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Luke tried to reconstruct what he had done. “Let me try that again. Just relax.”

She seemed anything but relaxed as he probed her again, reaching to the back of her mind, finding the isolated nub among her instinctive centers. Touching it, he found himself knocked away again with physical force.

“But I didn’t do anything!” Leia insisted.

Luke allowed himself to smile. “Your reflexes did, Leia. When a medical droid taps your knee, your leg jerks whether you want it to or not. We may have just stumbled upon something a potential Jedi has that others don’t. I want you to try it on me. Here, close your eyes and I’ll give you an image of what I did to you.”

“Do you think I’ll be able to?” Leia asked.

“If it truly is instinctive, all you need to do is find the right spot.”

“I’ll try.” Her face wore a skeptical expression.

“Do, or do not. There is no try. That’s what Yoda always said.”

“Oh, stop quoting him. You don’t need to impress me!”

Leia touched her brother’s temples, and he took a deep breath, using Jedi relaxation techniques to drop his guard. He had erected so much mental armor in the past seven years that he hoped he could still let her inside. He felt the touch of her thoughts, delicate mental fingers tracing the contours of his brain. He directed her search toward the back, where primitive thoughts slept. “Can you—”

Before he could finish his question, Leia stumbled backward into the self-conforming seat. “Wow! I found the nub, but when I touched it, you knocked me off my feet.”

Luke felt wonder tingle through him. “And it was completely unconscious on my part. I wasn’t aware of doing anything.”

Luke touched his lips as new thoughts raced through his mind. “I need to try this on other people. If it’s completely a reflex reaction, this could be a very useful test for finding people who have latent Jedi powers.”

Next morning, the metropolitan shuttle skimmed over the rooftops of Imperial City, like a bus on the thermals rising from chasms between the tall buildings. The strip of buildings newly erected by the construction droids looked like a gleaming stripe through the ancient city.

Admiral Ackbar piloted the shuttle himself, holding the controls in his articulated fin-hands as he watched the skies with his widely set fish eyes. Behind him, strapped into their seats, rode Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa Solo. The bright dawn spread long shadows in the lower levels of the city.

Ackbar leaned forward to the comlink. “General Antilles, we are on approach. I can see the construction droid up ahead. Is everything cleared for our landing?”

“Yes, sir,” Wedge’s voice sounded clearly from the speaker. “There’s a good spot just to the right of the droid that should be perfect for landing.”

Ackbar cocked his head to peer through the curved viewplate, then brought the metropolitan shuttle in, aligning it with gaps in the buildings, descending to the unexplored street levels.

Wedge came out to meet them after Ackbar had settled the shuttle beside the powered-down construction droid. Ackbar emerged first into the rubble-strewn clearing, tilting his domed head up to look at the strip of sunlight coming from high above. Luke and Leia stepped out side by side as the vehicle hummed into its standby/cooldown mode.

“Hi, Wedge!” Luke called. “Or should I say, General Antilles?”

Wedge grinned. “Wait until you see what the demolition crew found. I just might get promoted again.”

“I’m not sure you’d want to,” Leia said. “Then you’d be stuck with diplomatic duties.”

Wedge motioned for them to follow. The construction droid blocked out the sun. Luke could hear teams scrambling up access ladders and automated lifts on the outer shell of the droid. Maintenance crews were taking advantage of the shutdown time to check the internal factories and resource processors, to modify some of the programming inside the droid’s computer blueprint.

The stripped carcass of a large beast lay in the rubble just outside the opening of the