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These were nice digs, no doubt about it. Besides the three-story studio with its overlooking gallery, there were four private bedrooms, a library/workroom, a living room, and a large kitchen. A real kitchen—not just a food prep area with the usual nanowave and conservator. Apparently Ves Volette or Dejah had liked to cook.

Den found himself hoping that Dejah was the cook. If they relocated the entire team here … He caught himself. He might not be around that much longer. Depending on the answer he got from Eyar, he might soon be taking off for Sullust and leaving this dangerous, misbegotten, Inquisitor-infested hunk of real estate behind.

“Done with that inventory?” I-Five asked.

Den pulled himself forcibly out of his reverie and glanced down at the compad he’d been taking inventory on. “Yeah. Think so. We’ve got three more sculptures in the far corner that seem to lack power modules. A fourth that’s down a PM and a crystal, and component parts for maybe two more. I just don’t know if the parts list is complete. I found a log record that indicates he kept a small supply of crystals and a few PMs here, but I haven’t run across them yet.”

I-Five’s photoreceptors lit with surprise. “Pilfery?”

Den shrugged. “Or he hid them well. Those particular parts are pretty dear—both rare and expensive.”

He threw a glance at the boy within his circle of light sculptures. The rainbow of illumination reared above him into the vault of the ceiling, restless, ever moving, casting light and shadow on everything in the room.

Den shivered, feeling as if he was looking at an analog for their scary guest. Or maybe for the power he invoked. He tried to ignore the crawl of heat across his own face and asked, “Is it working? Can you tell?”

“No. We won’t be able to tell until we have a Jedi here to tell us it’s working.”

“Or an Inquisitor to tell us it’s not,” muttered Den.

“Will a Gray Paladin do?”

Den spun and stared up at the durasteel gallery that ran the length of the studio. Laranth Tarak stood looking down at them, eddying light from the sculptures playing over her, making her seem to flicker like a candle flame. The radiance shone on the polished railings of the gallery as well, making it look as if she stood on a bridge made of strands of light.

Den was surprised by how glad he was to see her. She represented, he realized, things as they had been, as he had wanted them to be. Sure, she was taciturn and unsmiling and unyielding and uncommunicative. None of that mattered, because she was also unambiguous. Laranth, Jax, and I-Five were the three people Den Dhur felt most at home with. In a bad situation, these were the people he wanted at his side, at his back.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I was in the neighborhood. I sensed an anomaly in the Force.”

Laranth left the gallery rail and descended, using the house grav-pad. Stepping off onto the studio floor, she sauntered over to them, her eyes on Kaj. The boy smiled a little nervously and waved at her. To Den’s utter surprise, she waved back.

“Interesting,” she said, gesturing to the light sculptures. “Wonder why we didn’t sense this Force-canceling property in them before now.”

“I think they have to be tuned to a specific harmonic,” the droid said. “The pertinent question is, are they working?”

She turned her head to look at Kaj, tipping her head to one side. Her right lekku coiled slightly. Then she turned, picked up an electrospanner from a tray of tools, and rolled it between the two light sculpture stands closest to them. “Kaj—lift that.”

The boy looked at the spanner. It bobbed up from the floor.

“Hold it there,” Laranth told him. She walked the perimeter of the circle. After making a complete circuit, she had Kaj let go of the tool.

“A little gets through,” she told I-Five. “But very little. Still, if he were to do something major in there, who knows what might leak out.”

“It appears,” I-Five said, “that we’re going to have to do some adjusting.”

Laranth’s eyes widened. “Meddle with the art of a deceased master? Dejah