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Seff frowned for a moment, and Leia thought he was going to say that he couldn’t recall.

But then he flashed that hangdog smile again and said, “Wasn’t it on Taris, at that pet show?”

“That’s right,” Han said. He clapped a hand on Seff’s shoulder and slipped smoothly around to the other side, so the young Jedi would have to face away from the door as they spoke. “The one where the ornuk took the grand prize.”

“Han, it wasn’t the ornuk,” Leia said in a reproachful tone. She slipped around to Seff’s other side and stood opposite her husband, so they had the young Jedi flanked on both sides and could quickly redirect his attention with a gentle hand on the shoulder. “It was the chitlik.”

Han scowled. “What are you talking about? It was that big ornuk. I should know. It nearly bit off my ankle!”

Leia rolled her eyes and—seeing by Seff’s slack jaw that their distraction was working—shook her head vehemently. “That was the cannus solix! You would have known that, if you hadn’t been off starting fights when the judges explained the difference.”

“Hey, I didn’t start that fight,” Han countered, the edge in his voice so sharp that even Leia wasn’t sure he was acting. “Is it my fault if—”

“How many times have I heard that?” Leia interrupted. Across the cell, she could see Tekli standing in the door, pointing the funnel-shaped antenna of the portable encephaloscanner at the back of Seff’s head. “According to you, it’s never your fault.”

“That’s right—it never is.” Han turned to Seff. “You were at the show, kid. Who did they arrest?”

But Seff was no longer paying attention to Han. He was looking at the same corner he had been facing when they arrived, staring at a wavy blur in the transparisteel that Leia did not recognize as a reflection—until she realized why Seff had known it was Cilghal knocking earlier. Hoping to draw his attention back to her, Leia laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Seff, please forgive us,” she said. When he continued to watch the reflection, she squeezed hard. “After you’ve lived together as long as we have, you develop a few tender—”

Leia did not realize Seff was attacking until she felt his arm snaking over hers, trapping her elbow in a painful lock that she could not slip without snapping the joint. She whirled away, screaming in alarm, and barely managed to keep him from grabbing the stun stick secured in the back of her belt. In the next instant Han was between them, bringing his own stun stick down across Seff’s shoulder.

Seff pulled back, dragging Leia into the path of the strike. He still took most of the blow across his biceps, but she was jolted so hard that her knees locked and her teeth sank deep into her tongue.

Incredibly, Seff did not drop. He drove Han back with an elbow to the face, landed a side kick to the gut that sent Han slamming into the wall, then launched himself across the cell at Tekli and Cilghal.

“No, you won’t!” Seff landed two meters away and nearly fell as his leg buckled beneath him. “I won’t be copied!”

Both of Leia’s legs and one arm had turned to noodles, but she still had one good arm with which to grab her stun stick.

By that time, Seff was only a pace from Tekli and Cilghal.

The phoot-phoot of a tranquilizer gun sounded from the doorway. Seff stumbled again, one arm trying to slap the darts from his chest as he struggled to keep his balance. He took one more step, then Leia activated her stun stick and sent it spinning into the back of his legs. He crashed to the floor just centimeters from Cilghal’s feet, then lay there twitching and drooling.

Cilghal turned to Tekli. “You may as well deactivate the scanner.” She sighed. “I think we’ve learned what we came to find.”

About the Author

CHRISTIE GOLDEN is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels and several short stories in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Her media tie-in works include launching the Ravenloft line in 1991 with Vampire of the Mists, more than a dozen Star Trek novels, and the Warcraft novel Arthas: Rise of