"Their command ship has exceptionally powerful jammers, so we can only hope Admiral Varko is able to knock them out. Until then, even our comlinks will be useless. The bombardment damaged our own jamming device, but our technicians are working on getting it back online as we speak…"

Major Vasch stood rooted before the main holotable, which showed a map of Singularity Base. He did not move except to gesture at different parts of the image in keeping with whatever particular subject or location he was prattling about. The members of his staff were scattered along the walls, monitoring and fiddling with their own precious computer consoles, their weak little minds filling the command center's air with the scent of anxiety. Spread out among them, Lord Silbus' entourage of Sith Acolytes and Marauders only magnified that fear as they fidgeted and whispered to one another, their generous hunger for violence suffusing the Force.

As he slowly paced around the holotable, Silbus spent much of his time pretending to study the map. With his nerves as frayed as they were, he did not trust himself to let his eyes linger on the major; after so many years inside his beloved academy, where the only Humans he ever had to deal with were the handful fit to be Force adepts, the Headmaster had been able to forget how he loathed that most absurdly prolific of species. To have to stoop to the level of being informed by a member of its ignorant masses was an indignity.

But for Silbus, this was one of the lesser trials on a day that already seemed fated to test him to his limits.

On an adjoining side from the major, flanked by her retinue of silent, masked assassins, stood Visas Marr, whose sudden appearance had been, for the Headmaster, unwelcome in particular but an at-least perfunctory relief in general. The presence of more Sith adepts meant the Republic invaders could be obliterated that much sooner.

The turbolaser barrage had annihilated the upper half of Trayus Academy's subterranean levels as well as its surface. Of the lower half, many of the sections that had survived were isolated by collapsing tunnels and passages, leaving most of the survivors—those lucky few—trapped. Nevertheless, Silbus had managed to assemble a party of Sith Marauders and Acolytes which happened to include Gorbus' friends, Zanjo and Yaiban. One acolyte, a sniveling Selkath who would never have survived the more exciting days of Revan's Empire, happened to mention that he had come from the deeper beast pens, and that they were relatively unscathed. The little runt was immediately sent back the way he had come with instructions for the Beastkeepers.

Marr had appeared and joined Silbus while he was still on his way to the command center. In her off-putting, oily monotone, the Miraluka told him some story of her deducing the Republic's intention to attack Malachor, then of a damaged hyperwave transceiver preventing her from warning the academy. Her vessel had only just been able to conduct her back to Malachor, and to slip around the battle in orbit.

She did not breathe a word of accusation against the Headmaster, much less did she gloat that he had underestimated the threat posed by the meddling Atton Rand—not because she wasn't arrogant enough, surely, but because she surmised that the time for that would come later. Or perhaps she just thought her silence and faux meekness would be enough to silently humiliate him. How Silbus raged within himself, unable to put her in her place, to rid himself of these vexations of mind and body…

Major Vasch continued to drone on. "The intruders have disabled most of the security monitors in primary corridor six, but we've ascertained that they're stationing squads down its length as a rear guard. The vanguard and the main body of troops are pressing on toward Security Zone C. Lieutenant Tallav's men are staying at this junction to slow them down…"

Silbus scratched at his neck, where blood had pooled and dried about the collar of his robe, and thought that perhaps he should amputate the rest of his olfactory tendrils when he got the chance.

He shook his head. His body still racked him with a hundred other aches and complaints, and he struggled to harness his endless frustrations, to burn them as fuel for the power of the dark side. It was imperative that he maintain his focus under these delicate circumstances. But there were other aggravations as well. One was a horrible, gnawing thought that he had forgotten something, some item of critical importance…

Every minute or two, he cast a wary glance over to a far corner of the command center, where the tome of Fulminius Graush and his two datapads were neatly stacked on an unused console. No, he had certainly not forgotten anything. Such a neurotic idea had to be coming from outside. Pausing his orbit of the holotable, he took a moment to close his eyes, casting his perception outward…

And yes, there was another presence. It was not Sith, but neither was it Atton Rand; that one was always at least trying to conceal himself. This being was different, of a kind that Silbus had not sensed since before Darth Revan's disappearance: like Malachor's primary, it was distant and on the wane, yet it gave off the unmistakable strength of light.

A sudden twinge in Silbus' forehead forced him to open his eyes, which fell on Major Vasch. The whelp looked over the hologram at him, his pompous façade of professionality cracking. Pointing to some other part of the hologram, he said, "We're going to have to make a last-ditch attempt to blunt their assault here, at Security Zone C. Their sentinel droids aren't going to last long in those close quarters, but by the time their soldiers arrive, my men may be reduced to quarter strength." His eyes swept across the black-clad men and women who stood impatiently around him. "My lord—and my lady—I fear you and your Sith are our only hope of winning the day."

The Headmaster rounded on the little man, disguising his grimace of pain as one of annoyance. "Your deference is as great a credit to you as your wisdom, major. But why don't you explain to me how these intruders managed to penetrate so far into the base so quickly?"

A cascade of emotions rippled across the major's features, as though he was shocked to find his audience actually paying attention to him. "Well yes, my lord, that was a cause of great alarm for us as well! They took us by surprise with the bombardment—"

"Leave off with your excuses and answer the question, you mumbling ignoramus!" Silbus thrust a finger at the hovering blue holomap, where a small section along the edge of the base's inner ring area was highlighted in yellow. "A facility such as this should have blast doors, security fields, and other passive defenses. Element of surprise or not, those should have slowed the Republic down where your toy soldiers could not."

"We do have such defenses, my lord," protested the major breathlessly. "But the Republic has been disabling them—what's more, they anticipated all of our attempts to flank them. It's as though they have intimate knowledge of this facility—"

"Because they do have such knowledge," Marr interrupted, turning her eyeless face toward the Headmaster. "They have the schematics and all of the necessary command codes to shut down those defenses. Atton Rand supplied them."

"So he did," Silbus humored, studying the map again. "But what is their objective? Why is that security zone the site of the final battle? Why not attack us here, at the command center?"

"My lord, if I may—"

Currents of black thought twisted in the room, and Silbus' mind flooded with the temptation to telekinetically slam the major's head against the floor so hard that his wasted brains would spill out. But that was the appropriate way for a brute to respond to such a creature, so although he would not object to one of the many brutes in attendance doing so, the Headmaster himself responded only with a choice rebuke. "Silence, you fool!"

Ignoring the exchange, Marr spoke again. "It can only be the Mass Shadow Generator. The inner ring of the facility houses its control stations and its machinery. They will try to sabotage it, or more likely reprogram it, since they have its control codes—and Malachor itself will be destroyed."

At this, the hushed conversations of the Sith Acolytes and Marauders fell completely silent. Sweating contemptibly, Major Vasch cast dreadful glances between the Miraluka and the Headmaster, cognizant of his own superfluity but unwilling to completely disengage from the discussion. Even Silbus was genuinely appalled. His academy destroyed, priceless artifacts and archives lost, hundreds of Sith dead, himself embarrassed by Visas Marr—and all on the eve of the coming of the true Sith…

The Headmaster was confident that, with the right maneuvers, he had a good chance of salvaging his position within the Sith Order. There was an academy on Thule, after all. It was almost totally uninhabited, but that was soon to change, and it wouldn't be too much trouble to wrest control away from that meddling Hoctu woman. More urgently, he needed to ensure that the news of the Republic's attack was phrased properly when it reached the Exile, so that she would understand it had no connection to any supposed neglect on Silbus' part. More likely than not, something would have to be arranged in order to keep Marr's testimony from muddying the waters.

However, that would all be a moot point if the battle itself was lost. He could survive a catastrophe such as the one that had already occurred. But if Malachor itself were to be destroyed… Well, assuming Silbus escaped that cataclysm, it was certain that the Exile would make him wish he hadn't.

His thirteen remaining tendrils began to slowly writhe again as a fresh pain passed between them and his forehead. "We will not allow that to happen," he declared, shaking a fist at the holomap. "Students—to me!"

The Marauders and Acolytes pressed in around the holotable, their minds charged with anticipation as Silbus formed and relayed his plan to them. When he had finished, he inclined his head toward the garrison commander with mock warmth. "And as for you, dear Major Vasch, it is as you said all along. Your men need only hold the Republic troops until my students arrive. They will make a slaughter of them!"

"I have complete faith that they will, my lord, but what about their ships outside?"

"Think nothing of their ships. I have already arranged something for them."

"Very good, my lord." The major shut the holotable off and finally disappeared as the jubilant Sith adepts formed into two groups. Silbus was momentarily caught up in the mood of their excited chatter.

Until he saw Marr approaching him. "Surely you are not so ignorant as to think mere soldiers are the true threat to us here. Atton is fighting with the Republic."

Silbus chafed at the Miraluka's insolence, but he maintained control of himself. "Of course he is here. But I am more concerned…" He lowered his voice. "…about his Jedi friend. It seems you were right; he did find one to join his cause."

"No—he has found two."

"Two?"

"I sensed them. Both are holding back—one far away from the fighting…" She paused, then exhaled. "Another farther still."

The Headmaster reached into the Force again, more deeply than he had before. He sensed the same distant light that he had—glaring from afar off like the beams of a desert world's primary, needling at his mind. And yes, closer, deeper in the waves of darkness that covered Malachor V, there was some ripple of presence… Presences, rather, that were not of the Sith. One had to be Rand: slippery as always, found one moment, lost the next. The other was different, difficult to sense, yet not through camouflage but through weakness.

He came back to himself. "You… are correct. What do you intend to do?"

With a twitch of her head, the woman indicated her confederates. "They are meant to strike from the shadows, not in the plain light of battle. We will wait in the control area. If Atton or his Jedi allies manage to penetrate it, we will know."

Looking over her shoulder, Silbus studied the statuesque assassins—his assassins, he remembered with ire. "I fear you will need some help, Marr… After all, Rand and his friends have outmaneuvered you for this long." He turned to the students. "Yaiban! Zanjo! Gorbus!"

When the three arrived, he gestured first at the Twi'lek and then at Zanjo, the Iktotchi. "You two will accompany me to the control area. And Gorbus, I have a special task for you. When your confederates move up the corridor toward the security zone, I want you to stay behind."

The Human's mouth fell open, and his friends traded frowns. "Headmaster, you're taking me away from the battle? Why?"

"So that you may have a chance to finally live out your dream, Gorbus—and thereby put it to rest. You've always wanted to meet a Jedi, haven't you?"

Kaevee had to force herself to not hurry as she descended the dropship's loading ramp and walked out under the oppressive gloom of Malachor V. Though her pet stayed at her side, faithful as ever, and Cole followed a few paces behind, she didn't think anything or anyone could put her at ease as long as she remained on this graveyard of a planet.

The loose ring formed around the landing zone by the towering tank droids was partially filled in by Republic troopers, who clustered in squads behind prefabricated flexisteel barricades. Kaevee didn't go right up to them, but walked along the inside of the ring close enough to see what was going on. A brief eruption of laser fire and more distant explosions drew her to the northwest side, which looked out from the base.

After about two hundred yards the more or less flat ground disappeared into a stomach-twisting expanse of towering, jagged mountains and spires separated by huge cracks and crevices which formed walking paths. Squinting out into the murky landscape, she saw movement as huge, lumbering forms emerged from those openings, making heavy footfalls against the dry earth. "The hell are those?" Cole asked warily from behind her.

The darkness of the plain was briefly lit a dazzling scarlet as the tank droids opened fire—next to their heavy lasers, the rifle fire from the troopers looked like sparks. They afforded a glimpse of the approaching figures: shambling bipedal lizards, easily a meter or so taller than any Human, burly and covered in scaly armor. After coming onto the level ground, the monsters dropped to all fours and charged.

They never came close to the landing zone. The droids' cannons blasted craters into the ground at their feet, put huge holes through their thick torsos, blasted their heads and limbs into pulp. Observing with repugnance as their dismembered remains collapsed into the smoke and darkness, Kaevee absently said, "Atton mentioned them. I think he called them storm beasts."

They came in waves, but each of their lethargic advances were rebuffed just as thoroughly in brief clamors of thunder and light, and soon enough the troopers stopped pitching in with their rifles.

Impelled by curiosity, Kaevee stretched out with the Force into the crevices of the ruinous landscape, where quickly enough she sensed one of the approaching storm beasts. In a way its mind felt about the same as that of her laigrek or any other animal, diffuse and vaporous, just a shade when compared to a sentient being's thoughts and sentiments. But there was another element there, something beyond words that just felt wrong. Everything on Malachor felt wrong, but there was a stronger trace of its dark taint in the storm beasts. It didn't feel quite strong enough to actually block her from bonding with the creature. All the same, she drew back as though she had touched something that turned out to be covered in filth.

She continued her circle around the inside of the landing zone, her eyes wandering. Between the mammoth transports and tank droids, the inhospitable landscape, and the stormswept skies, there was ugliness everywhere she looked. From the whispers that had reached her over the years, she had always known that something terrible had happened to Malachor V, but actually being there… The sense of desolation was far worse than anything she had felt from the ruins of Dantooine. Dantooine's wound was personal; in an obscure way it felt almost comforting even as it pained her. Malachor, on the other hand, had no such connection, and that only made it worse; it was so monstrously huge as to swallow all personality, all meaning and memory of there being anything else in the galaxy.

"I am a Jedi, the Force is with me, I am a Jedi, the Force is with me," she murmured, calling to the light again and again, trying her best to center herself. And the Force was with her, but Malachor's corrupting atmosphere was constantly gnawing at her will and concentration. The clarity of her Force sense seemed to come and go at random, but when she had it, it was clearer than she would have expected. She could pick out Atton's signature, somewhat vague in its location, but distinctly over there, somewhere deep inside the base; and deeper, past him, darker presences…

She glanced up at the opaque sky, imagining the battle in orbit, thinking of Atris alone in her quarters aboard the Valiant. Kaevee wondered if her clarity of sense was entirely her own, or if the former Jedi was augmenting it from afar. Was she only able to see through the awful darkness of this world at all with Atris' help?

Returning to the dropship, she found Major Hawkins standing at the bottom of the ramp, flanked by two of his men. "Kaevee!" he called as she approached. "Have you sensed anything?"

The Padawan shook herself out of her wandering thoughts. "Um, no, I haven't. Sir."

The man nodded as though deeply satisfied. "That's good. But I need you to stay aboard the dropship. You'll be safer there in case we're attacked by anything worse than those irritating lizards. Is that clear?"

He was giving her orders. She was basically another soldier, as far as these people were concerned, but there was nothing she could do about it. "Yes—" The finality of his tone almost made her say, Yes Master. "—sir. Do you know how they're doing inside?"

Hawkins led the way up the ramp. "The battle's going well so far. The garrison is badly equipped and wasn't expecting an attack. The sentinel droids are already close to MSG Control, and our men should be inside there soon. Carry on." With that, he swiveled abruptly and marched off toward the bridge.

Putting him out of her mind, Kaevee went to the back of the ship, where they had been for the ride down. "Looks like we've just been worrying for nothing," Cole remarked as he lowered himself into a jumpseat.

Standing by the window, Kaevee turned and frowned at him.

"What's the matter, you disagree? We've got it easy—just hang back here and leave the fighting to the fighters."

"I'm not so sure," she said slowly, shaking her head. "Can't you feel something's wrong here?"

With some apparent reluctance, Cole let his smile fade. "No, can you? Do we need to sound the alarm?"

"No, it's just— This whole place, it's evil, it's full of darkness, it's… It's a trouble magnet. Just think of everything we've already been through. Why would things go easy for us all of a sudden?"

"I dunno. Maybe the universe stopped hating us for a day. It's not impossible." There was a long, creaking chirp from the laigrek as it poked around under the nearby jumpseats. Nodding at the creature, Cole added, "Ah, see? He agrees with me. Let's keep a little optimism here."

Grimacing, Kaevee looked back out the window, eying the battle-scarred wall surrounding Singularity Base.

"Why can't you Jedi ever just be glad to be alive," Cole needled, "and let other people have some peace of mind, instead of—"

"Be quiet," Kaevee said forcefully as she lowered herself to the floor. "I need to concentrate."

"Oh, be my guest. Don't let me disturb you."

Thinking better of wasting her breath on a retort, Kaevee shut her eyes and reached out with the Force again, but she found it more difficult than she had while walking outside the ship. Besides the aura of Malachor itself, every littlest sound jabbed at her concentration, from her laigrek moving about to Cole shifting on the jumpseat. And though it wasn't exactly the Force telling her, she could feel, she swore she could feel her would-be bodyguard's resentful stare on her back.

Mentally repeating her mantra, she tried to brute-force through the distractions, pushing her perceptions out into to the landscape, sweeping the eyes of her mind back and forth, falling out of her focus and scrambling back in. The troopers in the landing zone and the hapless storm beasts, the idling ships and hulking tank droids, the twisted landscape and the monolithic form of Singularity Base—they appeared to her sometimes clear, sometimes indistinct, and sometimes hidden altogether, swallowed up in the planet's shadows. But through it all, she felt a constant, penetrating sort of sound that she at first took for the psychic residue of the firefights inside the base, the wordless expressions that accompanied injury and death. In time she realized that it was the planet itself; Malachor's sound was a chorus of screams. If she stopped to listen to it by itself, she thought she would lose her mind.

Minutes dragged by—ten minutes, thirty, five?—each one more draining and disturbing than the last, and Cole kept yawning or popping his knuckles, but Kaevee gritted her teeth and tried to persist, remembering that people were counting on her to be alert. But whenever she sensed the dark-siders, they were never anywhere near the dropships, only inside the base—with Atton and the others.

Then, without warning, the shadows parted completely and the sounds and other distractions of Kaevee's physical surroundings fell away. It was as though a beam from the sun had burst in through the roof of the dropship and fell on her alone, filling her with warmth and light. There was an unmistakable sort of personhood in the light as well, and she knew this time that it was Atris.

And Atris was telling her, wordlessly, to open her eyes. Kaevee did so, and at once the sense of rapture left her.

Looking up through the dropship's window, she fancied she could see a cluster of solid shadows moving beneath the dome of Malachor's already restless storm clouds. The split-second backdrop of a lightning burst showed them to be huge winged creatures, perhaps a dozen, gliding into view from beyond the lip of Singularity Base's outer wall.

Amazement drew Kaevee to her feet as she stared. The first thing it made her think of was Dantooine's flat-bodied brith, which seemed to almost swim through the atmosphere. But she had only seen brith fly alone, not in packs, and though she had always found them impressive, they were delicate and flimsy compared to the gargantuan bulk that these creatures carried along. They had no legs; past their wicked-looking, spine-studded wings, each one's mammoth body gave way to a muscular tail that ended with a spike the size of a harpoon. Their arms were as thick around as the trunk of any blba tree, and their claws were as long as a man's arm.

As the creatures came overhead and started circling down toward the landing zone, Kaevee almost pressed her face to the glass as she tried to keep them in view. She started at the sound of Cole's voice beside her, but kept her eyes up. "Now what in the galaxy are those things?"

"I've seen them in holos a long time ago," she realized, struggling with a hazy memory from some class in the Jedi Enclave. "I think they're called drexls."

"Okay… Don't suppose they'll just leave us alone?"

"No, I don't think so." Steeling herself, Kaevee reached out to the drexls as she had to the storm beasts—perhaps she could make the creatures go away, or even attack each other. Their minds felt strange. She expected the taint of the dark side, but there was also a kind of semi-solidity to their thoughts, as though each one had a hardened shell of purpose around its animal instincts, and Kaevee's own will broke against it like rain against stone. They were already under someone else's control.

Cole began to say something, but trailed off as a furious upward display of light began, a torrent of red rifle fire augmented by occasional large green pulses from the dropship's roof-mounted cannons. The former didn't seem to affect the drexls in their terrifyingly quick descent; the latter never hit them.

Seconds passed, and Kaevee heard Cole's comlink squawking with orders and chatter among the officers. She looked between the flashing skies and Cole's increasingly dismayed face, trying to keep her thoughts straight over the rising screams in the Force. Finally she broke and was just about to blurt out What do we do? when the dropship shook from one end to the other. She fell against a jumpseat, covering her head, Cole braced himself against a wall, and the laigrek shrieked.

More awful noises followed, impacts against the ground as loud as bombs, and metal crumbling and tearing. Then Cole was crouching in the center aisle of the dropship, waving an arm in a frantic beckoning gesture. Unable to hear his shouts, Kaevee stumbled over to find him in the process of opening an emergency exit hatch in the floor.

The ship rocked once and a section of the port wall dented inward, shattering the nearby viewports and scattering transparisteel. The hatch opened and Cole went first, trying to slide down the five-meter ladder that had extended, but mostly just falling next to it. Kaevee followed in the same way, and the laigrek simply jumped.

Deep in shadow, the ground underneath the dropship felt stable, but Kaevee was unsure on her feet. Before she realized it, the spacer had gotten an arm around her and they were shuffling over to one of the landing struts. He let her go as they crouched behind it and tried to get their bearings.

The landing zone was in chaos, its interior swarming with Republic soldiers who moments before had been holding its outer perimeter. The drexls were strafing them mercilessly, their tails and clawed mandibles crushing and ripping, turning men into streaks of blood and pulverized heaps in their passing. More arresting but no less deadly were the monsters that had landed among the troops. Kaevee struggled to process the sight of them—their skin an eerie, almost luminescent purple, they seemed move across the ground by a combination of slithering and pulling themselves with their clawed digits. They drew bursts and streams of blaster fire from every direction, but even their massive, billowing wings seemed impervious. As they rampaged through the soldiers, their tails whipped back and forth, slamming into the sides of transports, denting and buckling their hulls.

The report of weapon fire intensified, and Kaevee recognized the heavier, ground-rattling din of the tank droids' weapons and explosive impacts. There were more screams of metal. Not really wanting to see where that was happening, the Padawan stayed huddled against the landing strut, gaping out at the carnage. Desperately clutching the last of her nerves, she begged herself not to freeze, but to think, to act.

She managed to note that most of the soldiers who were still alive were running to the right, southeast, toward Singularity Base. As she parsed this out, Cole, who had been holding his comlink up to his ear and listening, put it away and jabbed her in the shoulder. "Major says get inside the base! Sounds like a good idea to me!"

Without waiting for a reply, he jogged to the other side of the dropship, facing the base's damaged wall, where he paused beside another landing strut. Following him with her pet in tow, Kaevee squinted and found the still-open door that Atton and the troops had taken to get inside. No stupid, suicidal heroics, he had told her, that's my job here. She wished for a million things at that moment, wished that Atton had taken her with him, or that he had stayed. She wished that she was with Atris on the Valiant, or back on Dantooine, or anywhere else in the galaxy…

Cole looked back at her, nodded once, and sprinted out into the maelstrom. Sucking in a breath, Kaevee mentally told her laigrek to keep up and tore after him.

She might have expected the will of the Force to bear her through the welter of strife and horror that was the next few minutes, but if the Force was with her, there was no sense of that in her mind, only the singular, all-devouring thought of, Get to the door, get to the door, get to the DOOR! She careened between and bounced off of Republic soldiers fleeing the same direction. She hurdled over or stepped on or in bodies or uncertain reddish masses that had once been bodies.

Far, near, and on every side the strafing drexls sliced huge, blurring paths of destruction between the landed starships, buffeting Kaevee with surges of wind that carried hails of dirt, blood, or other debris. Besides Human bodies, she passed huge mounds of steaming flesh and gristle; the tank droids had ponderously turned around and been casting their barrages of eye-searing firepower toward the handful of monsters that were rampaging exclusively on the ground.

Off to her left, beside the half-crumpled hull of a battle droid carrier, one such drexl was thrashing about on its side and letting out bellowing shrieks that carried even over the din of battle; its left arm and wing had been blown off. The landing zone flashed red amidst another heavy laser barrage, and the drexl's upper torso and the back half of the ship vanished into a shower of flame, shrapnel, and tissue.

Kaevee lost her footing and fell prone as the shockwave rattled the ground. Barely noticing, she crawled, got up and ran, fell and crawled again, got up and ran again. For a moment she was back to being twelve, and the Force wasn't with her. There were more explosions and more flames, and as their glow turned the landscape into a field of pyres, they looked the same as those on Dantooine, and the Force wasn't with her.

As she ran, causality and distinction seemed to unravel; her anguished legs carried her past the same toppled tank droids or smoking heaps of metal multiple times. She was looking for Emon as much as she was trying to follow Cole; she was on Dantooine, but Dantooine was somehow on Malachor, and Malachor was sucking everything down into whatever bottomless atrocity had happened there, where people were dead but still screaming.

The madness left her when that same beam of light in the Force found her again; the visions of the Enclave disappeared like banished shadows, and Malachor's hellish psychic noise fell behind the right-now noises of Kaevee's surroundings. She was running across the plain between the landing zone and the base, the skies thick above her, and the last of the soldiers spread out around her. Like each of them, she was dispassionately betting on the chance that the drexls might just miss her.

Remembering again where she was, she spotted Cole up ahead—Cole running for the door. Get to the door.