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“Just between you and me and the viewspider, here,” Nom Anor said agreeably, “what’s slight is your niggling about some imaginary insult to your authority. What’s silly is worrying about how Jacen Solo got here; you should be vastly more worried about what he is doing right now.”

Rising blood pressure blued the master shaper’s face. “Where is he? You know, don’t you?”

“Of course.” Again, Nom Anor displayed his needle-pointed smile. “I was only waiting for you to ask.”

There was something wrong about this crater.

Jacen backed up along the notch in the crater’s rim wall, frowning. Vergere, a few paces beyond, stopped when she sensed Jacen was no longer following, and she looked a question back at him.

He shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

The outer slope of the crater was a scree of rubble, spilling off exposed structural members of what had once been government offices; this section of the crater’s rim had been a weight-bearing wall several kilometers high. The multicolored ferns and mosses covered it as though it were natural ground, but their roots were too shallow to bind the rubble solidly in place. They’d had to climb slowly, with Vergere in the lead. Jacen couldn’t know if his next step might fall on a loose chunk of duracrete and trigger an avalanche, or send him tumbling through a crust of fibertile into some semi-intact room below. Vergere never explained how she was always able to find the safest path; Jacen assumed she was using some kind of Force-sense.

The notch had once been part of a vehicle accessway, possibly an air taxi stand; three meters or so of its reinforced sidewalls had survived the destruction of the surrounding building. Jacen settled into their shade, just deep enough that he could see down the crater’s inner slope, and sat on a speeder-sized hunk of lichen-crusted wreckage.

This crater—

It was big enough to swallow a Star Destroyer without a trace. Big enough to lose the seedship in. It dropped forever away from them in a flattening curve, its bottom lost in black shadow: shadow cast by a billowing column of cloud that stretched up to a flat anvil top.

The cloud darkened as it descended, reaching deep into the crater, licking itself with forked tongues of lightning. Thunder rumbled up from below, and the air crackled with negative ions.

Jacen swallowed. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he repeated.

“And well you should.” Vergere hopped back to him, and settled onto the lichen beside him. “No place on this planet is more dangerous.”

“Dangerous …” he echoed. “How do you know?”

“I can feel it in the Force.” She laced her fingers together into a bridge upon which she rested her chin, and smiled up at him. “The question is, how did you know?”

He squinted at her, then turned his head to frown back out into the crater. How did he know? He sat in the shade of the ruined accessway wall, and thought about it.

Weeks of trekking had thinned and hardened his body, carving him into knotted rope and tanned leather. His hair had grown out in unruly curls, now streaked with blond by the harsh ultraviolet of the blue-white sun. His thin, itchy teenager’s beard had filled in, wiry, darker than his hair. He could have dug up some depilatory creme from an abandoned refresher along the way, or even a blade sharp enough to shave with, but he hadn’t bothered. The beard protected his cheeks and jaw from sunburn.

He could have picked up clothing, too, if he’d wanted it—he wore a pair of tough boots he’d found—but no regular clothing could be as durable, or as useful, as the robeskin. Warm at night, cool during the day, self-cleaning, it even healed itself when it ripped. Beneath the robeskin, he wore the breechclout Vergere had fashioned for him. After he’d found the boots, he’d plaited strips torn from the robeskin to make himself a pair of self-cleaning socks that never wore out.

The robeskin had proven useful in other ways, as well: across his back he wore a sizable knapsack,