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Jax directed his steps toward the community kitchen that served as one of the Whiplash’s windows on the world. He was about three long strides from the door of the charity when an unseen compulsion abruptly settled violently about him like a bola, all but spinning him about. For several seconds he felt like a feather buffeted in a strong wind. He put a hand out and steadied himself against the façade of the nearest building, reaching out with his senses to locate the source of the disturbance.

Down. Down and to the west. That was where it was.

What it was, was easy.

It was the Force.

five

Probus Tesla returned to Ploughtekal Market despite the fact that his target had been changed. After all, he reasoned, the droid and the Jedi he sought surely were in close proximity to each other. The droid belonged to Pavan, or so reports suggested.

Which led the young Inquisitor to wonder why his lord had changed the target in the first place. Find one, logic suggested, and you would eventually find the other. The Force had been telling him for weeks that a powerful sensitive was present in the environs of the marketplace. The chances of that being anything other than a Temple-trained Jedi were vanishingly slim. Tesla’s own Force sensitivity was the surest means of finding Jax Pavan, so why would Darth Vader set him on this detour instead? Was it a test, or was his lord simply guiding him to use his sense of the Force in a different way than he was inclined to do?

The idea set him back on his heels, mentally speaking. Perhaps it was not his ability that Darth Vader doubted, but his loyalty. Perhaps what was being tested was not his skill but his obedience.

The thought raised a tendril of shame. He had doubted Vader’s wisdom, if only for the briefest moment, and even as he went about seeking the protocol droid—asking questions of his contacts and sifting through the answers—he was hoping to encounter the presence he’d come so close to touching mere days before.

He stood now in the shadow of a support pier listening to the marketplace chatter, sniffing its panoply of scents—greed, acquisitiveness, anger, satisfaction—tasting the subtleties of those emotions, hoping to encounter the vibrancy of the Force.

He experienced the Force that way—as scent, sight, sound, and savor. Every nuance of it thrilled his senses, playing darkly in his head, exploding on his tongue, dazzling his eyes with color and light. Because of the sheer power of those things, he’d had to learn at an early age to filter and control the impulses the Force evoked in him. It had been a lifelong struggle to work through the potency of those impulses, and he often wondered if all Force-sensitives experienced it in this way.

It was not the sort of question one was encouraged to ask other aspirants during Inquisitorial training. He had spoken of it to his master, of course, for he had to learn the discipline of his gift.

Master Kuthara had not commented on whether his particular experience of the Force was unusual or common. He had only said, “The Force flows through you, around you. You must learn to sail its currents and harness its winds without letting them swamp you or blow you off-course. Your discipline is a vessel, and you are the being whose hand is on the tiller.”

He had been about fourteen when that conversation had taken place and had suspected that his master experienced the Force in just such a way—as a current to be ridden. He had been naïve enough at the time to ask, “But wind and wave have no motive, do they, Master? We speak of an ill wind, but isn’t that just a pretty conceit? The wind and waves are random.”

“Your point?” his Falleen master had asked, oddly puzzled.

Tesla had grown used to Master Kuthara answering his questions before he could even frame them; the uncertainty thus expressed had been a bit unnerving.

“Can the Force be said to have dark and light sides? Winds are neither dark nor light; currents are neither