confines of his skull, writhing tendrils rooting through his brain, scraping against the underside of his braincase. He imagined worms burrowing through tissue, leaving a network of empty tunnels in their wake. He heaved as if to vomit, but his stomach contained nothing.
Between heaves his screams turned desperate; he warred against the restraints, but they simply would not give. He railed, screamed, shrieked, heaved, knew that he must soon pass out or die, and …
The pain vanished.
Sweat soaked him. Every muscle in his body ached. His breath came hard and fast through a throat made ragged. Before he could speak, ask what had happened, a spark shower exploded in his brain and a gout of information poured in, washing away what preexisted it and filling the empty vessel of his mind.
Memories flooded into the crevices of his empty recollection, making him anew, rebirthing him on the spot.
He remembered himself.
He had been born on Coruscant, and his parents had died in an accident when he was young.
A voice was speaking to him from outside himself, but he could not understand it, could not move his attention from the rush of memories, his memories.
After the death of his parents, he had turned inward, had become philosophical even as a child, and that internal focus had triggered his latent Force sensitivity.
The voice continued to speak to him, soft, insistent. But he refused to acknowledge it. Instead he lived in the past, his past, watching faces and events stream by.
Without any training, he’d used his Force sensitivity to make a lightsaber for himself. Soon thereafter, his uncle had enrolled him in the Jedi Academy. He’d met Grand Master Luke Skywalker.
The voice finally penetrated his perception.
“Do you hear me?” it asked.
He felt a hand tapping his cheeks but ignored it in favor of the memories.
He’d fought the spirit of Marka Ragnos on Korriban, trying to redeem Rosh Penin.
“Open your eyes,” the voice said, and tore the adhesive strips from his eyelids.
He hesitated, unwilling to let himself slip from the realm of memory.
“Open them.”
He did, and even the dim light in the small, steel-walled room set them to watering. He blinked, his vision blurred. A figure stood before him, but he could make out little detail.
“I cannot see,” he said.
“Your vision will improve quickly,” the figure said.
He looked around, down, trying to blink away the blurriness. He was in a transparisteel cloning tank. Traces of the pink suspension fluid in which he’d been floating puddled in the base of the tank. He stared at them while his vision cleared.
Cables, hoses, and wires snaked out of the sides of the tank and connected to his body at arms, legs, torso, and head. Conduits connected a computer to the tank. He was surprised to see that he was not restrained, yet he still could not move.
A man stood at the computer station. Not a man—an Umbaran, thin, with skin so pale it looked white. He wore a tailored black cloak complete with a cowl, and the dimness in the room seemed to collect around him, intensify near him. The reflected glow of the comp screen made his dark eyes glow red. He worked the keyboard with one hand. In his other he held a device that looked like a metal hilt or handle engraved with strange grooves and from which extended a spike of rigid filaments, each of them far finer than even the finest hair.
“I cannot move,” he said to the Umbaran, his voice coarse with disuse.
“The programming paralyzes most of your skeleton-muscular system until the … process is complete.”
“I cannot feel the Force,” he said.
The Umbaran nodded. “That is my doing.”
He did not know what to say to that. He did not remember ever being cut off from the Force. His gaze fell to the device the Umbaran held in his hand. The Umbaran noticed and held the device up for him to see.
“It is Rakatan,” the Umbaran said. “We think they used it to store and transfer their consciousnesses. We’ve found caches of them here and there across the galaxy.”
“We?” he asked.
“The One Sith,” the Umbaran replied.
He realized his danger then. He was in the hands of an unknown faction of the Sith. He tried to fall into the Force but felt only emptiness. He was alone, powerless. The Sith had developed some new weapon by which they could separate a Jedi from the Force. He had to escape, report back.
“What do you want from me?”
“What’s your name?”
“You know my name. Jaden Korr.”
The Umbaran smiled.