Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights III_ Patterns of Force - Michael Reaves [24]
Tesla hovered, perfectly still, listening, sensing, feeling. It was not the Force he felt, but some type of kinetic energy. He could feel it dancing across his cheeks and the backs of his hands, raising the narrow strip of red hair that ran from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck. A force field of some sort?
He moved slowly downward, senses probing the way before him, eyes watchful. His boots touched down lightly on the rubble-strewn floor, and he strode forward. The cleft was about twenty meters long and ended in a dim wash of light that seemed to flicker and weave like the shadow of a fire. At random points along its length, dark apertures suggested other means of egress and regress. He eyed them suspiciously, but none of them held anything of note. Armored rats. Hawk-bats, perhaps. Nothing sentient.
The only sentient target he sensed was ahead somewhere in or beyond that wash of inconstant light. Tesla activated his lightsaber. The blade hummed to life, the color of a sunset he had once seen on his homeworld of Corellia. It was also the color of the lava flows on Mustafar. He moved forward with cautious anticipation.
The target had stopped.
The threads Jax followed were slender and impossibly bright, but they seemed to flicker and pulse as he trailed them down into the depths of Ploughtekal Market. When he reached the lowest levels of the structure that housed the rambling bazaar, they were little more than the ghosts of threads—like an afterimage burned into the retina.
They were on the point of vanishing completely by the time he dived into the warren of crevices in the towering resiblocks that roughly defined Ploughtekal’s borders. As he stood at the gaping mouth of one such crevice, several levels below where the marketplace petered out, he saw the threads break altogether.
He stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do next, then froze at the sudden sense of presence behind him. He swept his lightsaber into his hand, activated it, and spun 180 degrees in one smooth movement.
“I see I’m not the only one who’s had her aura tweaked today.” Laranth Tarak faced him from an alcove in the dirty wall of the junction in which he stood. She had a blaster in each hand and holstered one of them as she stepped out of the alcove.
Over her shoulder Jax could see a set of steel rungs embedded in the alcove wall. Okay, not an alcove, then—a chimney or access tube. He used the trivial observation to hide his reaction to seeing Laranth so suddenly and under such circumstances, and couldn’t decide if he was excited or dismayed.
“You felt something, too?” he asked stupidly.
“I think I just mentioned that.” The green-skinned Twi’lek’s truncated left lekku shifted slightly on her shoulder and Jax had the irrational feeling that she was laughing at him, despite the fact that her mouth formed a familiar grim line … as it ever did. Also irrationally, he was finding it difficult to look away from her face.
He did so with a will, clipping his lightsaber back on his belt and nodding toward the crevice he’d been about to explore. “I lost it right here. What do you think it is?”
She shook her head, moving to peer into the darkness. “No idea.”
“Inquisitor?”
“I suspect most of them carry taozin wards these days,” she said.
“They what?” There he went, sounding stupid again.
She turned and looked at him, her eyes—which were the same rich shade of green as her skin—showing no amusement. “I noticed it about three days ago. I saw one of them plain as day about three levels up, snooping around in the bazaar. Saw him, but couldn’t sense him.”
Jax nodded.
“So, how … how have you been?”
She tilted her head to one side, right lekku curling slightly at the end, whatever that meant. He wished he knew how to read the sophisticated subtext that Twi’lek head-tails were said to convey.
“You can’t tell?” she asked.
“No, I …”
“I can tell how you’ve been,” she said cryptically,