Inferno (2 page)

After a moment, Jacen said, “Okay, let’s say I
did
arrange it. Why did you come?”

“Because I was tempted,” Tahiri answered. “And I want to find out what you need from me.”

“I don’t need anything,” Jacen lied. “I just thought this might help you move on.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It’s for Anakin, too,” Jacen said. “I think my brother deserves this much…don’t you?”

A guilty ripple rolled through the Force. “Not fair!” Tahiri protested. “And I still don’t believe you.”

Jacen raised the shoulders of his pressure suit in an awkward shrug. “Does that mean you don’t want to go through with this?”

Tahiri sighed. “You know better than that.”

“Then you have to trust my instructions,” Jacen said. “You can’t react to the past. The more you become a part of it, the more likely you are to be seen—and the more power it has to harm you.”

“Okay, I understand.” Over the suit comm, it was difficult to tell whether Tahiri’s tone was resentful or embarrassed. “It won’t happen again.”

“Good.”

Jacen turned back to the battle, where the momentary silence that had followed the grenade explosions had been shattered by screaming blaster bolts and droning razor bugs. In the back of the grashal, Anakin was just rising to his feet as the strike team took advantage of the enemy’s disarray to overrun the cloning lab. When Jacen saw his own figure dodging through the battle, he remembered how sad he had been for his wounded brother, how wrong it had seemed for the war to take such a noble young life. It was like watching himself in a home holo, wondering how he could ever have been so naïve. Perhaps, once he united the galaxy, such idealism would no longer seem quite so foolish.

The boom of a longblaster sounded outside the grashal, then a trio of Jedi came rushing inside. The young Tahiri—then just fifteen—was in the lead. Her blond hair billowed behind her; the scars suffered during her imprisonment among the Yuuzhan Vong were still red on her forehead. She and the others had barely cleared the breach before a ball of yellow-orange fire followed them inside and exploded.

The shock wave hurled the Jedi in three different directions, but they quickly used the Force to bring their trajectories under control and come down safely. Young Tahiri tucked herself into a front roll and disappeared behind a gestation bin, then emerged from the other end returning to her feet. Anakin was already rushing to her side, his free hand cupped over his abdomen, his jaw clenched against the pain of his wound.

The voice of the older Tahiri came over the suit comm. “We need to move closer.”

“Fine, but stay in contact with me or the current will carry you off.” Still holding Tahiri’s arm, Jacen started toward his brother and the young Tahiri. “And whatever you do, don’t open your pressure suit. Our presences are still anchored in our own time, so you’ll decompress.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Tahiri replied drily. “But I had kind of guessed.”

Anakin and young Tahiri were now crouching together behind a gestation bin. Had his brother survived this battle, the pair would almost certainly have become lovers and then married. He sometimes wondered how that might have changed things, whether that extra bit of happiness and stability could somehow have kept the galaxy from spinning so wildly out of control.

As Jacen led the way around behind the pair, young Tahiri suddenly raised her arm and pointed across the aisle, toward a scorched bin overflowing with Yuuzhan Vong corpses. Next to the bin, the strike team’s meter-high healer, Tekli, stood over the scaly bulk of Tesar Sebatyne. She was sprinkling stinksalts on the Barabel’s forked tongue, trying to rouse him from his unconsciousness…and failing miserably.

Jacen continued to lead the way closer, moving very slowly and carefully. Flow-walkers tended to cause blurs around themselves both visually and in the Force, and the slower they moved, the less noticeable the effect would be.

As they approached, Anakin pointed toward Tekli and the wounded Barabel.

“Take him…and go,” he said to young Tahiri. “You may need to cut a way out.”

“You?”
she responded. “I’m not going—”

“Do it!” Anakin snapped.

Her face fell, and even the older Tahiri began to radiate surprise and dismay into the Force.

Anakin’s tone softened almost as soon as he had spoken. “You need…to help Tekli. I’ll be along.”

Even through a pressure suit’s auditory sensors, Anakin’s voice sounded weak and anguished, and it was clear that he had known even then he was about to die. A growing tightness began to form in Jacen’s throat, and he was surprised at the effort of will required to make it go away. Jacen had loved his brother—and apparently still did—but he could not let his emotions draw him into the past. As he had warned Tahiri, any reaction at all would make them easier to see, and if the other strike team survivors suddenly started to recall a pair of blurry, pressure-suited apparitions at the battle, someone might realize he had flow-walked here with Tahiri—and that would make her useless to him.

By the time Jacen had quelled his emotions, Anakin had stood again. He was gently pushing young Tahiri across the aisle toward Tekli, who was kneeling astride Tesar’s scaly bulk and trying to slap him awake. The Force grew heavy with older Tahiri’s sorrow, but Jacen said nothing to her about the dangers of reacting to the past. He had known all along that she would not be able to control her emotions at this moment—he was
counting
on it—and he would just have to hope Tekli and the other survivors were too busy with the battle to notice any flow-walking apparitions.

“Tesar is not responding,” Tekli said, looking across the aisle. “I cannot move him and work on him both.”

Young Tahiri lowered her brow in doubt, clearly suspecting the Chadra-Fan of trying to draw her away from Anakin, but she could hardly refuse to help. Blinking back a tear, she stretched up to kiss Anakin—then caught herself and shook her head.

This was the moment when young Tahiri had pulled back, telling Anakin that if he wanted a kiss, he would have to come back for it. The Force seemed ready to break with the anguish of older Tahiri, who quickly stepped forward and pushed her younger self into Anakin’s arms.

Young Tahiri’s mouth fell open, but before she could cry out, Anakin leaned down and silenced her with a kiss. The surprise drained instantly from her posture, and they remained together, body pressed to body, for what seemed an eternity—even to Jacen, who often saw eternity in his visions.

Knowing by the sullen weight of the Force—and by his own breaking heart—that they were being drawn ever more deeply into the past, Jacen pulled the older Tahiri back to his side. If they were still there when the kiss ended, Tekli would certainly see them. In thirteen years or so—when Jacen and Tahiri returned to their own time—the Chadra-Fan would begin to recall seeing them here in their pressure suits. Once she reported her memory flashes to the Council, the Masters would realize that Jacen had flow-walked Tahiri back to the battle and begin to ask themselves why, and his plan would be ruined.

Jacen began to back them away, slowly releasing his hold on the past. The scream and roar of battle started to quiet, and the sallow light of the grashal’s glow-lichens began to dim. Before long, all he could see were two forms locked in eternal embrace, their presences shining across time to illuminate the cold darkness. And then even that light faded.

A single heartbroken warble sounded over the suit comm, and Tahiri clasped the arm of Jacen’s pressure suit.

“Did we have to leave?” she asked. “I wanted to see him after, to see if the kiss made his death any…any easier.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t let us be seen.” Jacen no longer felt like Jacen inside. He was using his brother’s death to manipulate Tahiri—to
corrupt
her—and it made him feel brutal and dirty. But what choice did he have? The Jedi were hunting Mara’s killer with all their resources, and he needed a way to track their progress, to keep them under control while he saved the Alliance. “You were getting caught up in the past. We both were.”

The strength left Tahiri’s grasp, but she continued to hold his arm. “I know. It was just so…” She stopped and turned her faceplate toward Jacen, leaving him to stare at the anonymous reflection of his own helmet. “I thought the kiss would be enough. But it isn’t, Jacen. I need—”

“Tahiri, no.” It wasn’t Jacen speaking now, but his new self, the one he had created when he killed Mara. “Your emotions—
my
emotions—make it too risky. We can’t go back.”

“I know, Jacen.” Tahiri turned her back on him and started for the exit. “I just wish we didn’t have to leave it that way. I wish I could be sure he died knowing how much I loved him.”

Darth Caedus smiled sadly inside his helmet.

“I’m sure he knew.” Caedus started after her. This was what it meant to be Sith: to use friends without hesitation, to sacrifice family for destiny, to live with a stained soul. “I mean, you
did
tell him, didn’t you?”

one

Tenel Ka sensed the hole in the Force the instant she entered the bedchamber. It was lurking in the black depths of the corner farthest from the entrance, a void so subtle she recognized it only by the surrounding stillness. She moved quickly through the doorway, her spine tingling with a ripple of danger sense so delicate it made her blood race.

Before her lady-in-waiting could enter the room behind her, she looked back over her shoulder and called, “That will be all, Lady Aros. Ask DeDeToo to lock down the nursery.”

“
Lock
it down, Majesty?” Aros stopped at the threshold, a slender silhouette still holding the evening gown Tenel Ka had just removed. “Is there something I need to—”

“Just a precaution,” Tenel Ka interrupted. Her robe was still hanging inside her refresher suite, so she was standing in her underclothes. “I know our embassy should be secure, but this
is
Coruscant.”

“Of course…” Aros dipped her chin. “The terrorists. This rach warren of a planet is absolutely teeming with them.”

“Let’s not be too disparaging, shall we?” Tenel Ka chided. She casually reached down and unfastened the thigh holster where she carried her lightsaber. “We
did
have to call on Colonel Solo to dispose of a few raches of our own recently.”

“I didn’t mean anything negative about the colonel,” Aros said, practically cooing the reference to Jacen. After his recent heroics defending Tenel Ka against the traitors trying to usurp her throne, he had become something of a sex symbol to half the women in the Hapes Consortium…Tenel Ka included. “Quite the opposite. If not for Colonel Solo, I’m
sure
Coruscant would have sunk into anarchy by now.”

“No doubt,” Tenel Ka said, casually shifting her grasp on the holster so that she held her lightsaber by its hilt. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I can turn down my own sheets tonight.”

Aros acknowledged the order with a bow and withdrew into the anteroom. Tenel Ka used her elbow to depress a tap pad on the wall. Half a dozen wall sconces glimmered to life, revealing a chamber as ridiculously opulent as the rest of the embassy’s Royal Wing. There were three separate seating areas, a life-sized HoloNet transceiver, and a huge hamogoni wood desk stocked with stacks of flimsiplast bearing the Hapan Royal Crest. On the far side of the chamber, a dreamsilk canopy shimmered above a float-rest bed large enough to sleep Tenel Ka and her ten closest friends.

Despite the two sconces flanking it, the room’s farthest corner—the one near her refresher suite—remained ominously dark. Tenel Ka could not sense any sort of optical field keeping it that way, but then again, the only thing she
could
sense was…well, nothing. She reached out with the Force to make certain Aros was not eavesdropping from the other side of the door, then ignited her lightsaber and took a few steps toward the corner.

“You would be wise to show yourself,” Tenel Ka said. “I have no patience for voyeurs…as you should well know by now.”

“I’m a slow learner.” The darkness melted away, revealing a tall, shadow-eyed figure with a melancholy echo of his father’s famous lopsided grin. He was dressed in black GAG utilities and smelled faintly of hyperdrive fuel, as though he had come to her straight from a space hangar. “And I don’t usually get caught. My camouflage powers must be slipping.”

“No, Jacen. I am just growing better at sensing your presence.” Tenel Ka deactivated her lightsaber and tossed it on the bed, then smiled warmly and opened her arms to him. “I was hoping you would find time to call.”

Jacen cocked his brow, then let his gaze slide down her body. “So I see.”

“Well?” Tenel Ka asked. “Are you just going to stand there gawking? Or are you going to do something about it?”

Jacen chuckled, then stepped out of the corner and crossed to her. His Force presence remained undetectable—he was so accustomed to concealing himself that he did so even around Tenel Ka—but she could tell by the shine in his eyes how happy he was to see her. She slipped a hand behind his neck and drew his mouth to hers.

Jacen obliged, but his kiss was warm rather than hot, and she could tell that tonight his heart was not entirely hers. She stepped back, embarrassed to realize how insensitive she was being.

“Forgive me if I seem too joyful,” she said, able to perceive now the sadness that tinged his hard eyes, the grief that tainted his clenched jaw. “Tomorrow is Mara’s funeral.
Of course
you have other things on your mind.”

Jacen’s snort was so gentle that Tenel Ka almost did not hear it.

“It’s okay.” He took her hand, but the softness had vanished from his face, leaving in its place only the stoic, unreadable mask that he had worn since his escape from the Yuuzhan Vong. “I wasn’t thinking about Mara.”

Tenel Ka eyed him doubtfully.

“Well, not exclusively,” Jacen admitted. “I’m happy to see you, too.”

“Thank you, but I’m not offended,” Tenel Ka said. “Our thoughts
should
be on your aunt tonight. Have you found her killer yet?”