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Kaj scrambled after her, giving Jax an apologetic side-wise glance. “It won’t happen again,” he murmured.

Not true, Jax thought. With Dejah around it most likely would. And if it did …

Jax crossed the room and picked up the now slightly dented song ball. The plasticrete wall, supposedly resilient up to a metric ton of pressure, had sustained equal damage. And who knew how loud the roar of that white-water surge had been? Jax had been deep in his own meditation and he had felt it. His thigh still tingled with the residual energy.

In the outer room Dejah uttered a throaty laugh that was followed by a diffident echo from Kaj. Something stirred uneasily beneath Jax’s breastbone—something he couldn’t quite put a name to. One of the first things he was going to have to teach Kajin Savaros, he decided, was how to block or at least filter Dejah Duare’s heady “perfume.”

Rhinann had no reasonable expectation that the droid would divulge any information about the bota, but on the off-chance that some vestige of his original programming had survived Lorn Pavan’s tinkering, he asked anyway. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the humans said.

So when Rhinann and I-Five were alone in the workstation alcove, the Elomin decided there would be no better time. Everyone else seemed to be engaged in the current pursuit of smuggling a Togrutan female with nascent Force abilities offworld via the UML.

He thought of his travel arrangements, of how easy it would be to simply pack up and leave … were it not for the arrival of the Force prodigy and the fact that Rhinann had been less than aggressive in his search for the bota. It wouldn’t do to be slavish in sticking to a timetable. That sort of tunnel vision could lead to missed opportunity—like the one he was now presented with.

Deciding that honesty—or something close to it—was the best policy, Rhinann seized the moment, sat back in his workstation formchair, and said, “I am troubled by the amount of attention that may soon be trained upon us.”

After a moment of hesitation, I-Five disengaged from whatever online information he had been pursuing and responded. “Really? Why is that?”

“Why is that?” Rhinann repeated. “I should think that would be obvious, particularly to you.” He ticked the reasons off on his long, spatulate fingers. “Our houseguest is a Force-sensitive—that makes him a prime target for Lord Vader’s continued purges. He has been pursued by an Inquisitor—ergo, he has drawn attention to himself. Ergo, Vader cannot help but know of his existence. He has killed an Inquisitor—”

“We don’t know that for a fact,” I-Five said with maddening imperturbability.

“Then he’s injured one, at the very least. And he drew Laranth and Jax into his association. How can you possibly think that we are not at increased risk of exposure?”

“I can, because one thing has not changed: Vader has no more information about us or our activities or location as a result of Kajin’s appearance than he had previously.” I-Five gestured at the HoloNet link. “I monitor several different bands that convey classified intel, and none of them has given me any reason to suspect otherwise. Trust me: so far, Vader knows nothing of this.”

“He does if his Inquisitor saw Jax and Laranth come to the boy’s rescue.”

“A moment ago,” said the droid drily, “the Inquisitor was dead. He can have hardly observed anything in that state.”

Rhinann kept calm. “If he was only injured, he might have seen Jax and Laranth save the boy.”

“At the time that Jax and Laranth arrived on the scene, the Inquisitor was being blown sky-high by a blast of repulsor energy. Jax was blinded standing outside looking into the blast. I can’t imagine what the Inquisitor might have seen from inside the blast zone, but I doubt it was Jax and Laranth.”

The stupid droid was apparently bent on being utterly uncooperative. Rhinann strove for composure. “But he sensed them, surely. He would have known other Jedi were involved.”

“Perhaps he did. But he was incapacitated, or so Jax sensed.”