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He just grinned, relying on the Force to keep him rooted firmly in place. Meanwhile, every maneuver, every extra moment of full-speed travel drew the Prime Minister’s vehicle farther from its now crippled escort of CorSec vehicles, farther past the gates to the Prime Minister’s residence and all the guards waiting there.

The airspeeder was upside down and fifty meters above the avenue when Zekk finished transcribing his circle with the lightsaber. The impromptu hatch he’d cut fell past him. He leaned upward, the awkward position and angle pulling muscles like an abdomen-firming exercise, and stuck his head into the passenger compartment to confront his quarry. “Madame Minister,” he said, voice jaunty and raised a bit to carry over the whistling of the wind, “I apolo—”

He wasn’t looking at the Five World Prime Minister. The only individuals in the passenger compartment were droids. A skeletal figure with a CorSec uniform loosely fitted to it was in the forward position, piloting. And in the spacious, crimson-velour-lined main compartment sat a battered old protocol droid wearing a cumbersome ball gown and matching wide-brimmed hat of blue velvet. Only its face and arms were visible, their silvery finish worn off in places with rusty brown showing beneath.

It held a rectangular object that looked like a double-thick portable computer terminal in closed position. On the top surface was a blinking red light. In friendly but officious tones, the droid said, “I have been instructed to play this for any unexpected visitors.” Then it pressed the button.

Zekk straightened, yanking his head and shoulders free of the hole, and leapt clear—straight down.

He was a bare two meters from the inverted airspeeder when it exploded.

Kolir and Thann, riding their respective crippled CorSec vehicles to shuddery, sliding stops on the avenue, heard the boom and looked up.

The reddish flash of the explosion was enough to blind Thann for a moment; he threw his free arm over his eyes and concentrated on maintaining his balance.

Kolir didn’t look at the explosion straight-on. She saw chunks of disintegrated airspeeder flying out of the explosion cloud, and, to the lower left, Zekk—limp, on fire—plummeting.

She raised her hand, an instinctive gesture, and exerted herself through the motion, feeling the Force swell from her, feeling it intermix with the unique set of sensations and memories and textures that were Zekk.

There wasn’t a question of not being able to move a mass of less than a hundred kilograms. Under the right circumstances, Kolir could telekinetically lift tons. But the right circumstances meant having a moment to compose herself, to channel the Force through her, to eliminate all distractions…

She did what she could. She focused entirely on the task at hand, abandoning the attention she had been paying to the Force-based adhesion that kept her feet firmly planted on the slewing, skidding airspeeder beneath them, on the lit lightsaber in her hand, or the honking, beeping, screeching groundspeeder traffic roaring toward her and veering aside at the last second.

She found Zekk and slowed his descent. A speeder bus passed between her and her unconscious charge, but she was not relying on eyes; she continued to slow his plummet in the brief moments she could no longer see him.

Now he was fifteen meters above the pavement outside the Prime Minister’s residence. His back was still on fire, and smoke curled up from his shoulders.

Then Kolir’s airspeeder hit the rear of one of Jaina’s downed airspeeders. Kolir, catapulted forward, smashed into the rear of that vehicle’s passenger compartment, ricocheted off at an angle, hit the pavement of the avenue itself, and rolled a dozen meters before coming to a halt, bloody and unconscious.

Jaina’s eyes cleared of the explosion afterimage in time for her to see Zekk suspended in the air not far from her—and Zekk suddenly plummeting again. She leapt free of her airspeeder, hurtling between oncoming speeders in the