Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights III_ Patterns of Force - Michael Reaves [81]
He was having daydreams of battling at Jax’s side, wielding a lightsaber the color of a twilight sky, of flying in controlled leaps from cloudcutter to cloudcutter, when Dejah, walking placidly beside him, went suddenly stiff.
He stopped and looked up. “What?” he asked, looking at her face. She had paled and was staring into the oddly canted window of a storefront to their left.
She turned back to peer up the street behind them. “I thought … I thought I saw something.”
“Could you be a little more unenlightening?” Rhinann asked.
She shot him an uneasy glance. “I thought I saw an Inquisitor—reflected in the window there.” She nodded at the storefront.
Rhinann jerked his head around and followed her gaze back up the street. Kaj looked, too, feeling a horrid, cold tingle gliding up his spine. He saw several hovertrucks, some rickshaw speeders, and weavers, and a good many people of all species. He saw no Inquisitors.
He reached out tentatively with the Force—just a trickle—and probed their back trail. He was about to announce that Dejah had been mistaken when he felt it—the questing sense of another Force adept, seeking. Seeking him.
He withdrew his touch as if scalded. “She’s right. There’s at least one there. I felt him.”
Dejah stared at him, horrified. “Did he feel you?”
“I don’t know.”
She grasped his arm and wheeled him about. With Rhinann panting and worrying behind them, they quickened their pace. But it was no good. Kaj knew as they rounded the corner onto the block that housed the studio that that questing intelligence had felt his minute touch.
The Inquisitors were coming.
The studio was empty, right down to Kaj’s little sanctum. And if that were not unsettling enough, the living quarters were vacant as well. They were also neat and tidy, something that did not tally with the idea of an Imperial home invasion. The doors were unbreached, the locks locked, and everything in its place.
“One message on the HoloNet,” I-Five said, turning from the terminal in the studio. “Pol Haus, verifying that he’d be here, though possibly a bit late. Of course, I’d have to check the nodes in the individual rooms to be sure.”
Jax gazed down at the droid from the gallery, feeling the beginnings of relief. “That’s probably what spooked them—the thought of a visit from Pol Haus with Kaj here. They must have figured they should remove him until we’re sure of Haus. I should have thought of it myself.”
“Whistling in the dark, are we?”
“Doesn’t that make sense to you?”
“Just because it makes sense doesn’t mean that’s the way it happened.”
Jax closed his eyes and felt the room. No, there was nothing here. No fear. No residual ghost of the Force having been used … He opened his eyes and looked at I-Five.
“If they’d been taken forcibly, Kaj would’ve shattered the place and sent out a blast of Force energy that I would have felt all the way from Poloda Place. They’ve taken him out to keep Haus from seeing him, that’s all.”
I-Five made a percussive sound not unlike an exasperated sigh. “As you said, it makes sense.”
“Look, can we not indulge in this nonsensical behavior? I can hear you rolling your photoreceptors all the way up here.”
“What nonsensical behavior?” the droid asked. “I’m not the Force-sensitive who’s insisting on playing an active role in a plot in which having a Force-sensitive present is suicidal.”
Jax only heard half of what I-Five said. The other half was drowned out by a silent scream that sent the Jedi reeling against the gallery rail.
Kaj!
Jax pulled himself upright and bolted for the studio door, vaguely aware of I-Five calling his name. He approached the corner toward the antigrav lift in the outer corridor and felt the presence of another, advancing on the corner from the other side. Taking no chances, he drew and ignited the Sith blade, and cleared the corner wielding it in a two-handed grasp.
Pol Haus stared at him from the middle of the corridor,