Renora never had trouble remembering things under pressure. Not only was she capable of retaining nearly ten times the amount of information that normal sentient beings processed on a regular basis via memory-enhancement techniques enacted through the Force, Renora was born with a naturally photographic memory that she’d noticed even before she’d met the strange older woman who levitated rocks with her mind. Conversations, events, minute details that would typically bounce away happily unnoticed and unconsidered, were all logged away in her memory to be replayed, analyzed, and manipulated.
As a matter of fact, Renora probably functioned better under pressure than she did under normal circumstances, since she had not only the benefit of her intellect, her training, and the omnipotent threads of the Force, but of untainted, unmarred adrenal strength. Not to mention the quite formidable strength of her own verbal self-abuse if she screwed up. But sometimes, just sometimes, she wished she didn’t remember things so well.
Take the current state of affairs, for example. She was perched on a tree branch, the strength of which could only be calculated in terms of low probability (which Renora recognized immediately, despite her distaste for the word “calculate”), one arm wrenched painfully out of it socket (which was obviously not a natural thing, and Jedi were all for the natural thing), and the cords of muscle in her neck throbbing with a lifeless, deadening pain in time to the regularity of her pulse. She was surrounded by a bunch of oversized, carnivorous beetles that looked like a drawing from some sort of demented comic cube. She probably had a dislocated shoulder, possibly had a concussion, and was definitely in big trouble. And her weapon was gone.
Despite all of this, and all the inherent distraction that came with it, all she could do was remember something Master Giddy had told her a long, long time ago. Actually, it couldn’t have been that long ago, seeing as Renora hadn’t even hit her seventeenth year in this Force-forsaken galaxy that, against all the odds that her Master refused to hear, she had found some reason to love. Nevertheless, it seemed like several lingering eternities ago, and a couple of infinities tossed in for good measure; from a certain point of view and all that poodoo.
It was in that cave with the squills. Renora had been complaining about how repulsive the creatures were, hideously human in their stature and build, in their long, thin chests and two legs, but something obviously alien and revolting in their small, red-yellow eyes, and the dripping, gnashing daggers lined in neat rows within their cavernous mouths.
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“Go on, say it.”
“Say what, Master?” Renora asked, pausing to catch her breath against the worn, corpse-gray rock in the cave wall.
“I thought it, too, when I first saw them.”
“Master?”
Gidrea regarded her apprentice for a moment, arms crossed against her robed chest. A thin strand of hair, still a blistering red despite her years, had fallen into the Jedi Master’s face. She brushed it away impatiently, reaching down into the backpack Renora had set against the cavern wall.
“Padawan, remember the holos of Master Qui-Gon I showed you?”
“Master, I’m many things, among them annoying and impetuous. But I’m not blind. And not likely to forget something like that. Or someone like that,” she chuckled.
“Those sparkling blue eyes. You would’ve liked him,” Giddy laughed, her eyes suddenly reflecting an odd mixture of happiness and forgotten sorrow. “He was a good man. And a great Jedi. Speaking of Jedi, your Master is getting old. Mind lifting that water bottle out of the pack for me?”
“Another one of those benefits of age, Master?”
“What, ordering you around?”
“No, of course not. You’re my Master, you’re supposed to order me around. That way I learn the value of humility. And, judging by the way things are going, you’re going to be ordering me around for a long, long, long time.”
“I never believed in all that ‘humility’ nonsense,” said Giddy, taking a sip from the water bottle. “I just like telling you what to do.”
“I know that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“Why? You haven’t convinced yourself yet?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t asked myself lately. I’m not the one who stands around and chats with invisible people. Master,” she added, muffling a short laugh.
“They’re invisible so they don’t frighten young Padawans who still sleep with stuffed banthas.”
“Hey, I’m not the only one who doesn’t sleep by myself, you know. And I noticed that before you introduced me to Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Master Emeritus. That was just a confirmation,” Renora snickered slyly.
“Good to know some of those lessons on minding your surroundings have finally sunk in.”
“What can I say? I have a very good teacher.”
“Hmph. Anyway, I happened to notice that your skills with the Force haven’t gone away in all the time you spent practicing your wit. Yet you still managed to notice how handsome Master Qui-Gon is.”
“Last I checked, I don’t belong to any weird, backwater Force cult where they burn out your eyes when you achieve mastery of the Force.”
“Mastery of the Force is overrated.”
“I thought you said it doesn’t exist, because mastery is a relative term.”
“No, that sounds like something you’d say. But the point is, Padawan, your senses don’t just disappear when you call on the Force. Sometimes, it’s equally important to pay attention to what your eyes are telling you as well as what the Force is telling you. Otherwise, you might miss something you would’ve otherwise noticed. You can sense a person is coming, but you don’t know how good-looking they are until you do the important part: the looking.”
“So that’s why I’m always crashing into stuff. I don’t use my eyes.”
Gidrea laughed. “No, that’s just because all those lessons about footwork are only good for lightsaber combat. But you can certainly judge the location of a squill by using your nose. You complained long enough about the way they look, but you didn’t mention the smell.”
“I thought it was obvious,” Renora muttered.
“Obvious is a relative term.”
“That sounds like something I’d say.”
“The benefits of youth, Padawan?”
“What benefit is that?”
“Always taking credit for everything.”
“No, Master, that’s just the product of your training,” Renora grinned.
“Only in your mind, my very young apprentice!”
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“Are you going to say it?”
Renora was startled out of her brief reverie and glanced down at the comlink on her wrist. Her thighs had begun to shake with the exertion of remaining crouched on the slender, serrated tree limb, and she closed her eyes for a moment to send tendrils of Force energy to calm the tense muscles. When the trembling abided, Renora took several short, gasping breaths, face and neck awash with perspiration.
“Say what, Master?”
“What you never said at the squill cave.”
Renora shook her head, deciding not to waste her limited reserve of strength on surprise.
“How did you know I was thinking about the cave?”
“I didn’t.”
Sighing, Renora risked a glimpse at the Tanc Mites below her, their gnashing mandibles working in a wet, repugnant display of visceral hunger. She suppressed a shudder, stretching her consciousness into the familiar arrays of the Force that surrounded and penetrated everything around her.
“You have to jump sometime,” Gidrea said, her voice unusually soft.
“Not before I say it,” Renora reminded her.
“That’s okay, we both know Tanc Mites stink.”
“You thought that’s what I was going to say? At the squill cave? That the squills smell bad?” Renora laughed, detecting the briefest of hesitations in her Master’s response.
“What was it then?”
“I was just going to say that Jedi have no sense.”
With that, she hurled herself into the terror below.
