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Lorn accepted the cube. “Well,” he said, “it’s been a pleasure doing—” He left the sentence unfinished when he saw that Bilk was now pointing a blaster directly at I-Five’s recharge coupling. Zippa, his smile now decidedly unpleasant, floated forward and plucked the Holocron and the remainder of the credits from Lorn’s hand.

“I’m afraid in this case the pleasure is all mine,” the Toydarian said as both Lorn and I-Five raised their hands. Then Zippa’s smile vanished, and the next words came out in a sinister hiss. “No one ever threatens me and lives to tell about it.” One three-fingered hand made a pass before a sensor plate, and the booth door slid open. “I’ll tell the proprietor that booth nine will be needing some extra cleaning,” he said as he exited. “Hurry up, Bilk—I want to find another buyer for this item.”

The booth door closed after Zippa’s departure. It was impossible to tell if the piglike snout of the Gamorrean was smiling, but Lorn was pretty sure it was. “What’s the galaxy coming to when you can’t trust a Toydarian fence,” he said to I-Five.

“Disgraceful,” the droid agreed. “It just makes me want to … scream.”

Lorn still had his hands raised, and now he quickly jammed his two index fingers into his ears as deeply as he could as a deafening high-pitched screech came from I-Five’s vocabulator. Even with his ears plugged, the volume was excruciatingly painful. Bilk, caught with no defense, reacted exactly as they had hoped he would: He howled in pain and reflexively clapped both hands over his ears, dropping the blaster in the process.

I-Five stopped the scream, caught the weapon before it could hit the floor, and in another second was aiming it at Bilk. The Gamorrean either didn’t notice this fact or was too enraged to care. Snarling, he lunged at Lorn and the droid.

The particle beam punched through Bilk’s armored chest plate, seared its way through various internal organs, and exited between the shoulder blades. The beam’s intense heat instantly cauterized the wound, stopping any visible bleeding—not that that mattered much to Bilk. He dropped to the floor like a sack of meat, which was essentially what he had become.

Lorn waved his hand over the exit plate, and the panel snapped open again. “Come on—before Zippa gets away!” he shouted to the droid as he charged through the lobby. The proprietor barely glanced up as they dashed by.

They both emerged into the dim light of the dead-end street, Lorn now holding the blaster, which I-Five had tossed to him. But there was no sign of Zippa. No doubt he had heard I-Five’s scream, realized Bilk’s probable fate, and let his wings carry him out of sight as fast as possible.

Lorn slammed a fist against the graffiti-scarred wall. “Great,” he groaned. “That’s just great. Fifteen thousand credits and the cube gone. And I had someone on the hook to pay fifty thousand for an authentic Holocron.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t committed that slight blunder earlier …”

Lorn turned and glared at I-Five, who continued, “But now may not be the most appropriate time to discuss it.”

Lorn took a deep breath, let it out slowly. Dusk was falling fast. “Come on,” he said. “We’d better get out of this sector before the Raptors find us. That would be the perfect end to the day.”

“So,” I-Five said as they started walking, “was it a real Jedi Holocron?”

“I didn’t get a chance to examine it closely. But from the cuneiform on it, I’d say it was even rarer than that. I think it was a Sith Holocron.” Lorn shook his head in disgust—mostly self-disgust. He knew I-Five was right; his burst of temper had probably precipitated Zippa’s reneging. He’d dealt with the Toydarian before and never been double-crossed. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

But there was no point in self-flagellation. He was out of credits, and this was a bad part of Coruscant to be in with no assets. He needed a hustle, and he needed it soon—or he might very likely wind up as dead as Bilk.

Not at all a comforting thought.