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When he landed, he was facing another lightsaber, its blade a vibrant blue.

Behind it—gripping it and grinning fiercely—was Tahiri. She’d just slashed the force pike in half that had almost impaled him.

He didn’t let his astonishment faze him. The turbolift with Sannah and Valin was long gone. Find Master Ikrit, he sent after the young candidates, hoping that if they could not make out actual words, they would at least get the sense.

Then he squared his shoulders and faced the Peace Brigaders who were warily regrouping about two meters away. “You don’t stand a chance,” Anakin told them. “I’ve been trying not to hurt you. That ends with the next person who fires a weapon at me.”

“They can’t get all of us,” a woman in front said. She had a seamed brown face and dark eyes.

“Of course we can,” Anakin said.

“All of us?” She smirked. From behind her came the sound of what could only be reinforcements.

Anakin hit the woman, hard, with a telekinetic shove that took all of her companions down, too. Then he whirled and made four quick slashes that opened a gaping hole into the turbolift shaft.

“Go,” he told Tahiri. “You say you’re ready for all this? Jump.”

Tahiri nodded and without the slightest hesitation leapt down the shaft. Anakin followed her, bolts flashing above him. Together, they hurled through darkness.

CHAPTER FIVE

Anakin reached to Tahiri through the Force, and for an instant met a wall as hard as the stone of the temple. Then she reached back, and they clicked as if they had never been apart, so intensely that it actually frightened him. They fell in a sort of acrobatic dance, Anakin using the Force to slow Tahiri’s fall and she slowing his as they spun around a common fulcrum somewhere between them, like two children clasping hands and leaning back, turning around on their feet. If either let go, the other would go whirling off, out of control

An old game, one they had invented long ago.

He noticed something was falling with them—a pair of glop grenades. He sent them humming back up the shaft and out the hole he had cut.

The two young Jedi touched down, feather light, on top of the turbolift.

“Wow!” Tahiri said. “It’s been a long time since we did that. That was terrific. And the way you got the grenades, too—that was art!”

“I—”

The car of the lift suddenly started again.

Desperately Anakin cut into the power couplings and superconductor casings in the walls. The lift jarred to a stop. Meanwhile, Tahiri sliced into the roof of the car itself and jumped back, in case there was blasterfire.

But there was none.

“I don’t feel anyone on the lift,” Tahiri said.

“No. I sent it down to the third hangar level below the temple. I think Valin and Sannah got off, and then someone called it back up—probably someone on the ground level. Judging by our drop, we’re probably somewhere between—”

An explosion six meters above him cut him off as one of the outer lift doors blew in.

“There’s the ground floor, right there,” Anakin said. “Come on!”

He jumped down into the car. With his lightsaber, he cut through the car and the wall beyond, revealing an underground hangar that hadn’t been used since the battle against the first Death Star.

“You block their shots,” Anakin told Tahiri.

As bolts rained down and Tahiri deflected them, Anakin cut the fail-safe magnetic bolts that had locked the turbolift in place. He flicked off his lightsaber.

“Cut your lightsaber, now!”

“But—”

“Quick!”

She did, flattening against the lift walls as blasterfire poured through the hole above them. Another grenade plinked against the lift floor.

“There. Throw that back at them,” Anakin said.

The grenade whizzed back up the hole. “Why didn’t you do it?” Tahiri asked.

“Because I’m holding the lift car up.”

Above them, the glop grenade went off, and Anakin let gravity have the car.

It dropped like a stone.

“Remember to jump up just before we hit bottom,” Anakin gritted, as the lift hurled down through the layers of hangars and