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There had been a moment of suspended time in which he waited for his master to applaud his intuition, punish his audacity, or simply astound him with an answer of the utmost simplicity and profundity. He had more than half expected the latter. So the answer he got had stunned him.

“You disappoint me, Probus,” his master had said. “It is the most elemental of understandings that the Force is a duality. You have mouthed that duality yourself, apparently without understanding it. Light and darkness simply are. It is that elementary.”

Impulsively Tesla had blurted, “But isn’t darkness merely the absence of light? Light is made up of photonic particles. Darkness isn’t made up of anti-photons, is it?”

For that question he had been instructed to take his lightsaber and spend six hours practicing Shii-Cho—the most basic of combat forms.

Later, when he had lain on his bed aching with fatigue and numb with boredom, his master had come to him in an odd frame of mind—if not apologetic, at least conciliatory.

“You will understand in time, Probus,” he’d said, “that the Force is neither as simple nor as complicated as we want to make it. It falls into the realm of neither science nor mysticism. Its use is at once an art and a discipline.”

“Like sailing,” Tesla had suggested.

His master had nodded, a wry smile curving his thin lips. “Like sailing. Or like learning to sort through and comprehend the world of the senses.”

Tesla sorted through his senses now: peering, scenting, tasting, listening, and still hoping that he would catch—

He raised his head and turned to look out over the marketplace, eyes narrowed. Through a veil of multicolored light he saw a flash of blue-white radiance moving away rapidly. The scent came next, pale and sweet and tangy at once. A sound that was almost musical danced and shimmered at the fringes of his hearing.

He smiled in anticipation and dived after the sensory ghost. The crowd of shoppers parted before him as people recognized the uniform of the Inquisitor—cloak and cowl of an indescribable hue that seemed to shimmer with phantom color, the Imperial crest upon one shoulder.

Across the width of the teeming square he trailed the bright target, determined not to lose it as it dimmed. He suspected the Jedi must have used the Force for something to have sent up such a vivid little flare just now. That puzzled him. It had puzzled him since the first time he’d picked up the telltale signature of a Force-user. A trained Jedi would surely know better than to give in to displays of power in so public a place, and it was hard to believe he would have need to.

This gave Tesla some pause; it was just possible, if not likely, that Jax Pavan was intentionally luring him somewhere.

He bit back a chuckle of dark mirth. That would be futile. Probus Tesla knew without ego—or nearly so—that his abilities were exceptional. He had been trained by one of the greatest masters in the College of the Inquisition, and he had earned his place in the Inquisitorius by utterly defeating that master.

Regrettable, that, and it had drawn from Tesla the pledge that one day he would take Master Kuthara’s place in the college himself, training aspiring Inquistors. He would never, he promised himself, give any of them any knowledge of himself that could be used for his undoing. Oh yes, he’d come to understand well why it was best not to speak to others about one’s own relationship with the Force. To understand others’ sense of the Force was to understand how they could be defeated.

He was dismayed to realize that the sensory target was dimming still further—its scent was all but gone, its taste turned to dust, its music muted. Only the light of it pulsed at the fringes of his awareness from white to blue, paling against the mundane palette of the market.

He hastened his pace, zigging and zagging through the crowd until he reached a long, dark alleyway with a dim rectangle of light at its nether end. Gouged into the ferrocrete walls of the surrounding buildings, the alley seemed to lead nowhere.