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opening it wasn’t visible with the eyes.
    My room had a basic desk and chair, and I seated myself at it and placed the lightsaber on the desk, emitter pointed away from me for safety. As before, I kept myself open to the Force, but now I tried to focus on the lightsaber and feel the Force inherent in it. Closing my eyes, I explored the top of the hilt right below the emitter with my fingers, searching for any tactile clues. The surface retained that same strange slick feeling, but I detected nothing unusual at the top, or around the button or dial, or even on the rest of the hilt. When I ran my finger fully around the base, however, clockwise and then counterclockwise, eyes still closed and trying to feel the Force, a
snick
announced the appearance of a fissure lengthwise down the hilt; after another soft
click
, the casing popped free, revealing yet another metal sheath, one that looked more like mine and had visible screws. Artoo unscrewed them for me and I was able to lift off one half of the sheath and reveal the innards.
    The power cell at the base was insulated and held no interest for me. Above that was a platform for the primary focusing crystal that gave the lightsaber its color. Two additional crystalsfloated above it, balanced so precariously on mounting ridges that they could easily be disturbed—and they had been. They lay askew, and I feared I must have done that in the process of disassembling it. The lightsaber wouldn’t work properly now, even if I put it back together; without proper focusing there was no telling what would happen if I tried to turn it on. It might explode. And aligning those crystals by hand would be impossible—I sensed that it had to be done with the Force, and only through the Force would I know whether it was aligned properly or not. They were wafer-thin slices of crystal, too, a beautiful clear amethyst, and might scratch or cloud with handling. Moving them precisely with the Force would ensure that they remained pristine.
    The lightsaber’s construction confirmed for me what I had already suspected: Far from being merely a feeling of interconnectedness that could guide your actions or a method of tricking the weak-willed, the Force could be used to manipulate solid objects. However, the skill required to construct a lightsaber—or even put this one back together—was a parsec or five beyond my current abilities.
    I had Artoo take holo stills of the lightsaber as I deconstructed the rest of it for future study, and then I thought I should work on those Force abilities if I ever wanted to reassemble it or make my own.
    Obi-Wan had never addressed telekinesis with me. It was likely that I wasn’t strong enough to begin training in such an advanced field of study. That didn’t mean I shouldn’t try. I could begin with something small and harmless. At the far corner of the desk, there were a few sad vegetables lounging on a plate left over from lunch. I imagined that the cranker root, especially, looked unhappy where it was and wouldn’t mind moving a tiny bit. The humblest of Rodian vegetables, it sat, steamed and soggy, in a puddle of oil on a ceramic plate. Its outlook would be vastly improved if it escaped the valley of the plate, say, andmoved to the crest along the edge, where it could enjoy the fabulous vista of the desk and the tumbled remains of Huulik’s lightsaber.
    Before I began, I gave myself permission to fail. It was to be my first try, after all, and there was no use in getting upset or even angry at myself if I didn’t succeed right away. Obi-Wan said the man who killed my father, Darth Vader, had been seduced by the dark side of the Force. I assumed he was referring to darker emotions like fear, anger, and guilt, but his word choice puzzled me—I would never think of dark emotions as being seductive, with an agenda to consciously corrupt someone. To me they were emotions triggered by events that were felt intensely and then faded away, not natural states of