energy of the dark side thickened. He was closing on its source. Its power alarmed him. He leaned into it, against it, as he might against a rainstorm. He flashed on a memory of Force lightning crackling out of his fingers, energy born of fear or anger. He studied his hands, the one unwounded, the other missing three fingers, and knew that fear and anger no longer held any power over him. Force lightning was not a weapon he would use again.
Ahead he saw a large vertical seam, its size suggestive of a much larger door, a much larger chamber beyond. The lights in the floor and walls made a kaleidoscope of color around him, reds, greens, yellows, beckoning him forward, but he slowed, sensing something awful in the air, some lurking danger that lived in the darkness beyond the door. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. The lights flared more rapidly, more urgently, as if sensing his emotion. He stopped, swallowed. Sweat collected on his flesh.
His glow lamp died, then the lights in the walls and floor, leaving only the dim intermittent flashes of the overhead lights. He stood alone in the corridor, bathed in darkness, in light, in darkness, in light.
A shriek carried from the room beyond the seam and pierced the tension, a prolonged wail of hate only partially human. Its pure, unadulterated rage staggered Jaden. He took a half-step back, his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber. Adrenaline flooded him, turned his senses hyperacute.
The shriek diminished to a savage growl, but he heard the cunning in it. A huge boom sounded from within the chamber, another. Footsteps? Some kind of locomotion, surely. Whatever horror lurked in the chamber was coming toward him.
He fell into the Force and unclipped his lightsaber from his belt, the metal of the hilt cool in his sweat-slicked hand.
“Jaden,” said a voice from behind him, a voice that sunk a fishhook into his memory and started reeling recollections to the surface of his consciousness.
He turned, saw furtive figures emerge from the shadows. Had they been following him? How had he missed them?
Jaden recognized them, one with his arm around the throat of the other, but his mind did not put a name to them right away.
“I know you,” Jaden said.
And all at once memories flooded him. He remembered where he was, why he had come, what had happened to him. The sudden rush of memory and emotion overwhelmed him. He clutched at his head and groaned.
One of the figures held something in his off hand, a lightsaber hilt. He ignited it and a red line split the darkness.
Another shriek sounded from the chamber behind Jaden. The lights in the wall flared to life in response, brighter than before, and Jaden at last recognized them for what they were—veins coursing with dark-side energy.
He had awakened in the belly of a beast.
Another shriek shook the walls.
He ignited his lightsaber, its yellow light his answer to the darkness that surrounded him.
TWO DAYS EARLIER
JADEN STARED THROUGH JUNKER’S VIEWPORT, HIS REFLECTION superimposed over the receding spheres of the frozen moon and the blue gas giant it orbited. He stared at the image of himself, able to hold his own gaze for the first time in months. He’d lost fingers on the frozen moon, broken bones, but he’d left his fear there, too, and in the process healed his spirit.
He realized now that his doubts about his relationship to the Force were not a sword of weakness to stab at his resolve and drive him to the dark side. Instead, they were a shield of self-examination to protect him from it. He would never fall to the dark side, because he understood it too well.
Master Katarn had tried indirectly to teach him as much, but Jaden hadn’t fully learned the lesson until he’d traveled to an uncharted moon in the Unknown Regions and faced Force-using clones born of Sith and Jedi genes.
He hoped to see Master Katarn soon. It had been too long. Jaden had let them drift apart until their orbits never crossed. He would remedy that.
He held his hands before him, one whole, the other maimed, the stumps of his lost fingers still the black and red of charred meat. He knew he’d never again see Force lightning discharge involuntarily from his fingertips. Not because Force lightning was associated with the dark side—for Jaden, the Force was a tool, neither light nor dark—but because its uncontrolled discharge represented a lack of understanding,