Telos — The Jedi Academy

Atton cursed and drew his third backup pistol from the back of his belt as he fell back farther down the narrow steel-blue corridor. But the ghost women had long reach with their electrostaves, and one of the two that were after him thrust hers at his weapon arm before he could get off a shot; it just barely tapped against the blaster, but that was enough to zap it out of Atton's hand and send a jolt up to his shoulder. Screwing up his face against the pain, he yanked out his vibroblade and awkwardly parried their follow-up attacks with his other hand. Silver arcs of energy snaked their way up the blade, but stopped at the specially insulated handle.

Just out of arm's reach to Atton's left, his partner in this fool's errand was in a similar predicament. He had only one of the Handmaidens on his case; while the middle of the three occasionally snuck a stab at him, she really had it out for Atton for whatever reason.

She wasn't alone in that.

Barely a week had passed since Atton and the Force had been introduced, but already he was seeing signs that things weren't going to work out between him and it. He'd started to think that his sensing abilities were already beginning to sharpen, and in ways that he hadn't expected them to. Soon as they landed back in this ice hole, for instance, he'd started to have another one of his premonitions. But it wasn't one of the more common, general we're-all-probably-about-to-die-somehow ones; it was stronger and more specific than that.

Kreia's not here. I can sense it, Meetra had said. I'm going to talk with Atris and find out where she is.

And that had set off the alarm in Atton's head. Bad idea, bad idea, it went. Don't let her go alone. Bad idea, don't let her— He'd let her, though, and so had the rest of the crew. Most of them seemed content to do as they were told and stay put; Meetra could handle herself in a fight, after all. But that wasn't the kind of danger that the Force seemed to be mumbling about. It had given Atton vague impressions that were hard to distinguish from his own random guesses. Perhaps Meetra was about to make some mistake, something that was going to kark everything up—assuming they could get any more karked up now that Kreia had killed the Jedi and gone rogue.

Speculation was a waste of time, though. Only one thing was crystal-clear: he couldn't let Meetra confront Atris alone. No matter what. And as it turned out, the only other person in the crew who was crazy enough to just "trust the Force" and go with him was Mical.

But again, Atton wasn't sure this whole Force thing was going to work out. Case in point, when he supposedly needed it to warn him about some esoteric, mystical danger? Sure, no problem. But when three Echani fighters armed with electrostaves were about to jump him and his partner? Nope, too much trouble. Not a blip on the sensor screen.

And if that was too much for the Force to help Atton out with, he sure as hell wasn't going to trust it to guide his lightsaber.

A glance over his shoulder told him that they were just meters away from backing into the door at the end of the hallway—and the controls for it weren't on his side.

"Mical—door!" Atton barked over the crackles and hisses of the staves. After batting aside a stab from each of his friends, he feinted at the third Handmaiden, making her flinch back. He very nearly got shocked in the kidney for his trouble, but it bought Mical a second to slap the panel. The door beeped and hissed open, and the two men practically tripped through it. The room beyond was spacious; even with the conference table and chairs in one corner, it offered plenty of room to maneuver. Which was good, because the other three Handmaidens were waiting for them in there.

Atton found himself in the middle of a cyclone, blocking and parrying—now he had three of them to deal with on his own. No doubt Mical did as well, but Atton couldn't keep track of him. He was whirling, feinting and parrying, occasionally managing a hasty counter-chop, but getting nowhere fast; the ghost women were just taking their time, letting him burn himself out with all this fancy, ridiculous swordplay.

Outrage welled up in his mind and spread, gnawing away at his concentration. For a while now—ever since Peragus, really—he'd known that his days were numbered, and out of all the hopeless, skrag-shoveling, misfit murglaks to be found in the galaxy, he was one of the last ones who'd look out at the stars and tell them that he deserved a better deal than they'd given him. But to die now? Without knowing what would happen to Meetra, or even figuring out the stupid omen that had gotten him into this fight in the first place? That was just too much. He had always believed, needed to believe, that he would be there at the end of this mission. And that Meetra wanted him to be there.

Swallowing his pride, he took one hand from the vibroblade's hilt and thrust it into the jacket pocket where his lightsaber was hidden. In that blazing split second as the Handmaidens' electrostaves flashed in at him again, he reached out to the Force in his own clumsy, stupid way, not asking or begging or bargaining, just trying to get out of his own head and be what he had to be.

The Force isn't something you study, Meetra had told him. It's something you use. You just feel it. You just do it.

Without looking, Atton sidestepped, and the arc of an electrostaff missed his spine, sizzling harmlessly past him. At the same time, he tossed his vibroblade toward the Handmaiden to his left. While she smacked it away in a crackling flash, he drew his lightsaber and blocked a slash from his right.

There was an awful electric squeal as the weapons ground together; lightning coiled around the electrostaff's pole, and the already-crazy oscillations of the lightsaber blade intensified. Surprise shone in the ghost woman's eyes, and Atton sensed a ripple of distraction pass through the other minds in the room.

After another second he surrendered the lock, ducking under the follow-up slash. Things were different; he could sense his lightsaber now. But instead of stopping to be amazed, he moved, and the roiling blue-white blade seared through the middle of the woman's electrostaff and her left shoulder. As she fell to the floor with a scream, Atton spun around and met the other two's assault. The Force joined with muscle memory, and he found himself slipping into one of the dueling sequences Meetra had taught him, smoothly parrying and striking in turn, and before he knew it the two Handmaidens were backing off.

Looking to his right, Atton spied Mical over by a far wall. Having lost his vibroblade, he'd rushed one of the Handmaidens and grabbed her electrostaff, twisting about and wrestling for it even as another one tried to circle around and shock him from behind. Meanwhile, the third over there had disengaged and was jogging over to help deal with Atton.

Atton's jaw clenched as he took in the scene. He didn't have any more time for this. Finding his eye drawn to the conference table in the far corner, he threw his focus over there and gave a twist of his will. The table lurched, and three of the chairs shot into the air. One almost bowled over Mical and his two assailants, but at the last second they scattered and dove out of the way.

The Handmaiden who was in the middle of crossing the room was hit by the second chair hard enough to send her rolling across the floor. Her electrostaff went flying. The third chair landed behind one of the ghost women in front of Atton, skidding and knocking against a heel. It tripped her up, but she managed to catch herself against the floor instead falling on her face.

The last of ghost women hesitated, looking over her fellows in dismay, and Atton backed off a few steps, placing himself beside the one whose arm he'd severed. The Force was slipping away from him, his mind plunging back into his skull—he'd done too much too fast. He'd impressed himself, to be honest, but it just wasn't enough...

Desperately, he reached back into the hallway that he and Mical had come from, dragging the last of his power in a wave down its length. Two of the blasters he'd dropped there came skittering into the room, and he snatched one up with his free hand. But the other pistol went well past him, and the Handmaiden he'd tripped with the chair grabbed it with a snarl. Atton raised his saber toward her, but it was already back to feeling alien in his grip, and none of Meetra's lessons had included blaster bolt deflection.

Luckily, he knew better than to count on Jedi tricks. Scoundrel tricks were his stock-in-trade, and when a scoundrel was in a tight spot, the only better thing to have than a good blaster was a good bluff. He trained his pistol on the maimed one who lay nearby and bellowed, "Hey, HOLD IT! TIME OUT!"

The whole room froze in front of him. Over by the wall, Mical was on his knees, an electrostaff in his hand; one of the Handmaidens was quivering on the floor before him, favoring a smoking black mark on her leg.

As everyone stared at Atton like he had three heads, he continued, "You all have enough yet? Huh?" He nodded at each of the wounded Handmaidens. "This one, those two—not dead yet. Gives you a choice, it seems to me. Keep scrapping with us and probably die—or get them to some kolto tanks, or whatever you've got, and let your master deal with us. What do you think?"

For a long moment the two Handmaidens in front of Atton held him in a murderous gaze. But even as he watched them, the one with the blaster cracked, the intensity visibly draining from her face. Her eyes flitted to her sister. "Cliona," she said in a low voice. "Cliona, please..."

Cliona hissed back, "Quiet. Help Rhea. I'll get Genevieve." With a click, the poles of her electrostaff switched off and collapsed back into the hilt, and she slowly tucked it into her belt. Her sister did the same, set her blaster down, and backed away.

"Step back," Cliona said to Atton. Extinguishing the saber, he did so, and a short moment later the ghost women had collected their wounded and swept from the room, leaving him alone with Mical.

As they recovered their dropped weapons, Atton thought Mical would want an apology for almost crushing him with a flying chair, but the half-Jedi only told him, "Let's go. Quickly."

Which they did, heading the rest of the way to the central hub, and from there through a strange replica of the Jedi Council chamber on Coruscant—Atton recognized it from the recording of Meetra's trial—and then finally to a bridge leading to what looked like a meditation chamber. They shared an uneasy look as they started across the walkway. The chamber's door was wide open, and through it they could see no sign of Atris or Meetra. Spanning its circular wall were two rows of pyramidal ornaments, each of which gave off a steady crimson glow. As he drew near, a strange tingle came into Atton's mind. Though he'd exhausted his use of the Force, he was instinctively reacting to something in that room.

Mical spoke then, his voice inexplicably trembling with dread. "Atton, those devices on the walls—I think they're..." But he trailed off as soon as they had crossed the doorway, because now they could see both Meetra and Atris off to the right.

The ex-Jedi stood with her back to the entrance, her inactive lightsaber in her right hand. Her left one was raised, the fingers curled toward the wall, where Atris was pressed flat by an invisible hold. Strangely, the Jedi Master looked thinner than she had seemed in the recording of Meetra's trial, with her white robes draping loosely from her splayed limbs. Her skin was inhumanly pale—glowing, even—lending it a semblance of fragility, almost like ice.

The first thing Atton thought of was a Gorsian dragonfly pressed between two panes of glass. But then he noticed the tremors and spasms that roiled through Atris' frame, like her body was trying to shake itself apart even as the Force held her in place. His gaze traveled down her right arm and found that it ended in a charred stump, still aglow but cooling fast. Her left eye was gone, as well; in its stead was a steaming black streak that traveled back almost to her ear, then down over the cheek.

Grisly as this sight was, it wasn't the type of thing Atton would lose sleep over. He'd seen worse—hell, he'd done worse. But when he tried to speak, Meetra's name died in his throat, and he found himself paralyzed by a grotesque mixture of fascination and horror. He had felt the exact same thing during an incident from his adolescence in which he had witnessed a nerf being eaten alive by a manka cat. Why that feeling should return to Atton there, at that moment, was incomprehensible; it was like his brain was seeing something that his eyes could not.

Mical found his voice before Atton could. "Meetra!"

With a jolt, Meetra dropped her hand and Atris slid to the floor, writhing and whimpering. The ex-Jedi spun around. Something wild and frantic was in her eyes, and her chest was rising and falling as if they'd stopped her in the middle of a sprint. "What are you doing here?"

"We thought you needed a hand," Atton said mechanically as he emerged from his daze.

"What happened?" demanded Mical. "What is this place?"

For a moment, Meetra stared as though she didn't understand Basic. "I... I'll explain." Stepping closer, she put her lightsaber back on her belt—right beside a second, similar hilt which was already there. After another strange pause, she cocked her head toward Atton. "You felt something just now, didn't you?"

"I... Yeah, it was..." He left off. The afterimage of whatever he had experienced loomed large, and it got his skin crawling. All he knew was that it was a Force thing; the fact that he had no words for it told him that much.

"These things," Meetra supplied, gesturing at the little pyramids around them. "Sith holocrons. Atris' little secret. Shows what she thinks of guarding against the dark side."

Mical took in the room with an appalled look that came to rest on the pitiful robed form a few meters away. "Atris fell to the dark side?" he breathed, though it wasn't really a question.

"You could say that," said Meetra, an uneasy chuckle running beneath her words. "She and I, we couldn't reach an agreement... but I know where Kreia is now. We're going there after we've dealt with the Sith here." Her face went rigid as a haunting croak sounded behind her.

Atton barely heard the exchange; he was still trying to make sense of what he'd felt in the Force. He wanted to believe Meetra's explanation, but it didn't add up. If the weird little psychic tingling was some kind of aura being generated by the holocrons, that was one thing.

But the other thing, the one that had left Atton stunned with an inexplicable fear—it sure as hell hadn't been triggered by a couple of spooky old trinkets. It was the sight of Meetra and Atris that had done that. And Atton had been led to it by his bad feeling from before, his blind certainty that Meetra was in some kind of danger. But what did it actually mean?

And why would Meetra try to keep him from figuring it out?

He almost snorted out loud. This crazy mission, his involvement with Meetra, Kreia turning on them all, the Jedi dead, and he was still new to the Force—it had all gotten to him, and it was twisting his brain into a knot.

After everything they'd been through, he decided that he was ready to trust Meetra more than he trusted himself. She was actually there, in front of him. Given the choice between her and some cryptic, uselessly vague instincts and omens, he'd follow her. She was the only one who could train him, and she was not some cold, scheming, devious Jedi witch, hiding things from him. Whatever the hell he had seen, there was an explanation, and she would help him figure it out—later.

Having finally buried his doubts for a time, Atton leaned a little to the side to get a better look at Atris. The strange light that had seemed to exude from her body a moment before was gone. "Well, the ship's ready to go," he ventured. "What are we doing with her?"

Meetra clenched a fist, then unclenched it. "She has her servants. They can take care of her."

Atton and Mical glanced at each other. The pilot shrugged.

Mical grimaced and turned back to Meetra. "What about the holocrons?" he asked.

Meetra looked up wistfully, and red light gleamed in her eyes. "We'll come back for them soon enough."