TWELVE
It took four days to get back to the Hawk, and Pellek had been on few worse marches. Dustil became increasingly difficult to manage as he tried to work himself out of the collar, so Pellek was forced to keep a heavy hand on him through the Force. Such expansive use of the Force left her without enough reserves to finish Healing her arms or do anything about the broken ribs she knew Carth was sporting. After the first night, she and Carth decided to use stims to keep going instead of stopping to rest, but that made them both jumpy and short-tempered, snapping at each other and hearing Sith that weren't there. A few did attack them, but they were surprisingly easy to defeat, going down with just a shot of Carth's blaster or a swing of her blade. Pellek had never been so glad to see the Ebon Hawk's battered form.
Carth left her with Dustil and went to the cockpit to take them into orbit. Pellek sat across from Dustil in the main hold, back against the cold wall of the ship, and tried to fall asleep. She managed to get into a light doze, but the stims hadn't worn off enough to let her actually fall asleep. She found herself lost in a confusing maze of half-dreams, images real and imagined.
"Pellek," she heard. Pellek opened her eyes to see Carth standing over her.
"Time for my watch, Admiral?" she asked, hauling herself wearily to her feet.
Carth shook his head. "I used the last stim before we took off, so I won't be able to sleep for another eight hours. I need you to do something else." His gaze drifted to Dustil, who was leaning dejectedly against a bulkhead. The younger man's eyes were barely open. Every few seconds, he would jerk spasmodically, and Pellek would feel a surge of anger from him. It wouldn't take much longer for him to get out of the collar.
Pellek had the distinct sense she wouldn't like what Carth was going to ask her to do. "Yeah?" she asked warily.
Bao-Dur appeared at her side. "Listen to him, General, it's important." He smiled at her. "And before you ask, yes, Atton is fine."
"You have some kind of Force connection with Dustil, right, a Bond or something?" Carth asked.
Pellek automatically reached for the connection she had made with Dustil and bumped up against the barrier she had created. "It's not a Bond—that's something much more intimate, usually between Masters and Padawans. I'm connected to Dustil through the Force, but it's very superficial, just a way for us to use the Force through each other."
Carth waved his hand dismissively. "Fine, whatever. I need you to—look at him, through the Force or whatever you people do, and tell me what's wrong with him."
What's wrong with him is that he's a damned Sith, Pellek thought to herself. She shuddered at the thought of opening the connection between herself and Dustil again—he was too powerful, not to mention that he might kill her as soon as look at her. "I don't know, Admiral," she began.
"There is something wrong with him," Bao-Dur said, frowning at Dustil. "Can't you see it in the Force? He's shadowed, but I don't believe he is himself Dark."
Carth crossed his arms over his chest. His expression was hard. "Jedi, I appreciate your reluctance, but I have to know before we get back to Republic Space if Dustil has lost his mind, or if he's fallen to the Dark Side, or if there's something else at work here. I can't determine that myself."
"General, you have to help him." Bao-Dur was more agitated than she had ever seen him, looking from her to Dustil and back again. "Someone as powerful as he cannot be permitted to fall."
"Do you understand what I'm saying, Pellek?" Carth asked urgently. He grabbed her arm and she looked into his exhausted, anguished eyes. "I cannot permit him to reenter Republic space if he has fallen. I have to know, now, before we enter hyperspace."
Pellek paced away from the Admiral and the ghost. Someone's life, someone's soul, hung in the balance, and it would be her fault if she failed. "I don't know if I can," she answered both of them. "I'm not nearly as—I'm just a mediocre Jedi."
"Please, General."
"Please, Pellek."
Pellek remembered Trayus Core, remembered watching helplessly as Mira's life was taken. She closed her eyes. "All right. I'll try."
"You lose again, Human," the green Twi'lek said cheerfully. "You owe me half your rations tonight."
Bastila nodded distractedly, eyes on the flat prairie outside the window. The grass was the wrong color, but it reminded her of Dantooine. Because she had been apprenticed to Master Zhar, she had trained there instead of at the Jedi Academy on Coruscant. Dantooine felt more like home to her than any other planet.
"Hey, double or nothing, what do you say?" the Twi'lek asked. She leaned over the table, lekku unconsciously rubbing against the collar around her neck.
Bastila started to nod—she was rarely hungry these days, anyway, and another game of pazaak would fill some more time in the endless afternoon. But a shadow fell over the table and the Twi'lek made herself scarce.
Gellan sat down across from her in the Twi'lek's seat. "Sabanyl is a card firaxa, you know," he said mildly. "You're the only one she can convince to play her anymore."
Bastila shrugged. "I have never cared for the game," she said.
Gellan reached across the table for her arm. "Master Jedi—" he began.
She jerked her arm back. "That is no longer my title," she snapped. "Do you see the Force around me? What kind of a Jedi cannot use her powers? What kind of a Jedi spends week after week as nothing more than fodder for these—these monsters? I am no more a Jedi than anyone else in this prison."
Gellan said nothing for several moments, and Bastila continued to seethe. In another life, she might have worked to suppress her anger, tried to meditate it away, but what did it matter now? She couldn't touch the Force, Light or Dark, so why not be angry? She had every right to be, trapped on this planet without hope of escape. She had thought she was so clever, that she could find out what was causing the Darkness on this planet all by herself, that the Force would guide her. Now, the only time she felt the Force was when it was being pulled out of her in the cube sessions. She spent the rest of her time trying not to lose her mind while she waited for the session that would eventually kill her.
"How long have you been here?" Gellan asked her.
"Thirty-one standard days," she replied automatically. Carth, Pellek, and Dustil should have come back for her by now. There was only one explanation for their absence, and that was they had been killed on the Sith planet. The Vintari would kill Gellan soon enough, and then she would be entirely alone.
"So you're still counting," Gellan said. She looked up at him, wondering at the significance. He smiled. "It means you haven't given up, Bastila. I thought I had, even after the Deralian woman escaped—I expected to die here until I met you."
Something about Gellan's words penetrated her angry fog. "Deralian?" she asked. "How do you know?"
"We all have a certain look," he replied. "She was only here for a couple of days, and she was in bad shape physically when she arrived. She just disappeared the first time they took her for her session—rumor has it that she destroyed an entire wing of the building on her way out."
Bastila remembered the argument between Carth and Dustil on the speeder. She leaned across the table. "What was her name?" she asked urgently.
"I didn't speak to her myself, but I heard her say her name was Case Lanatal."
Bastila gasped. "Case was here? Why didn't you tell me this before?" she demanded.
Gellan raised his eyebrows at her change of mood. "My apologies, Master Jedi. If I had known that you were interested, I certainly would have told you. I take it that you know her? Is she also a Jedi?"
Before Bastila could answer, the nearby door hissed open. Everyone in the common area looked up, and Bastila didn't need the Force to feel the fear in the room. She clenched her teeth in anger, disgusted by the fear in her own stomach. The Vintari guard scanned the room before pointing to Gellan and gesturing outside. Bastila's hand reflexively tightened on Gellan's arm. It had taken him three days to recover last time they took him. She wasn't sure he would survive another session.
The Vintari snapped something in its own language and held up the collar controls threateningly. Gellan sighed and stood. He started toward the door, but turned back quickly and kissed Bastila hard on the mouth. She gaped up at him to see him smiling. "Have hope, Master Jedi," he said. He turned without waiting for a response and walked out the door.
Bastila brought her hand slowly to her lips.
Pellek was trapped in a windstorm. Rain lashed at her face like cold needles and the wind tugged at her robes and saber. The sky above her was nearly black. Pellek brought up her arms to shield her face and felt back along the Force toward the Ebon Hawk, where Bao-Dur remained to anchor her in reality. The storm was Dustil's creation, an imaginary storm on an imaginary Telos, a barrier to keep her out of his head.
"Dustil, for Qel-droma's sake, I'm trying to help you!" she called. In response, lightning flashed in the sky above her, illuminating the field of hifa she was slogging through. Cursing under her breath, Pellek kept hold of the Force connection between her and Dustil and kept pushing forward, the tall plants scratching her and dropping chaff down her robes. "All this place needs is some kath hounds," she muttered. In the distance she heard howling. "I was kidding!" she shouted into the rain.
Abruptly, the hifa ended and Pellek found herself on Espol again. "Oh, for the love of Hoth," she growled. She didn't ever want to be back on this wreck of a planet again. Dustil ran past her, stumbling badly on a leg covered in blood. Something Dark was chasing him. Pellek reached for her lightsaber but found that she was unable to move. She was only meters away from him, but it appeared that she was to be a spectator only in this—dream, or memory, or whatever it was.
"Show yourself!" Dustil shouted, his green blade out, his back to a wide chasm. He was trapped. The Dark shadow leapt at him, and Pellek gasped when Dustil fell backward from the cliff with the shadow. A woman, running with the speed of the Force, dove at the edge of the canyon and flung her hand downward.
"There's no way," Pellek whispered. But to her amazement, the woman pulled backward and she saw Dustil's hand and then his head come over the edge of the cliff. He pulled himself up the rest of the way and rolled onto his back next to the woman.
The woman, of course, was Revan. Pellek hadn't seen her in ten years, and she was surprised to find that she wasn't a young woman anymore. The eyes were the same, as was the determined set of her jaw, but she wasn't the woman Pellek had last seen leaving for the Rim after the war.
"You escaped?" Dustil was asking Revan. He looked exhausted, and was no doubt in a great deal of pain from the nasty gash in his leg.
Revan placed her hands over the wound and closed her eyes. Her hands glowed as she said, "Apparently, the True Sith haven't figured out stealth belt technology. I saw one of the Sith go after you and had to stop it, since I'm the one who ran you through to start. But I'm going back."
"What?" Dustil yelped, sitting up and yanking his leg back. "What do you mean, you're going back? They'll kill you!"
Revan shook her head, jaw clenched. Pellek knew that nothing Dustil could say would change her mind now. "There's a holocron in that cave, Dustil, and I think it's the final piece, the last thing to lead us to the source of all of this. I think this is what I've been chasing, and if I find it, I think I can go home." She pushed her hair back. "If I can," she said quietly, eyes on the ground. "You'll feel it, through our Bond, if I fall. If that happens, Dustil, you have to come find me. You have to kill me."
Dustil leaned in close to her, and Pellek could see his love for her. It wasn't romantic love, but it was love nonetheless. "Let me help you," he said.
She was already shaking her head. "I have to do this alone."
Dustil grabbed her hands. "Let me take the Dark from you. I can do it, through our Bond. You do what you have to do, and whatever they do to you, you won't fall."
"No, Dustil, it's too dangerous. You might fall yourself," Revan said. Pellek was surprised at the look of genuine concern on her face. The Revan she had known didn't waste time worrying about others' decisions or the effect her decisions had on them.
The determination in Dustil's face was a mirror image of Revan's. "I won't." He closed his eyes and Pellek could feel through her own weak connection to him the strength of his Bond with Revan. He did something with their Bond and opened his eyes. He smiled. "It's done. Now go, but if I feel one flicker of fear from you, I'm coming for you."
There were tears in Revan's eyes. She waved her hand in a familiar way, and the strength of the Persuasion reached all the way to Pellek. "You will go back to the ship."
Dustil stood and staggered away from her. He waved his hand to counter her power. "What—Case, what are you doing? Don't—"
Revan waved her hand again. "You will go back to the ship. You will not remember this. You will not come after me unless I fall." Dustil shook his head hard, but Pellek saw the moment the Persuasion took hold. He mumbled something and turned away from the chasm, toward his ship.
Revan remained crouched on the ground for another moment, watching Dustil leave. Then the hard look came back to her face and she walked away.
"So that's what happened," Dustil said beside her, and Pellek found herself abruptly back on his imaginary Telos. She was sitting next to him on the shore of a lake surrounded by scrub brush and trees. It was still raining, but the black sky had lightened to pale gray. Dustil looked at her, a bit of a smile on his face. His hair was plastered to his head by the rain. "You're not supposed to be here," he said.
Pellek shrugged. "Try telling that to the Admiral. He doesn't really care about what Force users can or can't do. He just expects us to wave our hands and work it out. So here I am."
"He thinks I've fallen, doesn't he?" Dustil asked.
"Have you?"
Dustil stretched out his legs and rubbed a hand across his sodden hair. "I couldn't remember what happened on Espol, and I couldn't understand where all the Darkness was coming from." He shook his head. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly a model Jedi, and a lot of that anger is mine. But some of it isn't. So, no, I don't think I've fallen. But Case is in trouble, and we have to find her."
Pellek couldn't stop herself from saying, "I can't believe she did that to you." The idea of purging Darkness through someone else was abhorrent to her.
Dustil rounded on her, anger on his face. "I chose to do it. You saw that. No one made me do anything. I did it for her, because she's much closer to the Dark than I am. It's not easy for either of us, but it's harder for her. She's my Master, and we help each other."
"That's the thing about her, Dustil. She always makes you think it's your decision." Pellek glared out at the lake.
She felt Dustil's anger, then felt him force it down with effort. When he spoke, his voice was calm. "So are you convinced?" he asked. "Would you mind taking this damn collar off of me now?"
Pellek decided not to tell him that it was his life which had hung in the balance, not his freedom. She tugged backward on her connection to Bao-Dur and opened her eyes on the Hawk. Bao-Dur was still in the main hold, hovering anxiously nearby.
"You did it," he said.
Pellek shook her head. "I didn't do anything. He remembered what happened, what he agreed to do for Revan. I was just there as a witness."
Bao-Dur cocked his head at her. "Do you think he would have been able to remember without your help? You once had a Force connection with Revan, too, remember?"
"That was a long time ago," she said. She looked over at Dustil, still slumped to the side with the collar around his neck. "I guess I should give the Admiral the good news." She got up, feeling her knees creak—how long had she been meditating?—and started toward the cockpit.
"General," Bao-Dur said. She turned back to see him watching her seriously. "You know you have to save Revan, too, don't you?"
Pellek sighed. "I know." Bao-Dur smiled, then faded out.
"Sure, sure," Pellek muttered, walking up to the cockpit. Carth was in the pilot's seat, dead asleep, with his blaster and the collar controls in his lap. She looked at her chrono and saw with a groan that she'd been in Dustil's head for nearly ten hours. She lightened her step with the Force and gently removed both items from Carth's lap. She set the blaster down in the co-pilot seat and took the collar controls back with her.
She knew from experience that after three days of stims, Carth would be out for at least sixteen hours. Pellek would let Dustil out of the collar, and then she intended to sleep for about two days. He could pilot the damn ship to Revan.
Bastila was standing at the window when the common room door opened and Tepai entered with Follani and several guards. "Please return to your quarters," she ordered. The Vintari's voice was perfectly pleasant, but there was no missing the titansteel undergirding her words. Bastila clenched her fists but started toward the interior door. Tepai held her arm as she passed. "Please remain, Bastila Shan," she said.
It took only moments for the room to clear. "What is this about, Tepai?" she asked, pleased her voice remained even.
Tepai smiled slightly, her head fur serenely blue. "I knew that you were important, Bastila, but I did not know why. Startol wanted just to take the Force from you, but I urged patience. And now we find that you know the powerful Jedi who has been looking for us. What does she know, Bastila?"
"Looking for—" Bastila began. Realization dawned, and a slow horror crept across her face. "Are you the True Sith?" she whispered.
"The True Sith are a belief," Follani said, her fur as blue as Tepai's.
Bastila could feel herself paling. She had known the Vintari were doing something Dark, but she had never considered that they were themselves Sith, or disciples of the Sith. She had been wrong, arrogant to come in here alone. "Then you were behind everything," she said, thinking of the Mandalorian Wars, Revan's rise to power, Malak, Traya, the Jedi Massacre of Katarr.
Tepai smiled. "Not everything. There are others who believe they are Sith. We did not learn of the Sith way until your Jedi enslaved us. The holocron that Startol found showed us our true potential and helped us defeat your Jedi. Now we have no need to attack your Jedi directly—others do our work for us." Her smiled disappeared. "Who is Case Lanatal, Bastila?"
Bastila shook her head. "She is just a woman I haven't seen in more than five years," she replied.
Tepai nodded, then spoke over her shoulder in Vintari to the guards in the hallway. Two of them half-dragged, half-carried Gellan into the room and tossed him roughly to the ground. He fell hard on outstretched hands and failed to rise. Bastila sucked in her breath but was gratified to see that he was still breathing. "What you are doing is monstrous, Tepai," she said quietly. Out of the corner of her eye, Bastila saw Follani shift uncomfortably at her words.
"We simply have different knelta, how do you say, philosophies," Tepai responded. "When your Jedi enslaved my people, they did not value our lives. This is but the same." She brought her hands together and looked at Gellan, now slowly getting his knees under him. "He has had much Force to take, but his value is nearly gone. If you do not tell us who Case is and why she was looking for us, we will take him back for another session with the cube."
"That will kill him!" Bastila protested.
Tepai nodded. "Yes. But you can save his life."
Bastila looked desperately around. The guards were impassive, as was Tepai. Gellan had gotten himself to his hands and knees, but didn't appear to have heard Tepai's words. Follani wouldn't meet her eyes. "Case left Vintar weeks ago," Bastila lied, hoping it was true. "I believe she has returned to Republic space."
Tepai narrowed her eyes, head fur going dark. Bastila was sure the Vintari was scanning her with the Force, and it made her feel dirty, violated. "She's lying," Tepai announced briskly. "Take him to my collection room," she ordered the guards. They hauled Gellan up by his arms and pushed him out of the room.
"No, wait!" Bastila cried.
"If you knew something, you would have told me," Tepai said. She turned to leave the room. "I look forward to feeling Gellan Mar joining the Force. Follani, please take Bastila for a session of her own."
Bastila knew she had do to something, anything, to stop this, but before she could move, one of the guards gave her a vicious shock with the collar and she was hustled out of the room. By the time she got her senses back, she was in the collection room with Follani across from her.
"I am sorry, Bastila Shan," Follani said. "I wish we had gone to the Force-users camp."
The panic in Bastila's chest flared up anew. The thought of spending the rest of her life in this hell was too much to bear—she could envision the days of unremitting boredom, interspersed only with the violation of the cube. She did not think she would survive long. And in the meantime, the Vintari would continue stealing Force adepts to fuel their Dark plans. Bastila felt with certainty that this moment, this decision, was important, that the future of the Galaxy hung in the balance.
Follani waved her hand and the collar-induced fog cleared out of Bastila's head, leaving only the familiar tug of the cube on the Force. Bastila closed her eyes and concentrated on pulling back on the Force. The cube was strong, but she managed to hold onto a tiny filament of the Force. She opened her eyes and saw Follani watching her with interest. It was apparent that the child knew she was doing something, but wasn't sure what. Bastila thought she had enough Force powers available to her to put some Persuasion in her voice. Though apparently older and more powerful that Bastila had initially thought, Follani was still a child. She thought she could probably force Follani to do what she wanted.
Bastila opened her mouth to speak and remembered the feeling of disgust she had whenever Tepai scanned her with the Force. Would overpowering a child's mind be any different? Persuasion was a Light side power, but it never felt like it. You can do it too, Princess. Bastila sighed and pulled the Persuasion away. "Follani," she said without the Force, "do you think what Tepai is doing is right? Do you agree with her?"
The child shifted in her seat. "She says the only way to protect ourselves is to be stronger than everyone else. Only when we control the Force are we safe."
The pictures of the Children's Massacre she had seen in the archives came to mind. Bastila knew that the Vintari had only started their "collection" plan after they had themselves been enslaved by the Jedi-turned-Sith. The holocron Startol and Tepai found must have persuaded them to embrace the philosophy of the Sith themselves. Bastila had studied a few Sith holocrons in the last several years and knew how powerful they could be.
She could feel the Force draining away and worried that she was already too late for Gellan. "Your sister escaped to the camp, didn't she?" Bastila asked Follani.
Follani frowned. "Yes, Limae said she didn't want to do this. She said Tepai was a bad person. But Tepai says Limae was the bad person, because she didn't use her gifts to help our people."
Bastila leaned down. "But you don't think that, do you?"
Follani rubbed her head fur anxiously. "I don't—I don't know," she said finally. "I don't think she would have wanted your friend to die just because you wouldn't help us."
"Help me escape," Bastila whispered. "You can come with us."
Follani rocked back and forth in her chair for a few moments. Bastila glanced anxiously at the cube. The Force was still being pulled out of her, and she could feel herself weakening. In another few minutes, she wouldn't have the strength to escape. She readied the tiny store of the Force she had held onto and wondered how she would overpower Tepai. Then, abruptly, Follani waved her hand and the pull of the cube stopped. She pressed a button on a datapad and the collar around Bastila's neck clicked open. "I don't want to do this anymore," Follani said in a small voice.
Bastila fell back in her chair, reveling in the sudden explosion of sensation around her. She could feel, see, smell everything again, like she had just woken up from a long sleep. She pulled on the Force and could tell that her powers were still dulled from the cube. She hoped she would have enough reserves to escape. Bastila walked around the table to Follani and kneeled down in front of her. "Thank you, Follani. That was very brave of you, and we'll both have to stay brave until we get out of here. Can you take me to Gellan?"
Follani smiled at the compliment and nodded. "He's down the hall with Tepai. We'll have to pretend you're still in the collar. Can you put the open part under your hair?"
Bastila spun the collar around and tugged her hair out of its tails so that it spilled over her shoulders. She regretted the absence of her lightsaber, but there was no time to look for it. She reached out with the Force to feel for Gellan and was rewarded by a kick from Follani. She looked down at the girl in surprise.
"Don't do that!" Follani said, fur pale. "They can tell that you are using the Force!" She stomped over to the door and palmed it open. "Walk in front of me and don't do anything dumb."
Bastila quickly swallowed her smile. The girl was right, of course. She obediently walked in front of Follani down the featureless hallway. The hum of many Force collars was like a dull headache against her Force senses, and she realized why she only saw Tepai when she was actually using the cube.
"Here," Follani whispered, and Bastila stopped in front of a doorway flanked by two of the guards she had seen in the common area. "Leave us," Follani ordered, sounding for all the world like a miniature Tepai. The guards glanced at each other, clearly amused by the authority assumed by the child, but they complied without argument. Follani waited until the guards had turned the corner to palm open the door.
Gellan was standing against the back wall of the room, clearly trying to fight the cube. His hands were holding himself up on the wall, his eyes clenched shut. Her back to the door, Tepai sat at the table with a small smile on her face. "Not long now, Gellan Mar," she said softly. She glanced over her shoulder at the open door. "Follani, are you done al—" she broke off when she saw Bastila behind her. "What are you—"
Bastila flung her hand forward and Pushed Tepai hard out of her chair. She followed with a Stasis field before Tepai could react. The Vintari froze against the wall, her eyes burning with anger. Follani waved her hand and the hum from the cube stopped. Gellan dropped to the ground. Bastila ran over to him and snapped his collar in half with the Force before Follani could even open it. She could feel Tepai fighting her way out of the Stasis field.
Bastila used the Force to help her pull Gellan to his feet. He looked at her, the bewilderment on his face almost comical. "How—" he started.
"No time!" Bastila said anxiously, eyes on Tepai. The Stasis attack Bastila had thrown had taken more out of her than she initially thought. She knew she didn't have enough reserves for another strong attack. "We must leave this place, immediately. Can you walk?"
"Of course," he insisted, but his weight was heavy on her shoulder. Bastila didn't have the spare energy to try to create a Force connection between them—they didn't come as easily to her as they did to Pellek Tran. Without a connection, she couldn't lend Gellan any of her meager Force reserves. She'd have to hope they didn't have to go far to find a speeder.
"Follani, can you take us to the speeder bay?" she asked.
Follani tore her eyes away from the struggling Tepai. "I don't know where that is," she said.
Bastila bit down on the sharp retort that came to mind and tried to center herself in the Force. She could not afford to lose control now. "All right, then can you tell me how Case escaped from here?"
Follani looked at her oddly. "The Deralian woman?" she asked. "She is still here."
Bastila gasped and glanced at Gellan, who looked equally surprised. "I thought she escaped!" she said.
Follani shook her head. "She tried, but all of us together stopped her. She is too dangerous for the cube—we can't let any part of her out of the collar. That's why Tepai wanted to know about her—we are all afraid that someone will come for her and destroy us." Follani looked awed. "Is she your friend, too? I can take you to her—this way." She ran off down the hallway.
Bastila followed as fast as she could, eye out for any guards. She wished she had the spare power for Boost—Gellan was trying his best not to slow her down, but it was plain that he was still conscious only by force of will. He was deathly pale and Bastila could feel his body shaking with the effort to remain upright. She was grateful to Follani for clearing the hallways ahead of them so that she only had to toss a couple of small Stasis fields when Vintari accidentally crossed their path.
They passed several doors with windows, and Bastila glanced inside one as they walked. It was a common room like the one she and Gellan had been in, full of sentients wearing collars. She looked quickly away, horrified. How many sentients had the Vintari captured? What could they possibly be doing with all the Force energy that they took? She shuddered and vowed to come back and destroy this place.
Follani ran back to them. "This is it!" she called, pointing to a windowless door. As they approached the door, an alarm began to sound. Follani palmed open the door and waved Bastila and Gellan in. "Hurry, they're coming!"
Bastila entered the room with trepidation and gasped at what she saw. Then the smell hit her and she had to force herself not to back away. Case was a huddled pile of torn cloth in the corner of the room. Her hair was matted in clumps and fell over her closed eyes, but Bastila could see the dark bruise under one cheekbone. There was a collar around her neck and band around each wrist.
Bastila choked back a sob and left Gellan to support himself against the doorway. She slid to her knees in front of Case. "Case? Can you hear me?" The woman's eyes opened slowly, and Bastila could tell that the Vintari had her heavily snowed under the collar. The pulse of anger from Case was palpable. "I'm going to take the collar off, okay?" Bastila said loudly, as if to a child. She reached first for the wrist bands and gasped at the condition of Case's hands. "Force help you," she whispered. Case's hands were curled in, the fingers on each obviously broken and badly reset. Bastila wondered if she could even use them. She quickly snapped the wrist bands, prompting some movement from Case, and then reached for the collar. She held her breath and broke the collar.
The Force Push that Case threw might have killed her if she hadn't expected it. Even so, it knocked her back to the doorway. Gellan moved immediately in front of her and stood facing Case, who now had her back to the wall, hair still in her face and lips pulled back to show her teeth. "Case, it's Bastila," she called from the hallway. She gently pushed Gellan's arm aside and walked back into the room. "You're with friends, but we have to leave right now." Bastila reached forward carefully with the Force and touched Case's familiar aura. The Bond between them was gone, but they would recognize each other in the Force anywhere. "It's me, can't you tell?"
The silence, broken only by the near-growl of Case's breath, stretched on so long that Bastila was afraid Case was lost, or fallen. Her anger was so powerful that she should have fallen already, but it was bleeding away somewhere, someplace not inside of Case. Finally, Case blinked and seemed to come back to herself. "Bastila?" she asked in a small voice. "Am I dead?"
Bastila smiled. "Not yet, and when you die, I hope your ghost doesn't return to Vintar. Please, I will explain when we are gone from here. Can you walk?" She had the sudden fear that Case wouldn't be able to—Bastila couldn't support Case and Gellan at the same time.
Case pushed herself off the wall and straightened. "My wounds are old. I still have the Force. And I'll walk out of here or die first. They won't take me again." Bastila breathed a sigh of relief and nodded to Gellan. All three of them went back in the hallway just as Follani was rounding the corner back to them at a run.
Case tensed and Bastila quickly held up her hand in restraint. "She is helping us escape," she explained. "Follani, which way?"
Follani was looking at Case like the woman was a giant. "I found a speeder area just outside the walls. But they're coming! They'll close the gate!"
They dashed through the open door into the bright sunlight. Case took Gellan's other arm and the three of them ran as fast as they were able across the courtyard toward the exterior walls. Follani ran ahead and ducked under the closing gate. Bastila pushed harder, sure they wouldn't get under the gate before it went down, but they just cleared the descending door. Blaster fire sparked the air around them as Vintari poured out of the building and through the side gates a few hundred meters away.
Bastila started for the nearest speeder and quickly lifted Follani into the back. Gellan collapsed into the back with her. Bastila started for the jump seat, but Case got there first. "My hands," she said, holding them away from her as if they weren't hers. Bastila nodded quickly and swung into the driver's seat. The Force trilled at her and she ducked a blaster bolt aimed at her head. She pressed the throttle down as hard as she could and started away from the city toward the green smudge of a forest on the horizon. They could hide there, if they could reach it.
In her peripheral vision, she saw Vintari leap into the remaining speeders and lift off the ground. Bastila swallowed and kept her head low. They'd never get far enough away from the speeders to hide. "Keep it steady," Case said, and stood up backward in the open jump seat. She flung her mangled hands forward and every other speeder around them burst into flame. The vehicles crashed to the ground and caught the short grass around the walls on fire. The surviving Vintari scrambled to contain the flames before they reached the main buildings.
Case dropped back to her seat, a satisfied grin on her face. Bastila felt Case add a Boost field around their vehicle, and the grassland flew by at a dizzying speed. "We should have time to get to the Resistance camp before nightfall," Case said. She looked over at Bastila. "Thank you."
Bastila nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She was exhausted, flying toward a camp she wasn't sure existed ten minutes ago with a woman she had half-believed to be dead. She knew whatever refuge they found at the camp was only temporary, that the Darkness on Vintar still had to be stopped. Case's hands looked beyond repair, Gellan was unconscious in the back of the speeder, and Follani had started to cry, but Bastila couldn't help but smile.
They were free. The Force was still with her, after all.