Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force Read Free Page A

back again. Somewhere—Jax just couldn’t remember where—he had heard that pyronium was a source of immense power, of almost unlimited power. He had thought that apocryphal and absurd.
Power
was a vague word and meant many things to many people.
    “What’s this for?” he asked now as he had then, looking up into his friend’s face.
    “For safekeeping while I’m on Tatooine,” Anakin said. His mouth curved wryly. “Or maybe it’s a gift.”
    “Well, which is it?” Jax asked.
    The answer
then
had been a shrug. Now it was a cryptic phrase uttered in a deep, rumbling voice not at all like the Padawan’s own: “With this, journey beyond the Force.”
    Jax laughed. “The Force is the beginning, middle, and end of all things. How does one go beyond the infinite?”
    Instead of replying, the Anakin of his dream began to laugh. To Jax’s horror, Anakin’s flesh
blackened
, crispingand shriveling as if from intense heat; peeling away from the muscle and bone beneath. His grin twisted horribly, becoming a skull’s rictus. Worst of all, laughter still tumbled from the seared lips.
    Jax woke suddenly and completely, bathed in cold sweat.
    With this, journey beyond the Force?
    That was impossible. It made no sense—and what was with the burning? He shivered, his skin creeping beneath its clammy film of sweat as he recalled one of the rumors of where and how Anakin was supposed to have died on Mustafar—thrown into the magma stream by … no one knew who.
    “Is something wrong, Jax?”
    Jax glanced over from his sweat-soaked bed mat to where I-Five stood sentry, his photoreceptors gleaming with muted light.
    Jax hesitated for only a moment. It might seem a futile monologue to discuss a dream with a droid, but I-5YQ was no ordinary droid, and even if he were, there was value to talking out the puzzling dream even with a supposedly nonsentient being. If nothing else, Jax reasoned that sorting through the images, actions, and words aloud would help him understand them.
    He sat up, leaning against the wall of his small room in the Poloda Place conapt he shared with the rest of his motley team. “I dreamed.”
    “I’ve read that all living things do,” I-Five observed blandly.
    Jax was seized with sudden curiosity: Did I-Five dream? Was that even possible? He wanted to ask but quelled the urge, instead launching into a detailed re-telling of his own nighttime visitation.
    When Jax at last exhausted the account, I-Five was silent for a moment, his photoreceptors flickering slightly in a way that suggested the blinking of human eyes. Finallyhe said, “May I point out that this would seem to contradict the knowledge you received through the Force some months ago that Skywalker was still alive?”
    “Well, yeah.” Jax ran fingers through his sweat-damp hair. “Although he might have been injured on Mustafar, I suppose.”
    “Possibly, although other possibilities abound. It might have a more metaphysical meaning, for example. Or it might be an expression of your own inner fears.”
    “That’s not usually how Force dreams work, but I suppose it’s possible. I’ve never had one like this before,” Jax admitted. “I mean, a dream of the past, rather than the future, for one thing. And an edited past at that. Anakin didn’t say anything about the Force when he gave me the pyronium, he just asked me to keep it for him while he went to Tatooine. And I think I’d have noticed if he burst into flames,” he added wryly.
    I-Five’s “eyes” flickered again, seeming to convey amusement.
    The door chime sounded; Jax checked his chrono, but I-Five was ahead of him.
    “It’s oh seven hundred hours.”
    It wasn’t a terribly early hour this deep in downlevel Coruscant where few acknowledged either day or night, but most sentients seemed to agree that some hours were impolite for calling on one’s neighbor.
    Jax rose and padded out of his room into the larger main living area, noticing that the rest of his