• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Akanah rested her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry—I’m not doing a very good job of being invisible.”

“No one cares,” Luke said. “No one’s watching. All these people have tunnel vision—all they can see right now are their own plans and worries and hopes. They’re all eager for confirmation that this really will be the vacation of a lifetime.”

Raising her head, Akanah sought confirmation of his words. “On Carratos, everyone notices public tears,” she said, wiping her cheeks. “My ears expected to hear ridicule.”

“Looks like you’ll have to do without, this time,” he said. “So where do we start? Who are we looking for?”

“The city of Griann,” she said. “It’s in what they call the Greenbelt Region. That’s where they were taken—Jib Djalla, Novus, Tipagna, and Norika. The first three are boys,” she added. “Novus is Twi’lek, the others are human.”

“Okay. Let’s go see what the machines can tell us about Griann,” Luke said, reaching down and shouldering both bags.

As they stood in line for an information kiosk, Akanah’s mood seemed to brighten, as though she were absorbing some of the joyful energy around her. But Luke again felt someone’s curiosity as a sudden shiver, as if someone had lightly touched his face, trying to recognize him.

Looking back across Welcome Park on a pretense of casual crowd-watching, Luke focused in on the tall, slender form of an Elomin male, already turning his horned face away. Luke watched his quarry move aloofly through the gathering until it disappeared behind the curve of the information center, but the Elomin never glanced his way again.

You’re getting twitchy, Luke told himself. There’s no way that an Elomin would be working for Imperial intelligence.

But the fact that an Elomin—perhaps this same one—had parked an airspeeder directly across from Mud Sloth would not leave his awareness. And the noise and the bustle of the crowd in the park suddenly seemed less a joyful party and more a potentially deadly distraction.

Maybe they were holding us up for a reason, Akanah, Luke thought worriedly, patting the bulge of his lightsaber along his thigh to reassure himself that it was there.

But though he stayed protectively close, Luke said nothing to Akanah beyond the kind of inconsequential chatter a couple as accustomed to each other as they were to traveling might share while waiting in line. There’s something here that I still don’t understand—some question I’ve failed to ask. He shook his head in annoyance, with such vigor that Akanah noticed.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Oh—I’ve just done it again, that’s all,” said Li Stonn. “The lines on either side are moving faster than ours. I shouldn’t ever pick. You pick the line next time, all right?”

She slipped her hand into his. “Be patient, dear,” she said with an affectionate smile. “We’re almost there—and maybe this will be the last line we have to stand in.”

Someone behind them chuckled deeply. “This is your first time on Teyr, isn’t it?” the stranger called out. “You haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until you get near the Rift.”

“Oh, it’ll be worth it, I’m sure,” Akanah said brightly, tightening her grip on Luke’s hand. “I just know it will be worth the wait.”

Chapter 6

Luke and Akanah rode the Rift Skyrail as far as Cloud Bridge, the southernmost of the West Rim stops. That treated them to a breathtaking view of the last eighty kilometers of the Rift—one of the narrowest sections, and consequently one of the most spectacular. The elevated track was perched right on the edge of the chasm, leaping across side canyons that would have been major attractions in their own right anywhere else.

At Cloud Bridge, Li Stonn rented a bubbleback, a local landspeeder variant popular with visitors who wanted to explore the canyon bottom. But instead of heading for the elevators at the Cloud Bridge Rift Access Point, Luke turned the bubbleback west along Flyway 120, toward the Greenbelt.

An hour and a half at the top speed allowed on the flyway brought