At I-Five's nod. Den said, "Well, let me just show you what's up ahead here-a marvelous place for the kiddies to play."

They picked up their pace, Den casting furtive glances over his shoulder. Still no followers.

They emerged into the plaza, and Den trotted to the center to turn in place, arms wide. "You sec? Just as I said, room for your children to play-though I wouldn't recommend they be left unmonitored. A number of the units look out on the plaza, of course, and..."

He cut off as his eyes caught on a reflected image in one of the tall, narrow windows. There was an Inquisitor standing in the shadow of an overhanging eave in the building facing their own. He was looking right at them.

Den's stomach abruptly felt like someone had just flicked the on/off switch for Coruscant's gravity.

"Yes, yes, but have you anything on the third level? Something with a window that looks out on this court?"

Den spun to look at the droid. wondering if those omniscient photoreceptors had finally missed something. But then, his hands steepled before him, I-Five made a minute gesture.

"It's your lucky day, friend," said Den. "I have an empty unit on the third floor of this building that just came open. The previous lessees were an odd bunchsecretive, peculiar. One might almost be tempted to suspect criminal behavior." He bustled toward their building as he spoke.

Inside the building it was all Den could do not to race to the lift and throw himself in. Once out of the lift on the third floor, he continued to fight the urge to run, but rather kept prattling about this or that lovely feature of this well-built structure.

At the front door of the conapt, he glanced up at l-Five. If he gave his usual verbal pa.s.s code to enter, and an Inquisitor overheard it. ..

The droid pulled aside the sleeve of his robe to display the gleaming tip of one index finger. He would use his laser on lowest power to beam the code into the house computer.

Weak with relief. Den turned to the door and said, "Hatto Rondin," a name he made up on the fly. The door slid open and Den turned to his "client" and bowed. "After you."

Five nodded and entered. Den following. They'd no more cleared the door when Jax appeared, his gaze flicking from Den to the apparent Koorivar.

"Den? Who is . . ." He stared hard at the droid. "I-Five?"

"Gotta love that Force," Den murmured.

"Why are you in dis..." Jax started, then apparently changed his mind. "It doesn't matter. Come on. we need to get Kaj out of here and over to Ves Volette's studio now."

"Yes, it does matter," said I-Five, with unbelievably irritating calm. "There is an Inquisitor in the courtyard."

Jax's looked shocked. "I didn't . . . ," he murmured, then clearly did. "The taozin effect. And I wasn't looking for it."

"Something happened with Kaj, I take it?" I-Five asked.

Jax nodded. "He had an episode. Almost a seizure. He was lonely and angry, and i: got to be too much for him. I was wondering if anyone picked it up. I guess I've got my answer."

He turned and moved to the window. Thick and narrow. the panel of transparisteel ran the entire height of the resiblock, intersecting every floor. Den and I-Five followed to look down into the courtyard. The Inquisitor was nowhere in sight.

Which, of course, meant nothing.

"Okay," Jax said. "Rhinann's got an airspeeder waiting for us on level seven. We're going to have to make a run for it. Get Kaj into the speeder and..."

"That won't be necessary," said I-Five. "Den and I played the roles of an agent and his client to our unsuspecting audience. I'm supposedly thinking of leasing this overpriced pile of ferrocrete. If our friend the Inquisitor stays in the courtyard, he will be expecting us to leave at some point. This could work to our advantage."

Den nodded. "I get it. We can provide a distraction while we take Kaj up to the docking station, or..."

"Or," said Jax. "we can take Kaj out right under his nose." He turned to their de facto logistics officer. "Rhinann, did the speeder come with a driver?"

"Yes. A protocol droid."

"What model?" asked I-Five.

"It's a threepio."

"That'll do."

"That'll do what?" asked Den. He felt as if bolts of blasterfire were zooming back and forth over his heada scenario that he had no trouble believing would be reality shortly.

Jax's eyes were alight with something unhealthily close to excitement. He turned to Rhinann. "In about ten minutes, have the driver bring the airspeeder down to the front door."

Rhinann gaped. "Land it in the courtyard? In plain sight?"

"Exactly. Instruct him to come up to this conapt. He'll be taking our property agent and his client off to sign some papers."

Rhinann disappeared back into his lair. Jax was in motion again, this time heading for his quarters. He beckoned I-Five and Den to follow.

"I can explain..." he said to Den, but the Sull.u.s.tan interrupted.

"I'm sure you can," he said. "What scares me is that the explanations are starring to make sense to me. Even when I'm sober," he added, "which I devoutly wish I wasn't at this point."

"Be as that may," Jax said, "you and I-Five are going to take our Koorivar friend to your office to sign lease papers."

"I may have found a basic flaw in your ingenious scheme-namely, that I-Five is our Koorivar friend."

"Not for long."

The scariest thing about the whole maneuver was waking Kaj. Jax did this with his own Force threads tightly held, ready to shield any anomalies. As an added, though possibly useless precaution, they carried the boy into the living room and placed him on a couch so that the light sculpture lay between him and the forecourt of Poloda Place. If the Inquisitor was still there and if the cloaking effect worked at that distance and if Jax didn't have to resort to extreme measures to calm Kaj, they just might get him out without being detected.

As easy as navigating an asteroid field ...

Chapter Thirteen.

Den felt as if an army of Inquisitors were stationed in the courtyard, just waiting to pounce on them. He kept his gaze on Kajin as they neared the external door and nearly jumped out of his skin when I-Five poked him in the back of the head.

"Showtime. Start your spiel."

"Uh, yeah." Den wiped his palms on the legs of his pants, cleared his unnaturally dry throat, and launched. "I'm pleased we were able to find a property that fit your exacting needs. My office will have the legal work drawn up by the time we get there."

The faux Koorivar nodded eagerly and parted his hands together. "Excellent!" he said. "And how soon can I move my family in?"

The voice was l-Five's, thrown expertly from the droid's voice generator via tightband hypersonic beam, so that it seemed to be coming from the disguised Kaj, who had awakened by now and been pressed into service as part of their scheme.

"Oh, ah ... well, pending a check of your funding, we should be able to have you in sometime tomorrow."

"Very good. I'm pleased to do business with you."

They had reached the airspeeder by then, and I-Five opened the doors for his pa.s.sengers to embark-Kaj first, then Den. He had closed the doors and gotten into the driver's seat when Den saw the Inquisitor. He was standing in the shadows of the building across the way, approximately where they'd seen him before.

Kaj stiffened, and Den knew he'd seen it, too.

"Kick it, Five," he murmured. Then to Kaj, "It's okay, kid. We'll be out of here in a flash. Just sit tight."

But Kaj wasn't sitting tight. He had reached up and was trying to undo the seals on the back of his skinsuit's headpiece. Den put his own hands up to keep him from succeeding.

"Kaj! Just calm down. If you're calm, he won't..."

"I can't fight like this!" Kaj panted. "I have to get-this-off!!"

The speeder lifted. Simultaneously, the Inquisitor came out of the shadows, his step halting, uncertain. Den suspected he was sensing something but wasn't sure what it was.

The Inquisitor raised his hand, hesitated, reached again toward the rising airspeeder, and froze, his head swiveling away from them.

As the vehicle turned and soared upward toward the skylanes, Den watched the Inquisitor dash across the courtyard in the opposite direction, hurling himself into a Force leap that carried him up toward the resiblock's communal docking stations.

He was in hot pursuit of something, Den realized. Or someone...

Jax knew the ruse was in jeopardy when he felt Kaj's psychic gasp of terror. He didn't have to wonder what had caused it, but he knew that he had to act before Kaj did.

He bolted from the Conapt, frightening Dejah and sending Rhinann into conniptions of gloom. He went up; the turbolifts were too slow, so he literally flew up the emergency stairs, touching down on the landings only enough to change direction for the next leap.

On the fifth level, he reached out and called to the Inquisitor in the courtyard below, exuding a thin, sharp whiplash of the Force calculated to get the dark adept's attention. He got it all right. Jax felt the other's interest as a sharp tug on his tether.

He cut the thread and leapt away, heading up to the next level ... in the opposite direction from that which the airspeeder had taken. He let off two more short, sharp bursts of Force energy, then shut down and went literally to ground, taking a lift from the upper levels all the way down to the midlevels of Ploughtekal.

He waited there for some time, listening for other Force-users. When none materialized, he set off for Ves Volette's studio.

Kaj, sans disguise, sat cross-legged in the center of the studio regarding the light sculptures with hopeful eyes. I-Five moved the last of them into place-the last currently functional one at any rate-while Den cataloged how many dormant ones and component parts were left in the sprawling studio.

These were nice digs, no doubt about it. Besides the three-story studio with its overlooking gallery, there were four private bedrooms, a library/workroom, a living room, and a large kitchen. A real kitchen-not just a food prep area with the usual nanowave and conservator. Apparently Ves Volette or Dejah had liked to cook.

Den found himself hoping that Dejah was the cook. If they rekxated the entire team here ... He caught himself. He might not be around that much longer. Depending on the answer he got from Eyar, he might soon be taking off for Sull.u.s.t and leaving this dangerous, misbegotten. Inquisitor-infested hunk of real estate behind.

"Done with that inventory?" I-Five asked.

Den pulled himself forcibly out of his reverie and glanced down at the compad he'd been taking inventory-on. "Yeah. Think so. We've got three more sculptures in the far corner that seem to lack power modules. A fourth that's down a PM and a crystal, and component parts for maybe two more. I just don't know if the parts list is complete. I found a log record that indicates he kept a small supply of crystals and a few PMs here, but I haven't run across them yet."

I-Five's photoreceptors lit with surprise. "Pilfery?"

Den shrugged. "Or he hid them well. Those particular parts are pretty dear-both rare and expensive."

He threw a glance at the boy within his circle of light sculptures. The rainbow of illumination reared above him into the vault of the ceiling, restless, ever moving, casting light and shadow on everything in the room.

Den shivered, feeling as if he was looking at an a.n.a.log for their scary guest. Or maybe for the power he invoked. He tried to ignore the crawl of heat across his own face and asked, "Is it working? Can you tell?"

"No. We won't be able to tell until we have a Jedi here to tell us it's working."

"Or an Inquisitor to tell us it's not," muttered Den.

"Will a Gray Paladin do?"

Den spun and stared up at the durasteel gallery that ran the length of the studio, Laranth Tarak stood looking down at them, eddying light from the sculptures playing over her, making her seem to flicker like a candle flame. The radiance shone on the polished railings of the gallery as well, making it look as if she stood on a bridge made of strands of light.

Den was surprised by how glad he was to see her. She represented, he realized, things as they had been, as he had wanted them to be. Sure, she was raciturn and unsmiling and unyielding and uncommunicative. None of that mattered, because she was also unambiguous. Laranth, Jax, and I-Five were the three people Den Dhur felt most at home with. In a bad situation, these were the people he wanted at his side, at his back.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I was in the neighborhood. I sensed an anomaly in the Force."

Laranth left the gallery rail and descended, using the house grav-pad. Stepping off onto the studio floor, she sauntered over to them, her eyes on Kaj. The boy smiled a little nervously and waved at her. To Den's utter surprise, she waved back.

"Interesting," she said, gesturing to the light sculptures. "Wonder why we didn't sense this Force-canceling property in them before now."

"I think they have to be tuned to a specific harmonic," the droid said. "The pertinent question is, are they working?"

She turned her head to look at Kaj, tipping her head to one side. Her right lekku coiled slightly. Then she turned, picked up an electrospanner from a tray of tools, and rolled it between the two light sculpture stands closest to them. "Kaj-lift that."

The boy looked at the spanner. It bobbed up from the floor.

"Hold it there," Laranth told him. She walked the perimeter of the circle. After making a complete circuit, she had Kaj let go of the tool.

"A little gets through," she told I-Five. "But very little. Still, if he were to do something major in there, who knows what might leak out."

"It appears," I-Five said, "that we're going to have to do some adjusting."

Laranth's eyes widened. "Meddle with the art of a deceased master? Dejah's going to allow that? I'm amazed."

"Really, Laranth-sarcasm is so human an attribute."

Laranth ignored him. "Is Jax coming?"

"Jax is here, Good to see you again so soon, Laranth."

Den looked up to the gallery again. Jax was the creature of light and shadow this time as colors danced across his face and set his drab clothing metaphorically aflame. The Sull.u.s.tan felt a little more secure now that two Jedi were in the immediate vicinity. Not much, but a little.

In the aftermath of Kaj's hasty removal, Haninum Tyk Rhinann sat at his workstation feeling as if someone had immersed him in icy water. They had come that close - that close-to being discovered. Oh, he was sure that Pavan would deny this-if he ever returned from wherever he'd gone so precipitously. He would no doubt claim everything had been just fine, under control, and that there had never been any great danger of discovery. But in the proximity of that Inquisitor. Rhinann had felt the cold gaze of his erstwhile master.

He turned back to his workstation, desperately trying to herd his scattered neurons back into some semblance of order. He didn't have the bota. Perhaps he was no closer to knowing who did, though he strongly suspected the little Sull.u.s.tan. All that foot-dragging and naysaying was most likely just a smoke screen.