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He nodded and let her precede him into the dark gap.

They’d gone maybe ten meters along its stygian length when Jax remembered that he’d thought of looking for her earlier. “Laranth,” he said quietly, “about Tuden Sal …”

“What about him?”

“You know him.”

“He came to us about three weeks ago. Got in touch with us through our contact at Sil’s Place.”

“Sil’s Place,” repeated Jax.

“A dive near the Westport. The Amani pubtender is an operative.”

“And you trust him?”

“I wouldn’t have helped him find you if I didn’t.”

He let that settle for a couple of beats. “Did he tell you why he wanted to find me?”

“He didn’t want to find you, exactly. He wanted to find I-Five. To repay an old debt, he said. He told me what he’d done … or rather what he failed to do.” Her voice was grim, cold. It took Jax back to the night he and the Gray Paladin had met in the ruins of the Jedi Temple complex amid the death and smoke and flame. She knew as well as he did that what Tuden Sal had failed to do may have been responsible, among many other things, for what they referred to as Flame Night. Responsible for the deaths of all those innocent Jedi and Padawans.

“Did he tell you how he plans to repay that debt?”

She shot a glance back over her shoulder. “I figured that was between him and I-Five.”

“No. Not really. It’s a lot more complicated.”

He was about to explain just how complicated when the Force nearly yanked him off his feet for the second time that day. This time there was no question what direction the pull was coming from—the tether stretched away into the darkness of the crevice.

He didn’t have to ask if Laranth had felt it, too; the Twi’lek Paladin was already in motion. Jax unclipped his lightsaber and hurried to keep up.

Tesla stepped from the shadows of the fallen buttressing into light that was brilliant only in comparison with the midnight gloom he’d just traversed. The sight that met his eyes was confusing at first. Stretching away from him for perhaps a hundred meters was a debris field roughly twenty or thirty meters wide, formed by the gap between two massive resiblocks. It made what he’d just passed through look like a well-tended garden path; twisted lengths of duralumin and gigantic shards of transparisteel, some thicker than his body, lay like strange, misshapen skeletons over and around chunks of masonry and plasticrete. The two resiblocks on either side were apparently in an advanced state of decay, and this bizarre landscape was the result.

But there was more to it than that, Tesla sensed as he drew closer. The air here was charged with electrostatic energy that made every hair on his body stand on end and created strange creeping halos around the pieces of debris. As he continued to move, he found it more difficult, as if the very molecules of the air conspired to push him back. He realized that this was a repulsor field, subtly tugging and twisting due to an everlasting state of flux, which had, over the centuries, warped the huge pieces of various metals into the agonized postures that lay all about him.

Peering down the length of the cluttered swath, Tesla saw the source of the weird auroras. At the far end of the wreckage a repulsor field generator thrummed, the subtle, light-bending contours of the region pressing against the canted walls of the buildings and coating them with shimmering iridescence. A faulty field generator would explain the state of flux that caused the visible effects. Under normal circumstances the field would be invisible.

He smiled. If his quarry had come in here thinking to escape him, he had erred grievously. That repulsor field would thrust back whatever approached too closely. The Jedi had come to a dead end, and the slice of darkness that marked an exit, which Tesla could just make out through the writhing veil of the energy barrier, might as well be on another world—he would never be able to enter it.

Tesla started forward again, his lightsaber at the ready. He was halfway across the open expanse