stared at his fingers in wonder, grinning. The emotions of the other clones reached through their community’s shared empathic connection and bombarded him with feeling. He felt their glee, their ecstasy, their anger. His emotions fed on theirs, and theirs on his, a never-ending feedback loop, an ouroboros of emotional energy that made him feel as if he were boiling inside, filling with emotional steam that he could vent only in bestial shouts, in discharges of lightning. The cargo bay was chaotic. Only his concern for the children kept him grounded. He stood over them protectively.
“It is a sign from Mother!” Seer suddenly shouted above the tumult. She had her eyes closed and raised her hands above her hairless head toward the ceiling. “She has blessed our exodus!”
The others—Maker, Two-Blade, Hunter, all of them—had echoed her words, their voices slurred from the rush of power.
“It is a gift from Mother. A gift.”
The children had mostly laughed or groaned, their connection to the Force still weak.
“What is it, Soldier?” Grace had asked him in her small voice.
He could not bring himself to mention Mother, so he simply said, “It is power, Grace. Be still now.”
And then the cloakshape had flown through the cloud and the power suffusing the air had bled through the hull and touched them all directly.
It had hit Soldier like an electric shock, torn open some deeper connection to the Force, and sent him to his knees.
“Soldier!” Grace said in alarm.
He waved her away, afraid that he could not control the power boiling in him.
The rest of the Community, too, had shouted aloud as the power entered them. Seer had begun to moan in ecstasy, the children—even Grace—to laugh aloud, a touch of wildness in the sound.
New channels into the Force opened and power rushed to fill the voids. Soldier’s mind spun. Perception widened. His eyes watered and he gripped his head in his hands, as if trying to contain his expanded understanding.
The ship had veered wildly—Runner was piloting and he, too, must have been overcome. Everyone shouted as the sudden lurch threw them against the far wall of the cargo bay. Hunter cradled Grace and Blessing—her children—to her chest to protect them from the impact. Soldier, the most clearheaded of them all, had cushioned their impact with the Force, sparing them all broken bones, and the ship had ridden the lurch into a spin, throwing them across the cargo bay once more like so much flotsam, tipping the stasis chambers standing along one side of the bay. The chambers skidded across the floor, the shriek of metal on metal joining the chorus of the clones. Soldier and Scar both raised a hand and used the Force to halt the chambers two meters before they crushed the still-entranced Seer against the bulkhead.
Fighting against the push and pull of the ship’s lurches, Soldier had climbed to his feet and wound through the chaos of the cargo bay to the cockpit. He found Runner in the pilot’s chair, his arms out wide, his head thrown back, eyes closed, drool dripping from a vacant smile. Soldier pushed him to the floor and slammed a fist on the instrument panel to engage the autopilot. He turned and grabbed Runner by the shirt.
“You sit in this seat, you fly the ship!” he said, but Runner, lost in the surge of power, seemed not to hear him.
As the autopilot righted the ship, Soldier followed the sounds of the clones and the children back toward the cargo bay. Before he reached it, the emotional surge changed tenor. Through his connection with the other clones, he felt their fear grow. Then he felt their pain, and the laughter of the children give way to wails, then to shrieks of agony. The exultant exclamations of the clones stepped aside for screams of pain.
All but for Seer, whose voice he could still hear above the rest, praising Mother over the screams.
Soldier closed down the empathic connection as best he could and sprinted through the corridor to the cargo bay. He reached it and stepped into a storm of screams and pain.
Hunter lay in a fetal position, teeth bared in a grimace as she screamed. In her arms she cradled Blessing and Grace. Her eyes were open, vacant, and her breath came so fast between screams that Soldier thought she might hyperventilate. The girls, too, had their eyes open. Grace stared at Soldier, her welling eyes full of pain. Thankfully the children were not screaming. Instead, they lay entirely