Heir to the Jedi by Kevin Hearne Read Free Book Online

being. But Obi-Wan probably knew what he was talking about and I didn’t think I could risk ignoring the warning of Vader’s example. That meant I needed to be extremely cautious since I didn’t have anyone around to train me. The cranker root looked thoroughly nonthreatening. I hadn’t read the histories of those “seduced” by the dark side, but I doubted that any of them had been corrupted by a vegetable of questionable nutritional value. This had to be safe.
    I pulled the plate nearer to me so that it filled my vision on the desk. The cranker root lay inert, jaundiced and phlegmatic in the yellow light of the room’s filtered glow panel. Its weight was negligible. It should be a simple matter to use the Force to move it off the plate, especially since conditions were optimal.
    The first step—the only step I really knew—was to clear my mind and reach out to the Force. So simple to say but not so easy in practice. Sometimes it just kind of happened for me, but whenever I actually told myself to clear my mind, the words sort of hung around in my consciousness, an image of white letters on a green screen: CLEAR YOUR MIND. That didn’t help. Thinking THAT MEANS YOU didn’t help, either. Sending in more thoughts to clear out the old ones from my brain cycled throughthe same problem again. How did the Jedi do this reliably and on cue?
    Meditating and getting to a quiet place when alone was somehow much different from feeling the Force in combat or while piloting or practicing against drones. When I opened myself to the Force in those situations, it was more of an instinctive process, and I felt guided and warned in an almost effortless way, perhaps owing to a combat-ready state of action and reaction where there is no time for thought, and a profound sense of personal danger.
    The cranker root represented the opposite of danger. Maybe that was my problem—I needed pressure to push my abilities, to switch me into a nonthinking instinctive mode. But even if that were true, I couldn’t settle for such a standard. I had to be able to do this on my own, by conscious effort—or would it be an unconscious effort if I managed to clear my mind?
    CLEAR YOUR MIND, I told myself again. The words remained stubbornly uncleared and began to blink insistently for my attention. That wasn’t working.
    I sighed, and that gave me the idea of focusing on my breathing. Each breath quieted the roiling of my thoughts a bit more. The three blinking words that annoyed and mocked me gradually faded as my lungs filled and emptied and the rhythm of it took over. The Force swirled through and around me, eddies of energy that I could sense and feel but had yet to push or control. Stretching out through the Force, eyes closed, I located the plate, a cold ceramic disk. I found the cranker root, dead now, but a thing sensed as fundamentally distinct from the plate. That was a beginning. But now what? If I merely imagined the cranker moving, would it happen? What if I—
    Laneet Chekkoo burst in. “Forgive me, friend Skywalker, but there is dire trouble. The Empire has issued a planetwide alert for a ship matching yours, and if you do not leave right away you may be discovered here.”
    “What? Can’t we just hide it in the smugglers’ bay?”
    “The chance of being seen by spies is too great. We’re trying to prevent the ones we know about from investigating the spaceport, but we can’t hold them forever and there are probably others we don’t know about. If you’re seen here, we want you to be seen leaving. We can smuggle goods to the Alliance, but we can’t openly defy the Grand Protector or the Empire now.”
    “All right, I understand. Just a moment.” I collected the pieces of Huulik’s lightsaber and placed them in a small bag. “Come on, Artoo,” I said. “We have to run and hide again.”

WE TOOK A LONGER ROUTE back to the fleet, a circuitous path that involved forging a new hyperspace lane between Kirdo and Orto