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“Let’s go,” Jaina said.

“Next one,” Jacen said.

“But, children, I haven’t told you the biological background of these creatures yet,” Threepio said.

“Go now,” Jaina insisted.

They walked right through the surrounding illusion to the far wall, where several more openings presented themselves. Chewbacca urged the children through the left-hand door.

“Oh, not that one, Chewbacca,” Threepio said. “I’m not certain—”

But they had already entered the second chamber to be surrounded by the illusion of a desert planet. Waves of invisible heat rippled from a scabbed, dried clay surface. A strange creature scuttled atop a rocky outcropping with a bloodcurdling roar. It had a squarish humanoid head and a massive feline body, huge curved claws, and a segmented tail that thrashed back and forth, capped with a wicked-looking scorpion stinger. As it opened its mouth to bellow again, cracked yellow fangs dripped with venom.

“A manticore?” Threepio said in disbelief. “Well, really! I’m astonished they haven’t updated their display yet. That creature was proved to be a jumble of mismatched fossils long ago. Manticores never existed.”

Directly behind them in the hologram another manticore echoed the bellowing challenge and climbed over the baked rocks. The twins tugged on Chewbacca’s furry arms and headed through the nonexistent creatures toward the next set of openings.

“Let me choose this time, children,” Threepio said.

Chewbacca groaned. The twins didn’t seem to care.

“Go home,” Jacen said.

Jaina nodded in agreement. “I want to go home.”

“But, children,” Threepio said, “I’m sure you’ll enjoy this next one. Let me tell you all about the mournful singing fig trees of Pil Diller.…”

After three more dioramas and three more of Threepio’s boring lectures, the twins decided that they would much rather play hide-and-seek than continue the tedious expedition through the Holographic Zoo.

While they couldn’t communicate telepathically with each other word for word, they did know in a clear but general way what the other was thinking. When Jacen broke away from Chewbacca to run through the glacier eyries of the Snow Falcons, he headed to the left. At the same time, Jaina sprinted in the opposite direction, brushing past a startled Threepio. The twins used their fledgling talent with the Force to guide them into one of the other openings that led to an exit corridor.

Chewbacca bellowed; Threepio called after the children, but Jacen and Jaina met up outside the dioramas, pleased with their escape and giggling. They trotted down the white-tiled corridor as fast as they could go, past icons for refreshments, rest-and-recharge rooms, repair facilities.

At an intersection of corridors, an old maintenance droid worked in an open turbolift. Jacen and Jaina had seen turbolifts before. That was how they got back home once they reached the Imperial Palace.

The maintenance droid was gunmetal-gray with two heads and numerous mechanical arms, each studded with a handful of attachments. The droid’s two heads faced each other. One head bore a set of bright optical sensors, while the other face was a blank screen that displayed data, statistics, and official Imperial Building Code specs.

Muttering to itself in binary, the droid searched its back compartment for a particular tool, found it missing from its bin, then puttered down the corridor. It left the turbolift wide open with only a small dangling sign saying Out of Service.

The children ran for the turbolift and ducked inside. They had watched their parents and Threepio use the controls many times.

The panel looked different from the one in the Imperial Palace: much less ornate, discolored with age and rough use, with a wall of buttons marking hundreds of different floors in the kilometer-high metropolis. Since the lower levels of the city had been abandoned and buried long ago, a thick metal plate had been welded onto the bottom half of the panel, sealing off the first 150 floors. But the maintenance droid had removed the barrier plate to check the turbolift