrashing mass with all the legal and illegal intoxicants their transcards could handle, regardless of age. In The Cavern, if you got in, you were in all the way, and once you were in, it was anything goes. Whatever happened in The Cavern, stayed in The Cavern, and the bones of not a few unfortunate transgressors of The Cavern's law of lawlessness were buried beneath the floor to prove it.

There were burning torches in holders all over the walls. Strobing, crystal spectroscopes and flashing directed beam projectors splashed The Cavern and it's revelers in a dazzling display of light accompanying the arhythmic wall of sound coming from the stage.

There were private alcoves, partially hidden from open view, all along the dark edges of The Cavern's walls as well as on the balcony that ringed the main floor, in which debaucheries could be attended discreetly. There was, however, enough open, abandoned, bizarre and sometimes disturbingly violent promiscuity taking place directly on the dance floor to make even the most closeted hedo-nihilist throw caution to the wind and get it on in any number of dirty ways right out on the massive, crowded floor.

It wasn't like the KSF Public Decency Squad was going to pay The Cavern a visit, Sith thought, as he stood on the balcony, arms spread wide on the balustrade ringing it, grinning darkly while surveying the scene of The Cavern below him.

Death to Exile! finished their number and the crowd roared, shrieked and howled their approval.

Sith stared directly at the band's frontman, a gaunt, emaciated and pale-skinned, black-haired young Exile named Lucius, who was dressed in the shining black leather, studs and chains of an ancient Nareed executioner.

With his thoughts, Sith reached out to Lucius' mind and sent his own image into it.

Suddenly, Lucius stepped up to the microphone.

"Exile friends!" Lucius' voice boomed out and echoed off the rocky walls of The Cavern over the din of the crowd. "I just got a feeling that our guest of honor has finally arrived!"

The crowd went wild.

Searching the crowd, Lucuis's eyes finally fell on the figure of Sith, clad in all black, standing on the balcony above the main entrance at the end of The Cavern, opposite the stage.

Lucius pointed up to the balcony and shouted into the microphone.

"Exiles and Friends!"

Over two-thousand heads on the floor turned and looked up in the direction the Death to Exile! frontman pointed.

When the crowd recognized the lone figure of Sith on the balcony, the roar that erupted was deafening.

"I give you," Lucius shouted into the microphone to be heard above the thundering and shrieking crowd. "I give you Heir to the Throne of Krai..."

The crowd went out of their collective mind.

"Prince Sith of Rai!"

Sith looked admiringly down at the faces turned up at him, and basked in the warmth of their thundering adulation, drinking in the energy of their focus on him and through his Force sense, feeling the energy of their thoughts and emotions swelling him with a tangible sense of power, of invincibility. With command of this kind of energy, he thought, there was nothing and nobody on Krai who would be capable of standing in his way.

Especially his brother.

He let the roaring and shrieking go on for a few moments, and then lifted his arms above his head while pumping his fists in the air.

The crowd went silent.

"Welcome, Friends!" Sith shouted out melograndiosely, and his voice boomed over the smooth, stony surfaces of The Cavern in almost perfect acoustic projection of the degree of his intoxication. "To the party ccccccelebrating the birth of a new Krai!"

The crowd went simwaste!

"Now I know," Sith began again, silencing the crowd below with the power of his presence. "We're all supposed to be good little Nareed. Well, we've aaaaaall been good little Nareed, haven't we?"

Another roar.

"Tonight is the night we all get bad, nasty, and so down, that all of Krai will one day wish it had been at the party that ushered in, with your dedicatedly wicked and wanton participation, the beginning of a new era for Krai! Death to Exile!"

Sith raised his arms again above his head and pumped his fists in the air. Over two-thousand pairs of arms followed suit, chanting his name, shrieking and howling with delight, as Death to Exile! kicked in with a thundering blast from the stacks of acoustic projectors at each side of the stage.

After the roaring died down and the music took over the crowd once again, Sith turned away from the colorfully ornate, obsidian balustrade. He swayed backward until he bumped the stone rail with his back, then pawed the rail clumsily to steady himself. He surveyed the balcony crowd, noting all the prominent members of the Noble families present who were either covert sympathizers or had been bought with something juicily incriminating or humiliating enough to bury them for good if they didn't cooperate ...

And most of their kids, too.

He was about to push his way through the balcony crowd and head for the stairs to go down to the main floor, when he was intercepted by a lithe, long-haired Pyarran girl dressed in nothing but the jewelry adorning her wrists, ankles, fingers, waist and hips. The small, curved hump of her pubic bone was bare and smooth.

And glistening.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, ground her hips feverishly into his, pressed her oiled and slippery skin against him, and drew his face to hers with a passionate, wet and savage kiss, returned enthusiastically by Sith, who grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into him viciously.

Suddenly, Sith felt a tap on his shoulder. He withdrew from the kiss and looked annoyingly behind him for the source of the interruption of his pleasure.

His annoyance changed to an almost sheepish expression when he focused, squinting through his stupor to realize it was the owner of The Cavern, The Worm's closest associate, DeemarChor.

"Chor!" Sith shouted joyfully, and with a free arm, pulled the short, fat, light-skinned Shadu man into a hug, squeezing closely into his side while still pressing the Pyarran girl to himself as well.

Sith chose Chor's place to host the party because Chor as a Shadu had the largest yahyohs Sith knew, operating an underground place this big right under the noses of the Pyarrans, traditionally at odds with the Shadu for centuries because of some old Noble dispute over something somebody did to fiss somebody else off one time too many.

Sith kept his arms casually hanging on Chor's shoulder. The Pyarran girl, showing acute signs of advanced narcotic intoxication, continued stimulating Sith with her hands and her naked body.

Chor, fondling the oblivious Pyarran girl's left breast, brought his head close to Sith's. Sith leaned in closer, all business-as usual despite what the girl was doing to him. Chor shouted over the music and the crowd into Sith's ear:

"Just got word our man's on his way!"

"Beautiful!" Sith shouted back. "You send him all the security codes?"

"He just commed me back! He got them, and he's heading along the route you gave us!"

"Getting better all the time!" Sith yelled into Chor's ear, and let his left hand drift down to the grinding Pyarran girl's right buttock, kneading it lustfully. "This guy really know what he's doing, know what I mean?"

Chor looked at the back of Sith's head as he shouted into his ear. "Sith ... baby! Best installer there is. I proooooomise you, there won't be a trace of the hardware or the detonation software on the vehicle when he's finished."

"We only got this one chance, Chor!" Sith shouted, making the menace in his warning unmistakably clear.

"Trust The Worm, Sith!" Chor answered with exaggerated reassurance. "He's never let you down, has he?"

"I'll be happy to trust The Worm compleeeeetely," Sith shouted. "When I'm ssssssitting on the Throne of Krai."

Chor looked at Sith. Sith winked at him and guffawed.

"Sith, you're our ace in the hole, baby!" Chor shouted into Sith's ear.

Sith was temporarily blindsided by a sharp, frighteningly powerful pang from deeper down in himself than even he knew.

In his mind, he saw the image of himself pulling the unconscious Jedi out of the river yesterday and onto the grassy, rocky bank.

And despite any effort to try to deny it, repress it, or in any other way avoid admitting the truth, Sith was forced to recall that the overwhelming feeling flooding through him as he lay his limp brother down on the grassy stones ...

Had been grateful relief.

He tuned back into DeemarChor's sales pitch again.

"... The stakes. This isn't seven-thousand cycles ago. This time, we do it right! We do what we gotta do tomorrow—"

"He's my krokin' brother, 'nar!" Sith declared with surprising menace.

"Wha'? You gettin' cold yahyohs on us here, Sith?" Chor questioned with concern, then quickly relaxed his composure. "Baby, this is bigger than both of you. Bigger 'n all of us. Relaaaaaax. It's all gonna be a swing through the trees! Just act natural. Don't overdo nuthin'. Show the proper respect. We get you married ... Then you're on The Throne! ... Then the real fun begins! Trust The Worrrrrrm, baby!"

Sith paused and looked at Chor penetratingly, searching the man's thoughts and feelings with Force senses for any signs of doubt or deception. Finding none, he broke out into another mad grin and slapped Chor hard on his back.

"We'll see!" Sith regarded Chor intensely while still keeping the drunken, wicked grin beaming at full throttle.

"Enjoy your party, Boss!" Chor shouted, as he slipped out from under Sith's arm. "Any-thing—or any-body—you need or want, lemme know!"

Chor, grinning, winked, slapped Sith playfully on the back of the neck, gave him a comradely shake, then excused himself and withdrew into the crowded balcony to disappear in the sea of bodies.

Sith watched Chor leave for moment of a little more intensely scrutinous consideration now that Chor's back was turned, focusing his sensing of the Force in the man and not yet finding any signs in him that might have indicated a lack of confidence or the singular kind of nervous energy associated with premeditated betrayal.

He still wasn't completely sure. Something kept ringing in his head like a screech around Chor, and he couldn't figure out what it meant about either the man or what he was up to alone, or with The Worm, and what he, or they, were ultimately putting Sith up to.

In the end, though, he'd be getting what he never in his most self-flagellatingly narcissistic fugues dreamed would be possible.

And so soon, and so easily: the Throne of Krai.

All it was going to take was the death of his brother and the woman he wanted.

Could he live with that?

The image of Jedi and Zita in each other's arms vividly burning in his mind sent a blast of anger through him hard enough to pulse in the blood pounding through his ears.

The screeching ring in his head jumped excruciating octaves higher, piercing Sith's temples painfully for a moment, forcing him to wince.

Krok 'em!—he concluded.

I don't get The Throne ... aaaaaand I don't get the girl?—he ranted mentally while staggering drunkenly through his thoughts. Krok that! No krokin' way!

Suddenly, such a powerful surge of energy pulsed through him on the level of The Force, that he staggered slightly against the balustrade and righted himself clumsily again. The burning hot flood exploded out of him as he bellowed a pale, hollow, ringing but drunk and deafening laugh at the ceiling.

Sith turned his attention back to the Pyarran girl pressing herself against him as she slid down his body, cupping his penis, pushing erect through his trousers, between her breasts. He grabbed her roughly by the hair and pulled her up onto her feet again. She squealed with delight as she slid up his body and laughed maniacally as he pulled hard down on her hair, throwing her head back savagely, and began to devour her exposed neck with his hungry lips, scratching her skin violently with his teeth, seeing Zita as he makes her submit to him in his mind.

CHAPTER XXXI

There's the guy! Right on time!

The Installer: a Shadu associate of DeemarChor, the employer who paid him an obscene amount in stolen credit because he liked to keep it all in the Shadu family, so to speak, so he said.

Whatever.

The Installer got paid to do a job, and he didn't care who or what, as long as the price was even only moderately obscene; compared to this gargantuanly obscene amount.

For an admittedly obscenely gargantuan job.

The Installer had brought plenty of hammers down on people in Za. This would be his first gig Outside.

The Heir-to-the-Throne and krokin' Queen-to-be of Krai!

His name would be legend for centuries!

But only if he could pull it off, he reminded himself.

The Installer had first asked Chor if he was motherfatherkrokin' crazy. Then he asked why they wanted an explosion in public.

They told him they were talking about the krokin' Heir, 'nar, and his krokin' bitch,and that they wanted the whole world to see it happen, and anything else was none of his motherfatherkrokin' business.

That told him they were motherfatherkrokin' crazy.

"Go high or go down," he repeated his life's mantra to himself for the who-knows-what-the-krok millionth time.

The Installer wasn't just one of the best burners in Za.

He was a stinkingly rich burner, because of it, too, 'nar!

His preferred method was making people go "BOOM!" really big.

But he knew how to use a knife, too.

All those little Outside vegetarian flowerkrokers knew to use a knife for was paring their peckers with fruits and vegetables.

Try a bagging a flying tree lion in Za or becoming it's dinner, drik!

In the neurolinguistic wake of reinforced confidence and assurance washing through him as a result of that thought, The Installer suddenly forgot all doubts and switched on his natural predatory instincts, enhanced from two decades of living in the jungles of Za.

He grinned confidently while slightly trembling physically with anticipation and nervous adrenaline, drooling emotionally with the thrill of the risk and the reward of the kill.

Welcome to The Wilds, Valley Baby!—he thought as he got out of his rented Wanderer and crossed the magway to the front of the guy's suburban, Valley forest home.

The guy he was supposed to snuff and whose ID he was to assume was just about to leave his house. The Installer could see him putting his jacket on through a round, bulbous front window.

He would wait for the guy to open the door; then ...

JUMP!

... The startled krok in the face before he'd know what was coming at him, take him inside, take his uniform, his ID, take his rider and go in his place to his job as night-watchman.

In the krokin' Royal Garage holding the carriage-convertible that'll be carrying the motherfatherkrokin' Prince and his lovely, new young bride-to-be in tomorrow's engagement ceremony parade through downtown Rai Valley!

The Installer suppressed a nervous shudder.

The ultimate penalty for even the slightest screw up would be his life. If he got caught, he was dead. That was all there was to it. Those were the stakes.

But if he pulled this gig off—

He calmed another wave of doubt with the thought that no matter what happened, his name would be legend for being the first 'nar to attempt an assassination of a Royal since VoriChak slew those krokin' wastebag Zavoi and his whore-woman Atmi, the founders of the House of Rai and the Royal Line, to pay them back for their defeat of The Exiles seven-thousand cycles ago in the war Exiles called The First Rising.

The Second, The Installer thought while waxing somewhat whimsically about his own role in the whole historic process, was about to begin tomorrow as a result of what he would do today.

Any of the sparse pedestrians passing by the sidewalks or drivers floating the magway would assume, in the dimness of the thickly forested suburban dusk, that the man they would now catch a passing glimpse of crossing the magway to wait at the guy's door was just the transcom home-unit repair man he was dressed as, waiting for a customer to answer their door for a house call.

No worries! All ripe so far!—he told himself quietly, glancing around carefreely, while casually crossing the magway with his hands in his pockets and a tool bag loosely slung over the left shoulder of the ubiquitous and distinct Valley Data Doctor jacket he wore.

He hopped up over the polarity-generating amplifier rail on the edge of the magway, onto the sidewalk, and approached the front door of the guy's house, which stood amongst giant fern, palm and fruit trees, their numbers only slightly and carefully thinned to accommodate habitat construction on a suburban scale.

Not like the massive, thick, dark and deadly density of Za, The Installer thought as he stepped up to the guy's front door. He could hear the guy on the other side fiddling with his ring of remotes.

Here it co-oooomes! ...

A silent pause ...

Then ...

Then!—The Installer's mind screamed out in nerve-frying—

The door slid open.

The Installer brought his left hand out of his right pocket already in a full, backhanded swing on its way up and across through the air before the door slid fully open.

"Welcome to The Wilds, Valley Baby!" The Installer greeted the guy cheerfully, while slitting deeply into and across his throat with the stone sabershiv that was shaved down to a razor the width of a jungle ant's ass hair.

Before the poor dumb drik could bat a stupefied eye.

The Installer stepped quickly and confidently into the house as the guy slumped back into the tall and open skylighted atrium as luminous, violet blood gushed from his gashed neck. He caught the remote key in the guy's hand with the fingers still on the small, rectangular plaschip remote, on a ring with others of various colors and sizes.

Slipping completely through the doorway, The Installer aimed the front door remote and pressed the guy's fingertips over it. He let his hand go and stood over the guy as he finally fell to the floor while the door hissed closed behind them.

CHAPTER XXXII

He was in!

The Installer entered the heavily fortified Castle court complex by the North Gate, through the back end, instead of the East Gate he was told the guy always took. That way nobody watching the security monitor screens at Gate Security inside would be likely to identify him. He had the guy's digital Castle Security Pass remote and today's security password. Shadu men were famously short and solidly stocky, so to those Raian bastards exclusively making up the Royal Guard, The Installer—dressed as the night-watchman now dead in the house that would burn down with him in it early tomorrow morning just after his "shift" at The Castle—would look just like any other Shadu.

And it had worked!

He had waltzed right up to the TransCom AutoMat in the wall, slipped his CSF remote-chip pass through the TAM's slot, punched in the right password and made it look for the surveillance monitors like he was just a night-watchman guy here for his shift looking at his wristchrono to check and see how much time he had to get to his office. There were two monitors: one directly in front of him, facing him from inside the TAM unit; and one on a pivot hinge above the doorway to his left in the alcove carved into the massive, sculpted emerald-stone gate.

His heart had skipped a beat as he waited ...

And waited ...

And waited ...

Krokin' fiss I'm gonna lose it heeeeeere!

... And the system finally buzzed him through the door.

It had whooshed open, and The Installer passed through the scanner belt in it's frame without incident, moving into the well-lit passageway through the thick, green stone.

He had tried hard not to fiss his frock from relief and whoop out of excitement on his way past the Gate Security window. The guys inside hadn't even looked up from their monitors or their illegal porn or whatever else they were watching as he walked by confidently.

The rest of the way had been a swing through the trees, too. As promised, traffic inside The Castle was sparse this late in the evening; most, if not all, of the day staff were long gone and Castle residents were mostly turned in early in lieu of the big deal day tomorrow.

He had all the right security codes to get past all the right TAM checkpoints, had walked through them all smoothly and unremarked by any of the on-duty Royal Guard, and none of the dozen or so Castle staff he had passed on his route through the lit corridors and outdoor courts had given him a second look following any first quick glance as he had wound his way through to the Royal Garage. He had studied a virtual vidtour program of his route through The Castle's interior to his destination. So he knew the way with his eyes closed and could walk through it casually just like the poor, dumb, dead krok he was impersonating.

The biggest scare to The Installer had come when he had considered that the watchman he'd be relieving would be there and see for sure he wasn't "the guy."

After contacting Chor to let him know he was on his way, he'd taken care of the above problem with an audio-only transcom, imitating the guy's voice that he'd studied from the personal InterTrans vidmail he'd obtained hacking into his online IT account. Calling from the guy's appropriated rider, on the way to The Castle as Jav Vaj, night-watchman, The Installer had told his security guard buddy at the Royal Garage he was going to be five minutes late and for him not to worry, he could go home.

His buddy then told him he'd already left half an hour ago, and asked "Jav" to logoff for him when he got in to make it look like the buddy had actually finished his shift.

"Sure buddy, no prooooooblem," "Jav" had told buddy.

Problem solved!

Now, he stood in the plush office overlooking, beyond its open wall, the massive, fully maintenace/repair/storage-equipped Royal Garage. In the centre of its parking bays stood two, gleaming Ambassador PMR carriage-convertibles, custom designed-and-built exclusively for the Royals: one a deep, almost mesmerizing metallic violet, the old lady's and man's; the other, a blinding white:

The little brat and his whore-woman's.

That was the one.

The Installer pulled a small, rectangular remote the size of a mobile out of his pocket and, pointing it at the open garage area, ran it across the breadth of the view from one side to the other while a glowing red light flashed intermittently on the otherwise smooth device.

When he finished, he sat down at the counter that looked out over the garage, and before going to log in to The Castle's transcom system using Jav Vaj's ID, The Installer took the same, small remote device and plugged it into one of the transcom console's Universal ports.

"Jav Vaj" logged his truant buddy out, then logged himself in to work right on time. The device The Installer had plugged into the UPort contained, among other special features, a video record of the garage inside the software, that would project the image—of a nice, uneventful, quiet garage—directly to the system archive of the garage's monitor signal, by-passing it while disabling it first.

That way, the only thing anybody would ever see in the video record of Jav Vaj's last logged-in shift at work after he was found, burnt to death in his home tomorrow, would be a nice, uneventful, quiet garage.

The same nice, uneventful, quiet garage into which The Installer now descended, pulling his custom set of micro-instruments and a handful of colorful, glowing data-crystal cubes from Jav Vaj's back pack.

Among those cubes was a black crystal containing an electromagnetic compressor bomb, whose blast would cause the electromagnetic fields surrounding the bodies of the Royal brat and his Pyarran slut to hyper-attract until they'd collapse on themselves and implode at their molecular source; the effect of which would be that the resulting energy blast would make their bodies explode in a bloody, meaty cascade like ripe fruits in a giant, angry, invisible fist.

And just as messy, too.

Live. On KTN Global.

The Installer was confident and calm now as he he strode quickly, straight for the white Ambassador that stood beside its violet twin. This was when his senses were completely on, when his focus was entirely on what he did best:

Installing.

He had worried about the "getting-in" part. That turned out to be a swing through the trees! The "getting-out" part would be easy, too. He'd just pull the same stunt buddy on the shift before pulled on him, by placing a call to morning-shift buddy, whose transcom ID would be in The Castle system. There was no worries about anybody walking in on him either, because the remote plugged into the garage's sensor array would warn him if any of the monitors outside the garage showed somebody coming. If anybody was on their way while he was working on the brat-and-whore's rider, he'd still have time to shut down and then run to the waster, making it look like he was in there taking a raucously stinking dump, which would prevent anybody from seeing it wasn't really Jav Vaj in the Royal Garage tonight. If they came after he was done working on the rider—which should take no more than half an hour anyway—he'd already be watching, so no problem there, either.

He'd made sure everything was in place for him to walk out of The Castle with nobody the wiser that "Jav Vaj" had just waltzed out of the most fortified and secure place on Krai, after having installed a powerful explosive device on Prince Jedi-and-whore-woman's shiny new rider.

The alternative was getting caught and rehabed by those Valley Babykrokers into vegetable-like quiescence for the rest of his life, and that wouldn't fit in with his plans.

By this time tomorrow, he planned to be back in Za and filthy, stinkin' rich—and famous—for the rest of his life.

He didn't need to stick around for the big "BANG!" That was tomorrow. The device would be detonated by the remote The Installer had provided DeemarChor. The Installer didn't care who would be pushing the button. His job was to make sure it would make them go "SPLAT!" and then he was done.

Right now, as he approached the pair of Ambassadors, The Installer took another plain, rectangular remote from Jav Vaj's bag and pointed it at the white rider. The magnetic security field around the vehicles dropped as the ring of projectors in the floor surrounding it was disabled.

"Welcome to The Wilds, Valley Babies!" The Installer chuckled quietly out loud with marvel, menace, and pleasure all at once, as he was now firmly in the front door of his place in history.

The Ambassador chirped and hummed to life as its on-board systems powered up.

"Time for The Installer to install," The Installer said aloud.

CHAPTER XXXIII

This was it.

The big day before the Big Day.

Here we go—Jedi thought ...

... And walked through the door.

The Grand Reception Room of The Castle was packed: groups and even larger crowds throughout the massive room; people talking, laughing and dancing alone, in pairs or even in throngs in some places.

The room's expansive, high, domed ceiling was retractable, and was opened to today's exceedingly radiant sunslight, which splashed off the carved, creamy stone hall and down on the exactly one-thousand, one hundred and eleven guests—an auspicious number in Kraian numerology—mingling under the exotic arborea and winding streams, brooks and waterfalls networking the floor.

Although the party wouldn't be transcast live, Jedi saw, scattered here and there throughout the crowd, some transcom media figures with monitors were shooting footage of and getting sound bites from all the right members of the Kraian Nobility as well as from the numerous global celebrities present.

Jedi wore a dazzlingly jeweled and embroidered, white silk jacket cut just above the knee, over loose white silk pants and a white tunic. As was tradition in Pyarran marriage custom, he came barefoot, as Zita would be.

His mop of hair, though, was just as messy as always.

I'll hear something about that!—he smiled to himself.

Jedi's Force sense amplified all the energy from the anxiety his physical senses were already dealing with over his impending presentation to the world for the first time as the soon-to-become King and ... all that was going on all underneath all of that ... aaaaaaand, what was even more nerve-wracking because of what it meant to him on a personal level too deep for even Jedi to express completely right now:

Waiting to see Zita come down those stairs ...

... To join him in the ride that would last them the rest of their lives.

A ride he now had no doubt was going to be the grav of a lifetime.

Pressure? What pressure?

He breathed himself into a centered frequency in the Force energy flow rushing through him now like a freight magtrain. There was a well of everybody's energy swirling around the giant, domed room at a time when, because of the global scope of the event, tensions were all high anyway as people were already naturally anxious. All the top people from the top families of the top of the Royal pack. All here and all anxious.

And their kids.

Some were anxious over putting on a good show for the global audience that'd be watching. Some over trying not to look like inept bunglers in front of same said audience.

Some were anxious just as part of the general anxiety present due to the perceptible shifting in Kraian awareness occurring to the collective Nareed consciousness.

Others, however—not only through how he had learned to sense what the Force revealed to him in others about them and their intentions, but because of everything that he had learned in the last three weeks, too—had some pretty, Master Lekh would've said, dark intent.

Jedi felt a lot of that from all around the room, as thickly as if it were hanging in the air like a soupy, luminous fog.

A dark, soupy, luminous fog.

He understood now that if it hadn't been for his gift, he'd be dead by now, victim of the predators he now knew were so skillfully stealthed amongst the highest levels of Kraian society.

... But that The Force let Jedi see as clearly as a hand before his face.

In the center of the fog that he could "see" with his Force sense, Jedi felt a cold burning so intense it sucked the heat out of everything near it:

Sith.

So he was here already.

Okaaaaaay. Whatever. Here we go!

It was Zita's father, Amrun, Lord of the House of Pyarr, who caught Jedi coming in the door.

Jedi smiled at the tall, thick, copper-toned man—dressed ornately in a white frock embroidered with multicolored jewels, white leggings and the curlicued, jewel-encrusted bark-leather shoes Pyarran fire-tiger riders traditionally wore—as he broke away from a group of guests mingling by the tall, arched, amethyst doorway.

Jedi lost the stab of Sith's coldness somewhere in the background energy din of the room, and washed over with the pleasing and completely harmlessly disarming warmth radiating from Amrun.

Jedi liked the man. He was a strong character who grew up fighting hard together with the woman he loved for a cause that had not been a popular or easy one in Pyarr for a long time.

When Amrun had been a youth, second son in the Pyarran Noble House, whose Lord was the Governor-General Representing the Crown in Pyarr, he was a law student of great excellence, so he knew the GGRC had the legal privilege to intervene in legal cases on behalf of the Crown. In this instance, it had been as a result of Amrun's impassioned pleading with his father, Lord Umran, to get involved in the trial of a young Pyarran girl the student-Amrun knew only by sight from the Royal. She had been brought up on trumped-up conspiracy charges as a way of covering the asses of some corrupt, local KSF boys who had roughed her up a little during a peaceful protest supporting legislated equal female salary status in Pyarr.

In court, Lord Umran's legalists proved the woman's innocence.

Amrun of Pyarr redeemed it afterwards, in an out-of-court settlement, when the young man and some associates paid the offending officers a visit one evening at their precinct headquarters and taught them what it meant to beat up on innocent young women.

Upon emerging from the courthouse after the acquittal in court, the woman had asked the Crown Legalist with her who it was that had arranged for her to be represented by the legal team of the Lord of the House of Pyarr, no less.

His son, the handsome, dashing young Amrun of Pyarr, just "happened" to be waiting right there at the top of the courthouse steps.

He stepped into the conversation.

"I did," he answered the startled young woman.

The young woman had then asked the handsome, dashing young Amrun of Pyarr, who she didn't know from a hole in the wall, why he would do something like that for her.

He told her it was because she had the most beautifully kind eyes he had ever looked into and couldn't believe that anything she was involved in could ever be of any wrong.

Then he asked her name.

The speechless woman stuttered, catching her breath.

"Zula," she had manged to squeak out:

The woman who would become Zita's mother.

Jedi loved that story every time Lord Amrun told it, which was practically every time he had an audience, willing or captive. Lord Amrun liked to have a few drinks, especially at social occasions, and was a jovial, engaging storyteller.

He was also a Kah Zok; aPyarran fire-tiger rider, from a group of warriors famous for their talent for taming and riding the vicious, giant cats of the deep, Pyarran forests.

One time, Jedi had watched Lord Amrun talk a wild fire-tiger down into a submissive crouch, with its paws gently at Lord Amrun's feet and its giant, feline, saber-toothed maw resting casually on them, only occasionally daring to look sheepishly up at the man.

"Woah. Grav, 'nar! You gonna ride him?" Jedi had asked Lord Amrun in enthusiastic wonder.

Lord Amrun laughed. "No," he had said. "I'm too old for that kind of nonsense." The elder stopped and regarded the young Prince. Then: "But you're not, though, are you?" Then again, grinning madly: "Yeah. I'm not going to ride this one ..."

Then he pointed to another fire-tiger resting in the crook of the branch of a nearby tree.

"... You're going to ride that one," Amrun then had said to a stunned-fissless Jedi, who turned pale.

Before Jedi could even utter a protest, Lord Amrun had then taken a rock, threw it, hit the sleeping fire-tiger in the belly, and woke the fissed-off giant cat up.

It growled angrily at the two men with it's deep, throaty rumble, and began climbing down the trunk of the tree.

"If you're the one who's going to marry my daughter, Son, you're going to ride that tiger."

"And if I don't?" Jedi had replied, motionless, calm, his back turned to Amrun, not taking his eyes off the snarling beast.

"Then you're not going to be 'The One,' are you?"

"And if it kills me?" Jedi called out, eyes locked with the giant feline.

Lord Amrun had laughed. "Then I guess you really won't be 'The One!'"

"Jedi of Rai is marrying your daughter, My Lord," Jedi had proudly declared to Amrun, while watching the fire-tiger hop down to the ground from the trunk and start slinking it's muscular, obsidian, crystaleonine hulk toward him, it's glowing crimson eyes on fire, it's incisors dripping with neurotoxic venom.

Looking straight into the eyes of the fire-tiger, Jedi let a wild grin break out on his lips. He winked at the tiger playfully, and called out to Amrun.

"Now watch this, 'Pops,'" Jedi had said with a chuckle, and Lord Amrun had been witness to the first non-Pyarran in known history ever to manage to tame and ride a fire-tiger.

The same witness who, now with a tall drink in one of his welcoming outstretched hands, approached Jedi with a beaming smile and his customary, loud expressiveness.

"Jedi!" he proclaimed loudly enough for everybody in the vicinity to hear, making heads turn and discreet buzz start to happen all around. "So you decided you were man enough to show up, eh, you little pup?"

He then turned to everybody and shouted out proudly. "Hey everybody! The rascal who thinks he's man enough to steal my daughter just dared to show his face!"

Everyone roared with laughter.

"Hey! My Lord!" Jedi shouted out. "Ride any fire-tigers lately?"

Lord Amrun's eyes shot open in surprise. Then he broke into a grin. "Why you little ..."

He rushed Jedi rambunctiously and embraced him in a tight hug. Everybody roared laughing again.

Amrun collared a passing attendant with a tray full of tall glasses containing small amounts of timra, a wine made from the flowers of the timra tree, which gave off a pleasantly sweet, perfumed scent, and had mildly sense-enhancing properties.

He handed one glass to Jedi, placed his now-drained other glass on the tray and grabbed a fresh one for himself, winking gratefully at the male attendant as he left.

"Have a drink with me, my boy," Amrun put one arm around Jedi's shoulders and led him into the huge room along the back wall lined with tables laden with delicacies and drinks from all over Krai.

"This is the last chance I'll get to talk to you like this before you marry Zita," Amrun bellowed into Jedi's ear as they walked casually through the crowd, making all the appropriate nods as they went, while everybody understood by the way Lord Amrun had his arm around Jedi's shoulders that it was off limits for now until he was finished. "We'll be returning to Pyarr after the parade and won't see you again until the wedding."

Amrun gave Jedi a consoling few taps on the back of the head. "How are you after ... yesterday?"

"You mean the accident?" Jedi asked. That seemed ages ago now, and in the absence of any remaining physical symptoms at all, he had already forgotten about it. "I'm okay. My memory's back and I don't forget things. I just can't remember much about how it happened." He rubbed his head where it had hit the rock. "They patched me up pretty tightly. Just a little tender, is all. I've had worse falling off my magboard."

"But you never almost went over a waterfall while knocked unconscious on the eve of your engagement as a result, either!" Amrun laughed, his concern not too deeply disguised by mirth.

He paused for a moment, gathering some thoughts. Then, suddenly:

"I wasn't sure about you at first," Armun proclaimed with exaggerated melodrama, glancing sideways at Jedi playfully. Then he narrowed his eyes. "You're talented, smart, good, skillful and cocky as krok. I liked that. But you were wild. I didn't like that. You like danger a little too much, you know what I mean?"

He paused to visually confirm Jedi knew what he meant. Jedi wasn't sure, because he didn't know how much Lord Amrun was in on anything that was going on; so he nodded anyway.

"But when I saw you tame that tiger, my boy!" Amrun suddenly lost the last shreds of seriousness and slapped Jedi hard across the back. "I knew you not only had the heart that was strong enough to take my daughter's fire—and she's a hot one, my little Zee—but the heart soft enough to never break hers. I know my daughter enough to know that she loves you with all hear heart and trusts you with her life. And about your love for danger?"

He paused again and gave Jedi a sideways glance.

"What better man to take care of my little girl than one who isn't afraid of danger when it comes knocking. And it will come knocking, I promise you."

In the brief pause Amrun took, Jedi sensed an anxiety over some foreboding the man was feeling with that thought. But then:

"You're going to be a good man, Jedi. And a good king. It's going to be an honor to serve you and a privilege to call you "Son." We're all proud of you. Especially your parents. Both of them."

While the two men smiled warmly, Jedi sensed a slight disturbance in Amrun at the mention of his mother and father.

Then a sudden flood of warmth washed it away.

"Here," Amrun entwined arms with Jedi so that their glasses were pointed toward each other. "To Zita! The most beautiful Queen Krai will ever know!" They both shouted, and a cheer went up as they hoisted their entwined arms up to their mouths and downed the drinks in the customary Pyarran toast.

"You're going to be a man with a woman now, My Prince!" Lord Amrun boomed out into the crowded room. "Hope you can handle it!" he guffawed, and the guests in the area all roared along with him.

"Go see your mom and dad," Amrun then leaned in and suggested with a curious discretion and exceedingly intimate warmth. "They're so very happy for both of you. And for the world. I bet they'd love to tell you today."

He then made a quick and, Jedi noted, awkward apology, and turned to talk to somebody behind them in the crowd. Jedi sensed a tension inside Amrun that was clearly attached to his thoughts and feelings about Jedi's parents.

The noisy and intrusive din of the room suddenly brought him back out of his deep dive into Force sense. He filed the thought and turned to look around ...

... And drank in pleasantly the colorful and brilliant mix of fashions and splendor from around the world, and felt the voices and the energy flow of all the people in the room like a whirlpool of light swirling through the air all around the vast hall.

He zeroed in on two of the energies he knew best.

Mom and Dad.

There they were!

Jedi began plodding through the crowd toward them, nodding here, pressing an elbow there, making a pleasant comment into a passing ear elsewhere, sensing his parent's location while following his feeling of them as it grew stronger in intensity. Soon, he saw the Queen and King across the room, seated in some plush chairs underneath a canopy of towering ferns and palms, surrounded by chatting and laughing guests, and, because Jedi could spot and count all of them, plenty of discreet, undercover Royal Guard. He'd have to make his way through a sizable chunk of the polite chit-chat trail before getting to them.

Oh look! Here comes the next one now!

Jedi smiled and opened his arms in greeting.

King Eloh leaned elegantly over and whispered into Queen Deleb's ear. "Excuse me, Your Sweetness, I'll be right back."

He got up and excused himself from his guests.

Eloh was dressed in his multi-crystal robe, shimmering like a dazzling light display. Underneath he was in a white, silk tunic and pants, and in honor of Zita's Pyarran heritage, the King, along with Queen Deleb, chose to go barefoot for the ceremony. On his head he wore the gold Crown of Zavoi, which contained, set in its center, one of the two Eyes of Rai: the Crown Jewels of the Kraian Royal Family. The other was set in the Crown of Atmi that Deleb wore.

Sith was nearby, talking to a group of young girls over by an orange-and purple palm.

Eloh wanted a word with his son before the festivities got under way.

A serious word.

Sith, Eloh had noted with a wince when he'd seen his son arrive for the reception, was less regally attired: a black leather cloak over his violet, velvety tunic and black, reptosaur-skin pants. His bald head, gaunt skin from intoxicant addiction, tattooed face, the frightening focal point of which were his burning yellow eyes rimmed in blood red—all made the King of Rai incensed, while the father of his son was simply saddeningly disappointed and woefully concerned.

The King approached the group from behind Sith. They all saw him before the Prince did, and so Sith swung around in surprise after suddenly noticing the wide stares they started aiming behind him.

"Dad!" Sith blurted out in a subtle but unmistakably intoxicated tone. He threw his arms open wide and grinned.

"Excuse us, young ladies, will you please?" Eloh charmed the giggling young girls and led Sith quietly away from them through the crowd with his arm around his son's shoulders.

There were beads of sweat all over Sith's gaunt, green head, and he appeared suddenly anxious. Eloh smiled regally while addressing his son discreetly. The King kept his eyes darting casually around to monitor who and what he was seeing and where all, including the two of them, was going. Sith kept his eyes submissively on the floor.

"Where'd you disappear to from the CMC last night?" Eloh asked Sith.

Sith remained silent.

"When we came out of Jedi's room, you were gone," Eloh reiterated. "You didn't get in until a couple of hours ago. Where were you all night and all morning?"

Sith still remained silent.

"Why didn't you come tell us you were back yesterday?" Eloh kept firing away at Sith.

"What's the difference?" Sith burst out finally. "I wanted to see Jedi first," he added, with a more timid defiance.

"Sure you did," Eloh commented, casually. "Why?" he interrogated further.

Sith's anger rose in correspondence with the fear that began gnawing at him with his father's obvious hints at some suspicion.

"I wanted to take him out for a little blast before his engagement today. Something wrong with that?" Sith's cockiness, despite his usual timidity before his imposing father, was creeping back.

Then, as if out of nowhere, Sith suddenly felt an irrepressible urge for validation that he couldn't verbally contain. "What happened yesterday was an accident!" he exclaimed hotly.

"Was it?" Eloh asked, pointedly.

"What the krok is that supposed to mean?" Sith spat out, fangs now fully bared.

Eloh leaned his head close in to Sith's.

"Was ... it?"

Sith looked up at his father with fires smoldering in his glowing green irises, surrounded by the burning yellow of his eyes, but he remained silent in deference to his father's imposing strength.

"You'll never talk to me like that again," Eloh said, while winking at him and running his hand gently and casually to the crook of Sith's neck, pinching it imperceptibly but painfully enough for Sith to wince.

The King smiled at an elderly Noblewoman, and led Sith on with his arm back around his son's shoulder.

"Where were you the last three weeks?" father asked son.

Sith paused. Then: "You mean your Royal Guard hounds didn't tell you? You didn't know where I was all the time?"

"Never mind what I know or I don't know," Eloh announced forcefully. "I'm asking you to tell me where you were for the last three weeks. And why you're here now. So? Going to tell me?"

They stopped where the marbled floor came to the grassy bank of a burbling brook winding its way through the room.

Looking down at the water with his head hanging low enough for his green-and-gray, bearded chin to almost rest on his chest, Eloh kept his arm casually around Sith's shoulder.

"Well?" he asked again, this time with an undisguised, angry forcefulness creeping into his slightly raised tone. "You going to tell me?"

The King looked up hard at Prince Sith of Rai, who stood beside him with his head down, staring at the water as well, with burning eyes and an angry scowl on his lips.

Eloh watched his son breathe heavily for a few moments.

The King of Krai and the father of the son both smiled sadly. "I didn't think so."

Eloh looked away from Sith for a moment and stared off into the crowd. Then he looked back at his son, whose head was still hung low.

"You can stay for the party," Eloh said simply, as if outlining instructions to a child or a subordinate. "You make any trouble in here for Zita or Jedi or anybody else, I won't have you taken out, I'll take you out myself. Clear?"

He paused and looked at Sith, whose position and demeanor remained unchanged. Only his nostrils were flaring now, while they hadn't been the last time Eloh looked.

"You make a discreet exit, and I don't want you riding with us in the parade," Eloh commanded Sith with both regal and parental authority explicit in his tone. "You hear me?"

Then the King straightened up and grinned the mischievous grin of a man mysteriously content. He slapped Sith forcefully enough in the back of the neck that the startled youth almost stumbled forward into the brook.

Sith looked up at his father sheepishly.

"Have a blast, son!" Eloh told Sith, with mirth in his voice, and slapped him hard on his back.

Then he turned and left Sith seething by the burbling brook.

"Jedi!" Queen Deleb rose from her seat when she saw her son approaching the group under the fern. She rushed out to him with her arms open, beaming with pride at Jedi with love in her sparkling, turquoise eyes, while the group around the fern looked on enthusiastically.

She was radiant in her full length, tight, sleeveless, peacock-blue silk body wrap that was embroidered in gold silks in the blue-and-gold colors of the House of Rai, and encrusted with brilliant, precious jewels. The clear crystal Eye in her crown twinkled luminously and her long, dark hair fell back behind her shoulders and was clipped with a gold-and-jewel barrette at the base of her spine. Her bare arms were adorned with thick, sparkling gold and jeweled bracelets, and she wore an elaborate galsoo marriage necklace of gold and jewels that matched the one worn by the King. Like her mate, the Queen too was barefoot, with toe rings and anklets of colored jewels clacking under the hem of her dress as she strode across the floor to embrace her son.

She emitted an aura that was an almost supernaturally regal power combined with the gentle, loving kindness of a mother, the confident innocence of a girl and the attractive allure of a beautiful woman.

"You look pretty hot, Mom." Jedi winked at Queen Deleb as he looked her up and down after she withdrew from warmly embracing him. She did a quick, flourishing twirl around.

"And look at you," Deleb the Queen and the mother beamed proudly at him as she came out of her spin and took him by the shoulders. "Mother and Father! No wonder I had to keep beating them off with a stick!"

"Until the one who beat you back came along," Jedi laughed.

"Very funny!" Deleb teased. "Come with me." She hooked her arm into the crook of Jedi's elbow and took his hand in both of hers.

"Where's Dad?" Jedi asked.

"He's talking to Sith," Deleb replied cheerfully.

Despite her ebullience, Jedi sensed a nervous stirring in Deleb. It was faint, deep, distant—but there.

"What is it?" he asked.

Deleb smiled warmly and continued in a sincerely festive and cheerful tone, glowing only with the joy of her son's impending happiness. "It always surprises me! Because, I know that you can feel my feelings and sometimes even sense my thoughts, but it still always surprises me every time. You know what the thing about you is that makes me most proud of you, you nasty little boy, is that you have this ability, and all your life you never once used it to harm anybody or anything or for your own advantage."

She paused and looked sideways at him. "Don't let that go to your pretty little head," she admonished him playfully. "You've still got a long way to go. We both know what I mean. You're just at the beginning of it. But I'll tell you, this jealous, over-protective, catty mother lioness of yours couldn't have dreamed of a better mate for you than Zita."

There it was again. That nervous twitch in her feelings, like the skip of her heartbeat that Jedi could feel in his own.

He waited. He knew she'd get around to it when she was ready, whatever it was.

"Sith."

As soon as she said it, Jedi knew it, felt it.

All the pain she felt.

He felt it too.

"I know," Jedi said, squeezing her hands now in both of his as they walked and did the occasional smile-and-nod on the move. "You don't have to say anything."

"Be careful, Jedi," Deleb said, tender concern mixed into her warning. "He's become dangerous."

"I know."

"You'll be okay," Deleb said soothingly, seeing his concern. "Everything will be. But it won't be easy. Or quick. Just remember. No matter what you face, you won't be facing it alone. You'll always have Zita, and then everybody else you know you can trust. You're becoming what you're becoming for a good purpose and that's both your strength and your advantage. You have the talent and your special gift to help you. You have the combined power of all our ancestry in you. You ..."

Jedi laughed out loud as he scooped a pair of drinks from a passing attendant and handed one to Deleb. "That's some pretty heavy grav, mom!"

"Don't play adventure boy with me," Deleb chided her son. "This is heavy grav, and you know it is. And I know you're scared fissless not because I have some magic sense but because I'm your mother. So listen to me. I'm telling you things you'll need to remember. Important things."

Jedi smiled at Deleb, and this time he hooked his arm around hers and took her hand in his as he pulled a long sip of his drink and she followed suit.

"I know. I'm listening," he assured her. "I know this is heavy grav. But I also know that anything that isn't supposed to happen, won't. So everything's going to be okay in the end. No matter how long 'the end' takes."

"There are some things, my little baby, you won't be able to foresee," Deleb said with a stab of melancholy that Jedi felt painfully within his chest. "Be prepared for that, too."

The stab hit Jedi in the heart so hard his whole chest twitched.

He looked into his mother's eyes, and saw that pain in them, too.

Could she already know she's got the virus?

"Mom, I ..."

"Never mind," she cut him off quickly. Then she looked long into his eyes with that same melancholy in them. "I know."

Then his mother smiled, and when she did, the pain Jedi felt from her was gone, replaced by the same strength, loving and joyful warmth he'd spent a whole lifetime always feeling from her.

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. "Mmmm. That Zita is taking away my yummy little morsel. Don't you dare ever let her down. Or else I'll pull your ear like I did when you were a little cub." She jabbed him in the ribs with the drink in her hand and giggled.

"Loooooook," the Queen of Krai gushed like a little school girl. "Look at me, now! On the arm of the handsomest, most eligible bachelor in the world! And Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai! Maybe I'll steal you away right now and we'll fly to Za and hide-out there together!" She laughed mirthfully.

Jedi cringed. "Mo-om," he mock complained. "You gotta creep me out like that?"

"What? I'm just playing with you, silly," Deleb the mother said, and laughed. Then Deleb the woman suddenly stopped, stepped back, and looked her son the man up and down approvingly. "Mmmmmmm. Yum-my! You're lucky I'm your mother. I'm lucky I'm your mother."

She burst out laughing at the pleading look on Jedi's face when he fell for her playful jab again.

They were stopped at the bottom of the expansive staircase that ran up to the balcony which led to the door behind which Zita and her bridal party were also waiting for the big moment.

Queen Deleb glanced up quickly, then turned back to Jedi.

"Sweetie, listen to me." She touched Jedi's face and looked longingly into his eyes. "I have to go up there now. Stop looking so worried! You've go that waterbird-eyes-in-the-headlights look all over your face and you look like you're going to fiss your frock. Relax. Everything's all right. You're getting married to the most beautiful woman in the world ... Next to me, of course."

Deleb slapped Jedi lightly on the cheek and laughed again at what must have been the worried look on his face. He worked hard to bury his thoughts about her and the virus and feel the joy of the moment.

And the one just about to come.

"Just remember this last thing," his mother said. And now it was all "mom" Jedi saw in her eyes.

"Whatever it comes down to between you and Sith, always remind yourself that he's your brother, and never let anything, especially anger ... never let anything but love for him motivate how you react to him. Now if you'll excuse me, groom boy, mumma's going to go see what the ladies upstairs are doing with your girl."

The Queen of Krai placed her drink on a passing attendant's tray with agility and grace ...

"I love you, mom," Jedi said quickly.

... And with that same grace was about to turn in a flourish to go up the stairs, when the mother stopped her regal self. She looked into her son's glowing cobalt eyes and her lips quivered slightly as she smiled while her eyes watered in the corners.

"I know, baby, I know." Deleb hugged Jedi tightly, and he returned the embrace. "I love you, too," she whispered in his ear.

Deleb withdrew, holding Jedi by the shoulders, and looked him in the eyes longingly again. Then she smiled. "Aaaaaaand ... We're proud of you. Both your father and I are. Always remember that!"

She gave him a light, playful slap on the cheek, giggled, then turned and scuttled up the stairs with all the regal decorum of an excited, cheerful little girl on the last day of school before vacation.

As Jedi watched his mother ascend the staircase—she seemed to almost float effervescently across the balcony to the bride-to-be's room, all "The Queen" now for of the people who would be noticing her—he felt a sudden tap on his shoulder and turned.

It was Zita's mother, Zula.

"Ami!" Jedi excalimed joyfully in the Pyarran endearment for "Mom." Then his joy turned abruptly to confusion. "Hey!" He rolled his eyes in thought. "Aren't you supposed to be up there with Zita?"

Zula looked around almost conspiratorially as she kept her warm smile both on her face and in her deep, dark metallic-copper eyes and violet irises. She was stunning in her jeweled, shimmering violet silk rongthi that was as similar as it was as tight as the one Zita had worn the previous day, complementing Zula's curvy, robust figure. Her wrists, ankles and toes of her bare feet were adorned with rings of gold and precious stones. An elaborate gold piece hung around her bare, trim waist and tapered off discreetly but suggestively downward over her navel. She was an older version of Zita, although she could have been easily mistaken for her slightly older sister and not her mother.

In other words, Jedi thought, Zita's mom was pretty hot. He saw what he'd be seeing in about twenty cycles in Zita, and he liked it a lot.

Even though it was the pure goodness, gentleness and power he had felt through The Force in Zita's heart when first saw her, the hormonally enhanced, teenage Jedi was pleased to know that she would age like a good timra: same exuberant, potent, flowery "little-girl" flavor, but with the richer, deeper, darker, smoother texture that came only after the longevity of a "full-grown-woman" taste.

In other words, I'm going to be mad for Zita for a krok of a long time!—Jedi thought.

Zula touched Jedi gently on the upper arm just then as she looked up at him from under her thick, batting eyelashes with the warmly shining, almond-shaped eyes that always matched her smile.

"Come with me," she leaned in and asked Jedi, making it sound like an urgent favor more than a command. "Please," she added, and Jedi noted the same melancholic stab from Zula that he detected twice with his mother a few moments ago, and earlier with Amrun, too, now that he recalled.

Then he felt a tightness clench his stomach.

Mother-and-Father! Zita changed her mind!

"Is everything all right?" Jedi asked casually, even though the alarm suddenly began ringing loudly in his mind, and the completely irrational fear that Jedi knew was completely irrational—that Zita changed her mind—had unaccountably made him feel suddenly terror-stricken.

"Everything's fiiiiiine," Zula laughed in the soft yet throaty sing-song voice of Pyarran women, not missing that the Prince had abruptly gone barely perceptibly pale. "Just come with me. I have a surprise for you."

She took Jedi by the hand and led him around the side of the opulent staircase to the back, under it, and to a set of silver maglift doors in a lit alcove in the dark wall below the slope of the huge stairs.

Zula pawed the call-crystal.

"Where are we going?" Jedi asked. He could sense nothing but warmth and joy in Zula's thoughts and feelings, so he knew nothing wrong or worrisome was up. But Zula had an extraordinarily disciplined mind, and Jedi only rarely could pop into her thoughts through her walls.

She was grinning—biting her lower lip hard to try to stop—without answering while staring into the maglift doors

"What are you up to?" he grilled her, smiling and poking her in the shoulder, her inherently ebullient playfulness infecting him and washing his thoughts of all worry.

Zula giggled.

"You'll see!" she said, then stopped and thought for a second, like a little girl trying to remember a math formula. Then: "Oh waitamminit ... no you won't see!"

She giggled some more, then covered her mouth with the back of her hand to try and stop herself, her bangles clinking and chiming musically.

Jedi laughed with her.

The doors to the maglift whooshed open.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Sith watched his dad leave.

Yeah, krok you too, Old Man!—he thought, and spat mentally after him. Soon things'll be different. A whoooooole lot different.

He burst out laughing to himself.

A Yulan attendant passed by with a tray of drinks. Sith roped her by the arm and swung her back to him, grabbing a drink of the tray and then pushing her past him all in one swift, smooth motion that left her with a stunned look on her face as he walked away.

Krokin' Outsider!—the Prince of Rai muttered under his breath, paused blankly for a moment, then burst out laughing as the irony of the thought occurred to him.

He spotted somebody across the room, a couple of babbling brooks straight ahead, two giant ferns and one palm over.

It was the Lord of the House of Roshan, the province in the south on a parallel with Yula, but much further west of the Rai Valley.

And much closer to Za.

The House of Roshan was directly plugged in to the Exile hierarchy, and The Utàr had a strong presence all over the province.

Sith made his way over.

He crossed a clear crystal bridge over the brook; pinched the elbow of a young Shadu woman standing with a group of friends and winked at her as he walked by; made for the second babbling brook across the floor past a thick gathering of bodies between two low, intricately trunked trees with colorful, umbrella-like pods sticking out of the branches; squeezed suggestively past a surprised, creamy-skinned Herin girl from the north, whose indignation suddenly turned to a lustful bliss as her eyes closed and she smiled and moaned out a laugh; slapped a pale-skinned Ilakan Representative to the Yedina from the west coast on the back and winked at him; crossed the bridge over the second brook between two luminous fern trees while sipping from his drink and then stopping to embrace a light-skinned Ayola woman from the east and then fondle one of her breasts casually as she brushed her hand against his throbber...

... And arrived at the group of people with whom the Lord of the House of Roshan was chatting and laughing raucously.

"Zadoooooo!" Sith called out loudly, almost howling.

Sith didn't really care that there were undercover Royal Guard all over the place who might note him being openly friendly with the Lord of the House of Roshan.

Soon enough, the Royal Guard would be loyal to him.

And the Lord of the House of Roshan would be dead.

Zadoo turned.

"Sith! Baby!" he roared, and embraced Sith roughly, spilling his drink all over the floor.

Sith leaned in before withdrawing from the embrace. "You all set?"

Zadoo nodded quickly, keeping his eyes darting to watch for anybody watching them while looking casual. "Uh huh."

"Get the remote from Chor?"

Another discreet nod. "Yep."

"You know what to do? Don't krok it up!"

"Aaaaaall over it, My Lord."

They both laughed.

"See ya at Manthi's tonight." Sith slapped Zadoo on the back and wandered off into the crowd.

A few steps away he was hit by an impulse on the level of The Force that was like the instinct that told the predator that prey was nearby.

It was Jedi. He was afraid of something. His defenses would be down.

Nice chance for a little jab.

He reached out with his hand in his mind for an image of Jedi's head, then ripped open his skull and looked into the blazing light that was spilling out of it from the inside.

Then Sith took a small black sphere and placed it into Jedi's head, and the light spilling out from inside went black.

Mother-and-Father! Zita changed her mind!—Sith thought.

He drained the rest of his drink, tossed the crystal flute into the brook, laughed out loud and headed for the bar.

CHAPTER XXXV

The maglift went down a level and stopped.

The doors whooshed open.

The grin Zula kept trying to suppress made her look like she was about to burst out any second, and she shook and swayed lightly as if dancing to some unheard music and the rhythm of her tinkling jewelry.

She stepped out of the maglift.

"Where are we going?" Jedi asked, following her out and into a long, high, arched, clear-crystal corridor with lit alcoves all along it containing royal antiquities on display.

"You'll see," was all Zula said as she headed down the corridor and giggled.

Jedi went along. His Force sense was all good to go right now. He was beyond fearing something bad might be coming.

In fact, he sensed something good was coming.

He smiled.

Zula led him a few alcoves down and then stopped in front of a second set of metallic maglift doors.

"We going up?" Jedi asked Zita's enigmatic mother.

She bit her lip to stifle a laugh and just shook her head.

Then she gestured with her chin and glanced with her eyes at the maglift call-crystal.

"Call the maglift," she giggled, her hands tinkling behind her back as she swung back and forth to her own, inaudible, happy music.

"Okay," Jedi laughed as he reached out and tapped the call-crystal in the panel on the wall.

The crystal lit up red.

"Okay, bye!" Zula giggled loudly, turned abruptly, and danced back down the corridor.

"Hey!" A startled Jedi called after her. "Where are you ... What's—"

"You'll see! Oh wait ..." She giggled as she paused. "That's right. You won't!"

Her giggle broke into a high-pitched ring of a laugh, she pawed the call-crystal, Jedi saw her disappear into the other maglift and heard the doors whoosh shut.

Then he heard his name being called.

In his mind.

It was Zita.

Then:

"Jedi."

That wasn't in my mind!

He whirled around.

There was nobody in the hallway.

It had come from behind the maglift door.

The maglift.

Inside the maglift.

Zita!

"Jedi, you there? Come on, there's not much time!"

"Zita?"

He punched the call-crystal a few times but the doors remained shut. "You in the lift?"

"Yeah."

"Why won't the doors open?"

"I have them on LOCK from the inside. You're not supposed to see me, remember."

"That waste again? What's going on? What's with your mom? What's ..."

"Will you shut up for one second and let me talk?"

Jedi laughed. "Okay. Okay. Sorry. What? Go ahead."

"I wanted to see you before all of this happens, but my mom said 'No way!' So she suggested that even though I couldn't see you, I could talk to you."

"Okay. What do you wanna talk about?"

"It's not so much what I wanna talk about as it's about what I wanna say."

"So this is the part where he listens with intense interest." Jedi quipped playfully, and laughed.

He heard Zita burst out laughing. Then: "Wastehole! Shut up, I'm serious." Her laugh died down.

Jedi's did too. He sensed suddenly how intensely she was feeling right now. He stopped playing with her. "Okay, Zee. Go ahead. What is it? Tell me. Tell me everything. Especially right now."

Jedi leaned his whole body blissfully against the doors, placing his hands on them, pressing his cheek against them, closing his eyes, and smiling.

He saw her in his mind.

She was smiling, too.

"After I left last night ..." Zita began. "This morning ... whatever, I was out of my kroking mind! All this head-blasting grav and all at once! It wasn't about all the head-blasting grav all at once even so much as I realized I was terrified of what knowing this about you ... about your abilities ... might do to how I feel about you. I was worried that I might become afraid of you. And then I thought that if I ever became afraid of you, I couldn't keep being with you, because I could never live with you if I was always wondering if you would do something to hurt me."

"Zita, I ..."

"Jedi, you're still just a kid. We both are. I know now after we've been together that you'd never do anything to hurt me on purpose. But this Force is something ... heavy-grav ... And even though ... you may be ... the hottest looking 'nar with mystical superpowers I've ever seen, you could cause hurt in ways that you don't even realize on the level of that kind of grav we're talking about, 'cause you're still not a master of all you know and are. Well, that's not true. There are a few things you're pretty good at."

Jedi laughed. He could see and feel how Zita was smiling when she said that.

"Liiiiiike ...?" He teased.

"Like loving me."

A hot flash shot through him.

"But then I remembered how I felt when I saw you go over that edge yesterday, and how I felt when I thought I was watching your death happen right before my eyes. I decided I never want to. Feel that way again. Or be without you. And then I remembered the time we were in that market on the west coast and you bought that glass heart and when I asked you what it was for you gave it to me and said, "Here. This is mine. Now it's yours. Don't break it." And I realized that no matter what you're capable of, your heart is incapable of doing harm, and I don't fear that from you anymore and I never will again. And then I thought how fragile all this must make you, and with what's happening around you, and it tears the grav out of me, and I just so much want to be the something in this world that gives you the strength you need to keep from breaking apart when you don't have enough of your own."

Jedi's heart swelled.

It hurt to be in love under these conditions.

But how sweeeeeeet it was!"

"Are you listening to me?" Zita blurted out suddenly, like his mother might have if she had caught little Jedi stealing crystal sweets hot off the tray.

"You are what this world gave me to give me strength. And I am what this world gave you to give you yours," he said.

He felt it and sent it to her through the door in a luminous swirl with a light brush of a hand in his mind.

"Smooth." Zita laughed. " I looooooove when you talk sweet to me. Nobody does it better than you. Or sweeter. Makes me go all ... warm and tingly."

She laughed again, throatily this time.

Jedi got his bulge on.

"I know even in the deepest, darkest corner of my heart," Zita went on. "How much you love me, and that light is what helps me make it. All the time. I just wanted ... no, felt ... no, needed ... no, had to tell you before we go into our life together that I trust you with my heart and my life. I want you to know that you can trust yours with mine, too. I wanted you to know this now, before I go out of that room and come to the top of those stairs. Because when I go out of that room and come to the top of those stairs, I want you never to doubt that I'm completely yours."

Jedi heard her sniff.

"Zee?" he called out softly, opening his eyes suddenly.

He opened his eyes because the image of Zita with tears in her eyes wasn't how he wanted to be seeing her now.

"Shut up! I'm crying!" she whined, and then laughed, and then sniffed loudly and wetly.

"Listen, Zee," Jedi said softly, pressing himself into the doors, almost willing himself to melt through them and join Zita on the other side. "In my heart and mind, you'll always be the way I saw you the first time I ever laid eyes on you: the most beautiful woman with the most beautiful heart who's ever let me touch it. Every moment. Every breath. Every beat of my heart. For the rest of every one of our lives."

"Always," Zita said softly, then sniffed, paused and burst out into a bubbly, sniffly laugh. "Okay. I gotta go. Now my krokin' eyeliner is running, you wastehole. I hate you!"

They both burst out laughing.

"Sweetness?" Jedi said suddenly.

"Yes?" she said.

"I can't wait to see you," he said, grinning.

"Me too," she said.

He felt her smiling through the door.

Then he felt the maglift power up and take off, and Zita was gone.

"I could use a timra," Jedi said out loud, and headed cheerfully back to the other maglift, trying to smooth his erection down from being too visible through his loose pants.

CHAPTER XXXV

The maglift doors opened.

The din from the Grand Reception Room hit Jedi again immediately, as he expected.

Master Lekh waiting for him was a little bit of a surprise.

Jedi was startled by his figure, standing shrouded in the shadows of the darkness beneath the giant staircase. Jedi had just been seeing himself and Zita in all sorts of ways in his mind that weren't doing much to prevent the bulge-on he just finished losing from returning again.

Master Lekh was smiling.

"You look like a happy groom-to-be, my boy," he proclaimed with a warm cheeriness, a stark contrast to all the direness in which the two had been mired for the last three weeks, as Jedi came out of the maglift and the doors slid shut behind him, leaving the two figures shrouded in a thick, almost ethereal, gray darkness.

"I am." Jedi smiled as he left the maglift and they clasped wrists.

Master Lekh gave Jedi a proud couple of slaps on the back and beamed with both admiration for the boy's success at becoming the man he was supposed to be, and satisfaction in his own accomplishment as his lifetime teacher, guide, guardian and friend.

"You found the right woman, Jedi," Master Lesh assured Jedi approvingly. "She makes you happy, she'll never hurt you or ever let you down. And you make her happy. That's the best you could possibly dream of in a partner.

"Did you ever ... I mean..."

"She died," Master Lekh cut Jedi off quickly. He didn't lose his smile and there was nothing but joviality in his voice, but Jedi noted the wistful twinkle shining in his teacher's suddenly moistened eyes, and then he became aware of a slight disturbance of pain deep down inside Master Lekh. Jedi instantly knew the regret over the time the teacher felt he had lost with his worldly love that he must have carried all his life. He instantly regretted the question he was going to ask.

"A long time ago," Master Lekh said. "Don't look so apologetic. I'm a little sad all the time deep, deep down, for all the time I didn't get to spend with her. But the time I did get was so beautiful that the memory of it has been the source of my greatest happiness all my life. I've always known that I'll be with her again soon. So in a way, I'm also happy that I've found my partner for the eternal ride across the sky." He stopped and then smiled at Jedi. "But not as happy as you today!"

"I can't wait to see her," Jedi said. "I just talked to her!"

Master Lekh looked surprised. "You did? But ... I thought you weren't supposed to see her before the big moment."

"Yeah, I can't figure them out any way. But, it's not a rule, just one of those 'wives' tales' things," Jedi laughed. "I didn't get to see her, just talk to her through a door. Besides, it's really only for the wedding and not the engagement. But Zita's mom is heavy-grav superstitious careful-like about these kinds of things"

"Right." Master Lekh replied lightly.

Jedi smiled back, but then detected in his mentor a brief stab of melancholy. Feelings were a lot harder to guard than thoughts, and not even Master Lekh was good enough to mask his feelings from Jedi's Force sense.

Only Sith could.

The melancholy was the same kind that Jedi had felt coming from Amrun, his mom, and then again Zula moments ago. He reached out to touch Master Lekh's mind, which was something he didn't often do because he respected his teacher's privacy, and Master Lekh had the most tightly guarded mind that Jedi had ever encountered, a result of his teacher's own long lifetime of learning and practice. So it was never an easy thing to do in the first place.

Jedi couldn't sense anything Master Lekh may have been thinking, but he suddenly did get a keen sense that something was up. Something big and immediate. Jedi didn't know what, but it was starting to worry him the way an ominous, solid, black storm front on the horizon would a coastal village.

But he felt that others did. Sense something. Something had a lot of others close to him extremely worried and about something saddening, and it was starting to make Jedi feel anxious.

And then the alarm bells went off. His stomach went tight. The high pitched ring in his head jumped a couple of dozen frequencies higher.

Master Lekh saw the perturbed expression on Jedi's face, and smiled in empathy while sighing heavily. "From now on, Jedi, your life's not going to be easy." He pressed Jedi's hands with his. "Or safe."

Jedi looked and read the concern in Master Lekh's eyes. He felt it, too, and his own expression betrayed his feelings to his old teacher.

Then Master Lekh's serious air evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared. He laughed merrily, took Jedi by the shoulder and started leading him toward the din coming from around the staircase. "But this is a party right now, m'boy, on an auspicious and momentous occasion. Come on! Let's go drink a toast to you and your bride-to-be!"

They swung around, and headed out from under the stairs, around their sweeping side, and headed back into the thick, cheerful din of the celebration with the foggy and turbulent aural dimension hanging over it that only Jedi could completely sense.

Not only me—Jedi thought.

Sith can sense it, too.

Suddenly:

"Hey there, brother!"

It was Sith.

Master Lekh and Jedi stopped in their tracks just as they were about to cross one of the small bridges over one of the babbling brooks, and turned to the source of the greeting.

Sith rolled around from behind the trunk of a giant fern tree on the bank of the brook, arms folded, a drink sloppily swishing around in one hand, leaning on the trunk with his shoulder and grinning madly with a twinkle of menace in his eyes that he hid well enough so that only Jedi could detect it.

He couldn't openly show any of the contempt he'd let himself feel for his brother. It wasn't time to fit that into the act.

Yet.

"Don't look so startled!" Sith declared to both of them with melodramatic reassurance, pushed off from the trunk and came from around the tree to face Jedi and Master Lekh. He looked to Jedi.

"And don't worry, 'nar. I know you're thinking I'm gonna cause some trouble for you, but dad told me to krok off because he doesn't want me around spoiling all the fun for everybody today. So 'Sor-ree!' As per Royal Decree, I won't be sticking around for the big moment. And I won't be causing any trouble here ..."

Sith punched Jedi playfully in the shoulder while looking at Master Lekh and winking with a grin on his face but menace threatening in his luminous-veined, fiery yellow eyes.

He couldn't openly display the menace he now felt toward his brother. Jedi and his precious little woman-whore would be dead soon, and there could be no visible reason anybody could use to connect Sith to their deaths. He could—had—to hide it from everybody absolutely, and from Jedi as best as he could. And he was the only one in the world who was capable of hiding his true feelings from his twin brother's probing senses.

Since getting back yesterday, however, Sith had noticed a stark and sudden, radical improvement in Jedi's ability to mask his feelings, something he had never before been able to do very well with Sith. He was good with his thoughts, but feelings, being a harder kind of energy to control and direct, were not as easy to prevent from being sensed using The Force. In addition, right now, there was no reason for Jedi to sense anything amiss from Sith anyway. They knew Jedi had somehow followed Sith for some reason to Za that night three weeks ago. At best, he may have ran home and ratted Sith out to mom and dad, and probably Master Lekh, too.

So what?

What else could they possibly know now except that Sith had gone to Za? They certainly couldn't have known that Sith had been co-opted by The Worm and The Utàr for three cycles now. All his tracks had been diligently and ingeniously covered. While the two Old Men might sniff something funny, they'd have way of knowing what Sith was involved in, or how deeply. His mother was too torn up about her poor-son-gone-bad to be aware of anything else.

So, Jedi had to be completely clueless about was was in the works, and there would be no way that he could foresee what was coming. Sith concluded he had nothing to fear from Jedi right now.

And in a couple of hours, would never have again.

Master Lekh may have been a different story, but Sith neither cared nor worried about him anymore either. There was nothing the old krok could do to stop what was coming, and he would soon no longer be intimidating Sith the way he used to all of Sith's life, so he was rendered, effectively, no-obstacle-at-all, too. Once Sith was on The Throne—his ultimate destination—Master Lekh would be taken care of, just like Zadoo of Roshan; only not for being a nasty piece of evidence that needed to be eliminated, but because of the threat the old teacher, as Royal Guardian of the twins, posed to the whole plan.

He turned back to Jedi. "Later, 'nar. Have a blast!

He roared out a laugh, pushed his way through between Jedi and Master Lekh with his fists against their chests, crossed the bridge over the brook while draining his drink and tossing the glass into the water, and disappeared into the crowd on the other side.

Jedi looked after him and a worried look fell over his face.

He was worried about Sith.

And sad for him, too.

"Never mind anything else now," Master Lekh leaned in so he wouldn't have to raise his voice over the party noise, and said reassuringly. "It's almost time to go meet your bride-to-be and show the world it's next queen."

And I hope—Master Lekh thought—not its last one.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Jedi and Master Lekh came back up to the crowd where Jedi had first seen his parents and found both Deleb and Eloh there.

Eloh saw them and broke off from the raucous conversation he was having with Lord Amrun.

"There's my boy!" Eloh roared. "How ya doin' killer?" he laughed, punched Jedi in the shoulder, then hugged him tightly, lifting the youth off the ground.

Jedi laughed and pushed his dad back playfully. "Your Highness!" Heir-to-the-Throne mock-chided the King, then they both laughed harder.

"S'cuse me, everybody," the King turned back to his court and roared. "I gotta go explain to my son here ..." He hugged Jedi with one arm around the shoulder. "... What to do with a woman on their wedding night!"

The group howled.

"Come on, I want to talk to you." Eloh turned to Jedi, and with his arm around his shoulder, led him through the crowd. A trio of undercover Royal Guards fell in with them at discreet distances and maintained watch on the King and the Heir-to-the-Throne.

"Everybody wants to talk to me today!" Jedi quipped jocularly.

Eloh laughed, but Jedi could sense disturbance somewhere in his dad.

It was faint and deeply buried. Eloh's overt joy was genuine and real. Jedi could feel it as a tingling, bubbling warmth, and recognized it as what his dad was mostly truly feeling. But there was something hidden beneath that almost as if it were fighting to make its way out, and Jedi's dad was fighting to keep it down. It was as if he were trying to—

Hide something!

And then Jedi realized now that he felt exactly that with everybody he'd just talked to since walking into the party. He'd been sensing a struggle in all of them between something wanting to surface and something trying to keep it down. What he sensed felt like knowing somebody has dropped something in a murky pool: you knew there was something there at the bottom, you just couldn't see it. It's ripples, though, were apparent to Jedi's Force sense as clearly as if he were watching them spread through water.

"Re-laaaaaaax!" Eloh suddenly pulled back and examined Jedi's expression. "Everything's all right. Today's your day, kiddo. But listen," Eloh glanced around surveillantly and conspiratorially. "There's a few things you're going to have to know if you want to get through all of this the way it's supposed to go and not the way it shouldn't. And I don't know when I'll get another chance to tell you what I want to."

Jedi nodded, biting his lower lip, watching the floor in a wide-eyed, almost-trance. Since as early he could remember, he felt a powerful protective yet completely un-possessive desire in his dad's feelings toward him, and he knew that was true for how he felt about Sith, too. So he was listening intently because he knew what was coming was somehow going to be important enough for him to never want to forget.

"When you become King ..."

There it was, that same melancholic stab buried deeply again. Jedi felt it coming from his dad now, too.

Then it was gone.

"Don't trust anybody completely except Zita and Lekh," the King told the Heir-to-the-Throne. "Zita because she loves you completely, will never betray you, and will take care of you. Lekh because he'll know how to help you and tell you who you'll be able to trust, with what, and how far. Everybody else, always assume the worst until proven otherwise, and handle it delicately but without letting yourself be intimidated or showing fear or hesitation. Ever."

"You and mom will still be around, too ..." Jedi lied. He knew his mother wouldn't be around for much longer. He felt sad for her, and for Eloh.

Then it occurred to him suddenly:

The melancholy.

Amrun.

Mom.

Zula.

Lekh.

Dad.

All sad. All fighting to keep something buried and away from Jedi.

Could they possibly know? Was the virus no longer dormant? Was she already—

"Son, your mom and I will be with both of you far longer and in more ways than you can ever imagine."

He hugged Jedi, pulling him in around the shoulder and knocking foreheads playfully with his son. Then he withdrew and sighed heavily just like Master Lekh had earlier. They kept strolling casually through the crowd.

"There's a heaviness coming down," Eloh said. "And you know it's coming, I know you can feel it, and I know you know what it has to do with. You just don't know the whole deal yet. Nobody does. You never can, so just roll with it. Always. Down to every moment, down to with The Force. Roll with it. Don't fight. Direct. "You won't be able to foresee everything ..."

There it was again!

The melancholy.

Do they know, and they're keeping it from me because they think I don't?—

Then it was gone!

"... Even with your epic fantasy superhero powers."

Jedi glanced up at his dad from under his brow questioningly.

Eloh guffawed, then quickly went back to his discreet but forceful seriousness. "So don't try to. Go with what you know and know as much as you can before you make a move and when you do, do it with confidence. Never react in anger. Only according to what needs to be done. And never make your aim conquest. Always act to harmonize and balance. That means you have to keep jumping both sides of the line to keep it going straight down the middle. Otherwise, everything goes "SPLAT!" Including you. Except for you, superhero super-sense boy, you're doing it with a sphere and not a straight line. Good luck!"

Eloh chortled loud and long, then let it die down, and he sighed the way a man would in complete and satisfied contentment. "I believe in you, kid. Not only will you do right but you'll do good. It isn't going to be easy. You know that. You just have no i-de-a yet how hard it's going to be, and I don't envy what you're going to have to face. Not at all.

"Now about the trust thing," Eloh steered them across a bridge through a quadrad of tall fruit palms at the banks of one of the babbling brooks. "Here's the deal. What's coming at you has the ability to know what you're thinking, so keep your thoughts tightly guarded at all times. Don't forget, everything you tell anybody can also be sensed and found out from them, too. So keep it in your head unless you need to, and then always be conscious of what you say because you never know who or what might be listening; or how."

Eloh paused again. Now Jedi sensed a turbulence running beneath his surface feelings that was a mixture of disappointment and anger.

Then:

"Deep down in your heart you know this isn't going to end without a showdown between you and Sith. I wish it could be otherwise. But it's not. Sith chose to go the wrong way. You can't stop that because it's not a matter of your doing but of his choice. He's let his fear pull him too far into the darkness and now it may be too late for him to ever find his way out. Let's hope that's not the case for the rest of the world.

"Sith is angry, and that makes him dangerous. He's let his abilities amplify all his ultimately destructive qualities because he has no tolerance for dissatisfaction, and he's never satisfied because he always wants it all. But he can't have it all. And he knows it. But he still wants it. And that makes him channel his power into destructiveness, because what he can't have, he doesn't want anybody else to, either. And that's why he's dangerous. Especially to you. Because you represent to him everything he can never have. But that also makes him rash, though, and you need to remember that. Use your patience and his rashness to your advantage. Because if he can't stop himself, you might to have to."

"Dad," Jedi said with the sudden whine of a sad little boy. "This all makes me really sad."

"I know, son," Eloh said with empathy. "Me too. But you're a man now and not a little boy anymore, and you have to do what needs to be done. This is how things are and there's nothing you can do about it except work it in the right direction as best you can. Don't let how you feel about anything distract you from what needs to be done. Sith is hurting because he's never been able to deal with you being Heir instead of him. It's made him crazy. And to him, you represent everything he covets. So watch out. Because he'll be coming after you and anything you've got, with everything he's got. I hate having to say that about one of my own sons, but your mom and I also hold ourselves partly responsible for ..."

"You and mom are the best parents a child could ever dream of," Jedi interrupted his dad in protest, not looking up as he spoke.

They continued their walk through the crowd and it felt to Jedi as if there were no noise, no crowd, no room even, just the two of them existing in this moment.

"We are to you," Eloh corrected. "But not to Sith. His jealousy of the attention we had to give you as Heir-to-the-Throne all your life made him so angry, he mistook our responsibility to teach you what you'd need to know to be a good ruler, for favoritism. Because we were a little more occupied preparing you for your life as King of Krai instead of coddling his whiny, little ass!"

Jedi glanced up at his dad, and Eloh smiled sheepishly. "Sorry. He's your brother, but our son. I have the right to feel the frustration even though I'm partly responsible for how he turned out. I don't really think of him in those terms and never have. That was anger talking. Your mom and I have been proud of both of you exceptional boys since you were a pair of little pups. I'll be proud of Sith again if he realizes what he's doing in time and gets a hold of himself. He's falling and he'll probably go down hard. It's too late for you to grab on to him. He's jumped over the edge. Trying to catch him will only take you over with him."

Jedi welled up with a desperate sadness for his brother that he couldn't hold in.

"But he saved me yesterday!" Jedi pleaded for his brother. "He didn't have to. He could have let me go over those falls while standing there and—"

King Eloh winced with the dual pains of one son's deviousness and the other's naivete. "He saved you because he knew yesterday wasn't supposed to be the way it was supposed to happen. Not because he intended to selflessly risk his life to save yours."

"But that just proves there's still something good left in him," Jedi protested. "If there wasn't, his selfishness would have let me die because that would have guaranteed him everything he wanted—the Throne, maybe even Zita, eventually—and he wouldn't have cared how he got it!"

Eloh laughed mirthfully at his son's rhetorical acumen. "Wooh. Okay. You got me there! You don't know if it was some latent compassion in him, or just his own strategic agenda that made him save you. At least you still hope that his good can still be reawakened. But the good in Sith, Jedi, is at war, under siege, and massively outnumbered by the wrong he's chosen to allow into him."

"So? Maybe it can still be reached, then?" Jedi pleaded hopefully.

Eloh sighed. "I'd like to hope so, but I doubt it. He's too weak to withstand the temptations of his dark passions. Don't let the fallout hurt you no matter how bad it gets. And I'm afraid it's going get bad for you because it's going to get bad for him. But you will come out all right. That I know not because of any superhero powers of yours, but because I have complete confidence and faith in you."

The King stopped in the empty space between two large gatherings of partyers, and the father turned his son to him and lifted his chin up with a hand so he could look him straight in the eyes.

"Never forget that Sith is your brother," he said, and paused while regarding Jedi intensely. "But always remember that as long as you live, you are the one, true king. He may want to change that. If he tries, you need to stop him. You have a duty to your people and to this whole world that goes beyond your feelings for your brother. If the two are ever in conflict, you have to put your people and the world first. You hear what I'm saying?"

Jedi only nodded sadly in reply. He couldn't feel anything of what his dad might have been thinking or feeling because he was too overwhelmed at the moment with what he was feeling himself.

He tried to reach out with his mind, but couldn't sense anything right now, no matter how much he tried or wanted to.

His sadness was too strong to be broken through.

Right now, all Jedi could feel was the huge weight of everything, coming down on him as if it were a foot about to stamp on a fernbug.

He guessed he just have to learn to move quickly.

"I guess I'll just have to learn to move quickly," Jedi said.

And keep looking up.

"And keep looking up."

Eloh regarded his son for a moment quizzically, then chuckled. "You know, Prince Superhero Powers, I love you, I'm proud of you, and you simply never cease to amaze me; but sometimes I don't know what the krok you're talking about."

They both laughed.

"You're going to do all right ..." Eloh looked at Jedi admiringly, tapped his son's cheek a few times reassuringly and then pumped his eyebrows. "... KING! Now forget everything your 'Old Man' just told you."

Jedi looked at Eloh, startled.

Eloh laughed. "Let's go get that hot little bride-to-be of yours and show her off to the world!"

CHAPTER XXXVII

This was it.

The big moment before the Big Moment.

Here we go—Jedi thought.

There was a blast of fanfare from the orchestra.

The entire room was ready for, and full-to-overflowing with, "The Moment."

King Eloh broke away from the group surrounding Jedi and Queen Deleb at the foot of the massive staircase, and bounded up the stairs two-at-a-time.

Queen Deleb leaned in to Jedi, took him by the arm, and whispered in his ear.

"Couldn't do something about the hair, huh?"

Jedi laughed as she gave him a sly, wide grin while leaving to follow her husband up the stairs.

Eloh got to the top of the stairs, turned and raised his hand in the air.

The din in the gigantic room dissipated. Deleb joined him at his side and took him by the arm with both hands.

"I don't know if you heard," King Eloh bellowed out. "But the Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai is getting engaged today ..."

The crowd laughed.

"... So we thought," Queen Deleb boomed. "We thought we'd throw him a little party!"

The crowd roared.

"Son ..." Eloh addressed Jedi directly. Jedi could feel the stares from everybody around him burning into him. He focused on his dad to ignore the crushing weight of all the attention. "You may have tamed a fire-tiger, but trust me ..."

The King paused and winked with a grin at Queen Deleb.

" ... If you think a woman is going to be any easier, you've got another thing coming!"

The crowd roared again as Eloh squeezed Deleb around the waist and pulled her close to him.

Then:

"And hold on a minute!" Eloh declared, withdrawing from embracing his wife. "Nothing's saying you're still going to get your chance yet ..."

The King signaled to the orchestra and they broke into the Royal Fanfare. Eloh swooped backward and swept widely with his arm toward the double doors at the back of the balcony from which Zita would emerge.

The doors opened.

This is it!

Jedi's heart swelled and he caught his breath.

He looked up.

Out of the doorway, she came.

No.

Not she.

They came.

They?

Huh—?

Jedi looked quizzically from his mom to his dad on the balcony above, then back at the door.

A row of veiled women in bright crimson robes laced with intricate gold embroidery—the colors of the House of Pyarr—emerged from the room beyond the doors, all identical, all indistinguishable from one another under their veils. They filed out of the doors and formed a line to the right of the guffawing King Eloh.

The crowd was agog.

After the last of the seven women had filed out, Lord Amrun and Lady Zula emerged, holding hands, beaming and grinning.

Amrun walked with Zita's mother to the bannister at the edge of the balcony and leaned on it. He called down to Jedi.

"Hey, boy who's come to steal our Zita," Lord Amrun shouted while the crowd laughed. "So you rode a fire tiger. Big deal! Now here's the task that's going to prove that you're not a boy, but a real man!"

Jedi looked again from his mom to his dad, but they were both inscrutable behind their grins.

"You want to marry our daughter?" Amrun called down. "Come up here and find her!"

The crowd cheered as understanding slowly began to dawn on Jedi, when he saw now what was going on even though he had had no idea this was what would be waiting for him behind those doors at the top of the stairs.

He thought he was going to finally see his love, and now he had to hop yet another hurdle in order to claim his prize!

Jedi hoped this was the last of the surprises.

He climbed the stairs slowly, grinning now, too.

Amrun went on. "You pick out your bride-to-be from among these women here before you? You get to marry her!"

Jedi climbed the stairs a little more quickly, and then bounded up the last few in comic bravado.

This was an ancient Pyarran custom in which a man was tested to see if he was worthy of the woman he claimed to love. The play before the play that would end up being the real thing.

He played along.

"But if you don't ..." Amrun shouted teasingly, Jedi paused, attentive. The crowd hushed. "If you don't pick out your-bride-to-be, you go home with a waterpumpkin, but no wife!"

Amrun glared at Jedi in mock challenge. Zula laughed and tinkled with jewelry. King Eloh guffawed and slapped Jedi encouragingly across the back, propelling him forward toward the line of women.

Jedi grinned as he stumbled from the force of his dad's slap up toward the women.

The din of the crowd died down as all eyes were on Jedi.

The first thing Jedi thought was: 'the eyes.'

He'd know Zita's eyes in an instant.

But the women's eyes—visible through narrow slits where their face veils connected with the crimson and gold-embroidered headdress—were all cast down, and their heads were inclined slightly forward.

The only thing Jedi was left with to go by was what he could feel.

He'd have to feel his way to Zita.

That should have been as easy as falling off a magboard for him under normal circumstances, what with his superhero super-senses.

But these weren't normal circumstances.

Jedi's Force senses were clouded right now because of his own emotional intensity over the immensity of the moment. He couldn't contain his feelings and didn't even want to, because it all felt too wonderful to interrupt.

Then there was the energy of all the attention focused on him.

And then there were the women themselves.

Force or no Force, Jedi had learned by now that women had ways that no magical mystery power ever dreamed of would ever penetrate in understanding.

But that's what made the depth of a woman's true beauty so enticing: the mystery meant always something new, and beautiful, to discover.

And all logic-defying infuriation aside, it was fun trying!

Jedi walked slowly up and down the line, hands behind his back, examining each woman as he went along, looking them up and down, stopping occasionally as a brief glimpse somewhere deep down inside him stirred and threatened to surface for a moment, only to disappear with the ruffle of a robe, or the flutter of a dark eyelash, or the shifting of a bare, painted and ringed toe.

He tried to conjure up Zita's image in his mind, but all he could come up with was an endless row of veiled faces.

Suddenly, he had an idea.

The crowd gasped as Jedi finally stopped in front of the fourth veiled woman and stared at her intently, grinning.

He raised his hand and touched the clasp at the top of her cheek where the veil was held over her face, just below her eyes. The woman kept looking down as her eyes fluttered.

Then he heard Zita's voice crying out desperately in his mind as clear as if she had cried out loud.

"No! I'm here!"

Jedi closed his eyes.

In his mind, Jedi saw every flutter of the women's eyelashes that he'd just surveyed, while probing with his mind toward the source of the voice he'd just "heard."

There it was!

He grinned.

He swung around suddenly, eyes open and blazing, marched confidently down to the end of the line of women, snatched one corner of the last woman's veil, pulled it off and ...

Zita!

"Woohoo!" Jedi whooped in triumph.

The King and Queen threw their arms up in the air and cheered. The Lord and Lady of the House of Pyarr broke out in loud whoops and rushed to Jedi. The crowd thundered with cheers and applause.

And all Jedi saw and felt was Zita, looking up at him and smiling, her eyes fluttering in bashful acknowledgment with dark, luscious lashes.

Zita broke out into a wide grin as she looked at him intently with her molten-copper eyes.

It was the look Jedi would carry with him in his heart for the rest of forever.

Then proud parents converged on ecstatic children, all the hugging and backslapping began, and Jedi was lost in a whirlwind of swirling joy around Zita and him, around the whole entourage on the balcony, with the now-unveiled other women also celebrating, crowding around the gushing young couple.

All because both Jedi the man and Jedi the future King of Krai, had found his Queen.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Zita hooked her hands through the crook in Jedi's elbow as she stood beside him, and pulled him in closer to her while she cooed contentedly.

"I don't care about being Queen of Krai," she announced as she looked Jedi in the eyes. "My greatest happiness is that you came into my life." She smiled and blinked her trembling, watery eyes back under control.

"I'll never leave your side, Zee," Jedi answered, leaned in and kissed her lightly on the forehead.

Zita closed her eyes, shrugged her shoulders slightly and smiled blissfully.

They were standing in the tunnel to the doorway inside The Castle's massive East Gate.

Having been divested of the robe after the ceremony in the Grand Reception Room, Zita had simply blown Jedi's and everybody else's mind with her stunning radiance in her engagement dress: a tight, full-length crimson silk wrap, cut just above the ankles of her bare feet, draped around her, with an askew triangle exposing her midriff, around which she wore strings of gossamer-like gold chains, creating two loops connected at her bellybutton ring. The shoulderless wrap had tight sleeves—embroidered with shimmering gold filaments—that ended just below the elbow, exposing the rest of her arms, which were adorned with glimmering and tinkling bangles on her wrists. Her long hair fell back over her shoulders, was parted in the middle, and a head-dress made of a web of gold threads inlaid with rows of crimson pearls hung down in a diamond configuration over her forehead. Large, gold hoop earrings were connected by matching, gold-and-crimson-pearl chains that were thrown over the back of her head and fell down the part in her hair together to join the suspended head-dress.

Following Jedi's successful selection of Zita from the lineup, the two had emerged together on the Royal Viewing Balcony overlooking Castle Square, packed with thousands of Nareed awaiting to get the first public glimpse of the soon-to-be royal couple.

The crowd had gone wild as soon as the pair had walked out onto the ornate balcony.

Zita, Princess of Pyarr, soon to be Queen of Krai, had shone like a glowing sunsrise beside a beaming Jedi.

Now, they were at the end of the line up for the procession of carriages that would be carrying them in the parade through The Valley, which would wind it's way through the streets of downtown until arriving at The Temple, where Prince Jedi and Princess Zita would officially register their intention to marry and formally apply for a license as was required by Kraian law.

The procession would be led by the Speaker of the Yedina; followed by the Members of the Presidium Cabinet; followed by the Lords and Ladies of the remaining Noble Houses of Krai, minus the House of Pyarr, each couple in its own carriage; followed by Lord Amrun and Lady Zula as the parents of the bride-to-be; then Queen Deleb and King Eloh in the royal violet Ambassador; and finally the couple of the moment: the Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai and his Queen-to-be.

It was announced that the first of the carriages were arriving at the entrance to the East Gate, and the Procession members inside the lit, crystal tunnel leading to the doorway could hear the crowds gathered in Castle Square roar as it became clear outside that the royal entourage was about to emerge.

"So now that we have the last moment we'll ever have as just Jedi and Zita," Zita took Jedi's sweaty hand and squeezed it tightly. "And not the Prince of Rai and the Princess of Pyarr about-to-be-married—" She paused and gave him a sly, sideways glance while grinning. "How'd you know which one up there was me?" Then a concerned look clouded her face. "You didn't use your ... sense, did you, you big cheater?" she asked coyly.

Jedi smiled, equally as coy. "Nope. I just knew you had to be the one on the end. All my life everything that was ever the best was always saved for last."

"Yeah, right," Zita giggled, and hugged his arm with both hands.

Jedi laughed, wrapped his arms around her shoulders and hugged her playfully back.

"You're not gonna tell me, are you?" she asked teasingly.

"Nope!" Jedi grinned, and they both laughed again as Zita smacked him in the chest with her palm, accompanied by a loud tinkle of gold and jingle of jewels.

Queen Deleb and King Eloh and their security entourage arrived just then to take their place in line ahead of the happiest couple in all of Krai and behind the Lord and Lady of Pyarr.

Eloh stopped and tapped Jedi on the shoulder before squeezing past him.

Jedi turned.

"Son, I want you to do me a favor," Eloh said simply.

"Sure dad," Jedi replied. "What?"

Eloh glanced around at the crowded tunnel, the Royal Guards and the personal security milling about. "Come here," he said ...

"Be right back," Jedi said to Zita, as he slipped out from her hands that were embracing his upper arm.

... And pulled Jedi off to the side toward one of the lit alcoves lining the walls of the tunnel, between which stood Royal Guards, arms behind backs and staring stoically ahead.

Just then, Deleb was squeezing past Zita. Deleb was glowing, a joyful, contented smile on the proud Queen Mother's face. She stopped and took Zita by the shoulders, looking her up and down approvingly, and finally resting on Zita's fiery, copper eyes with an intense look of her own.

"You beautiful girl! I couldn't have dreamed ..." mother of the Heir-to-the-Throne said to future Queen of Krai. "... Of a better partner for Jedi or a more worthy queen for this world. And neither could he." She tapped Zita lightly on one cheek, leaned in and kissed her gently on the other. "He trusts you with his secret. And so do we. But from this moment on, watch your backs. Both of you. Watch each other's backs," Deleb whispered into Zita's ear, then pushed past her and some security guards to join Amrun and Zula in a bubbly exchange.

Zita looked after the Queen. A cold shudder passed through her in the wake of what Zita now understood—after the all-nighter with Jedi and Master Lekh that lasted late into early this morning—was an ominous import behind the Queen's warning.

But why—Zita asked herself—did she choose to tell me something like that right now?

CHAPTER XXXIX

Sith landed and parked his Wanderer inside the cavernous, empty warehouse as the huge bay doors slid slowly shut behind him.

This was Manthi's place in The Valley: an old storage facility in Industrial District, on the outskirts of the city where it met the surrounding suburbs.

The vast space—supported by rows of stone columns reaching into the metallic rafters of the three storey-high ceiling—was ringed around the top by a row of windows outlining the warehouse perimeter. Sunslight streamed through them into the darkness below in eerie, dusty stabs, falling in pools of lonely, murky light on the cold, bare stone floor.

In the far corner of the darkness, under a suspended, shaded light-crystal lamp, dressed in a shimmering, sheer wrap hiding absolutely nothing of her body, Manthi sat on a giant, ornately upholstered, low-back divan, a transcast coming over the screen hanging suspended in the darkness from the ceiling, but looking as if it were floating in space. The glow from the transcom monitor bathed the corner with a flickering of shadows struggling in constant clashes with the light.

Sith hopped out of his rider and the door hissed shut. He strode across the floor, passing through alternating voids of darkness and dusty slashes of light. The closer he approached, the more apparent it became to him that the voice-over of the announcers from the transcast of the big circus wheeling its way through town—no doubt the big show Manthi was watching—were not the only voices he was hearing.

One of them was Manthi's.

She was on her mobile.

She was talking anxiously, almost frantically.

Sith slowed down as he projected his senses outward.

He halted.

He reached out with his mind.

Something was wrong.

Terribly wrong.

Krok!

Sith bolted suddenly, and ran the rest of the way across the warehouse until stomping to a halt behind Manthi's divan.

"What's going on?" he demanded.

She hissed at him to quiet down as she tried to listen attentively to whatever conversation was going on over her mobile.

"What's wrong?"

She pointed at the screen with a click-clack of a white bracelet made of tiny bone skulls around her wrists, while "uhm-hmming" into her mobile and nodding her head in acknowledgment of something.

Sith looked at the screen.

"What? What?" He was feeling an increasing, panicked disturbance in The Force not just around Manthi, but coming from far wider.

Not something wrong ... EVERYTHING!

"Hold on a minnit," Manthi said into her mobile. She looked away from the screen and up at Sith. "Look who's in what rider!" she exclaimed with a shriek, eyes bulging out in panic, then returned to her mobile conversation. "Go ahead. Sith just got here. Yeah ..."

Sith examined the live transcast of the parade. It was a wide shot from above right now. The parade looked like it was somewhere just outside the plush Castle District and moving into the angular Commercial District. Crowds lined the streets, hoisting banners and flags and cheering and waving frantically like an army of insects making way for the fattest ones of all to pass through. The announcers' voices were booming out in inane, canned spectacle-announcer banter.

What ... was ... wrong?

The shot on the screen changed to a close-up of the Royal Procession in the parade.

There was Zadoo with his swamphog wife in a silver Ambassador, smiling and waving to the crowds amidst streams of confetti and flower petals.

Two riders behind them was the convertible carrying Amrun and Zula.

Then there was Sith's mother and father in the white Ambassador ...

Then finally Jedi and Zita came into the shot in the violet convertible.

Huh?

Then it hit him.

HOLY KROK!

"HOLY KROK!" Sith screamed out.

"Shut up!" Manthi shouted back at him.

Sith stood frozen in terror, unable to accept what he knew he was seeing because he was seeing it.

But unable to accept it.

Jedi and Zita were in the violet Ambassador.

The MOTHERFATHERKROKIN' violet ambassador!

That means that—

"They're in the wrong krokin' rider!" Sith yelled out in panic as his mind finally acknowledged what his senses were telling him.

"Shut the krok up!" Manthi shouted at him again, almost hysterically. "Uh huh ... then what?" she said back into the mobile.

Jedi and Zita were in the rider that Eloh and Deleb were supposed to have been in. The one they always traveled in for every public appearance. The one they've ... but now his mother and father were in—

The one Jedi and Zita were supposed—

The one with the bomb—

"HOLY MOTHERFATHERKROKIN' KROK!" Sith exclaimed hysterically. He began breathing erratically, his chest heaving while he gasped.

"Okay. Yeah. We'll be all over it," Manthi said and finished her conversation, throwing her mobile where it landed in a loud "CLACK!" on the glass table in front of the divan and slid with a second "CLACK!" into a crystal carafe.

"Will you calm the krok down!" Manthi spat at Sith angrily. "I know. I know. Motherfatherkrokin' waste happens. Deal with it. Plans change." She rose from the divan and shook him by the shoulders violently. "Now get a hold of yourself, you big baby!" she shouted. "That was The Worm. There's a new plan. An even better one than we could have ever dreamed."

Sith's breathing eased somewhat, but his fiery eyes stayed wide with panic and fear.

"In fact," her tone softened and she grinned wickedly. "He's got it all figured out how this not only doesn't krok us up, but is going to speed up our plans by cycles, baby. Cycles! It's too beautiful! So this little mishap turns out to be a motherfatherkrokin' hard-grav blessing."

Manthi caressed Sith's cheek with the back of her hand. "Calm down, Sith baby. We need you to be with it more than ever now. You're the only one who can make all this happen. Only you. You're 'The Vindicator' that Exile prophecy has foreseen. This is your destiny. You can fulfill it," she cooed, and ran her hand down his neck as he closed his eyes ...

"Manthi's right here with you ..."

... Over his chest ...

"Haven't I always been the one to comfort you, since you were a little boy crying when your parents would ignore you? Haven't I always been the one to get you what you wanted after mommy and daddy wouldn't let you have it? Haven't I always been the one you could trust to make your pain go away? Haven't I always been the one to tell you you were destined for a greatness no other Nareed has ever dreamed or dared to achieve?"

... Over his stomach ...

"Ooooooh, you're so tense," Manthi rubbed his tight stomach, then let her hand slide down further.

"Trust the Worm baby," she said, and rubbed her palm vigorously against Sith's member, making it swell.

Sith moaned.

"Now pay close attention," Manthi said, leaning in close.

Sith, keeping his eyes closed, grabbed Manthi by the buttocks and pulled her hard against himself so that she gasped from the force of the contact.

"We've got just thirty-six minutes," she cooed into his ear while her eyes fluttered and her mouth fell open in an ecstatic moan of pleasure. "Before that fat krok Zadoo presses the button. Now this is what we've gotta do."

CHAPTER XL

Jedi was simply humming.

The energy swirling all around from the crowds in the streets was like being in the middle of a warm, whirling, luminous wind. All of his senses were saturated. The ringing in his ears was beyond deafening. It was shrieking at a frequency so high only his Third Ear could hear it.

He held Zita's hand tightly as they smiled and waved at the throngs lining the magways. The two of them were sitting on the raised seats at the back of the open carriage, which rolled along with the parade at a crawl down Atmi Boulevard, on it's way to Temple Square.

Although unquestionably sensing genuine elation, Jedi was nevertheless aware of a deep, swirling disturbance somewhere. Everywhere. A cold darkness that he could feel lurking subtly beneath the energy of the entire celebration.

The joy of the people was real. All they knew was that their world was about to get a new King and Queen, and they were ecstatic.

But there was another level beneath that joy that Jedi's singular abilities let him sense. A malevolence anxious to be unleashed, fiery in its determination.

Surrounding the tangible borders of everything and lurking, waiting to pounce, on the edge of the ineffable that only a Force sense could detect.

Something ...

Involving him.

Focused on him.

Targeting him.

The warning bells that had sounded as a faint, nagging feeling as soon as his dad asked him to switch vehicles for the parade, were now a screaming alarm in his mind.

Eloh's story—that he wanted the world to see Jedi and Zita as the future King and Queen of Krai on this occasion, so he wanted them to have the Royal Carriage—seemed forced to Jedi even at the time; but he went along with it because no matter what he thought, his feelings had told him to go with it, since whatever was going to happen would only be the way everything was supposed to be. He'd trusted his dad all his life, so he had no reason to start doubting him now.

Especially now.

But what the warnings and the feeling of a poised malevolence meant, he was far too distracted right now to figure out.

Once again, the same nagging sense that had jabbed at him back at the reception, took a hard stab at him now. A fear of something very tragically wrong was lurking beneath what he could feel was the forced nature of the joy that he had sensed in his mother and father, in Lord Amrun and Lady Zula, in Master Lekh. It wasn't that Jedi thought they were faking their joy. It felt more as if they were fighting to feel that joy, fighting against a greater something-wrong they also couldn't help themselves from feeling despite the auspicious and joyful occasion.

That was as close as Jedi could nail it for the moment. The way The Force worked sometimes was beyond what could be explained in cognitive terms. So he decided to let it be—what will come will come regardless—and focus instead on the beautifully warming joy of the current moment: the occasion of his engagement to the most beautiful woman in his world.

He glanced at Zita and squeezed her hand tightly.

She looked at him, glowing, oblivious to his level of what could be sensed, and blissfully content; which made Jedi swell with happiness. Whatever was coming, he wanted Zita to have at least this one moment of pure bliss to remind her of the peaceful happiness that their life together might have been forever, but that he knew now would never be.

Zita leaned over and kissed Jedi on the cheek, then laughed.

The crowd went mad, calling for more.

Jedi forgot all about apocalyptic conflicts of transcendental proportions for the moment.

He wanted to kiss Zita.

Badly.

He grabbed her hand and stood up, pulling her up out of her seat after him.

She squealed in surprise as she fell into his arms.

He took her face in his hands and looked for a long moment into her soft, coppery eyes.

He smiled.

She blushed and looked down ...

...Then smiled and looked back up into his eyes.

His desire for her went hard-grav, flooding him with warmth and tingles all over his skin.

He kissed her.

The crowd went wild.

CHAPTER XLI

Sith had the rider at full-thrust, the hammer all the way down, as he sped through the east end of Industrial District where it bordered with Artisan District.

He had exactly twenty-three minutes to get to Temple Square to meet the Royal Procession when it was scheduled to arrive at the end of the parade in front of The Temple.

He could've made that easily in ten minutes at this speed, were the magways clear.

But the closer he'd get to the parade route, the thicker the traffic and the crowds would be.

And the KSF patrols that would be chasing him down would be an added bonus he could've done without.

He needed to speed through town recklessly not just to get to Temple Square on time, but because he had to attract KSF attention and get them to follow him there. Without letting them catch him first.

That was essential to the script revisions The Worm had cooked up.

The Worm—Sith thought—is a motherfatherkrokin' ...

"GENIUS!" he burst out, and it reverberated throughout the cab of the rider ...

And there's the first one now...

... Sith's mind announced to him as he glanced into his rear-view to see the patrol rider parked in a driveway that receded into the distance. The blue-and-yellow Valley KSF vehicle was pulling out of the driveway with its crystals flashing and it's siren blaring.

Sith knew everything he had to do. He had no time to analyze everything that had happened, was happening, was going to happen, might happen, might not happen.

He had to get to Temple Square in time to meet the Procession, not get caught by KSF, or crack up his Wanderer in the process, while flying at illegally high-speed through thick surface traffic and pedestrian crowds.

He knew what he had to do once he go there.

First, he had to get there.

Sith took his eyes off the magway ahead and glanced into the rear-view. The cruiser was getting closer.

Checking the magway ahead, Sith could see it was clear for some distance. He took a hand off the stick and tapped up a display on the dash-screen. The Wanderer was equipped—illegally of course, courtesy of one of Manthi's friends—with pneumatic thrust boosters, which pounded out an extra two-hundred ADU3 (Atmospheric Density Units) of pneumatic thrust, adding another almost two-thirds maximum-capacity to the 350-ADU thrust assembly's normal output.

There wasn't a KSF cruiser on the planet that could catch him.

He activated the boosters.

The rider lurched forward and sped away from the pursuing cruiser.

"Oh look, another friend who wants to play!" Sith cried out and laughed madly, as he sped past another patrol car, its overhead crystals flashing on as the speeding Wanderer zoomed by.

It hovered away from the curb and joined the chase after the first pursuing cruiser careened past it.

CHAPTER XLII

The tail end of the parade containing the Royal Procession reached the intersection where the head had already turned almost an hour ago, off Atmi Boulevard onto Yedina Way, the long avenue that led through the center of Commercial District down to Temple Square, behind which lay Artisan District, and at whose far end stood, on a hill overlooking the whole square, The Temple. The towering stone edifice of The Temple was massive enough that it could be clearly seen even at this distance, dwarfing even the tallest of the Commercial District towers.

The crowds lining Yedina Way erupted when the Royals finally turned the corner and came into view.

Queen Deleb, seated in the raised back of the Ambassador with King Eloh, paused from smiling and waving for a moment, hooked her hands around her husband's arm, and pulled him closer to her so he could hear her over the roaring of the crowds.

"I'm scared, Eloh!" she shouted into his ear.

He leaned his head back and shouted. "I am, too. But they'll be fine, Your Sweetness! We all will be!"

"Eloh!"

King Eloh aborted his next cycle of smiles and waves and turned to his wife. There were tears in her eyes and she was blinking quickly, fighting them back.

She was smiling and looking at him the same way she had on their wedding day.

Her mind was full of sad thoughts.

Her heart, however was full of nothing but joy and gratitude toward her partner for a long, good and happy life together.

Eloh's heart melted.

"You've never had to say it, My Love. I've always known," Eloh said into her ear as gently as he could without being drowned out by the crowds. "I'll hold on to you."

He put his other hand on both of hers, squeezed tightly, kissed her on the forehead, and then looked long into her watery eyes as if it were going to be for the last time.

And they both knew it soon would be.

CHAPTER XLIII

Sith whooped madly while steering wildly into the corner. The force threw him against the side window violently. He fought to steer out of the turn, straightening the stick and righting the polarity thrusters. The Wanderer took off down a narrow side-way lined by towering shops and condos.

"Eat polarity, motherfatherkrokeeeeeers!" he shouted, focused with all his physical senses on the magway ahead and with his Force senses on the magway to come, ready to anticipate and react in time to anything, as most in tune with everything in the moment as he'd ever been in his life.

All his life he was tortured by the despair of not being able to get what he wanted.

And after all those agonizing years of being tormented by that despondency, what he wanted was finally just a few moments away from his grasp.

He couldn't krok this up. Not now.

He was pumped so full of anticipation of the power that would soon be all his, he felt it throbbing underneath his skin like a hot pulse.

He was burning in anger over all the years of humiliation, being made to feel inadequate by all the people, including his mother and father, who expected nothing of him simply because he had the misfortune of having been born a few seconds after his precious brother.

He was also nearly exploding with the elation he felt over what was about to come:

The realization of what all his life he had considered to be an impossible dream.

He knew that his reveling in his feelings made his sense of individuals, especially as far away as the Royal Procession was from him right now, cloudy.

But he didn't care. He knew where the Procession was going. All he had to do was get there at the right time.

Until then, he had to keep the KSFers on his tail, but not too close.

Sith cackled hauntingly.

He was on his way to take the Throne of Krai ...

... And in style!

BIG style!

The first of the now four patrol riders chasing him—crystals flashing and sirens screaming—turned the same corner seconds behind Sith, and followed his speeding rider down the long, gently curving magway.

Sith glanced back from his rear-view and steered the speeding Wanderer along the curve of the magway. Pedestrians jumped out of the way from in between parked riders. The KSF sirens blared and echoed in and out of phase off the towering stone facades of the buildings lining the magway that was barely wide enough for two riders to pass by without threatening to hit pedestrians on the sidewalk.

CHAPTER XLIV

The door to his office whooshed open and Master Lekh rushed in, carrying a green velvet bag tied together with a blue-and-gold thong with frilly ends.

He headed directly for the transcom station, activated it, and the wall-screen glowed to life.

He was steeling himself for hearing and seeing the worst that could have been feared and imagined, had already happened.

Master Lekh punched up KTN. The transcast of the parade popped up into a window on the wall before him, amidst various colorful, running data and control displays. He carefully and gently placed the bag on the console next to him and watched, listening to the announcers' commentary.

The end of the parade just before the Royal Procession was coming down to the bottom of Yedina Way, would soon enter Temple Square, and be met by the scores of thousands gathered there on the vast expanse below Temple Hill, and in all the magways leading into it running between the surrounded towering edifices that looked out over it.

Master Lekh went slightly faint as a thick wave violently ebbed its way through and away from him, so that it nearly took his consciousness with it.

He steadied himself with both hands on the transcom console.

It was going to happen in Temple Square, he thought.

That's all the feeling he just had had to tell him.

He slumped down onto the padded and low-armed stool and watched in helpless despair.

CHAPTER XLV

This was motherfatherkrokin' hilarious!

In a wild whining of thrusters, polarity generators and stabilizer servos inside, and screaming sirens and flashing crystals outside and behind, Sith laughed, banking the Wanderer through a face-pressing turn out of a side-way and onto Hordi Boulevard, the main thoroughfare running up to the back end of The Square through Artisan District.

The rider fishtailed.

He slid the booster control back up, and the vehicle rocketed off in a whirlwind of confetti and streamers already filtering down through the air even at this distance from Temple Square.

Sith was only a few blocks away now, behind The Temple, to the left of The Hill, racing up Hordi Boulevard, whose wide magway sloped upward toward the titanic stone structure of The Temple towering up into the sky above the city.

The buildings to either side of him raced by in a blur. The only thing he saw was The Temple and the boulevard that ran up ahead of him. Everything else, he simply steered clear of using instinct and Force sense.

This back side of The Square wouldn't be populated with celebrating Outsider Valley Babykrokers. Only the magways on the far side, below The Hill and across The Square opposite The Temple, would be packed. Hordi Boulevard had normal traffic circulating up through it, with the only stipulation being the security detour set up at the foot of The Hill, where Hordi met Temple Hill Ring—the avenue that ran around both sides of Temple Hill and spilled out onto Temple Square at the foot of the mount below.

The sirens that were lost in the echoing precipice of the magway Sith had just left now screeched out onto Hordi, and Sith noticed that the flashing crystal lights that had a second ago been only reflections on buildings behind him, were now burning in his rear-view.

The convoy of KSF cruisers that numbered about a dozen—Sith figured from his numerous cursory glances backward—had started to rocket out onto the boulevard, ejecting one by one from the side-way in screaming, whining, throbbing magnetic skids, and propelling themselves forward in pursuit of the criminally speeding vehicle.

"You got no krokin' clue what's comin' up The Hill, baby!" he shouted out loud and cackled throatily.

CHAPTER XLVI

The Royal Procession entered Temple Square, and began to make its way around The Square's perimeter along Temple Square Ring.

The crowds packing The Square were contained inside The Square Ring, a multilane magway that offered traffic access around the perimeter of The Square into all the adjoining, tributary magways. Yedina Way opened up into Temple Square directly opposite The Hill. The parade route was to circle left, travel around The Square dialwise, and stop before The Temple, where the Royal Couple-to-Be and their parents—the Queen and King of Krai and the Lord and Lady of the House of Pyarr—would mount the stairs, acknowledge the crowd, and then disappear into The Temple's administrative wing to officially register their intent to marry. A massive stage was erected off to the side of The Temple, from which a post-registration concert would celebrate the Royal Engagement.

The Square was showered by a consistent and thick cloud of confetti, flower petals and streamer swirls, making the whole scene seem to be taking place in a mountain snowfall despite the clear, deep azure sky above and the balmy, Rebirth-Season temperatures.

The roar was deafening. Thundering. It seemed to Jedi he could see The Temple—towering above The Square—virtually vibrating on The Hill as it was framed in his view by the stone, crystal, glass and steel towers on either side of the wide magway leading down to the square.

His senses were completely overloaded and overwhelmed by the density and intensity of the energy mass he could sense through The Force. It made him feel as if he were magboarding at maximum push through a hurricane of solid water instead of air, that was flashing with lightning and roaring with wind and thunder.

Like a tiny speck that was about to get sucked into the vortex of everything, hurtling around Temple Square in one, mad, crushing whirlwind of what Jedi could see in his mind's eye-version of Temple Square as luminous waves of energy in a torrential swirl of changing colors, accompanied by a screaming, high pitched ringing in his Third Ear.

Suddenly, he sensed a glimpse of what was at the center of that speck, and he abruptly went cold, the darkness from the speck piercing him in the pit of his stomach like a black needle thrust into his abdomen and sending a burning cold shiver through him that stabbed him excruciatingly in both temples.

He cried out in pain.

Zita tuned to him, saw him wince in barely controlled agony. He squeezed her hand tightly enough that it almost hurt her. "Jedi! What?"

Back at the center of the swirling vortex of energy that Jedi could "see" with The Force: through the chaotic and frenetic, high-velocity churning, he could clearly see the energy swirl pulling downward into one single black point in it's pit. In that point Jedi could feel the source of the dark energy of a shattering intensity unlike any he'd ever experienced. It was a piercing point of cold darkness, above and all around which everything else's energy roared and thundered; the point into which all the energies of goodness and strength were being sucked in almost liquid fluidity, and out of which emanated nothing but a cold, debilitating terror that threatened to cut into anything in its path.

Then Jedi's sense was back in the carriage, in Temple Square, beside Zita, holding her hand, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, breathing with difficulty, a look of anguish on his face.

Zita stared at him, stunned. The carriage made its way between the crowds on the interior of The Square, and those packed under the feet of the buildings that surrounded it on three sides.

CHAPTER XLVII

Sith flew up Hordi Boulevard, weaving aggressively but smoothly between the light traffic starting to funnel down as it backed up at the detour ahead.

The convoy of screaming KSF patrol riders had grown to at least twenty.

This was it.

He was coming up to the gate, the one beyond which once he stepped, there would be no turning back.

Ever.

"Krok it! Let's go!" he shouted out, and gunned the thrusters into red-line, making them whine in agony against the strain.

The Wanderer shot out of the funneling traffic and rocketed alongside it, up the boulevard before it met with Temple Hill Ring.

Traffic guards directing traffic away from the blockade and to the right onto Temple Hill Ring, at first stood in wonder at the rider barreling down on them as it flew over the lip of the upward slope and then came down the slightly declining plateau that was the end of Hordi Boulevard.

Then they heard the rapidly approaching screaming sirens over the noise of the traffic in front and the rumble coming from behind them in Temple Square.

Then they began scattering in panic as they realized the vehicle wasn't slowing down and was going to plough right through them if they didn't get out of the way.

Sith downpunched the thruster controls and the rider jolted into a gravity-defying deceleration of high-torque magnetic and pneumatic grind, the thrusters surging in a piercing whine and then kicking down into the low rumble and throb of high-gear anti-thrust.

He steered frantically into the turn as the rider slid into Temple Hill Ring across three lanes while doing a complete three-sixty ...

... Twice! ...

... And then slid to a halt directly in front of the portable guard pavilion set up at the blockade across the avenue.

As the Wanderer's driver-side door popped up and Sith jumped out, the first of the pursuing patrol riders began sliding erratically out of Hordi Boulevard onto The Temple Hill Ring, and screaming down onto the blockade point in a stroboscopic storm of light coming from their flashing crystals.

Guards were running out of the pavilion.

Sith ran to meet them.

This was it. He was on. It all was. Whatever happened next to him, to everybody, to Krai, he was the one who was going to take it from there. He had to be. Or else it was his skin that would fry. He knew that.

"Who the krok are you?" the Captain of the Guard, leading the men, accosted Sith when they met at the gate.

Show time!

Lord Sith let loose.

"WHO THE KROK ARE YOU?"

The Captain was taken aback. He stuttered. "I ..." He took a good look at Sith and, finally recognizing him under a bald pate and face-tattoos in which the world had not yet seen him, went pale.

"My Lord. Forgive me."

Then the lead patrol riders thrummed to a halt a few feet behind Sith's rider, the echoes of their killed sirens starting to swim away and ripple off the towering stone walls of the back of The Temple. The cruisers' occupants began spilling out with angry shouts as more patrol riders arrived on the scene behind them.

Sith addressed the Captain with manic urgency.

"Somebody is going to try to—"

Suddenly, a guard burst out of the pavilion, screaming.

The Captain and his men turned.

Sith froze.

Then a fire exploded inside of him, consuming even his vision.

His senses were completely overloaded and overwhelmed by the density and intensity of the energy blast the explosion of fire suddenly showed him swirling all around everything. He felt as if he were magboarding at maximum push through a hurricane of solid fire instead of air, that was flashing with lightning and roaring with wind and thunder.

Like a tiny speck that was about to get sucked into the vortex of everything, hurtling around Temple Square in one, mad, crushing whirlwind of what Sith could see in his mind's eye-version of Temple Square as luminous waves of energy in a torrential swirl of changing colors of flame, accompanied by a screaming, high-pitched ringing in his Third Ear.

Suddenly he sensed a glimpse of what was at the center of that speck, and he abruptly went molten hot, the light from the speck piercing him like a hot-white needle thrust into his mind, sending a burning hot shiver through him that stabbed him excruciatingly in both temples.

He cried out in pain and winced, bringing his hands to his head.

Back at the center of the swirling vortex of energy that Sith could "see" with The Force: through the chaotic and frenetic, high-velocity churning, he could clearly see the energy swirl pulling downward into one single burning-white point in it's pit. In that point Sith could feel the source of the white energy of a shattering intensity unlike any he'd ever experienced. It was a piercing point of hot light, above and all around which everything else's energy roared and thundered; the point into which all the energies of weakness were being sucked in almost liquid fluidity, and out of which emanated nothing but a hot, immense power that would to cut through anything in its path.

Sith then saw a towering column of flame firing out of the center of the swirling mass of energy around Temple Square.

Above it, looking down over the whole square from the sky, fed by the column of fire, Sith saw his own grinning face.

He opened his eyes.

The patrolmen arriving at the gate with sticks drawn, slid to a halt and forgot all about the maniacal speeder they'd just been chasing when confronted with the sight of a hysterical guard running out of the pavilion, gesticulating spastically with his arms in the air and screaming madly in despair.

He finally stopped and shouted out to all of them.

"THE QUEEN AND KING! THEY'VE JUST BEEN MURDERED! THE QUEEN AND KING ..."

Everybody present froze, horrified, as if collectively just slapped hard across the face.

After a moment of paralysis had passed, the Captain of the Guard, with a face even paler than it had just gone a moment ago, now automatically turned toward Prince Sith, who—despite his skin being almost marbleized from habitual over-intoxication—also went visibly pale, and swooned faintly as if he were too weak to stand on his own.

From somewhere distant on the horizon of his Force sense, he heard a faint cry:

Mom! Dad! No!

Then, suddenly, despair began to spread out through Sith's chest like a pool of blood oozing across a cold stone floor.

Then Jedi's face floated into the air before Sith's swimming vision.

Then the fire exploded inside him again, disintegrating Jedi's image with a blast of flame.

Suddenly, his yellow eyes were aflame.

Then, finally, he felt like he was all Sith, the real Sith, the true Sith, the Sith lying dormant and hidden beneath the constraints of duty and oppressive propriety all his life; the Sith unleashed:

The Sith who was unlimited, indomitable power itself!

He wheeled around to the officer nearest to him.

"DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" he shouted into the startled man's face.

The stunned officer blinked blankly. Then his jaw dropped. "Holy kr—Yes, My Lord!"

"YOU KNOW? YEAH?" Sith was screaming. "SO GET YOUR KROKIN' ASSES INTO THOSE RIDERS AND GET DOWN THERE. DID YOU JUST HEAR THE MAN? SOMEBODY JUST KILLED THE MOTHERFATHERKROKIN' QUEEN AND KING! MOVE!"

He swung around to the Captain.

"GET THIS BLOCKADE DOWN! LET THESE RIDERS THROUGH! COM TO YOUR PEOPLE DOWN IN THE SQUARE THAT PRINCE SITH IS COMING DOWN WITH A KSF PATROL!" he screamed, turned, ran back to his Wanderer while pressing the remote to open the door and power up the systems, hopped in, and as the door hissed back down over him, laughed maniacally like a man about to go over a mountainous, thundering waterfall, challenging its angry roar with a brazen one of his own.

By the time the systems were up and Sith had his hands on the panel and the stick ready to launch forward, the Captain and his men had removed the first sections of the blockade.

Sith punched it up and the Wanderer screamed away and down the sloping avenue ringing Temple Hill, toward The Square and toward the stage of unbelievable scale onto which he was about to step and take the spotlight.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Master Lekh sank back into his seat at the transcom station with a cry of despair and a look of anguish on his face.

He closed his eyes. A single tear rolled out and down his cheek.

Over a wide shot of Temple Square from above, the announcers on the live transcast were hysterically trying to describe the chaos taking place in Temple Square in the aftermath of the Queen and King—before the eyes of scores of thousands gathered in The Square and the countless millions watching on KTN—suddenly exploding in a heart-sickening hail of flesh and blood all over their carriage and the stone surface of The Square.

Master Lekh suddenly opened his eyes.

He grabbed the velvet bag and ran out of the office.

CHAPTER XLIX

Just before having reached the front of The Temple:

Jedi felt a burning cold stab abruptly pierce his heart.

MOM! DAD! NO!—his mind screamed out in anguish and his heart felt like it had just been punched down into his stomach by a gravitic hammer.

"MOM! DAD! NO!" Jedi screamed out.

Then, it happened.

In the Ambassador ahead of Jedi and Zita's, Jedi saw with stunning intensity the bodies of his mother and father, along with their chauffeur, suddenly explode.

Pieces of flesh and bone rained down in a shower of blood and bile.

Jedi felt the whole world go silent, as if everything were momentarily suspended in silent nothingness.

Then Zita started screaming uncontrollably.

A wave of panicked cries and screams of horror started to roll through the crowds gathered on both sides of the avenue closest to the scene.

The Queen and King's carriage stopped abruptly.

Jedi and Zita's driver slammed their carriage to a jolting halt as well.

In their carriage ahead of the Queen and King's, still continuing forward, Amrun and Zola turned, and when they realized the sight their minds were registering, began shouting hysterically.

Ahead of them, vehicles in the Procession came to staggered halts as it was realized down the line that something terribly wrong had just occurred behind them.

Jedi's vision swam thickly before his eyes.

He swooned slightly and felt as if he were about to drown in the air that became thick as liquid.

Then suddenly a fire exploded inside him.

This was it. He was on. It all was. Whatever happened next to him, to everybody, to Krai, he was the one who was going to take it from there. He had to be. Or else it was already the end of everything even before it all began. He knew that. But—

MOM! DAD! NOOOOOOOOOO!

Then his vision came back to him all crystal sharp. His eyes were burning blue flame.

He grabbed Zita and pulled her close to him. She buried her face in his chest, sobbing, shaking. He hid her eyes from the grisly scene in the carriage ahead with his hand.

Rai Valley KSF and Temple Security stationed on foot at the edge of the crowds began running toward the Royal Procession from all sides while shouting and crying out loud. Both Royal and Noble personal bodyguards, following along with the Procession in black riders on the edge of the avenue, were ejecting from their vehicles and rushing to the horrific scene as well. Lords and Ladies of the Noble Houses were starting to scramble over the backs or out the sides of their open vehicles.

Jedi had to take control, no matter how much his heart ached right now and how suddenly and mortifyingly terrified he was.

Then:

A bomb!

What if there's another one?

Jedi suddenly grabbed Zita.

"Come on! We have to get out of the rider, NOW!" he had to shout to her above the now wailing-and-roaring crowds, who had witnessed the scene on the giant screens throughout The Square. He pulled her up by the shoulders and guided her dazed-into-plasticity form past him while pushing her out and over the side of the open Ambassador, where she fell into the arms of the first of the bodyguards to reach the vehicle.

Jedi vaulted out of the rider onto the pavement behind Zita.

"GET HER OUT OF HERE! NOW!" he shouted to the man he recognized as one of the Royal Guard regularly assigned to his dad. "GO TO THE CASTLE! MOVE!"

"JEDI!" Zita turned and screamed out to him, in tears as the bodyguard shielded her and started to pull her away from Jedi.

Jedi took her by the shoulders and held her firmly while looking her intensely in the eyes and projecting courage and confidence with his mind into her heart.

Jedi Mind Trick Number 9.

Reserved only for emergencies with those you love most.

"GO WITH HIM! IT'LL BE SAFE!" he shouted into her face. Then, glancing at the bodyguard to make sure he understood that the instructions applied to him, too: "GO TO MASTER LEKH WHEN YOU GET TO THE CASTLE AND STAY THERE UNTIL I GET THERE!"

"BUT WHAT IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO YOU?" Zita cried out, terrified.

"NOTHING WILL! I PROMISE!" Jedi shouted, and with as much tenderness as he could direct into his eyes—despite the raging, torrential flood of conflicting and clashing feeling burning inside him right now, and the chaos reigning all around them; he placed his hand gently on her heart and then put it to his chest just over his. "I PROMISE!"

"I WANT TO STAY WITH YOU!" Zita implored.

"IT'S NOT SAFE! I'LL COME AS SOON AS I CAN! PLEASE, SWEETNESS! GO!" he yelled out to both the panicked and shaking and crying Zita, and the stern-looking but collected bodyguard into whose arms he pushed her.

Jedi watched Zita disappear into the throng of KSF and Temple Security swarming around the Procession, hearing her anguished cry of his name melt into the mash of chaotic shouting that was swirling immediately around the stopped column of vehicles in the foreground of the more distant but equally imposing thundering of the crowds that was now rolling into a deafening crescendo, as the grim event they had also just witnessed on the giant transcom screens erected all over Temple Square started to sink in.

It suddenly felt as if all of Krai were roaring in Temple Square around Jedi.

He sensed a crushing pressure, as if the air itself were pressing him into a fine, subquantum point at the speed of light, until he would collapse into a single point of cold, black nothingness that he could feel sharply spreading from the pit of his stomach to consume all of him. The sides of his vision went black. He staggered back against the Ambassador.

He looked up and suddenly it was as if he were looking up at the sky through a towering tunnel of raging flame, at the top of which, in the sky looking down at him in titanic size and grinning with extreme malice, was Sith's face swimming in the swirling, gigaheated air inside the fiery column before Jedi's eyes.

Then Jedi heard the sirens.

The shouting and chaos all around him brought him back and to:

The sirens.

He's coming.

This was it.

This was where and how it was all about to begin.

Jedi bolted, then ran and dodged his way through the wild scrum of shouting bodies, and broke through to the open avenue on the fringe of the crowd around the Procession. He saw the agitated crowds being held back by the blockade detachments of KSF lining the protective barriers behind which the public was kept off the parade route.

He could see down Temple Square Ring as it ran across the front of The Temple, and where Temple Hill Ring came down from around the enormous mass of The Hill and The Temple on the other side of it. He saw flashing crystals and a phalanx of KSF patrol cars come screaming down through an opening in the blockade of The Hill Ring, fanning out onto the The Square Ring along the inside lanes, and come barreling down on the scene at high speed ...

And then Jedi noticed that it was Sith's Wanderer leading them all.

Jedi closed his eyes and cleared his mind.

He saw Sith behind the stick of his rider, laughing wildly and shouting while steering the vehicle down the wide magway as hysterical people on both sides of him rushed by in a blur.

Jedi's whole body suddenly winced and he almost doubled over from the stab of a burning cold that pierced his stomach with the almost physically perceptible violent force of a flaming spear of ice.

He cried out and clutched his stomach.

Suddenly, all the noise roaring around Jedi was drowned out by the thundering of Sith's laughter; laughter Jedi could hear inside his mind as deafeningly as if it were all the sound of the world.

Then the flaming spear of ice inside him violently exploded, and a hot, angry fire shot through him.

Jedi bolted through the rushing crowds, straight toward the quickly oncoming squadron of police magriders in the distance...

And Sith.

Suddenly, he felt a lonely pair of voices from his heart speaking to him in his ears, and the compulsion they inspired in him stopped him dead in his tracks. He slid to a halt and tried to focus on what the voices were saying, but he couldn't make them out over the noise of the chaos all around him.

"Mom? Dad?"Jedi suddenly cried out, and—

All sound melted away with a haunting echo, except for the distant pair of voices and their imperceptible speech that kept whispering in the ears on the inside of his head.

Then Jedi looked up into the sky, and was suddenly blinded by the twin suns; but he didn't close his eyes.

He didn't close them because in the burning light of the suns, he could see his father and mother in the sky—his dad's arms around his mom's shoulders, and hers holding him tightly around the waist. They were both smiling and shining with light, and Jedi felt a gentle, soothing warmth radiating from them down into the darkest corners of his trembling and terrified heart.

They were saying something to him, but he still couldn't make out what it was.

Suddenly, Jedi knew for certain with confidence and faith, that everything, no matter what happened, would be all right.

Then he zeroed in on his mother's voice, it coming in as if being tuned in by a sonic transmitter from a scrambled frequency and then booming out over the scene on Temple Square from the sky above.

"Whatever it comes down to between you and Sith," Jedi's Mother-in-the-Sky said. "Always remind yourself that he's your brother, and never let anything, especially anger ... never let anything but love for him motivate what you do."

Then his father chimed in:

"Never forget that Sith is your brother ... But always remember that as long as you live, you are the one, true king."

And then he felt a surge of energy course through him like a light, warm breeze.

And then, all of a sudden, he understood.

"Mom! Dad!" Jedi whispered, and his vision swam again, only this time with tears.

By the time he wiped his eyes, all he saw up in the sky again was the twin Kraian suns.

There was no time right now for the distractions of grieving for his dead parents, or struggling with moral dilemmas about his brother; not with the empty throne of a world in danger and in need of protection. Every moment of Jedi's entire being from now on, for the rest of his life, would have to be dedicated to that pursuit.

There was no way he could let his brother do this to the world. Jedi understood now that the bomb had been meant for him and Zita. He understood now that Deleb and Eloh must have known somehow, too. He understood now that his mom and dad had willingly sacrificed themselves to try to save the throne from whatever plot to steal it Sith was mixed up in. How they had known, he didn't have time to figure out at the moment. He just knew that they must have known. That's why his dad came to him just before leaving The Castle, and asked him to switch vehicles for the parade.

He knew!

There also was no way Jedi was going to let that end up being in vain, while a brother who was willing to let his own brother be killed and now was somehow involved in the killing of his parents, usurped the Throne of Krai and led its people down a path into collective darkness and suffering of unimaginable duration and intensity.

No way.

Not with the world's future in All That Could Be hanging in the balance.

"... As long as you live, you are the one, true king."

Jedi quickly blinked more tears back, his vision cleared, and through the dwindling shower of floating confetti, flower petals and streamers fluttering down through the air, he zeroed in on Sith's Wanderer and the phalanx of patrol riders screaming along the inside lanes of the magway between chaotic, roaring crowds kept at bay by blockade guards on one side, and chaotic roaring and running crowds of security forces and panicked Procession members and all their vehicles, on the other.

Jedi closed his eyes.

His Force sense and every Jedi Mind Trick in his book were telling him now to wait calmly for Sith to come to him.

CHAPTER L

Sith rode the rider into the steep curve that emptied out onto The Square from Temple Hill Ring with a whoop.

He barreled past the opening in the blockade and rocketed out across several lanes of Temple Square Ring, before righting the vehicle and propelling it down the wide magway alongside the parade vehicles stopped in front of The Temple, and toward the end of the Royal Procession, where Sith knew the scene awaited his appearance.

He was trembling with excitement, anticipation, elation, fear, thrill, power-lust—all at once and at overload—as he slammed the stick forward, and the Wanderer lurched into overdrive with a fantail of KSF patrol cars now pursuing him in support, and no longer as the suspected traffic felon they'd just been chasing through the streets of downtown Rai Valley.

Sith wasn't looking forward to seeing the scene. He knew it wouldn't be pretty. He'd have to put on his best act yet, while not going over the top either way.

He decided he'd play it however Jedi was playing it and respond accordingly. Whatever Jedi was going to do now, however he was going to respond to Sith with what Sith was going to throw at him, was how Sith would direct himself further. All he had to make sure of was that whatever challenge Jedi posed, he would have to best him and sell his story, no matter what the cost.

But the whole world would be watching it all happen, and it would have to be played just right, or else it would all fall apart very quickly and Sith would find himself, not Jedi, on the skewer.

There was no way he would let his brother win this one. There was no way he was going to retreat in humiliation, once again, forced into the shadow cast by his Heir-to-the-Throne brother.

Not this time.

Not with his own glorious future at stake right now; along with the chance to go down in history as the greatest leader Krai will ever know: the first leader to unite Exile and Outsider under one king and ruler and end over seven thousand cycles of schism and discord.

Sith would be King of Krai.

Not Jedi.

Not ... Jedi ...

Jedi ...

An angry, searching tendril of neoluminous fire shot out from Sith's mind.

There!

Sith could feel the pathetic whining of his brother's high-frequency energy vibrations in his mind, somewhere ahead in the center of the swirling, chaotic mass of Force energy raging around Temple Square in the aftermath of the bloody bomb blast.

He started laughing madly as he thought of how moments from now, Jedi would no longer be Heir-to-the-Throne, but instead hauled off in manacles ...

As the murderer of his own parents: the Queen and King of Krai.

The Worm.

"GENIUS! KROKIN' GENIUS!" Sith shouted out loud, and pushed the rider down the avenue toward the approaching thick clump of swarming KSF, Temple Guard, bodyguard and Noble-clown bodies, where he guessed the whole scene must be.

Before anything else could happen, the first thing he had to do was find that fat krok Zadoo quickly, and make it fast and discreet.

Sith calmed his thoughts and feelings as best he could and stretched out with his mind, searching for Zadoo amongst the swirl of bodies and their Force energy all around ...

... And found his Force energy, recognizing it by its frequency and sensing the panicked state it was in.

Sith punched in the retro thrust, and the rider ground and whined and thrummed and throbbed to a skidding halt in a barrage of wailing sirens, flashing crystals, and finally the rest of the patrol cars accompanying him from behind.

He jumped out of the Wanderer as the door was sliding up, and without pausing to acknowledge anything or anybody, bolted directly into the crowd several vehicles ahead of where he stopped, and two down from the hit car:

The white Ambassador carriage that was to have contained his brother and his whore-to-be, but which now contained only what was most probably the grisly and meaty and messy remains of the people Sith had known all his life as his mother and father.

A sudden stab of despair at the thought of his dead mother and father—from a bright point of coldness somewhere deep beneath the raging fire—threatened to quench the empowering flames burning all around Sith's senses. He quickly doused the coldness with a lance of flame in his mind, and it re-ignited the aberrant point again with fiery ferocity, putting the coldness out.

There would be no time anymore for the distractions of battling sappy sentimentality or struggling with sophistic moralizing; not with the empty throne of a world to secure and maintain. Every moment of Sith's entire being from now on, for the rest of his life, would have to be dedicated to that pursuit.

Now—Sith reached out with his mind—Zadoo ...

There!

In a muddle of rushing bodies all flashing by in blurs, Sith saw the hulk of Zadoo being pulled out of his rider with great difficulty by two Temple Guards.

He ran to them.

"Zadoo!" he yelled out.

The fat Roshani turned and went pale when he saw Sith running toward him, pushing his way through the crowds, calling out his name.

Sith arrived at Zadoo's rider and assisted the two Temple Guards in hauling the great hulk out of his vehicle so he could be escorted off to safety.

"Who the krok are you?" one of them shouted to Sith.

Sith restrained the burning impulse he had—to unleash the entire force of the angry fire in his mind at the man—and instead answered without missing a beat:

"The Lord's personal bodyguard! Who the krok are you?" Sith indicated with his hand at the bulk of Zadoo's wife, still struggling to climb out of the rider. "Never mind me. Help the Lady out!" he instructed the two guards, and they turned their attention and efforts to her while Sith pulled Zadoo away.

"Give me the remote!" he shouted into Zadoo's ear as they rushed away from the vehicle through the crowd.

Zadoo stopped and looked at him, stunned.

"Just give it to me. Now!" Sith commanded in a strangely distant yet at the same time compellingly immediate and forceful voice, as if it were at once coming from both all around and inside him as well; and when Zadoo looked in Sith's eyes and saw the fire blazing in them, he meekly pulled the device from his pocket and slipped it into Sith's waiting hand, with visible surrender in a struggle to resist doing so.

Sith pocketed the remote. "Now get the krok out of here! Disappear in a panic just like everybody else. Go!" He pushed Zadoo off, and the man was jostled into the mass of rushing bodies and swallowed up by it.

Now, Sith thought.

"Jedi," he said out loud, and strode off into the crowds towards where he could sense his brother was ...

... Waiting for him?

Oh, so he's waiting for me, is he?—Sith thought with amusement.

He could feel Jedi's presence as strongly as if Jedi were standing right before him, and although he couldn't sense his thoughts through the angry, powerful fire raging within him, he could sense his brother's quiet, disciplined and focused anticipation.

He thinks he's ready for me?—Sith thought, and laughed out loud with challenge and swaggering self-assurance, while homing in on Jedi and letting the sense of his brother's Force energy guide him through the crowd to what was about to become the scene of Jedi's final demise at the hands of Sith; and the end of a lifetime of Sith being constantly humiliated and dismissed by everybody as "Second-in-Line-to-the-Throne."

Moments from now, he would be Only-in-Line-to-the-Throne.

"Let's see how ready you are," Sith declared to himself out loud, then spat on the ground and added with an angry hiss: "Brother!"

Jedi stood erect and still in the midst of the chaos all around him, arms at his side, breathing deeply, eyes closed, relaxed.

Waiting.

For Sith.

He could feel Sith's presence as strongly as if Sith were standing right before him, and although Jedi couldn't sense his thoughts through the angry, powerful fire he could feel raging within his brother, he could sense Sith's excited, erratic and passionate anticipation.

"PRINCE JEDI!"

The call came from somewhere behind him and startled him with it's urgent tone.

He turned to look where the call came from ...

... And was suddenly slammed hard from behind, knocked forward to the ground before he could manage to put his arms out to stop the fall, was crushed by the weight of a heavy body falling on top of him, felt a piercing lightning bolt of pain strike the side of his head as it met the stone pavement, and ...

Everything went cold and black.

There he is!

Through confetti, streamers, flower petals, and accompanied by the anguished wailing and roaring in Temple Square that fed the angry fire that raged inside him, Sith saw Jedi at the edge of the crowd of shouting, rushing, escorting security forces and panicked, screaming and fleeing Nobles. His brother was standing still with his eyes closed and his arms at his side, while bodies rushed all around him. He was facing the direction from which Sith and the KSF patrol had arrived, and just ahead and off to the left from where Sith now carefully approached.

Sith couldn't believe his luck. Jedi seemed oblivious to his presence. He wasn't stirring at Sith's approach, and appeared not even to be aware that Sith was so near and coming toward him from the thickness of the crowd around the quickly emptying Royal Procession. Sith couldn't feel anything at all from Jedi's Force energy. It was as if his brother had detached his presence completely from his current location just a few long strides away.

He wasn't going to take the chance that his brother might be playing dead, to draw Sith out and make him force his hand. As he pushed his way through the rushing bodies, Sith focused his thoughts and his mind.

He waited for a clean shot. Waited patiently until the bodies rushing around him at that moment ran clear ...

Then he quickly fired a tiny pair of blazing rings out of his eyes, through the air and behind Jedi, where they exploded in an urgent cry:

"PRINCE JEDI!"

Then he saw Jedi start, open his eyes wide, and turn to look behind him for the source of the call.

Sith pounced.

He launched himself and flew with a bone-crushing tackle through the air, pounding into the distracted Jedi from behind and taking him hard to the ground.

Jedi landed with a thud under Sith, hit his head on the stone, and went limp.

In a flurry of motion whose speed, accuracy and stealth were all fueled by years of extrasensory practice and discipline, Sith quickly reached inside his cloak, took out the remote detonator Zadoo had used to trigger the bomb that had killed Deleb and Eloh, wiped it clean with his cloak using one hand, and holding it in a black kerchief he produced from another pocket with his other hand, slipped the remote into the pocket of his unconscious brother's jacket.

Then, letting out a wail of anguish so loud and so piercing that it drew the attention of everybody around the two fallen men, Sith began pummeling his brother viciously with blows to the back of the head. Then he took him by the hair and began pounding his head into the stone while screaming uncontrollably, releasing a lifetime of forcefully repressed rage, while at the same time enjoying an almost orgasmic ejaculation of the energy and feeling that came with the knowledge that this moment signaled and signified Sith's victory over a lifetime of living in Jedi's pathetic shadow.

Sith began grinding Jedi's face a little more forcefully into the pavement, when he heard shouts directed at him, immediately after which arms roughly pulled him up, yanked him off Jedi's slack and prone body, and threw him to the side as he screamed and thrashed wildly.

Two KSF guards stood over Sith on each side of him and pinned his arms down at the shoulders with their boots. Sith spat and shouted obscenities. A Temple Guard in front of him withdrew his baton and was about to take his first swing at Sith—

"Do you krokin motherfatherkrokers know who I am?" Sith screamed hysterically.

... When the guard suddenly stopped in mid swing, a look of horror quickly replacing the rage with which he was about to paste the unknown assailant of the Heir-to-the-Throne. He went weak and stammered. "My Lord!"

The two KSF guards pinning Sith down, realizing in equal horror that they had just taken down a Royal Prince, stepped off and shouted copious and self-deprecative apologies.

Sitting up, Sith pointed an angry finger at Jedi and screamed out with as much hysterical grief as he could manage to put on:

"HE killed theM!"

The guards all around Sith were stunned dumb. Some KSF and Temple Guards nearby who heard the scream turned heads, also with stunned expressions on their faces. Others, further away, turned upon hearing the scream, and then everybody in a uniform of any kind within earshot of Sith's voice rushed to the two fallen bodies on the stone pavement and surrounded them amidst torrential shouting.

Sith sprang to his feet as the crowd around him and the prone Jedi gathered. Amidst all the shouting, he repeated his earlier, hysterical and grief-filled cry:

"HE killed theM!"

The Temple Guard who moments ago was about to thrash Sith, gathered the courage and asked: "My Lord. Do you realize what—"

"SEARCH HIM!" Sith screamed, the blazing fire in his yellow eyes projecting as much burning terror into the crowd around him as did the volume and tone of his voice.

All the security forces crowded around them looked at one another questioningly.

"SEARCH HIM!" Sith shouted with the just the right mix of both put-on and real desperate pleading.

The Temple Guard turned from Sith and knelt down over the unconscious body of Jedi, lying in his now dirty and torn white suit, face down in the pavement, a small pool of violet, faintly luminous blood around his head.

After a moment, the Guard stood up and produced a small, black device in his hand that looked like a transcom mobile, but without any screen.

"WHAT THE KROK IS THAT?" Sith shouted out, amidst a chorus of queries rising from the group around them. The Temple Guard held up the device so all the gathered security officers could see.

A murmuring rose from the crowd of security officers as they all looked to one another with more curious but unknowing expressions. The roaring and wailing from Temple Square, and the shouting and rushing about around the Procession continued unabated, everybody in Temple Square oblivious to the scene being played out here.

'MY LORD!" A KSF officer pushed his way through the crowd. "MY LORD!"

All eyes turned to the officer as he pushed into the clearing around the standing Sith and his fallen brother, and approached the Prince of Rai and the Temple Guard holding the smooth black device in his hand.

"May I?" he asked, and before the Temple Guard had time to process the request, had snatched the device from his hand.

The KSF officer examined the device closely, turning it over in his hands. Then he suddenly looked up at Sith. "This is a remote detonator for a bomb!"

The group was shocked into stunned silence.

Sith grabbed his head in both his hands, looked up at the sky in anguish, and cried out in hysterical sorrow yet again: "HE KILLED THEM!"

A Captain of the Guard among the KSF suddenly became encouraged enough to take command of the situation.

"Take him!" he commanded, gesturing at the Prince's body.

Sith, standing with his hands still at his head, closed his eyes.

In his mind, he saw two suns blazing in a black, night sky.

He shot a blast of fire up into each of them.

They exploded with blinding light.

Sith projected the resulting, infernal energy blast outwards from himself in waves of luminosity visible only on the level of Force sense.

Suddenly, a number of KSF officers and Temple Guards rushed past Sith and pounced on Jedi's unconscious body, pummeling it with fists and batons. Others joined in with kicking boots.

"Sop that! Now! Wrap him up!" the Captain shouted at the pile of bodies around and on top of Jedi, who had somehow then managed to manacle Jedi in the melee. The Captain turned to a KSF officer beside him. "Com for a lockup rider. Now! I want a patrol escort ready by the time the lockup gets here."

Sith opened his eyes

He couldn't believe what was happening. He couldn't believe that it already had happened, had just happened, right before his very eyes. Everybody in his family who stood in his way to the Throne, eliminated all in one, fell swoop.

The Exile prophets must have been right.

Manthi must have been right.

Sith must be The Vindicator.

It was his Destiny.

The events of today and their successful completion without a hitch despite their unforeseen turn and radical, last-second script rewrite, were the proof that it was Sith's destiny, not Everybody's-Darling Jedi's, that finally prevailed.

He would live in the cold, lonely, unjust shadows of his brother no longer. Now it would be Sith's light that would burn brightly all over Krai.

The hard part was almost over. He had successfully pinned the murder of his mother and father, with evidence, on Jedi. He wanted to laugh out loud and shout to the sky in triumph.

But the show, Sith reminded himself, must go on, because the curtain had not yet come down on this scene of the play.

He dropped his hands from his head and sank to his knees slowly, wailing in unintelligible grief, burying his head in his hands.

"Go get somebody from the Royal Guard! MOVE" the Captain ordered another KSF officer, and then rushed to the wailing Prince Sith.

He crouched down and put a hand on the Prince's shoulder. "My Lord, we're getting the Royal Guard and we're getting you out of here to safety. Please, My Lord ..." the Captain tried to console the bereaved, hysterical Prince by holding him with both arms around his shoulders, and the Prince, displaying all the signs of a young man facing the loss of both his parents at the apparently murderous hand of his brother, sank into the Captain's embrace and sobbed uncontrollably.

CHAPTER LI

The hallway was empty and cold.

And dark.

It wasn't that there was no light. The stone walls were well appointed with giant, luminescent crystal sconces all along their length just under the high ceiling, bathing the entire corridor in a warm glow.

It was a feeling of darkness that seemed to hang in the air all around everything since the terrible event yesterday afternoon.

It felt as if there was a great malevolence of some kind barely at bay, drooling with anticipation over its impending explosive release into all or reality.

And the fear of knowing and feeling that which went along with it.

Everywhere. Everything. Everybody.

But right now, for The Doctor, it was nowhere more apparent, and thick, and felt, than right here, right now.

He was making his way down a corridor of one of The Towers, to make the last of the hourly check-ups of his shift, on the lone patient being kept on this floor of the massive detention facility.

They had been converted from the ancient, stone watchtowers erected at the south end of the Rai Valley, where The Pass cleaved through the surrounding mountains along the route of the Eed River. The Towers stood on either side of the opening to The Pass, and reached into the sky until they surpassed even the summits of the low, sharp-peaked mountain range surrounding and protecting The Valley.

The Towers were originally constructed at the same time as The Castle had been, as a combination watch-tower/garrison installation after the war with The Exiles seven-thousand cycles ago, and were originally designed to house thousands of KSF Special Forces as an advance protection in case of the next possible and feared attack of The Exiles that never came.

Apparently, The Doctor thought, until now.

The Towers looked out across the Rai Plains and had afforded the garrison, in a time when visual surveillance by Nareed eye was the only long-range surveillance technology available, a view of the vast expanse all around. Now that that time had long passed and the Rai Valley was an urban megaplex surrounded by tropical forest, while the surrounding Rai plain was a major hub of local transportation and logistics infrastructure, surveillance was done by technology, and The Towers were converted into and fully equipped as the most secure detention facility in the world. The lower hundred stories were dedicated to transitional detention. The middle three hundred floors to long-term rehabilitation, and the top hundred to the medical facilities.

The Doctor followed the curve of the hallway, passing doorways and sconces and the occasional transcom or medical interface alcove. The hallway was otherwise empty. This level had been restricted to authorized personnel only, and at this point, that meant nobody allowed but on-duty CMO and the two Royal Guards standing outside the magnetically locked medical detention cell holding the unconscious apparent murderer of the Queen and King of Krai:

Their own son, Prince Jedi.

He had been brought in yesterday afternoon. The whole place was already shaken after "The Event," as it was being called all over transcasts, amongst constant pleading for public calm; because it had to be called something so that everybody knew what was being talked about. To any extent that a direct reminder of it could have been avoided, for the purposes of averting the despair-induced mass hysteria that threatened to explode across the globe at any moment now, it had been decided to call it, as innocuously as possible, "The Event."

This level—ET486—of East Tower had been cleared and sealed from all personnel and patients even before the Prince had been brought there by a KSF paramedic transport less than an hour after The Event, accompanied by a pair of Royal Guard, who were relieved with a fresh pair that arrived from The Castle every two hours.

The Doctor, the CMO on duty at this time, was charged with keeping the Prince alive while his fate, along with the fate of the world, was decided elsewhere by elsebodies.

The tide of events that had occurred since The Event had been numbing in its perceived ramifications and implications to the collective Nareed mind, while staggering to those of the individual. There had been scant time for any public or even private displays of grieving, as the world sat and watched in alternate waves of horror and despair rolling through every beating heart on The Continent, as the story unfolded before their eyes. The transcasts were reporting, however, some impromptu, mass vigils of despondent grief held in temples and squares all over Krai.

The Yedina had been recalled into Emergency Session, and a sea of stern and haggard-looking faces determined the most urgent order of business to be the reconstitution of Krai's official hierarchy, currently decapitated with the deaths of the Queen and King. As the sole member of the direct Royal Line not currently dead or in custody for apparent regicide, Sith was made to preside the session in his capacity as the new Lord of the House of Rai, in the name of the Binarchs who last held the Presidership. It was decided to give legislative approval to Lord Sith's ascension to one of the two Presiding Chairs reserved for both Binarchs; which under these circumstances made him alone the Kraian Head of State, and gave him alone all the legal and constitutional powers assigned to that office. Under normal conditions, both Binarchs would be the Prime Officials. With the Queen and King dead and the Heir-to-the-Throne under arrest for their murder, Sith was now officially recognized as Prime Official following the uncontested tabling of the legislation to declare him so, with unanimous support from The Yedina.

Lord Sith took the time in his short and solemn acceptance speech first to declare a state of global emergency, and then to announce an indefinite, official period of mourning.

Because the rulership of Krai was a Constitutional Binarchy, Lord Sith could not be constitutionally declared King of Krai and ascend to The Throne until he took a wife to share it with him as Queen. He was now by royal custom official Lord of the House of Rai, the Kraian royal line, but he couldn't take The Throne until a Queen had been found. It had been decided that because of the extraordinary circumstances, the constitutional requirement that the Raian binarch be eighteen cycles of age would be waived in the interest of filling The Throne and the leadership of the government as quickly as possible.

KTN had reported that what must be both a tense and intense joint meeting of the Yedina Cabinet with all Commanders-in-Chief of all Kraian security branches, was under way following the Yedina's Emergency Session. Preliminary statements about the session being leaked to the media by spokespeople from the various branches represented, were saying that the murder of the Queen and King of Krai had been the result of an extensive plot to attempt to seize the Throne and all political power on Krai. A plot and conspiracy about which there was no way imaginable to keep quiet the fact that it involved the Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai. The transcasts had been aflame with wild speculations gone out-of-control on a nonstop basis the moment KTN leaked to the world the paralyzing blow that it appeared to have been Prince Jedi who had carried out the murder with what KSF sources were forced to publicly verify had been an "explosive device detonated by remote control."

The Doctor recalled now thinking at the time, how there was something looking and feeling wrong in and about everything that hung about Lord Sith's stunning, bizarre appearance in the Yedina session; his shaved head and facial tattoos shocked the world no less than anything else had over the past day, but The Doctor had seen something in Lord Sith's eyes in one quick shot from the live transcast of the Yedina session that had disturbed him in a way like nothing he'd ever seen or felt before.

It had been the opposite of the weak and haggard and despondent look all about his physical features that he had seen in his eyes:

It had been menacing fire.

No other details about the conspiracy had been released. The official explanation was that following the adoption of Lord Sith as Head of State, he was jointly meeting with the Yedina Cabinet and the Kraian Security Council at Yedina House, the massive private residence of the Speaker of the Yedina on the grounds of the government complex, to plan a strategy to deal with protecting The Throne, the government, and ultimately, the world in the face of a plot that had reached it's tendrils all the way up to the Royal Line and had been one step away from The Throne before being heroically thwarted by Lord Sith. The media were announcing that Lord Sith would be making a global transcast appearance in just a few hours with a statement, during which it was speculated he would at least confirm the unspeakable news that the Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai was indeed responsible for the murder of the Queen and King, and then most probably declare martial law to be imposed immediately, among a number of what was only being speculated as "what will most probably be drastic but necessary measures." It was expected that eventual details of the conspiracy would reveal a vast underground network of saboteurs that demanded no less than a swift and heavy global security response. Speculation also said that did not exclude a declaration of war against Za, before either universal despair or anger-induced-and-directed chaos erupted all over the world.

It was no melodramatic exaggeration, either. The Doctor felt how everything, everybody, the whole world, seemed to be a fire-crystal about to blow.

He had been in his East Tower office this morning, hours before sunsrise, going over the charts on Prince Jedi to prepare for his duty shift, when the fire-crystal finally exploded for him with a mind-shattering blast.

It had started with a chime at his door.

It was Master Lekh, Royal Guardian to the Heirs-to-the-Throne of Krai.

Following the frantic, ten-minute meeting in which the Doctor's entire system of perceiving the world had been shattered by Master Lekh's astounding revelations about what had really happened yesterday and why—that The Doctor immediately knew, felt to be true—all the indescribable "wrongness" that The Doctor had sensed seething through everything had suddenly become clear.

Master Lekh had been glad to hear The Doctor say that, and then proceeded to tell him that there was something desperate that desperately needed to be done, and that there was nobody else in the whole world that could help make it happen besides The Doctor.

Now, long, tense hours after that, he was even more terrified than ever.

His footfalls echoed hollowly throughout the smooth corridor as he rounded the curve into view of the two Royal Guards standing outside Prince Jedi's room. His heart pounded in his chest and he felt as if he were about to crawl out of his skin.

The two Royal Guards stared straight ahead while he approached, their hands clasped behind their backs, giving no sign that they were even aware of his presence. The Doctor was aware, though, that not only were they innately aware of his presence, but prepared, on a hair-trigger, to act with extreme prejudice and if necessary, fatal efficiency at even the slightest sign of anything untoward.

The Doctor slowed his nervous pace as he passed the door before Prince Jedi's room. He had no trouble keeping the grim expression on his face, because both the situation and his feelings were full of grimness. It was his trepidation, bursting to broadcast itself in every physical manifestation of his being, that he was concerned about concealing.

Everything that The Doctor had felt and everything that he had subsequently learned from the almost desperately pleading Master Lekh, told The Doctor now that what he was about to do was not only right, but for the sake of everything and everybody, the only thing to do.

He knew that.

But he was still scared fissless as he walked up to the two guards outside the Prince's room.

With his thumb pushing it out from underneath, The Doctor casually projected the crystal ID badge he wore attached to the the breast pocket of his sterile coat and showed it to the Royal Guard on the left side of the door. The badge, containing an interactive, luminous iconoglyphic data display, was embedded with his genetic signature. On the guard's transparent, globe-like helmet, a glyphwindow—representing a scanning mechanism array contained on a device clipped to his belt—swung towards the badge. The Doctor watched the convex square of colors on the guard's helmet flash through as the program ran the scan and confirmed his identity. He watched a second iconoglyph display of his body float in the crystal helmet as the same device ran a complete body scan on him to clear him of anything concealed or suspicious-looking.

He was carrying nothing but the remote diagnostic device in his coat pocket.

The only sign that the Doctor's presence had finally in any way been acknowledged, was the sudden hissing open of the door between the two guards.

With tiny beads of sweat as cold as early morning dew dotting his forehead, and hands barely able to stop shaking shoved as casually as possible into pockets, the grim-looking, frightened CMO went in, and the door whooshed shut behind him.

Inside the Prince's room, The Doctor paused, closing his eyes and steadying himself as relief flushed through him. But the general fear he felt all over was not at all diminished with the successful relief of a specific one. The Doctor balled both hands into fists to stop them from shaking.

He had to control his terror. The fate of the world right now depended solely on what he must do in the next few moments.

Inside the windowless room, a bed stood in a pool of soft, crystal light shining from a shaded lamp suspended overhead.

Prince Jedi lay on the bed, under sedation and surrounded by monitors and readout displays. The rest of the room lay in total darkness. The Prince may as well have been hanging in the midnight sky.

The Doctor walked across the stone floor to the bed and began checking readouts, punching up touch-screen commands and navigating through myriad data and glyphic bio-surveillance systems, while correspondingly updating the data in his mobile unit. The monitoring systems received data transmission from the Prince's subcutaneous transponder unit, which was programmed to link and interface with medical diagnostic devices and provide them with all his vital statistics.

He finished checking the Prince's systems. With as much professional dispassion as he was capable of displaying despite the fear that was shaking him, The Doctor determined that Prince Jedi was recovering well from the battering he had taken yesterday. The swelling in his brain due to multiple points of concussion had been reduced to nominal levels by EM stimulation. The lacerations on his face were sealed and had almost completely disappeared thanks to applied, cutaneous regenerative compounds. The two broken ribs had been re-set and then welded by directed, polarizing EM waves. His broken nose had been set back into place and welded to stop the profuse bleeding from his sinuses due to the trauma of its separation. The broken bone in the upper arm had been fused, and so had the multiple cracks in his lower vertebrae, although the black-and-blue bruises full of almost-bursting capillaries on his lower back would be around for a while.

The patient-in-custody would have normally been kept sedated as a matter of medical protocol, to allow his body to recover from the shock of the multiple and serious traumas. But the Office of the CMO had surprisingly received a direct order from the Office of the Presidership of the Yedina, that regardless of medical protocol, the patient was to be kept sedated, ostensibly for what The Doctor was only told by the CMO Office Director were "global security concerns," until he was stable enough to be remanded into full KSF criminal custody.

Now, standing above the Prince, who lay peacefully asleep with both hands folded on his chest, The Doctor glanced quickly back at the outline of the doorway, glowing in the darkness where the magnetic seals in the frame surrounded it.

There was no stirring from the guards outside. There was no reason for there to be, as far as they knew.

As a medical cell in a detention center, the room was under constant visual surveillance by monitors, covering all angles. All the medical equipment was connected via transcom LAN with a Tower Security surveillance transcom at Security Command, which was constantly manned and watched.

So every movement made inside the room was being watched and recorded. Every readout and diagnostic running on the Prince from the machines in the room with him, was also being monitored by the TS medical surveillance agent on duty up in SecCom. Everything The Doctor did around, as well as to, the patient, was being watched.

Closely.

So The Doctor had to be quick and discreet.

It was now or never.

And it had to look good.

Or else.

Now! Go!

The Doctor took the diagnostic device out of his jacket pocket while reaching down with a hand to check the patient's eyes by peeling back the closed, green lids and seeing empty-looking but alive, blazing sapphire. He put his hand on the Prince's forehead to feel for temperature, even though one of the readouts around the bed clearly told him that the Prince's temperature was exactly where it should have been.

He ran the portable unit in his hand up and down the length of the Prince's body, checking the readout display as it flashed all sorts of vital statistics data that he wasn't even paying attention to because the fear had gripped him so hard he was afraid to focus on anything except what he had to do, or else he would surely lose it and bungle the whole job.

He tapped out a few commands and navigated through a number of windows in the mobile in his hand, submitting this latest input into the patient's charts, then looked from its display to one of the units standing behind the bed, and, bending forward, leaned over the patient to tap out some commands on that touch screen with his right hand, dropped his left hand so that the diagnostic device rested against the Prince's upper right arm while concealing it with the lean-over; and quickly pressed a command on the remote before straightening up, looking satisfied that the data he had just been comparing between remote and direct monitoring devices had correlated correctly, and stepping back from the bed.

The Doctor checked his mobile again, looked at the patient, sighed so remorsefully you could almost hear his tears in his voice, tapped out a few more commands, and replaced the mobile in his pocket.

He set all the machines back on auto-monitor, checked all the readouts one last time, paused to look with concern at the sedated Prince, then, with his heart pounding in his throat and struggling to keep his breathing even, turned and left quickly.

The door to the medical cell swished open, and The Doctor stepped out.

He paused in front of the same guard as before and submitted to his ID and body scans again so that his time of departure would be recorded.

The tinny, electronic chime that came from his crystal badge was followed by the ubiquitous Tower Voice, which told The Doctor via remote audio command projection, that he was clear.

He sighed heavily and walked away from the room, back down and around the curve of the hallway in the direction from which he had come.

When Master Lekh had told him in the wee hours of this morning what he, what Prince Jedi, what all of Krai, needed him to do, the Master had left it up to The Doctor how to get it done. Master Lekh just wanted it done and for it to work because if anything went wrong, then everything else would stay wrong from there on out for who knew how long.

Barring discovery or screw up, The Doctor's part would be over with his one task, and his cover would be safe.

Should be safe, he hoped.

The "It" they had to get done was get Prince Jedi out of The Towers. The Doctor's part was to somehow surreptitiously induce an acute condition in the Prince—without actually, physically threatening him with harm—that would appear to be bad enough so that there would be no choice but to move him to the Castle Medical Complex, the only facility in the whole world equipped to render the necessary emergency treatment.

He was to have timed the condition to manifest while he was still on watch, so that he could be the one to make sure the patient was sent to The Castle facility immediately. There would have to be a procedure and an order given somewhere, he knew but it would first be his job to sell the move. The monitoring systems in The Doctor's office, also linked to the systems in the Prince's room, would alert him immediately about the appearance of the condition at the same time Tower Security would be picking up the alert at SecCom. As soon as that happened, Tower Security would contact him, and the whole huge ball would be set in motion. Without letting a nervous slip-up give him away, The Doctor would have to simply convince everybody with cold medical detachment and professional confidence, that the only choice available for preventing the Prince's death was to move him to CMC.

Or else that huge ball set in motion would end up rolling back right over him.

When Master Lekh will have picked up that the Prince was being moved, he'd take the rest of it from there; and The Doctor didn't need to know the rest anyway, Master Lekh had told him, in case they failed and were caught, so that the less he knew the less he could tell "Them."

The Doctor hadn't liked the sound of that then.

He didn't like the sound of it now, either.

He had spent every hour in between his checkups of the patient—that only he was allowed to conduct, and without assistance—toiling all morning and into the afternoon, while exhausted from not having slept since the previous night—wondering if anybody on all of Krai had slept at all since The Event—in his office, programming the data delivery system to simulate acute cerebral hemorrhaging in the Prince that would have to be stopped within the hour or the patient would die.

He uploaded all the vital statistics and event data that would emulate such a condition into his mobile. Given the Prince's multiple concussion points, this condition to simulate had seemed the most logical, hastily construed choice in the time he had been given to work.

It was all crazy enough that in this craziest of all times that Krai had perhaps ever known—and certainly the craziest ever imagined—it just might work.

Because the systems in Prince Jedi's room took their data from the Prince's transponder, The Doctor decided the most convincing course would be to upload a simulated stroke directly into the transponder's microsystems, and time-delay it to go off for, as he chose, twenty-three minutes; which would give him enough time to get back to his office and wait for the call that was going to come after it all went off. For the benefit of the surveillance monitors, The Doctor had also programmed an electronic pulse into the sequence, directed at the patient's nervous system that—timed with the ersatz stroke transmission—would cause the Prince's body to spasm as if it had just suffered a massive trauma.

The program sequence was uploaded and primed by The Doctor while he had stood over the Prince's bed, pretending to be coordinating the charts on his mobile display with the data from the monitoring systems in the room. When he had leaned over the Prince's bed to reach for one of the monitor touch-screens, he had casually dropped the hand holding the remote under his body to conceal it from surveillance-monitor view, and initiated the program upload into the Prince's transponder.

By the time The Doctor had straightened up again and stood over the Prince's bed, the upload had already completed, and the program was lying dormant in the transponder's systems, disguised as a data transmission back-up archive in the transponder's memory cache. Because he had initiated the upload in such close proximity to the Prince's body, The Doctor was sure that with all the background EM and microwave activity present from the monitoring systems, the transponder, the Prince's own bio-electromagnetic fields, and all the linkups, the brief three-second data blast would go undetected.

The fact that alerts hadn't gone off during the upload and a security alarm hadn't gone off while he was still in the room, was now buoying The Doctor's confidence somewhat, although it was not entirely successful in eliminating the panic still wracking his nerves.

The simulation was programmed to last until it was disengaged by a code that would have to be transmitted to it by remote, which would cause the program to dismantle itself and disappear as random data bits in the transponder's normal data stream.

When the detonation sequence on the data bomb ran out, the program would launch all the constant data transmission via the Prince's transponder systems-interface link, that would convince both the systems in his room and the remotes in SecCom, that the Prince was suffering from a massive stroke.

Then they would alert The Doctor with the news of the emergency condition being detected, and he'd have to come running back up to the Prince's room in a well-staged surprise and panic, confirm it, and make his emergency assessment and recommendation that the patient be moved or else he will die, and convince them the only place to which Prince Jedi could be moved would be The Castle.

And Master Lekh promised him that would be the end of his role.

It was when he considered what might happen to him if he got caught—whether Master Lekh pulled off whatever he was planning to do with the Prince after The Doctor got him out of The Towers, or not—that an intense and panic-stricken fear squeezed The Doctor inside and he felt his gorge rise into his throat.

Picking up his pace, his mind swirling with all the potentially terrible consequences of what he had just committed himself to, he hurried back toward the maglift to descend to his office.

He felt the urgent need to vomit, and he wanted to do it in the privacy of his office wasteroom and not either in the hallway, in the maglift, or just as he got the call that the Prince Jedi of Rai, in medical custody while charged with the murders of his mother and father, the King and Queen of the world—was suffering from a life-threatening stroke.

The Doctor arrived at the maglift and punched the call-crystal hard.

In light of the fantastic and fantastically dangerous, suddenly personal implications of recent globally consequent events, he'd resolved that as soon as this shift was over, he was going to cash in everything he had that was cash-in-able, take his wife and two kids, and disappear for good somewhere like in his brother's mountain village in Trakpa, the most northern province on the continent, and quietly make a living running some mountain lake aquatic-related business.

If they didn't come looking for him, find him, and take him away before he'd managed to do so.

CHAPTER LII

Sith sat in the conference room, at the head of the long, oval table, surrounded by all the heads of anything that had a head on it and was involved with either Yedina leadership or Kraian security.

He was presiding over the meeting that had droned on now for over six hours, feigning a grieving distraction and detachment in the wake of The Event and the loss of his parents at the hand of his brother; which was what everybody would naturally have expected him to feel and express—while at the same time paying keen attention to every statement, every nuance, every allusion made in the debate over how to proceed from here against the threat to global stability The Event had posed for the entire world. He kept track of who was proposing and agreeing with what, ascertaining their loyalties and tendencies thereby, to assess who could be trusted to comply with the direction in which he would steer everything, and who would have to be eliminated from the process one way or another and replaced with reliable people.

There wasn't the slightest hint that anybody from any level of authority was even remotely suspicious of the true nature of The Event, the process its occurrence had set in motion, and who was really behind that process:

Not the Heir-to-the-Throne, who by now was known to the whole world as the key figure in a plot to usurp it; but his Second-in-Line brother, who was more deserving of that Throne because he had proven that he had the courage and strength to do what was necessary to take it, while his brother had demonstrated his incapacity to rule by allowing his "rightful place" to be so easily taken from him.

After being whisked away from Temple Square and returned to The Castle, the first thing Sith had done was to inform the Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Guard, amidst desperate, tear-filled and cry-punctuated outbursts of grief and sorrow and despondency, that he wanted the only person left in the world that he could trust with his life—which he now felt in grave danger in the face of an apparent vast, regicidal conspiracy—by his side, and he refused to leave his quarters or speak to anybody until they were brought to him.

He had given the CIC, while being escorted by a pair of Royal Guards to his quarters, the address of what would appear to them to be a condo co-op, but was really a clandestine Utàr safe house in The Valley; where an equally despondent and grieving Manthar, the loving and nurturing former Royal Governess, would be waiting. The address was the officially registered residence she kept Outside to maintain the façade of a legal presence on The Continent.

Manthi had agreed to accompany the Royal Guard detachment sent to collect her and bring her to Prince Sith at his urgent request with a well-executed demonstration of concern.

That had all been according to plan. Once the waste hit the rotors after The Event, they knew Sith would be isolated from any covert contact or activity, so they needed Manthi to be with him and act as a liaison between him and The Worm, to be the intermediary through which instructions could be relayed to Sith, and through which information about official activity would be passed on to The Worm. It would also facilitate the consolidation of The Utàr network within the corridors of authority: Manthi would know exactly who all the Exile sympathizers and full-out Utàr operatives were, hidden within official structures and laying dormant for just this occasion. It would be her job to assist Sith in placing them in key positions of power so that they could affect the further process of guaranteeing Sith's hold over the entire Kraian authority mechanism; so that The Worm's plan could continue to unfold as it should.

Sith then informed the CIC that he had received intelligence that directly implicated Master Lekh and Princess Zita in the plot, and he suggested they be taken into custody for suspicion of complicity in the conspiracy.

The CIC in turn informed Lord Sith it was known that the Royal Intended had been brought directly to The Castle from Temple Square after The Event, but none of either her or Master Lekh's movements since her arrival, nor their current whereabouts, could be ascertained.

"Find them!" Sith had failed to keep the anger that suddenly had enflamed his heart from bursting into his voice.

A global All-Security Bulletin had been put out and an arrest warrant had consequently been issued for the apprehension of the fugitives Master Lekh and Princess Zita of the House Pyarr, with a strict information ban in effect, any violation of which would be punishable by forced custody.

A stunned Lord Amrun and Lady Zula had then been unceremoniously taken into custody by Royal Guard from the guest house in The Castle, in the middle of the night, where they had originally been brought in already all freaked out after The Event. They were currently being held in isolated confinement at the Castle Detention Center, without being informed of the reason for their detention, because Sith hadn't yet been told by Manthi what The Worm wanted him to tell everybody those reasons were.

They'd find out soon enough, Sith cackled mentally now.

He had originally been alarmed at the threat that Master Lekh and Zita on-the-loose might pose, was seething at their apparent slipping through his grasp, and frightened that they might have disappeared because they had somehow foreseen what was coming and were trying to do something about it.

He was afraid, and would remain afraid every moment they stayed on the lam.

Despite that fear, Sith nevertheless managed at the time to convincingly explain to the Royal Guard CIC what he subsequently repeated at the start of this meeting: that he had uncovered shocking intelligence (which had been furiously but flawlessly fabricated by The Worm's people and provided to Sith via Manthi)—that the murder of the Queen and King had been the result of a secret plot between the House of Pyarr and The Exiles. The House of Pyarr was accused of wanting to steal the Throne of Krai from the House of Rai, and to make the House of Pyarr the new Royal Line. An alliance with The Exiles, and especially with the resource-rich, criminal Utàr, gave the House of Pyarr the support and courage it thought it needed to carry out the scheme. As reward for assistance in usurping The Throne, the House of Pyarr then planned—according to the "agreement" Sith had discovered existed between Pyarr and The Exiles—to grant amnesty to all Exiles and incorporate Za officially into the Kraian continental order, with full constitutional rights for individuals and organized entities, along with legislative representation in the Yedina.

Sith had presented the claims to the meeting amidst shock, stun, and finally a chorus of disbelieving protestations. Nobody in the room was willing to believe over seven-thousand cycles of benign rule could so suddenly and viciously be destroyed for so base a purpose, and with the participation of an Heir who was betraying a world and not just a Throne.

When he had searched the conference room with his Force sense for any air of duplicity that might accompany covert suspicions about the whole story on anybody's part—and found, to his relief, none—he quickly allayed that fear as baseless.

Sith then produced the data cubes containing all the (skillfully fabricated by Utàr wizards) "evidence" of connections and activities between Prince Jedi, the House of Pyarr and criminal elements amongst The Exiles and The Utàr.

The initial storm of protestations that had sounded earlier, had then vaporized into a cloud of silence as all present examined the data in shocked and stunned grimness. The soundless cloud hanging over the meeting had gradually morphed into a desperate rain of cries of exasperation first, then into a sudden barrage of conflicting propositions on what to do next: the outburst that had grown into the debate that had raged on until this moment.

Sith sat in the meeting now, fidgeting restlessly in his high-backed seat, impatient and bursting with an irrepressible excitement over the looming prospect of the absolute rule and public adoration and respect that now lay not just within his grasp, but firmly perched on his palm, waiting only for him to close his hand around it all to assume complete control. The confirmation of Presidership had been the first step: Sith was now in command of both the State and Security apparatus and, with the Emergency Powers granted him by The Constitution, was in a virtually uncontestable position to direct the process that would lead to his ascension to The Throne and the concentration of all power on Krai in his hands; from whence the real plan would begin in earnest.

The Worm, through Manthi, had advised Sith to let them argue it out during this meeting, to make it look like any decision that ultimately would be taken—under the covert direction of Sith through well-timed interjections and suggestions during the debate—would be theirs. As soon as these Valley Babykrokers were done their pompous krokin' posturing, Sith would direct them in into accepting an official policy, whose tenets—the way in which these official kroks talked with their big words made Sith both laugh and sick to his stomach—would be submitted to The Yedina to be passed as legislation with immediate and full legal force. As emergency titular head of the House of Rai representing the Royal Line, he would ratify the legislation into the Royal Decree that needed to be issued to complete the measures' legal authority. As the new Kraian Head of State, Sith alone would be in complete control of the implementation of the measures.

A statement would be made to the global public at the media conference Sith was scheduled to hold in just a little over an hour; at which time the whole world would be told of the insidious plot by a regicidal heir to betray a seven-thousand cycles-old tradition of benign rule, and the courageous and decisive steps that needed to taken by the new Heir-by-Decree in order to protect the world from the dangerous machinations of misanthropic plotters to plunge the world into chaos and violence.

There was nobody either sympathetic to, or on the payroll of, The Utàr in the meeting room. That would have been unlikely anyway because all the top positions in Kraian security were taken by personal appointees of King Eloh, while the cabinet posts were decided by the Speaker, a famously loyal binarchist. They would all be individuals loyal to The Throne and although they couldn't be trusted to do the things that would ultimately be necessary for complete power to be seized, that same loyalty could be exploited by Sith now to make sure the things that needed to be done right now to set everything up would be carried out by faithful little dupes who would be under the impression that they were helping thwart a plot—when in essence they'd unwittingly be helping ensure its success!

Sith would use them to get the deck gravving, then once it was—with the background of a global plot against The Throne and the people of Krai—he would eliminate through dismissal, arrest, or in the harshest cases, fatal "accidents," anybody at the highest levels that couldn't be completely trusted to follow his orders unquestioningly, and replace them all with those who could. He would unleash a process of purging both Royal and State officialdom of all ostensibly "traitorous elements bent on destroying Krai," and fill them with known sympathizers or direct representatives of The Utàr in all the world's top posts; with co-opted or coerced individuals in key positions all the way down every official chain of command—creating a covert structure personally loyal to Sith and The Utàr plan, while appearing to be put in place in response to a calamitous threat to the security and stability of The Throne, the people, and the world of Krai by a vast conspiracy.

The House of Roshan and it's people were securely in Sith's pocket thanks to complete infiltration by The Worm and The Utàr, so Sith could both count on support from them and use them as a fulcrum for leveraging power against any of the other Houses that might get any idiotic ideas of opposing the new Heir. The Worm, Manthi had told Sith in his chambers before he left for the meeting, was sure that a brutal and very public prosecution of the House of Pyarr, including a campaign to paint them as scandalous degenerates of deplorable and aberrant behavior, a seizure of all their global assets and an arrest of all them, would send the right message to all the other Houses: one that would keep them all at least cowed and quiescent, if not enthusiastically supportive of Sith's effort.

They might figure out what was happening, The Worm had said. But so what?—he had also said. Once Sith was one The Throne, there'd be nothing any of them could do to stop him, and not going along meant going away for them. For good.

And anybody who got a little too close to the truth and didn't like it, and would be stupid enough to say so?

Gone. For good.

That's where the alliance with the House of Roshan would be most important, politically speaking: Roshan would lead the public and private campaign to make all the Houses as enthusiastic and supportive of Sith as possible; especially in promoting their unquestioning compliance with anything he might do or ask them to do, and making them fully aware of the swift consequences that noncompliance would force when suspicion of their participation in the plot might be aroused due to that very noncompliance.

Sith knew most of the House families were cowards. They all sucked the House of Rai's drick and they would all end up sucking his too.

And then, as soon as it was plausible to set up a marriage for Sith, it would be ...

King Sith, Lord of the House of Rai, Ruler of the Throne of Krai.

Because the terrible plot surrounding The Event had proved that the—Sith had howled with laughter inside—Binarchy itself could be infiltrated, Sith would persuade the Yedina that the Throne of Krai must pass from a Binarchy to a more secure and less vulnerable Monarchy. The Royal Line would remain in the House of Rai, and for future generations, only the progeny of the House of Rai—the progeny now Sith would provide—would occupy either The Throne or act as Head of State. Future husbands of House of Rai Queens would receive the title of Crown Prince, while wives of House of Rai Kings would be Queens in name only.

And neither would have any other official designation or function than that of Royal Consort.

Royal Consort. Sith had laughed at the sound of that.

King Sith, Lord of the House of Rai, Ruler of the Throne of Krai.

That one Sith liked the sound of. He could get used to hearing them all finally bow down to him to that tune.

Wallowing in his joyful, narcissistic fugue of adoration-to-come, Sith was staring blankly at the Commander of KSF Special Forces as he droned on about some point of military esoterica to make some point against some other inane point of diplomacy that somebody else must have made, when—

The door to the conference room suddenly whooshed open.

A Captain of the Yedina Guard rushed in with an urgent and distressed expression on his face. The room went suddenly silent as all heads turned and followed in startled blankness while the Captain ran directly to his boss, the Commander-in-Chief of the Yedina Guard, seated halfway down the table on Sith's left, and frantically whispered something for a long few moments into her ear, while the CIC quickly went pale as her subordinate related his news to her.

The table erupted in a murmur of curious consultations.

Then:

"My Lord," The CIC turned to Sith.

Sith's pulse raced. His heart jumped into his throat. A panic was on the verge of erupting in every expression his body was capable of conveying.

He felt a great deal of distress through his Force sense.

He wasn't sure if it was somebody else's or his own, though, so he couldn't trust it.

His paranoia kicked in before his rational mind even had a chance.

Had they been discovered?

Impossible!—he told himself in an attempt to calm his nerves so as not to arouse any suspicion in the room if he started baying like a sundog at night while going out of his mind with the weight of all of what was happening all at once and all around him squeezing him out of said mind like paste out of a tube.

About to go off racing through disastrous scenarios, Sith instead forced himself to tune back in to the Commander while struggling to appear obliviously calm.

"... recess and a conference in the Speaker's private chambers," the Commander urgently announced while glancing at the Speaker seated on Sith's immediate right to include him in the request as well.

"... Huh?" Sith skidded back into the meeting from his paranoid, frenzied staggering, having caught only something about a recess. Then he finally got a complete hold of himself and was all back and all cool and smooth. He smiled apologetically. "Forgive me, Commander. I was a little distracted for a moment. What about a recess?"

"I requested a ten-minute recess, My Lord," the CIC repeated understandingly, while still agitated.

"Ten-minute recess?" Sith was genuinely at a complete loss and he panicked inside, afraid of the loss of control his momentary distraction may have given him. "Recess for what?"

A hint of curiosity crept into the CIC's expression. "The ... uh ... There's an emergency situation you must personally be made aware of."

Mind about to resume its race through disaster contingencies, Sith fought to control his fear of losing control, glanced at the Speaker, nodded, and then looked away quickly to hide the uncertainty that he knew was evident in his eyes. Struggling to compose his in-command self-image and keep it in command, he then rose from his seat while addressing the conference with quiet but confident authority. "We'll take a ten-minute recess, Ladies and Gentlemen. Mr. Speaker ..." he motioned for the Speaker to join him, deferring to him only since it was the krokin' bastard's place after all.

Amidst worried murmuring, the trio left the table and exited the conference room at the far end through a door that led to the Speaker's private office.

They walked into The Speaker's office, a space as large and tall as a ballroom, ornately decorated with multicolored and luminescent crystal sculpture and sculptured trim, whose domed ceiling reaching high above them contained a huge skylight that dropped filaments of smoky silver light down that gave the tall and nearly empty room—save for a luxurious desk in the center with two chairs facing it—an ethereally foggy feel.

As the door whooshed shut behind them, anxious to deal with whatever was coming before his imagination and fear got the better of him, Sith quickly took command of the situation.

"What's this all about?" he asked the Yedina Guard CIC point blank.

"It's your brother, My Lord," the CIC informed them without preamble. "He's suffering severe cerebral hemorrhaging from one of the concussion points on his brain. The Towers CMO's office informs that if the bleeding isn't stopped within the hour, Prince Jedi will die."

Outwardly, Sith wore an expression that morphed from general concern to urgent worry as he listened.

But inside ...

So, what's the problem?—Sith thought, with a surge of elation in his dark heart, while feigning concern.

This was even better than he could have expected! If Jedi were dead and completely out of the way—

Then Sith halted that train of thought, and got a hold of the official self that he had to play in real life for now.

"So?" Sith blurted out. "Stop the bleeding."

With Jedi dead, now, before Sith had a chance to prosecute him and thoroughly destroy him in a public show trial of spectacular and spectacularly damning proportions, Sith would miss the opportunity to rub his brother's face in the dirt before signing the orders for his execution after he lets Jedi watch him officially ascend to The Throne and take it from him. It wasn't—wouldn't be, could never be—enough that the world simply be made to know Jedi as a traitorous, regicidal plotter allied with megalomaniacal Nobles and criminal Exiles.

Sith wanted to make sure Jedi was alive long enough so that he could watch, along with the whole world, as took everything from him that would have been his: his crown, his throne, his power, his place in history, his glory, his dignity, his sanity ...

His life.

Sith felt the surge of fiery confidence in the feeling of ultimate vindication that accompanied his recognition of the way events were unfolding almost seamlessly in his favor, which was all the proof he needed to tell him he was taking his rightful and destined place in Kraian history.

If it was wrong, then why was everything going so exactly right?

And feel so good?

The CIC had been answering Sith's question, and Sith tuned her back in. "... The Castle."

She finished and looked at both Lord Sith and the Speaker standing beside him.

Sith felt momentary panic surge through him as he realized he hadn't heard what the CIC had been saying.

But he was quick on his toes and recovered immediately.

"Whatever it takes to keep him alive," he pronounced with feigned decisiveness, while still reeling inside amongst his thoughts and feelings. "Do it."

The CIC and the Speaker both looked at Sith and waited. The CIC looked at the Speaker, cleared her throat and then addressed Lord Sith.

"My Lord," she suggested meekly. "As Provisional Supreme Commander-in-Chief of Kraian Security Forces ..."

"My Lord," The Speaker cut in, easing the burden of the terrified CIC who was manifestly uncomfortable with the responsibility of telling the only remaining representative of the Royal Line and Head of State his duty. "I believe the Commander is suggesting that you must give the order for your brother to be moved from The Towers to the Castle."

"To The Castle?" he blurted out in surprise without thinking.

The Speaker and the CIC exchanged quick glances.

"Yes My Lord," the Captain spoke up with a quivering voice, unable to keep an even keel in the intensely unsettling aura surrounding Lord Sith in such close quarters. "As I just said, the CMO's office at The Tower informs that the The Tower medical facilities are insufficient to treat the Prince's condition. The only facility on Krai with the necessary equipment is at CMC."

"And if he isn't transferred ..." Sith completed the scenario in his head, now fully understanding what it was the Captain had been saying while he had been distracted, and reminding himself how crucial it was for him to stay focused, because one missed detail could lead to the one slip-up that could bring the whole plan, along with Sith, to its knees. "... And treated, he'll die?"

"That's correct, My Lord," The Speaker answered.

Sith thought furiously. The Worm had originally recommended Jedi be kept at The Towers so he could be isolated, preventing any contact with anybody familiar to him who might also be sympathetic and throw an EM spanner into the whole works, something that would have been more likely had Jedi been kept at The Castle, where the krokin' simp had many loyal friends.

For now—Sith reminded himself with no end of pleasure.

He frantically ran through details and considered contingencies. He couldn't take the time to contact Manthi so that she could consult with The Worm. It would look suspicious for him to make any delay in the face of the emergency presented him, especially an inexplicable and secretive one. This was a decision he'd have to make on his own. The sudden hot flare up of the fire already raging at full flame inside him since The Event, provided him with all the decisive courage he needed.

Suddenly, Sith was in command again. Of himself, his feelings, his fears, his thoughts.

Of the world.

"Get me the Director of the The Towers' CMO," he ordered the CIC, then turned, deferring briefly to The Speaker in whose office they stood. "Mr. Speaker, if you'll permit the use of your transcom?"

"Of course," The Speaker replied, and gestured with his arm for the CIC to take the console of the station at the side of the office, spanning the whole wall from the door to the vast picture window looking out over The Valley in the clouded-over and gray, heavy, gloomy afternoon.

The CIC rushed across and called up the transcom while Sith and the Speaker followed behind her.

They watched as the stadium-sized transcom wall went up and under direction of the CIC working the console madly, the giant comwindow launched into a search for a direct connection to The Towers' Chief Medical Office.

CHAPTER LIII

"That's it!" Master Lekh exclaimed excitedly.

Zita was startled out of her skull thinking that his exclamation might draw attention. She quickly glanced around the busy corridor to check if anybody was paying any NOTE to them, and her heart only slowed down to a barely tolerable rate when she saw that in the constant stream of activity and people passing through this particular access way in the web of corridors connecting all the almost innumerable bays of the vast Transportation Complex atrium at the base of West Tower—nobody was paying attention. As far as anybody passing by the busy corridor who gave a cursory glance could take the time to notice, all they would've seen was a couple of TTC medical transport drivers, recognizable in their powder blue-and-yellow coveralls and attached paramedic gear.

When Zita had asked Master Lekh how he got his hands on TTC medical transport drivers' uniforms, he had simply smiled enigmatically and said there was no time to explain.

"That's it! It worked! The order's been given." Master Lekh, seated at the transcom station in an alcove set into the wall of the corridor, said more quietly while Zita leaned in over his shoulder from behind as if studying the glyphwindows Master Lekh was calling up on the transcom screen.

"They're moving him?" she asked.

"Uh huh," Master Lekh replied, grinning and biting down on his lip to prevent himself from whooping out loud triumphantly.

"To The Castle?"

"Yup."

Zita forced herself to smile nervously. She was encouraged by the news and excited.

But also terrified.

Now they had to act.

"They bought it!" she exclaimed in a restrained voice.

"Uh huh." Master Lekh said again. "The order just came into the CMO's Office from Sith himself."

While he was working the console of the transcom in the alcove, he was also looking into the display of his mobile unit, which he kept discreetly in front of him on the console between his hands.

The window in the mobile unit's display was showing the graphic legend of the tracking program that was monitoring all The Towers' internal transcom network. The software was so totally Za, and when Zita had asked Master Lekh how he got extremely sizzling hot software from The Wilds, he had simply smiled and said there was no time to explain.

The program uplinked to the Tower Central Dataplex Nodule by intrusive and seriously unauthorized electronic means that Master Lekh refused to explain because, as he kept constantly emphasizing to her about everything since yesterday afternoon, he said there was no time explain.

And he was right, Zita thought. It seemed since that terrifying and world-shattering moment yesterday, that there was no more time left for anything.

Especially for explanations for anything.

The program was keyed to scan for and alert when detecting any communications going in or out of The Tower that had to do with Jedi.

A few false alarms had come and gone in the last half hour while they loitered nervously in the transcom alcove, Zita feeling the fear of discovery breathing hotly down her neck and making her skin crawl as if it were going to peel right off her.

She was completely spent. In every sense that it meant in every sense that could be experienced and felt.

She had stopped physically reeling between alternating bouts of fugue-like shock and fits of terrified, hysterical sobbing in the wake of the horrible scene she had witnessed—part of which had splattered all over her in a sickening, bloody and meaty mess—about an hour after Master Lekh had taken her from the Royal Guard transport that had returned her to The Castle from Temple Square.

In the chaos at The Castle that met her arrival, Master Lekh had managed to whisk her away from the Royal Guards escorting her, when the escort was suddenly summoned by transcom back to Temple Square to help in the evacuation to safety of the Nobility from the Royal Procession that had still remained trapped in the rioting crowds.

The guards, recognizing Master Lekh's authority, left the Royal Intended in his care on the dock of one of The Castle's transport bays, rushed off to their rider and took off back to Temple Square.

Through labyrinthine corridors and courts, all frantic with panicked activity while regal staff from top to bottom were on extreme emergency alert, Master Lekh had quickly led, at times dragged, a sobbing and shaking Zita to his quarters. She had little recollection of having been anywhere at all then, only feelings of a numbness to anything and everything except panic but having no way to escape out of the insanity that had been unleashed and was suddenly raging all around her.

And the next thing she knew she was waking up with Master Lekh looking over her.

More precisely, it had been his face, but everything else was different. He was beardless, and his customary long hair had been cropped short so that it stuck up around his head in a mess of spikes.

And then suddenly she had seen Temple Square in her mind, but as if it had been happening all over again and she had been back there in it, and was about to start screaming in terror as shreds of exploded flesh rained down upon her, when Master Lekh gave her a drink of something warm, sweet and flowery he had called yantra, and she relaxed immediately, melting into a carefree calmness as if she had suddenly become a carefree child running through a forest on a summer afternoon chasing a crystalfly. She was acutely aware of everything, and her mental process was not just working but intensely focused like she'd never felt before; but the drink had somehow made her detach emotionally from the input, as if the only thing she were able to feel even had she been just about to take a running leap off the highest cliff in the world, was calm rationality.

"Where am I?" she had asked, completely devoid of any anxiety, conscious only of the desire for information update, and feeling nothing but calm despite being completely cognizant of all that had happened and everything it meant.

Master Lekh explained to her that when he had got her to his quarters, he put her to sleep with a pinch in a pressure point that knocked her out by temporarily shutting off the main flow of oxygen to her brain. She had been hysterical and before she popped a vessel in her brain and did herself some serious harm, he had had no choice but to knock her out because her body and mind needed to completely shut down to allow the physical and mental shock of the experience to subside.

The emotional shock, she knew, would never go away, even if she were to sleep a dreamless sleep that lasted the rest of her lifetime.

While she had lain unconscious and locked in his quarters, Master Lekh, sure that the simply crazy amount of craziness that was flying around The Castle in all directions would mean little attention would for a time be paid to her whereabouts, had been certain she'd be safe at least for that hour while he dove out into that mad stream of traffic and shot around The Castle making frantic arrangements for what he had informed her was their escape.

"Escape? Escape from what?" she had asked.

From the most probably fatal danger that being taken into custody would mean to them, Jedi, everybody, everything, the world; and to Za, Master Lekh had answered quickly.

To The Wilds?

And that had made her suddenly realize she had forgotten Jedi wasn't with her.

She had begged Master Lekh to get Jedi. Where was Jedi? Bring him here! I need Jedi! She repeated with a desperate urge—but inability to—sob, held back by the yantra's astounding apparent neurotropic properties.

It was then that Zita had learned that Jedi was in custody and accused of carrying out the murder of his parents.

That had been the push that she needed to finally take that running leap over that cliff, and were it not for the yantra, she was sure she would have gone grav-raving mad at that latest bulletin from the Krai Horror Opera Show.

The implication-overload had made Zita feel weak again, as if she were going to simply cease wanting to breathe and shut down for good so she didn't have to process the heavy-grav implications of all the heavy grav that was happening. She had wanted to feel everything she was feeling but couldn't, and she realized now that it had been for her own good that Master Lekh had anesthetized her with the yantra. She had wanted her mother and father, and had wanted to feel that desperation at the time. But all she got while in a dispassionate rational and peaceful vacuity was Master Lekh telling her all he knew was her parents had been brought back to the Guest House on The Castle grounds, and that there was no time to explain anything else because they had to get out of The Castle and away, like, yesterday.

Master Lekh had then thrust clothes into her hands to change into out of her bloodstained and torn engagement dress. Telling her in forceful yet barely below frantic tones that there was no time now for anything, no feeling, no thought, no anything, but to get out of The Castle, NOW!—he had pulled Zita off the couch, steered her toward his washchamber and ordered her to wash and get dressed as quickly as she could. If they got away and survived, then there would be time for explanations and answers and tears and cries and grief and sorrow and despair and rage and everything else that was threatening to explode out of all of them all at once now but had to be suppressed for the stark sake of running for their lives, or facing capture and what Master Lekh assured Zita would most probably mean their eventual premature deaths.

But first, he then had dropped the next bomb on her.

They were going to kidnap Jedi.

The door to the washchamber had slid shut, cutting Zita off from Master Lekh.

As the very first drops from the warm flow of the shower had fallen over her, she sunk weakly into the rounded corner of the crystal alcove and had so wanted to cry, to sob and wail with an indomitably luring abandon that she hadn't even wanted to resist; cry until she shook so much she felt as if she wouldn't have a single tear left in her for anything else anymore, ever again.

But the yantra, Zita thought thankfully in retrospect, had prevented her from doing anything but consider peacefully:

Two cycles ago she had been a young princess in school.

Then she had become a young princess in love.

Like, with the Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai!

That had made her the Queen of Krai-in-waiting. She had been preparing herself for dealing with that as best as she could have, while swinging between moments of elation and fits of panic at the daunting prospect of sharing the responsibility for the leadership of an entire world.

Two days ago she sat and listened to Jedi and Master Lekh, and learned being in love with the Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai suddenly had meant being thrown into the middle of a vicious game of mind-staggering scale involving theocosmic forces and all the xenohorrific phantasms a mind could handle at a time when the current cycle of Kraian life had already become more heavy-grav than any other ever experienced.

Then she became what had now turned out to be the first Queen-to-never-have-been of Krai, in the most horrible scenario that anybody could have imagined even seeing, let alone seeing up close enough to have felt the eviscerated remains of what had only seconds before been the Queen and King of Krai and the parents of the man with whom she was about to share a life and a world—splattering all over her in a storm of horrifying, warm and wet grotesqueness.

Then, as the force of a MagNet's-worth of thoughts clobbered her out over the horizon of sanity to make a crack in the wall erected by the yantra between her feelings and her, realizing all of the meaning of what she had experienced, she had started screaming uncontrollably until Master Lekh had called frantically to her from outside the wash-chamber, and as suddenly and auto-mechanically as she had begun, she stopped screaming while finding herself standing in the shower, soaking wet, shaking and heaving to catch her breath without remembering for a panicked moment how she'd gotten there.

Then she remembered it all over again, and suddenly, she was all ready to run.

The clothes Master Lekh had given her were the uniform of a Castle Security guard. By the time Zita had emerged from the washchamber, Master Lekh had also been transformed into a Castle guard, and with his cap on, was barely recognizable as himself. They'd left immediately, Master Lekh carrying a green velvet bag.

Making their way through the terrible tumult in The Castle, they had slipped out the East Gate and went on foot from Castle District down through frantic city traffic that was showing all the signs of awareness of what had happened in Temple Square with anxious, hectic, erratic action all around and a feeling of tense panic about to break loose hanging over everything oppressively. Master Lekh and Zita rushed to the Import Quarter of Market District, where a rider with a driver had been waiting for them.

They'd fought their way through traffic across downtown, moving away from Temple Square and against the far heavier activity that was rushing in towards it. All the way, Zita had paid attention to little except to remark at what she, in her yantra-state, could only sense as a persistent heaviness permeating everything; as if the very air all around were pressing on every individual on the planet and making them feel that terrible pressure in their hearts. They left The City and ended up at a cube-and-dome, tiered residence somewhere in Valley Beach—a forested suburb on the Eed River to the south.

After having changed into some of their host's clothes and being thankful the four of them were of similar builds, Master Lekh had left Zita in the care of the elderly Zaboran couple, who Zita would only ever know as Rodo and Cheeba. Leaving the velvet bag with Rodo with instructions to secret it somewhere impeccably well-hidden, Master Lekh announced he was leaving, with a promise to return soon; and that by the time he did, they'd be ready to go get Jedi.

He hadn't known how long he'd be gone, but he assured a slightly anxious Zita that all the chaos raging around acted as the perfect cover for her safety. Before leaving he advised her to eat well and get as much rest as possible: the first because he didn't know when they'd have the chance, if ever, to eat anything next; and the second because before they got away they would have to get out.

And that wasn't going to be easy.

Or safe.

Safe was dead for now, Zita had thought. Safe was something she didn't know if she'd ever feel anywhere ever again in this life except maybe in her heart with Jedi. She saw no way that anything this huge and heavy-grav was going to play itself out completely in just one lifetime. And that meant spending the rest of their lives never feeling safe.

At the best of times.

Zita had begged Master Lekh to let her know as soon as he found out where Jedi was and how he was doing. He promised her that was his first priority, but didn't want to risk communicating over the transcom because anytime now, somebody would notice their absence and the net would be cast out to look for them.

During her whole time at Rodo and Cheeba's, Zita had noted curiously how the elderly couple avoided voicing much about anything that was going on, and when they occasionally couldn't contain some emotional expression, they had done so only in muted and quiet tones, as if irrationally fearing to be overheard in their own home being upset about what had happened. Most of the their exchanges were short on words but heavy with warm and sympathetic but silent gestures and eye contacts during the passing of a plate or the bringing of a mug of yantra. Zita felt the same heaviness from the run through the panic-stricken city now penetrating deep into the atmosphere of the Zaboran couple's apparently safe, innocuous and remote abode.

Spasms of shock, horrification, incredulity, panic, incomprehensibility, denial that any of it was happening, and a host of other mild fits that her gradual if albeit slow accustoming to the yantra had permitted—that's what Zita had sat through as she cruised transcasts in the plush, verdant living room; sometimes alone, sometimes with either Rodo or Cheeba or with both of them when it was an urgent development; watching both the transcast aftermath of The Event along with all the unfolding speculation on what was about to come down; watching Sith suddenly transmute from a practically paraiahic Royal exile to an almost absolute ruler, with the "almost" a mere nuptial formality away from being erased from the title, while hearing over and over again in an inordinate number of ways over all the transcasts how the man she loved and about whose whereabouts and well-being she had been at that moment completely clueless and completely helpless to do anything about—was accused of murdering his parents, the Queen and King of Krai.

With detached, rational recognition, she had also watched the announcement of the arrest of her parents for what the media were implying wildly could only mean their shocking complicity in what was already in the speculative industry developing into quite a complex plot. Thanks to what Jedi and Master Lekh had spent the whole night-before last telling her, Zita had the fortune of being in possession of unique knowledge about the processes on Krai right now, and as horrifying and debilitating as they were to the very desire to survive against their magnitude of impending darkness and difficulty, Zita's passion-disconnected mind had already by that time decided they had passed so far beyond the measures of incredible horrification and into the realm of the incredibly absurd, that it was way beyond even funny, let alone everything else that it was.

She had again worried at how cold it was to absorb this all without what should have been emotionally crippling, hysterical mania. She wanted so much to feel, despite knowing how terrible and spirit-wrenching that much bad feeling all at once would have been. Master Lekh had told her on the way from The Castle to meeting the rider that she needed to be clear, focused and acutely aware of every circumstance right now, and emotional hysterics, no matter how necessary, were a fatal attraction at this time. He promised her as soon as they had Jedi and managed to get away, there would be all the time that would be needed to do whatever was necessary for healing.

Right now, the prime survival directive—passed down through millennia of genetic inheritance from the time when Nareed were a popular item at the top of the menu for natural predators—was commanding that all thought, focus and energy be supra-holistically devoted to one aim and one aim only:

Run and don't get caught!

Master Lekh had told Zita to be ready to bolt at a moment's notice.

She had waited and watched all night and into the morning, eating sparingly but constantly, mechanically stuffing something absently into her mouth and washing it down with fruit ferment and yantra, waiting for Master Lekh on the razor-sharp nails lining the edge of her cognitive seat while completely calm and focused and taking it all in as it came.

Waited in place with her generators squealing and ready to run.

Master Lekh had returned just after midday, startling the wide-awake Zita and napping Rodo and Cheeba, by walking into the living room unannounced with a large duffel over his shoulder. He emptied it out and produced the two TTC uniforms they both now wore, and told a frantically enquiring Zita that Jedi was being held in medical detention at The Towers, and that he was in stable condition after a beating he had received yesterday by the arresting officers in Temple Square.

Zita had wanted to cry out in agony for Jedi, but the yantra wouldn't let her jump into that abyss.

Master Lekh had then quietly announced they were going to The Towers posing as paramedic transport drivers to steal Jedi during his impending transfer to The Castle, and had no time to lose to get there because the call could come at a moment's notice and they had to be in place by the time it did or else all, really all, a capital "ALL", would be lost for good.

None of which was made easier by the fact, Master Lekh had next informed Zita, that a KSF global ASB had been put out for his own and Zita's apprehension and arrest.

She had rationally resigned herself to the reality that not only were they officially heavy-grav on the run, but now the official heavy-grav-of-geomagnetic-proportions hunt was on, and she and Master Lekh were the prey.

While they were changing, a Kolomi man, whom Master Lekh had been expecting, had arrived unannounced. The man quietly waited in the atrium while Master Lekh asked Rodo to get the velvet bag. When Rodo returned after a few moments, Master Lekh took the bag from him, handed it to the Kolomi, and with nothing more than a silent exchange of serious looks between them, sent him on his way.

The Kolomi had left, Master Lekh and Zita had changed, then with warm and discreet good-byes and tearful farewells, parted with Rodo and Cheeba, again with the oddity of doing so with strict verbal economy, as if everybody were afraid of being somehow overheard.

Master Lekh and Zita had left and jumped into a waiting rider, whose driver took them through the quiet, suburban magways south toward The Towers District without once even looking back at or speaking to his passengers. Master Lekh and Zita rode in silence all the way. Zita had noted on that trip, unlike the ride through yesterday afternoon's Post-Event chaos to Rodo and Cheeba's, there had been a silence and almost complete absence of any vehicular or pedestrian presence at all. Anywhere. The heaviness that she still felt everywhere had now been rendered eerie in the nearly deserted magways and silent edifices of all kinds that they passed; that contained no signs of anything but silence and stillness anywhere in or about them.

It felt as if the whole world were suddenly in hiding and afraid.

They arrived a few blocks from the restricted Tower District, and had walked through the last residential suburb outside it the rest of the way to the the nearest of the gated district's security checkpoints. On the way there, Master Lekh had produced the ID's that would get them in, and outlined the plan he had arranged for kidnapping Jedi and making good their escape, made all the more difficult now that they were the subject of a global hunt and on the lam; but when Master Lekh had finished explaining all the details, Zita had considered in her peaceful and passionless, yantric clarity that it was an insanely heavy-grav risk, but it was all they had and it sounded like it was a plan that could work.

At least that's what she had forced herself to believe, because to consider otherwise would have been the last step off the ledge into taking that leap off the cliff and into the oft aforementioned abyss that somehow never loomed too far away no matter how hard Zita tried to run from it in her heart and in her mind.

The plan involved some daring and demanded Zita do a few things she never in her life thought she'd need to do; but then when she considered that less than a day ago she'd been rained upon by the exploded bodies of her soon-to-be parents-in-law while the eyes of a world had been on her, she decided she could take just about anything now, and determinedly charged herself to be ready for no matter what she had to do for what needed to be done next:

Get Jedi and get away.

If they didn't get caught at the check-in to the Tower District.

Which they hadn't been, thanks to the ID's Master Lekh had procured and about which, while walking through the tumultuous activity they guessed was surely related to The Event and visible throughout the massive administrative complex surrounding the base of The Towers—Master Lekh refused to explain except to smile and say that there was no time to explain.

Their ID's had got them into the gargantuan East Tower, where Jedi was being kept. Master Lekh assured Zita that in the hustle going on all around them, their uniforms would keep them anonymous pebbles in a very busy, frantic, and chaotic stream that had become evident the moment they walked in, as much in the elevated level of activity as in the oppressive atmosphere pressing down on everything. It had felt to Zita as if everybody were somehow running around in fear of some whip coming down on them from somewhere at any second in everything they were doing.

Master Lekh and Zita made their way toward their stake-out position near Medical Transport Bay through the maze of tubular, crystal access ways supported by the insanely intricate, heavy-grav, stone-column scaffolding system that surrounded the perimeter of the cavernous atrium housing the TTC at the base of East Tower.

Having positioned themselves in the transcom station alcove down the hall from the MT Bay as inconspicuously as possible, they had waited, while looking busy and innocent, for the call that told them it would be time to go.

And now that call had just come with the order confirming that Jedi was about to be transferred, in almost cathartically gratifying accordance with Master Lekh's plan and Zita's desperate hope.

They were officially heavy-grav on the run, the official heavy-grav-of-geomagnetic-proportions hunt for them was on ...

And now they were off and running!

Zita realized in that instant that their only foreseeable immediate future was limited to the horizon defined by how far and how fast they could run, how well they could hide, and both of which for how long; until they could either figure out what to do next and do it, or be caught doing it.

Under the influence of yantra, she felt nothing of what would certainly be the debilitating emotional expressions inspired by that knowledge now. She felt only the constant, irresistible, almost protoprimal urge that her survival, their survival, the world's survival, the whole future-of-reality's survival, depended right now on running and not getting caught.

From the start there had never even been the hint of a question about running without Jedi.

Even if Master Lekh hadn't suggested his heavy-grav insane plan to rescue Jedi, and had instead insisted it was necessary she run for her own safety without Jedi, she wouldn't under any circumstances have agreed; not just because Jedi was the key to it all, but because he was key to her, too.

To her heart and to her life.

And she was key to him.

She knew he would be lost to her forever if she ran right now without him.

And then no matter how far or how safe it was to where she ran, she would be lost forever without him, too.

They had to get him back.

It looked now as if they were one step closer to that.

If they didn't get caught.

It was no-time show time.

Right now.

Master Lekh snatched up his mobile, switched it off, shoved it in his pocket and started to quickly logout of all the windows on the transcom screen. The windows began to pop off the display and eventually he quit the system completely.

Zita backed out of the alcove as Master Lekh rose out of his seat, turned, and followed her into the corridor. They hurried through the busy stream of Tower personnel, and headed for one of the dockside entrances to Medical Transport Bay.

CHAPTER LIV

"Zoptar! Veebo!"

The two TTC paramedic drivers loitering around on the dock turned when they heard their names called form the dispatcher's office.

"Take number Ten-Sixty-Six and get up to dock 333L5! You're going to CMC."

Zita and Master Lekh also loitered inconspicuously on the dock that was teeming with drivers, techs and maintenance workers. They made sure they were in earshot of the dispatcher's office, because Master Lekh had guessed that's where they'd hear the order.

It had just come right out to them from the office, and without pause for thought Master Lekh indicated to Zita that they were on their way.

"C'mon! Transport Ten-Sixty-Six!" Master Lekh said under his breath to Zita. "We need to get there before Zoptar and Veebo."

The two real TTC drivers were just outside the office. Grumbling and looking unhappy about their assignment, Zoptar and Veebo gathered themselves up to leave. Veebo then waited while Zoptar went into the office.

"Let's go!" Master Lekh said, and he and Zita turned and headed down the dock.

In the office, after tapping out a few instructions on its touch screen and waiting a moment, Zoptar then detached a remote unit from the wall that was hung just inside the door with a large number of vehicle remotes of various sizes. He emerged from the office.

Further down the dock, as far as anybody who was rushing back and forth unloading supplies or carrying parts and/or tools for servicing a docked vehicle who even acknowledged their presence in passing knew, just another regular pair of TTC paramedic drivers was casually but briskly walking down the platform past the long line of medical transports of varying sizes and configurations that were backed up to the loading bays as far as the two could see: from small, single-patient carriers to huge magbus models equipped to carry twenty patients with full life-support facilities for all.

Scurrying past vehicles and noting their numbers, they discovered it would be as Master Lekh had quietly muttered to Zita he hoped it would be: the registration numbers on the vehicles ascended from three-digit to four digit designations, so that vehicle number Ten-Sixty-Six would be found way down at the quieter and less busier end of the dock.

"Don't worry. I've got a good feeling about this," Master Lekh said to Zita in quiet and confident reassurance just as she was about to voice her trepidation.

It wasn't that she was afraid. The yantra had taken care of that. She was worried she might not be up to the task. This was some heavy grav that was about to go down, and she was running up to an almost upright vertical at full push, blind and terrified.

She may not have been in her beloved world-champ Jedi's class, but among the myriad of things in common that had brought Jedi and Zita together—besides an irresistibly compelling yet ineffable attraction from the first moment their eyes had met—was her own pretty gravin' set of magboard skills.

Another was some pretty nifty hand-to-hand and stick fighting moves she had picked up sparring with Jedi for two years, that she had incorporated into her already-impressive martial arts repertoire, having trained at the Royal all her time there.

She was moments from finding out one way or another if she had what it took for the real thing.

If she did, they were on their way.

If she didn't, they were on their way out. For good.

Master Lekh glanced back as they kept moving down the dock, to check on Zoptar and Veebo's progress.

"Good. They're in no hurry," he declared, taking Zita by the elbow and pushing her gently along a little more quickly, as the crowded dock thinned of activity the further they moved down it. "Move."

The vehicle numbers on the backs of the magriders were in the high nine hundreds. After a few more moments, they spotted Ten-Sixty-Six: a silver, single-patient transport docked between a pair of minibuses. The boxy vehicle contained the driver's cab up front and an attached cargo bed of walk-in height, accessed by a set of double doors at the back of the rider that sat level with the floor of the dock.

Without hesitation, Master Lekh glanced quickly around and walked right up to the back of Ten-Sixty-Six while producing his transcom mobile from a pocket in his uniform. Zita kept close behind him, nervously glancing around as he discreetly worked his mobile and launched a lock-hacking program that quickly decoded the vehicle's security lockout and accessed its systems.

The doors of the transport suddenly hissed open.

With a quick glance up and down the dock, Master Lekh and Zita, ducking their heads slightly to clear the top of the door frame, slipped into the cargo hold and the doors slid shut behind them.

Zita's curiosity at Master Lekh's astounding arsenal of clearly illegal connection made her want to ask him how he'd come in to possession of a hack app, but she knew he'd only tell her there was no time to explain.

CHAPTER LV

Zoptar and Veebo were making their way down the dock toward number Ten-Sixty-Six, still steaming over the assignment that they got thrown at the very end of their shift just as they were about to sign off, go home and get away from the heav grav that was going on everywhere.

"Okay, I got the keys from the office," Zoptar announced to Veebo. He snapped his mobile shut after just having downloaded the access key codes for transport number Ten-Sixty-Six from the dispatch mainframe in the office.

"Krokin' Shadu bastard Ho'kan," Voboo swore. "Right at the end of our shift, motherfatherkrokit! They could'a given it to Afshk and Yahss, sittin' on their duffs waitin' for their shift to start! What a drik!"

"Yeah, whatever." Zoptar dismissed Veebo's diatribe and glanced up to see how far along they'd gone with vehicle numbers, noting they were in the high nines. "Nine-Eighty-Eight. Should be coming up soon."

They'd hit Ten-Sixty-Six soon.

"Now never mind the grumblin'," Zoptar grumped to Veebo. "I don't wanna hafta listen to your krokin' cryin' for the whole trip there and back."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," Veebo answered back, his belligerence only slightly deflated. "Just let me do the drivin'!"

"Uhhh-unhhh," Zoptar refused the request. "You're all fissed off and wanna get home and you're gonna drive like a krokin' idiot all the way. No motherfatherkrokin' way. Forget it. Besides, I downloaded the keys. I drive." Zoptar smiled triumphantly.

Veebo, now completely deflated, admitted defeat. "Yeah, krok you, ya' drik!"

"Thaaaaaat's much better," Zoptar quipped sarcastically and laughed. "Wastehole."

"Wastebreath!"

"Fissbag!"

"Assface!"

"Assface?" Zoptar was taken aback. "That the best you can come up with?" Then he paused. "Look, there's Ten-Sixty-Six." He pointed ahead to a silver, single-patient transport docked between a pair of minibuses.

As they approached the vehicle, Zoptar took out his mobile, logged into the vehicle's online system and began entering the access key codes for Ten-Sixty-Six. They came to the back of the vehicle just as Zoptar finished punching in the last code. A few chirps from his mobile after that, the doors to the transport slid open, and Zoptar and Veebo went in.

CHAPTER LVI

Master Lekh and Zita were waiting, each pressed against the wall on either side of the doors inside the cargo cab of medical transport Ten-Sixty-Six.

Base of the skull. Base of the skull. Base of the skull, Base of the ...

Zita kept mouthing over and over to herself in a chant, anxiously trying to focus on where and how Master Lekh had hurriedly instructed her to strike to incapacitate her driver.

She may not have been able to feel the emotional aspect of the moment—if she could have she probably would have been tearing her hair out by now—but her mind was racing and her body was ready to blast off at full thrust.

She was heavy-grav pumping to the geomagnetic max.

Then, from the dock outside they heard:

"Assface? That the best you can come up with?" Then a pause. "Look, there's Ten-Sixty-Six."

As they each pressed themselves even further into the corners to avoid detection through the windows in the doors, Master Lekh and Zita saw first two shadows, and then Zoptar and Veebo appeared standing outside the back of the transport.

Master Lekh, poised to spring, nodded at Zita and mouthed "Ready?" to her with his lips while having a look in his eyes as if the question were a command he was channeling into her.

Zita nodded back that she was ready.

She wasn't.

She was terrified as she waited there, coiled like a spring poised to shoot loose as soon as—

The doors suddenly slid open.

Never mind!

Zoptar and Veebo walked into the cargo hold of the transport, past Master Lekh and Zita hiding in the shadows in the corners.

Master Lekh gave Zita one last look only to nod that it was time and ...

It was time!

Zita's heart shot up into her throat.

She could feel her pulse pounding in her ears.

Her blood felt like it was on fire.

Oblivious to any intruder presence, Zoptar and Veebo headed for the driver's cab up front to start up the vehicle.

Out of the corner of her perception Zita saw Master Lekh move and before she registered any more of his motion ...

She sprung!

She flew out of her corner and within two steps was upon Zoptar or Zeebo or Veebo or whoever the krok it was Zita didn't know or care because she was concentrating on the base of the man's skull as she sped towards him in a silent second that felt to her as fluidly slow as if she were moving through water ...

And then she was on him all at full speed all at once.

With her knee as a butt, she rammed into the back of his knee.

He began to go down as his arms flew up.

She shot her hand around his shoulder and placed it over his mouth as he began to recoil from surprise ...

But before he could even have done that, Zita yanked hard back on his head while bringing her free hand forcefully up to slam her extended finger into the soft tissue at the base of his skull where the spinal cord met it ...

And Zoptar, or Veebo, went limp like a wet sack of ripe fruit in her arms. She slumped down under him and eased him to the ground while quickly and lithely slipping back out and up.

In less than two seconds.

By the time she was standing over the inert mass of either Zoptar or Veebo, Master Lekh was standing over an inert mass of his own.

He glared at her intently and smiled.

She could feel her heartbeat pounding through her every breath as her chest heaved violently.

"Relax." Master Lekh held out his hand and motioned down with his palm gently. "It's over. You did it!"

Zita allowed herself a brief, astonished smile.

"C'mon,"Master Lekh urged, already grabbing his man and dragging him toward the front of the vehicle. "No time to admire your handiwork. We've gotta get rid of these lugs first, and fast!"

Zita stooped to pick up her man under his arm pits. She heard Master Lekh stop.

She glanced up.

He was grinning at her.

"What?" she pleaded, exhausted from not knowing what to feel anymore and not being able to feel it and how that made her feel.

"Nothing." Master Lekh beamed. "You move pretty smooth and quick ..."

Zita flushed.

"... For a girl."

Her eyes went wide.

Master Lekh cackled under his breath mischievously and resumed dragging his man to the front of the cargo hold, through the passageway and into the driver's cab. Zita followed.

Letting his man slump down at his feet, Master Lekh fell into the driver's seat. He whipped out his mobile and frantically worked it while pointing it at the minibus next to transport Ten-Sixty-Six. Zita, having left her man on the floor behind her, watched while leaning on the back of the driver's seat.

"Twoing!" Master Lekh declared, and they heard the maglocks on the minibus pop open. Then its passenger-side door slid open.

Master Lekh leaned forward and peered out the driver-side window back to the dock. "Wait here. Let me check the dock. Make sure it's clear."

He touched the activator crystal in the door. The door slid back. He jumped down and disappeared, leaving Zita in the cab with either Zoptar or Veebo at her feet behind the driver's seat in front of her, and the other one on the floor behind her. On edge, on fire, every sense burning at its maximum potential, she was about to start letting her heartbeat race away from her again to catch up to her mind, when Master Lekh startled her by popping back into the driver-side doorway and got her heart going for her anyway.

"Okay! It's clear! Let's go!" he urged, motioning with his hand for Zita to help him drag the first inert mass of Nareed flesh out of the transport.

After passing/pushing the first unconscious driver to Master Lekh, she kneeled with one knee on the driver's seat, leaned back to rest, and watched him quickly drag the driver into the minibus. When they disappeared, Zita hopped back and dragged the second driver from behind the driver's seat to the edge of the open door. By the time she had got him there, Master Lekh was back and waiting.

He dragged the second driver out, again hustled across the space between the vehicles, and disappeared into the minibus. Zita parked herself in the navigator's seat to the right of the driver. In a flash, Master Lekh was hopping back into the transport and working his mobile at the minibus to lock it down. After a few seconds, its passenger door quickly whooshed shut.

Master Lekh took out a second mobile unit from his pocket.

"What's that?" Zita watched him, curious.

"That's Zoptar, or Veebo's, mobile," Master Lekh replied, and proceeded to link the second mobile to his via a port in the side of his unit. "Whichever. He was opening the transport with it, so he's got the key codes to the vehicle we need."

"So ..." Zita deduced out loud. "You hack the codes out of his mobile and then transmit the codes to the vehicle to boot up its systems."

"Nope," Master Lekh answered, while working his mobile. "I hack into his mobile with mine and then use his unit to transmit the codes to Ten-Sixty-Six. Ten-Sixty-Six here won't accept a key code from my mobile. Only from a TTC remote."

It was then that it struck Zita how it wasn't only in appearance that Master Lekh had changed so dramatically. His mannerisms, his speech patterns and the language he used, weren't what she had grown accustomed to over her two-cycle acquaintance with him through Jedi. In all the contact they'd ever had, Zita had known Master Lekh to speak and act, well, all "proper-like," all "Royal-Guardian-of-the-Heirs-to-the-Throne-like." Now, though, he was acting and talking with the wild air and aggressive fearlessness only possible for a man from Za; which Zita reminded herself, he in effect was after all, having spent forty cycles there. But he was a native "Outsider," as The Exiles called people like Zita, and Zita only now realized the influence Za must have on the very Nareed being; one that could make Nareed from Za so different from the "Continentals," as people like Zita called themselves. She saw a raw "wildness' with sharply defined edges to everything about him all of a sudden. She noted how Master Lekh seemed to have, after nearly two decacycles on the "Outside," suddenly reverted to his Wilds persona precisely at this time. She wasn't sure she knew what that meant, and whether it was good or bad. She trusted Master Lekh because Jedi trusted him with his life. That was enough for her because she trusted Jedi like nobody she'd ever trusted before. If they made it to a time where she could consider it a little more casually, Zita reminded herself to revisit Master Lekh's curious transformation more closely.

In a few seconds, the transport hummed to life. Its systems came online. Lights and screens lit up all over the dashboard panel in front of them. The overhead light in the cab, which had set off the moment Master Lekh had opened the driver-side door, dimmed slowly and went out. The cargo hold behind them was dark, with only running lights along the sides of the ceilings and equipment-monitor lights glowing.

Master Lekh and Zita were bathed in an eerie, kaleidoscopic glow coming from the transport's onscreen systems. Zita watched Master Lekh navigate touch-screens and windows and power up the transport, getting it ready to grav off.

"That was easy," he declared. "Now comes the hard part. Check this out ..." he slid a gateway glyphwindow over across the dash's black touch-screen and it came to a rest on the screen in front of Zita. "Call up the East Tower map, find us, then locate dock 333L5. I need to know where the grav we're going."

Zita launched the gateway, navigated through a few windows and waited for the East Tower map schematic to come up. She quickly glyphed out "Medical Transport" out on the touch-screen keypad, and the dock they were on was highlighted in three-dimensional depiction onscreen. Then she tapped out "Dock 333L5," and the dock's location lit up, a number of decks above theirs.

Zita quickly studied the schematic. "Here." she slid the glyphwindow over to Master Lekh. "We're closest to West Gate. You'll have to take us out and around and then back in down at South Gate, Level Five. Dock 333 is up there."

Master Lekh tapped out instructions. The polarity generators on the transport throbbed to life. Zita felt the clank of the magnetic locks in the back reverberate throughout the vehicle as the seals unsnapped. The transport floated free of the dock. Master Lekh logged out as "DEPARTED" from the dispatcher's mainframe. Making sure he didn't miss anything of standard procedures was important, to discourage the potential for being contacted by the dispatcher.

"Let's hope the dispatcher's office doesn't need to contact us," Master Lekh voiced his concern. "They'd immediately recognize that transport Ten-Sixty-Six isn't being piloted by either Zoptar or Veebo. Then we're roast. But let's worry about that if it happens.

"We've got them moving Jedi," he started naming all the things they had going for them, as if trying to will success into happening by voicing it into being. "We got the transport. Zoptar and Veebo are in no position to blow it for us. They'll be out cold for at least a couple of hours before their spinal columns unclench enough from the shock of the blows to start letting sufficient oxygen for consciousness to flow to their brains. As soon as we get Jedi onboard, we should be all right."

"Oh," Zita answered with yantric-dulled irony. "Is that all?"

"The chances of 333L5's Dock Captain knowing Zoptar and Veebo personally are slim. Once we're away from the dock with Jedi on board, trust me," he said, pausing to wink and grin at Zita mischievously. "The hard part will be over."

Zita doubted that.

Whether they got away or not, Zita knew the hard part was just beginning.

Suddenly, she panicked.

"You haven't told me how we're supposed to get rid of the guards!" Zita pleaded. "There'll be guards! And a CMO doctor! How will I know what to do? How are we getting Jedi out of The Valley? Not in this thing! What—"

"Stop!" Master Lekh cut her off with a wave of his hand while concentrating on working the touch-screen. "The guards and The Doctor are all taken care of. You already know what to do because you're doing it right now. No, not in this thing. And the less you know the less you can tell in case we get caught is all the rest, which there'd be no time to explain right now even if I wanted to anyway."

He pushed the stick forward slowly, the transport rose and began to creep out of its docking-space toward the doors lining the high wall of Medical Transport Bay, beyond which they would have to navigate a labyrinth of tunnels until exiting the tower through West Gate, circle around the massive stone base, and reenter at South Gate. The map schematic highlighted the way.

"All right," he declared, and sucked a deep breath in through his teeth. "Here we go."

CHAPTER LVII

The Doctor waited anxiously in a small holding room that looked out on dock 333L5.

In the room with him were the two Royal Guards who had been on-duty outside Prince Jedi's medical cell when it all had happened. They stood on either side of the biogravbed on which the sedated and unconscious Prince Jedi lay in supine slumber. It hovered between them and quietly hummed with attached monitoring and life support peripherals.

The Prince was in stable condition. But only The Doctor knew that, because everybody else, from Lord Sith down to probably by now the whole world—thanks to the always-diligent and immediate reporting of KTN—was under the impression that Prince Jedi had suffered a massive brain hemorrhage and might die if not treated in time. The scanners on the bed were all seeing that he was displaying the symptoms of a massive brain hemorrhage, because that's what his transponder was telling them to see. Only The Doctor and Master Lekh and whoever else was in on this crazy-scheme-that-could-get-them-all-killed, knew that Prince Jedi hadn't suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. He was resting quite comfortably and mostly recovered from the treatment of his injuries. The only thing they hadn't managed to get to, The Doctor noted in a quick glance down at the sleeping Prince, was the jagged scar above his left eyebrow, where his forehead must have been split open.

What he hoped nobody except who was supposed to know knew, was that Prince Jedi was about to be abducted.

At a time that in less than twenty-nine hours, had seen a Queen and King publicly assassinated, their son implicated in the carrying out of the murder, and their other son suddenly obtaining in one smooth, almost effortless fell swoop what amounted to absolute power over an entire world.

The impression The Doctor had been under was that his role in this potentially fatally insane scheme was to have been over with him having convinced them to move the "dangerously close-to-death" Prince to CMC.

He'd sold that well when the time had come, with genuine-looking enough histrionics. They were moving him. After "stabilizing" the patient and preparing him for transport according to all necessary medical procedures, The Doctor was ready to make his quiet exit from the stage, since his shift was at an end, while waiting for both his relieving on-duty CMO, and the transport that would take Prince Jedi to The Castle to arrive.

The Doctor had been counting on that quiet exit. What he hadn't counted on was that his relief CMO, Dr. Zabav, would suddenly com in after his shift-time had already come, to say he wouldn't be making his shift because of a family emergency.

Family emergency. Right. Wastehole! He simply didn't want to be anywhere near this case. Not with what looked like a whole world at stake and with the whole world watching it all, too. Live on KTN. Zabav had played it smart. Zabav wasn't stupid.

The Doctor only now just realized that that honor, it appeared, fell upon him. While Zabav was home playing with his kids or in bed with his wife, he would be the one who would henceforth either be known for his role in affecting Prince Jedi's heroic escape; or, if they couldn't pull it off, probably end up either in custodial rehab-for-life, or dead.

He didn't regret his choice to do the right thing instead of the easy thing. He just wished right now the right thing hadn't had to have ended up being so hard and mind-blowingly dangerous a thing.

In any case, he wasn't at home, where he had thought he'd be right now, where he desperately wished to be right now, making arrangements to get the krok out of town on the next magtrain out of there, colloquially speaking, and quietly disappear and start that small fishing business up north.

Instead, he was standing behind a biogravbed in a holding room on dock 333L5, as on-duty CMO and medical accompaniment for the the unconscious body of Prince Jedi during his transfer from The Towers to Castle Medical Complex, moments before he was about to be abducted; with, on either side of him, two facing Royal Guard who train an entire lifetime to be able to do a lot of damage at the slightest even most precarious provocation.

Did he say "anxious?" He meant "scared fissless out of his motherfatherkrokin' mind!"

A shudder rippled through the dock and then through the already shuddering Doctor. Through the large window looking out onto the bay, he saw the door that spanned the entire front slide slowly upwards. The dock had been cleared of all vehicles and personnel, except for the Dock Captain, needed to operate the doors and confirm and archive the transfer login; and the occupants of the holding room, who now stood and watched as the gleaming medical transport that was there to rush Prince Jedi from The Towers to The Castle, floated into the docking bay at about eye-level off the ground, executed a hundred-eighty degree rolling pivot, then gently glided through the air backwards, smoothly braking while finally backing into the magnetic clamps in the dock with a loud thud.

"That's it Doc," the Dock Captain's voice came over the room's audio projectors. "All clear to go."

The Doctor's hands were shaking. He could feel tiny beads of sweat breaking out along his hairline. He decided he'd better move before the guards, who also trained entire lives to be able to sniff out anything even remotely suspicious, got even remotely suspicious at his hesitation.

He grabbed the headrail of the biogravbed, grateful for the chance to have something to hold onto to steady his hands. He was ready to push the bed toward the door.

The guard on the left suddenly grabbed The Doctor's arm, which frightened him so much it made him suddenly feel like his heart was going to explode, and the room swam before his eyes for an instant, then cleared when he focused on the guard's face.

The guard only motioned silently with his arm for The Doctor to wait.

The second guard activated the holding room door. It slid open. He stepped out quickly, looked up and down the dock, then motioned with his hand for them to come out of the room.

From inside his clear, globed helmet, the guard in the holding room nodded to The Doctor, and The Doctor pushed the biogravbed out of the room and onto the dock. The guard followed, covering The Doctor and Prince Jedi from behind, falling in behind them. The guard outside fell in ahead and led them.

The parked transport was only a short walk to the right down the dock from the holding room. The vehicle's boxy cargo hold with rounded corners and the acutely tapered driver's cab gleamed in the large, overhead pot lights suspended from the ceiling above the bay.

While pushing the biogravbed along, The Doctor could see the Dock Captain, in the operations office at the far end and overlooking the dock, watching them through the window that spanned the length of the office.

The Doctor suddenly flashed with the fear that the Dock Captain was suddenly going to get a call from Tower SecCom about the uncovered abduction attempt, the alarm was suddenly going to sound, and a platoon of Tower Security would suddenly burst onto the dock.

The guard coughed slightly, getting the distracted Doctor's attention before he let the biogravbed drift off to the side. He motioned with his hand again for The Doctor to get moving. The Doctor stifled his impending-doom, panic-induced rush and steered the bed carefully once again toward the back of the transport.

The rear cargo doors of the transport whooshed open. The first guard ducked his head slightly and entered.

The Doctor, hands shaking despite his holding on tightly enough to the biogravbed's headrail to make their knuckles white, nevertheless managed to maneuver the bed through the doors and followed the guard in.

CHAPTER LVIII

Zita sat facing forward in the passenger seat of the transport.

They had only waited outside 333L5 for what to Zita had stretched into an almost interminably torturous few seconds while the access codes transmitted by Master Lekh upon their arrival were confirmed by the dock's operations office. To their relief, the only reply they had got and the only confirmation they needed to relieve their anxiety, was when the long bay door to 333L5 lurched noisily and began to ascend.

While they waited for the door to clear, Master Lekh had instructed Zita not to communicate with anybody, or to even turn around. The less conversation there was while at the dock, the better. And none would be best.

Something about the way he had said that had made Zita feel as if she only thought she understood what he meant and why.

She complied nevertheless, and now sat silently and blankly staring into the dash-screen at her hands, while all her perceptions were intensely keyed to what was going on behind her.

It was the bed containing Jedi.

He was finally here. With her.

It was all she could do to stop herself from bolting back to his side.

She listened as the biogravbed was being clamped into magnetic moorings on the bioplatform in the center of the cargo bay.

She heard the biogravbed systems' hum jump an octave as their power got jacked by the uplink with the transport's systems and all their extra juice.

It was killing her, even through the yantra, just sitting there while he lay mere steps behind her, unconscious. It was only a day ago that they had been on their way to the happiest happy-ever-after Zita could ever have imagined. And then that dream and their world had exploded along with the bloody mess of the Queen and King in Temple Square. The world before that, whatever it had been and wherever it had been heading, now felt whole lost ages, not mere hours ago.

To distract her mind from thinking about it, she watched Master Lekh as he deftly entered all the proper login information for the transfer, and then sent it to the traffic mainframe in 333L5's ops office.

All the security codes attached to the login were confirmed, and they received clearance for departure.

Master Lekh then called up the Castle Security gateway, accessed its net, and transmitted their departure from 333L5. He engaged the transport's lockdown, the rear cargo doors hissed shut and all access points on the vehicle throbbed and snapped into magnetic lock.

He glanced quickly back to make sure the biogravbed was secured to the bioplatform, saw that it was, and noted that the guards were posted on either side of the bed, with the completely sick-looking Doctor trying to look casual while scurrying around, monitoring systems.

Master Lekh deactivated the magnetic locks on the rear end of the vehicle, it broke loose with a humming pop from 333L5's docking clamps, and floated gently on its own gravitic field.

Without any further preamble, Master Lekh pushed the stick forward, and the transport glided toward the open bay door ahead of them.

Zita flushed slightly with the rush that their apparent, miraculously impending success was sending through her. It was all she could do to keep her excitement contained. She looked out her side window and grinned into her own reflection as the dock disappeared behind and slightly below them. She looked back ahead in time to see them clear the door of 333L5 and steer into the tunnel leading to the route out through East Tower's South Gate ...

And away!—Zita cheered in her mind, while remaining calm on the outside, now pretending to be monitoring glyphwindows in the dash-screen.

Master Lekh guided the transport through the network of TTC tunnels back along the route they had taken when arriving at 333L5 from South Gate. Just before the security checkpoint to exit the tower, he transmitted TTC-MT Ten-Sixty-Six's ID and pass codes. After a few tense moments, a series of electronic chirps from the dash-screen signaled confirmation, and the transport was given clearance to exit East Tower.

The barrier across the magway in the exit tunnel split and slid open, and Master Lekh piloted the transport out the tunnel exit. They found themselves five-stories above ground in the massive, twenty-storey, hollowed-out grotto in the tower's base that served as South Gate. Zita could see across the entire gated complex of Tower District to the thickly forested suburbs crowding it's edges.

The transport floated casually down toward the ground.

"Uh oh." Master Lekh muttered.

Zita looked up from the glyphwindow in the dash screen she'd been pretending to study.

The vehicle settled into the face of four KSF heavy cruisers blocking their path.

Yantra or not, now it was all Zita could do to keep her heart from exploding out of her chest.

They were caught!

She whined slightly while her eyes bugged out of her head and she began to slump down into her seat. Master Lekh at once silenced and calmed her with a quick, firm but reassuring glance.

He brought the transport to a steady hover.

Then:

"TTC-MT Ten-Sixty-Six. Acknowledge," the voice command came over the transcom console between the driver and passenger's seats.

Master Lekh tapped into the com. It was VKSF HC Three-Eleven. "TTC-MT Ten-Sixty-Six. Go ahead, VKSF HC Three-Eleven," he replied in a casual tone only Zita could tell was being forced. He must have been heavy-grav spooked now, too, she guessed.

This had not been part of the plan.

"We've got orders to escort you and your transfer to The Castle."

Zita thought she was going to scream. She whined again to herself, quietly, while pressing her lips together forcefully.

"We weren't told anything about an escort," Master Lekh declared, with as little challenge in his tone as possible. "Whose orders?"

"Office of the Presidership, 'nar," came the reply over the transcom.

From the Office of the Presidership, Zita noted.

From Sith.

Then she panicked.

Was he just being super careful? Did he know? Could he have detected their deception through his Force sense?

No. Couldn't be. If Sith was on to them, these cruisers would have been sent here to arrest them, not escort them, Zita convinced herself. She had to believe that, or else risk blowing it all for them herself by exploding into anxious hysterics.

Then:

"You ready to go, or what?" queried the voice over the transcom.

Master Lekh glanced sideways at Zita and with his hand resting on the dash screen, motioned for her to calm down, mouthing to her that it was all right, nodding his head. "Okay, VKSF HC Three-Eleven. Lead the way," he answered the escort.

"Fall in between us," VKSF HC Three-Eleven ordered, and the four, gleaming black, stocky and powerful KSF cruisers spread apart to let TTC-MT Ten-Sixty-Six into their midst.

"Acknowledged, VKSF HC Three-Eleven," Master Lekh replied, pushed the stick ahead, and the transport glided forward until it was surrounded by the escorting cruisers.

"Off we go!" VKSF HC Three-Eleven ordered, while in the background coming over the transcom they heard his partner relaying back to VKSF Central that the escort had made contact and was under way.

All five vehicles glided along the magway that led to the series of access ways out of Tower District.

Zita was madly signaling to Master Lekh with her eyes, trying to gain some indication of what the grav they were going to do next, when she felt a hand come to rest on the back of her seat.

Startled, she whipped her head around. One of the Royal Guard was standing over her, looking down right at her.

CHAPTER LIX

"'Hurry the krok up! Take them all out! Clear the level.' Now, 'Move them all back!' What the krok, motherfatherkrokit?"

The Medic grumbled as the maglift arrived at ET486. The doors hissed open. He pushed the biogravbed containing a sedated patient out and headed down the long, curving, busy and bustling hallway.

When they'd gotten notice that they were going to be holding the Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai, suspected regicidal murderer, in the East Tower, the CMO's office designated ET486 because it was the highest-security level in both towers, equipped to provide medical lockup for "Unrehabilitables:" either the clinically mentally unstable, or, only a recently advented phenomenon, the dangerously criminally insane.

The Medic had been unlucky enough to have been on duty when Temple Square happened, and as if that hadn't been enough to set the place going wild, an hour later they got the call that the murderer of the Queen and King of Krai was coming to ET486, and they had to clear the level of all patients and personnel, like, fast!

All of ET486 had erupted at once as orders were shouted and gravbeds with patients were unlinked from bioplatforms and hustled out of rooms and into the encircling hallway and jammed up in line for maglifts. They had to get over two-hundred patients out of their rooms and to other levels before the transport carrying Prince Jedi arrived.

That was bad enough. Everybody was shaken and everything felt a little spooky and on edge all the time and everywhere you looked since The Event. The Medic had barely had any rest between duty shifts, staying up most of the night, like he guessed just about the whole rest of the world had done, watching in incredulous, numbing shock as their world was not just turned upside down, but batted spinning out of control into The Void.

He had showed up exhausted, stressed and freaked by the eerieness enveloping everything, for this shift, and now they've got them suddenly moving all the patients back up to ET486: because while he had been just arriving for work, The Medic had missed the news all over the transcasts that Prince Jedi had suffered what was only being described as a "critical episode" and was being transferred from The Towers to The Castle.

The Medic pushed the biogravbed ahead and steered it along the curving hallway. He checked the touch-screen attached to the headrail once more to confirm this patient's room number, then looked up to check the room numbers on either side of the hallway to see how far he had to go.

"ET486-222," The Medic muttered. "One-Sixty-Nine. One-Seventy-One, Seventy-Two ..."

He kept pushing the biogravbed along.

By the time the patient's room came around in the curve ahead, The Medic could see that directly across from ET486-222 was ET486-223. It's doors were sealed off with a magnetic lockout barrier, in front of which a pair of SecCom boys were standing on alert.

The Medic angled the biogravbed towards Two-Twenty-Two. As the bed slid up to the doors, he took his mobile out of his pocket, let the biogravbed come to a rest, and nodded across the hallway to the guards.

"What gives, fellas?" he asked the guards. "Why the lockup?"

"This was the Prince's room," one of the guards replied roughly. "Mind yer own business and get back to work."

"Relax, I was just askin'," The Medic shot back in response to the guard's harsh tone. "Wha'?Not gettin' any at home? Holy Krok!"

He fiddled with his mobile and the doors to ET486-222 slid open. He grabbed the headrail of the biogravbed and steered it into the dark room.

Just inside the doorway, The Medic palmed a glowing yellow crystal on the wall and the room lights faded up.

His jaw dropped. His eyes bugged out.

"What the krok?" he shouted out loudly in surprise.

The guards in the hallway outside the room heard the startled, frightened shout. They came running into Two-Twenty-Two and were met by the sight of The Medic, standing in open mouthed confusion and fear, over the lifeless bodies of a pair of Royal Guard piled unceremoniously one atop the other over the bioplatform in the center of the room.

"What ... the ..." one of the guards said slowly, taking in the scene.

"HOLY KROK!" the other guard exclaimed with such savage force that both his partner and The Medic cringed before turning to look at him.

By the time they did, he was already whipping his mobile out and tapping its screen. It emitted a double-chirp. Then: "SecCom Central! Come in!"

The Medic rushed to the bodies and crouched down over them, looking for signs of life.

"Go ahead," the audio came over the mobile.

"SecCom Central. This is TSA-1138 on Level ET486. I think we have a situation here. Like, I think we have The MotherFatherkroker of All Situations here ..."

"These two men are dead," The Medic declared.

CHAPTER LX

The door to the conference room burst open suddenly.

Again? What now?—Sith thought.

Everybody in the room, including Sith, was startled. The Royal Guard CIC and the Tower Guard CIC who'd been arguing some point of martial ethics, whatever the krok that was, went silent.

The last time the Captain had interrupted the meeting, they all found out it was because Prince Jedi's condition had suddenly changed to almost fatally critical. Everybody feared something else of the worst kind was coming.

Sith did, too, immediately sensing that the profound imbalance in the Captain's Force energy was even more intensely fearful than the last time.

With a spike of panic skipping his heartbeat a couple of jumps, Sith joined all the pairs of eyes and followed the petrified-looking Captain of the Yedina Guard as he scurried over once again to the Yedina Guard CIC, proceeded to whisper something in her ear, following which the Yedina Guard CIC went pale and her hands began to shake.

"Commander," Sith, tightly reining in his anxiety, ordered the woman to spit it out right away in the form of a politely toned and explicitly implied request.

The Yedina Guard CIC—Poonoo? Boonoo? Sith couldn't remember many names right now—cleared her throat nervously and looked at her hands. "We've just received a report that, uh, My Lord, would seem to indicate—"

"Commander," Sith said simply, while with his mind clasping the woman by the throat and squeezing the information out of her until her eyes were about to burst out of her head and her tongue swelled to a bulbous grotesqueness protruding from her mouth.

Sith's yellow eyes flashed red-rimmed fire for a brief instant. He couldn't take it anymore.

What was it? WHAT? WHAT?

He calmed the fire raging inside him like a blaze contained in a cauldron that was about to crumble, let loose its fiery contents at any second and consume the whole house.

He smiled warmly at the CIC.

"Somebody has, um ..." the CIC faltered for a second, then she ejaculated: "Somebody has abducted Prince Jedi from The Towers."

The entire room froze as if the moment were simply stopped in mid action and nothing existed but the echo of the CIC's last words trailing off into some foggy distance.

The only external indication Sith gave of having even registered the statement was to blink once.

He felt the heat of his fire skyrocket in intensity as if a skytrain engine had just ignited inside him, and the cauldron containing the blaze was about to blow to bits.

At the heart of that fire, Sith saw Jedi's face contorted in pain and suffering with Sith's hands around his throat.

Suddenly, Manthi replaced Jedi's face in Sith's mind.

She told him to get a krokin' hold of himself and think clearly right away or else.

He got a hold of himself and thought clearly.

Somebody got him. Who?

Lekh.

Bastard!

The illness had been a ruse to get me to move Jedi!

Clever bastard!

Okay, no time for that now.

Wait. This is good. Not bad. Good. MotherFatherkrokin' good! Better than motherfatherkrokin' good! MotherFatherkrokin' GREAT!

The Worm would be proud of me—Sith thought.

By the time he blinked the second time, a gentle smile broke out across Sith's lips. Although he spoke with an empathic sadness in his voice, he couldn't hide the slight twinkle in his eye that managed to crack through the tight facade he currently so tenuously held; but held nonetheless.

It was his destiny to.

He was sure he'd be able to hold on to everything he needed to until he had the one thing left missing from his grasp:

The Throne.

That was his destiny.

Of that, he was sure now beyond all question.

Jedi was not going to get in the way of that by getting away.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," Lord Sith suddenly addressed the stunned silence, and all the faces around the long table, along with the whole room, seemed to reanimate once more as all eyes turned to the radiant, regally composed Lord Sith.

"As you can see by this startling development, what we're dealing with here is far stronger than anybody could have imagined, let alone feared. I'm going to ask all of you to agree that we adjourn this meeting immediately, and I would like all of us together to put all the forces at our disposal to immediately locate and apprehend the abductors and my brother. I'm sure you can see and understand the urgency here now, and how dangerous this threat really is to the security of Krai. We have to cut this conspiracy off at the head before it gets a chance to unravel our entire civilization, which it's so savagely shown it's prepared to do.

"As for what will be said in the Royal Address. I assure you that what I announce to the world in the transcast will reflect all the perspectives and concerns we've heard voiced here. There will be little of detailed substance in any case. All the details will start coming out once the Bill of Royal Decree with our measures is submitted to the Yedina for ratification. The main goal of this address is to allay the fears of the people and assure them that their leadership is intact and in control. I think we've all agreed that outbreaks of widespread panic might escalate into unmanageable situations that could spiral out of control. We can't allow that to happen. I can't allow that to happen."

Lord Sith paused, placed his hands apart on the table, and continued smiling warmly while looking from pair of eyes to pair of eyes with confident command.

The stoic, heroic, poor orphaned Heir. Leading the fight for his world despite personal tragedy piled upon personal tragedy!—Sith thought, and felt enormously pleased with himself.

Hah!

"Now please return to your individual HQ's. I'll coordinate the hunt personally and contact each of you with any subsequent orders. And I know I don't have to, but I will remind you anyway of the strict information ban in force. Orders are to be passed down, but explanations are strictly on a need-to-know basis, and right now, nobody outside this room needs to know what we've just heard. Until we've rooted out the conspiracy on all levels, we must assume that all of us are in some way susceptible to its reach and influence. I urge vigilance at every moment. Mr. Speaker," Lord Sith turned to the Yedina leader. "May I trouble you for the use of your transcom center once more?"

Everybody in the room understood immediately and without question that the conference—perhaps along with any further influence of theirs on anything that was going to happen next on and with and to Krai—was over.

And they'd be right!—Sith mused to himself and roared with laughter inside.

The CIC's headed in a hurried muddle for the doors in a murmur of worried voices.

"My Lord," The Speaker indicated with an outstretched hand toward his chambers while wearing a grim and deeply concerned expression.

"After you, Mr. Speaker," Sith replied with equally expressed grimness and concern.

Although on the inside, a completely different Sith was jumping for joy and screaming at the top of his lungs in glee.

With Jedi's abduction, Sith now had the perfect, publicly justifiable excuse to declare martial law and take complete control of all authority and power on Krai. The arguments against the moral, ethical or legal dangers associated with absolute power he'd listened to for the last krok-knows-how-long in the meeting were now officially nullified and voided and filed under "I'm The Man Now and There Ain't A MotherFatherkrokin' Thing Anybody Can Do About It!"

Sith wasn't worried even the slightest by the possibility of Jedi getting away. Angered by Lekh's audacity, Sith was utterly confident nevertheless that with absolute power and control in his hands, and with the combined security forces of the world at his fingertips' command, there was no way they'd be able to avoid a massive hunt for them.

They'd be back in custody.

Before the transcast, Sith hoped; if not, soon after that for sure.

It was his destiny.

The escape attempt dropped an astoundingly convenient extra piece of additional evidence in his lap that Sith could construe to use against his brother in what he was about to launch as the most vicious defamatory campaign ever witnessed on Krai.

They couldn't have gone far yet because Sith had just given the order to move Jedi less than an hour ago. It must have just happened. That was good. They may not have even left Tower District yet.

No panic. The way this was all just falling into place was both astounding and elating him to no containable end. It was all just further demonstration that he indeed was fulfilling his destiny.

And he was liking it.

A lot.

Now it would be he, not Jedi, who would decide the fate of the world.

First, though, he reminded himself that he was in a conference room full of powerful people and there was a hunt to launch and coordinate along with a speech to be made to a rattled and badly shaken world that would very soon be completely in Sith's hands.

He made a mental note to get a hold of Manthi as soon as he'd obtained the whole story on the escape and got the hunt for the fugitives rolling. The Worm needed to know about this, too. He might have something to say about what to do next.

Not for long, you fat, slimy tub of crawling crap—Sith mused happily.

Once Sith was on The Throne, The Worm would be first on his list, because then The Worm, with his command of resources in Za and underground on The Outside, would be the only thing left standing between Sith and absolute power and control on Krai.

Inside and Outside.

The door to The Speaker's chambers slid open and Lord Sith followed the Leader of the Yedina in.

CHAPTER LXI

The Royal Guard towered over Zita. He was so tall and built he had to stoop slightly under the cab's roof. He addressed himself to Master Lekh. "Kinda complicates things, doesn't it Boss," he said.

She looked from the guard to Master—

Huh?

... Then back up at the Royal Guard behind her, confused.

"No worries," Master Lekh sighed in resignation. "We'll just have to break and make a run for it now. Everything else stays the same."

Zita was glancing back and forth from Master Lekh up to the guard, not comprehending what was going on, when the second guard came up behind Master Lekh and leaned on the back of his seat. "Trouble, Boss?"

"Nothing we can't handle," Master Lekh grinned.

By this time, Zita was lost in the shock of being totally lost in the shock, and yet astonished at once. When the first guard had appeared behind her, she thought the gig was up and he was about to arrest them and call for help. Then she found both guards addressing themselves to Master Lekh in an informal and yet subordinate manner.

The CMO called out from the back. "What's going on?"

The two guards and Zita turned to look at the trembling CMO at the foot of Jedi's bed, a few steps behind them.

"Don't worry," Master Lekh called out loud enough for the CMO's benefit, while glancing and grinning wildly at Zita. "These two are with us!"

"What do you mean with—" she stopped dead when she realized what Master Lekh had meant. "You mean they're 'with us' with us?"

"What do you mean 'with us?'" The suddenly emboldened CMO, whose timidity had finally been apparently overcome by the ferocity of the terror he was feeling over his own plight, pushed forward into their midst with a desperately mad look in his eyes. "You said I'd be done as soon as they took him away! I wasn't even supposed to be here!" he shouted. "You told me all—"

"Shut up!" Master Lekh commanded, without raising his voice but with such astounding force that made the CMO snap shut.

"You mean they're with us?" Zita queried again, this time a little more loudly. "Why the krok didn't you tell me? I was going out of my—"

"You didn't think I'd try taking your Prince Sweetie out of here without any back-up did you?" Master Lekh explained, grinning while steering the transport through the tunnels out of the tower. "Listen. Your thoughts and feelings were on the snapping point as it was, and still are, but for the yantra. I needed you—Jedi needed you—to be on your toes. Taking out Zoptar and Veebo was for real. Knowing we'd already had it made as soon as they'd agree to move Jedi could have made you overconfident and careless, and then we wouldn't now be one little unforeseen wild-magrider-chase-through-city-streets away from pulling this off almost completely without a hitch."

Zita sat back hard into her chair, folded her arms across her chest and glared as menacingly as she could at Master Lekh. They had Jedi. A flood of relief washed through her now that she realized that. That was the main thing. She was together with Jedi. Whatever happened from now, whether they got away or not, would happen to her and him together.

She was grateful for at least that.

There wasn't much sense looking any further beyond that right now, because it might still all come to a very abrupt and tragic end.

They still had to get away from the KSF escort, and the minute they'd try, the whole KSF—and, more importantly, Sith—would know where they were and what they were trying to do.

"It's a good thing I've got the yantra buzz still on," she warned him. "Or else I'd be pretty fissed at you right now." She paused briefly, then thought, then smiled. "Didn't see the escort coming, did you 'Boss?'" she quipped triumphantly. "And hey, by the way," she asked, dripping defiant sarcasm, indicating with a thumb at the two guards behind her. Why are these two guys calling you 'Boss?' Huh? 'Boss?'"

Master Lekh first grinned, then broke out in a chuckle while keeping his eyes on the magway ahead. "You're as sharp as Jedi keeps saying you are. But never mind. There's no—"

"... Time to explain," Zita mockingly joined him in unison. Then sarcastically again: "Yeah, so I've heard. Seems there's plenty that there's no time to explain, isn't there, Boss?"

"I'll tell you both everything," Master Lekh promised. "First we have to get away from those cruisers out there. Otherwise nothing else is going to matter. Once we're clear—"

"Yeah, I've heard that one before, too!"

"Once we're clear of The Valley," he repeated. "We're as good as gone."

"Better not be gone for good," Zita shot back, but smiled eventually, now satisfied she got Master Lekh back enough for keeping her in the dark and making her go heavy-grav out of her mind with anxiety when he could have spared her by telling her the whole truth.

"Hey, Doc!" Master Lekh called back to the CMO, who stepped closer and leaned in. "Here. Take this ..." He handed the CMO a small device similar to a miniature transcom mobile. "Take this and deactivate the Prince's transponder."

The Doctor took the device while examining it. "How do I—"

"No time to explain, Doc," Master Lekh said, while steering the transport. "Follow the menus through to DEACTIVATE. Hurry up."

The Doctor disappeared back into the hold of the transport and bent over the supine and unconscious Jedi while holding the device over his chest and tapping furiously away on the mini-mobile's screen.

"As soon as he dismantles the transponder's protocols," Master Lekh explained to Zita, "He can shut the transponder off. That means they won't be able to track us through him. When they lose the signal, though, they're going to want to know why. That's when we'll run."

The transport and the escort emerged from the last row of buildings in Tower District, and across a wide span of empty field, the wall surrounding the district loomed ahead. A security checkpoint pavilion was attached to a gate spanned by a magnetic barrier.

"Easy, Princess Worrywart," Master Lekh chided jovially. "There's the gate. We're almost clear."

Looking ahead through the front windshield, Zita saw a red crystal on the roof of the security pavilion start to strobe. "What's that, 'Boss?'"

A piercing klaxon began to shriek repeatedly.

"That's it!" Master Lekh shouted. "They've made us!"

"They must've found the bodies of the two guards we left back there," the guard behind Master Lekh remarked matter-of-factly.

"Bodies?" Zita and The Doctor cried out in unison. The Doctor came running back up to the front, saw the commotion outside, and went pale and nearly limp.

"Never mind!" Master Lekh exclaimed to Zita. Then, to the guard: "Yeah, I was hoping they wouldn't find them before we were clear, but too late for that now!"

"TTC-MT Ten-Sixty-Six," a menacing voice urgently commanded over the transport's transcom. "Come to a complete stop and prepare to be boarded and to surrender yourselves into KSF custody."

Master Lekh was furiously tapping instructions into glyphwindows while the command came over. The thrusters' hum climbed to a high-pitched whine.

"Too late for that now too, fellas!" Master Lekh said calmly, tapped out a last command, pushed the stick forcefully all the way forward ...

"What are you doing?" Zita and The Doctor cried out in unison again ...

... As the transport rocketed ahead, breaking formation with the escort before the front two cruisers had a chance to pinch the vehicle off.

The ersatz Royal Guards and The Doctor held on to the backs of Master Lekh and Zita's seats against the sudden forward acceleration, staggering slightly backwards as they did so.

Outside, a few guards from the security pavilion came running out in front of the barrier to the gate, obviously thinking they were going to meet a compliant transport. But when they saw the transport had no intention of slowing down, let alone stopping, they scattered just in time as the accelerating vehicle crashed through the barrier, sending it's two halves splitting and flying apart into the air.

The four cruisers, rooftop alarm crystals flashing and sirens wailing, came barreling through the gate almost immediately behind the transport, in pursuit of the fugitive vehicle.

"TTC-MT—"

"Shut uuuuuup," Master Lekh complained, and deactivated the transcom, cutting the security point's voice command off. "Trying to drive fast here!"

"We'll never lose them!" Zita exclaimed. "They're KSF cruisers!"

"Whose drivers have never had to fly a rider at full thrust through pitch-black jungle darkness in Za, either," Master Lekh casually informed her. "Relax, Princess Panic Button. We'll get out of this yet. Now hold on!"

Master Lekh guided the transport into a sharp left bank in the magway. The cruisers banked and followed.

"Get back to deactivating that transponder, Doc," Master Lekh reminded the stunned CMO, who managed to gather himself, stumble back to Jedi and resume his work with the mini-mobile.

The surrounding thick suburban Valley forest sped past either side of the vehicles in a blur, with the sound of whining thrusters and sirens screaming over it in accompaniment.

Zita watched the magway come barreling at her at ridiculously heavy-grav speed through the windshield. "Where are we going to—"

"We've got to get to Market District," Master Lekh replied while staring intently ahead and steering the vehicle. "I've got a place to ditch this thing and then we switch vehicles and fly out of there. But first we have to lose these clowns."

He glanced in his side-view and saw the pursuing cruisers pursuing close behind.

"Could've used some extra thruster juice," he complained.

"What do you mean?" Zita asked, bracing herself against the dash as Master Lekh banked into a hard curve.

"Some boosters for ..." Master Lekh dropped off suddenly as he was forced to concentrate on dodging some of the magnetic speed barrier strips in the magway's fields, designed to counteract precisely what they needed most right now: excessive speed. "No time to explain now!"

He roll-bounced the vehicle over his side of the magway, and the rider launched through the air. Punching hard on the attractor amplitude in the polarity generators, he pulled the transport smoothly back onto the magway as it sailed over the lip of the avenue and back down into its attractor field, while skipping over the speed strip that would have disabled their whole drive system, brought them to a complete stop and alerted even more KSF cruisers onto the scene. They all held on tightly as he rocked the transport out, over the side, and then back into the magway's attractor field from side to side, skipping over each speed strip as it came up.

"Speed strips'll disappear once we get to Commercial," Master Lekh said calmly as he guided the transport on its caroming way, carving an S-pattern down the forested avenue while the KSF cruisers behind him, now joined by a few other reinforcements, whisked down along the magway without worrying about the speed strips, because they were equipped with precisely the kind of strip inhibitors that were otherwise illegal to own and with which TTC-MT Ten-Sixty-Six wasn't equipped.

"Where in Market District?" Zita asked, eyes anxiously fixed on the magway ahead.

"Huh?" Master Lekh replied while steering.

"Where are we going in Market District?"

Master Lekh grinned conspiratorially. "You know the Quadropole MegaComplex?"

"Right across from Bebasar Market?" Zita knew it well. Everybody on Krai knew of it. It was the premier shopping complex on all of Krai, perched on the outside of the world's largest and most cosmo-exotic open-air market.

"One and only," Master Lekh stated. "Friend of mine runs it."

"And that helps us how?" Zita asked encouragingly for further explanation.

"The Rai Ring would be the fastest route," Master Lekh mused, ignoring Zita's request for elucidation, while continuing to weave the transport back and forth over speed strips. "But we'd be spotted immediately. We've got to weave our way under cover and stay off main magways. Traffic's nonexistent all over. We can fly through. But closer to town there'll be more KSF to avoid. And these fellas better not get a hold of us first somehow, either, before we can lose them."

Valley suburbia sped by as the transport rocketed along the magway. The magways all along the way were still as empty as they had been before, the world still seeming to be in hiding in the wake of The Event, numbed to a state of global paralysis, afraid to come out because of what they feared was waiting for all of them out there.

"Uh-oh!" Master Lekh casually let out.

"What?" Zita exclaimed with worry.

"Company ahead."

Zita squinted and peered through the trees lining the winding magway ahead. She could see flashing lights through the trees.

"They've probably got a blockade set up," Master Lekh stated matter-of-factly.

"What're we gonna do?" Zita asked. "We can't stop. We can't go back"

"That's right," Master Lekh agreed. "We can't stop and we can't go back."

He steered the transport into the curve ahead. The long, gentle bank bent to the right. They could see the flashing lights through the trees getting brighter.

"How are we going to—"

"No time to explain now!" Master Lekh cut her off.

The transport flew out of the curve and they could see the blockade ahead: two columns of KSF cruisers parked on either side of the magway, who-knew-how-many-deep, all angled inward and noses almost touching to completely block off any possible transit.

"What do we do?" Zita managed to let some anxiety punch its way into her voice despite the yantric stillness she continued to experience.

"Can't stop," Master Lekh mused aloud. "Can't go back. We go straight through."

"Straight through?" Zita questioned. "How? They're lined up solid—"

"Everybody hold on!" Master Lekh shouted out in a commanding boom that suddenly eliminated everybody's awareness of anything else except the need to hold on. Zita gripped the sides of her seat. The two "Royal Guards" held on to Master Lekh's and Zita's backrests.

"Hold on for what?" The Doctor, back in the cargo hold, interrupted his work with the transponder and called out in panic.

"Hang on to the Prince, Doc!" Master Lekh called back, then pushed the stick down as far as it would go, squeezing every last ADU he could out of the thrusters.

The flashing lights ahead bounced off the shadows of the mid-afternoon forest. The sirens behind screamed. The blockading KSF cruisers grew more ominous in both size and intimidation as the transport sped towards them.

"You know what you're doing," Zita stated, as much in prayer as either in declaration or inquiry.

Master Lekh broke into a subtly mad grin while staring intently at the obstacle that lay ahead.

"Watch this," he said simply, then quickly glanced at Zita, pumped his eyebrows and then looking back down the magway at the imposing bulk of KSF cruisers surrounded by forest, screaming sirens and flashing lights, chuckled throatily.

Keeping one hand on the stick to hold it down and maintain velocity, he rested his other hand with a pair of fingers each poised above the forward and aft polarity generators' manual controls.

The blockade rushed at them from ahead. Zita braced herself even more, pushing so hard against the dash that she sank back as far into her seat as she could. She didn't know what was coming next, but she knew it was going to happen right ...

Master Lekh tapped the NEUTRAL iconoglyph on the forward generator controls. The polarity generation on the front end of the vehicle disengaged, releasing the nose of the transport from the magway's attractor field.

The front of the transport popped up almost half-upright, to a chorus of surprised and anxious "Woah's!" from all the transport's conscious passengers.

The transport rocketed straight at the blockade, it's tapered nose pointed in the air and it's long, boxy body riding its tail under the attraction still linking it to the magway's field by the rear generators.

The transport was seconds away from slamming straight into the blockade.

In a tranquil, yantric-induced stillness, Zita went calmly out of her mind.

"Are you out of—"

"I'm driving here!" Master Lekh exclaimed forcefully, while staring with heavy-grav mad intent ahead as if he were in a trance.

Zita looked back forward. They were going to hit the blockade. She cringed.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand ..." Master Lekh waited.

The lights flashing outside were now blindingly dancing on the inside of the cab. The sirens' screaming became deafening.

Zita shouted out.

"WE'RE GONNA—"

"Now!" Master Lekh exclaimed.

He tapped his other finger,

The rear polarity generators went into NEUTRAL and disengaged.

The tail end of the transport was freed from the magway's attractor field, and sailed up into the air.

The transport launched over the front ends of the two columns of cruisers.

"What the ..." was all the astonished Zita had time to utter before—

The transport flattened out and flew forward through the air, the momentum of its ridiculous velocity propelling it ahead while it sailed right over the tops of the blockading cruisers.

The cruisers stood five deep.

Zita watched them pass in a blur of dark bodies and flashing crystal lights underneath the transport.

The front end of the transport cleared the cruisers.

Master Lekh tapped the rear polarity generators control. The rear generators engaged. The magway's attractor field pulled the rear end of the transport down just as it cleared the last blockade cruisers, and it smoothly locked in.

The transport flew forward unimpeded, riding its tail again, its nose still in the air.

"... krok?" Zita finished her exclamation.

Master Lekh tapped the forward generators' control. They engaged, and now the front end of the transport gently eased back down until the vehicle leveled off while rocketing away.

He grinned, chuckled throatily again and glanced in his side-view.

The pursuing vehicles, whose drivers had no doubt been at first confused by the fleeing transport's actions and then astounded at seeing it take off the way it did, long ago lost any time they would have had to to slow down and stop.

Their momentum carried them crashing straight into the blockade.

The screaming sirens were abruptly cut off, replaced by loud and crisp sounds of heavy volumes of metal colliding with heavy volumes of metal at high speed.

Master Lekh let out a loud whoop.

Zita, finally relaxing her death-grip on the dash, glanced into her side-view and caught a glimpse of the carnage behind her. The formerly pursuing cruisers had just plowed into the blockade, sending vehicles twisting through the air and tumbling all over one another.

Her breathing finally began to slow down. She looked at Master Lekh in complete incomprehension, each of his recent cumulative actions leaving her unable to fathom who this person seated beside her really was.

Sensing her stare, Master Lekh glanced away from the magway at Zita and read the look on her face. He broke out into a grin and winked at her. "Not bad for an old man, huh?"

Zita continued staring blankly.

Master Lekh turned his eyes back to the magway. "Now we've gotta lose this vehicle, because they'll be all over it soon. We haven't got the time to stop and remove the transponder, and even so, the whole Valley'll be on the lookout for a medical transport."

"So what are we gonna do?" Zita asked.

First," Master Lekh replied, slowing the transport down abruptly as a cross-way came up and he turned right off the avenue they'd just traveled. "We've gotta get off this magway and zigzag our way off our last known course. They'll be all over the main ways by now, but the side-ways should be safe. At least until we ..."

Master Lekh trailed off and began peering out of the cab from one side to the other of the narrower avenue that had thicker surrounding forestry and more residences than the one from which they'd just turned, as he guided the transport slowly along.

"Until we what?" Zita prompted him when she couldn't stand it anymore

"We've got to find a rider big enough to carry the biogravbed."

"What do you mean 'Find?'" Zita asked. "Where are we gonna find—"

"Okay," Master Lekh interrupted mirthfully. "I meant 'steal.'"

"Steal?" Zita was incredulous. " What do you mean 'Steal?' How? From where?"

"Riiiiiight ... there!" Master Lekh exclaimed, looking out the driver-side.

Zita peered in the direction that Master Lekh was looking, then saw what he saw, and exclaimed incredulously. "You've got to be kidding."

"I think we'll be able to find something suitable here," he proclaimed cheerily, as if they were out for an afternoon of shopping and not fleeing for their lives from the collective forces of Kraian security now under the command of a regicidal royal heir.

CHAPTER LXII

Sith sat in the pre-cast prep room of The Castle Transcast Center.

After having learned from The Towers' CIC all the details of the escape via what must have been a stolen medical transport containing Lekh, Zita and Jedi, that broke through a magnetic barrier in one of The Towers District's security gates, Sith immediately knew they were trying to flee The Valley. There was no way they were stupid enough to think they could avoid being hunted down while trying to hide out in The Valley until "things died down."

They would know krokin' well "things" weren't going to "die down" any time soon.

They had to be running.

Sith had contacted the Royal Guard CIC to tell him to put orders out for every available unit of any kind of security present in The Valley to hunt his brother down and take what Sith was sure would also be Lekh and Zita back into custody. He made sure to emphasize the gag order by telling him that anybody responsible for leaking a word of this would be locked away for life.

The CIC informed Sith he'd already been contacted by Towers SecCom, a by-passing of Sith's Royal authority that had angered him violently at the time, until he considered the panic that must have hit The Towers, and their desire to sound as big an alarm as possible. He reminded himself to remind the CIC to remind all other security CICs that they were to subsequently report on this directly to Lord Sith before anybody else and that Lord Sith would decide what would be done and who to tell what to do about it.

Before he'd been able to get that out, though, the CIC told him that he'd just received word that after a brief chase when they broke out of The Towers District, the fugitives had then somehow eluded a blockade, and then soon after that had disappeared without a trace.

Livid, incensed, on the verge of losing it all, Sith had held it together enough to have immediately guessed Lekh must have disabled the medical transport's transponder. When he asked about Jedi's personal transponder and was told that signal had gone dead, too, Sith knew Lekh had somehow disabled it as well.

Inside, Sith was livid.

There was no way of knowing where they were.

He tried to search for Jedi with his Force sense, but he could sense nothing through all the erratic fluctuations of thought and feeling into which the torrential rate of these developments was working him.

In the Speaker's presence, he had had to fight to calmly tell the CIC to do everything possible to catch them and fast.

Then he left Yedina House.

Before Sith's motorcade had even exited from Yedina Grounds, Sith, alone in the back of his black limorider, had listened incredulously to The Towers CIC's report of the description of how the stolen transport had flown over the blockade, causing the resulting pile-up of pursuing KSF cruisers.

Sith was incredulous and enraged.

"Flew?" How "flew?"

Nobody knew how. Just that they had "flown."

And then disappeared.

That meant there was no way of knowing where they were or where they were headed. With no signal from Jedi's transponder, they were as good as invisible. Sith had ordered a network of blockades all over The Valley to stop all traffic to visually search for the fugitive vehicle. He ordered the same alert for the Rai Valley GravPort in case they were crazy enough to try and take a skybus out, as well as to the Krai Central Station, the magtrain node just off Temple Square.

They'd barely had a fifteen-minute head start, and couldn't have possibly have made their way out of The Valley yet. How hard could it be, for motherfatherkrokin' sake, to catch a fleeing medical transport in a city almost devoid of life except for the frantic rushing around of KSF forces in a whirlwind of screaming sirens and flashing lights? Sith knew that if they somehow did manage to get out of The Valley, they would be much harder to track down, and could possibly slip out of his grasp.

He was then incredulous, enraged and suddenly:

Afraid.

He had thus returned with great apprehension to The Castle, where he had to first let Manthi and through her, The Worm, in on Jedi's escape, before preparing himself to go live before the world for the widely announced Emergency Royal Address.

Manthi's instinctive reaction to the news had been a hot flash of anger. Sith had immediately felt through his Force sense that she was angry at him for letting it happen; but before he had time to say anything on that account, she'd become suddenly reassuring and almost casual about the news. Via her own scrambled mobile, she immediately let The Worm know about the escape and now the hunt for the fugitives.

He'd already heard.

They had both forgotten to consider just how big and deep The Worm's underground network ran.

The Worm had been singularly undaunted by the development, pleased with Sith's measures, and confident the fugitives would be found and caught soon. His only concern was for Sith to be emotionally convincing enough in his transcast; but he did also caution Sith against mentioning anything publicly about the escape and manhunt yet. They would only go public with news of the escape if it became necessary to institute a public manhunt, which would then put the whole world on the lookout for the fugitive conspirators—if by some unlikely, incredible stroke of bad luck, they managed to elude the dragnet Sith had set up all around The Valley. Sith would, with eloquence and compelling persuasion, have the whole world so worked up with both fear and anger, that global urbanites would be seeing Jedi, Zita and Lekh—Royally Decreed Enemies of the People—lurking behind every corner and in every shadow, and every farmer from Panch'k to Ehk'do would be combing the forests and fields with pitchforks for them.

After they were caught, The Worm had said, everything else would be easy.

Until that, nothing would be—Sith had thought.

He had been relieved that The Worm hadn't blamed him or expressed any concern over his handling of the developments.

He was scared again now, but for a different reason than his powerful patron's potential ire.

Now, Sith stared at himself in the mirror ahead, regressed infinitely in that position in the mirrored wall behind the prep chair in which he sat, facing a counter covered in a mess of small, polished-stone pots and jugs of various sizes and shapes, brushes, applicators and other cosmetic instruments.

The prepwoman had just finished and left Sith, having powdered face and lined eyes and painted lips with cosmetic compounds to prepare him for the transcast.

The transcast he was about to make in which he was about to declare himself—not in explicit words, of course, he noted ironically, but in effect—the absolute power on Krai.

And then everything else, The Worm had said, would be easy.

Sith was elated.

He was nervous.

He was excited.

And even deeper than all of those, he just realized while looking at his shaved, tattooed, seventeen-cycle face ...

How completely frightened he still was.

Not of the power.

Oh, no he liked that. He liked that a lot.

But of losing it.

That's what really terrified him at the bottom of all things that terrified him.

Sith was startled out of that realization when an infinite regression of Manthis walked into his mirrored reflection.

The one at his point in that line walked up behind his chair and ran her hands comfortingly over his shoulders.

"Ready for your big moment, baby?" she cooed throatily, massaging his shoulders.

"I'm nervous," Sith declared simply, emotionlessly, staring himself in the eyes in the mirror in front of him as if he could really see himself through the eyes of the reflection that stared back at him.

"Don't be, baby." Manthi dropped her hands from his shoulders and began massaging his chest. "It's destiny. It's all happened exactly the way The Worm's said it would."

Sith stared ahead silently.

It wasn't The Worm or what he could do to him should he blow this that Sith was worried about anymore.

He wasn't planning on blowing anything.

Or letting anything, or anybody, blow this for him.

"Jedi," he whispered almost wistfully.

Then he saw the angry fire in his reflection's eyes flash.

And he felt it ignite and explode once again inside him.

And then all his doubts were burned away in his anger's flames.

"He's the only thing in this world that can take it all away. I won't let him."

Manthi leaned close in and nuzzled Sith's cheek while licking his ear hungrily. "Nothing in this world can take it all away from you. Not now. It's yours, baby, all yours. All you have to do is go out there and tell the world you're in charge now and what you're going to do about it. It's in the bag, baby!"

Manthi dropped her hands down into Sith's crotch.

"You're the Vindicator, Sith," she whispered in Sith's ear. "Don't ever forget that. It's your destiny. Soon you'll be on The Throne like you deserve."

Manthi stood up abruptly and primped while admiring herself seductively in the mirror above Sith's reflection, smoothing her skintight wrap over her hips and under her breasts.

"They'll have them any second now," Manthi declared with confidence and unconcern. "There's no way they can make it out of The Valley."

Sith could feel she wasn't faking that conviction. He sensed no telltale fluctuations in her Force energy that would indicate duplicity.

If she wasn't worried, then The Worm wasn't worried.

And Sith shouldn't be worried.

So why was he still so worried? So much so that he suddenly found himself not able to stop thinking or feeling anything else but a sudden overwhelming fear that Jedi would get away and as long as he was out of reach, so was the power Sith now couldn't stop craving like a starving animal straining against its leash over a bowl of food just out of its reach; he could almost taste it the way a jungle predator can sense its prey in its grasp even before attacking.

But this prey was putting on a determined chase.

Sith was afraid it might get away.

Maybe neither The Worm nor Manthi seemed anxious.

Then, it wasn't their faces going out there in front of the whole world in a few seconds and it wasn't their necks sticking out, either.

It was his.

Sith had always told himself he'd always been up for more than Jedi could ever handle, if only he could get at least even one of the chances everybody's little darling Jedi got all the time ever since ... Ever since Sith could remember feeling anything.

It was a feeling so strong and so deep he knew it must have originated sometime that he was too young to remember.

But now his one chance was staring at him only a few moments away.

His one chance not just to take a little of what Jedi could have had from him—

But to take everything he ever could have had.

He would have to take it.

He had to. To make up for a whole lifetime of feeling the way he felt without knowing where or when or how the feeling had originated but just feeling it and not being able to stop.

He couldn't be afraid anymore.

While Manthi primped herself from behind Sith, he smiled up at her reflection in the mirror ahead.

He reached out with his Force sense, projecting with his mind a huge fist that encircled the entire Rai Valley.

Any second now, they would have Jedi.

"Zeerbo!" Sith called out, startling Manthi out of her self-infatuating preen.

Standing just outside the prep room's door, the Royal Guard personal security who was assigned to Sith, came in quickly.

"My Lord," he asked.

Without breaking eye contact with his own reflection, Sith asked, "Have they found them yet?"

He could feel the man's fear rising in him as he was caught being forced to tell his Lord something he knew his Lord didn't want to hear, so Sith already knew the answer before it was coming.

One of what Sith liked to privately call his Sith Mind Tricks.

"No word yet, My Lord," the guard replied.

"Thank you, Zeerbo," Sith dismissed the guard and he left.

Manthi checked the chrono at the end of the counter.

"It's time, baby," she announced.

"Okay," Sith said, sitting up erectly while pulling his thick, shimmering, black velvet cloak over his violet tunic evenly. He stared hard at himself in the mirror while all his infinitely regressed-others did exactly the same. "I'm ready."

"Baby." Manthi came around in front of Sith, pushed him back into his seat, straddled him tightly with her legs and took his face in her hands. "Fifteen minutes from now, you'll be only one more, tiny step away from The Throne. This is the big leap. You can do it."

"I know," he smiled up at her. "Give me a few seconds alone, okay? I need to get my mind together."

"Anything you need, baby," Manthi ran a hand over his forehead and got out of his lap. "Destiny, baby. Yours," she said as she left the room and the door slid closed behind her.

Sith stared into his reflection's eyes, searching for the strength he knew he would need to hold it together while effectively selling his ascension to power to the world, trying to look into himself to find and hold onto what would give him that power and the ability to wield it indomitably.

For a moment he became mortifyingly afraid he wouldn't be able to find it.

Ever.

Then suddenly, the flash of fire burned brightly in his reflection's eyes, and he knew where to find the strength he needed.

He would not only pull this off, but would pull it off so that the entire world would soon be eating out of his hand, instead of the whole life he had spent trying to get attention from a whole world that was always full of nothing but attention and adoration for Jedi.

The fire abruptly surged hot within him, making his skin crawl, and causing him to feel restless in the chair.

He began to sweat, trickles appearing above his eyebrows.

He felt as if the chair would soon melt away from the fire that burned inside him. His anger was hot enough to cut through crystal.

He gripped the armrests tightly with shaking hands, trying to keep the fire from consuming his feelings and causing him to lose control of himself. He wasn't sure what would happen if he lost it now, and that added to his panic and his fear, escalating them until it felt like they were pushing so hard against his skin that he was going to burst out of it and all over his reflection in the mirror.

He stared desperately into his reflection's eyes, looking for that flash of fire again to give him the strength to stop the burning inside him.

Instead, suddenly the face in the mirror changed from his to Jedi's.

It was ginning at him mockingly.

The angry fire inside Sith set his mind ablaze and out of control.

With an explosion of thought and feeling, he projected all the rage of a lifetime into the mirror and at the face of his brother staring back at him.

A pair of fiery lightning bolts flashed from Sith's eyes, pierced the space between him and the mirror with a crisp snapping sound, and spilled onto the plane of the quicksilver, like ripples on a liquidy pond, from which two identical lighting bolts then arced through the space inside the mirror that separated the reflection from this physical space, and struck Jedi right in the eyes.

The mirrors both in front of and behind Sith cracked suddenly, with crisp webs of fine lines circling and breaking the reflections into fragmented disarray.

His fear was now the fuel, and no longer the fire, that was burning inside him.

That fire inside him became the angry, uncontrollable and irresistible desire to get his brother, the last remaining obstacle in his path to power, out of the way once and for all, and for good.

And he would.

He had to.

It was his destiny.

He was The Vindicator.

His coming to power had been foretold by prophecy.

There was nothing, and nobody, that could stop his destiny.

Jedi would be caught and soon after that, dead.

Soon after that, Sith would be King.

The Throne would be his and his alone.

It was his destiny.

He reached forward, grabbed a soft cloth from the counter and dabbed the beads of sweat from his forehead. Tossing the cloth back, he got out of the chair and, without even glancing again at the mirrors, walked out of the prep room confidently and with a regal air about him so dense he could already almost feel the crown perched majestically atop his head.

The Crowns of Zavoi and Atmi were lost with his dead parents.

His would be a new crown, the crown of a dawning, new age:

The Crown of Sith.

CHAPTER LXIII

Zita was finally convinced Master Lekh was crazy.

He had to be.

What was going on all around them was now such a concatenation of crazy that going out of your mind may well have been the only way out of such insanity.

Next to a sprawling condo complex set deep in the trees, there was a KSF Suburban Watch Division installation.

Around it's pavilion were parked a number of KSF vehicles.

"Are you out of your mind?" Zita questioned him not in exclamation, but with genuine curiosity.

"They'll all be busy with the chase," Master Lekh replied, pulling the medical transport into the condo complex. "In fact, that blockade probably came from here. Look. You can see there are only a couple of cargo riders and a personnel wagon left. That's the one we want."

He bore left and they went along the front faces of the condo cubes.

"And you're just going to go take it?" Zita asked.

"Uh-huh," Master Lekh declared.

Zita had to look at him to check to see if he was serious; and by the look on his face, she could tell he was.

"Welcome to The Wilds, Baby," he snickered in reply.

They pulled around the back of the complex and found an empty parking berth, into which Master Lekh guided the transport.

"It'll take 'em longer to find the transport this way," Master Lekh strategized on-the-fly. "If we leave it right under their noses."

He parked the transport and left it running. He turned quickly to Zita. "Anything at all looks like it's going to happen before I get back with that KSF carrier, you take this thing and go. Understand?"

Zita did.

"But if you see a KSF carrier coming around back here in the next two minutes, don't panic." He grinned and winked. "That'll just be me."

Before Zita could say anything, he was out of the vehicle and gone.

They all watched as Master Lekh, in the shadows of the thick trees surrounding the condo complex, made his way to the edge of the clearing around the KSF pavilion.

Then they saw him dart across straight for the KSF carrier, and disappear around its driver-side. A few moments later, they saw it start silently backing out of its berth around the side of the pavilion and without turning around, glide out the Division's driveway.

A few moments after that, they heard the whine of thrusters and polarity generators approach and then throb down to a dull hum just behind the parked transport.

Then Master Lekh was at the driver-side door and it opened.

"Okay," he egged them all on quickly. "Let's go."

It took them less than a minute to transfer Jedi's biogravbed to the KSF carrier and secure it.

They got the medication to revive him, along with quick instructions from The Doctor on how to do so.

Master Lekh clasped wrists with each of the "Royal Guards," thanked them, and told them they'd meet up back Inside. Then he turned to The Doctor. "You're on your own now Doc. Thanks." He slapped him on the shoulder. "Well done. You won't be forgotten. Now get lost!"

The Doctor paled suddenly. "What do you mean, 'Get Lost?'"

But they had already turned and without answering, Master Lekh hopped into the KSF cruiser's driver-side, while Zita slipped into the navigator's side and before she knew it, they were out of the condo complex and back out onto the magway when suddenly Master Lekh tapped out a few commands in a window on the dash-screen, and the carrier's lights all came on flashing and the sirens screamed to screeching life.

Zita, the yantra already wearing off slightly, feeling a gentle creep of panic, asked once again: "Are you out of your mind?"

Master Lekh, ignoring, pushed the stick forward and they sped away.

"It would be pretty tough on a fleeing medical transport in a city almost devoid of life except for the frantic rushing around of KSF forces in a whirlwind of screaming sirens and flashing lights," he explained with a pedantic casualness. "But in a city almost devoid of life except for the frantic rushing around of KSF forces in a whirlwind of screaming sirens and flashing lights ..." He paused dramatically. "What better way to get around undetected than in a KSF vehicle frantically rushing through in a whirlwind of screaming sirens and flashing lights?"

Zita couldn't say or think anything. She just stared at Master Lekh as they sped in a flashing, screaming blur down the magway.

That was fifteen minutes ago.

With the audacious tenacity of a mystic madman from Za, which Zita supposed living there for forty cycles unmistakably made him, Master Lekh flew them unmolested and unnoticed through the suburbs, up and across Commercial District and into Market District, while passing a plethora of other KSF vehicles of all kinds frantically rushing around in a whirlwind of screaming sirens and flashing lights; following which, upon approaching Bebasar Market, he suddenly shut down the lights and sirens, they disappeared into a labyrinth of narrow, shady alleys of Market Quarter, and finally came to the back of the Quadropole, into which they disappeared down a ramp that led to its underground loading docks.

Using his mobile, Master Lekh transmitted codes that opened first one set of doors, then after a few moments down a narrow tunnel, a second set, and they were inside a cavernous shipping-receiving complex, filled with cargo transports of all sizes from all regions of the continent, docked around the perimeter of a massive, square dock.

Because of the state of emergency, The Valley, and indeed the entire global urban complex, may have been paralyzed; but commerce waited for no man, woman, or state of global emergency, business was business, and it all still had to go on. The dock complex was consequently busy, and they wove their way, naturally fading into the bustle without drawing any attention at all, as if they belonged there.

They headed for a space between a gleaming silver, long-distance megatransport with the colorful markings and logos of the Quadropole Complex's transport division, and a short, Valley Express cargo carrier. The driver of the transport hopped down from his cab onto the dock and waited for them as they pulled in.

That was five minutes ago.

They were in the sleeping cab of the megatransport, behind the driver's cab, after they had Jedi's biogravbed secured in the cargo hold, hidden inside a cargo cube, that stood along with two-dozen other cargo cubes filled with vegetable steamers imported from Shadu in the central north-east, and being shipped to the Ilakan west coast.

They weren't really heading to Ilaka, Master Lekh informed Zita while they were transferring Jedi to the transport. They were going south, to Yula. Once they were safely out of The Valley and on the GTN, he'd be able to wave his magic mobile, and have the vehicle's transponder unit transmit a phantom route signal, making it look to anybody at a tracking center like a megatransport carrying imported vegetable steamers from Shadu indeed was heading merrily along its route to Ilaka; while they actually headed south inconspicuously. Master Lekh's mobile also had fabricated online log information standing by to support their route and destination in case the driver should be stopped and questioned anywhere en route to Yula. Should it become apparent they would be searched, Master Lekh and Zita would hide in the cargo cube with Jedi's biogravbed.

Having secured the still-sleeping Jedi—Master Lekh decided it would be better for Jedi to revive him only once they got to where they were finally going safely—they returned to the sleeper via an access door between the cab and the cargo hold. Master Lekh then produced bundles out of a storage locker in the wall, that contained clothing to change into out of the TTC uniforms they still wore. Master Lekh changed into his familiar robe, while Zita was provided with a loose, thick, three-quarter wrap and a shawl to cover her shoulders.

That was a minute ago.

Now the megatransport climbed out of the ramp behind the Quadropole and quietly began snaking it's way through narrow alleys toward one of the magways bordering the megacomplex.

The narrow sleeper cab contained two benches opposite one another that pulled out of the wall and made beds. Between them stood a table that retracted into the floor when the beds were out. The wall to the left of the door to the driver's cab held storage lockers. A cooking station was ensconced in the wall on the other side. A transcom station was in the wall at the right end of the table.

Master Lekh and Zita were seated across from one another on the benches, both of them almost physically collapsed against the walls, in relief from the mind-and-body-numbing tension and effort of the past description-defying day. They both knew they weren't out of the sinkhole yet. But it was a glorious opportunity to allow themselves to at least physically relax from the extreme high-speeds at which they'd just spent the past day both literally and figuratively running.

The shock of the meaning of everything that had happened to them and to Krai since The Event, along with the fear of the all the terribly unimaginable What-Was-Yet-To-Come, would not be as easy to recover from.

"We don't know if they've found the medical transport or not," Master Lekh again verbally resumed his recurring stream of mental strategizing on-the-fly. "So we don't know if they're still looking for us in that. They may not have gone to an all-out blockade yet. Even if they have, though, we're covered. The only way anybody's going to find us is if they stop us and take a look inside. Once we make it to the Rai Belt, we're only a short ride away from The Pass, then out of The Valley, onto the GTN, and away we go!" He declared confidently with matter-of-fact cheeriness.

Zita was re-astounded at the way in which this previously undisclosed version of Master Lekh continued to bowl them through all of this with the casual determination of somebody who seemed to know at every turn what to do and how to make it happen no matter how impendingly ominous each turn may have become.

Then she was scared all over again.

"Master Lekh," she asked suddenly, hesitantly.

He looked at her, read everything he needed to know from her expression, and sensed what she was asking before she could.

"I'm terrified, too," Master Lekh proclaimed casually. "For us. For the world. I don't know which way any of this is going to go any more than you or anybody else does. But right now, when you're being chased by a hungry, fissed-off velosaur through the jungle, if you take just a second to be scared, you'll be dead."

Master Lekh paused, and Zita saw a shadow briefly pass over his usually casual and gentle expression, hardening all his features and giving them sharp edges that momentarily surrounded him with a quality of something Zita could only describe for herself as "wildness."

Then his eyes twinkled, he broke into the gentle grin of a man who had faced a hungry, fissed-off velosaur and was still alive to tell the tale, and he winked at her. "That, my little baby Princess of Pyarr, is what Za teaches you about how rough the ride of life can get and how to stay alive to tell the tale."

They were interrupted by a quick pair of electronic beeps.

Master Lekh dug into his robe, pulled out a mobile and read the screen. He dropped the mobile on the tabletop and indicated to Zita with his chin towards the transcom station at the end of the table.

"Speaking of predators," he said. "Power up the transcom. Sith's speech is about to go live."

Zita slid down the bench, crossed the few steps to the transcom station, dropped into its seat, and tapping her way through glyphwindows on the touch-screen wall, finally got a window with the KTN transcast of the address to fill the whole wall.

The image showed a live exterior shot of The Castle Transcast Centre, with iconoglyphs across the bottom telling viewers that they were seeing a live exterior shot of The Castle Transcast Centre, and a pop-up window in the top left corner containing the talking heads-and-torsos of the transcast hosts.

Zita slipped back into her seat at the end of the bench opposite the semi-reclining Master Lekh as the voices of the announcers filled the sleeper cab.

Master Lekh leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Zita watched intently, riveted, with a strange compulsion to be so forcing her to want to watch no matter what.

"—solutely incredible ... and a shock ... uh ... that we all know ... SNIFF! ... Sorry ... That the entire world is still ... AHEM! ... reeling from. But what has happened ... has happened ... and what's next is what we're all about to find out."

The other talking head-and-torso took it from there.

"I'm being told, Hatoo, that The Castle Transcast Centre has just alerted us to stand-by. Yes. That's right? Right. All right. Here we go, Ladies and Gentlemen, to what I know is the most anticipated Royal Address in all of Kraian history. We go live now to The Castle Transcast Center and the Emergency Royal Address, to be delivered by the sole remaining member of the Royal Family currently in authority: Sith, Lord of the House of Rai, Presider of the Yedina, and with the present one in custody for the murder of the Queen and King of Krai, the apparent new Heir-to-the-Throne. Live, from CTC, the Emergency Royal Address."

Then suddenly Zita felt a coldness shiver its way through her rapidly as the CTC exterior shot slowly faded into the image of Sith— Lord Sith—seated casually but with decorum in an enormous, plush, high-backed armchair, with an expansive picture window behind him showing a sprawling Rai Valley in the slightly misty, late afternoon dimness of the completely clouded-over day.

He was dressed in the black cloak-and-trousers and violet tunic that had recently become his look. His hands were folded loosely in his lap. His tattooed face, still a shock to behold for Zita, wore an expression that was an amalgam of all the conflicting feelings that the world might expect the poor Lord to be suffering at the time of great shock, grief, despair, and danger that this moment in Kraian history had so horrifyingly and tragically become for him personally.

But overpowering all of that was an unmistakable aura about Sith, one whose energy Zita felt herself strangely having a difficult time to resist allowing to penetrate her own thoughts and feelings; an energy that seemed not just to suggest, but strongly and directly convey that despite the unbelievable personal pain and suffering that everybody expected Lord Sith to be feeling, she, along with the whole world, was looking at a young man who was just thrust into the hands of historic destiny and who with confidence, decisiveness and authority, would do everything necessary to restore peace and order on Krai.

Zita suddenly recoiled as she found herself—despite knowing the truth about what was really going on and what Sith was really doing—almost powerless to resist accepting that thought; helpless against embracing and believing with full faith and conviction that Lord Sith was about to announce to the world that he was going to save Krai from the dark abyss at the edge of which the whole world and all of its people currently teetered, and over which a small group of conspirators—with Zita right smack in the high-max epigrav center of it all—was trying to push them all.

She turned to Master Lekh with yantric-dulled-but-not-completely-quelled fear in her expression.

"Master—"

"I know," Master Lekh cut her off without opening his eyes. "I feel it, too. He's projecting that using his Force sense and its energy is being carried via transcast directly into every mind watching the address. The only ones immune to it will be those of us who know." He sighed heavily. "He's going to have the whole world eating out of his hands by the time this speech is over."

The image on the transcom wall began creeping in until Sith was only a hauntingly mesmerizing, magnified head-and-shoulders filling the wall of the other side of the sleeper.

As the close-up finally came to a rest, it appeared to Zita that Sith's eyes were a pale yellow, the red-rims around them looking swollen with what the world would believe must have been many grief-filled tears over the last day, despite the heroic effort he's had to put in to keep the administration of the world from falling apart and ultimately destructive chaos from reigning.

Then, suddenly, it looked to Zita, as it must have also looked to the rest of the world watching, she naturally assumed, that the pale yellow in Sith's eyes abruptly brightened, then became enriched with burning color, and it was as if his green irises flamed with a flash of momentary fire.

Did it look that way to everybody?—she thought.

Or just me?

As Sith—Lord Sith—opened his mouth to begin to speak, all the previous, projected weakness in his expression and demeanor melted away behind a gentle smile that conveyed a determined and authoritative strength and confidence that, catching Zita unguarded, somehow made her horrifyingly want to both believe in and completely submit to Lord Sith's will with conviction.

She reminded herself of Jedi—legitimate Heir-to-the-Throne—unconscious in a cargo-cube behind them, and the disturbing compulsion was melted by the residual heat from the indignant anger she could feel smoldering deep down inside her beneath a yantric cloak.

Then suddenly caught off-guard again, Zita found herself feeling strangely compelled to believe the image on the wall before her wasn't about to speak to the whole world, but directly and personally to her. She felt as if the eyes looking out from the transcom wall were looking directly at her, directly into her.

And then the image of Lord Sith spoke.

"My Brother-and-Sister Nareed ..."

Zita noted Sith's voice was calm and peaceful, yet possessed of a mysterious forcefulness that seemed to command attention even despite resistance.

"For the last few decades our world has been experiencing the unmistakable symptoms of what has commonly come to be accepted as the dawning of a new age of profound changes to the fabric of our civilization, as well as to our very way of life. We have witnessed our society beginning to sense a new awareness of itself, of its potential and of its destiny to transcend all the obstacles still left standing in the way of our full blossoming into a vibrant and complete community of both enlightened structures and dedicated individuals.

"This new collective awareness has naturally led us to begin an earnest examination of all that we are and all that we know, in an effort to discover and harness the untapped potential that lies hidden beneath the veil of all that is true about our nature that we still have yet to understand, let alone learn how to apply.

"Understandably, this process has led to a collective unease, as we also began to realize that the comfortable certainties that seven-thousand cycles of peace and prosperity have afforded us, are no longer as completely assured as we had for so long assumed them to be. Some of us have learned to embrace the processes of change. Others, reluctant to abandon some or all of the comfort that seven-thousand cycles of peace and prosperity have given us, wish to ignore these processes and entrench our civilization in what can only be, while facing an irresistible stimulus to change, the assured stagnation and eventual decline of our great civilization. We find ourselves collectively torn between going forward into a promising yet uncertain future, or remaining satisfied with the accomplishments of our past.

"I know that we all have not been able to help but become aware of the disturbing cloud this tension has gradually and yet ever so subtly lowered over our civilization, our social relations, and our collective and individual spirits as well; a lowering that has culminated now with the shocking bolt of lighting that burst forth from that cloud so horrifyingly yesterday afternoon at Temple Square."

Lord Sith the grief-stricken and traumatized victim, paused dramatically to compose himself and stifle a pathetic sob.

Then:

"At that moment, we all horrifically shared in what I'm sure we all must admit has to have been the most tragic event in our civilization's over seven-thousand cycles of peaceful and prosperous existence.

"The world has lost not one, but two beloved Binarchs at once, and in a manner so terrible as to previously have been thought to be beyond imagining.

"While we have all collectively shared in the pain of this tragedy, Destiny has chosen that I, however, have still to bear the pain of the personal loss of a mother and a father, along with the horrifying revelation of the betrayal of a beloved brother. I consider myself humbled by the daunting task Destiny has placed before me; and also immeasurably fortunate. Were it not for the mysterious ways of Destiny, I would have been in that carriage with my mother and father when they—"

Sith's voice rose abruptly as he sucked in another well-timed sob.

"I am grateful that I have the rest of our common Nareed family to comfort, inspire and encourage me in such a time of great need ..."

"He's setting himself up as the head of 'our common family,'" Master Lekh proclaimed, eyes still closed. "And Jedi as the focus of all the evil in the world."

Zita focused back on Sith's words.

"... As painful and horrifying as The Event may be, though, our world must still go on. Our children must still go to school. Our communities still need to be maintained. Our commerce and trade must still go on. Our megatransports still need to bring vegetable steamers from

Shadu to Yula ..."

Huh?

Zita was startled.

Did he just say that, or did I just hear it?

Or both?

She tuned back in to the voice coming over the transcom.

"... Need to still go to work every day and make sure that our world continues to operate and progress as peacefully and prosperously as it has for the last seven-thousand cycles.

"But the terrible tragedy of The Event, the loss of a beloved Mother and Father to us all, has startled us all into the collective realization that the peace and prosperity that we have perhaps learned to take for granted for so long, can be threatened, and that the way of life that we've come to know, love, and through which we've learned to thrive and grow, can be put in danger.

"We want our children to go to school. But we want them to go there with a sense of freedom and in safety. We want our communities to be maintained, and not for them to fall into neglect and dysfunction. We want our commerce and trade to be able to go on without fear of subversive sabotage or hostile takeover from without. We also need to be able to go to work every day freely and safely, to continue to ensure that all the above continue to happen.

"Shockingly, we have now had our innocence suddenly, savagely and surely, violated. Our children no longer can go to school with a sense of freedom and in safety. Our communities could fall into neglect and dysfunction because of fear for personal safety. Our commerce and trade are no longer able to go on without fear of subversive sabotage or hostile takeover from without. We can no longer be able to go to work every day freely and safely.

"Why?"

He paused, and Zita sat transfixed by the live image of Sith hanging on the transcom wall, her mind suspended in empty limbo during the seemingly interminable pause.

"Because—"

Zita noted a brief waver in Sith's voice.

"—A clandestine group of Exile subversives, in conjunction with callous and brutal opportunists from one of our most prominent Noble Houses—"

Zita went even colder still. In yantric tranquility but with a desire to both cry and rage, she pulled her shawl tightly around her and bunched her knees up against her chest.

"—Has finally emboldened itself to directly challenge not just The Throne, but the very existence that untold generations of Nareed have worked to give us to enjoy, and to which it is our sacred duty to continue to contribute.

"They have challenged it with the intention of seizing absolute power over all of Krai, by means of a profane alliance: on the one hand, Exile organized criminal elements that have infiltrated our urban centers with vast underground operations, with a fanatical belief in their mystical mission of prophetic fulfillment; on the other, a Noble House tragically gripped in the throes of what has been revealed to be an envious lust for power and a callous disregard for anything, including the peaceful and prosperous future of the Nareed and our world, that stands in the way of its sadly misguided aims.

"These conspirators have demonstrated both their savagery and their hatred for civilized, Continental Nareed with the perpetration of the murder of—"

Another pregnant pause. The image of Sith swallowed hard. A hint of grief-filled despondency crept into his expression. His lip quivered briefly.

"—The Queen and King of Krai—" His voice wavered again slightly. Then he regained composure and his expression was commanding again.

"This is a blow to our world from which we will not collectively be able to fully recover for a long foreseeable time; and one from which, in many senses, I personally never will. But that does not mean that it is a victory for the profane alliance that has reared its head, either. Their violent attempt to seize power showed the world their insidious resourcefulness and guile. By murdering the Queen and King—both the stewards of our peace and prosperity and way of life, and the symbols of them—the conspirators have demonstrated to the whole world their hatred for everything that we as a world and a people have become.

"But even though the murderous act succeeded, it did not succeed in furthering the profane alliance's aims. The plot to install a puppet of the profane alliance onto the Throne of Krai—and then using that authority to preside over the systematic subjugation of the world and its people to the nefarious and brutal intent of dismantling our civilization and way of life—although not uncovered in time to save the tragic loss of our beloved Binarchs, has now nevertheless been uncovered before it has had any more time to proceed undetected and without impunity.

"But we must assume that having been emboldened to come this far, the conspirators are not going to relent. As long as their leaders remain at large and their structures remain intact and in operation, the future of our very civilization lies under a dark and ominous and very real threat.

"The reports that have been circulating over the global transcasts are true: the conspiracy indeed managed to infiltrate the highest imaginable level, and it is my sad and terrible duty to confirm to the world that the center of the conspiracy, as well as the figure directly responsible for the brutal murder of the Queen and King of Krai, is none other than the former Heir-to-the-Throne, Crown Prince Jedi of Rai.

"As shockingly inconceivable as this may seem, it is the reality of the threat that we now collectively face: a determined conspiracy to usurp power and lead all of Krai along a dark path to what can only be ultimate, assured destruction, that has reached into and poisoned the very veins of the Royal Line itself.

"A danger has been posed from both without and within, and it requires a swift and decisive response in order to ensure that the poisonous seeds savagely sown by the murderous conspirators do not have a chance to take root and grow into the weeds that will gradually choke to death our civilization, our way of life, and eventually, all of us in a suffocating spiral of wanton and violent chaos, whose only plausible outcome can be the eventual end of our very existence.

"This is the reality we all face together. It is as frightening as it is ominous for what this threat poses to us as a civilization and to our fundamental rights and freedoms as peaceful, prosperous and continually progressing individuals. An unfortunate truth seems to be that from time to time, the peaceful and prosperous need to fight to defend their peace and prosperity from those who wish to take it from them. Our civilization originated as a result of one such struggle. The Event has tragically shown beyond any doubt that now, after more than seven-thousand cycles, the second struggle for control of our world and its destiny has begun.

"But as daunting as the task of safeguarding our future and that of our world from a threat that has shown to be capable of reaching into the Royal House itself may suddenly seem, I am appearing before you today in the capacity that the events of the past day have thrust upon me: as the leader of your government, and as the only remaining, living legitimate representative of the Royal House of our world, the House of Rai.

"In this time of great grief and terrible uncertainty, I am appearing before you to assure you that the rightful stewardship of our world, our civilization, and our traditional and ancient way of life continues to lie in legitimate and authoritative hands. Our beloved Binarchs, the royal heads of our collective family and the legal heads of our collective state, may have been brutally taken from us, but our will and determination to protect our world and our people from assured destruction has not. Yesterday's emergency session of the Yedina has established the reinstitution of constitutionally legitimate regal and legislative authority. The emergency session of the Joint Commanders-in-Chief of the Kraian Security Forces with the Yedina Cabinet has resulted in the formulation of a plan of action. Every effort and security resource will be dedicated, given the evidence and intelligence we have, to pursuing an aggressive investigation of all official and Noble-house structures, to uncover, apprehend, and prosecute all the leaders of the conspiracy that still remain hidden at the highest of levels of the Royal, Noble and legislative administrations, at the highest levels of global commercial enterprises, at the highest levels of Temple administration, at the highest levels of our communications and cultural media, at the highest levels of our social structure, and even at the highest levels of the security forces of our world—before those hidden conspirators and enemies of the Nareed and of Krai, can either escape, or what is even worse, escalate their efforts at destabilizing our civilization as part of their ultimate aim. If the conspirators are not swiftly apprehended and their structures categorically crushed, there is no doubt that their subsequent actions would inconceivably yet certainly necessitate our passing into a global state of war, undeniably threatening our peace, prosperity, the progress toward which the profound changes on our world have been leading us for the past number of cycles, our very existence, the fate of our world, and that of our children.

"While our security forces work to apprehend the leadership of the conspiracy, I will immediately be assembling an Extraordinary Royal Commission that will convene within the next few days. This Commission will officially formulate all the constitutional, legislative and security measures that will be instituted in pursuit of our aims; that will give us the force and direction needed to eliminate all vestiges of the threat that lies dormant and waiting to strike at every level of our entire social structure. I will be charging the Commission to present the proposed legislation to the Yedina for ratification before issuing it as Royal Decree by no later than the end of this week.

"Yesterday's terrible event has thrust the urgent immediacy upon us to thwart this menacing threat. With that urgency and for the safety of all of us and of all the infrastructures of our society, I am forced to announce the immediate invocation of the Global Martial Law Act, as provided for in our Constitution under circumstances of a demonstrated and immediate danger to the security of our society posed by either or both internal and external threats. With this authority, I am announcing that there will be a complete dusk-to-dawn curfew in effect for all urban centers. Heightened security measures will be in indefinite effect at all gravports, magtrain nodes, on all magways and all the trunks of the GTN. A temporary, global, personal inter-urban travel prohibition is in effect, except in cases of demonstrable emergency.

"It is my hope, and the hope of those of us responsible for our collective security, that these measures will be a brief, inconvenient but crucial necessity, pending a swift and decisive dismantling of the conspiracy's covert structure, the bringing of all its leaders to justice, the bringing to rehabilitation of all its lower ranks, and the reinstitution of the order that will now not only safeguard our peace and prosperity, but our progress as well through the profound changes leading us and our world into a dawning new age.

"The conspirators hoped to destroy our collective strength and will with yesterday's heinous act. But our civilization has evolved and remained strong and consistent for over seven-thousand cycles because of the common desire we all share to prosper together in peace, and our dedication to protecting our ability to continue to do so unimpeded.

"It has become painfully evident after yesterday's tragic and brutal events that we now face a threat both from without and within. How far that threat manages to penetrate into our society and into our individual spirits, now depends on each and every one of us: on our strength, our discipline, our dedication to our common values and their protection, our vigilance, and what now, in the face of a looming violent intent of as-yet-unknown potential, must become our uncompromising determination to wipe out all symptoms of the disease that has infested our collective being. It is not just an ailment of the mind or of the heart, but of the whole body. The conspiracy isn't confined to individuals of prominence among us. It exists, lying in wait for its time to strike at all of us, on our streets, in our schools and institutes of higher learning, in our offices and on our assembly lines, in our community and recreational organizations, and it threatens to penetrate into our homes and into our hearts, with the aim of directing each and every one of us to contribute to our own individual and collective self-destruction.

"Our world and our way of life may be under attack. But our dedication to the fight for our self-preservation as a civilization and as individuals must never falter before such obstacles. Over seven-thousand cycles ago, the progenitors of our Royal Line, our first beloved Binarchs, the founders of our civilization, Zavoi and Atmi The Great, had the courage to stand up, unify our fractured people and lead them in the fight against and triumph over the last threat posed by those Nareed who since ancient times have chosen to revolt against normality and pose a destructive threat to our collective existence.

"It is the courage of our first beloved Binarchs that we must now all seek to invoke in ourselves, to ensure that the forces on our world dedicated to disrupting our natural evolution and progress towards the realization of our as-yet unimagined but very real and impending great leap forward, do not succeed in preventing us as a people and as a world from passing into what promises to be a new age of untold development towards a more complete state of peace and prosperity than our world or our people has ever known.

"Brother-and-Sister Nareed!

"At this great moment of pain and grieving for the tragic loss of our beloved Binarchs, with an insidious, covert menace poised to strike at our civilization, I call upon all of us not to succumb to fear, doubt, or despondency. Working together, we will all contribute to the uprooting and elimination of the tendrils of this conspiracy, no matter where they may appear to lie hidden—from the highest levels of our global collective, down to its most fundamental units. Our urgent task is to unite into one, strong, monolithic, impenetrable force that will resist any effort at taking us from the path along which over seven-thousand cycles of hard work and sacrifice have kept us moving. We will resist any effort at plunging us into darkness, ignorance, conflict, and eventually, destruction. We will not be made to cower in terror over our safety, our lives, or our future. We will also not turn in fear from our promising yet uncertain future, and stagnate in the comforts of the past.

"While affairs of state, commerce, and security must still go on even under extraordinary circumstances, so must the process of collective healing from the stunning and debilitating shock of The Event. Therefore, following the traditional Twenty Nine Days of Mourning, a global memorial service will be held at The Temple of Rai, and simulcast in every temple across the globe. I urge you all to show solidarity with all other brother-and-sister Nareed in this show of both our collective grief, and our collective strength.

"My Brother-and-Sister Nareed!

The image began a slow pullout from its full-on close-up.

"This conspiracy has been lying dormant for a long time, and has struck suddenly and stunningly. I promise you that in the name of our murdered beloved Binarchs, in the name of our Royal Line, in the name of our people and in the name of our world, our response under these circumstances will be as equally stunning a blow to the conspirators and their destructive aims, as their savage act of yesterday was to our collective spirit. But whereas they will not be able to conquer our spirit, will will completely break theirs. I promise you that we shall not fail. Victory will be ours.

"May The Mother-and-Father Bless Us All!"

The image of Lord Sith, now a full shot of him in his plush, high backed chair with the Rai Valley behind him, began to dissolve gently out.

Zita stared transfixed at Sith while his gently smiling image slowly disintegrated into darkness. While it did, however, she noted the same fire flash in his green irises that she thought she might have imagined before. This time, she was sure of what she saw, and equally sure that she wasn't the only one who saw it.

The whole world did.

As the dissolve faded to black, all of Sith's image faded with it.

All of it except for the two, burning points of flame from his eyes that remained suspended in the darkness of the black transcom screen.

Zita shuddered as if her blood suddenly hardened into ice in her veins.

The transcast cut to a shot of the previous KTN hosts, seated on high chairs in a flashily appointed studio, immediately launching into their post-Address analysis and banter.

Her mind, her heart, her body now completely numb in unison, Zita tuned the announcers out while staring right into them.

"That's it," Master Lekh proclaimed sadly, still reclined with his head back and eyes closed. "The death of Krai has begun."

Zita shifted from her reclining position, and with a weak groan of despondency that was slipping ever more easily through the waning yantric effect, buried her head in her hands on the table.

She heard Master Lekh make some movements. A snap was followed by a pneumatic hiss as a locker door slid open, then slid shut again after a moment.

A loud "THUNK!" was followed by the sensation of velvet against her bare forearm on the table.

Zita lifted her head and saw the mysterious green velvet bag Master Lekh had entrusted to the man who had come and taken it from Rodo and Cheeba's, now lying in front of her on the table. Master Lekh was standing on the other side of the table, smiling compassionately down at her.

"That, my brave little Princess of Pyarr," he announced with a hint of defiance in his voice. "Represents its rebirth."

Zita looked from Master Lekh to the bag curiously.

"Go ahead, open it," he urged her, grinning.

Zita sat up, took the bag, untied the gold tassels, widened the opening of the bag, reached inside and with one hand felt something metallic and crystal inside.

Two somethings.

With the bag resting on the table, she reached in with her other hand, pulled the two somethings out—

And gasped.

One in each hand, Zita held the Crowns of Zavoi and Atmi.

The Royal Crowns of the first King and Queen of Krai.

The Royal Crowns worn by every pair of Binarchs for over seven-thousand cycles.

"But," Zita stammered, confused. "Weren't Queen Deleb and King Eloh wearing them yesterday when—"

"No," Master Lekh replied, to prevent her from having to say it. "Replicas."

Zita considered for a moment, and then a shocking realization began to dawn on her. "They knew, didn't they?"

Master Lekh closed his eyes, bit his lip and inhaled deeply through his nose. "They knew."

Zita's hands began to shake so much she placed the crowns on the table before her.

"As long as the true and legitimate Heirs-to-the-Binarchy live," Master Lekh said, seating himself on the bench and taking both of Zita's young, soft-but-strong, shaking hands in his old, hard-and-strong, worn ones, looking intently into her eyes. "So does the hope for that rebirth."

A tear rolled out the corner of Zita's eye and splashed onto the Crown of Atmi.

CHAPTER LXIV

Accompanied by Manthi and two Royal Guards, Sith came out of the Castle Transcast Center and climbed into the back of the long, black limorider waiting just outside the CTC entrance. Behind and ahead of the limo was a column of Royal Guard escort vehicles. Although the CTC was on Castle grounds, and he would only be going the equivalent of a couple of city blocks, the Royal Guard CIC had insisted that under the circumstances, Lord Sith not be unescorted or unguarded at any time for any reason.

A Royal Guard stood at attention by the open limo door.

Sith let Manthi climb in, then followed her. The escorting Royal Guards remained outside as the door to the limo slid shut.

The column of vehicles pulled away from the front of the CTC building.

Inside the limo, Sith took a mobile from inside his cloak and tapped out a few instructions. After a moment, the face of the Royal Guard CIC appeared in the mobile's screen.

"Yes, My Lord?" The CIC asked.

"Have you caught them yet?" Lord Sith asked simply but with forceful command.

There was a brief pause. Then:

"Not yet, My Lord," the CIC replied meekly.

Sith switched off his mobile angrily, then clasped it with a crushing grip in both hands as they fell to his lap. He stared straight ahead, his temples fluttering from the grinding of his teeth, his nostrils flaring uncontrollably, his breathing heavy, his eyes aflame with rage.

Manthi, seated next to Sith in the luxurious reclining bench at the back of the limo, placed a tentative hand on his arm, then slipped her arm around his shoulder, embraced him with her other arm across his chest, and put her head on his shoulder.

"They'll find them soon," Manthi assured Sith. "Destiny, baby. Believe it."

Sith let the mobile slip out of his hands.

It fell to the floor of the limo between Sith's booted feet.

The mobile lay on the floor, smoking slightly, its form completely fused into the liquid shape it was twisted into by the force of Sith's crushing grip, smoldering from the heat and fire of his barely contained, extrasensory-projected rage.

CHAPTER LXV

In the early evening gloom of the overcast Day After, a line of vehicles of all shapes and sizes inched its way forward toward the KSF blockade at an on-ramp to the Rai Belt on the outskirts of Entertainment District.

The KSF officer checking vehicle and occupant documentation of all riders wishing to leave the urban magways and get on the Rai Belt, waved a personal magrider through and it disappeared up the on-ramp.

A gleaming silver, long-distance megatransport with the colorful markings and logos of the Quadropole Complex's transport division pulled up to the officer. It's driver-side window hissed open and the driver's head appeared above his elbow resting on the door frame.

"Vehicle and personal documentation," the KSF officer pronounced.

The driver handed the officer a mobile unit, which the officer plugged into the larger unit he held in his hands. A series of beeps and chirps ensued.

"Destination?" the officer asked while continuing to examine the data streaming into his unit from the driver's mobile.

"Ilaka," the driver replied casually.

"Cargo?"

"It's all there in the manifest,'nar," the driver pointed out. "Vegetable steamers."

The officer unplugged the driver's mobile from his own unit and handed it back to the driver. "Pull over there," he indicated with his hand to the side, past the KSF cruisers bottle-necking the entrance to the on-ramp. Then he called out to a pair of officers loitering around the parked KSF cruisers. "Have a look inside this one!" he called out to his fellow-officers.

The driver of the megatransport smiled and thanked the officer, and with the thrumming whine of massive thrusters and polarity generators, the megatransport squeezed between the KSF cruisers and pulled over to the side once it was clear.

Having parked the vehicle, the megatransport driver hopped out of his cab and was met by two KSF officers. One demanded his documentation, and the driver handed him the same mobile he had just submitted for inspection. The officer plugged the mobile into his unit and examined the data briefly.

"What are we looking for today, officer?" the driver asked nonchalantly.

"What, you been under a log since yesterday?" The officer asked, without taking his eyes off his readouts. "Never mind what we're looking for. We know what we're looking for."

There was a flurry of beeps and chirps from his reader unit.

"Okay. Let's have a look," he declared, and indicated for the driver to follow him to the back of the transport.

As the two headed away, the second officer climbed into the driver's cab through the open driver-side door and disappeared.

Around the back of the transport, the officer asked the driver to open the rear loading door. The driver took out a small remote, tapped in a few commands, and the wide door spanning the vehicle's width groaned into action and slid upwards slowly.

The officer hefted himself onto the bed of the transport, followed by the driver. Checking the driver's documentation, the officer saw a column of cargo cubes lining the entire interior of the long cargo hold, lit from above by running lights at the sides of the ceiling.

"Vegetable steamers?" the officer asked. "A murdered Queen and King, and people still need to steam vegetables? Okay, open 'er up," the officer said, indicating with his chin at the nearest cargo cube.

The driver tapped out some more commands on his mobile. There was a hiss, followed by a clank as magnetic seals popped in succession, and then the doors of the cargo cube swung open, revealing stacks of vegetable steamers in colorful packaging stowed inside.

While the officer examined the cargo, the driver could see down and through the open access door at the front of the hold, that the second officer was having a look around in the sleeper cab. The officer then emerged from the sleeper cab and began strolling casually down one side of the long line of cargo cubes towards the back, absently running a hand along each cube as he passed it.

"All clear up here!" the second officer called out to the first. "We gonna open them all?"

The driver cast a discreet, sideways glance at the officer beside him while the latter was in the process of closing one of the vegetable steamer packages he'd just finished inspecting.

"Are you outta your krokin' mind?" the first officer called out. "Vegetable steamers! Done! Next! See that krokin' lineup out there?"

He suddenly unplugged the driver's mobile from his larger reader unit and handed it back. "Okay, 'nar, off you go!" the first officer said to the driver, and as the second officer came to the back, the driver watched the two of their overweight hulks clumsily hop back down from the bed of the transport and onto to the on-ramp's shoulder.

"Drive safely!" one of them called out as they walked back toward their cruisers.

The driver watched the two officers head toward their vehicles for a moment. Then he quickly turned back and tapped out lock-down commands for the cube into his mobile.

CHAPTER LXVI

It was late evening.

Sith stood on the semicircular stone patio adjoined to the Binarchs' Chambers in The Castle: formerly occupied by the late Deleb and Eloh, Queen and King of Krai, and now the sanctum sanctorum of Lord Sith, Lord of the House of Rai, Presider of the Yedina, Commander-in-Chief of all Kraian Security Forces, and sole remaining legitimate Heir-to-the-Throne of Krai.

He stood erectly and stiffly, his hands clasped behind his back, facing the glimmering lights of the vast Rai Valley metroplex that spread out into the darkness from the foot of The Castle.

On most other nights, most other individuals would have marveled at the splendor of color and light that made up the Rai Valley nightscape. Sith himself had spent long hours alone on any number of balconies and patios all over The Castle, staring out over the sparkling, nocturnal Valley. While most others marveled at the splendor, all Sith had ever dreamed of whenever looking out into The Valley at introspective times like that, was a seat of power:

His.

Except this evening was unlike any other on which Sith had previously stood in the cool Raian evening air and gazed out through the light-speckled darkness into his imagined and hotly desired destiny.

For one thing, he wasn't gazing out, but in.

With eyes closed, Sith breathed deeply, drawing in each breath almost excruciatingly slowly, and exhaling equally as slowly through his mouth. His heartbeat was slow. His pulse was even slower.

With every ounce of his physical faculties and every conceivable unit of Force energy he could muster and direct, Sith reached out with his thoughts and his feelings, searching for the slightest sign of his brother Jedi somewhere in the vast ocean of swirling Force energy that made up the Kraian "Forcescape."

He had meditated himself into a forced tranquility to try to eliminate any mental, emotional or ethereal impediments to his Force sense, hoping that a clearing of his thoughts and feelings would increase his reach and sensitivity and give him some clue as to where to find the fleeing Jedi.

But after a half hour of standing and reaching and searching, he had not been able to sense even the slightest ripple of Jedi, not even a faint or distant echo.

Maybe they did get away?

A cold stab of fear slashed across his heart.

Then the fire exploded in his mind.

Then it spread to his heart.

Then, suddenly, a voice—

"Sith."

And in his mind, Zita's face formed.

Then the voice again.

"Sith, baby."

His eyes suddenly shot wide open, burning with the rage that roiled inside him.

Brought back fully to his physical senses from his extrasensory expeditions, Sith heard Manthi padding barefoot across the patio from the immensely tall, wide-open, framed-glass doors to the bedchamber.

Before she could reach him, he spoke, without turning or even moving a muscle: "Have they found them yet?"

The footfalls halted. There was a pause. Then:

"No word yet."

Before Sith's mind's eye, Jedi's laughing face appeared, mocking him again.

Sith clenched his teeth tightly, his temples fluttered and a vein protruded from his neck. His nostrils flared as he inhaled a violent breath quickly. The fire burning in him was so hot, it felt as if his thoughts themselves were molten spikes shooting excruciatingly through the synaptic pathways of his brain.

Suddenly, he doubled over from the pain, pressed his palms hard into the sides of his head, and groaned.

"Baby!" Manthi called out from behind him.

"Leave me alone!" Sith cried out, and continued to press his head with his hands, as if to squeeze both the pain and the image of Jedi out of his mind.

He saw and felt nothing but flames. Flames all around him. Walls of flames. Seas of flames. Skies of flames. All burning violently and hotly all around him.

Sith moaned.

And in the center of the flames, Jedi's face was still there.

Laughing.

Sith moaned more loudly and angrily, challenging the ethereal apparition with an almost savage growl.

The face spoke to Sith in his mind.

It was, however, his own voice that Sith heard coming from his brother's mouth:

"He got away!" it said, and cackled forcefully.

Then Sith felt himself explode as if into billions of pieces, with a hot, torrential flow of energy coursing out of him, through him, feeling as if his physical body had disintegrated and all that was left of him was his burning, raging heart and the molten, liquid fire it spewed out in all directions.

"KROK YOU!" Sith shouted out angrily, and straightened out abruptly.

"Sith!" An alarmed Manthi called out from behind him.

He reeled around.

She recoiled in horror as she saw that his eyes were burning flames. Beneath his emerald skin, veins of fiery luminescence mapped his whole face, subcutaneously pulsing and throbbing in rhythm with his own, mad pulse. His mouth hung open in a savage grin, his teeth bared as if he were a wild animal about to attack.

"Sith, baby!" Manthi pleaded with him meekly, while backing slowly away from him. "You're scaring me!"

He growled in his throat.

A drop of saliva fell from one of his incisors.

His arms began to slowly rise from his sides, his hands clenched open, claw-like, fingers taut.

"Sith," Manthi pleaded again while backing away, terrified.

The stone of the patio beneath Sith's feet began to glow hot.

A funnel of acrid wind suddenly swirled down out of nowhere and enveloped Sith, whipping dust and bits of debris all around him.

Sith's hands, also pulsing with subcutaneous veins, now began to glow hot, until they became almost formless globes of fire.

Then:

"JEDI!" Sith shouted out with the force of a thousand voices.

Bolts of lightning shot out of his hands and struck the stone deck of the patio, charring it and splitting it open with a smoking, earsplitting crack.

Manthi's eyes widened. She halted her retreat. Her hands came to her mouth as she gasped when more lightning bolts shot from Sith's eyes.

Directly for Manthi's head.

She ducked in time to see the bolts fly over her and splash with fiery ripples of light into the giant, glass bedchamber doors.

In silence, a networked web of cracks popped into view all over the tall doors.

Then all at once, the glass exploded with a thundering, tinkling "CRACK!"

Manthi fell into a crouch and covered her head as shards and nuggets of crystal silicate rained down all around her and all over the patio floor.

"JEDI!" Sith shouted out again so loudly that Manthi was afraid the echo would carry across the entire Rai Valley.

Covered in clinging bits of glass and tiny lacerations all over her exposed skin, Manthi dropped her arms from over her head and looked to Sith.

His eyes and hands were glowing hot again.

"SITH!" Manthi screamed at him with all the angry force her terrified heart could gather.

Suddenly, The fire in his eyes and in his hands began to subside. The pulsing network of luminous veins under his skin grew fainter, too, until all the physical signs of the fire raging within Sith had completely disappeared.

"Manthi?" Sith asked in a timid, frightened, lonely voice, as if just now realizing where he was. He looked at his hands questioningly, and then let them fall to his sides. His eyes, now normal eyes with pupils and irises instead of burning flames, blinked softly and repeatedly. His mouth hung slightly open.

"Yes, Sith," Manthi replied, getting to her feet, slowly and cautiously approaching him, putting all the comforting nurture into her voice that she could. "It's Manthi."

He watched her approach through blinking eyes as if struggling to recognize her.

"Manthi?"

"Yes, baby," she replied. "It's me. Your Manthi. I'm right here. It's okay, baby, it's—"

Sith's head fell back, he brought his fists to his eyes, and he moaned long and with a forlorn despondency that Manthi could feel cleaving her own heart as if it were being torn in two.

Then he slowly sank to his knees, and with his face buried in his hands, began sobbing uncontrollably.

Manthi reached him just as he hit the ground. Before he could double over, she fell to her knees herself, cradled him in her arms and, with tears streaming from her own eyes, sat back and held his shaking, sobbing body close to her.

CHAPTER LXVII

A lone, short-haul cargo-rider made a slow, gliding ascent away from the last suburban structures of the provincial capital of Yula, and headed towards the vast plain that separated the city from the dark line on the horizon that was the far-off outer-rim of Za.

There was an overcast sky above, with thick clouds showing their dark, rolling underbelly to the late-evening world. The menacing, gray sea of cottony clumps spanned the entire sky ahead and behind.

Inside the rider, Master Lekh sat alone in the driver's cab, behind the stick of the vehicle, guiding it forward, his face aglow with the colors of the dash-screen's systems-control glyphwindows.

In the cargo hold behind him, the biogravbed containing the still-unconscious Jedi was secured tightly. Beside the bed, Zita lay sleeping comfortably and peacefully on a thick, plush but firm bedroll, covered with a blanket.

After the Quadropole megatransport had arrived at the storage depot on the outskirts of Yula, Master Lekh and Zita transferred Jedi to the rider that had been waiting for them when they got there. They were assisted by a pair of Yulans with whom Master Lekh seemed to be intimately familiar, and who were equally so with him. Although there were no introductions, and barely any words spoken at all amongst any of the "conspirators," both Yulans did not fail to express their deepest sympathies to Zita with meaningful looks or gentle touches on the arm or shoulder.

They transferred their belongings from the transport to the rider as well: Zita had nothing at all except the green velvet bag containing the Crowns of Zavoi and Atmi. Master Lekh had a large duffel that he removed from the transport sleeper cab's storage lockers, and which now lay on the seat beside him.

Before leaving the depot, it had become apparent that the yantra—keeping Zita from falling into uncontrollable hysterics over the horror she had experienced, added to which were all the subsequent shocks and tensions of the last day—had begun to wear off more substantially. She was exhausted, and had a hard time stopping herself from crying quietly, only the remnants of the yantra still in her preventing her from breaking into wild sobbing.

Master Lekh had given her some zasnula, an herb whose leaves, when chewed, have extremely strong sedative properties. He promised her that by the time she awoke, they would finally be safely out of reach.

He tapped his way through dash-screen glyphwindows while steering the rider toward the jungles in the distance.

The illegal thrust boosters installed in the rider powered up for a burst, and began to throb through the cabin of the rider.

The whining of the thrusters reached their usual pitch before the turbo burst.

Then:

THE BURST!

And then the lone cargo rider, extinguishing all its exterior lights, rocketed off into the gray night towards the dark monolith of massive jungle trees on the far horizon.

691