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“Leave me alone,” the boy said quietly, and the words sounded in Tesla’s head, each one like an icy dagger in his paralyzed brain. “Just leave me alone.”

Then suddenly he was free. He stumbled to his knees, fury and humiliation sweeping through him in waves. Tesla lifted both hands and fired a bolt of Force-lightning at the corridor just above the boy’s head, uncaring of the result. If the wretch would rather die than be taken by an Inquisitor, then so be it.

The lightning struck the rippling surface and bifurcated, each sizzling lash recoiling to strike again centimeters apart. They twinned again, then quadrupled.

Tesla cut off the flow of Force-lightning from his body, but it had little, if any, effect. Suddenly the corridor was filled with a dozen random lightning strikes, then twice that many. They were advancing on him in a trenchant storm, eating up the passageway before him. He couldn’t see what had happened to the boy; his figure was lost in the erratic pulses of light. Tesla threw up a defensive barrier and backed swiftly away from the advancing lightning. Surely, with its motive energy cut off, it would soon fade.

He kept moving, staying just ahead of the searing, draining discharges until he was certain the exit must be directly behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. It was not. In fact, only a meter or two farther along the passage, what had been an open passageway seemed to end in a pocket of charged and warped air.

He hesitated, heart thudding. How was this possible? The interstice in which he stood was formed by a cancellation effect. The two fields’ overlap was unstable, but the instability was linear. There was no way the two opposing fields could meet and meld in that way, no power that could—

He peered beyond the barrier, through the fluctuations in the cul-de-sac. Beyond them, out in the open debris field, he saw a lone figure standing atop a slab of ferrocrete. A figure with a bright mane of pale hair, rippling and warping as if viewed beneath the surface of a storm-tossed sea.

The dance of energy on the left side of his face alerted Tesla to the fact that he had hesitated too long. He had barely enough time to stiffen his Force shield against the lightning before it struck, exploding the tiny pocket of relative calm in which he stood—

When Jax first emerged from the cut into what passed for daylight at this level of the city, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. At the far end of the plaza, between the walls of two massive buildings, a pair of indistinct figures struggled within what looked like a writhing bowl of transparent, gelatinous light. It looked like the interstice between two force fields, but Jax had never encountered such a thing except in theory.

He glanced at Laranth, who gave the Twi’lek equivalent of a shrug, both lekku lifting slightly before settling again, the shorter one just brushing her shoulders.

That both combatants possessed the Force in abundance was obvious. They knocked each other off their respective feet several times before one hurled a ball of such brightness at the other that it was painful for Jax to look at it, even from meters away.

Laranth stopped in midstride, peering at the unstable slot between the fields. “What was that? It didn’t look like Force-lightning.”

A second charged ball erupted toward the figure nearest the entrance to the flux. This time the would-be victim met it with his lightsaber—his bright crimson lightsaber.

“Sith,” hissed Jax under his breath as the repulsor fields lit up like a festival barge. “Or an Inquisitor.”

“Then who’s the other guy?”

“I’d love to know.” Jax activated his lightsaber and moved cautiously toward the fray, keeping low and moving from cover to cover, Laranth at his back.

They had reached a particularly large block of ferrocrete when the fault between the two fields erupted in a fitful blaze of blue-white light that seemed to grow exponentially.

“Now that is Force-lightning,” Jax murmured.

“From the Sith?