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 her. 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.”
“You came here to kill someone, Aryn. I cannot spare that kind of time.”
Her face flushed, and he saw some inner battle going on behind her eyes. “I can just identify him.” She said it as if trying to convince herself. “I can find him another time. But I must have his name. This may be my only chance.” She blew out a deep breath. “I would welcome your help.”
“Been real useful so far,” he said.
“You got me here.”
“I got us blown out of space.”
“And yet here we are.”
“And here we are.”
“Let me get a name and then I’ll help you get offplanet. Agreed?”
He made up his mind, nodded. “All right, I’m with you, but we have to do this fast.”
MALGUS WAITED FOR ELEENA TO AWAKEN, his mind moving through possibilities, still trying to square a circle. He was beginning to think it could not be done.
Eleena emerged from the bedroom of his quarters, barely covered in a light shirt and her undergarments. As always, her beauty struck him, the grace of her movement. She smiled.
“How long did I sleep?”
“Not long,” he said.
She poured tea for both of them and sat on the floor near his feet.
“I have something I need you to do,” he said.
“Name it.”
“You will take several shuttles to Coruscant. Ten members of my security team, Imperial soldiers, will accompany you.”
In his head, he had already picked the men—Kerse’s squad—men whose discretion he knew he could trust. He continued: “I will give you a list.”
She sipped her tea, leaned her head against his calf. “What will be on this list?”
“Names and locations, mostly. Some technology and its location.”
He had pulled it all from the Imperial database while she had been sleeping.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Find everyone and everything you can on that list and bring it to this ship.”
She sat up straight, looked up at him. The question was in the pools of her eyes.
“The people are to be made prisoners,” he said. “The technology confiscated as spoils of war.”
The question did not leave her eyes. She gave it voice.
“Why me, beloved? Why not your Sith?”
He ran his hand over her left lekku, and she closed her eyes in pleasure.
“Because I know I can trust you,” he said. “But I’m not yet entirely sure whom else I can trust. Not until things progress a bit further.”
She opened her eyes and pulled away from him. Concern creased her forehead. “Progress further? Are you in danger?”
“Nothing that I cannot deal with. But I need you to do this.”
She leaned back into him, her arm draped over his legs. “Then I will do it.”
The smell of her clouded his thoughts and he fought for clarity. “Tell no one else of this. Report it only as a routine transfer of cargo.”
“I will. But … why are you doing all of this?”
“I’m simply taking precautions. Go, Eleena.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
She rose, bent, and kissed first his left cheek, then his right.
“I will see you soon. What are you going to do while I am gone?”
He was going to disobey Angral’s orders yet again and return to Coruscant. “I am going hunting.”
THE SMELL OF SMOKE and melted plastoid hung thick in the air. Aryn and Zeerid picked their way on foot through the streets and autowalks of Coruscant. Aryn was conscious of the fact that level after level of urbanscape extended into the depths below her. She realized that she had never put a boot to solid ground on Coruscant. Not really. Instead she, like so many, simply trod the network of walkways and duracrete streets on the surface level, unaware of most that went on in the lower levels. She had lived on the planet for decades but did not know it well.
The sun pulled itself into the sky, slowly, as if it did not want to reveal the ruin. Her eye fell on a distant, isolated skyrise that leaned precipitously to one side, the attack having damaged its foundation. It, like all of Coruscant, like the entirety of the Republic, had been knocked off kilter.
In the distance, the black dots of a few aircars and speeders populated the morning sky. Sirens blared from somewhere, rescue teams still searching the wreckage, pulling the living and dead from the ruins.
Coruscant was coming to life for another day, the day after everything had changed.
As they traveled, they encountered piles of rubble, streets flooded by broken water lines, shattered valves spitting gas or fuel. It was like seeing bloody viscera, the innards of the planet.
A few faces regarded them from behind windows or from balconies high above, the uncertainty and fear in their eyes the expected aftereffect of unexpected war, but they saw far fewer people than Aryn might have imagined. She wondered if many had fled to the lower levels. Perhaps the damage was less severe there. If so, the underlevels must have been thronged.
As the morning stretched, an increasing number of vehicles filled the sky. Medical and rescue ships screamed past. Swoops and speeders, bearing one or two riders to who knew where streaked over them.
Due to her empathic sense, Aryn felt the dread in the air as a tangible thing, a pall that overhung the entire planet. It wore on her, weighed her down. The towers of duracrete and transparisteel seemed ready to fall in on her. She felt hunched, tensed in anticipation of a blow. The dread was omnipresent, an entire planet of billions of people projecting raw emotion into the air.
She could not wall them out. She did not want to wall them out. The Jedi had failed them. She deserved to feel what they felt.
“Aryn, did you hear me? Aryn?”
She came back to herself to see Zeerid standing beside an open-topped Armin speeder. It was just sitting there in the middle of the street. His face twisted with concern when he saw her expression. His straggly beard and wide eyes made him look like a religious fanatic.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m fine. It’s just … fear is everywhere. The air is full of it.”
Zeerid nodded, his lips pressed together and forming a soft line of sympathy. “I’m sorry you have to feel it, Aryn. Everyone on Coruscant knows what the Empire has done to some conquered worlds. But if they were going to do it here, I think they’d have done it already.”
“It’s only been a day,” Aryn said, but still she hoped he was right.
A squad of Imperial fighters flew high overhead, the unmistakable hum of their engines cutting through the morning’s silence.
Zeerid climbed into the speeder, stripped its storage compartment of four protein bars, a pair of macrobinoculars, and two bottles of water. He tossed a bar and bottle to Aryn.
“Eat. Drink,” he said, and ducked under the control panel.
“What are you doing?” Aryn asked him. She guzzled the water to get the grit out of her throat, then peeled the wrapper on the bar and ate.
The speeder’s engine hummed to life and Zeerid popped back up from under the instrumentation.
“I’m taking this speeder. We can’t walk all the way to the Jedi Temple. Get in.” He must have read the look on her face. “It isn’t stealing, Aryn. It’s abandoned. Come on.”
She climbed in and strapped herself into the seat. Zeerid launched the Armin into the sky.
They made rapid progress. There was little traffic. Zeerid flew at an altitude of about half a kilo. For a time, Aryn looked out and down on Coruscant, but the rubbled buildings, smoldering fires, and black holes in the urbanscape wore her down until it all began to look the same. When she realized she had become inured to the sight of the destruction, she sat back in her seat and stared out the windshield at the smoke-filled sky.
“The Temple is ahead,” Zeerid said, coming around. “There.”
When she saw it, her heart sank. A hole opened in her stomach and she felt as if she were falling. She extended a hand to the safety bar and held it tight, to keep from falling.
“I’m so sorry, Aryn,” Zeerid said.
Aryn had no words. The Temple, the Jedi sanctuary that had stood for millennia, had been reduced to a mountain of smoking stone and steel. The destruction wrought by the Sith on Coruscant generally had left her pained. The destruction of the Temple left her gutted. She had to remember to breathe. She could not take her eyes from it.
Zeerid reached across the speeder and took her hand in his. She closed her fingers around his and held on as if she were sinking and he was a life ring.
“I don’t think we should set down, Aryn. No data cards survived that.”
“Fly closer, Zeerid.”
“You sure?”
She nodded, and he took the speeder in for a better look. Smoke leaked from between blackened stones. The remains of the towers lay in chunks across the ruins of the main Temple, as if they had folded over on it.
Broken columns jutted up from the ruins like broken bones. Aryn braced herself for bodies, but thankfully saw none. Instead, she saw broken pieces of statuary here and there, the jagged remains of the stone corpses of ancient Jedi Masters.
Thousands of years of honorable history reduced in a day to dust and ash and ruins by Imperial bombs. The fires would smolder for days, deep in the pile. Loss suffused her, but she was too dried out for tears.
How wonderful and terrible, she thought, was the capacity of the mind to absorb pain.
Zeerid had not released her hand, nor she his. “If your Master was here when the bombs hit, then he … he died in the blast. And it was just some anonymous Imperial pilot, Aryn. There’s no one for you to find, no one for you to hunt down.”
She was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking. “He did not die in a blast.”
“Aryn—”
She jerked her hand from him, and some of the grief and anger she felt sharpened her tone. “I felt it, Zeerid! I felt him die! And it was no bomb blast. It was a lightsaber. Right here.”
She touched her abdomen, and the memory of the pain she’d felt when Master Zallow had died made her wince.
Zeerid’s arm and hand still stretched across the seat toward Aryn, but he did not touch her. “I believe you. I do.”
He circled the ruins in silence. “So, what now?”
“I need to go down.”
“That is not a good idea, Aryn.”
He was probably right, but she wanted to touch it, to stand amid the rubble. She fought down the impulse and tried to quell her emotions with thought, reason. “No, don’t go down. There is another way in.”
“There’s nothing standing.”
“The Temple extends underground. One of the rooms where backup surveillance is stored is fairly deep. It may have survived the blast.”
Zeerid looked as if he wanted to protest but did not. Aryn was grateful to him for it.
“Where is the other way in?”
“Through the Works,” Aryn answered.
MALGUS’S PRIVATE SHUTTLE bore him toward Coruscant’s surface. Eleena and her team had left Valor in a convoy of three shuttles an hour earlier. They would already be well into their mission.
He sat alone, the steady rasp of his respirator the only sound in the compartment. Staring at his reflection in the transparisteel window of the shuttle, he tried to sort his thoughts.
Wild ideas bounced around his brain, thoughts that he dared not latch onto for fear of where they would carry him.
He knew only one thing with certainty—Angral was wrong. The Dark Council was wrong. Perhaps even the Emperor was wrong. Peace was a mistake. Peace would cause the Empire to drift into decadence, as had the Republic. Peace would cause the Sith to become weak in their understanding of the Force, as had the Jedi. The sacking of Coruscant was evidence of that decadence, that weakness.
No, peace was atrophy. Only through conflict could potential be realized.
Malgus understood that the role of the Republic and the Jedi was merely to serve as the whetstone against which the Empire and the Sith would sharpen themselves, make themselves more deadly.
Peace, were it to come, would dull them.
But, while Malgus knew that the Empire needed war, he had yet to determine how to bring it about.
“Entering the atmosphere, my lord,” said his pilot.
He watched the fire of atmospheric entry sheathe the ship, and pondered something he recalled from his time at the Sith Academy on Dromund Kaas.
It was said the ancient Sith of Korriban purged their bodies with fire, learned strength through pain, encouraged growth through destruction.
There was wisdom in that, Malgus thought. Sometimes a thing could not be fixed. Instead, it had to be destroyed and remade.
“Remade,” he said, his voice harsh through the respirator. “Destroyed and remade.”
“Darth Malgus,” said the pilot over the comm. “Where shall I fly you? I do not have a flight plan.”
The fire of reentry had faded. The smolder in Malgus was growing into flames. Aryn Leneer’s unexpected presence had started him down a path he should have trod long ago. He was grateful to her for that.
Below, the cityscape of Coruscant, pockmarked and smoking here and there from Imperial bombs, came into view.
“The Jedi Temple,” he said. “Circle at one hundred meters.”
If nothing else, he would soon have his own personal war. Aryn Leneer had come to Coruscant looking for him. And he had returned looking for her.
They would meet on the rubbled grave of the Jedi Order.
ARYN POINTED over the windscreen at an enormous building of duracrete and steel that could have held ten athletic stadiums. The peak of the dome stood several hundred meters high, and the innumerable venting towers and smokestacks that stuck from its surface looked like a thicket of spears. Not a single window marred the metal-and-duracrete façade.
“The Works,” Aryn said. “Or at least one of the hubs. Set down there.”
As Zeerid piloted the speeder down, Aryn looked back over the urbanscape, orienting herself to the relative position of the Jedi Temple. She could not see the actual ruins from their location—the intervening terrain blocked it—but she could see the smoke plumes.
The image of the ruined temple still haunted her memory.
Zeerid put the speeder down atop a nearby parking structure. Few other vehicles shared the structure. A single speeder and two swoops—both tipped onto their sides—were all that Aryn saw.
“Where is everyone?” Zeerid asked.
“Hiding in the lower levels, maybe. Staying home.”
Though it seemed a lifetime ago, the attack had happened only a day before. The populace was still in shock, hiding perhaps, picking up what pieces they could.
They took a lift and autowalk to the Works hub. A large gate and security station provided ingress through the ten-meter duracrete walls. While the gate remained closed, the security station stood empty. Ordinarily it would have been well guarded. Aryn and Zeerid climbed over and through unchallenged.
The mammoth structure of the hub, larger even than a Republic cruiser, loomed before them.
Zeerid drew a blaster from his hip holster, then pulled another from a hidden holster in the small of his back and offered it to Aryn. She declined.
“Thought I’d ask,” Zeerid said. “That lightsaber doesn’t do you much good at twenty meters.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said.
The arched double doors that offered entry looked like something from an ancient Alderaanian castle built for titans. They were enormous. Aryn’s Raven starfighter could have flown through them.
“Power is still on and controls are still live,” Zeerid said, examining the console on the doors.
Aryn tapped a code she’d learned years before into the console.
Somewhere invisible gears turned, the groans of giants, and the doors began to rise.
The doors opened and they entered, walking empty corridors that smelled of grease and faintly of burning. The metal floor vibrated under their feet, the snores of some enormous, unseen mechanical beast. The shaking increased as they moved deeper into the complex. Somewhere, metal ground against metal.
They cut away from the wide main corridor through which they’d entered and moved through a network of halls and offices sized not for vehicles but for sentients.
“I’ve never seen the inside of a hub,” Zeerid said. “Not much to look at. Where are all the mechanisms?”
Aryn led him through a series of deserted security checkpoints until they reached a set of soundproofed doors that opened onto the central chamber under the dome.
EARWEAR AND HELMETS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT FOR ALL NON-DROIDS read a sign on the door.
She pulled open the doors and sound poured out in a rush: the rhythmic clang of metal scraping metal, the hiss of vented air and gas, the discordant hum of hundreds of enormous engines and pumps, the beeps and whistles of maintenance droids.
Zeerid’s arms fell slack at his side. His mouth hung open.
The Works was difficult to comprehend all at once. The central chamber itself was several kilometers in diameter and hundreds of meters tall. Tiered flooring and a network of stairs and cage lifts made the whole of it look like a mad industrial artist’s take on an insect hive. Aryn always felt miniaturized when she saw it. It seemed made for an alien race ten times the size of humans: gears as large as starfighters, pipes wide enough to fly a speeder into, individual mechanisms that reached floor-to-ceiling, chains and belts hundreds of meters long. Hundreds of droids scurried, rolled, and walked among the workings, checking gauges, readouts, maintaining equipment, greasing mechanisms. The sound was overwhelming, a deafening industrial cacophony.
Compared with the advanced technology apparent elsewhere on Coruscant—with its sleek lines, compact designs, and sheer elegance—the Works looked primitive, garish in its enormity, like a throwback to ancient times when steam and combustion powered industry. But Aryn knew it was an illusion.
The Works stretched under Coruscant’s crust from pole to pole, generally accessible only through the hubs. Its pipes, lines, hoses, and conduits formed the circulatory system of the planet, through which water, heat, electricity, and any number of other necessities flowed. It represented the peak of Republic technology.
“Follow me!” she shouted above the noise, and Zeerid nodded.
Following signs and calling upon her memory, Aryn led Zeerid through the maze of raised flooring, lifts, and autostairs. Droids moved past them, oblivious, and it occurred to Aryn that the droids in the Works would probably have kept doing their work even if everyone on Coruscant were dead. The thought struck her as grotesque.
Zeerid turned circles as they walked, trying to take it all in.
“This is unbelievable,” he said to her. “I wish I had a holorecorder.”
She nodded and hurried along.
They soon left behind the mechanical tumult of the hub proper. As the sound faded behind them, the corridors narrowed and darkened, and the wall-mounted lights became less frequent. Pipes and conduits snaked on and through the ceiling, the floor, the entrails of plantwide convenience. Zeerid pulled a chemlight from one of the pockets of his flight pants, snapped it in half, and held it aloft as they advanced. Both of them were sweating in the still air of the tunnels.
“There are security droids in these tunnels,” she said. “We don’t have a proper pass. They will try to stop us.”
“Great,” Zeerid said. Then, “You sure you know where you’re going?”
She nodded, though she was beginning to feel lost.
From ahead she heard the whir of servos, the rattle of metal. A droid.
She pulled Zeerid to a stop and activated her lightsaber, fearing a security droid. Dust danced in the green light of its glow. Zeerid pulled his blaster, held the chemlight up higher.
“What is it?” he whispered.
A form moved in the shadows, small, cylindrical, a droid. Not a security droid but an astromech. It emerged into the light and she saw the flat, circular head and dun coloration of a T7. Scratches marred the droid’s surface, and loose wires dangled from one of its shoulder joints. But she knew its color and felt as if she were seeing a ghost, a specter from her past haunting the dark tunnels of the Works. Deactivating her blade, she said, “Tee-seven?”
Her voice cracked on the words.
When he beeped a greeting in droidspeak, she knew it was him, his mechanical voice redolent somehow of very human joys, triumphs, and pain, the soundtrack of her time in the Temple, of her life with Master Zallow. Tears pooled in her eyes as T7 wheeled toward them.
“You know this astromech?” Zeerid asked.
“It was Master Zallow’s droid,” she said.
She knelt before T7, daubing at the dirt on his head as she might a small child. He whistled with pleasure.
“How did you get here?” she asked. “How did you … survive the attack?”
She struggled to follow his droidspeak, so rapidly did he spit out his beeps, whistles, and chirps. In the end, she determined that a Sith force had attacked the Temple, that Master Zallow had sent T7 away during the fight, and that T7 had sneaked back to the battlefield after all had gone quiet. Later, the Sith had returned, presumably to lay explosives, and T7 had fled to the lower levels.
“I know about Master Zallow, Tee-seven,” she said.
He moaned, a low whistle of despair.
“Did you see his—Did you see him when it happened?”
The droid whistled a negative.
“Why did you go back after the battle?” Zeerid asked the droid.
A long whistle, then a compartment in T7’s body slid open and T7 extended a thin metal arm from within.
The arm held Master Zallow’s lightsaber.
Aryn recoiled, stared at it for a long moment, memories crowding around her, falling like rain.
“You went back to get this? Just to get this?”
Another negative whistle. Another long, hard-to-follow monologue in droidspeak.
T7 had gone back to see if anyone had survived but had found only the lightsaber.
Once more, Aryn stared determinism in the face. The Force had brought her to Zeerid at the exact moment when Zeerid was making a run to Coruscant. And now the Force had caused T7 to find Master Zallow’s lightsaber so that the droid could give it to her.
Aryn decided that it could not be coincidence. It was the Force showing her that the course she pursued was the right one, at least for her.
She took the cool metal of the saber’s hilt in her hand, tested its weight. The hilt was larger than hers, slightly heavier, yet it felt familiar in her hand. She remembered the many times she’d seen it in Master Zallow’s hands as he had trained her in lightsaber combat. She activated it and the green blade sprang to life. She stared at it, thinking of her master, then turned it off.
She clipped it to her belt, beside her own, and patted T7 on the head.
“Thank you, Tee-seven. This means more to me than you know. You were very brave to return there.”
The droid beeped with pleasure and sympathy.
“Have you seen any other survivors?” Zeerid asked, and Aryn felt ashamed for not asking the question herself.
T7 whistled a somber negative.
Zeerid holstered his blaster. “What about security droids?”
Another negative.
“I need to get to the backup surveillance station,” Aryn said. “Is it still standing? Can you lead the way?”
T7 chirped with enthusiasm, spun his head around, and headed off down the corridor, wires still dangling from his shoulder joint. Aryn and Zeerid fell in behind him. Aryn felt the weight of the extra lightsaber on her belt, heavy with the memories it bore.
T7 led them on through the labyrinthine passageways of the Works, avoiding collapsed or blocked corridors, doubling back when necessary, descending ever deeper into the hive of pipes, gears, and machinery. Aryn was soon lost. Had they not encountered T7, they could have wandered for days before finding their way.
In time, they reached an area familiar to Aryn.
“We’re near now,” she said to Zeerid.
Ahead, she saw the turbolift that would take them up into the lower levels of the Temple. T7 plugged into the control panel and the lift’s mechanism began to hum. As the doors slid open, Aryn braced herself to see something horrible, but there was nothing behind them save the empty box of the passenger compartment.
The three of them entered, the doors closed, and the lift began to rise. Aryn could feel Zeerid’s concern for her. He watched her sidelong, thinking she did not notice. But she did, and his concern touched her.
“I am glad that you’re with me,” she said to him.
He colored with embarrassment. “Yes, well. Me, too.”
The doors opened to reveal a long corridor. The emergency lights overhead flickered and buzzed. T7 started ahead, and Aryn and Zeerid followed.
Aryn had walked the corridor before, long ago, yet to her everything felt different. It no longer felt like the Jedi Temple. Instead, it felt like a tomb. The Sith attack had destroyed more than merely the Temple’s structure. Something else had died when the structure fell. It had been a symbol of justice for thousands of years. And now it was gone.
There was symbolism in that, Aryn supposed.
She wanted out as soon as possible, but first she had to see if there was any record of the attack.
T7’s servos, and Aryn’s and Zeerid’s footsteps, sounded loud in the silence. Rooms off the main corridor looked entirely ordinary. Chairs, desks, comps, everything in order. The attack had destroyed the surface structure but left the core intact.
Maybe there was symbolism in that, too, Aryn thought, and let herself hope.
When they reached the secondary surveillance room, they found it, too, entirely intact. The five monitoring stations each featured a chair, desk, and a computer, with a large vidscreen suspended from the wall above it. All of the screens were dark.
“Can you get some power in here, Tee-seven?” asked Aryn.
The droid beeped an affirmative, rolled over to a wall jack, and plugged in. In moments, the room came to life. The overhead lights brightened. Computers and the monitors hummed awake.
“I want to see whatever we’ve got of the attack. Can you find that?”
Again the droid beeped an affirmative.
Zeerid wheeled a chair over to Aryn. She sat, her heart racing, her breath coming fast. Zeerid put a hand on her shoulder, just for a moment, then pulled up another chair and sat beside her. They stared at the dark security monitor, waiting for T7 to show them horror.
The droid let out an excited series of whistles. He had located the footage. Aryn gripped the arms of the chair.
“Play it,” she said.
A single glowing line formed on the monitor and expanded up and down until it filled the screen. Images formed on it. The main security cam had a view opposite the main doors of the Temple, so it could record those coming in or leaving.
Aryn’s mouth was dry. She was afraid to blink for fear of missing something, though that was ridiculous since T7 could freeze, replay, and even magnify any image on the screen.
They watched as a cloaked figure and a Twi’lek woman armed with blasters walked through the Temple’s enormous doors.
“Does the Temple post guards?” Zeerid asked.
Aryn nodded.
Neither of them needed to say what must have happened to the guards.
As the pair walked brazenly down the entry hallway, the cam showed people gathering on the balconies above, looking down.
“They didn’t know what to make of him,” Zeerid said.
Aryn nodded.
“He is big,” Zeerid said.
“Freeze on his face and magnify,” Aryn said to T7.
The image froze, centered on the man’s hooded face, and magnified. She could make out nothing in the shadowed depths of his cowl except what looked to be the bottom of a mask of some kind.
“Is that a mask?” Zeerid asked.
“I don’t know. The Twi’lek, Tee-seven,” she said, and T7 pulled the image back, recentered on the Twi’lek, and did the same.
The Twi’lek’s face filled the screen.
“Skin color is unusual,” Zeerid said. He leaned forward in his chair, peering intently.
She was beautiful, Aryn allowed.
And she was a murderer. Or at least associated with one.
“See the scar,” Zeerid said. He stood and pointed a finger at the screen, at the Twi’lek’s throat. There, a jagged scar cut an irregular path across her neck. “Between that and her skin, maybe we can identify her?”
“Maybe,” Aryn said, and tried to swallow. She was less interested in the Twi’lek than she was in the hooded figure. “Continue, Tee-seven.”
They watched as the two strode halfway down the hall. Aryn’s breath caught when she watched Master Zallow emerge from off cam to confront the Sith and the Twi’lek. Six other Jedi Knights accompanied him.
“Freeze, Tee-seven.”
The frame stopped, and Aryn studied Master Zallow’s face. He looked as he always had—stern, focused. Seeing him somehow freed her to grieve with something other than tears. She recalled some of their training sessions, how he had at first insisted that she fight with his style, but had later relented and allowed her to find her own path. The memory made her smile, and cry.
“Are you all right?” Zeerid asked.
She nodded, wiped away the tears with the sleeve of her robe. “Tee-seven, let me see the faces on the other Jedi.”
T7 flipped through a variety of footage from recorders at different angles until it finally captured the faces of the other Jedi. Aryn recognized each of them, though she did not know them well. Still, she recited their names. She figured she owed them at least that.
“Bynin, Ceras, Okean, Draerd, Kursil, Kalla.”
“Friends?” Zeerid asked, his voice soft.
“No,” Aryn said. “But they were Jedi.”
“It’s not possible that this Sith and Twi’lek took down those Jedi and the Temple alone,” Zeerid said, though he sounded uncertain. “Is it?”
Aryn did not know. “Continue, Tee-seven.”
The footage started again. Master Zallow went face-to-face with the Sith. The other Jedi ignited their blades. Aryn stared at Master Zallow and the Sith warrior, seeing if they exchanged words, gestures, anything. They didn’t, at least as far as she could see.
“Stang,” Zeerid breathed.
“What?” Aryn said. “Freeze it, Tee-seven. What is it?”
The image froze. She saw nothing unusual happening between Master Zallow and the Sith.
“There,” Zeerid said. He bounced out of his seat again and pointed at something beyond the Temple’s tall entrance, something in the sky. Aryn did not see it.
“What is it?”
“A ship,” Zeerid said. “Here. See it?”
Aryn stood and squinted at the screen. She did see it, though it was hard to distinguish against the sky through the slit of the Temple’s floor-to-ceiling open doors.
“Note the silhouette,” Zeerid said. “That’s an NR-two gully jumper, a Republic ship. Like the kind I used to fly. See it?”
Aryn did, but she did not understand its significance.
“Magnify, Tee-seven,” said Zeerid, and the droid complied. The ship came into clear view.
“No markings,” Zeerid said. “But look at its nose, its trajectory. It’s coming down, right at the Temple.”
“You sure?”
“It doesn’t look damaged,” Zeerid said thoughtfully. “Back out to normal magnification and play it, Tee-seven.”
They watched in awed silence as the gulley jumper crashed through the Temple’s entrance, tore through the hall, collapsing columns as it went, a rolling mass of metal and flame, until it stopped right behind the Sith facing Master Zallow.
Neither the Sith nor Master Zallow had moved.
“Mid-section is still intact,” Zeerid said, “It must have been reinforced.” He looked over to Aryn. “There’s something in it. A bomb, maybe.”
“Not a bomb,” Aryn said, beginning to understand.
They watched as a large hatch on the center compartment of the NR2 exploded outward and dozens of Sith warriors poured out, glowing red blades in hand.
Zeerid sat back in his chair. “Worse than a bomb.”
Master Zallow ignited his blade, and many more Jedi rushed in from off cam to reinforce him. Aryn watched it all, her eyes fixed on the Sith. As the battle began, he discarded his cloak, showing his face at last.
“Freeze it,” she said, and T7 did. Her voice was cold. “Magnify his face.”
The image centered and grew to show the Sith. A bald head lined with blue veins, the scarred face, the intense eyes, and not a mask but a respirator.
“That’s the same man from the cruiser!” Zeerid said.
“Darth Malgus,” Aryn said, sudden tension forming at the base of her skull. “Darth Malgus led the attack.” She stared into Malgus’s dark eyes for a time, hardened herself for what she knew would be coming. “Continue it, Tee-seven.”
She watched the battle unfold, trying to keep her passions in check. She imagined she could feel the emotions of the combatants pouring through the vid. Her entire body was tense, coiled, as she watched.
The flow of battle separated Master Zallow and Malgus from the outset. Both fought their way through enemies, obviously seeking the other.
“That’s a Mandalorian,” Zeerid said.
Aryn nodded. A Mandalorian in full battle armor appeared amid the battle, flamethrowers spitting fire.
“That’s hotter than some war zones I’ve been in,” Zeerid said.
It was. Flames burned everywhere, piles of rubble littered the hall, blasterfire crisscrossed the battlefield, and everywhere Jedi fought Sith. It became difficult to track any individual actions. Everything bled into the anonymous chaos of battle. She kept her eyes locked on Master Zallow as he moved toward Malgus, and as Malgus moved toward him.
As they closed on each other, she saw Malgus save the Twi’lek woman from a Padawan’s attack, saw him respond with even greater anger when she was hit with blasterfire.
“I didn’t know Sith cared about anything,” Zeerid said.
She, too, found Malgus’s response surprising, but had little time to consider it because Malgus and Master Zallow at last met in battle.
She rose from her chair as the duel began to unfold, stepping closer to the monitor. She watched them trade flurries, each test the other’s skill. She watched Malgus throw his lightsaber, saw Master Zallow leap over it, saw Malgus knock him from the air in the midst of his leap and follow up with a leaping charge that Master Zallow avoided at the last minute.
Her heart was pounding. She kept hoping for something to intervene, to change the outcome she knew could not be changed. Barring that, she hoped to see a mistake from Master Zallow, or some treachery by Malgus, that would explain what she expected in moments—Master Zallow’s fall to Malgus.
They engaged on the far side of the hall, Master Zallow loosing a torrent of blows. Malgus fell back under the onslaught, but Aryn saw that he was drawing Master Zallow in.
And then it happened.
Master Zallow slammed the hilt of his lightsaber into the side of Malgus’s face, driving him back a step. He moved to follow up but Malgus anticipated it, spun, and drove his lightsaber through Master Zallow’s abdomen.
“That’s enough, Tee-seven,” Zeerid said. “We’ve seen enough.”
“We haven’t,” Aryn said. “Play it again, Tee-seven.”
The droid did.
“Again.”
“Again. He says something at the end. Close up on his mouth.”
T7 did as she asked. Master Zallow’s blow to Malgus’s face had knocked his respirator aside and Aryn could see the Sith’s scarred, deformed lips. He mouthed words to Master Zallow as Master Zallow died. Aryn read his lips, whispered the words.
“It’s all going to burn.”
She found that she was holding her side as she watched, as if it were she that had been impaled on a Sith blade. She relived the pain she’d felt on Alderaan when she’d felt Master Zallow die. And overlaying all of it: anger.
And now she had a focus for that anger—Darth Malgus.
“Again, Tee-seven.”
“Aryn,” Zeerid said.
“Again.”
“Not again, Tee-seven.” Zeerid turned around so that they were facing each other. “What are you doing? What more do you need to see?”
“I’m not seeing it. I’m feeling it. Leave me alone, Zeerid.”
He must have understood, for he released her and she turned back to the monitor.
“Magnify Master Zallow’s face and play it again, Tee-Seven.”
She watched his expression as he died over and over. His eyes haunted her, but she could not look away. Each time, before the light went out of them, she saw in his eyes what he was thinking the moment he died:
I failed.
And then Malgus’s words. “It’s all going to burn.”
Whatever walls she had built around her pain collapsed as thoroughly as the Temple. Her eyes welled and tears poured freely down her face. Yet still she watched. She wanted to remember her Master’s pain, tuck it away and hold it inside of her, a dark seed to yield dark fruit when she finally faced Malgus.
Before she killed Malgus, she desperately wanted him to feel the same kind of pain Master Zallow had felt.
A gentle touch on her shoulder—Zeerid—brought her around. The monitor screen was blank. How long had she been sitting there, staring at a blank screen, imagining death and revenge and pain?
“Time to go, Aryn,” Zeerid said, and helped steer her from the room.
T7 whistled sympathy.
“Are you all right?” Zeerid asked.
She knew how she must look. Using the sleeve of her tunic, she wiped the tears from her face.
“I’m all right,” she said.
He looked as if he wanted to embrace her, but she knew he would not take the liberty without her giving him a sign that it was all right.
She gave him no such sign. She did not want relief from her grief, her pain. She simply wanted to pass it on to Malgus somehow.
“Keep a copy of that footage, Tee-seven,” she said. “Bring it with you.”
The droid beeped an affirmative.
They walked back through the Works and to the surface in silence. By the time they returned to their speeder, Aryn had rebuilt the walls around her emotions. She managed the grief, endured the pain, but put it within reach, so she could call on it when she needed it.
She and Zeerid lifted T7 onto the droid mount at the rear of the speeder.
“I need to get up to that cruiser,” she said.
Zeerid activated the magnetic clamp to hold T7 in place. “You can’t attack a cruiser, Aryn.”
“I don’t want to attack it. I just want to get aboard it.”
“And face him. Darth Malgus.”
“And face him,” she affirmed with a nod.
“And how do you think that plays out if you get aboard? Are you just going to walk through all those Imperial troops? Think he’ll just let you through and meet you in honorable combat?”
She did not like Zeerid’s tone. “I’ll bring the cruiser down. With him on it.”
“And you on it.”
She stuck out her chin. “If that’s what it takes.”
He slapped a hand in frustration on T7’s body. The droid beeped in irritation.
“Aryn, you’ve been watching the HoloNet too much. It won’t work like that. You’ll get captured, tortured, killed. He’s a Sith. They flew a ship into the Temple, killed dozens of Jedi, bombed Coruscant. Come on. Think!”
“I have. And I have to do this.”
He must have seen the resolve in her eyes. He swallowed, looked past her, as if gathering his thoughts, then back at her.
“You said you would help me get offplanet.”
“I know,” she said.
“I can’t follow you to the cruiser. I have a daughter, Aryn. I just want to get off the planet and get back to her before The Exchange or anyone else gets to her.”
The heat went out of her in a rush. “You’ve done more than enough, Zeerid. I wouldn’t let you come even if you volunteered.”
They both stared at each other a long time, something unsaid hanging in the air between them. T7’s head rotated from Zeerid to Aryn and back to Zeerid.
“You don’t need to face him,” he said to her.
Grime from the Works stained Zeerid’s coat and trousers. Lack of sleep had painted circles under his brown eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days and black stubble coated his cheeks. His appearance once more struck Aryn as that of a mad prophet, though it seemed she was the one acting out of madness.
“Yes, I do,” she said.
She reached out a hand and wiped away some dirt on his cheek. At first he looked startled at her touch, then looked as if he wanted to say something, but did not.
“We go our separate ways here, Z-man,” she said. She sensed his alarm at the thought. “You keep the speeder and T7. I’ll figure something else out. Good-bye, Zeerid.”
T7 uttered a doleful whistle as she walked away. Zeerid’s words pulled her back around, just as hers had pulled him back around earlier in the day.
“Let me help you, Aryn. I’m not going at that cruiser, but I can help you get aboard.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you stow away on an Imperial transport heading for it.” He pointed at a distant black form moving across the afternoon sky. “They come and go regularly and always to the same spaceport. And I know that spaceport. I’ve parked Fatman there myself a few times. I’ll figure out a way to get you aboard a transport while I find a ship to get me offplanet. So no good-byes yet. I still need your help and you still need mine. Good enough?”
Aryn did not have to consider long. She could use Zeerid’s help, and she wanted to keep his company for as long as possible.
“Good enough,” she said.
“And who knows?” he said as she climbed into the speeder. “Maybe you’ll come to your senses in the meantime.”