Raynar frowned and shook his head. “Well … well … I saw the supply shuttle—the Lightning Rod. I … think one of the TIE fighters hit it.”
Jaina gasped. “Did they crash?”
Raynar looked away. “I don’t know. The ship seemed to be going down, but …” He shrugged uncomfortably. “Anyway, it was hours ago.”
Jaina bit her lower lip and closed her eyes, reaching out with the Force, searching for Jacen. “He’s not dead,” she said at last. “But that’s all I can tell. Can’t feel old Peckhum—don’t have a link with him like I do with Jacen—but my brother’s definitely out there somewhere.”
A genuine smile broke out on Raynar’s face. “Well, good,” he said. “That’s good.”
“That’s the last of them, I think,” Lando said, striding up and kneeling beside Jaina. “How are you doing, Lowbacca, old buddy? You look like you’ve seen some hard action.”
Lowie gave an urff of agreement.
“I think we got everybody who’s in the neighborhood now,” Lando said.
“We did find one more,” Luke said, coming up to join them. He pointed toward the edge of the clearing, where Tionne was tending a treelike Jedi with a broken limb.
Jaina looked up at her uncle. “What about Jacen?”
“He’s alive … ,” Luke said slowly. “We don’t know any more than that.”
“Yes,” said Jaina, “but where is he? Shouldn’t we go look for him?”
“We need to get the injured back inside the Great Temple first,” Luke said. “If old Peckhum and Jacen managed to get the Lightning Rod going, the first place they’d head is the landing field. They wouldn’t be able to land in a small clearing like this.”
Jaina’s spirits brightened. It was true. She looked at Lowie. “Can you walk?” she asked.
Lowie groaned an affirmative reply.
“Master Lowbacca believes himself to be quite capable of perambulation with only minimal assistance,” Em Teedee supplied.
“Okay then,” Jaina said, “let’s get back to the Jedi academy.” She was anxious to see her brother again, eager to know that he was all right.
It was close to an hour later when the band of hobbling, limping Jedi trainees finally emerged from the jungle near the Great Temple’s landing field. To Jaina’s dismay, the flat patch of cleared ground stood empty.
“Don’t worry, little lady,” Lando said. “I’ll help you look for them.”
Jaina heaved a sigh and nodded. Even though she knew that Jacen was alive, she had a feeling of foreboding, of impending danger. “All right,” Jaina said. “Let’s get the wounded inside first. They’ll be safe and protected in the temple. We’ll have to take them in through the courtyard door, though. The hangar bay’s blocked shut.”
Crossing the landing field to the flagstone courtyard seemed to take longer than Jaina remembered it, but finally the entrance was only ten meters away. Seeing her goal so close, Jaina smiled and sped up.
Suddenly, a ragged figure lurched out of the shadowy doorway. His face was bloodied and bruised and covered with a thick layer of mud, but Jaina would have recognized him anywhere.
Zekk raised his chin proudly and stood barring the doorway.
“No one goes inside the temple,” he said.
22
Face-to-face with her old friend Zekk again, Jaina could find no words. Her breath refused to move in and out. It seemed to have frozen in her lungs like a chunk of winter. Her heart raced, and her palms grew sweaty.
Zekk didn’t move.
Luke came forward to stand beside Jaina. On her other side, still partially supported by her, Lowie voiced a soft growl. And behind her, Jaina suddenly felt the presence of all the remaining Jedi trainees—people who had never met Zekk before today when he had led the attack against the Jedi academy. They saw him only as an enemy, without a glimmer of his being anything else.
Her eyes still fixed on Zekk’s mud-covered face, Jaina said, “This is up to me, Uncle Luke. I need to handle this alone.”
Luke hesitated for a moment. Jaina knew that her request was difficult for him. His voice held an undercurrent of warning when he spoke. “This isn’t a broken machine that you can tinker with and fix.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I’m not sure he’ll listen to me, but I know he won’t listen to anyone else.”
“I remember thinking the same thing,” Luke said, “when I set out to turn Darth Vader back to the light side. It’s a dangerous thing to attempt … and success is so rare.” He sighed, as if thinking of Brakiss.
Jaina tore her eyes away from Zekk and turned to look at her uncle. “Please let me try,” she said. Luke studied her for a long moment and then nodded.
Jaina focused her full attention on Zekk now, shutting out all other distractions as Luke took Lowie away across the courtyard. She drew strength from the Force, but was at a loss as to what to say to the young man.
Where did one start when talking to a Dark Jedi?
Zekk, she reminded herself. This was her friend. She took a step toward him and raised her voice, though only enough so he could hear. “The fighting’s over now, Zekk. We just need to get inside to tend our wounded.”
Zekk shuddered from an inner chill. He backed up a step and spread his arms across the temple entrance. “No. There’ll be a lot more injuries if you don’t stop where you are.”
Jaina balked at the threat. She would need to try a different tack.
Zekk’s eyes darted from side to side, as if he were assessing the strength of the Jedi trainees, with their various wounds, wondering how many he could kill before they took him down.
“Let me be your friend again, Zekk,” Jaina said. “I miss being your friend.” He flinched as if he had been struck. “Let go of the dark side and come back to the light. Remember the fun we always had together, you and Jacen and I? Remember the time you salvaged that old slicer module and we tapped into the computers at the holographic zoo?”
Zekk nodded warily.
“We reprogrammed all of the animals to sing Corellian tavern songs,” she went on. A wistful smile tugged at the corner of her mouth at the memory.
“We got caught,” Zekk pointed out quietly. “And the zoo restored the original programming.”
“Yes, but so many returning tourists requested it that a few months later the zoo added our singing animals as a separate exhibit.” Jaina thought she saw some flicker of acknowledgment in his emerald eyes, but then they became hard as chips of green marble.
“We’re not those children anymore, Jaina,” he said. “We can’t go back to the way it was before. You don’t understand that, do you?” His gaze darted around the courtyard and he rubbed one hand across his forehead and eyes, smearing the mud there.
Jaina said, “All right, I don’t understand. Explain it to me.”
Zekk took a deep breath and began to pace in front of the dark doorway, like some wild creature trapped in an invisible cage. “There’s no place where I belong anymore, Jaina. The Shadow Academy became my home. It’s gone now—completely destroyed. Where can I go? The dark side is a part of me.”
“No, Zekk,” Jaina said. “You can give it up. Come back to the light.”
Zekk laughed, a sound filled with anger and a touch of madness. He clawed at his cheek with one hand and held out his fingers so that she could see the mud there. A wound on his cheek seeped blood, but he seemed not to notice. “The dark side isn’t like this mud,” he said. “You can’t just wear it for a while and then scrape it away—wash it off like some child who has finished playing in the dirt.”
Zekk wiped his hand on his tattered cape. “I’m a different person now than the uneducated street kid you knew on Coruscant. I don’t belong there anymore. Where could I belong? I’ve been trained as a Dark Jedi.” His expression turned bleak. “And now my teacher is dead, too. He taught me and believed in me, gave me skills and a purpose.”