Remnant: Force Heretic I (10 page)

It wasn’t a word. It was a
name
.

“Tahiri,” it called out to her, its tone tugging at her heart and the guilt she carried. “Tahiri … Tahiri … Tahiri …”

Tahiri woke to the sound of someone screaming, realizing only when she found herself being restrained that it was, in fact, herself.

She felt something cool and scented being pressed against her forehead. Pushing the hand holding it aside, she tried to roll away, but restraints across her chest held her in place. Nevertheless, they didn’t stop her from trying to wriggle free—even when a second hand joined the first, pushing her shoulders firmly back onto the bed. She
desperately scrabbled at her side for her lightsaber, only to find it gone. Besides which, the hands were simply too strong. She would never have had the chance to use it even if it had been there.

“
Sith spawn!
” she shouted at her assailants. “Let me go!”

“
Tahiri!
” Beneath the whip crack of command to the voice, there was something unmistakably familiar to it. She stopped fighting for a moment, trying to make out the figure standing over her, all but blurred through her tears. It couldn’t be, could it—? “Calm down,
please!
”

“Jacen?” The fight drained out of her like air from a punctured balloon, and she sagged back into the soft mattress, sobbing. “Oh, Jacen, I’m so sorry. I—I didn’t know it was you. I thought it was—”

“It’s okay,” he said, his tone warm and reassuring. “Just let it out. Don’t keep it inside where it can hurt you.”

She frowned at him as he came slowly into focus. His words left her feeling oddly naked. “What do you mean?” she asked, wiping at her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“Bottling things up,” he explained. “It doesn’t help anyone. Trust me. I should know.”

He smiled, but she found it difficult to reciprocate the gesture. The residue of the dream still lingered in her thoughts.

She sat up, this time finding no resistance from either Jacen or the restraints.

“You feeling any better?” he asked.

She wasn’t, not really, but she didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, reaching behind her to ease the back of the bed up. It was only then that she looked around and recognized where she was.

Despite the absence of the usual sensors or equipment, there was no mistaking the small, circular room as belonging to a medical ward. The smell of sopor-moss lingered about her, despite the wide-open viewport off to her left that admitted the fresh air blowing off the Calamarian seas outside. There was a functional edge to the room’s walls and furniture. Also, her own clothes were gone, replaced by a drab hospital smock. A thin sheet covered her on the bed.

“What am I doing here?” she asked, rubbing her hands across the bandages on her arms.

“You blacked out.”

Jacen sat on the edge of the bed beside her, his own hands coming over hers to stop her self-conscious movements. Even though he didn’t say anything, the message was obvious: she shouldn’t worry about what was hidden there, yet.

“The medics found you in the Water’s Edge market,” he said.

She concentrated for a moment, staring at the folds in her sheet. She remembered contacting Jaina, remembered the uncontrollable panic that had disoriented her following the dream of the Yuuzhan Vong cemetery. Then she had found herself in the cavern where the voxyn lay hidden …

She shuddered at the memory. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked, looking up at Jacen.

“It’s a bit of a mystery, actually,” he said. “They can’t find anything.”

His brown eyes were searching hers. She looked away, not sure if she was relieved or disappointed.

“I guess I must have just fainted, then.”

“You’ve been unconscious for fifteen standard hours, Tahiri,” he said. “You didn’t just faint.”

“I-I’ve not been sleeping well lately,” she lied, looking away.

Fifteen hours?
This was the worst episode yet. Maybe it would be for the best, she thought, if the truth finally came out. Even though she wanted to, however she found she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

He’d hate me if he knew
, she thought.
They would all hate me!

“Tahiri?”

She looked up again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” That, at least, was partly true.

“That’s okay,” he reassured her. “I’m sure Master Cilghal will work it out sooner or later.”

“I’m sorry to have been a burden, Jacen.”

“You’re not,” he said. “Coming here to keep an eye on you was a good excuse to get out of some tedious meetings I’m supposed to attend. Besides, it gave me a chance to get a little bit of shut-eye myself. Things have been pretty hectic these last couple of days.”

He did look tired, she noted. There were lines around his eyes that she hadn’t noticed the last time she had seen him. But how long ago was that? After his return from Coruscant? During the battle at Ebaq 9? It dismayed her to realize that she couldn’t remember just when that had been. In recent weeks—months, perhaps—her life had become a blur.

“Where’s Jaina?” she asked.

“Sleeping. She said to say hi when you woke up.”

Disappointed, Tahiri nodded and looked down at her folded hands. She didn’t know why she wanted to talk to Jaina so badly, or what she would say when she did. That she was sorry she hadn’t been able to save Anakin the way he had saved her? That she missed him as much as
Jaina did? No, what she wanted to say, what she
needed
to say, could never be said—not to Jaina, not to anyone.

She looked again to her arms, wondering at the wounds underneath the bandages. She remembered doing it to herself, remembered
seeing
herself do it, but she had been unable to stop herself.

She closed her eyes, wanting to shut out the thought. But it was impossible. The thoughts were always with her these days, waking or sleeping.

“Is Master Luke angry at me for missing the meeting of the Jedi?” she asked.

“No, of course not,” he said, laughing lightly. “Uncle Luke isn’t the sort to get angry about stuff like that. Trust me, he’s more concerned about your well-being. Actually, he had been hoping to take you along on this new mission with us. He thought you could use some time away from all the action. But given your condition, it was decided that perhaps it would be best if you rested some more.”

“Mission?” she asked, the beginnings of dismay creeping into her voice. “What mission?”

“We’re looking for something,” he said. “I don’t know how long it will take us—or even where we’re going, for that matter—but I do know it’s something we have to do. If we don’t, we could end up losing the war—even if we end up beating the Yuuzhan Vong.”

She frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It depends on how you look at it,” he said.

“And how do
you
look at it, Jacen?”

“Honestly?”

She nodded.

“Well, personally I think the worst thing we could do would be to wipe out the Yuuzhan Vong.”

Her frown deepened at this. “Why?”

Jacen stood, running a hand through his shaggy
brown hair. “We already know that they’ll never give up,” he explained, moving around the bed. “They’ll just keep fighting until they’re all dead. But when they’re gone, where does that leave us? I don’t know about you, Tahiri, but I don’t particularly want genocide on my conscience.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, he went on.

“I know what you’re probably thinking: if the Yuuzhan Vong don’t register in the Force, then why should we care if we wiped them out? But I don’t think it’s that simple, Tahiri. The Force isn’t just about what happens to living things; it’s also about what living things do to one another. No matter how you look at it, if we win by military means alone, then we’ll end up committing an atrocity, and there’s no way I can explain such an action without resorting to the dark side. I refuse to accept that there is no alternative.”

She stared at him, taken by the passion in his voice. This was a Jacen she had never seen before. Committed and sure of himself, he was no longer the teenager she had come to know. His experiences on Coruscant had changed him. He was so much more the adult now.

“Do you remember Vergere?” he asked after a few moments’ silence.

“Of course.” The change in subject puzzled her.

“She told me something before she died.” There was a slight deepening of the lines around his eyes as he spoke, and his hands fiddled with the railing at the foot of the bed. “She told me about a place she once visited—long before you or I were ever born, Tahiri. It was a world unlike any other in the galaxy. The people who lived there had a reputation for building starships. But not just any starships. These were without equal—starships that could outperform anything built even today. She was
sent by the Jedi Council on a mission to find the shipbuilders, even though there were those who thought the planet little more than a myth. She was successful: she found the planet and its inhabitants; she saw the marvelous starships in operation—and many other things, for that matter, things the likes of which no one had ever dreamed possible. It had jungles and vast forests; but they were not shunted aside or eaten away in the name of industry. This was a world in balance.”

His eyes gleamed with the wonder of this secondhand vision.

“Vergere fell in love with the place,” he went on, “rejoicing in its jungles, its many forms of life, the way it seemed to her to be a living hymn to the Force. But she failed to guess the truth underlying what she saw—at first, anyway, even though it had been under her nose right from the beginning. The thing about those starships made on the planet, the thing that made them really special, is that they were alive.”

Tahiri’s eyes narrowed. “Like the Yuuzhan Vong ships?”

He nodded. “These were no ordinary ships, Tahiri,” he said. “They lived and breathed and died just like any other being. They were alive like you and me, like any living thing. And so was the planet that made them.”

“The
planet
—?” she started, incredulously. If it hadn’t been Jacen telling her all this, and had he not been so earnest in his telling, she might have laughed the whole thing off as a joke. But he was serious; this was real.

“Its name was Zonama Sekot,” he said. “It was a living being in its own right, one of the most wondrous things this galaxy has ever produced.”

Tahiri felt a strange tingling sensation go through her. “ ‘Was’?” she echoed.

“Not long after Vergere arrived, aliens came and attacked
it. Zonama Sekot referred to these aliens as ‘Far Outsiders.’ We know now that these Far Outsiders were the Yuuzhan Vong—possibly a reconnaissance party sent to explore the galaxy before the actual invasion. The planet had been negotiating with these Outsiders for months, Vergere learned. The Yuuzhan Vong were fascinated by it, as you can imagine. A living planet would not be so different from one of the worldships that they used to cross the great gulf between galaxies.”

“So what happened?” Tahiri prompted when Jacen went quiet as if in thought.

He looked up. “The Yuuzhan Vong attacked and Zonama Sekot fled,” he said. “The whole planet—moved. It changed systems, and hasn’t been seen since.”

“Moved?” Tahiri echoed. “Just like that?”

He nodded. “There’s no mention of it in any records anywhere. It’s as though it completely vanished.”

“And you’re going looking for it—this living planet?”

“Exciting, isn’t it?” he said, coming back around to her side and sitting on her bed. “Vergere told me that the Yuuzhan Vong, in their own way, revere life. Not as a Jedi reveres life, cherishing each individual as a component of the Force that is both life and greater than life, but rather in their own perverse way. Their reverence for life, she said, is mixed with notions of pain and death. This fascinated me, and still does. It underpins their entire culture. I’ve always felt that if we could understand this ideology better, then we would understand
them
better.

“Call it an instinct,” he went on. “Zonama Sekot is the key to the whole thing—to victory. I’m sure of it. That’s why Vergere told me about it. It might help us find a way to turn back the Yuuzhan Vong. It did it once before, after all, if on a smaller scale.”

“Maybe it can make us ships as good as or better than
the Yuuzhan Vong’s coralskippers.” Tahiri marveled at the thought. “How do you intend to find it?”

He shrugged. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s done a very good job of staying hidden all this time, so tracking it down isn’t going to be easy. When I talked about it with Uncle Luke, there was only one conclusion we could come to: if it hasn’t been seen, then it
has
to be in the Unknown Regions. There’s nowhere else it could be. A fertile world is not exactly the sort of thing that would be omitted from a ship’s log.”

“Let alone a world that has appeared out of nowhere,” Tahiri added. “Or has a mind of its own.”

“Exactly,” Jacen said. “It’s literally the stuff of legends. And in the absence of rumors, we have to go chasing them ourselves. We’re stopping at the Empire first, since their territory borders the Unknown Regions; they might have information we can use. And then there’s the Chiss: they’ve explored the Unknown Regions much more than we have; they’ll have access to a wealth of data—”

“If they’ll share it with you. Either of them.”

“We’ll just have to talk them into it.”

Jacen withdrew into himself for a moment, and Tahiri took the chance to collect her own thoughts. It all sounded very unlikely: living planets, old Jedi missions, wild crusades into the galaxy’s darkest regions, Yuuzhan Vong prophecies. But she knew to keep an open mind. After all, stranger things had happened in his family’s history …

A twinge of pain accompanied the thought. Had Anakin lived, it might have been
her
family, too, by now.

She pushed the thought down as far as it would go. It whispered that she should tell him everything, exactly how she felt and all she suspected was happening to her. But she couldn’t. Jacen had more important things to worry about, even apart from Zonama Sekot; he had
been grappling with Jedi philosophy so deeply and for so long that the smaller concerns of those around him might seem trivial, perhaps even silly. She had no evidence, after all, that the things she was experiencing
were
anything more than nightmares, even though they felt so real.