Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights III_ Patterns of Force - Michael Reaves [30]
“So … it’s a choice you make.”
Jax and Laranth traded glances. “Yes,” Jax said. “Usually. Only I didn’t choose this lightsaber. The one I had, the one I built and trained with, was destroyed. This one”—he patted the hilt—“was given to me by … someone who knew I needed one.”
Laranth moved restively. “I hate to break this up, but we have a logistical problem—how to get Kaj onto friendly turf.”
“Yes, but which friendly turf?” Jax met her eyes, which made his stomach feel strange. “I can take him back with me, or you can smuggle him to Thi Xon Yimmon.”
“Yimmon has a lot on his plate,” the Twi’lek said. “I can’t conscionably give him yet another consideration without asking.”
Kaj, who’d been sitting against a pile of rubble, scrambled to his feet. “I’m not a consideration. I’m a Jedi. At least, I want to be a Jedi,” he amended when the weight of dual gazes fell on him. “I want to be trained. I want to—to learn to use the Force. To control it instead of having it … burn through me like it does. It—it scares me sometimes. The way I feel. The way it feels.”
He ran down, his hands tugging at his cloak, his eyes pleading. He looked and sounded so very young and fragile … which made what he’d done to the Inquisitor back there all the more astonishing.
I-Five’s words came back to Jax at that moment—what the droid had said about Jax being needed to train the next generation of Jedi. Perhaps that need was already presenting itself.
“We’ll take him to the conapt,” he told Laranth. “But be sure to give Yimmon a full report. Maybe it’s best for him to train with you, learn the ways of the Paladins.”
“Maybe it’s best he gets the high points of both philosophies,” said Laranth. “Circumstances being what they are, mutual exclusivity is a luxury the Jedi can’t afford.”
She was right, of course. They were stronger together than apart. Which brought Jax’s mind forcibly around to the fact of her leaving their team. He opened his mouth to say something about it, to suggest that she come back, but she was already moving into the alcove, craning her long, graceful neck to scan the vertical shaft with its inset hand- and footholds.
She flicked her green gaze back to Kaj. “Can you do a controlled leap when you’re not under attack?” she asked, and Jax thought that her lips curled slightly at the corners.
The boy moved to peer up the ferrocrete tube. He nodded. “I think so. At least I’ve leapt as high as that cross-shaft.” He pointed straight up.
Jax joined them in the small access, following the boy’s gesture to a point roughly ten meters up, where a durasteel catwalk skirted the shaft, halving its diameter.
“Good,” Laranth said. She drew one of her blasters. “I’ll go first. Follow me up.”
She leapt, reaching the metal platform easily and lighting on it with a soft tap of her booted feet. Kaj glanced at Jax, who nodded encouragingly, then followed, overshooting the catwalk by almost a meter. Laranth snagged his cloak and reeled him in before leaping away to a higher perch.
Jax took that as his cue to move, and joined Kaj on the catwalk. The boy peered at him in the twilight gloom, his eyes betraying fear.
“Won’t they feel us? The Inquisitors, I mean. Won’t they feel us using the Force?”
“Probably. But they certainly felt that big explosion you set off back there, and hopefully that’s where they’ll concentrate. It’ll take only a few seconds to reach the bazaar, and once we’re there, we can blend in. Now go on up. Laranth is waiting for you.”
They got him back to Poloda Place without incident. The market was, in fact, curiously empty of Imperial presence, and Jax, despite stretching to the limit of his Force senses, detected not even an Inquisitor—or, rather, the “hole” in the Force that would suggest the use of a taozin cloak such as some of the Inquisitors used to hide their presence from other Force-sensitives.
Jax was surprised when Laranth