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“When you boarded the Night Lady with Jedi Lowbacca and—”

“Sorry, Inquisitor. I did hear the question.” Jaina shifted her gaze to the accused, a massive Yaka with an expressionless, near-human face. He wore an engraved Ithorian skull on the lateral cover of his cybernetic implant. “Redstar’s crew tried to turn us away.”

A glint of impatience showed in Gyad’s gray eyes. “They attacked you with blasters, isn’t that correct?”

“Right.”

“And it was necessary to defend yourselves with your lightsabers?”

“Right again.”

Gyad remained silent, tacitly inviting her witness to elaborate on the battle. But Jaina was more interested in the sense of desperation she felt in the Force. It was growing stronger by the moment, more urgent and frightened.

“Jedi Solo?” Gyad stepped in front of Jaina, blocking her view out of the inquest salon. “Please direct your attention to me.”

Jaina fixed the woman with an icy stare. “I thought I had answered your question.”

Gyad drew back almost imperceptibly, but continued her examination as though there had been no resentment in Jaina’s voice. “What were you wearing at the time?”

“Our cloaks,” Jaina said.

“Your Jedi cloaks?”

“They’re just cloaks.” Jaina had stood at enough witness rails in the last few years to know that the inquisitor was trying to bolster a weak case with the mystique of her Jedi witnesses—a sure sign that Gyad did not understand, or respect, the Jedi role in the galaxy. “Jedi don’t wear uniforms.”

“Surely, you can’t mean to suggest that a criminal of Red-star’s intelligence failed to recognize—” Gyad paused to reconsider her phrasing. Tribunal inquisitors were supposed to be impartial investigators, though in practice most limited their efforts to presenting enough evidence to lock away the accused. “Jedi Solo, do you mean to suggest the crew could have legitimately believed you to be pirates?”

“I don’t know what they believed,” Jaina said.

Gyad narrowed her eyes and studied Jaina in silence. Despite Luke Skywalker’s advice after the war to avoid involving the Jedi in the mundane concerns of the new government, the challenge of rebuilding the galaxy obliged much of the order to do just that. There were just too many critical missions that only a Jedi could perform, with too many dire consequences for the Galactic Alliance, and most Reconstruction Authority bureaucrats had come to view the Jedi order as little more than an elite branch of interstellar police.

Finally, Jaina explained, “I was too busy fighting to probe their thoughts.”

Gyad let out a theatrical sigh. “Jedi Solo, isn’t it true that your father once made his living as a smuggler?”

“That was a little before my time, Inquisitor.” Jaina’s retort drew a siss of laughter from the spectator area, where two of her fellow Jedi Knights, Tesar Sebatyne and Lowbacca, sat waiting for her to finish. “And what would that have to do with the price of spice on Nal Hutta?”

Gyad turned to the panel of magistrates. “Will you please instruct the witness to answer—”

“Everyone knows the answer,” Jaina interrupted. “It’s taught in half the history classes in the galaxy.”

“Of course it is.” The inquisitor’s voice grew artificially compassionate, and she pointed to the Yaka captive. “Would it be possible that you identify with the accused? That you are reluctant to testify against a criminal because of your father’s own ambivalent relationship with the law?”

“No.” Jaina found herself squeezing the witness rail as though she meant to crimp the cold metal. “In the last five standard years, I’ve captured thirty-seven warlords and broken more than a hundred smuggling—”

Suddenly the sense of desperation grew more tangible in the Force, more clear and familiar. Jaina’s gaze turned back to the viewport, and she did not finish her answer.

“Wait.”

Tahiri Veila raised a hand, and the two Yuuzhan Vong standing before her fell silent. The two groups of spectators watched her expectantly, but she remained quiet and stared into Zonama Sekot’s blue sky. Over the last few weeks, she had begun to sense a distant foreboding