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There was no emotion associated with the droid’s decision to fire, no spike of alarm in the Force. Tahiri had to time it by what she saw. The instant the droid finished bringing its arm into line, she snapped her ankles apart.

Blasterfire erupted from the droid and smashed into the binding cable between her ankle cuffs. The sheer force kicked her legs up and backward. But the cable was sheared through—her legs were free, and the circuit the cable made between the cuffs, necessary for the restraints’ shock function, was destroyed.

She dropped to the floor, onto an empty suit jacket and a blond wig. She ignored them. She didn’t have time to be curious. She held her wrists before her mouth and popped up like a hole-dwelling rodent, exposing only her head and hands to the gap in the booth.

The YVH droid was in midstride forward. Seeing her, it aimed and fired again, a near-instantaneous reaction.

Tahiri jerked several centimeters to one side and snapped her wrists apart as far as they would allow. Again heavy blasterfire sheared into her restraints. The cable parted and blasterfire hammered into her right-hand cuff, stinging and numbing her arm all the way to the shoulder. The force of the attack knocked her over backward. She felt a burning pain in her right wrist from a graze by one of the blaster bolts. But flat on her back, she was now free—as free as one could be in a planetary prison with guard droids and a YVH droid converging on her position.

* * *

Daala scrambled over her tabletop, fell to the floor beyond, looked around. Visitors buffeted by the explosion lay all over the floor, though there was little if any blood; the transparisteel barrier seemed to have sustained most of the force of the blast. A few visitors, meters away, had not fallen or were already rising. The false Tevarkian was gone—

No, he was a few meters off to her right, elbow-crawling, his jacket and shirt off, revealing medical scrubs beneath. His hair was black now. Only his suit pants and his physique gave him away as the man she’d been talking to. She elbow-crawled after him. The smoke was thicker immediately above, but here at floor level she had decent visibility.

She crawled across Tevarkian’s discarded pants and shoes. Now the man ahead was fully dressed in scrubs.

There was a distant boom to her left. Daala thought it came from beyond the huge durasteel doors that allowed visitors entry into the hall. They were closed at the moment, not damaged in the least by the explosion.

Purple smoke began issuing from behind Daala and flooding the air above. She glanced back and saw that it was coming from her false lawyer’s abandoned briefcase, which was on fire. A new tone joined the standard alarm cycle, a shrill note indicating a biohazard.

Daala grinned again. If it weren’t so dangerous, this would have been a good show.

The doors out of the hall slid open. Hovering just on the other side, in the mostly empty hallway beyond, and now wreathed in the smoke that flowed out of the visitors hall, was a repulsor gurney, the type with a platform at one end to accommodate a pilot. Daala saw the false Tevarkian angle to crawl toward it. She followed.

There was a whoosh, rocket noise, and Boba Fett flew into the hall. He hovered just before the doors, the rocket thrust from his pack stirring the smoke into violent whirls, the green of his Mandalorian armor clashing with the smoke around him.

Daala’s eyes widened. She’d never expected Fett to appear in a recognizable form. To do so was to invite retaliation from the Jedi now controlling the Chief of State’s office. But there he was, big as life, hovering, scanning the visitors hall in his methodical fashion. Daala had to admit to herself that the man knew how to make an entrance.

The YVH droid was just reaching Booth Six when Tahiri, meters away, exerted herself through the Force. The bent sheet of transparisteel she’d crawled under bent farther, slamming into the droid, hammering it, sending it sprawling back into the secure