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“I seem angry to you, do I?” She’d asked him that. Why would she ask him that?

He was angry now. Frustrated.

The man in the doorway held his hands out in a placating gesture. “Please, Kajin. Don’t upset yourself. The Jedi drugged you. It may take some time for your memory to return.”

“Who are you?”

The pale gaze flickered as if in disappointment. “I’m Probus Tesla. Your teacher.”

“My teacher.” He had had a teacher. He remembered vaguely. A gentle voice prompting him, encouraging him. The soft touch of another mind …

There is no emotion; there is peace.

No face came with the memory. He gazed at the bald man. “Then who am I?”

The smile was back, warm and comforting. “You, Kajin, are one of the most promising initiates of the Inquisitorius. Which is why the Jedi sought to capture you.”

The Inquisitorius.

The ripple of iridescent robes. The flash of a crimson lightsaber.

“Sith,” the boy said. “I’m a Sith.”

His teacher’s smile broadened. “Good. You do remember.”

twenty-five

The Inquisitor stepped out into the skyway that terminated in the plaza in front of the Imperial Security Bureau and strode with studied confidence along its length. The personnel who passed him tilted their heads in deference to his apparent station and moved on. Not one of them raised their eyes to try to see his face within the obscuring cowl. Apparently even Imperial operatives were so awed by the Inquisitors that they averted their gaze.

This was a plus.

Jax’s goal was twofold—to see how well his disguise worked with no one else’s life on the line, and to see if proximity allowed him to sense Kaj.

Laranth he’d had no trouble sensing, though the nature of her contact had been disturbing in the extreme. It had come in a burst of mingled defiance and pain and had left him shaken to the core. He suspected she had been provoked into the brief contact; her captor wanted him to know where she was.

She was there. In that obsidian monolith across the golden surface of the plaza. Jax could see his own reflection in the front of the building as he crossed the plaza—or rather he could see the reflection of a tall, slender Inquisitor moving with cloud-like grace; one among several passing to and fro.

He watched as a pair of them, their robes coiling like sanguinary smoke about them, giving them the appearance of crimson ghosts, entered the broad doorway of the ISB. The bureau had become a home away from home for their order—the offices of the Inquisitorius were here, but the order itself was centered in a temple several kilometers away.

The two Inquisitors he watched entered the building without any sort of security check. Jax slowed his pace. Could it be that easy? He thought of Laranth—of that frantic burst of pain and desperation he had felt through the Force—and experienced the urgent desire to walk straight through those doors, find her, and take her out—now. The knowledge that she was in there and had been tortured with enough force to break that iron will, even for a moment, was agonizing.

He swept the place with tendrils of Force. He found Laranth amid the weird, dead echoes from the taozin wards worn by roughly a dozen Inquisitors. It was a tangled presence, its threads looped and knotted, but it was there. She was there.

Of Kaj Savaros, however, there was no sign.

Jax moved slowly along the front of the building to a lift on the far corner, scanning as he went. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. Then, abruptly, his regard slipped past another signature of coiled strength. Dark strength—as black and hard and gleaming as this edifice.

Vader.

He withdrew his touch gently and took the lift down several levels before making his circuitous way back to the Whiplash.

“What does it mean?” Tuden Sal glanced at the others in the room—Jax, I-Five, Rhinann, Dejah, and Thi Xon Yimmon. His gaze lingered on Jax.

“It means we can’t go through with the assassination attempt,” Jax said. “If we assassinate the Emperor, we would lose any chance of ever getting Laranth and Kaj back alive.”

“You’re sure they’re alive now?”

Jax