Chapter

2

Two Years Later:

She woke panting, sweat beading her brow and her hair a mess. But Jaina didn't pause; she jumped right out of bed and stretched.

Then she froze. The sun wasn't up yet. Moonlight from two of the planet's three moons shone brightly through the open window, stars still pinpricked the black sky, and a gentle, cool breeze fluttered the cyrene silk curtains. The breeze carried with it the salty smell of the ocean, and she took a deep breath of it before turning her back on the window to look around.

Something felt … odd.

With a flick of the wrist, Jaina summoned the Force around her and thrust a sliver of it at the light switch by the door. Light flooded the room, leaving no shadows for anyone or anything to hide in.

It took only a couple of seconds for her to confirm that she was alone. And yet, despite that, she still felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. Something still didn't feel right, and it wasn't just her being paranoid. Her father had taught her to be cautious, to trust in her feelings in the Force. That had wizened her far beyond her years, and yet there was still a sliver of fear that was present because of her age. She couldn't help that.

Besides, if Zak had taught her anything, it was that there was no sane person in the universe, regardless of age, species or experience, who felt no fear.

She took a deep breath and swallowed before opening the topmost bedside draw and retrieving her training lightsaber. She didn't activate it, but she kept it tightly gripped as she made a show of searching under her bed and inside her wardrobe. When she found nothing, she deduced that whatever it was that felt off must have been coming from outside her room.

She opened the door and crept outside, slowly and carefully. Her eyes darted from side to side down the hall, searching and finding nothing. She eased the door shut behind her softly, so that the latch made the quietest of clicks as it shut.

The Force swirled around her. Though her grasp of it was feeble compared to father, it was still strong for a girl of her years. She could sense subtle nuances, even if she couldn't draw details from those nuances. She sensed something coming from within their home for sure, but she couldn't tell if it was a threat or just a presence. It did feel familiar, of that she was sure, but it didn't feel like father, and not quite like Zak.

Curious, she started down the hall to her right, passing by the 'fresher door and the door to Zak's room before she reached the stairwell. She looked up first, reaching out with her senses to try and locate the origin of what she was feeling. The top floor was father's room and his private study, from which Jaina and Zak were forbidden to enter. It felt like he was sleeping fitfully, but even if that were the case it wasn't the cause of the strange vibrations in the Force that had woken her and was making her skin tingle.

She looked down, and almost immediately started down when she became sure of herself.

She passed through the modest entertaining space near the front of the house without pause. They rarely, if ever, hosted guests to their home, so the space saw little use. But it was decorated as a stranger might expect; comfortable lounge chairs, a caf table, some native tapestries, a couple of ancient-looking ornaments on a shelf below the holoscreen. A small kitchen was off to the side, with entry to a small, chilled cellar for storage.

Past the entertaining area was a doorway that led further back into the residence. Though usually open to allow a gentle breeze to funnel through from the open windows into the entertainment area at the front, the door was now closed. She reached out and firmly grasped the ornately carved handle and tried to turn it down, only to find that it budged no more than a few millimetres before the locking slip caught. She frowned and released the handle, putting her hands on her hips as she puzzled it over.

She could knock. There was always that option. It was polite, and something her father had really taken great pains to drill into her. She had a habit of occasionally disrupting his meditations, or his plans for a quiet, introspective afternoon simply by foregoing that nicety. On the other hand, curiosity made her wonder why the door was locked in the first place, at an hour in which her father and Zak should have been in bed and in which she could at least confirm the former.

Instead, she opted for the sneaky approach. Not only was it an exercise in satisfying her curiosity, but the situation presented an opportunity to practice her ability to manipulate small objects unobtrusively with her willpower. She had grown as skilled as she could for now in moving objects like boulders and felled trees, but her father had told her more than once that sometimes there was greater skill in affecting something smaller than in affecting something larger.

Though she didn't exactly take his words to heart, neither had she tried to actually practice the skill. She reached out broadly with her mind, sensed her father still in his room, sensed Zak … but not his location, which confused her. And of course, there was the strange feeling coming from beyond the door she faced. Twitch, the adolescent tusk cat she'd come into possession of a year ago, was sleeping soundly by the plexiglass door off to the side of the entertainment area; close to the building to guard, but also for her own comfort.

Having made her decision, Jaina leaned in towards the door and pressed her small hand against the fine-grained wood near where the lock should be. She reached out with her senses, tapped into the Force. The locking mechanism was simple—just a single latch that could be slid across. It had a deep enough niche in it to catch the stub on the inner workings of the handle, preventing the door from being opened.

She could see the mechanism in her mind's eye, as clearly as if the door had been bisected along its edge for her to discern the lock's workings by naked sight. The stub on the handle that caught in the lock wasn't very sturdy looking, but when she touched it with the Force, just a touch, she could tell that it was made from some pretty dense material. In fact, she was sure that it would take a powerful hammer-blow by the Force or destruction by blaster or lightsaber to damage it.

Well … her lightsaber was in her room and her father hadn't yet decided if he trusted her with a blaster not permanently set to stun, and she wasn't yet strong enough with the Force that should could just destroy the lock with a blow that powerful. Picking it would have to be her option; more precisely picking it by using her mind.

She grinned to herself mischievously and pressed her other hand against the frame, level with her other on the door, and extended her awareness. She felt where the end of the locking slip set in its slot in the frame, unmoving, unaware, and totally uncaring for how it barred her path. There were no trips attached, and no alarms that she could see or sense. It all seemed rather easy, and she began to doubt her father's words even more.

She extended feelers, intangible slivers of her mind, through the material of the door itself to the gear that would retract the slip of metal within the door so that it no longer obstructed her. She tried to touch it, gently, afraid that she might accidentally break it and thereby prevent her own access to the room beyond the door. Her slivers of mental power slipped over the gear without affecting it at all.

She frowned, retraced her path and tried again but with much more effort, much more mental strength. She drew on power, drew on more power than she had ever drawn on to lift a boulder nearly as big as their residence. She felt the psychic collision of her mind touching that small gear, felt and faintly heard the sound of one of the little arms being crushed to a fine metallic powder.

She panicked, withdrew her thoughts, and froze. What would she do now? Had she just ruined any chance of opening the door? She might now have to race upstairs and wake either her father or Zak and ask them to open the door to find out who or what was inside that made her feel so uneasy. She suspected an intruder, and there were some valuable items inside that she knew of. She didn't know exactly how many of them were valuable, nor did she know exactly how valuable those she knew of were. She just knew that a thief would definitely have cause to enter that room, and could walk away hundreds of thousands of credits richer for it.

One more. Just one more go, she told herself, determined that she would not waste the others' time if her suspicions proved erroneous.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and performed a quick centring meditation to sharpen her focus and clear her mind of all distractions.

Suddenly, her senses were focussed on the door, and lock hidden within. She no longer heard the deep, even breathing of her tusk cat outside, nor the ever-so-faint snores of her father upstairs. She heard none of the nocturnal insects that chirped, nor the other night life that was usually loud and around in the forest around their home. She smelled not the sweat from her brow, nor the leftovers in the kitchen that hadn't been cleared away before the three of them had headed to their rooms. She felt not the plushness of the carpet between her toes, nor the cool air against her skin.

Focus.

Then she opened her eyes. She no longer saw the door. She saw the lock within. Her last attempt had broken one of the arms clear off, and that she couldn't find it by sight confirmed that it had indeed disintegrated. The handle was still slightly turned down from her attempt to open it earlier, and the stub was caught in the niche, sitting soundly and content to remain there, it seemed.

Father had been right, she decided then and there. Operating with smaller objects was indeed more difficult and required more concentration than manipulation of boulders and trees did. It required a fine level of focus she often lacked.

Already, she could feel the external distractions beating at the intangible door within her mind, trying to get her attention away from the task at hand. And already, she could feel that mental door giving, nanometre by nanometre. She didn't have long before her temporary focus was gone, and she didn't think she had the energy just then to summon it back if she lost it before the task was accomplished.

Gently, she removed her hand from the surface of the door and eased the handle back into its normal position. The stub slid from the niche in the locking slip within the door. She stuck her tongue between her teeth and concentrated hard on the gear that slid the locking slip back and forth. She started off with gentle probes, increasing slowly until she found just the right strength to move it without further damaging it.

The slip began to retract. She smiled, proud of her accomplishment. Then the broken arm almost ruined it all. It ticked over and the slip found its chance to spring back. Only a gut-reaction from Jaina kept it from sliding back to where it had been, and she moved it along with the gear—doubling her concentration—until the next arm caught on the slip's pegs. The latch slid all the way back until it was no longer obstructing the handle.

She released her hold on the mechanism, allowed her focus to fade. She was breathing hard, almost panting for breath, and a heavy sheen of sweat coated her forehead and plastered her shoulder-length hair to her scalp. She swiped at the sweat on her brow, brushed strands of stubborn hair away from her eyes, before reaching out and pulling down the handle to open the door.

She eased the door open only marginally, just enough to squeeze inside without, hopefully, alerting a possible intruder.

The room was darkened, but not dark, she found. Glow lamps against the walls were lit every odd number, and when she looked up, she at first thought she was looking directly at the sky. It only took a moment of thought before she realised that the ceiling had simply been set to its transparent module, allowing the room's occupant to examine the sky without physically leaving the house. The stars winked at her, and though from here she could not see the moons, their light shone down, rendering the glow lamps pointless by comparison.

The stone floor was unadorned, unpatterned, and seemed to be made from a single slab of smoothed stone. She knew different, and yet the affect still amazed her young mind.

There was indeed someone in the room, as she had suspected. But her suspicions of an intruder had indeed been wrong. She hadn't been able to sense Zak's location in the Force because he was employing a meditation technique he had developed himself completely by accident, a technique her father disapproved of. It helped one divide their thoughts, instead of gathering them, and allowed them to disperse their presence in the Force, rather than centre and focus it. In trying to initially learn a proper way to meditate, Zak had found himself unable to concentrate correctly and had discovered this method instead.

Though initially he had been using it frequently as a crutch for dealing with the death of his sister, recently he had been using it far less, and seemed to have finally accepted it and moved on. Jaina liked to think that maybe she had helped him with that. She felt sad for him for having lost his only remaining family. And while she knew she couldn't replace the sister he lost, nor did she wish to, she did wish that she could at least be a new sister to him, to give him someone to love and cherish like he had for the blonde girl, Tash.

Truth be told, sometimes she needed someone other than father to talk to, herself. Having Zak as an older brother figure had given her as much as she hoped she had given him.

So to see him using that method of meditation now, with his presence in the Force so spread across the countryside that any passing Force-sensitive would feel it and be drawn to it, and with his thoughts so disjointed she could touch him and he wouldn't register the contact, was a sad thing for her. She thought, deep down, that maybe he wasn't yet able to let go of his sister. That was the only reason she could think of that he would try to escape like this.

She walked towards him and lowered herself to her knees less than a meter from him. And then she closed her eyes and waited for him to finish.