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“Come on.” Javon grabbed C-3PO by the elbow and hustled him away from the tent.

“I say …”

Allana fell into place beside C-3PO. “They didn’t hurt you?”

“No, young mistress, they simply inconvenienced me in order to make their political point. Ah, my communications faculties are coming back online. I say, I seem to have about an hour’s worth of accumulated messages. Many of them from you.”

Allana nodded. “You were missing.”

“I suppose I was. I didn’t think of it that way, of course, since from my perspective I was aware of my location. I suppose that means I didn’t share your worry. Though I am touched that you did worry. Oh, it appears I have a message from Princess Leia. Some event of note taking place at the central dais. I’m supposed to make myself available to the Hapan Queen Mother to offer translation services. It seems that her protocol droid knows fewer than three thousand vocal variations in Klatooinian. Poor, uneducated wretch.”

“You should go, then.” Allana wondered what to do now. This wasn’t going right. She’d wanted to find the mystery man before they found C-3PO.

“Thank you, young mistress.” C-3PO began waddling off in the direction of the center of camp.

Javon looked down at Allana. “So. Are we done?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you want to go back to the Falcon or to see the speeches?”

Neither. Allana thought about the tents they’d pass on the way to both destinations. “The Falcon.”

“All right.” Shaking his head, Javon led the way back toward the transport’s landing area.

Allana kept behind him, smiling reassuringly up at him every time he looked back. And she kept her eyes open.

Most of the tents in camp were full tents, with floors of the same hard-wearing material as the sides, but some were just canopies, open at the bottom. And some of them were not staked out with their sides entirely flush with the ground. There were gaps. And some of those were dark on the inside, suggesting that there was no one in them.

Allana saw one such tent ahead. She pulled her sun hood up, though the sun was long since set, and signaled to Anji to stay nearby. She gave her nexu a calming touch in the Force.

The timing worked out just right. Javon had glanced back at her and was now staring forward. He wouldn’t look back again for several seconds. The other members of the escort were meters away on parallel aisles.

As silently as she could, Allana dropped flat and scuttled sideways under the back wall of a tent. There were only cots inside, one of them occupied by a napping Klatooinian. He did not awaken. Allana darted out the front flap and charged straight ahead through the camp.

Now she was just another child-sized shape in the nighttime darkness, identical to scores of others in camp. Now, at least until she was found again, she could hunt.

She headed for the edge of camp by which the dark-aura man had left earlier.

“It is my pleasure to introduce the fourth member of Klatooine’s first Jedi delegation, Raharra of Clan Lapti.” Leia raised a hand and gestured for the diminutive apprentice to step up beside her, which the girl did.

The crowd roared, and Leia reflected that an audience of Klatooinians could really make a lot of noise when they wanted to. Encouraged, Raharra raised a hand, waving at her new admirers, and the noise increased by half again.

Reni Coll, on the other side of the girl, took over as prearranged. “Let us meet this link between the warriors of Klatooine and the warriors of the Jedi.” She switched to Klatooinian and growled out a sentence at Raharra. It ended on an interrogative note.

Raharra answered in the same tongue, her own voice higher, a series of yips. Her reply must have been cute. The Klatooinian majority in the audience laughed. Offworlders looked at one another in confusion, then up at the monitor, where a translation offered by a protocol droid appeared in text at the bottom of the screen. Then they laughed, too.

Leia withdrew as the interview continued. She stood between Han and Tenel Ka. She had to raise her voice for them to hear her, though her