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And he really wasn’t sure which outcome was the more appealing.

Without the Jedi, I am nothing …

thirteen

As usual, he didn’t find her; she found him.

It was a fairly deserted area near a bank of huge vaporators that sieved the urban air of moisture. Jax stood near the base of one, listening to the almost subsonic growl of its dynamos. As a child, he’d been told by another youngling that the vaporator’s functioning was so intense and efficient that, if you were foolish enough to climb up onto the vanes, you’d be trapped, and the water sucked through your pores almost instantly, leaving you a dry and desiccated husk. As an adult, he knew this wasn’t true, but the child in him still felt nervous standing so close to one.

He looked up. The sky, what little of it he could see, was a baleful red. Centax 1, one of the moons, showed a sliver in the west. And all around were the buildings, the towers, cloudcutters, and skyrises, all looming impossibly tall and close. It was said about unfortunates newly arrived on the ground floor that, even if they managed to survive the dangers of the streets, they still stood a good chance of going mad from pure claustrophobia, especially if they hailed from a world with wide-open spaces. It was bad enough uplevel, but down here the cyclopean structures seemed ready to topple at any moment, burying one under megatons of debris.

He sensed her at the same moment that she spoke.

“You’re dead, Pavan.”

Jax turned, and there she was, standing atop one of the vaporator units, silhouetted against the stuttering glow of a faulty neon advertisement. Even if she hadn’t spoken, and even if the Force hadn’t told him loud and clear, Jax would have known her. Laranth Tarak was not easy to forget.

She leapt down from the unit and walked toward him, holding a blaster on him with her right hand. Its mate remained in its holster, riding low on her left hip. Laranth was a green-skinned Twi’lek, lean and muscled, with eyes that had seen too much. A blaster bolt had burned ten centimeters or so of her left lekku away two months ago; instead of keeping it wrapped behind her head, she let it hang free in a sort of perverse pride. She wore a black synfleece vest over a gray pullover, gray thinskin breeches, and neo-leather boots.

She stopped before him, still holding the blaster; then she shoved it into its holster. “If I’d been a stormtrooper, that is.”

“Maybe,” he replied. “But it wouldn’t have been a lonely death.” His gaze flickered downward momentarily. She looked and saw the hold-out blaster in his hand, at the end of its extension, aimed at her belly.

Laranth nodded, ever so slightly. “Been practicing, I see.”

“No, I’ve always been this good. I just didn’t want to make you feel inadequate.” Jax cocked his elbow, and the tiny weapon’s extension telescoped back up his sleeve.

She didn’t laugh; he’d never heard her so much as chuckle, or even seen her smile. “Haven’t seen much of you since Flame Night,” she said. “What brings you down here? This is dangerous territory, even for the Slums.”

“If it’s so dangerous,” Jax replied, “why are you here?”

Her expression became even grimmer, if that was possible. “You know the answer to that, Jax.”

He did know the answer, quite well; if by no other means than the threads writhing about her. Laranth Tarak was a Gray Paladin, an offshoot of the Teepo Paladins, themselves a marginalized cadre of the Jedi Order. The Council had censured the Teepo Paladins years ago for advocating the use of blasters and other weapons in addition to lightsabers. At best, this had been viewed as extremist; at worst, Teepo and his followers had been ostracized as potential dark siders.

The Gray Paladins held even more radical views. Whereas the Teepos still sought oneness with the Force, some of them going so far as to wear masks or eye-concealing headgear in battle to maximize their connection with it, the Grays’ contention was that the Jedi Order had come to