Because he can.

The arrogance!

They started down the hallway again. It was empty, and they hurried to the bank of turbolifts and jumped inside. Ferus's heartbeat quickened. At last he would discover if any Jedi remained alive.

CHAPTER FOUR.

The turbolift worked smoothly. It was a piece of luck. It descended all the way down to the storage floor and opened. Ferus was prepared, his lightsaber at the ready, for whatever would lie on the other side of the door. But it opened onto an empty hallway.

He took a cautious step forward. Not only empty, but... dusty.

He listened for sound, for movement. He brought the Force to him and sent it out. True, his Force sense was still rusty at times, but he received nothing. Surely if this were a prison, he would pick up echoes of the Living Force, no matter how faint. Especially from Jedi.

"You look worried," Trever whispered. "And when you worry, I worry."

"I don't feel anything," Ferus said.

"Is that all?"

"For a Jedi, that's everything."

They moved forward cautiously. Ferus wasn't as familiar with this area as he was with others. They were on the very lowest levels of the Temple now. All Padawans were required to take an extensive tour of the Temple, from top to bottom, and become familiar with the layout, but Ferus had only visited the storage areas infrequently.

Luckily it was a standard layout, just parallel hallways leading to storage rooms of varying sizes. They walked down, peering into one after the other.

Empty.

Empty except for scattered bins, random items stored here and not raided because they weren't valuable - towels, tarps. Soap. Glow rods and servodrivers. Blankets.

"I guess the Empire found the treasure," Trever said. "But maybe they overlooked something? Anything down here?"

"What treasure?" Ferus asked.

"The treasure the Jedi had," Trever said. "You know the Order was rich. All those payments from worlds they protected.."

Ferus was furious. "That was a lie told by the Emperor. The Jedi never took payment for their services. Palpatine was trying to turn the galaxy against the Jedi to justify his crimes. And now you're repeating the lies!"

"Hey, Ferus, power down. How was I supposed to know it was a lie? Everyone said it."

"Everyone says the Emperor is on your side, too."

"Excellent point."

In many ways, this was the worst fallout from Order 66, the one that had destroyed the Jedi. History had been rewritten. Palpatine's lies had changed how the galaxy thought of the Jedi. Their lives of service had become bids for power. Their selflessness had become greed.

"I'm sorry," Trever said, looking at the expression on his face. "I hear the word 'treasure' and I start to salivate heavily. You know me...." He tried to smile, but his eyes were worried. "You forget I'm a thief."

"Not anymore," Ferus said. The moment of anger pa.s.sed. He looked around. "I don't understand. This is the logical place for the prison. And the word on the street is that the Jedi are down deep in the Temple storerooms."

"Is there anywhere else they could be keeping them?"

Ferus shook his head. "Anything is possible, but..." He stopped. Just as they pa.s.sed the largest storeroom, he thought he'd caught a glint of a reflection. Cautiously, he walked forward. There was no Living Force here. But there was... something.

He raised his glow rod.

It took him a moment to make sense of the piles, the jumble of objects. Rows and rows and rows disappearing in the dusky light at the corners of the vast s.p.a.ce.

Lightsabers.

Ferus felt his breath catch and his heart stop. He could not move.

Trever, sensing his emotion, drew back. In a rare display of tact, he said nothing.

Ferus moved forward. His boot hit a lightsaber hilt, and he flinched. He leaned over to pick it up. He ran his fingers along the hilt. He didn't recognize it. He put it carefully back down.

Row after row after row... jumbles and piles, some laid out neatly, no doubt for identification. "How many?" he whispered.

He leaned over to pick up a hilt here, another there.

Here was the proof. The Empire must have collected the lightsabers when they could, but for what purpose, he wasn't sure. To identify Jedi, perhaps. But who would be able to recognize the hilts but another Jedi? Or perhaps they meant to study the lightsabers in order to be able to use them as weapons one day.

After all, Obi-Wan had told him that Emperor Palpatine was a Sith. Darth Vader was his apprentice. Did they want to build a Sith army?

But what did it matter? There was a pounding inside him, metal against rock. Something fierce and elemental. Grief was pounding him.

This is how it worked, he realized. Each time you think you have comprehension of your sorrow, you get blindsided again. You slide back into your rage and your disbelief "All of them," he said, walking on. "So many." And each one represented a n.o.ble life, gone. And then he saw what he dreaded - the lightsaber of someone he loved.

He picked it up. He knew it well. He had even tried to fix it. Little had he known then that a favor for a friend would end up being the beginning of the end of his career as a Jedi.

Tru Veld had been his friend. Tru had been everyone's friend: His silver eyes, his gentleness, the way he would start a conversation in the middle and circle around to the beginning. The way he had been the one to see past Ferus's stiff manner into his heart.

He didn't know what to do with the lightsaber. He couldn't bear to leave it. But, gazing around, Ferus realized that Tru would want it to lie with the others. He placed it gently back down.

Some stormtrooper, some officer, some featureless clone, some brutal weapon, from the air or the ground, had cut down the br.i.m.m.i.n.g life and generous heart of Tru Veld. To the Empire he had been just another score, another Jedi down. Another step toward their goal. To Ferus, he had been full of complexities and ideas and hopes and pa.s.sions and will. He'd been unique and fully alive. The fact that he was gone - here it was again, that feeling of something being too real, and yet impossible at the same time.

"Ferus," Trever said urgently. "I hear something."

And he should have heard it, too, if the roar of sorrow hadn't been in his ears.

A squad of stormtroopers, by the sound of it.

He whirled around, his gaze searching for what he should have known was there.

"A silent alarm," he said.

He knew the way they worked, the Imperials. He'd fought them for months on Bella.s.sa. He should have known this.

"They spread the rumors," he said. "They want everyone to think this is a Jedi prison. They know that any Jedi left alive will come." He turned back to Trever. "Now I understand. This isn't a prison. It's a trap."

CHAPTER FIVE.

There had to be another way out. There always was, even in storage areas like this one. Ferus knew that the Temple had been designed with an eye toward utility as well as beauty. Energy must be conserved, even physical energy. This s.p.a.ce was too vast to have only one way to unload cargo.

"Follow me," he whispered to Trever. Instead of leaving by the front door, they ran down the aisle, past the lightsabers, past the memories and the sorrow, to the very back of the room. There he found what he was looking for - an entrance to the service tunnels. This should lead them back to the hallway.

First problem: The tunnel was sealed with a door, and the old control panel didn't work.

Silently and swiftly, Ferus sliced through the door with his lightsaber. It would leave evidence of their presence, but it was too late to do anything else. He could hear the squad now at the very front of the room. Any moment now they would be discovered.

Trever didn't need an invitation. He bolted through the hole Ferus had created. Ferus followed and they ran down the service tunnel. As he ran, Ferus calculated where the tunnel was taking them. It made a sharp right turn, and he knew that they were now running parallel to the second service hallway.

"If we can get out somewhere along here, we can make it to the turbolift," he told Trever.

"And go where'?"

"Well, anywhere but here is an option."

Ferus saw a control panel up ahead and, faintly, the outline of a door. He tried the control panel and this time it worked. The door slid open. Good. This way, once the stormtroopers entered the service tunnel, they wouldn't be able to pinpoint where Ferus and Trever had left it. It slid shut behind them.

They were in another storage room, which Ferus had expected. This one was filled with empty shelves. As they ran toward the door, Ferus suddenly stopped.

"Ferus, come on!"

He bent down and ran his finger along the shelf. "Look. They left marks."

"What left marks?"

"The bins. This was a food storage area." He sniffed. "You can still smell the dried herbs." There's one for you, Siri. You knew it would come in handy.

"Fascinating. Now can we continue escaping?"

Ferus was thinking fast, remembering. "Dry food storage had a separate delivery system. If the cooks ran out of anything, they could plug in what they needed on tech screens in the kitchen and the information would be transferred down here. Droids would monitor the readouts, find the items, and carry them to vertical lifts. The lifts run on compressed air. They would shoot the cans up to the food halls, where they'd be held in a temporary zero-gravity immersion - in other words, in midair. The lifts are small, but we might be able to squeeze in - that is, if the compressed air system still works." While he spoke, Ferus was quickly checking the control panel.

"You mean you're going to blast me up on thin air?" Trever didn't seem sure of that.

"You'll have the ride of your life."

"Can I remind you that I'm not a can of beans?"

"We're in luck. It still works."

"Hey, what happens if the zero-gravity part doesn't work?"

"Look for a handhold on your way down. Trever, it's the only way to escape the stormtroopers. They'll never figure it out."

"This just keeps getting better and better," Trever groaned. But he squeezed himself into the small vertical lift, tucking his knees under his chin. "By the way, have you given any thought to how we're going to get out of the Temple?"

"I'm thinking."

"That doesn't sound very promising."

"I don't make promises. Only plans."

"It's a pleasure doing business with you, Ferus."

"One last thing - if I can't make it, try to make it to the landing platform and steal a ship. Meet me back at the asteroid."

He shut the door on Trever's incredulous look. The whoosh of air told him that the transport had succeeded.

Ferus crossed to the next lift tube. He flattened himself and twisted, but he could not fit himself into the opening. He slammed his head and b.u.mped his elbow as he tried to jam himself in.

Wait, Ferus.

He focused on remembering.

Siri bent down to help him. He had fallen during a routine hike, just because he hadn't been paying attention. Fallen from a boulder, straight down, and hit the dirt.

First her expert hands made sure he was all right. Then she leaned back on her heels, balancing expertly despite the fact that they'd been hiking for six hours in rugged terrain.

"When you felt yourself falling, why didn't you use the Force?"

Because he was only fourteen, and it didn't come as easily to him. But Ferus didn't want to tell his Master that. "There wasn't time."

"There's always enough time for a Jedi," Sin said. "The point is, the Force is always around you."

Ferus struggled to sit up. He was growing fast, and his legs and arms always seemed to get tangled up underneath him. That's why he had fallen.

"Our bodies aren't just bone and muscle," Siri said. "They're also liquid. And air. And the ground isn't as hard as it looks."

Ferus seemed to feel every bruise. "So you say."

She sprang to her feet, reached out a hand, and hauled him up, laughing. "You make everything harder than it has to be, Ferus. Even dirt."

Ferus felt his body relax. The Force moved through him, and his muscles suddenly felt fluid. He bent and twisted easily and fit into the small s.p.a.ce. Then he closed the compartment door and flew upward on a rush of air, so fast that he felt dizzy.

The compartment door opened as he felt himself held up on the zero-gravity field. He pushed himself out and landed on his feet on the floor of the vast Temple kitchen, capable of feeding hundreds of Jedi. Trever was waiting.