Read Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 02 - Skyborn for Free Online

Each time he inhaled, he drew the Force into himself, and each time he exhaled, he sent it flowing throughout his body. He had no conscious memories of Shelter that were his own, so he envisioned a holograph of the facility that he had seen in the Jedi Archives. The image showed a handful of habitation modules clinging to the surface of an asteroid fragment, their domes clustered around the looming cylinder of a power core. In his mind’s eye, Ben descended into the gaudy yellow docking bay at the edge of the facility … and then he was two years old again, a frightened little boy holding a stranger’s hand as his parents departed in the
Jade Shadow
.
    An unwarranted sense of relief welled up inside Ben as he grew lost in a time when life had seemed so much easier. The last fourteen years began to feel like a long, terrible nightmare. Jacen’s fall to the dark side hadnever happened, Ben had not been molded into an adolescent assassin, and his mother had not died fighting Jacen. All those sad memories were still just bad dreams, the unhappy imaginings of a frightened young mind.
    Then the
Shadow
slipped through the containment field and ignited her engines. In the blink of an eye she dwindled from a trio of blue ion circles into a pinpoint of light to nothing at all, and suddenly Ben was alone in the darkest place in the galaxy, one child among dozens entrusted to a small group of worried adults who—despite their cheerful voices and reassuring presences—had very clammy palms and scary, anxious eyes.
    Two-year-old Ben reached toward the
Shadow
with his free hand and his heart, and he sensed his mother and father reaching back. Though he was too young to know he was being touched through the Force, he stopped being afraid … until a dark tentacle of need began to slither up into the aching tear of his abandonment. He thought for an instant that he was just sad about being left behind, but the tentacle grew as real as his breath, and he began to sense in it an alien loneliness as desperate and profound as his own. It wanted to draw him close and keep him safe, to take the place of his parents and never let him be alone again.
    Terrified and confused, young Ben pulled away, simultaneously drawing in on himself and yanking his hand from the grasp of the silver-haired lady who was holding it.
    Then suddenly he was back in the cockpit of the
Jade Shadow
, staring into the fire-rimmed voids ahead. Scattered around their perimeter were the smaller whorls of half a dozen more distant rings, their fiery light burning bright and steady against the starless murk of the deep Maw.
    “Well?” his father asked. “Anything feel familiar?”
    Ben swallowed. He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself wanting to withdraw from the Force all over again. “Are we sure we need to find these guys?”
    Luke raised a brow. “So it
is
familiar.”
    “Maybe.” Ben couldn’t say whether the two feelings were related, and at the moment he didn’t care. There was something hungry in the Maw, something that would still be there waiting for him. “I mean, the Aing-Tii call them Mind Drinkers. That can’t be good.”
    “Ben, you’re changing the subject.” Luke’s tone was more interested than disapproving, as though Ben’s behavior were only one part of a much larger puzzle. “Is there something you don’t want to talk about?”
    “I wish.” Ben told his father about the dark tentacle that had reached out to him after the
Shadow
departed Shelter so many years ago. “I guess what we’re feeling now might be related. There was definitely some …
thing
keeping tabs on me at Shelter.”
    Luke considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You were pretty attached to your mother. Maybe you were just feeling abandoned and made up a ‘friend’ to take her place.”
    “A
tentacle
friend?”
    “You said it was a
dark
tentacle,” Luke continued thoughtfully, “and guilt is a dark emotion. Maybe you were feeling guilty about