Chapter 12

Air!

It was damp, and smelt of mould and volcanic rock, but it was still air! I breathed in great big heavy gulps and fell forward, my muscles unable to hold me for very long.

How long had I been in the stasis tube? Surely it couldn't have been too long. Deevee would have come looking for us when we'd gone missing. He would have told someone that we'd been held against our will by that traitorous Sullustan that had so kindly put us up after Alitha had murdered Uncle Hoole. Maybe that's who had finally released me. If so, I swore that droid was going to be rewarded with the best greasing and scrubbing that I could give.

But when I finally had the strength to lift my head and look around, I didn't see Deevee anywhere. Nor did I see the men and-or women of the local security forces. In fact, there were only two people there, and one of them was just a little girl.

I didn't recognise them at all; I'd never met them before. But clearly, they were the ones that had rescued me. Whatever it was they wanted they would most certainly get it.

Muscles aching from that simple act of looking around, I dropped fully to the floor.

"Help him up, Jaina," said a deep voice from somewhere above me.

So I waited. I didn't feel any hands grasping at my clothes, or arms wrapping around me to help me to my feet. But, somehow, I was being lifted. I knew that much; there was no mistaking the feeling of suddenly rising to my feet, though I myself was putting no effort into the task. In fact, I would have been quite content to remain on the floor for a few more years, just sucking in air.

The stasis pod had been airtight, and I'd been rapidly running out of oxygen before the Sullustan had activated the device and unconsciousness had been induced in me as part of the freezing process. So to be out of the pod altogether now, I felt grateful to be breathing to the point that I didn't care how polluted or damp and uncomfortable the air was.

When I was standing upright, I looked to the strangers again to see that the girl's eyes were narrowed slightly and that her small hand was outstretched toward me.

I tried to speak, to ask them what was happening, but found that my throat was dry, and that my lips were slightly cracked.

"Water, Jaina," the deep voice said again. I couldn't see the man's face; it was hidden in shadow from the cloak and hood he wore. "But not too much."

"Yes, Father," the girl said.

She withdrew a small flask from her belt with her free hand and approached me slowly, as if she wanted me to be sure she wasn't a threat. I wanted to laugh at the thought that she could be, but then I remembered that she was likely the one that had lifted me, though I had no idea how.

She stopped just before me, the top of her head barely past my waist, and I felt myself dropping slowly until I was on my knees once more, looking her right in the eyes.

She smiled at me. "Open up," she said. It took me a few tries to open my mouth, but when I finally managed it, I was rewarded with the heavenly sensation of cold water dripping into my mouth and sliding down my throat. But there wasn't much of it before the girl—Jaina—took the flask away, replaced the lid, and hung it from her belt again.

Swallowing the last few drops of it, I found that my muscles were starting to gather strength, and that my throat, mouth, and lips were no longer dry.

"Who are you?" I asked finally, unable to think of anything else to say.

The man reached up and removed the hood that obscured his features and smiled warmly. He had close-cropped dark hair and high cheek bones. His eyes were dark, not quite menacing behind the smile. His teeth were straight and even and clean, so I knew automatically that he didn't live on Sullust; the humans here seemed to forego basic hygiene.

Then he spoke in that deep voice again. "My name is Brakiss," he said, taking a couple of steps forward. "I have come for you."

"How long …" I couldn't quite articulate the question. And I found that there was something nagging at the back of my mind; some small voice that kept telling me that I was forgetting something, that there was something more important presently to find out rather than the identity of my saviour.

"According to the records on the stasis controls, you have been locked in the pod for the past eleven years."

"Eleven years?" I exclaimed. "Then Deevee didn't find you? He didn't find us?"

I felt something then. It was almost like something invisible brushing gently against the inside of my head. "No," Brakiss replied, almost sympathetically. "And I cannot say I know what became of the droid in the time that you were in here. What is the last thing you remember?"

I thought about this. There was Uncle Hoole's murder, and my witnessing it. I reminded myself that if I ever caught up to Alitha, I'd make her pay dearly for what she'd done. Then there was being questioned for hours without end by the local security forces. They'd known I hadn't done it, but they hadn't counted on me being too shocked to be able to cooperate and give them a description of the culprit. Then I'd been handed over to—

"Tash!" I whirled around to face the other pod, breaking free of whatever invisible force held me in place, and crashed to my knees again.

The other pod, the one I'd seen Tash shoved into by our traitorous host before he'd activated them both, was destroyed. The plexiglass had shattered and the durasteel frame was bent out of shape in a couple of places. Wires and power chips were visible, fried and broken, from a dozen different places.

And inside the pod I could see the motionless form of my dead sister, her long blonde hair limp over her shoulders. Her normally sparkling blue eyes stared out at me, cold and lifeless.

"NO!" I gasped in disbelief. The realisation hit me hard and my stomach twisted itself into a hundred knots. Hot tears stung my eyes, and I found myself trying to get back to my feet so that I could get closer to her.

A strong arm looped under my own and around my back; the older man helped me to my feet and, seemingly knowing what it was that I was after, guided me closer to the broken stasis pod.

He let me down gently and I crawled the rest of the way to the pod and reached through the shattered plexiglass for my sister. I pulled her out of the thing and into my lap, cradling her and hoping that she would spring to life that instant just because I wanted it to happen.

But I knew she wouldn't. I'd lost the last of my family now. First Alderaan, and then my second cousin on Coruscant, and then Uncle Hoole had all died while I lived on. And now Tash was gone too, her life snuffed out by an unknown factor.

Anger welled up inside me and I turned my gaze on Brakiss, glaring at him to get across how angry I was. Suddenly, he was lifted off his feet and sent flying across the cavern. He crashed into the rock wall on the other side, and I heard the sound of breaking bones before I turned back to Tash and brushed a lock of her beautiful golden hair out of her face. I gently closed her eyes and then looked back up at Brakiss.

"Why?" I demanded.

"I did not kill her," Brakiss said, pushing himself back to his feet and hissing at the spike of pain I somehow felt shooting up his broken arm.

"Liar!" I hissed.

"He didn't!" Jaina said stubbornly from only a meter away. I glared at her too, but found myself unable to feel any hostility toward her. Unable to explain why as the hatred melted away, I turned back to Brakiss.

"Who killed her? Who and why?"

In response to my question, Brakiss lifted his good arm and gestured to his side. He flicked his wrist toward me and I watched as an equally lifeless body in the tunic of a spaceport labourer was flung from the darkened corner into the light around myself and the pods.

The dead man was perhaps in his late forties, with dark hair and a thin ring of bristles around his mouth. From his belt hung a communicator, a blaster, a grapple cable and a small pouch—not usually the necessary equipment for a labourer. There was a scorched hole in the middle of the man's chest.

"Who is it?" I demanded.

"I have no clue," Brakiss said with a dismissive wave. "All we know is that he was a Jedi Knight. Evidently, his intention was to either kill you both, or kill her and acquire you. I cannot give a reason for either intent."

"Jedi?" I said incredulously.

Tash and I had met a couple of Jedi during the great Civil War. The first had been Luke Skywalker. He'd been amazed at Tash's grasp of that mystical thing called the Force. The second had been an old hermit on the swamp world of Dagobah. A funny little creature called Yoda, he had told Tash and I that webothhad a strong connection to the Force. The Force, according to Yoda, was what bound the universe together. I'd only just begun exploring my own potential with Alitha when Uncle Hoole had been murdered and Tash and I betrayed.

"You know Skywalker?" Brakiss said curiously.

"A long time ago," I said, looking back down at my sister and gently caressing her cheek. It wasn't even cold yet! "We met on D'vouran. I used to look to him as the kind of person who would bring peace to the galaxy. And I knew that him being a Jedi he would do a lot of good for the galaxy. Tash admired him. But if his kind could do something like this to someone so …"

"Beautiful," Jaina offered when I choked on the word.

"Yes." I continued to caress her cheek in silence while the other two looked on. "If they could do this to her, then Luke obviously wasn't as good a person as I thought he was. He and his Jedi need to be taught a lesson."

"My thoughts exactly," Brakiss said. He paused as I gently lay Tash down and forced my muscles to obey me so that I could stand. I swiped away the tears stinging my eyes and cooling my cheeks before I looked up at Brakiss again.

"What are you?" I asked him, seeing the lightsaber that hung from his belt. I remembered that Luke had wielded one of those as well, and I'd always considered it the tool of the Jedi. "Are you a Jedi too?"

Then again, Darth Vader also had had a lightsaber, and he most certainly hadnotbeen Jedi. "No," Brakiss said in a tone that was almost a snarl. Perhaps my comment had stung him. "I am Dark Jedi. Jaina is my apprentice and, for all intents and purposes, my daughter."

"For all intents and purposes?"

"I'm an orphan," Jaina explained, coming to my side and looking up at me. "Father found me abandoned on Coruscant during the Imperial Remnant's campaign against the New Republic six years ago."

"I have raised her ever since," Brakiss added, "and, seeing her potential, have begun to train her in the ways and true nature of the Force."

I looked over my shoulder at Tash, ignored the sting of sadness and grabbed at the anger. Then I looked over to the similarly dead Jedi and growled deep in my throat. "I want to know."

"What do you want to know," Brakiss said almost sweetly, baiting me. Somehow I just knew that he was fully aware of what I wanted. He just wanted to hear me say it; he wanted me to acknowledge it.

"I want to know all you know about the Force. I can touch the Force. And a Jedi Master once told me that I had a strong connection. I want to explore it. I want toexploitit. I want to know everything there is to know, and I want to acquire all the power I can."

"And what would you do with that power?" Brakiss asked.

"I will find the Jedi responsible for my sister's death—the ones that ordered it. And I will make them pay. I'll make them wish they'd never considered it. I'll show them the true meaning of pain, and the true extent of its reach. I'll show them that mercy is for the weak!"

Something grabbed at my hand, and I looked down to see Jaina looking straight back up at me, smiling broadly with tears of happiness brimming. She clutched tightly to my hand with both of hers.

"She seems quite fond of you," Brakiss said. I looked back up at him as I gently pulled my hand free of hers and laid it gently on her shoulder, drawing her closer to me.

"We're both orphans," I said bitterly, and gently squeezed her shoulder to convey that I was grateful she at least knew how I felt. "Will you show me the ways of the Force.

"If that's what you truly want," Brakiss said.

I narrowed my eyes at him, trying to gauge if he was testing me again. If he was, I wanted him to know that it was not at all appreciated. He had no idea how much pain I was in. He could not know that I was hurting so badly that a part of me liked the idea of throwing myself into one of the nearby volcanos to end the pain. He could not know that another part of me was having trouble seeing what the point to living was now that I had no family left.

But perhaps that wasn't entirely true.

Jaina was also an orphan and Brakiss had taken her in and raised her as his own child. I knew I was too old now for him to actually raise me, but if he took me in as a student of the Force, would that not make us, in some ways, a family? Maybe not of blood but of kinship, and perhaps a common belief.

The Jedi were evil. Brakiss seemed to believe so, and if he did then it stood to reason that Jaina would too. After seeing the evidence for myself of what the Jedi could do, and obviously had no compunction about it, I couldn't honestly think back to those days at first meeting Skywalker and then Yoda and not feel intense surges of hatred.

"It's what I want," I said testily.

Brakiss's hand shot out and something made of metal was flung through the air at my chest so fast it was nothing more than a blur. On instinct, my free hand shot out ahead of it and grasped it before it crashed into me.

I looked down to see what it was, and gasped in shock.

It was cylindrical with blue grip strips encircling the fore-half of it. The pommel was braced with blue and thinned as it went along. Close to the pommel was a round clip, a pair of lights—one green and one red—and a red button with a grey dial in front of it.

I pressed down on the red button and a turquoise blade of energy shot out of the end of it for a little over a meter in length. The glow of the lightsaber lit up the area around me, and I could see the control panel for the stasis pods not too far away, near where Brakiss had been standing before he'd been flung across the room and broken his arm.

Which reminded me …

"That is yours," Brakiss said before I could ask. He still cradled his broken arm, but it seemed less stiff now, as if it had healed some. "Until you build your own. Take good care of it; I won't be giving you another."

I nodded. Now was my chance. "What happened to you? Earlier, I mean, when you broke your arm."

"That was your doing," Brakiss said brazenly, perhaps even proudly.

"How?"

"You tapped into your feelings of grief and hatred and used them as a weapon. They intensified to the point where your connection to the Force was beyond conscious thought. You reacted without intending to and inflicted harm on someone you perceived to have done you wrong."

"I … I'm sorry."

"Do not apologise. The arm will heal. That was your first step toward the dark side. You will control it in time. Follow me …"


Darth Nemuritor woke from his sleep, his eyes shooting wide to take in the pale glow of the Korriban sun creeping through the window underneath the thick curtains. His first instinct was to check his lover, who laid motionless on the bed they shared, breathing shallowly, her eyes closed tight. She was still asleep.

Sometimes his nightmares had the tendency of creeping into her dreams and waking her too. It did him no good to be reminded of the person he'd once been, before discovering true power, and he liked it less when Devess discussed it with him.

Though she had only been a little girl when they'd first met, her memory was infallible, and both of them remembered keenly the undeniable bond they'd felt between them at the time. At first, they'd attributed it to kinship, as they'd both been orphaned. But as they grew older, constantly in each other's company, it had blossomed into more.

Their singular hatred of the Jedi kept their bond strong. It was a hatred that would burn forever in both of them, igniting their passions, fuelling the power of the dark side that they both wielded so strongly against their enemies.

Even though Nemuritor had long since learned that it had in fact been Brakiss that had murdered his sister …