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Is that what this was about—Dejah? Had she been feeding the boy so much emotional stimulus through her pheromones that her absence brought this on?

“Dejah likes you a lot, Kaj. And she’ll be back soon.”

There was the tiniest letup in the mounting tension—the screaming of Jax’s senses muting to a mere roar. Then the boy shook his head, his fisted hands pulling at his hair.

“Not soon enough. Not—soon—enough.” His eyes flew open and he reached up to grasp the collar of Jax’s tunic. “Make it stop, please, make it stop! It’s burning me!”

“What’s burning you?”

“The anger.”

“Who are you angry with?” Jax asked desperately. “What’s made you angry?”

“They sent me away … sent me here.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to come. If I’d stayed, maybe this wouldn’t have happened to me.”

“You’re angry with your parents for sending you away?”

“No … not them. Him.”

“Who? Tell me.”

“The Emperor. He took everything. The farm, my life, my parents, my world. Everything. Everything!”

Jax felt it then—the huge gaping hole of loss and loneliness that lay beneath the anger. He had lost his parents, too, but not like this. Where he had grown up in the embrace of the Jedi, Kajin had simply been thrust out on his own, alone, to be overwhelmed by a power he didn’t understand.

The Jedi put his arms around the boy and held him tightly, falling into his rocking rhythm as if they were in a boat on water.

“Not alone,” Jax told him. “You’re not alone. And if you really want to ruin the Emperor’s day, don’t let the anger take you. Don’t let it win.”

“But I can’t hold it in.”

“Then let it go, Kaj. Don’t give in to it. Make it give in to you.”

The boy gritted his teeth and drummed his heels on the floor. “I don’t know how!”

“Yes, you do. Yes, you do. Say it, Kaj: There is no emotion; there is peace.”

“Peace,” Kaj whispered.

“There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.” Jax saw the boy’s lips move in time to his. “There is no passion …”

“There is serenity,” Kaj whispered, then repeated, “there is serenity.”

“There is no death; there is the Force.”

They finished the credo in unison, Kaj’s tightly wound body finally relaxing a bit in Jax’s arms, the white-hot press of rage cooling. Tears slid from the boy’s eyes and dripped to the meditation mat. A moment later he was sobbing, and the threads of anger at last loosened and released him.

Jax felt a trickle of perspiration race down his back beneath his tunic and realized he had broken out in a cold sweat. He heard a muffled noise and looked up to see Rhinann standing in the doorway, a well-pulped domrai fruit in one hand and a sodden spot on the front of his weskit.

“Will he be doing that often?” he asked. “If so, I suggest we store the fruit in an enclosed space.”

Jax smiled humorlessly. If Kaj did that often, the fruit would be the least of their worries.

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Two steps from the café, Den looked up to find I-Five regarding him placidly.

“And you were looking for me, why?” Den asked.

“I was a bit … concerned about your sudden disappearance earlier. It seemed as though you and Rhinann had a disagreement about something,” I-Five said.

“Don’t tell me you were eavesdropping, too?”

The droid’s photoreceptors brightened. “Someone was eavesdropping on your conversation with Rhinann?”

Den shrugged. “I’m not sure, to be honest. But Dejah seemed to know what we’d been talking about, and she would neither confirm nor deny.”

“Ah.”

The unspoken question, Den figured, was: What would she neither confirm nor deny?

I-Five started walking toward the amorphous center of the sprawling marketplace, and Den fell into step. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“To send a message to a friend.” In other words, a Whiplash operative.

“Yeah? Which one?”

“Someone who knows a great deal about the UML.”

The UML, or Underground Mag-Lev, was a route of egress the Whiplash had used for some time to ferry at-risk individuals to facilities within several of the nearby spaceports where they could be smuggled