When she’d been a little girl, so young it was hard for her to tell if her memories were real or only manufactured after hearing the stories so many times, Allana had gone everywhere with her mother. There had been security threats and so she had been hidden away in the depths of the palace, even more so than the average Chume’da, and without playmates or a father her mother had become the unequivocal center of her world. When she had left her to live with her grandparents she hadn’t settled for months. The only thing that had kept her from crying or begging to go back home a desire not to disappoint, to live up to the standards her mother had set for her. Then, with distance and time, she had gone from being unable to imagine life without her mother to feeling stilted and awkward when she spoke to her. Tenel Ka had become a reminder of sacrifice and duty, a proud, sad woman who had lost everything by doing what was right. The role model whose shoes Allana sank back desperately from filling.
She wasn’t thinking of any of that now, at least not consciously, not when she had the immediate concern of what she was about to admit. Yet as she crossed the room now Allana had a flash of memory, a safe room on Klatooine, hurling herself across the room at her mother in nearly transcendent joy at being reunited. She’d been taught from the time she was teachable to sweep rooms she entered for security, to seek out listening devices and spy cameras, but that day on Klatooine she hadn’t looked anywhere but at her mother, trusting Tenel Ka absolutely to have made sure she would be safe. Even later, in her resentful stage, she had never performed checks on the channels her mother used for their infrequent calls, simply assuming that they would be secure. Now, even though she was wary and frightened, of herself, of this conversation, of everything that seemed to be whispering around the edges of what she’d always assumed was safe, she stayed composed as she crossed the room.
She settled on the other end of the couch from her mother, resting her back against the opposite side and tucking her feet up so that she sat Indian-style, silent and serious for a moment.
“I don’t think there’s a Sith in Lawrence,” she said after taking a moment to gather herself. “I think,” she paused for another moment, steadied herself so imperceptibly that, without the Force to help with insight, only another court-trained Hapan could have noticed it, “I think I did it. I think I severed myself from the Force.”
Allana kept her eyes on her mother determinedly, a sort of forced stoicism tightening the corners of her mouth. Her father would have said that it didn’t matter, that she had not used Force with the intent to harm, that no ability was intrinsically dark. Jacen Solo, however, had not been a Jedi for a long time. To use so much power so desperately, to claw at power until it burned everything it touched, was against the Code that Allana was sure her mother still believed in. More than that there was a roster that ran through her brain, playing in a loop like a song from a TV jingle, the names of the Sith who had used the technique on others, Jacen Solo, Vergere… she tried to choke the list off now, and finally dropped her gaze down to her folded hands.
“I don’t know how I could have done it. I didn’t think I was strong enough, and no one ever even tried to teach me. I just know what I felt, and I…I’m certain. It was me.”