Star Wars: Crosscurrent Read Free

this war."
    Drev bowed his head, his shoulders drooping, trying to look contrite under his mass of thick brown hair. "Forgive me, Master. But I…" He paused, though his round face showed him struggling with a thought.
    "What is it?" Relin asked.
    Drev did not look at him as he said, "I sometimes think you laugh too little. Among my people, the shamans of the Moon Lady teach that tragedy is the best time for mirth. Laugh even when you die, they say. There is joy to be found in almost everything."
    "And there is also pain," Relin said, thinking of Saes. "Are the coordinates ready?"
    Drev stiffened in his chair and in his tone. "Ready, Master."
    "Then let us find out what it is that Saes is looking for."
    Relin maneuvered the Infiltrator out of the nebula and checked it against Drev's coordinates. Stars dotted the viewscreen.
    "We go," Relin said.
    Drev touched a button on his console, and the transparisteel cockpit window dimmed to spare them the hypnotic blue swirl of a hyperspace tunnel. Relin engaged the hyperdrive. Points of light turned to infinite lines.
     
     
    THE PRESENT:
    41.5 YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF YAVIN
     
    Darkness plagued Jaden, the lightless ink of a singularity. He was falling, falling forever. His stomach crawled up his throat, crowding out whatever scream he might have uttered.
    He still felt the Force around him, within him, but only thickly, only attenuated, as if his sensitivity were numbed.
    He hit unseen ground with a grunt and fell to all fours. Snow crunched under his palms and boots. Gusts of freezing wind rifled his robes to stab at his skin. Ice borne by the wind peppered his face and rimed his beard. He still could see nothing in the pitch. He stood, shaky, shaking, freezing.
    "Where is this place?" he called. The darkness was so deep he could not see his frozen breath. His voice sounded small in the void. "Arsix?"
    No response.
    "Arsix?"
    Odd, he thought, that the first thing he called for in an uncertain situation was his droid rather than a fellow Jedi.
    He reached for the familiar heft of his primary lightsaber, found its belt clip empty. He reached around to the small of his back for his secondary lightsaber—the crude but effective weapon he had built as a boy on Coruscant without any training in the Force—and found it gone, too. His blaster was not in his thigh holster. No glow rod in his utility pocket.
    He was cold, alone, unequipped, blind in the darkness.
    What had happened? He remembered nothing.
    Drawing his robes tightly about him to ward off the cold, he focused his hearing, but heard nothing over the wind except the gong of his heartbeat in his ears. With difficulty, he reached out with his Force sense through the fog of his benighted sensitivity, trying to feel the world around him indirectly. Through the dull operation of his expanded consciousness he sensed something…
    There were others there with him, out in the darkness.
    Several others.
    He sharpened his concentration and the tang of the dark side teased his perception—Sith.
    But not quite Sith, not entirely: the dark side adulterated.
    He tried to ignore the familiar caress of the dark side's touch. He knew the line between light and dark was as narrow as a vibroblade-edge, His Master, Kyle Katarn, had taught him as much. Every Jedi walked that edge. Some understood the precipice under their feet, and some did not. And it was the latter who so often fell. But it was the former who so often suffered. Jaden frequently wished he had remained in ignorance, had stayed the boy on Coruscant for whom the Force had been magic.
    Summoned from the past, his Master's words bounced around his brain: The Force is a tool, Jaden. Sometimes a weapon, sometimes a salve. Dark side, light side, these are distinctions of insignificant difference. Do not fall into the trap of classification. Sentience curses us with a desire to categorize and draw lines, to fear that after this be dragons. But that is illusion. After this is not dragons