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“Perhaps I can assist,” said Cilghal. Her lightsaber activated with a snap-hiss. She stepped forward and plunged it into the door, feeling the resistance, and began to slowly pull it through the material to meet up with Radd’s incision. It was tricky, doing this in tandem. There was the risk of suddenly feeling the metal yield and having both lightsabers collide while surrounded by white-hot metal, which was why Cilghal hadn’t stepped forward before. But Jysella’s life possibly hung in the balance.

Cilghal would just have to focus.

JYSELLA FELT THEM RUSH PAST HER, SENSED THEIR CONCENTRATION ON reaching the exits, their focus so great that they failed to search the immediate area in the Force. That was why they were still just apprentices.

No, she thought. They weren’t. They were imposters. That was why they hadn’t sensed her. A shiver ran through her and for a moment she was so frightened she couldn’t move. Then, through sheer will, she forced her legs to unfold and got to her feet.

She pressed the door with her hand, and it slid open. There was no one, nothing, between her and the exit. The guardian apprentices had gone off elsewhere. What about the shield that had been the downfall of her future self?

Wait—one of the apprentices had been speaking into his comlink as he ran toward her. Was it then that it was activated, when they knew she was heading for it? Had he already contacted security?

There was no time to head for another exit, no time to sit and concentrate to see if she could again find her future self to learn what had happened. Jysella took a deep breath, grasped her lightsaber firmly, and ran down the empty hall.

She tensed as she approached the entrance, the daylight coming through and pooling on the carpeted floor, expecting at any moment to feel the energetic net being dropped around her.

Nothing happened.

Jysella bit back a sob of relieved joy and raced out to freedom.

TEMPLE DISTRICT, CORUSCANT

YAQEEL SIPPED THE HOT, DARK BEVERAGE AND GLANCED AT THE NEWCOMER to the tapcaf. He was human, slender but not scrawny. He had a full head of hair, tawny and immaculately styled, and his clothing was fashionable but tastefully understated. His face was quite handsome by human standards, but the full lips seemed to her to be held in a constant smirk. Yaqeel’s sensitive nose detected some sort of musky scent about him. She had learned that humans liked to adorn themselves with “perfume” or “cologne,” as it was called, apparently not trusting in their own natural scents to attract the opposite sex. Bothans had no such concerns. They all smelled unique and almost all smelled appealing. At least to other Bothans. She cast a glance at Barv and wondered what he thought of her scent.

Barv was enjoying his caf in silence, his oversized hands holding an appropriately oversized mug. His jade face, with the thick, boxy snout and strong chin that often made him look so glowering and imposing to others, was relaxed in what Yaqeel recognized as comfortable good cheer.

Yaqeel turned her eyes back to the stranger, noting the well-manicured hands that accepted a portable cup. Now that she looked again, he seemed familiar to her somehow. Not the scent, she’d have remembered that, but his looks. Was he a holovid star? She watched the occasional one that Valin and Jysella had recommended to her and found them passably entertaining, but she couldn’t identify him. The stranger paid and walked out. He strode off briskly, and a droid that had been patiently waiting outside suddenly lifted and floated after him.

A Hologlide J57 cam droid.

And Yaqeel realized where she knew the stranger from. Her eyes narrowed and she growled softly, her fur rippling in displeasure.

“A journalist,” she spat, infusing the single word with the same disgust and loathing with which she would have said A Sith.

Barv grunted, but he allowed that journalists, despite Yaqeel’s personal opinion, were beings, too, and they should be allowed to buy a cup of caf if they felt so inclined.

A pedestrian hurtled through the tapcaf’s window right about