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  Zeerid was shouting but Aryn could not make it out.

  Her stomach crawled up her throat as they plummeted, spinning wildly, toward the planet below. Her perspective alternated crazily from flaming pieces of Fatman, to Coruscant below, to the sky above and the distant silhouette of the Imperial cruiser, to Fatman again. The motion was pulling the blood from her head. Sparks blinked before her eyes. She had to stop the spinning or she would pass out.

  She made her grip a vise around Zeerid and used the Force first to slow, then to stop the spin. They ended up hand in hand, passing through clouds, falling at terminal velocity toward Coruscant’s surface.

  Malgus watched the freighter disintegrate into flaming debris over Coruscant. He expected the faint touch of the Jedi’s Force signature to disintegrate with it, but he felt it still.

  “Magnify,” he said, leaning forward in the command chair. The image on the viewscreen grew larger.

  Chunks of jagged steel and a large portion of the forward section of the ship burned their way toward the surface.

  “Did an escape pod launch before the ship exploded?”

  “No, my lord,” Jard said. “There were no survivors.”

  But there had been. The Jedi, at least, had survived. He could still feel her presence, though it was fading with distance, a splinter in the skin of his perception.

  He considered dispatching fighters, a search party, but decided against it. He was not yet sure what he would do about the Jedi, but whatever it was, he would do it himself.

  “Very good, Commander Jard. Well done, Lieutenant Makk.” He turned to Vrath. “You are done here, Vrath Xizor.”

  Vrath shifted on his feet, swallowed, cleared his throat. “You mentioned the possibility of payment, my lord?”

  Malgus credited him with bravery, if nothing else. Malgus rose and walked over. He stood twenty centimeters taller than Vrath but the smaller man held his ground and kept most of the fear from the slits of his eyes.

  “It is not enough that you’ve killed a rival and destroyed the engspice your employer wished to prevent reaching the surface?”

  “I did not—”

  Malgus held up a gloved hand. “The petty squabbles of criminals hold little interest for me.”

  Vrath licked his lips, drew himself up straight. “I brought you a Jedi, my lord. That was her on the holo.”

  “So you did.”

  “Will I … be paid, then?”

  Malgus regarded him coolly, and the small man seemed to withdraw into himself. The fear in his eyes expanded, the knowledge that he was a lone prey animal surrounded by predators.

  “I am a man of my word,” Malgus said. “You will be paid.”

  Vrath let out a long breath. “Thank you, my lord.”

  “You may take your ship to the planet. The coordinates will be provided to you and I will arrange for payment there.”

  “And then I can leave?”

  Malgus smiled under his respirator. “That is a different question.”

  Vrath took half a step back. He looked as if he had been slapped. “What does that mean? I … will not be allowed to leave?”

  “No unauthorized ships may leave Coruscant at this time. You will remain on the planet until things change.”

  “But, my lord—”

  “Or I can blow your ship from space the moment it leaves my landing bay,” Malgus said.

  Vrath swallowed hard. “Thank you, my lord.”

  Malgus waved him away. Security escorted him from the bridge.

  After the chaos of the cockpit, the quiet of the fall seemed oddly incongruous. Aryn heard only the rush of the wind, the steady thump of her heartbeat in her ears. Zeerid’s fear was a tangible thing to her, and it fell with them.

  She felt free, exhilarated, and the feeling surprised her. To the east Coruscant’s surface curved away from them and the morning sun crept over the horizon line, bathing the planet in gold. The sight took her breath away. She shook Zeerid’s arm and nodded at the rising sun. He did not respond. His eyes stared straight down, iron to the magnet of the planet’s surface. Aryn allowed herself to enjoy the view for a few seconds before trying to save their lives.

  The drag increased as the thin air of the upper atmosphere gave way to the thicker, breathable air of the lower. Below them, Coruscant transformed from a brown-and-black ball crisscrossed with seemingly random whorls of light, to a distinguishable geometry of well-lit cities, roads, skyways, quadrants, and blocks. She could make out tiny black forms moving against the urbanscape, the ants of aircars, speeders, and swoops, but far fewer than ordinary. Plumes of smoke traced twisting black lines into the air. Large areas of Galactic City lay in ruins, dark lesions on the skin of the planet.

  The Empire must have killed tens of thousands. More, perhaps.

  The wind changed pitch, whistled past her ears. She fancied she heard whispers in it, the soul of the planet sharing its pain. Her clothing flapped audibly behind her.

  Below, she could distinguish more and more details of Coruscant’s upper levels: the lines of skyscrapers, the geometry of plazas and parks, the orderly, straight lines of roads.

  She let herself feel the descent and used the feeling to fall into the Force. Nestled in its power, she marshaled her strength. She pulled Zeerid toward her. Unresisting, he felt as limp as a rag doll in her hands. She drew him to her, under her, wrapped her arms and legs around him.

  “Ready yourself,” she shouted in his ear. “Nod if you understand.”

  His head bobbed once, tense and rapid.

  The buildings below grew larger, more defined. They descended toward a large plaza, a flat trapezoid of duracrete with stratoscrapers anchoring each of its corners.

  “I will slow us,” she shouted. “But we will still hit with some force. I will release you before we hit. Try to roll with the impact.”

  He nodded again.

  She lowered her head, angled her body, and tried to use the wind resistance to create some slight motion forward, rather than entirely downward. The ground rushed up to meet them.

  They passed through the ring of skyrises, plummeting past the roofs, windows, balconies. Given the hour, she doubted anyone saw their descent.

  She reached out with the Force, channeled power into a wide column beneath them. She conceptualized the power as somewhat similar to what she would use when augmenting a leap, except that instead of a sudden rush of power to drive her upward, she instead used the power in a gentler, passive fashion. She imagined it as a balloon, soft and yielding at first, but providing ever-increasing resistance as they fell farther into it.

  They slowed and Zeerid shifted in her grasp. Perhaps he did not believe it.

  Pressure built behind Aryn’s eyes, an ache formed in her head.

  The balloon of her power slowed them further. She could see benches in the plaza, a fountain. She could distinguish individual windows in the skyrises around them. They were five hundred meters up and still falling fast.

  The pressure in her brain intensified. Her vision blurred. The ache in her head became a knife stab of pain. She screamed but held on, held on.

  Four hundred meters. Three hundred.

  They slowed still more and Aryn feared she could not bear any more.

  Two hundred.

  A second stretched into an eternity of pain and pressure. She thought she must burst.

  “Hang on, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He was rigid in her arms.

  Fifty meters.

  They were still going too fast.

  Twenty, ten.

  She dug deep, pulled out what power she could, and expended it in a final shout, an expulsion of power that entirely arrested their descent for a moment. They hung in the air for a fraction of a second, suspended only by the invisible power of the Force and Aryn’s ability to use it.

  And then they were falling free.

  She released Zeerid and they both hit the duracrete feetfirst, the shock of impact sending jolts of pain up A
ryn’s ankles and calves. She rode the momentum of the fall into a roll that knocked the wind from her and tore a divot of skin from her scalp.

  But she was alive.

  She lifted herself to all fours, every muscle screaming, legs quivering, blood dripping from her scalp. She tore off her mask.

  “Zeerid!”

  “I’m all right,” he answered, his voice as raw as old leather. “I can’t believe it, but I am all right.”

  She sagged back to the duracrete, rolled over onto her back, and stared up at dawn’s light spreading across the sky. The long thin clouds, painted with the light of daybreak, looked like veins of gold. She simply lay there, exhausted.

  Zeerid crawled over to her, cursing with pain throughout. He peeled off his mask and lay on his back next to her. They stared up at the sky together.

  “Is anything broken?” she asked him.

  He turned to look at her, shook his head, looked back at the sky. “If we get out of this, I’m becoming a farmer on Dantooine. I swear it.”

  She smiled.

  “I’m not joking.”

  She held her smile; he began to chuckle, louder, and the chuckle turned into a laugh.

  She could not help it. A wide smile split her face, followed by a chuckle, and then she joined him in full, both of them giggling hysterically at the dawn sky of a new day.

  Vrath’s hands sweated on Razor’s stick. Despite Malgus purporting to be a man of his word, Vrath felt certain the Imperial cruiser would shoot him from space after he exited the landing bay. For a moment, he considered veering off deeper insystem, accelerating to full to get out of Coruscant’s gravity well, then jumping into hyperspace, but he did not think he would make it.

  More important, he feared that even if he did make it, Malgus would hunt him down on principle. Vrath knew that Malgus would do it because Vrath would have done the same. He’d looked into the Sith Lord’s eyes and seen the same relentlessness he tried to cultivate in his own. He would not cross Malgus.

  He let the ship’s autopilot ride the coordinates provided to him by Valor into Coruscant’s atmosphere. It would put him down in one of Galactic City’s smaller spaceports, probably one commandeered by Imperial soldiers.

  Presently, the spaceport hailed him and sent him landing instructions. He affirmed them and sat back in his chair.

  He resolved that he would not leave Razor once he put down on Coruscant. He wanted no further interaction with conquering Imperials. He wanted only to wait until peace negotiations on Alderaan were concluded, however long that might take, and then get off Coruscant.

  Malgus knew Aryn Leneer had somehow survived the destruction of her ship and he suspected she had survived the descent to Coruscant’s surface. He did not want Angral to learn of her escape. Such knowledge would be … premature.

  He would need to track her down. To do that, he needed to determine why she had returned to Coruscant in the first place.

  “I will be in my quarters,” he said to Commander Jard.

  “If anything requires your attention, I will alert you immediately.”

  When he reached his quarters, he found Eleena sleeping. Her blasters, tucked into their holsters, lay on the bed beside her. She slept with one hand on them. He watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, the half smile she wore even while sleeping. She had shed the sling on her arm.

  Staring at her, he acknowledged to himself that he cared for her. Deeply.

  And that, he knew, was his weakness.

  He stared at her and thought of the Twi’lek servant woman he had murdered in his youth …

  He realized that his fists were clenched.

  Shaking his head, he closed the door to the room in which Eleena slept and started up the portcomp at his work desk. He wanted to learn more of Aryn Leneer, so he linked to several Imperial databases and input her name.

  Her picture came up first. He studied her image, her eyes. She reminded him of Eleena. But she looked different from the woman he had seen on the vidscreen on Valor’s bridge. The change was in her eyes. They’d grown harder. Something had happened to her in the interim.

  He scrolled through the file.

  She was a Force empath, he saw. An orphan from Balmorra, taken into the Jedi academy as a child. He scrolled deeper into her file and there found her motivation.

  A picture of Master Ven Zallow stared out of the screen at Malgus, a day-old ghost.

  Aryn Leneer had been Master Zallow’s Padawan. Zallow had raised her from childhood.

  He scrolled back up to Aryn’s image. Back then, her green eyes had held no guile, no edge. He could tell by looking at her that she left herself too open to pain. Her Force empathy would have only increased her sensitivity.

  He leaned back in the chair.

  She had felt her Master die, had felt Malgus drive his blade through him.

  That was what had changed her, changed her so much that she had abandoned her Order and rushed across space to Coruscant.

  Why?

  He saw the faint reflection of his own face in the compscreen, superimposed over hers. His eyes, dark and deeply set in the black pits of his sockets. Her eyes, green, soft, and gentle.

  But not anymore.

  They were the same, he realized. They had both loved and their love had brought them pain. In a flash of understanding, he knew why she had come to Coruscant.

  “She is looking for me,” he said.

  She would not know she was looking for him because she had no way to know who had killed her Master. But she had come to Coruscant to find out, to avenge Zallow.

  Where would she go first?

  He thought he knew.

  He inhaled deeply, tapped his finger on the edge of the desk.

  She was hunting him. He admired her for that. It seemed very … unlike a Jedi.

  Of course, Malgus would not sit idle while she sought him out.

  He would hunt her.

  A squad of six imperial fighters, bent wing interceptors, zoomed overhead, the hum of their engines drowning out and throttling Zeerid’s and Aryn’s laughter. The bent panels of the fighters’ wings formed parentheses around the central fuselage.

  “That doesn’t look right,” Zeerid said. “Imperial ships over Coruscant.”

  “No,” Aryn said. “It doesn’t.”

  Zeerid looked higher up in the sky, trying to spot any sign of his destroyed ship. He saw nothing. Fatman had served him well and nearly gotten them away from the cruiser.

  He smiled, thinking that engspice addicts all over Coruscant would soon go through withdrawal. But after those few days of torture, they’d have freedom, should they choose it.

  Zeerid felt a peculiar sense of freedom, too. He had not delivered spice. That pleased him. In a way, the Empire had freed him from his treadmill, had destroyed it in a hail of plasma fire.

  Of course, The Exchange would try to kill him. He’d have that to contend with.

  “What are you thinking?” Aryn said.

  “I’m thinking about Arra,” he answered, as the weight of his situation overburdened the relief he felt at surviving a fall of fifty klicks.

  The man who had stood beside the Sith Lord on the bridge of the cruiser had been the same man that Zeerid had seen back at Karson’s Park on Vulta, the same man who had led the ambush on him and Aryn in the spaceport.

  Vrath Xizor, Oren had named him.

  Vrath knew about Arra and Nat.

  And if Vrath decided for some reason to share that information with The Exchange, Oren would order more than just Zeerid’s death. They’d make an example of him and his family.

  He sat up with a grunt. “I have to get back to Vulta. Now.”

  Aryn sat up beside him. She must have felt the fear in him. “Because of the man on the cruiser?”

  Zeerid nodded. “He knows about Arra.”

  “I don’t understand why—”

  “No one in my … work knows that I have a daughter, Aryn. They’d use her against me if they did. Hurt he
r. But now he knows. He saw me in the park with her. I talked to him.” He put his face in his hands.

  Aryn put a hand on his back. “Zeerid …”

  He shook it off and climbed to his feet. “I have to get back.”

  “How?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’m going. I owe you for saving me. I won’t forget that, but—”

  She held up a hand. “Wait. Just wait. Think it through, Zeerid. They’re not going to let him leave, this man who knows about your daughter. No one has gotten off Coruscant since the attack. And no one will until the peace negotiations are concluded and the planet’s disposition decided. They’ll keep him on the cruiser or ground him on the planet. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Zeerid considered the words. They made sense. His heart continued to pound, but slower.

  “He’s here, you think.”

  “Possibly. Maybe even likely. But he’s not returning to Vulta, at least not yet.”

  Zeerid knew that Vrath already could have told someone else about Arra, but he thought it unlikely. No one gave away leverage. It was like giving away credits. No, Vrath had kept it to himself. Maybe to sell to The Exchange, maybe to use later. But he hadn’t used it yet. He’d had to get to Coruscant from Vulta too fast. He must have left immediately after the ambush.

  “Why didn’t he use Arra against you back on Vulta?” Aryn asked. “Could’ve forced you to turn over the cargo.”

  Zeerid didn’t know. “Maybe he would have. Maybe that was him in the stairwell of the apartment complex yesterday. Maybe we frightened him off. Or maybe he didn’t have time. He had to follow me to ensure he could locate the spice. If he’d have grabbed Arra, he might have lost me, or I might have flown off with the spice without ever knowing he had her.”

  Aryn said nothing as Zeerid let his thoughts meander into the briar patch of the criminal underworld.

  “Maybe he just wouldn’t hurt a child,” Aryn said.

  “Maybe,” Zeerid said, but did not believe it. He hadn’t met many criminals who operated with any kind of ethical code.

  “Listen,” Aryn said. “I’ll help you get off the planet or find him here. But first I need to get to the Temple.”