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Laranth made a quick, lateral slicing movement with her left hand, its intensity rendering the fierce accompanying “Shhh!” superfluous. Den shut up. He watched the Twi’lek. She stood straight, in an attitude of listening. The passion with which she sought to connect with the Force was so obvious he half expected the fleshy tentacles her species wore in lieu of hair to rise like organic antennae, aiding her in her quest.

She stood for a long moment as if carved from jade, then abruptly looked at him and said, “Tell Jax I had to investigate something.” Without waiting for a response, she stepped back into the resiplex, emerging a moment later clad in a hooded cloak.

“You sure you want to go out there alone?” Den knew the question was foolish; if ever a creature existed who was designed for the mean streets of Coruscant, if ever urban natural selection had produced a predator better at stalking the city-planet’s duracrete jungles than Laranth Tarak, the Sullustan didn’t want to be in the same universe with it. Still …

“Wait for Jax,” he urged her. “Whatever they’re talking about at the Whiplash meeting can’t be nearly as important as whatever you’re up to looks to be.”

Laranth shook her head. “It could be nothing. I’ll be back this evening, most likely,” she said. Then, before he could say anything more, she walked away into the night.

* * *

Aurra Sing’s nostrils flared, almost as if she could actually smell her quarry. In a sense she could, if one could attribute something of that sense to the Force. Here, she said silently to herself, and close. Making her way steadily but unobtrusively through the crowds, she smiled her feral smile. She wasn’t 100 percent certain that it was Jax Pavan she was about to encounter, but it was someone steeped in the Force. Of that she had no doubt.

The trail brought her to an ongoing funfair in one of the deeper sublevels. Here there were tri-dee arcades, virtual rides, exhibitions from the farthest reaches of the galaxy—or at least what claimed to be such—and other attractions. Sing let herself be swept along in the polymorphic crowds, keeping her awareness extended.

Where are you, young Jedi? Where are you hiding in this hive of filthy, useless souls? I am coming for you. The Dark Lord wants you. This is easy for me. Don’t think you have a chance of defeating me; I have killed Jedi far more skilled than you.

A lover of chaos and confusion, Sing delighted in the funfair’s surroundings, where deafening noises and eye-smiting illumination, along with the multifarious commingling of species, all came together to produce a bedlam that she found pleasurable. Many of the attractions were genuinely clever. There was the Corrobor, where one didn’t just have the opportunity to race flying starships or participate as a crew member—one could also become the starship. In a neuralstim booth, one felt as if one was temporarily transformed into a thing of metal and composite, circuits and lights, weapons and engines. In the Droidome, similar virtual realities gave any sentient the temporary appearance and persona of a droid, from security to construction, from translator to engineer. Real droids found this particular entertainment mildly obscene, not to mention unrealistic. The worst that a customer could experience did not extend to such real-world droid tribulations as casual disposal or dismemberment.

There were high-tech massively multiplayer multi-species combat games, food and drink to sample from one end of the galaxy to another, live shows that one species would find unremittingly dry and another utterly hilarious, as well as body-switching simulations that permitted one to experience another species’ physicality, or gender, or sensoria. Size-distorters gave one the perspective of a giant or a germ. Transport sims for many known planets let one walk, float, or fly around the surface of a multitude of worlds.

Sing ignored them all. With her white epidermis, skintight jumpsuit, lithe figure, and shock of red hair geysering