tion of burned rubble that had been blasted from the entrance. Something gleamed in the debris, and he stepped forward to see what it was.

Shock sent waves of jangling sensations up his body, and he had to still himself, force his mind to unclench and accept what he was seeing.

He used the Force to grasp the shiny bit of metal, pulling it out of the rubble, bringing it to his hand.

It was the twisted, melted hilt of a lightsaber, its body scorched almost beyond recognition.

Almost.

In practice duels at the Temple, two Padawans traditionally exchanged salutes prior to their match, raising their lightsaber hilts to their foreheads before igniting the energy coils. Obi-Wan had noted more than once the carefully wound wire grip on Darsha's weapon, a unique design.

The same design he was looking at now.

The Force confirmed it, as if there were any doubt. Darsha Assant was dead.

Obi-Wan Kenobi stood quietly, looking at the hilt in his hand.

There is no emotion; there is peace.

How he wished it were so.

Chapter 33

Lorn stared up at the brightest light he had ever seen.

He felt… brittle, as though he might crack into countless pieces if he tried to move. There was a strange ringing in his ears, an odd smell in his nostrils. His eyes refused to focus. Everything seemed dreamlike. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.

Abruptly the light-which he now realized was the sun-was blotted out by a familiar face.

"Good-you're awake. How do you feel?"

Lorn moved his jaw experimentally, found that he could speak without too much difficulty. "Like a battle dog's chew-toy." He sat up, his vision still blurred, a multitude of aches trying to drag him down. "What happened?"

I-Five didn't reply for a moment. "You don't remember our recent… situation?"

Lorn looked around him. He and the droid were on a small setback roof about halfway up the side of a building. The last thing he remembered…

He turned and looked in another direction. Perhaps fifty meters away was the building they had been trapped in by the Sith. He remembered Darsha opening the door, remembered seeing the Sith framed in the doorway-but nothing more than that. He said as much to I-Five.

The droid nodded. "Loss of short-term memory. Not surprising, given the trauma of recent events and the carbon- freezing." He helped Lorn to his feet. "Can you walk?"

Lorn tested his balance. "I think so."

"Good. The authorities will no doubt be here soon, but with any luck Tuden Sal will arrive before they do."

Tuden Sal. For some reason the name triggered more flashes of memory. "You froze us in carbonite."

I-Five nodded. "The waste-treatment chamber we were in was set up to contain volatile materials for transport. It was simply a matter of readjusting the parameters for-"

It hit him then, like a stun grenade at close range. "Darsha!"

The sunlight, so much brighter than he was accustomed to, faded momentarily back to the grayness of downlevels. I- Five's mechanical hand gripped his upper arm, steadying him.

Darsha, the Jedi Padawan, the woman with whom he'd shared the last tumultuous forty-eight hours- the woman who'd come to mean, in that short and

I intense time, more to him than anyone except Jax and I- Five-Darsha was dead.

No. It couldn't be. The droid and he had managed to cheat certain death; surely there had been some way that she, too, might have.

He looked desperately at I-Five. Saw that the droid knew what was going through his head. And read, somehow, in the other's metallic, expressionless face, the truth.

They had escaped because she had bought them time-had bought it with her own heart's blood.

That part came back, too. She was.. gone.

"What happened?" he asked dully.

"She managed to stack some of the flammable containers together during her battle and ignited them as she was struck down."

Struck down.

Lorn was quiet as they made their way to the roof's edge.

"Why aren't we dead?"

"Carbonite is extremely dense. It survived the explosion, and since we were encysted within it, so did we. There was a process timer, which I set to thaw us after a half hour. Then I thought it prudent for us to relocate."

Lorn nodded slowly. "What about the Sith? Did he survive, or did he die with-" He could not bring himself to finish the sentence.

"Unknown. If he did survive-which, were we dealing with anyone else, I would deem extremely unlikely-then in all probability he thinks we're dead. The carbon-freezing lowered all biological and electronic processes to a level far too faint for even a master of the Force to detect."

Lorn stretched his arms and twisted cautiously from side to side. Other than a major headache, he seemed to be experiencing no adverse effects. All in all, he'd had hangovers that were worse.

A pinging sound came from I-Five's midsection. "That would be our ride," the droid said, pulling the comlink out of his torso compartment and activating it. He confirmed their location and toggled it off.

Within seconds a large black skycar with a canopied roof and dark windows dropped toward them, its side doors opening when it reached their level. Lorn looked in and saw that Tuden Sal himself had come to pick them up.

"I'm wondering what you two have gotten yourselves involved in this time," Sal said as the chauf-feured skycar lifted away from the scene. He glanced out the tinted window at the destruction below. "But given what I see down there, I'm not sure I want to know."

"A wise decision," I-Five said, as he leaned over to look out the side window. "The less you know, the less they can indict you for."

The skycar was drifting higher, heading toward a traffic lane that would take them to Eastport, where one of Sal's restaurants was located. I-Five tapped Lorn on the arm and pointed out the side window.

"You may not want to see this," he said.

Lorn looked out the window and saw a tiny figure in black striding along one of the elevated walkways below. He felt his insides ice over as if he'd been plunged once more into carbonite. He got only a glimpse of the figure, who was pretty far away, but it looked like…