Have the nightmares finished? Obi-Wan Kenobi wondered to himself, This place can't be real, surely?
He was curled up in a stone niche, behind the statue of a Nimgoni warrior in heroic pose, its many flailing tentacles covered in dust. Clouds and the hurrying moon made it look as though it stirred, but if he put his hand on it there was no tremor of movement.
A dry wind brought the scents of stone and ancient decay, passing silently. Ahead of him, in a ruined tomb, brown rags of ...something... flapped, and the twisted forms of dried out Nimgoni cartilage rocked, slightly, as the breeze touched them.
I'm imagining this, right? But the overwhelming panic had switched off, suddenly as it had come. He couldn't see the monsters any more, or feel the horror and hatred from which he had run. Gritty sand felt sandlike under him. And he was hungry.
He squeezed out from behind the sinister carving, and at that moment a beam of red light hit him in the face. He froze; No danger! I didn't feel any danger!, but there hadn't been any warning when the madness struck either. What if...
"It's only a kid!"
"Shut up! D'you wanna bring the Prowlers?"
The targeting spot swept down, out of his eyes. It took a moment for the afterimages to fade and then he could see that there were three of them; shabby humans with thin, hard faces. They crowded close, pressing him back against the stone. He wasn't sure if it was a threat, or if they were just afraid of the open spaces.
"This is our patch, kid," the blonde woman at the back whispered, narrowing her colourless eyes. She held the blaster-rifle awkwardly, like someone else's baby, but her authority was well worn and sure. "What are you doing here?"
Obi-Wan couldn't think of anything better than the truth; "I'm lost."
It made them all laugh, choking it back behind their hands so as not to disturb the silence. "How can you be lost here?" the woman mocked him - her spirit as calloused as her hands; 'Oh I just stepped out in the middle of this salt-plain by accident.'"
"I'm an offworlder. I was separated from my party, and I need to get back to the Embassy. Can you help me?" He tried the mind-trick. Once or twice it had come easily to him. This time it did not, and the effect was not quite what he was hoping for.
"Maybe you can help us."
"Dena," One of the men; late twenties, dark, with a beard like an artistic statement - two ridiculous spots - spoke up reproachfully, "We agreed a four way split on anything we find."
"Yeah, we don't have to pay him." Dena glanced at him, went back to surveying the tombs with stretched eyes, "But he's small - we don't have to dig such a big hole. Less noise to attract them." Her wary smile was crooked, as though the starved face didn't have room for it, "Then when we got the stuff, we help him back to his embassy, and maybe get a reward. How about that?"
Both men were clutching filthy bags from which poked the handles of picks, smooth with wear. The evidence clicked into meaning with a sensation of vague horror; "You're grave robbers!"
"No!" Dena's eyes were the colour of liquid oxygen and just as warm. She forgot to whisper. "I'm no grave robber, I'm an architect. Blue..." she nodded at the third man. Big and shy, he shrank back slightly at hearing his name, "Is a droid personality programmer. Gemmer's a fabric designer. You tell me who'll pay for any of that now. Haven't you noticed the war?"
"If you rob graves then you're a grave robber." It occurred to Obi-Wan an instant later that however technically correct he might be it had not been the most helpful thing to say, but by that time it was too late.
Dena grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. "My family is starving! Gemmer's baby is sick. Don't you dare judge us, you off-planet little snot. You don't know what it's like down here."
"Dena!" hissed Blue, "Ssh!"
Startled, she fell silent. All three stood warily, listening to the whisper of the dry wind for a long tense moment.
If I ran now they'd never catch me, he thought, but there was something about the shape of the light, a pressure in the landscape of the Force, which kept him where he was.
Dena stirred at last. "Nieman and the kids can't keep the Prowlers distracted for ever. Let's get going."
Nimgoni statues - writhing horrors of tentacles - looked down as they walked a long avenue between flat-topped pyramids and stele. Steps led down into a barren courtyard, salt and stone frigid under the gaze of monstrous gods; gods with bird-faces, with toothed beaks and pincers.
The final deity stood on a plinth half a metre from a sheer wall. Blue squeezed into the gap and disappeared. Gemmer went after. With a hand knotted in the folds of Obi-Wan's hood Dena tugged him forwards in time to see Gemmer's sack being pulled into a gap in the cliff side. The men's shabby, sand coloured clothes made white patches against utter darkness, and were swallowed. Scraping noises seemed unbearably loud in the sacred setting. "Your turn."
It was a big hole at first - large enough for Blue, who was wider across the shoulders even than Master Jinn. Force! Don't let him have to come and rescue me. He already thinks I'm useless. Now I get to be a nuisance too?
He shook the thought off. It wasn't going to come to that. He was going to do the Jedi thing - wait until the situation became clearer. But when it did, he was going to get back on his own. I'm not useless!
A short way down the sandy passage there was a niche where Blue crouched. "You go on past," he said. Like Obi-Wan's master he had a gentle voice, and he favoured Obi-Wan with a hesitant smile, "Don't look so worried, kid. We're good people really."
"Huh, well, you are." Dena pushed Obi-Wan forward so she could hand Blue the blaster-rifle. He took it as if there was something obscene about it - reluctantly - and Obi-Wan decided they were probably correct. Blue was OK. A criminal, but nice with it.
"Listen, kid." It had begun to annoy him that she hadn't even asked for his name. "Do you know what a blaster-rifle sounds like?"
In his sleep. He nodded.
"If you hear Blue start shooting you drop whatever you're doing and get up here fast. He'll blow the Prowler to bits, and we'll leg it before any more can come. You've gotta get over the wall - understand? They won't follow you over the wall."
"The wall?" Even Dena was defrosting a little, as though she liked this unstable hole in thousands of tonnes of rock better than she liked the sunshine. The Prowlers must be serious indeed.
"It's transparisteel, about waist high. You must have climbed it when you got in. But if you can get back over it you're safe."
"Due North from here," Blue offered, and turned back to watching the entrance. Kindly, taciturn, competent - Obi-Wan was liking him more and more. He began to hope for the crime to go smoothly, just so Blue would never have to use that rifle.
Past Blue's niche the tunnel narrowed. He got down on hands and knees, crawled further in, salt and sandstone abrasive beneath his palms. How did I get those cuts?
A glow-rod ahead showed Gemmer crouched in his own alcove, holding out the two sacks. The strange beard made his face look sinister, as if bisected by a cleaver from nose to chin. In the ivory light his eyes glittered with barely restrained panic. He's too fragile for this, Obi-Wan thought, and Jedi-like, took note of Gemmer as the weak link in the party.
Beyond the fabric designer's alcove the diggings narrowed again, until dry stone was brushing his shoulders, pressing down on his back. His nose and mouth filled with dust, but he tried not to sneeze, imagining the noise racing up the corridor, expelled like a laser-bolt into the watching silence.
Cramped into the tube, his body blocked the light behind him, and his grazed hands found the end of the tunnel by instinct.
"We there?"
"Yes."
"OK. You take the pick - don't get any funny ideas - and dig. Pass the rubble back to me, I'll pass it to Gemmer, understand?"
She really did think he was brain-dead, didn't she? "Of course."
"Kid?" A softening in her voice. Maybe she was about to hand him some grudging piece of comfort. He didn't need it.
"My name's Obi-Wan."
"Whoa, that's a mouthful!" Something in her eased, as if here in the darkness she could risk being herself. "You really are foreign." He could hear the smile, "Dig quietly, Obi-Wan."
The pick felt familiar in his hand. Though the rubble was hard-packed, compressed by thousands of years, it was still lighter work than the mining he'd done on Bandomeer. But there he had been able to stand upright; he had been less aware of the great weight poised to come down at any moment on his back. Hadn't they brought props? What was holding it up, apart from inertia?
After a while that threat became like a third person in the tunnel with him, and Dena's presence, quiet, the attitude dropped, was reassuring. Maybe she's not so bad. Maybe she's just scared too?
Reaching for a loosened rock, his hand met marble. Pallid, smooth and - if he read the Force correctly - only a hand's breath thick before emptiness.
"Yes!" Dena was working on her belly now - there was no longer space enough for her to kneel. Her dim, dirt-streaked face seemed less real than the ice-white wall. "We've reached the chamber. Just pray this wall is thick."
"It isn't."
She set up her barriers against him - her face becoming suspicious. "How do you...?"
"It's about this depth." He demonstrated the distance, curious as to why she wanted the digging to go harder.
"Hells!"
As though he'd knocked her out, she lay prone in the corridor, cheek pillowed on the dust. But the unconscious don't engage in fierce moral struggle. When she looked up again he knew she was going to do something she might have to regret for the rest of her life. His hand strayed to his sabre.
"Go on then," she said, "What're you waiting for?"
He turned back, and again, when he wasn't looking at her, she relented. "Try to make the hole arch shaped. It's going to be under a lot of stress."
Understanding brought outrage. This is what's supporting everything? And she wants me to cut through it? She's risking my life without even asking! "I don't think I should do that."
"It's not like you have a lot of choice, Obi-Wan." The armour was back over her soul, and her voice was as it had been when she had him in the sites of her blaster. A hand flicked to her sleeve and brought out a knife. "After all, you're only a little boy."
Back at the Temple his first response to that would have been fury. He would have had to take her down. Now he thought Master Jinn wouldn't like me to hurt her, and the anger found a new target. But he's not here, is he? Off minding someone else's business, as he always is when I need him.
Grimly, he pushed the anger away, concentrated on the Force, bringing his hand up "You don't want to...."
And shots tore through words and Force alike. "Blue!"
Dena was already struggling backwards. Why couldn't she go faster?
Up ahead he could hear Gemmer crawling away, muttering pointless sentences of denial; "No. No this can't be happening. Please!"
The light receded with him. In the following darkness the blaster strobed the corridor with gold.
In the entrance - a burning hole of green light which dazzled as they scurried up to it - Blue was silhouetted. Clinging to the shaft of a pick which had been driven into the wall, he fired the enormous blaster one-handed against...what? It looked as if the very stone moved - air, salt and stone forming long snakelike limbs that reached down the corridor, plucked at Blue's face, trying to pull him out into the day. He was firing and weeping at the same time.
Obi-Wan stopped, focused, and saw the huge creature clearly - the Force asking him to admire its perfect camouflage; its fitness, its beauty. Lying still on the necropolis' pale sands it would be utterly invisible. Even in movement it was hard to see. Yes, yes, he thought, impatiently, It's very nice. Now help us survive it.
Blue's shots had severed the first tentacle. Its colour ebbed away, becoming greenish, like the sky. Rolling on the tunnel's floor it made footing treacherous for Obi-Wan, hampered Blue's exit. More of them might block the hole altogether. "We've got to get out into the open! Blue, move!"
Confusion - Blue's shots driving it back. Obi-Wan trying to get past Gemmer. Gemmer, trembling, desperate to run. Dena, unable to see at the back, shouting useless advice. Someone had to take charge. Obi-Wan thumbed his lightsabre on - the blade sliced the darkness; instant authority.
"Hells! The kid's a Jedi!"
"Gemmer," he said, "Get behind me. You run when I say so, not before. Come on Blue, we're going to drive it away, like you planned."
Just as they planned, except that he didn't like the way it retreated - slowly, taking terrible damage in utter silence. As if it's trying to draw us out. But what else can we do?
At last, air, light, and room to move. It had torn down the statue at the entrance and now filled its place. Revealed, with its bulging copper eyes, its soft body lying flaccid on the ground, its tentacles writhing like a tornado of flesh around a mouth full of razors - the Prowler was one of the gods of this place made real.
"Keep shooting. Don't worry about me - you can't hit me."
Great, Obi-Wan, you talk like you've got faith. Now have it. He ran out - to the left. Between them they could perhaps keep it pinned, while Dena and Gemmer ran. It slapped at him, almost lazily, and - Gods! - it was fast.
His heart lurched There is no fear, there is only the Force. He leapt. The limb cracked like a whip as it tried to change direction. Tumbling, he brought the blade down - no feeling of resistance, but suddenly the tentacle was twitching at his feet. Easy! And the second and third came at him from both sides, making him jump up, into the path of the blaster-bolts. No. This thing's smart!
He deflected fire - it smashed harmlessly into the tomb - dived, cut again. How many shots in the rifle's power-pack? Why hadn't he asked?
The tentacle that Blue had severed was regrowing - already a thin cable covered with serrated scales. I'm carrying water in a sieve here. Got to go for the body.
Gemmer broke from the doorway, Dena behind him. Sensible - only the dusty courtyard and the long quiet road in front of them - so why did he want to scream at them to stand still?
'Trust your feelings, Obi-Wan,' his master had said to him, in the days when they used to talk, 'Trust your unconscious connection to the Force.' "Dena! Gemmer! Stop!"
She obeyed him. Gemmer ran on. And the white salt rippled ahead of him, opened bronze, metallic eyes, boiled with tentacles.
They pulled him apart, between them, before Obi-Wan could take his next breath, and the pale city was sprayed with red.
"Damn!" Dena was on her knees, chanting it, "Damn! Damn! Damn!"
There is no passion, there is the Force.
Hard to count, hard to see - they merged into each other - but at least twelve. No chance at all. "Dena, back inside!"
She didn't move. He ran to her, pulled her shoulder, arm. Too heavy. "Move or die."
Blue came running - no gentleness in his face now - stuffed the blaster into Obi-Wan's hands, picked up Dena easily and bolted for the tunnel. Obi-Wan walked backwards after them, laying down fire.
They were in the entrance, Dena throwing up, Blue shuddering as if in hypothermia. "Go all the way down," he told them, "They can't follow, they're too big."
"So am I."
Dena wiped her mouth, looked up, "Gods, Blue! No."
But it was true, even now the tentacles had begun snaking back through the entrance, grabbing for him, and he would not fit further in.
Hard faced Dena was crying. A childish voice in Obi-Wan's head was saying, Please stop it. This isn't fun any more.
"You know I never wanted to pick up a weapon again." Blue was crying too, though he had taken back the rifle and was still shooting, "At least let me die saving you."
Obi-Wan wanted to say something; something about how Blue was as good as any Jedi he'd known, how Blue constantly reminded him of his own master, but what would be the point? Words wouldn't make anything better. He turned and pulled Dena deeper into hiding, all the way down to the pale wall.
They listened in silence to the barrage of shots, until it ceased. There was no scream. Thank the Force, there was no scream.
A faint shushing noise, like water over stones. His ears popped as if the air pressure had changed. What was it?
"Don't look so calm, you callous little bastard!"
"Just shut up! Shut up!" Shock and grief turned into rage; he wanted to shout them out until there was nothing left, maybe hit her - get her to take that back.
'I won't take you as my apprentice. There's too much anger in you' He remembered Qui-Gon walking away from him; his last chance, gone. Remembered how furious it had made him. He's unjust. He's wrong! But he hadn't been, had he? Not if Obi-Wan could react to a friend's grief by wanting to punch them.
He sighed, flinching away from that memory, and tried to find something more appropriate to say. "I'm sorry, Dena. I liked him too."
She met his surrender with her own. "What are we going to do?"
The noise came again - no longer like water, more like the abrasive passing of a small glacier - the sound of loose dirt being dragged inexorably forward. "Force! It's still coming!"
The striplight glow of his sabre lit groping ends of fingered tentacles, travelled upwards to where the soft bulk filled the corridor, squashing into every available space. He saw himself reflected in one liquid metal eye.
"Kill it!" Helpless, on her belly in the tiny space, Dena sounded panicky, but she was clearly still thinking; "The body'll block the tunnel. They won't be able to get past."
They'd have to take the body out before another could attack, and they could only come one at a time. Filling the corridor to capacity, unable to manoeuvre, he would kill them easily, one by one, and carve a passage out through the flesh after. Gruesome, but it sounded such a perfect plan. Why did he feel that it couldn't possibly work?
His ears popped again, an ache spreading through his sinuses, tightening across his whole face. He cut through the questing limbs and the effort left him panting. Why?
His chest hurt. Dena was gasping like an asthmatic where she lay. Realisation struck; No air! The Prowler's boneless form had made an airtight seal in the tunnel, and they lay in a tiny pocket of oxygen which the lightsabre and their breathing were rapidly burning up.
A brief pause - severed tentacles twitched and their replacements wriggled worm-thin down the floor towards them. Obi-Wan shook his head, dizzy, his vision blurring. This isn't working. Have to try something else. Then he crawled over Dena, plunged the sabre into the white marble and cut the arch.
An ancient air sighed out, stroking through his hair, across his upturned face, like the touch of a ghost. He breathed it in and it tasted of spice.
"Get off me!" Dena bucked and twisted, "Get inside."
"That's not going to...."
"I mean it. If the wall fails the corridor collapses, but maybe not the chamber. Go!"
Something had wrapped around his boot - it felt like a feeder hose, but it was squeezing, pulling him back. He kicked out, slammed it against the roof. Dena had inched her way through the hole into shadow. As the creature's grip weakened he plunged forward himself, fell maybe a metre, and landed on a soft carpet of dust.
He breathed in mold, rolled to his feet, coughing, turned back to prevent the vast menace from pushing itself into the chamber after them. But it had stopped. Infant tentacles explored the arch with odd delicacy, fingered ends flexing.
Dena, the architect, saw what it was doing before he did. "Stop it! It's going to...."
And it pulled the wall down on top of itself.
Obi-Wan raised the lightsabre above his head, saw a domed roof, sagging, a patter of loosed mortar like dry rain. Everything was tipped slightly out of kilter - unstable, but holding. In what had been the corridor's mouth there was now no hole larger than the size of his finger. The Force told him it was blocked for a depth of at least three metres.
Gleams hurried across the floor as he moved the sabre's icy light, picked out blades as tall as he was; rings of gold that would have fitted round his waist; tiny models of Nimgoni servants doing heartbreakingly ordinary things - making tea, building houses, teaching children.
"I'm sorry Dena." Having laughed until her throat bled she now lay by the ruined door, sobbing. Dust, raised by the cave-in, had settled on her, covering her with layers of decay, "I'm going to have to shut off the light. I want to keep the power in case they decide to come back."
"It's OK. Let the dark come."
He sat down next to her, grateful for her breathing, her warmth. When the blade hummed into nothing, they were the only living things he had left.
Blackness pressed on his eyes, and pooled in his heart together. He sat there for a long time while his mouth dried and he wondered if he had any reason to hope.
Dena stirred beside him. The small sounds of sitting up, brushing tears from her face. Her voice was soft, and curious, as though she'd pared off all that callous, emerged as someone new. "Obi-Wan, you're glowing."
"What?" But it was true. Looking down, he could see the folds of his tunic outlined in pale saffron, and if he bent, the overlapped layers of fabric slid apart and light burst from the gap. "Oh, this. I'd forgotten about this."
He brought the stone out of his tunic like a pocket-sized star. His hand was full of golden radiance, so intense that the fingers glowed red.
Amazingly, Dena was smiling. "It's fantastic! How could you forget about something like that?"
"Most of the time it's just a rock." A black pebble, smoothed by water, red veined. Pretty, but something you'd kick aside as you walked down the road.
"Where'd you get it?"
She wanted to talk, and why not? What else did they have to do? Only he wished she had not chosen that particular subject. "My Master gave it to me."
Her face filled with curiosity, but he didn't want to be questioned about this. He rushed to fill in detail by himself; "It was when he first accepted me as apprentice - it's traditional to give a gift." So much anguish before then, and after.... No. I'm not going to think about it.
"He said he found it when he was my age. It came from the River of Light on his homeworld."
She had closed her eyes, was lying back against the wall, surrendered to the story, but smiling. "That's nice," she said, unexpectedly, "Like he was trying to give you part of his own past; a piece of his youth, his home. That's...." the smile tucked in at the edges as if embarrassed, "Really sweet."
Obi-Wan felt his understanding of the universe falter. He remembered receiving the present - Master Jinn's big hand pressing it into his - and his own reaction That's it? He's given me a pebble!
Later, when he found out it was Force-sensitive, he'd begun to value it, but at the time his disappointment must have shown. And there was this whole huge emotional subtext to the thing, that I completely missed?
Why? Why did it take six months and a complete stranger to see what he should have seen? Why did he have to see it now, after the moment had been so comprehensively ruined? No wonder he hates me.
"So what happened to him?"
Somehow he'd given her the impression his Master was dead. "Nothing. He's OK." Do I know that? Really? What if he's hurt? He cut the thought off impatiently - there was nothing a bunch of bureaucrats could do, possessed or not, that would threaten Qui-Gon Jinn.
Dena sat up as if propelled by electric shock. "But that's great! There's still hope. He's going to come rescue you, right?"
Why were people always making assumptions about him?
A pain in his jaw told him 'you are doing something self destructive'. He acknowledged it, unclamped his teeth and said, "Yeah, maybe."
"Maybe?"
"It's a long story." And I don't want to talk about it.
"Oh, right." Her surrender had not lasted long, she was fighting again, "And I've got so much else to do."
Did he owe Dena an explanation? I don't think so. But perhaps if he told it to her he could get it sorted out in his own head? If there's any point.
"We don't get on so well."
If he put the stone down it faded, so he cradled it in both hands and rested his arms on his knees. Where did you start, telling a story as complicated as this?
"I guess I'll start right at the beginning. I wasn't a good student...."
Things rearranged themselves with a feeling of surprise - that the beginning had not been with him at all. "No actually you have to start with Master Jinn. He had a Padawan before me, whom he really cared about." Bastard! "And this guy - Xanatos - turned on him, tried to kill him."
Telling it from Qui-Gon's point of view put a different slant on things, made him see causes he hadn't understood before. He went on, wondering, "It kind of destroyed him. He would volunteer for all the dangerous missions, you know, like he was hoping not to come back."
Hurt? No. Qui-Gon was a Jedi Master. He couldn't be hurt, but perhaps he had been trying to punish himself? The whole train of thought was too dark. Obi-Wan abandoned it and pressed on.
"Anyway, now I come in. And I wasn't a good student." It hurt to admit it But I wasn't. "I got angry, I got into fights, and because of it I'd been turned down by every knight who came to see me. Qui-Gon was my last hope."
"Qui-Gon?"
"It's his name - Qui-Gon Jinn."
She snorted softly, "Another foreigner." But he knew she was listening, and not unsympathetically.
"He didn't want me either. And I blamed him more than the others - because he'd ruined my last chance." It didn't get easier, replaying that rejection, especially not here, when the only thing standing between him and death was the hope that this time Qui-Gon wouldn't just walk away.
"There were," he didn't think he could explain about Yoda right now, "Important people in the Temple who urged him to take me on, but he wasn't having any of it."
He paused. The story seemed to have twisted out of his hands, like the white creature from the lake. It trusted him - and not me. How could he get it back?
"Poor guy." Dena said, surprising him, "He gets kicked in the face and while he's still reeling you all try to set him up for the same thing to happen again?"
Just like an adult to miss the point. Master Jinn wasn't the one suffering. He was. He opened his mouth to protest.
"But I guess he must have changed his mind, eh? Or you wouldn't be here."
"I helped him. We were on a mining colony called Bandomeer. Xanatos had set up a trap for him, and I helped him beat Xanatos and save the planet." It sounded boastful, put like that, but what he remembered was a turmoil of confusion, annoyance and dread. "Maybe he felt he had to - because he owed me."
He had to? Obi-Wan remembered his master's words, just yesterday: "There's no surer way to ruin anything than to force it; the resentment pushes it apart from within. You end up with smaller pieces and bigger grudges than before." Was he talking about us?
"Well, OK." Dena picked up a limb-band like a child's hoop. Gold and gems flashed cold as she spun it, "So he owes you. That's good."
"No." He felt her gaze brush his cheek as he stared down. "No, there's more."
"As good as a vid," she said, touching his arm to show she wasn't mocking. The thin face was saddened by its crooked smile.
"For a while things went alright. Not brilliant, but alright."
"I hear an 'and then'."
"And then I...." His throat closed, "I...." Could he get through this part of the story without thinking? Without remembering? Let's try it.
"I betrayed him. Just like Xanatos; I left him and I left the Jedi to start a war. I...found some new friends," Cerasi! Her laughter, her sense of purpose, the strength and beauty of her spirit.
"I drew my sword against him. I told him to leave me and go away, and he did."
"And yet here you are - with him?" Dena's face was bland, reassuring. If he'd seen any emotion at all he wasn't sure he could have gone on.
"It all went wrong."
Cerasi! Dying in his arms, green eyes glazing, part of his soul being torn away forever. And the meaningless days afterwards when he couldn't think or breathe for pain, when he watched everything he'd built dissolve and couldn't care about any of it.
"So I called him for help, and he came. But he couldn't trust me any more." Obi-Wan risked a glance at Dena. Her eyes were cold again, like the centuries of dead dust she sat in. He didn't want to hear an 'I'm not surprised,' he'd had too much of that at the Temple.
"I've tried, and tried to show him that this time I'm going to do better. I'm going to be perfect." He could hear the anger in that, and habit made him breathe it down before he continued.
"I helped him track down Xanatos, when I could have got kicked out of the Order for it. I thought he'd be grateful - the extra loyalty would show him I'd changed - but if anything it's made it worse. He doesn't even see me. I'm just a nuisance."
Talking hadn't helped. He bit down hard against tears and told the pain in his jaw to shut up about it this time. I can't afford to cry. There can't be that much air left in here.
The light in his hands flickered as he fought despair; "So I don't know," he said, finally, "I don't know if he's going to come or not."
