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She plunged into the blackness, not even bothering with a glow stick. Her breath was ragged and irregular, but her stride never faltered. Every muscle and nerve in her body was tingling with the power of the Force, her senses heightened to supernatural levels. She didn’t need to see to find her way: like a bat she could hear the alarms echoing off the walls, floor, and ceiling, painting a sonar image of her surroundings. The rumbling boom-boom-boom of the charges rang out in counterpoint to the wail of the alarms.

When she burst into the hangar where her shuttle waited, she was surprised by two things. The first was how bright the lights from her shuttle seemed after the total darkness of the subterranean passages she had been racing through. The second was that Set Harth was missing.

She’d always suspected he might cut and run, but she couldn’t think of a reason Set would disappear but still leave her shuttle behind. She didn’t have time to worry about it now, however. She heard the roar of another explosion, this one so close it actually made the walls of the hangar shake.

Jumping into the shuttle she fired it up as another detonation caused the entire vessel to rock back and forth on its struts. Fighting not to be thrown from the pilot’s chair, Zannah pulled back on the stick and the ship rose up off the ground. Banking sharply, she turned it toward the entrance and jammed her fist down on the thrusters.

The Victory sprang forward, hurtling through the cavern’s mouth as the final explosion set off the charges built into the hangar walls, collapsing the entire structure behind her.

Safely away, Zannah punched in a trajectory and activated the autopilot, letting the ship skim across Doan’s surface as she tried to catch her breath. The mad dash to freedom had left her both mentally and physically exhausted. Her body was covered in sweat, and the muscles of her thighs and calves were quivering as she slumped in her seat, threatening to cramp up at any second.

She had survived, but she could hardly call the mission a success. She had let Bane slip through her fingers, and she had no doubt her Master had found a way to escape the Stone Prison’s destruction just as she had. On top of that, she had lost her apprentice.

She didn’t know if Set had escaped or if he had perished in the blast, and she had no easy way to find out. The connection she had forged with Bane over twenty years was strong enough to stretch across the breadth of the galaxy: she would feel his death no matter where or when it happened. Set had been her apprentice for only a few days. She would sense him if he was in close proximity, as she would any individual who possessed a powerful affinity for the Force, but there was no special bond between them.

But Set was the least of her problems. Bane was still out there, and as soon as he found another lightsaber he’d come looking for her … unless she found him first.

The problem was, Zannah had no idea where to begin her search.

24

The Stone Prison’s escape shuttle was small in size and lacked the luxuries of the princess’s personal ship, but it had been fitted with a Class Five hyperdrive and was well provisioned for interstellar travel. Theoretically, if there was ever a need to activate the dungeon’s self-destruct sequence, there was also a strong possibility that key members of the royal family or their staff might be forced to flee Doan.

In Serra’s case this was actually true. She could only imagine the political fallout she had caused. The king’s father had decommissioned the Stone Prison; officially it was still inactive. Its destruction would lead to a host of questions as to what exactly was going on in the complex beneath the royal family’s estate. Any investigations would turn up nothing, of course: the demolition charges had been carefully engineered to inflict maximum structural damage. Any proposed recovery operation would prove too expensive and impractical. Whatever secrets