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The Sullustan always favored the highest seat in the room, which in their new environs put him where Laranth was perched. Jax recalled, suddenly, the too-neat room down the hall. The room with not a personal artifact in sight.

I-Five moved before Jax could, and was in the journalist’s quarters several seconds ahead of him. When Jax got there the droid was just standing in the center of the room, staring at its pristine neatness. It looked as if no one had ever slept in it.

“He’s gone,” said I-Five. “He’s really gone this time.” The droid seemed, for once, at a complete loss.

“I’m sorry, I-Five. I guess this is my fault. The vote …”

“No, it’s mine. He’s been considering leaving—going home to Sullust to marry Eyar Marath—for some time now.” I-Five set his shoulders in a very human gesture. “I should have anticipated it. I should have …”

“Talked him out of it?”

The droid emitted a tiny metallic sigh. “Not if it was what he really wanted. A home. A family. I suppose he’d fooled himself long enough that he had that here.”

Jax grimaced. “We’ve been a pretty dysfunctional family of late.”

“Yes. We have been.” I-Five turned his head to look at Jax. “But a family, nonetheless.”

Jax held his breath. There it was again—that odd Force echo. Just as he’d felt …

He put his hand on the droid’s gleaming shoulder. “Five, I can sense you. Right now. And before—in the street—just before you killed that Inquisitor. You felt … fear then. Fear for me.” As he said the words, as his memory played back the images and sensations, he knew it for truth. “Now you’re feeling pain. Loss.”

The droid’s head tilted slightly to one side. “Yes. I am.”

“Don’t you see what that means? You can’t just walk into Imperial headquarters unnoticed. You can be sensed through the Force, I-Five. You’d never get near the Emperor.”

“But you said it yourself: I was—am—feeling strong emotions. In Imperial headquarters I won’t be. I’ll be a good little protocol droid, going about my business—”

Jax put both hands on I-Five’s shoulders and met him eye-to-optics. “Until you get into the same room with the Emperor. Then what? Then can you promise me that you won’t feel anger? Loss? Pain? That the thought at the forefront of your mind won’t be to avenge my father’s death?”

“I can—”

“Promise me? Because if you can’t promise me that in all honesty, I can’t let you do this thing.”

The droid literally shivered. “You can’t stop me.”

Jax shook him hard enough to rattle his frame. “This isn’t about independence and free will and the prerogatives of a sentient. It’s about … it’s about family. It’s about me needing you because you’re all the family I have left. And inside that metal heart you hold the only image I have of my father. If you die—”

“I can put the hologram on a crystal—”

“But you can’t put you on a crystal! Look, you told me that I had to stay alive because I was needed. Needed to train a new generation of Jedi. Well, you’re needed, too. To help keep me alive.”

I-Five blinked, his photoreceptors going off and on quickly. Jax felt a pulse of emotion from the droid once again—stronger now than before. But it wasn’t fear or loss this time.

It was anger.

“If you go into Imperial headquarters leaking like that,” Jax said, “they’ll be on you in a Coruscant minute. It’s suicide.”

“Then I suppose we must come up with a different plan.”

“Maybe. But first, we have to move Kaj.”

twenty-one

“Then Jax Pavan still lives.” Darth Vader stood with his back to Tesla. His posture, like his voice, gave no indication of stress or inner turmoil. Only his gloved right fist, held at his side, worked rhythmically. The Inquisitor, fresh from the healer, was certain he could hear the tiny servo-mechanisms in the bionic digits click and hum with the motion. Was Vader intending to wrap those cybernetic fingers around his neck? Would the statement Jax Pavan still lives be Probus Tesla’s epitaph?

“Yes, my lord,” Tesla said. He made his voice as colorless as possible. “I felt it was best to bring report of these startling developments