Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights III_ Patterns of Force - Michael Reaves [7]
This last quality—if Ploughtekal could be said to possess “qualities”—was what had made Kaj seek it out. That, and the ease with which he could sustain himself here. Or at least it had been easy until his narrow escape from an Inquisitor the day before.
He shivered at the memory of that as he weighed the gnawing of his empty belly against the risk that somewhere in this crowd of unknowns might very well be someone watchful, someone suspicious, someone who might know what he looked like and be steeped enough in the Force to sense his presence. He had been hungry—just like now—and cadging food several levels up in the sprawling, many-layered marketplace. The Inquisitor had seen him coax a street vendor into giving him a skewer full of lovely smoked fleek belly strips, and had cornered him before he could even half devour it.
Even in his fear, the thought of the meat made him salivate. He needed to eat, but …
Kaj glanced up and down the overrun bazaar. Shadow and light danced in an ever-changing roil of smoke from cookpots and braziers; multicolored lights strung along kiosks twinkled and winked to tempt the eye and draw in the potential customers who thronged the thoroughfare. There was no sign of the Inquisitor or another like him—they made a point of remaining incognito.
It would seem that the sheer staggering amount of sentients, human and otherwise, that populated the cityplanet would afford more than enough protection for the individual who sought a lifetime of anonymity. Coruscant—Kaj shook his head in annoyance, reminding himself again to refer to the newly renamed ecumenopolis as Imperial Center in both thought and speech—Imperial Center was home to literally trillions of beings from across the length and breadth of the galaxy, and finding a single one among them all was more difficult by far than finding a single grain of sand on Tatooine, Bakkah, and all the other desert worlds combined. Hidden in the teeming multitude, he was safe—as long as he didn’t use the Force.
Which was no more difficult than, say, swallowing white-hot lava.
When he went for some time without actively using the Force, but instead simply kept it pent up within, it burned. It was like having a big chunk of fire lodged behind his sternum. He found it hard to breathe, harder to sit still. It quite literally raised his internal temperature; after a few days Kaj found himself sweating and running a low-grade fever. If he kept it bottled down much longer than that—say, another week or so … well, he’d only done that once. When he’d woken up in the middle of the night, he’d felt at first blessed relief—followed by heart-stopping fear.
The bed of the cheap resiblock he’d rented for the night had been soaked with sweat, and in the far wall a circle a meter wide had been charred into the paint.
After that, Kaj tried to “bleed off” whenever he felt the Force building up out of control. He concentrated on small telekinetics, levitating pieces of food or other objects, as those seemed to provide the most relief for the amount of effort expended. So far, it had worked—but he still quaked with the fear of being sensed by one of the malevolent Inquisitors every time he had to do it.
Kaj’s gaze wandered back to a kiosk some twenty meters distant, at which several shoppers were haggling with the vendor over the assortment of produce—most of it illegal. The kiosk had food bins on three sides and was open at the back. That was unfortunate, but the booth next door had a tatty fabric awning, one corner of which was tied down not far from the back of the produce vendor’s kiosk.
With his usual front-door methods rendered too risky, Kaj decided on a less direct approach. He pulled the cowl of his cloak up around his face and eased into the crowd. The stew of energies, aromas, and stenches flowed around him; the heat of someone’s regard when he accidentally bumped into her caused him to cower. He tamped down the anger that seemed to crawl to the surface