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“Is that where we’re going?” Gantoris said.

The roof, decks, and sides of Tibannopolis had been picked over by scavengers hauling away scrap metal. It looked like a skeleton of its former self, with buckled plates and twisted support girders in a broad hemisphere; dented ballast tanks hung below. Numerous antennae and weather vanes protruded from the joints.

“We’re going to wait for someone here,” Luke answered.

He brought the shuttle down on a primary landing deck that looked sturdy enough to support his ship. The crisscrossed structural beams were covered with scaled plating, but in some spots the seams had bent upward, popping their welds.

Luke emerged from the shuttle, and Gantoris joined him. The other man’s long dark hair whipped around him like a mane, no longer braided, but he stood proudly in his hand-me-down pilot’s cutfit. His black eyes glittered with wonder.

The high wind gusting through the carcass of Tibannopolis made a moaning sound. The swaying metal groaned as rusted joints rubbed against each other. The wind had a bitter chemical tang from trace gases wafting to higher altitudes.

Black birdlike creatures with triangular heads clustered in the open gaps of buildings, nesting on stripped girders. As Luke and Gantoris moved forward, the flying creatures stirred and rustled leathery wings. Their mouths snapped open and closed with croaking sounds.

Below and around Tibannopolis, the clouds had turned the smoky gray of impending thunderstorms. Flashes of lightning rippled through the cloud bank below.

“What now?” Gantoris asked.

Luke sighed and gathered some inflatable blankets and a sleep roll from the passenger shuttle’s storage compartments. “We’ve spent two days cooped up in the ship. I have no way of knowing when Streen might come back, and I think we should try to get a good rest.”

“Streen?” Gantoris asked.

“The man we’re waiting for.”

The storm came through that night and rinsed off the exposed surfaces of Tibannopolis, causing fresh blooms of rust and patina on the construction alloys. Luke and Gantoris had found shelter in the decaying buildings of Tibannopolis, resting on the slanted floor because of the derelict city’s tilt.

Awash in a Jedi trance more restful than sleep, Luke paid little attention to his surroundings but kept a small window open in his mind, ready to flick him back to wakefulness.

Gantoris surprised him. “Luke, I think someone’s coming. I can sense it.”

Luke became instantly awake and sat up from under the sheltered metal alcove, looking out at the washed-clean swirls of clouds. It took his mind only a moment to locate the approaching presence of a human—but he was impressed that Gantoris had been able to sense the distant stranger at all.

“I was practicing,” Gantoris said, “reaching out and looking with my mind. There isn’t much around here to distract me.”

“Good work.” Luke tried to keep the pleased expression from his face but failed. “This is the man we’ve been waiting for.”

He used his sense to focus on a black shape approaching across the skyscape of rising gases. Luke saw an amazing cluster of lashed-together platforms and bulbous tanks held aloft by balloons and maneuvered with propellers that stuck out at all angles. The hodgepodge vehicle drifted toward them, riding the winds.

Luke smiled at the bizarre construction, while Gantoris stared in awe. They could make out the silhouette of a single man standing at the helm as buffeting breezes rippled trim sails at the sides of the main platform. Streen, the gas prospector, was returning home.

Luke and Gantoris made their way down to the landing platform to wait for him. As the collection of gas tanks, balloons, and flat walkways approached, Streen finally noticed them.

At the controls of his contraption he swerved and circled around the ruined city, as if frightened and reluctant to land. But somehow, seeing only the two of them waiting, he regained his nerve and rode the breezes in.

Streen did not land his vehicle, merely bringing