“Master Jai! Master Jai, open up! It’s me!” Scout said, continuing to hammer on the door. “We have to send a message to the Temple!”
At this moment, a series of events occurred in quick succession. First, the door to Cabin 524 slid almost (but not completely) open, releasing a billow of steam and revealing Jedi Master Jai Maruk, looking considerably put out and wearing nothing but the towel he had grabbed on his way out of the shower. “This had better be important,” he said, glowering at Scout.
As he spoke, the door of Cabin 523 slid down, and Master Maks Leem’s worried face peered out through a cloud of dense black incense smoke. “Whie? What’s all the commotion?”
“I just found out where Doo—”
Here Whie was interrupted by a loud crash as the little R2 unit careened—apparently by accident—into Fidelis, and the rest of the Padawan’s words were drowned in the clatter and splash of dinner for five hitting the floor.
At the same moment, the Taupe Corridor security monad watched in electric ecstasy as the clouds of steam and incense in the corridor finally surpassed the hazard level on its built-in smoke detectors. Lights flashed and alarms sounded with all the passion of seventy-three trillion processor cycles of anticipation.
“Mistress Pho,” Jai Maruk said heavily, “do you remember what the number one priority of this trip was?” He hitched his towel up with one hand and looked grimly from Scout to the flashing alarms, to the spilled food and the watching droids, and back to Scout again.
Scout gulped. “Yes, Mast—I mean, Father.”
“And what was it?”
Whie and Scout exchanged pale looks before replying in unison. “Keep a low profile.”
The extremely private comm console on Last Call chimed. “Yes?”
It was a droid. “I have some information you may be interested in acquiring.”
“Not likely,” Asajj said.
“I know where Yoda is. The real one.”
Asajj sat up straight. “What do you mean? Don’t you watch the news? Yoda is—”
“I can cut this link right now,” the droid said. He was unmarked and unpainted, and his calm voice carried absolute conviction.
“No!” Asajj said sharply.
“You admit you are interested?”
“I might be.”
“Would your interest extend to seven hundred and thirty-four thousand nine hundred ninety-five Republic credits?”
“A curious sum.”
Her caller shrugged. “My treason tables are very precisely calibrated.”
Asajj thought for a moment. “I think we might be able to do business.”
When the terms had been negotiated and the communication broken off, Asajj set a course for Phindar Spaceport. After a moment’s thought, she lifted a clip of the droid’s face from the comm console’s log of their communication and asked the computer to make a deep search, looking for a match for the droid’s particular make and model. Such a search was rather slow, given the transmission lag between her current position and the ’Net, so she grabbed a quick lunch and administered an ampoule of adrenaline to her prisoner, whose tendency to stop breathing and pass out was becoming annoying.
The comm console gave a polite cough to announce the completion of her search. “Match found,” it said, displaying a picture from the authorative Peterson’s Guide to Droids of the Republic, Vol. VII: The Great Corporate Expansion Era.
Asajj came away from her console looking very thoughtful indeed.
7
Jai Maruk had always been a light sleeper, and at the first stealthy rustle he was wide awake. His hand was light and tingling, ready to sweep out the lightsaber from under his cot. He reached out with the Force, sensing the room: the Esterhazy girl was out like a log, making little snores. Even through the thin walls Jai could feel the gentle glow, like a banked fire, of Master Yoda, who now slept next door—Cabin 522 had opened up when another passenger had debarked two days ago.
Another rustle. Jai Maruk relaxed. There was no intruder; just Whie, stealing quietly into a set of robes. Wound up about something; across the room in the dark, Jai could feel him in the Force, his nerves jangling like the strings of a tri-harp.
Well, Jai thought, no surprise there. His first trip out of the Jedi Temple, and none of the challenges he was facing were the ones he’d been preparing for. Apprentices always thought the life of a Jedi Knight was all lightsaber battles and high-level diplomatic negotiation, because that’s what they were trained for. There was no classroom work to simulate running into a servant who claimed you were some sort of long-lost prince of Vjun.
After the cleanup crews had made their sweep through Taupe Corridor, he and Maks Leem had met with Fidelis, the droid who claimed to serve Whie’s human family, and his partner, Solis. At least it was clear to Jai that they were partners; he wasn’t sure the Padawans had figured out that Tallisibeth’s trip to the purser’s office had simply been a ruse to allow Fidelis to get Whie alone. It was a curious business all in all, and certain to be distracting for the boy.
Jai had felt a fierce hope that the droid would be able to give them information about Dooku and his movements, but its information turned out to be strictly secondhand; it had not been back to Vjun in a decade.
Still, the droid’s descriptions of Château Malreaux did match the glimpses Jai had gotten during his brief interview with the hated lapsed Jedi, Count Dooku, and his despicable lapdog Asajj Ventress. Jai had asked Fidelis for complete schematics on the château and its surrounding terrain, so they could prepare a plan of escape in case Master Yoda’s negotiations with Dooku went badly. Exasperatingly, the droid had all but ignored him; he would only take orders from Whie. He certainly knew Jai and Maks were Jedi—a term that he clearly found roughly interchangeable with cradle-robber or kidnapping cultist.
It was one of the things they never quite mentioned in the Temple—how many people, even in the Republic, viewed the Jedi with distrust or even outright fear and hostility. The sentiment had grown during the Clone Wars, to the point that Jai hated going on the missions to identify new Jedi; as much as he knew the children they found were going to lead better, richer, and more useful lives than they would otherwise have had, the whispers of “baby-napper!” bothered him, as did the heartbroken eyes of the parents who watched their children being led away. Less painful but still ugly was the relief in the eyes of a different kind of parent, the ones glad to be rid of the burden of an extra mouth to feed.
One couldn’t see that without wondering which kind of baby one had been oneself.
And now “Palpatine’s Secret Police” was a whisper he was hearing more and more often—even, painfully, from schismatic Jedi who had left the Order.
But however unpleasant it was for Jai to see the word Jedi fill people’s eyes with fear and distrust, instead of hope and gratitude, he was at least used to it. Maks Leem, who rarely left the Temple, and especially the young Padawans had been shocked to see just how mixed the public’s feelings about the Jedi truly were.
And on top of all that, for Whie, there was the issue of the girl.
Tallisibeth was pushy and smart and pretty in an athletic way, and she was weak in the Force. A more disruptive combination it would have been hard to imagine, Jai thought wearily. Presumably Master Yoda had his reasons for bringing her along, but a stronger Padawan with a little less personality would have made life a lot easier. For one thing, Whie couldn’t stop looking at her. This was normal, of course, in a thirteen-year-old boy forced into close quarters with a pretty girl for days on end: but it wasn’t helping anybody focus. Scout didn’t seem to have noticed the boy’s habit of stealing glances at her, but to judge from Master Leem’s affectionate little smirk, Whie certainly wasn’t fooling his own Master. This would have been nothing but fun and games at the Jedi Temple—adolescence had its laughs at the expense of a few Padawans every year—but out here, on a mission to confront Count Dooku, it was one more distraction Jai didn’t want.
 
; Jai liked the girl, too.
He didn’t want to, to be honest. With the war going as it was, Jedi lives were being risked far more frequently than at any time since the Sith War. A girl like Scout—Enwandung-Esterhazy, he reminded himself; don’t fall into the familiarity of nicknames, Jai—a girl like that was going to be dead within a year.
That was going to hurt enough already. He didn’t need it to hurt any more.
Whie had slipped into his robes. The room door slid down almost to the floor, revealing a dim hallway outside. The corridor lights had blown out when the fire alarm went off, and though Maintenance had taken out the hugely excited security monad, they hadn’t gotten around to fixing the lighting.
Jai watched the boy step over the stub of door and close it again.
Jai would bet ten credits the boy was bound for the gym. Jai was pretty sure he had put in a few midnight workouts of his own as a Padawan, trying not to think about some girl…who was it? Jang Li-Li’s red-haired friend. Politrix, that was her name. Killed in an ambush two months after Geonosis. Plasma grenade.
He remembered the fall of her hair, red ringlets around her shoulders. The smell of it one day—they had been sparring in the exercise room, she pinned him and laughed, her hair dangling down to his cheek.
Gone now.
Jai felt a tear on his cheek and let it come. Grief, too, was a part of life: no use denying it. From a calm center he watched it, this grief. So much sorrow. So many of his childhood friends already gone.
It was getting harder now, to feel the grief without giving in to it. What had Master Yoda said once? Too long sorrow makes a stone of the heart.
So he tried not to like Scout so much, and at the same time he could feel himself pushing her, pushing her: willing her to be stronger and faster and more deadly because that’s what she would need. She was brave enough, by the stars—even he would give her that. But brave wasn’t enough. He’d been brave, standing before Dooku and Asajj Ventress. It hadn’t kept him from failing.
Jai’s breath came out in an exasperated hiss. So much for his Jedi serenity.
He lay in the dark a little while longer, then gave up all hope of sleep, slipped into his robes (far more quietly than Whie had managed), and followed the boy out into the ship, leaving Scout’s strangely touching little-girl snores behind.
As predicted, he found the boy in the workout room, going through the Broken Gate unarmed combat form—swing, stamp, strike, throw! He was good—better than good, he was quicksilver, letting the Force ball and surge in counterpoint to his movements, suspending it in a high flip, and then calling it down like a thunderbolt in the last stroke. Where the boy’s feet had landed, the floor mat burst open, spewing out rockets of foam.
“Excellent,” Jai said quietly.
Whie spun, flipped, and landed in a fighting stance, his open hands up, cupping the Force like chain lightning in his palms. “What do you want?”
Jai blinked. “Is that how you speak to a Jedi Master, Padawan?”
Whie stared at him, chest heaving.
“Padawan?”
“Would you kill another Jedi?” Whie said abruptly. “If you thought he had gone over to the dark side?”
“Yes.”
“Just like that? Aren’t we all supposed to be family?”
“Because he was family,” Jai Maruk said. “A Jedi who has turned to the dark side is not a common criminal, Whie. His gifts and abilities give him a great power for evil.”
“You wouldn’t give him a chance to reform?”
“Once the dark side has you, boy, it doesn’t let go.” Jai cocked his head. Carefully, he said, “I hope, Padawan, you are not confusing a moment’s weakness with a wholesale embrace of the dark side. We all have our vices—”
“Even Master Yoda?”
“Even Master Yoda! Or at least so he claims. I don’t know what they are, though I will say that when Master Yoda is hungry, his temper does not sweeten.” Jai grimaced. “My own temper is not well regulated. It might be described as angry and resentful. I am too quick to condemn and too slow to forgive. I have struck men in anger.” Casually, now, careful not to place too much emphasis, “I have had feelings for women. This is natural. But though the dark side draws much of its power from such feelings, merely having them is not to have chosen the wrong path. Do you understand? It is the decision to dominate, to crush, to draw your strength from another being’s weakness that signals a turn to the dark side. Dark or light is not a feeling, but a choice.”
Some of the furious energy was draining slowly from Whie’s tense body. His shoulders relaxed, and his arms fell to his sides. “I always thought I was a good person,” he said quietly. “I could never see the point of…stealing food from the kitchen. Or cheating on exams. I was a good boy,” Whie said heavily. “I thought that was the same as virtue.”
“Amazing how easy it is to resist other people’s temptations, isn’t it?” Jai said dryly. He felt an unexpected surge of pity for the young man—one part sympathy for Whie, and one part compassion for his own remembered self at this age: pent-up and furious and barely aware of the fact. After a lifetime of pretending to be good, the boy was only now coming alive to the difficult choices of life—the ones that every shopkeeper’s son had to face, let alone a would-be Jedi Knight. “Don’t worry,” Jai said. “There are ways Master Yoda and Master Leem know you better than you know yourself. Even I know a few things about you, young Whie. Life in this world is never easy, but all of us still see in you what you thought you saw in yourself: a fine man, who one day will make a fine Jedi Knight. Make your choices, Padawan. They won’t all be right, but most will be, and none of your Masters has any fear that you will turn to the dark side.”
Cautious hope came into the boy’s face, along with relief. “Thank you,” he said.
“Will you come back to your cot? You have some dreams yet undreamed this night.”
It was not a happy turn of phrase. Whie’s face darkened again. “N-no,” he stammered. “I think I’ll just stay up, thank you.” He adjusted a weight machine currently set for a body type with flippers. “What about Scout? Do you think she would ever turn to the dark side?”
Jai shook his head. “Forgive me for putting it this way, but she hasn’t had things as easy as you, Whie. She has lived with her temptations for years—to cheat, to peek at other kids’ tests, to conspire against quicker students to make herself look better. She may not play by the ‘regular’ rules, but she has committed her whole soul to living with honor, despite her limitations. She will be fine, as long as she remains in the Order. If she were to be cast out, perhaps bitterness might drive her to the dark side. If she felt we betrayed her.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Whie said. “I always thought she’d be sent to the Agricultural Corps, but now I see why she wasn’t. It’s not just that Master Yoda feels sorry for her. It’s that she’s already passed the test the rest of us will be facing, with this horrible war.”
“Scout told me yesterday that she found it very irritating that a boy so young should be so wise,” Jai said. “I begin to see what she means.”
Whie snorted and settled into the weight machine, pushing hard through ten fast repetitions. No use of the Force to move the weights: this was all the old animal body, burning in his legs, his breath getting deeper as his cells called for oxygen. It was good to push like this, meat on metal. The truth was, he’d had another prophetic dream, the worst one yet. Far worse than the vision of himself and Scout, bleeding, in a room with Asajj Ventress—
No. Push the weights. Don’t think don’t think don’t think.
But as soon as he took his rest between sets, the images of his dream flooded back.
“Master Maruk?” he said, as Jai turned to go back to the cabin.
“Yes?”
“Are you afraid of death?”
“That is the one thing I do not worry about,” the Jedi said. “It is my job to live with honor, to defend the Republic, to protect he
r people, to look after my ship and my weapon and my Padawan…My death,” he said, with a little smile, “is somebody else’s responsibility.”
Phindar Spaceport, Gateway to the Outer Rim. The Phindians, known throughout the galaxy for their dour sarcasm, were tall and thin and mournful looking, with yellow eyes streaked in red and exceedingly long arms, so their luggage scuffed along the floor as they milled about the crowded space station. A vendor sold them balls of air-puffed flat bread and the stimcaf came in low-g squeeze bulbs instead of cups. Even the recycled space station air smelled different, and the bland synthesized voice that came over the speakers spoke Basic with a sarcastic drawl that made their own Coruscanti pronunciations seem clipped and brusque. “If you want your droids seized and searched by all means let them wander around unaccompanied.”
“Hear that?” Scout hissed, pinging the R2 unit on the head with her fingernails. “So be good.”
A muffled and rebellious snuff leaked out of the little droid’s casing.
They were standing in line waiting to buy tickets for the next leg of their journey, from the Joran Station to Vjun proper, this time as the Coryx family. “Business or pleasure?” the attendant asked in a bored voice as Jai Maruk stepped to the head of the line.
“Pleasure, mostly.”
“On Vjun?” the attendant said. “Oh, sure.”
“I hope,” Jai Maruk added, with a well-delivered falter. “I’m a water chemist by trade, and I’ve always wanted to study the famous acid rain. The kids are just coming along to, ah, play on the beach and so forth…”
“Gee, that will be fun,” the attendant said, glancing at Scout. “Can’t hurt her looks, anyway. By the way, I only see one kid. Am I blind, or can you not count?”
“My son went to use the, ah, facilities,” Jai said. “But I have his ID card here.”
The attendant took their docs. It was good work, best Jedi forgeries, but Scout felt her heart speed up as he frowned and thumbed through the stack.
“If you want your droids seized and searched, by all means let them wander around unaccompanied.”