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“Eliya, don’t,” Luke interrupted. If she continued to lie, Taalon would only make an example of her. “I know this is hard to believe, but the Fallanassi really will be better off if you just cooperate.”

“We are here to find Abeloth,” Taalon said. He looked toward the gathering hall. “Where is she? In there?”

Eliya shot an angry scowl at Luke, then shook her head. “No. Not any longer,” she said. “She left—”

“You will see Abeloth soon enough,” a familiar voice called.

Luke turned and found Akanah standing in the door of the gathering hall. Her hair was hanging loose and waving about her shoulders, as though caught by a breeze that was not blowing, and there was a darkness in her eyes that seemed to rise from the depths of time itself. Her gaze shifted from Taalon to Luke, and she smiled, revealing a mouthful of small sharp teeth.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said. “Really, you shouldn’t have.”

THE MORNING SUNLIGHT WAS BOUNCING OFF THE DURACRETE WALL, AGGRAVATING an already splitting headache and making it even more difficult to see through fogged goggles. Somewhere ahead—more than four hundred meters above the nearest pedway and two full kilometers of traffic-choked skylane above the actual planetary surface—was an expansion joint in need of inspection. To Han, it was just a dusky line running through a blurry gray radiance, a convenient excuse to be floating next to Detention Center 81. He shuffled along the repulsorlift-equipped scaffold—a hoverscaf—to the seam, then ran his gloved fingers up its length. When he felt a ribbon of sticky slime, he selected an electric slug-paddle from his tool belt and ran it up the trail until he hit something soft.

Instantly the silica slug flattened itself across the expansion joint. Han hit the trigger, electrifying the paddle blade. The slug curled into a ball, and half a second later it was killed and simultaneously captured by a barbed skewer that shot from the handle. Han quickly turned and thrust the body into the incineration vat in the middle of the hoverscaf, but he was not quick enough to prevent its spiracles from releasing a noxious yellow fume that seeped past the respirator mask’s imperfect seal. The stuff smelled like boiling tar poured into a nexu’s litterbox. His eyes watered, making it even more difficult to see, and his stomach threatened to empty its contents into his respirator mask.

Han stumbled to the back of the hoverscaf and pulled down his goggles and respirator, then braced his hands on the safety rail and stared down into the traffic-choked lane below. Why he had ever let Taryn Zel talk him into impersonating an exterminator, he had no idea.

Except, of course, that it had been the only way to get a rescue team close to the building. Given the short timetable and the facility’s stepped-up security, it had quickly grown apparent that trying to sneak a squad of impostors inside was out of the question. Then R2-D2 had discovered that the schematics on record with the Coruscant Building Authority—and the Planetary Fire Suppression Office—were inconsistent with modern engineering practices, and Zekk had quickly realized that someone in GAS had taken the precaution of filing false plans for the facility. In the end, with no reliable intelligence except the precise spatial coordinates at which the tracking bugs had gone silent, the Solos had settled for the most basic of all plans: blast their way inside, find the Horn kids, and get out.

A respirator-muffled voice sounded from the other end of the hoverscaf. “Who said it was break time?”

Han looked over at his scaffold partner. With his identity hidden behind his exterminator’s uniform—yellow hard hat, goggles, respirator, and white jumpsuit bearing the logo RUNKIL REMEDIATION—only the fellow’s two-meter height and the wisps of black hair brushing his collar identified him as Jaina’s old mission partner and ex-sort-of-boyfriend, Zekk.

“Hey, I’m only human,” Han complained. Unlike Zekk and the rest of the Jedi