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Kaj looked wistfully at the real lightsaber hanging from Jax’s belt. “Couldn’t I …”

“Not yet. As you pointed out, you don’t really know your own strength.”

“Yeah.” Kaj took the rod. “Do I need to close my eyes?”

“Try it with them open for a while. Then maybe we’ll try a mask.”

Obediently, Kaj mimicked Jax’s stance and waited for the remote to engage him. He deflected the thing’s salvos well enough from the outset, never letting them touch him. But Jax could see what he meant about the desperation. He wasn’t anticipating the remote’s attacks using the Force. Rather, he was using the extraordinarily quick reaction times the Force granted him and moving when the blink of the remote’s tiny weapons port gave it away. There was a difference, and it could mean life or death in a battle situation.

Jax halted the practice after several minutes and found a sash in Ves Volette’s wardrobe that he used to cover Kaj’s eyes. Below the makeshift mask, the boy smiled. Jax could feel his eagerness. He wanted a chance to challenge himself, prove himself.

Not waiting for Jax to start the drill, Kaj spoke the activation command.

The remote bobbed into the air and immediately zapped Kaj with a bolt of energy.

“Ow!” the boy yipped and spun around.

“Stand by,” Jax instructed the remote, struggling to keep a straight face. “Think of the space around you as a field—a fabric woven by and of the Force. That field joins you to everything else in your environment: Me, the rod, the droid. Let the Force guide you.”

“But the remote is a mechanism—it’s not alive. How can the Force read the intentions of a mechanism?”

“It’s not a matter of intentions, Kaj. Yours or the remote’s. The Force exists everywhere—in the present, and also in the past and the future. And the Force can move you in the right direction.”

“But the speed—”

“I’ve been watching you move, Kaj. With the blindfold off, you were reacting to the sight of the beam port opening, and it didn’t hit you once. The Force can affect your reflexes so that you can be even faster. Feel the Force, Kaj. Let it guide you …”

A slow smile spread across Kajin Savaros’s face. He slashed the air with his practice lightsaber. “Let me try again, Master.”

Jax felt a warm flush of gratification at the words. Maybe he did have something to teach, after all. He stepped outside the wall of light, called the remote back into action, and watched Kaj dance with it.

It zapped the sleeve of the youth’s tunic once, and another time caught his vest. But with a growing smile, the boy parried its bolts, at first hesitantly, than with increasing confidence, dancing this way and that within the circle of kinetic light.

Laranth returned silently to Jax’s side. “He’s getting cocky,” she murmured.

She was right. Jax could tell by the swagger in Kajin’s mostly graceful movements. Probably a good time to end the practice, though it might be beneficial for the kid to get zapped once more.

Even as he had the thought, Kaj made a bad parry. A flourish brought his hand too high, and the little floating sphere stung him on the wrist. He cried out and spun after the thing—it dived and got him again on the neck and a third time on the buttocks.

Before Jax could shut the remote down, Kaj roared in incoherent rage and let loose an explosion of Force energy. The hapless remote was blown clear out of the circle of light and the duraluminum rod shot straight at Jax.

If he had not practiced what he’d preached about gauging intention, he would have been skewered. As it was, the rod flew past him, narrowly missing, passing through the exact spot where his heart had been an instant before, and buried itself fifteen centimeters deep in the plasticrete wall of the studio. He turned to see the light bowls supporting Kaj’s “safe room” shake violently.

“Kaj!” Jax shouted, reinforcing the verbal command with an application of the Force as he dashed through the veil of light and into the circle. The boy tore the blindfold from his eyes and stood facing Jax, panting and rigid with