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And the Jedi came into the cantina.

He was a nondescript old human, his beard gone white as the hair of humans did with age, his robes shabby with wear and desert dust. He was trailed by a human youth—a back-desert moisture farmer, by the look of his clothes and the way he stared around him, as Nightlily had, awed by what he thought was the Big City—and by a couple of much-battered droids whose power cells made Trevagg’s cones prickle. Wuher the barkeep swung immediately around. “Hey, we don’t serve their kind here!”

“What?” said the boy, and the taller of the droids, a dented C-3PO, looked as disconcerted as it was possible for a droid to look.

“Your droids. They’ll have to wait outside. We don’t want them here.”

Trevagg, sitting only a few feet away, heartily concurred. It was difficult enough to think in here, to determine what he should do, with Nightlily so soft and vulnerable and giggly on one side, and the dark vibrations of the assassins on the other.

“Listen, why don’t you wait out by the speeder,” the boy said quietly—an unnecessary courtesy, in Trevagg’s opinion. A C-3PO only looked human, and an R2-D2 didn’t even do that. “We don’t want any trouble.”

The old man, meanwhile, had gone to the bar, and was deep in murmured conversation with the elderly monastic spacer in the flight suit; Trevagg stretched his hearing to pick up their words, but over the music of the band it was not easy.

Even less easy was it to hear something besides Nightlily’s soft voice, slightly flown with unaccustomed substances, asking yet again, humbly, how he could truly love her so much.

“Of course I do, of course,” said Trevagg, watching the old Jedi move into conversation with the towering Wookiee. He looked safe for a moment, and Trevagg turned back to Nightlily, grasping the smooth dark ivory of her hands. “Nightlily, you mean … Everything. Everything to me.”

She said “Oh …” while staring up into his eyes. “Oh … Oh, Trevagg. That we should have met like this—that you should have come into my life like this …”

He wondered if he could slip away for a moment, summon the city police … But he needed a go-between if he were to get the money. Slip away and contact Jub Vegnu—first speak to one of the assassins, in case Balu had tracked the old man here himself.

He felt the flare of emotions, of irrational rage and drunken aggression, before the yelling started. Swinging around in his chair, Trevagg saw, to his horror, that the sinister Dr. Evazan had decided to pick a fight with the farm boy, throwing him sprawling into a table while Wuher ducked under the bar yelling desperately “No blasters! No blasters!” and someone else grabbed for a sidearm …

The roar of the Force in Trevagg’s cones peaked like the drumming of a high-desert gravel storm. The old man, in what seemed like a single smooth gesture, somehow had a glowing stalk of light in his hand. A lethal slash, a severed limb leaking blood on the floor, Nightlily’s terrified hoot, and silence—a silence less shocked than cautious as everyone reevaluated the situation.

Then the band started up again. So did the conversations. The wounded would-be combatant was taken away. So was the arm, by Wuher’s small helper Nackhan recognized as operating a fast-food stand in the marketplace. The old Jedi picked up his young companion, moved off with the Wookiee to the booth where the brown-haired smuggler with the scar on his chin waited. Trevagg became aware that Nightlily was clinging to his arm, and his every instinct told him now was the time to move in on her.

Unfortunately, now was also the time to listen, to stretch out his hearing, to key and sharpen his hunter’s awareness of every word they said. Trevagg disengaged his arm from the trembling girl, stated “You need something to calm you down, my blossom,” and moved over to the bar, listening over the jumble of the music, the murmur of the crowd. Lingering by the bar, he heard the words “to the Alderaan system,” and felt the swift rush of hunter’s adrenaline in his veins. It was,