Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [11]
Should’ve killed them.
But he knew he could not have done that. It was one thing to kill in the heat of battle, quite another to do so in cold blood. Even though letting them go was an action nearly as suicidal as the Cerean’s had been. Of course, now he had two blasters he didn’t have before, but weapons weren’t that hard to get, particularly in his current line of work.
He slipped them into the pockets of his greatcoat, stepped over to the railing, and looked down. A chill breeze plucked at him, and he turned his collar up against it. He was only twenty-five stories above the pavement, still well below the dirty, gray-brown belt of pollution that shielded the wealthier inhabitants of this sector from unpleasant views of the squalid depths. He’d been in this locale for a little over three standard months.
The smog wasn’t too bad today, but everything was still cloaked in a pervasive gloom from the shadows of the buildings, thick as the boles of trees in a Kashyyyk forest. There was little air traffic under fifty stories in this sector, so the view was relatively unimpeded. On the street, ground skimmers hummed along less than a meter above the pavement. One-person conveyances called weavers lived up to their names as their riders adroitly piloted them by balance alone; rickshaw droids ferried others. But most of the slum’s inhabitants walked, or slithered, or crawled, or otherwise moved along under their own power. The streets were crowded with vendors, solicitors, vagrants, and footpads … it was like looking through some kind of magical portal onto a marginalized planet of the Outer Rim. Hard to believe that he was still on Coruscant, crown jewel of the Core Worlds.
He’d had to go downlevel once or twice while still a Padawan, both times with his Master. Both times had been relatively minor errands, and both times he had been appalled at the poverty and the filth. He’d been extremely happy and relieved to return to the sanctuary of the Temple. He felt guilty about harboring such an attitude, but he couldn’t deny it. He remembered wondering how people could survive in such a hopeless environment.
Now he knew: not easily, not well, and not for very long.
Jax Pavan had received his promotion to Knighthood three months before the fall of the Jedi. The Jedi Order had already been thinned considerably by the slaughter on Geonosis and the subsequent Clone Wars. Order Sixty-six had nearly finished the job. No more than a handful of Jedi and those associated with them were still alive, and they were considered little or no threat by the self-proclaimed Emperor Palpatine. There was no systematic effort being made to root them out; however, stormtrooper garrisons patrolled the streets to enforce order, and if they came across a Jedi, that Jedi died. It looked like it would be only a matter of time before the beacon of the Order was truly extinguished in the galaxy.
Jax had barely gotten to experience the pride of Knighthood before it had all shattered, like the noctilucent towers of the Temple itself. As had so many of his compatriots, he had vanished into the crimson night, shedding any trace of connection to the Jedi. Barely surviving on the streets, reduced to surreptitious use of mind and matter manipulation just to stay alive, Jax had eventually become something he had previously considered the lowest of the low. To stay alive, he had entered a profession barely a notch above the gangsters and other lowlifes he was forced to consort with.
He had become a bounty hunter.
At first, it had seemed to make sense. A man had to eat, after all, and even Jedi were not immune to fear and despair. He continued to use the Force to aid his survival in subtle ways, from winning credits by manipulating sabacc games to “suggesting” that local vendors and restaurateurs supply him with