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The ways of the Force were nothing if not unpredictable.

“That’s the one,” she said, pointing toward the tower that rose up ahead, stark against the afternoon sun. “Down there.”

Master Bondara said nothing as he angled the skycar out of the flow of traffic. They slipped into a vertical descent lane and began dropping.

The mist that seemed always present around the hundred-meter mark, demarcating the thriving upper levels from the slums below, wrapped around them momentarily and then faded away, to be replaced with an aerial view of the dark streets. Though it was still daylight above, down here it was at best a dim perpetual twilight.

She watched the wall of the building slip past, and pointed out to her mentor the ascension gun’s grapnel, still hooked to a ledge. They followed the cable into the miasmic depths.

When they were ten meters above the pavement, Master Bondara turned on the landing lights. The section of street below them was illuminated. Darsha, looking over the side, could see shadowy figures, long conditioned to prefer darkness to light, scuttling away.

There was no sign of the Fondorian. In all probability his body had been dragged away by scavengers. There was, however, a smear of purplish blood on the pavement and, nearby, the body of a hawk-bat, its neck broken in the fall. Master Bondara trained one of the lights on that and looked at it. His lekku slumped slightly, along with his shoulders. And, watching him, Darsha realized that her last hope of salvaging the mission was finally, irrevocably dead.

“What shall we do now?” she asked him softly.

He was silent for a long moment. Then he sighed and said, “Return to the Temple. We must report what has happened to the council.”

So there it was, she thought. Oddly enough, now that she knew hope was dead, she did not feel the crushing sorrow that she had anticipated. Instead she felt a surprising sense of relief. The worst had happened, and now she would find a way to deal with it. As with most looming disasters, the reality was almost anticlimactic compared to the dreadful anticipation.

Up to this point her concern about the mission had left little room for her to feel sympathy for Oolth the Fondorian. Now, however, looking at the stain of his blood on the walkway, she felt compassion well within her. He had been an obnoxious poltroon, and no doubt a conscienceless criminal, but few people deserved a death as horrible as his had been.

Master Bondara fed power to the repulsors, and the skycar began to rise.

Lorn watched as one of the Hutt’s flunkies delivered a large case to his master. Yanth opened it, and Lorn grew dizzy at the sight. It was filled with crisp Republic credit standards in thousand-denomination notes. Yanth turned the case toward him, displaying the wealth, and Lorn could feel his fingers twitching with the desire to take possession of it. He hadn’t seen that much hard cash in—he had never seen that much cash in one place before.

“One million nonsequential Republic credits,” Yanth said, as casually as if he was discussing the weather. “You take them—I keep this.” He held up the holocron. “Everybody’s happy.”

Lorn didn’t know or care about everybody, but he was sure of one thing—he was happy. He watched, still hardly able to believe this was happening, as I-Five stepped forward to take possession of the money that would transform their lives. He glanced at his chrono. Just enough time to get to the spaceport, if they left now.

I-Five was reaching for the case when the door behind them suddenly flew open. A Chevin bodyguard staggered backwards into Yanth’s sanctum, a force pike dropping from his nerveless fingers. It clattered across the floor to the foot of the dais. The leathery-skinned being looked down at his chest, in the middle of which was a smoking hole, and then collapsed.

Through the door stepped a nightmare.

Lorn stared in shock at the apparition. The Chevin’s killer was almost two meters tall and dressed entirely in black, including hooded cloak, boots, and heavy gauntlets. He carried a lightsaber unlike