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He returned his attention to Vestara, but Olianne spoke first. “Not these Jedi nor any Sith can take you away from us. You need feel no fear.” She leaned over to embrace Vestara.

Knowing that they were not likely to glean anything more that night, Luke rose, gave the Dathomiri women a little bow, and led Ben back toward the offworlders’ campfire.

Once they were far enough away that the women could not hear them, Ben, irritated, kicked a stone. “She’s playing them. Like they’re a sabacc deck. A children’s sabacc deck.”

Luke gave his son a disapproving look. “She played you exactly the same way. She drew you into an argument that was all emotion, no logic. And since she’s Sith and you’re Jedi, that means she won hands-down.”

Ben was silent for a long moment. Then he kicked another rock. “Yeah. I know.”

DATHOMIR SPACEPORT

Spying, Allana concluded, was mostly boring.

In the holodramas, a spy would hide herself where she could watch an important door, and a minute would pass, and something would happen at that door, and the spy would have an Important Clue.

But here, though she hid herself well among hedges that gave her a good view of the front door of one of the domes, a minute could turn into fifteen or thirty without anything happening. Anji would come back and curl at her feet and fall asleep. Allana would wait some more, then finally grow frustrated. She’d get up and trot to another vantage point … and wait there for an endless amount of time in which she learned nothing.

Well, not nothing. She learned that the dome nearest to where the Falcon and Jade Shadow were parked was a communications center. She could have guessed that by all the antennas, including hypercomm antennas, that crowded its roof, but it was good to catch a glimpse of the dome’s interior through a briefly opened door and see lots of comm equipment and one bored-looking man about Ben’s age yawning on duty there.

Another dome, the largest, turned out to be a hostel. People wandered in and out all the time, and through the constantly opening door Allana could see a cramped lobby like many she had visited. It was from this dome that all the intriguing food smells emerged.

It occurred to her that if R2-D2 had been looking for a yacht, he wouldn’t find it in a hostel.

That gave her something to think about. A space yacht would only be parked in some kind of dome. Not in a restaurant, not in a playground, not in a hall of records.

She decided to wander past the front doors of all the domes and read the signs this time. And it was the fourth sign she read, affixed to one of the largest of the domes, that bore the words, MONARG’S MECHANIC WORKS.

She set herself up a little nest among a stack of two-hundred-liter hydraulic fluid drums, waited half an hour, and sighed. Spying was dull. She hoped she’d find R2 soon.

The viewports of the dome were, at their bottom rims, about four meters above the ground, far too high for her to see into. But she gave the fluid drums around her an experimental push. They moved easily; they were clearly empty. Of plastoid construction, they were also very light.

Her heart racing, she picked up and carried a drum to the dome, carefully placing it directly beneath one of the viewports a quarter of the way around the dome’s circumference from the door. Scrambling atop it was no challenge, but she was still too low to see in. So she brought up another, placing it flush against the first one, and brought a third. That one took some work, because she had to lift it to rest atop the other two.

Now she could scramble up, and as she stood, wobbling, atop the third drum, she could peer in through the viewport.

Most of her view was blocked by a curtain, but it was tattered. There were holes and gaps she could see through.

She saw the gray tail end of a yacht. It looked a lot like Uncle Lando’s, but older and more beaten-up.

There were droids all over the place, small spindly ones. Most of them did not walk on legs; they glided