✶ Time Period: +1 month after the Battle of Geonosis ✶

chapter 1

"Again."

Kan Enik wiped the sweat from his eyes and forced his tired legs to turn him around and run. Up ahead there was a thin durasteel beam suspended over a towering heap of garbage. He made a running leap for the beam, calling on the Force to assist his ascent.

His control over the Force had been growing lately; he could tell. It was easier to access it than it had been less than a month ago.

Kan's feet thudded satisfactorily on the beam as he landed. Using the momentum to power his next leap, he double-flipped into the air and activated his lightsaber.

WHACK!

Suddenly Kan lost his control. His arms and legs flailed out helplessly as he flew through the air and landed, sprawling awkwardly on something soft and unpleasantly slimy.

It was also smelly.

A young woman in a black tunic was sitting on the beam above him, nonchalantly swinging her long, powerful legs as she casually deactivated her training lightsaber.

"Again."

Though he had greatly improved in the past month, his connection to the Force was till apparently not enough. Frustrated, Kan rose and kicked at the rotten heap. The trash beneath him lurched, knocking him off balance and sending him headfirst into the waste. "Yuck!" he shouted, spitting out a mouthful of an old piece of A'Jula fruit.

"Get up and try again," the girl said.

He sat back on his heels, shaking the foul-smelling debris from his stained tunic. A droplet of water splashed on his nose, and he angrily brushed it away. The blackish-gray sky had been threatening rain all day, and he had hoped that he would get back to his quarters before he got soaked on top of everything else.

But from the looks of it, it looked like he was going to be outside in the storm for a while.

Well, he thought wryly, getting wet can't be any worse than being as smelly and dirty as I am now.

The girl slowly swung one leg over the beam and leaped down to him, landing neatly on top of a discarded astromech hull. She watched him expressionlessly as he picked himself up and hastily smoothed down the front of his tunic with quick, angry jerks.

"Well," she said after some time, "are you going to try again or give up?"

He looked at her dismally. "How did you do that? I didn't even feel your lightsaber hit me."

She didn't answer his question. She just said, "You have to keep your mind open to expectation if you don't want to be taken by surprise. Try it again."

Kan sighed. His Master was a challenging person to be trained by. His Apprenticeship with her had started less than a month ago, and already, his muscles ached with the huge amount of tedious exercises that his Master employed him with.

Adriaan ell Talaan was the youngest Knight in the Jedi Order. In fact, she was only a few years older than Kan, but her brilliant mind and incredible lightsaber skills far outshone Masters who were decades more experienced than her. She believed strongly in lots of rigorous exercises that put both the mind and the body to work.

Yesterday, she had kept Kan busy for hours working on basic moves, moves he had learned years ago. According to her, he had fallen out of practice and was letting his mind wander during battles. Adriaan had drilled into him, making him swing and swing again until his arms gave out with exhaustion. Even though he usually started training a few hours after dawn, all too often Adriaan kept him working until way past midnight.

Kan had thought that the lessons were over for the next few days at least, but it was not so with Adriaan. He was roughly awakened before dawn by his Master, who threw a few protein pellets at him and strode away, without a word of explanation to him, out of his room. Kan still couldn't figure out how she had bypassed his security code to get in ––– he had designed it himself and believed it to be foolproof. Well, either he was a horrible technician, or she was a con artist. He preferred to believe the latter because personally he thought that he was still pretty sharp with machines.

He had followed her out the door, and she had led him to a speeder. Climbing in after her, he was zoomed down to the underlevels of Coruscant. On the way, she had spoken a few words to him, saying, "We're going to work on your focus today."

Now Adriaan crouched down next to him, her keen blue eyes studying him. She was an average height for a human female, and her body was long, athletic, and lean. A slight breeze gently ruffled her long hair, which she had coiled into a rope that hung down her back like a shimmering golden laserwhip. Her mouth quirked at the corners in a faint smile.

"Clear your mind," she said. "It's absolutely impossible to achieve open, alert senses if your thoughts are muddled. Organize them. Don't focus on what will come next, or on what you have left behind; the time will come, or it has already come. Focus on the present moment, and your actions will come of themselves. Then you will be able to react to things with the speed of a true Jedi Knight."

He nodded slowly and began to stand. "But what if I –––"

Suddenly, the silence was shattered by the shrill ringing of Adriaan's comlink.

Before he even had a chance to blink, Adriaan had already whipped out her communications unit and flipped on the transmission. Kan watched as her eyes traveled over the message, her face registering no emotion.

Then, with the ease of long practice, she slid her comlink back into her utility belt and stood up simultaneously. Without pausing, she leaped with an easy grace off of her precariously balanced footing and landed on stable ground with a catlike quality. Not even bothering to look over her shoulder to see if he was coming, she swiftly strode toward the speeder she had parked only a short few meters away.

Obviously, lessons were over. Kan hurried to keep pace with his Master. "Where are we going?"

She vaulted into the pilot seat and gunned the engines. Kan sprinted the last two meters and leaped in after her, puffing from his exertion. He couldn't trust her to wait for him to get in. Last time he wasn't in the speeder before her, she had taken off, leaving him practically stranded several hundred meters below the Jedi Temple. It had taken him hours to find his way home. It could have taken less, but he had gotten lost several times trying to avoid the more dangerous places in the sub-levels. In the end, he had to completely rely upon the Force to get him out of there. Following the strong attraction of the Living Force, which he could safely assume that was coming from the hundreds of Jedi living at the Temple, he had returned to his quarters, feeling half-dead with exhaustion.

He had opened the door to his room, ready to collapse onto his pallet, only to find Adriaan lounging against his desk. She hadn't come to apologize, or to even ask if he was okay. She had just stared him down with that unnerving catlike gaze of hers. When Kan had demanded to know why she had left without him, she had just shrugged, replying easily, "You didn't get in fast enough."

Now his stomach lurched as she pushed the vehicle at maximum speed ––– and a notch beyond ––– immediately plummeting downward in a nosedive. Wrenching the controls upward, she squeezed the speeder into a tiny spot in a spacelane, between a swoop and an airbus, with barely a millimeter to spare. She suddenly swerved and zoomed few levels down, barely side-sweeping an airtaxi and pulling into the lane.

Kan's hair stood on end. He almost preferred the gazillion-meter trek he took through the under-levels instead of flying with his Master. At least he felt safer walking through the domains of gangsters and thieves. At least they were predictable. Flying with Adriaan felt suicidal.

"You like my flying." Her smile had an annoying touch of sarcasm about the corners.

He decided he wasn't going to answer the question. If it was a question. "Where are we going?"

Adriaan tilted the speeder sideways to avoid hitting another speeder. "I thought you wanted a break."

"Yes, but –––"

"Okay, since you're going to play stubborn, I'll let you choose. You can take a break from all activities this week and just hang around and relax. Or –––"

"Or?"

"You can get involved in a dangerous mission that could mean my death…or yours."

He wasn't daunted. "You know what I'm going to pick."

She grinned. "The break."

"The mission. I need to get out. I'm starting to feel caged."

"Then let's get moving. Mace Windu hates waiting."

Adriaan accelerated and zoomed several levels up. A taxi suddenly swerved in front of them, and Adriaan yanked the controls down to avoid hitting it. Kan's jaw clenched as the air shattered with an earsplitting sound of metal grating against metal. Adriaan grazed the bottom of the airtaxi and swerved up in front of it, cutting in front of several other vehicles stuck in the traffic jam.

Kan stole a look backwards. The taxi driver was leaning out the side window and shouting a string of curses at Adriaan in Huttese, shaking his fist and making threatening gestures with his arm.

Kan turned back to look at Adriaan. She was grinning widely from ear to ear.

"That should teach him. Stinking driver scum can't tell a traffic signal from a headlight."

He shook his head at her. It was going to be a long ride.