But the feeling did not abate. She felt as if she were circling a drain, falling into a hole, and the rate at which she was falling was accelerating.
The darkness around her deepened. To her left and right, the light in the corridor dimmed to sparks.
She backed against the wall and ignited her blade. The familiar red line comforted her, and in its light she sought her foe. She let her anger build, her anxiety, and used it to connect her more deeply to the Force. But the connection felt loose, attenuated, and getting weaker.
“I know you’re out there,” she said.
She reached out through the Force as best she could, hoping to feel the presence of her opponent.
She felt nothing, just another hole, another vacancy in her perception.
Her calm slipped, replaced by alarm, by burgeoning fear. She bared her teeth and hissed.
Her eyes fell on Runner and she dropped the quarrel. Her blade began to flicker. Fear put down roots in her stomach and spread to the rest of her. She watched, wide-eyed, as the line of her weapon thinned, sizzled, and went out.
Darkness.
She felt entirely separated from the Force, a feeling she had never before experienced, a striking solitude that made her mouth go dry. She was breathing too heavily, betraying her position. She slid along the wall, as quiet as a shadow, her hand sweating around the hilt of her lightsaber, dead metal in her fist.
She needed to get back to the lift, back to Soldier and Seer and Grace. Feeling the wall with one hand, she slowly made her way back the way she’d come.
By the time her mind had processed the sound—the hiss of a fired quarrel—a painful, powerful impact in the side of her chest drove the breath from her lungs and knocked her to the floor.
She wanted to scream from the pain, but she could not seem to fill her burning lungs with air. She climbed to all fours, tried to lift herself up, couldn’t. She saw the shaft of the quarrel sticking out of her rib cage. Blood poured out of her side.
Two feet appeared on the floor before her.
She grabbed at the legs, the movement causing her to hiss with pain, but they stepped out of reach and she skittered on the floor, slick with her own blood, and ended up flat on her stomach. She was dying, alone, separated from the Force, separated from her daughter, her community.
The feet stood before her again.
A supreme effort allowed her to heave her body over. She stared at the ceiling, her breath becoming ever shallower, the pain diminishing as she died.
Her killer took shape in her vision, his silhouette emerging from the darkness as if part of it. Pale hands pulled back a hood to reveal a bald head and a pale face devoid of emotion. His dark eyes looked like holes, the pits into which Hunter’s connection to the Force had drained away.
She tried to speak, to ask him how he had done what he’d done, who he was, why he had killed her, but she could not draw enough breath to speak. Something heavy seemed to be on her chest, preventing her lungs from working. Sparks started to appear in her vision, motes of orange and red that announced a brain receiving too little oxygen.
The apparition of death removed something from under his cloak. A crossbow.
While Hunter fought for breath, for a few more seconds of life, he methodically cocked the crossbow, laid another quarrel atop it, and took aim at her chest. He stared into her face as he pulled the trigger. She felt the impact dully, with no additional pain and then felt nothing more, ever again.
* * *
The darkness on the cargo deck made navigating the ship slow work. Khedryn could not remember the way Runner had brought him; stress had erased it from his memory, and his hurried flight from the Umbaran had further foiled his sense of the ship’s layout. He picked his way along as best he could, following the occasional signs painted on walls. He needed to find the turbolifts, he knew that.
He rounded a corner and froze. Ahead, he saw two bodies. He flattened himself against the wall and watched for a time, listening. He heard nothing.
He approached the bodies at an oblique angle, cautiously, as he might a dangerous animal. He feared he would see the little girl there, her small form broken and bloody on the deck.
He sighed with relief when he