“I can tell you that.” The voice came from everywhere, or nowhere: a young man’s tenor, with the flattened, nasal accent of the far Outer Rim.

Cronal jerked upright in the absolute blackness inside the Shadow Egg.

“If you’d made friends with the Melters, instead of making them your slaves, you might have discovered all kinds of things they can do for you.” The voice was coming from inside Cronal’s head. “As for where I am, well …”

The interior of the Shadow Egg suddenly flared with light: blue-white light, from a crackling energy discharge that spidered across its inner shell. An instant later the shell collapsed, splashing around Cronal’s ankles and draining off the repulsorlift platform that had supported the Shadow Egg.

Twenty meters away, on the ledge that curved outward from the tunnel mouth, stood a slim young man in a Republic flight suit who held, loosely and casually in one hand, a lightsaber of brilliant green.

Luke tried to keep his breathing slow and steady, while his heart thumped against his rib cage like a trapped slashrat trying to break free. For an interminable stretching moment after the meltmassif egg had collapsed, all Luke had been able to do was stare blankly and think Look at the size of him …

Kar Vastor crouched like a sabercat coiled to spring. One of his enormous hands rested on a blob of meltmassif. His lips had peeled back to reveal teeth long and curving and sharp as stilettos. Luke blinked, and blinked again. Each of his biceps is bigger than my head …

And around him in the Force swirled a storm of darkness unlike any Luke had experienced since the Emperor’s death: darkness that could snuff his own paltry light like a candle.

But fear could have power over him only if he let it. He breathed deeply, slowly, and with each exhale he opened himself so that all his fear, all his tension and apprehension, his every care and concern drained out of him and flowed away.

How would Ben handle this?

That thought steadied him. He imagined Ben at his side, and held the old Jedi’s kindly smile of warm knowing firmly in his mind. “Blackhole,” he said, and the calm solidity he heard in his own voice reassured him even more. “You have one chance to do this the easy way.”

Blackhole’s response was a low snarl that somehow, in Luke’s brain, translated itself into words. The easy way, he growled, would be to swap. Give yourself to be my body, and I’ll let your sister go.

Luke shook his head and hefted his lightsaber. “If you fight me, you will be destroyed.”


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapter 17