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By the time he had landed on the speeder his lightsaber had rejoined him, snatched back to him by a feathery runner of the Force. Within moments the second police officer was dead, and Darth Maul had his transportation. With no witnesses, there was little chance of anyone suspecting the use of the Force, and the entire operation had been accomplished quickly enough that, in all probability, neither of the two officers had had a chance to send a distress signal.

Immediately he lifted off on one of the speeder bikes, heading uplevels to get ahead of his quarry. He set the speeder into a vertical spiral and checked his wrist comm as he rose. Again, he noted nothing unusual in the target area. However, one of the cam pickup sites seemed unusually devoid of traffic. Something about it …

Darth Maul replayed the scene again at a slower speed. Yes, right there—a flicker of something. He watched the security cam footage play again, slowing it even more. Nothing, nothing … and then, abruptly, there he was.

It was unmistakably his target: the information broker known as Lorn Pavan.

The Sith checked the time stamp on the data. The image had been recorded only about twenty minutes ago. He accelerated the speeder toward the location given on the screen.

He had them now.

Lorn poked the Raptor leader in the back with the barrel of his blaster as they reached the alley. “Hold it,” Lorn said. He turned to I-Five and Darsha. “Any warnings from the science and sorcery team?” he asked. “And don’t start whining again about the cheap sensor suite I had installed in you,” he added to the droid.

“Well, it was less expensive than the Mark Ten.”

“But more expensive than the other five choices. A lot more expensive.” Lorn glanced at Darsha as he spoke, intending to ask her if she was receiving anything on the Force bandwidth, and was somewhat surprised to see that she was smiling. What was even more surprising—downright shocking, actually—was the way he found himself reacting to that smile.

He liked it.

He liked her.

This was bad.

He knew he would soon have to break clear of her. There was just no way he was going back to the Temple. Sure, she was nice-looking, but he’d had nice-looking before, lots of times since Siena had left him. This was definitely not the direction in which his best interests lay. It was best to cut this off, right here and right now. Raise the blast shields, secure the air locks, bolt the hatches.

But instead, to his horror, Lorn realized he was smiling back.

As they walked toward the alley, Darsha enjoyed the patter between Lorn and I-Five. It was clear that they cared as much for each other as two friends would, two equals. Unusual, but at the same time it seemed quite natural.

She’d rarely had the opportunity to develop that kind of bond. The Jedi didn’t discourage friendships, of course, but the intensity of her studies and the time they demanded made it difficult to cultivate anything more than casual friendships with the other Padawans. Probably the closest she had to a friend at the Temple—aside from her Master, of course—was Obi-Wan Kenobi, and if she had the opportunity to speak with him more than once a week, she counted herself lucky.

As she listened to Lorn and I-Five, she kept her senses alert for any potential dangers ahead or behind. The only obvious latent trouble was Green Hair; the Raptor was brimming with hatred that he had been so easily captured, and that he was being made to lead enemies to his gang’s secret exit route uplevels. He would bear very close watching, but I-Five and Lorn seemed to have the situation in hand.

Behind them, she could feel no sign of the Sith, which either meant that they had finally made a successful escape, or was merely evidence of the fact that she still had a long way to go before she could stay in the Force at all times. Earlier, while fighting the Raptors, she’d stepped back into a full communion with it, every sense sharpened and honed, as she had done with the taozin. But she was not yet to a point where