Chapter

3

Jaina left the cantina arm-in-arm with Zak, lightsaber bumping against her leg with each other step, hidden under the dusty trader-style coat that went down to mid-calf. Tash stumbled out of the cantina after them, spinning around to slam the door shut behind her. The sounds from within were dulled only marginally.

Ahead, Jaina could see the man that had doped Tash's beverage in the cantina. Despite how protective she knew Zak was of his sister, Jaina could tell that his temper was entirely within his control. It had to have something to do with his continued one-on-one sessions with her uncle, Luke Skywalker.

After so many weeks working on it, Zak had apparently achieved a state of being able to restrain his outbursts while reliving the memories of his dark side weeks, and his impulsiveness had gone down some, too.

When Tash came into line with her brother, Zak slipped an arm around her waist to steady her as they continued walking.

"Hey!" Zak called out. "You, over there!"

The man stopped and turned to look at them. "Yeah, what do you want?" he said gruffly. He appraised Jaina and Zak with cursory glances, allowing his eyes to linger on Tash a few seconds longer, betraying his thoughts.

The three of them kept walking until they were only a couple of feet away from them, and then they stopped. Tash tried to speak, but Jaina silenced her right away and spoke to the main before them instead.

"You slipped something into her drink," she said, stating it as fact rather than as a question. She nodded to Tash at the same time, so that there would be no doubt to whom she was referring.

He started to shake his head in denial, but Zak unhooked his arm from Jaina's and held his hand up to stop him. "Don't even try to deny it. We know you did it. We can see it in your thoughts, see what you had planned if we'd turned our backs."

"How …what … no! You have the wrong person!" he stammered, Jaina frowned.

"Don't insult my intelligence."

"I'm not! You have the wrong person. I don't even know who she is." His voice was panicky, almost desperate with pleading. "You're mistaken."

He turned and started to walk off, but Zak reached out and placed a restraining hand on his shoulder to stop him. The man whirled to face him again, shrugging the hand off before swinging with both fists.

Zak caught one fist in his open hand, dodged the other. He squeezed on the hand he had in his grip and reached out to apply a gentle push with his other hand at the man's chest. An invisible wall slammed into him, and the man gasped, his eyes wide, before dropping to his knees in the dirt.

"Jedi!" he breathed, barely able to get even that one word to his lips.

Zak nodded with a grim smile as Jaina came around behind him, yanked his fisted hand out of Zak's grip, and wrenched it around behind his back. She held both of his wrists tightly together in her hands and watched over his shoulder for any signs of Zak's past darkness.

"I didn't know!"

"So it's perfectly all right to drug a regular person into a stupor and then rape them, but when it comes to a Jedi, you show actual regret?" Jaina hissed over his shoulder, incensed. She kicked out at the back of his knees, driving him to the ground. "Hutt spawn! I'd turn you over to the local authorities right now if I thought they'd do something useful about it."

She glanced over to Tash and saw that her friend was bent at the waist, her hands on her knees as she gulped down deep breaths of air. It looked like she was trying desperately to keep down another wave of vomit.

"What to do, what to do …" Zak muttered, thoughts buzzing through his head. And still, despite the heinousness of the crime, Jaina detected no darkness coming from him. "Oh. I have a splendid idea!"

The three of them were on the Phantom's designated landing pad half an hour later, Jaina dragging the thrashing and cursing criminal ahead of her the entire way.

Zak had, by means of comlink, contacted the spaceport to let them know that they were transporting someone back to their ship in orbit. The officials had put him on hold temporarily, insisting that it be cleared through the planetary security administration first, but they'd been quick to eventually grant him permission. Jaina was right that the planetary authorities would be useless in dealing with their little problem.

Jacen met them at the edge of the landing pad, twirling a pair of magnetic binders around his finger with an eager smile on his lips.

"Been doing a bit of cleaning, have you?" he said slyly. "I thought we were here on furlough?"

"He slipped something into Tash's drink when she wasn't paying attention," Jaina told him, grunting as she shoved the man forward so hard he stumbled and fell. Her brother's smile disappeared the instant those words registered and he stopped. "Yeah, I thought you'd react that way," she said.

"Get on your feet!" Jacen snapped angrily. The man, obviously recognising that he was now defeated, pushed himself up and looked across from one to the other uneasily, as if afraid that, Jedi or no Jedi, they would start torturing him any moment. "Turn around."

He turned around, looking back and forth between Zak, Tash and Jaina, and then finally resigned himself to look down at the ferrocrete landing pad. Jacen slapped the binders onto his wrists, flicking on the magnetic locks.

"I'll put him in the cargo hold. Someone wants a word with you, methinks."

Eyebrow raised as Jacen walked off with the man in tow, Jaina and Zak turned around to see a large-bellied, elderly, female Toydarian gliding ungracefully through the air towards them, her wings beating furiously to keep her afloat at a height sufficient for eye contact with them. Tash tugged on Zak's sleeve and when he looked, she gestured with her head towards the Phantom.

Zak nodded, correctly interpreting her intent to board the ship so she could lie down and rest. She left his side with her arm around Jacen's shoulders for support.

Jaina and Zak returned their gazes toward the visitor.

Her leathery skin was a light purple colour, with hints of darker green and amber eyes set into a squashed face. Her snout was short and heavily wrinkled, overlapping a crooked lower jaw and flanked by a pair of chipped tusks. She was wearing a leather vest that hardly covered her potbelly, tied off in the middle with flimsy leather straps that were brown and frayed with age.

They both knew her, and so did Jacen and Tash.

"Good evening, Farina," Zak said cheerfully, despite the arrest they'd just made. "I thought the Unias was scheduled for departure an hour ago?"

«It was» she replied in accented and gravelly Huttese. Zak had told Jaina when they'd first met the Toydarian that he couldn't understand Huttese, and so she translated for him over their silent link. Being the daughter of a famous former smuggler, Jaina herself had no problem understanding the language. «But with your greater ship still in orbit, I have no choice but to delay my departure until they are not»

Jaina smiled.

Farina was what the New Republic would consider a criminal. While she didn't work exclusively for, or operate, a crime syndicate, she was largely responsible for the distribution of a great many narcotics, prohibition-banned beverages and illegal weaponry from Nal Hutta all the way along the outer rim territories to Adumar and Cerea. She was technically a wanted by the Republic Security Bureau for said distribution, but only a meagre price had been put on her head, so she wasn't concerned with being caught by bounty hunters.

She hadn't at all been fooled by the fiction Jaina and her brother had spun about being on-the-sly traders themselves. Her suspicions had only been confirmed when her own ship's sensors had breached the falsified engine signature generated by the Corellian Glory in order to hide it from anyone who would otherwise be interested to know why a Republic ship was so far out.

She knew that Jaina and the others were all Jedi, by means of her own deductive powers, rather than by any actual proof or admission. Though, it seemed that the knowledge was nothing special to her. So far she had kept it to herself, and that was of small comfort to Jaina.

Jaina and Zak had tried numerous times to convince the smuggler that the Glory would make no attempt at stopping her from leaving the system. Presently, the ship's crew was preoccupied with ferrying the Jedi to their new home, and it would do none of them any good to announce their presence just to intercept criminal elements.

But Farina was paranoid in her disbelief in their insistence. She seemed to trust them, but that trust did not extend to the entire Republic.

"I'm sorry about that," Zak said, and Jaina could feel his genuine, albeit minimal, distress over the inconvenience they were causing the Toydarian. "It won't be there for very much longer. We should be leaving fairly soon."

«That's perfectly all right» Farina replied with an absent flick of a three-fingered hand. «I've got plenty of time to deliver the cargo. I was just planning on a slow and leisurely course to, perhaps, pick up a few more things along the way. This delay only means that I'll have to tax the engines and set a direct course»

Jaina nodded without smiling. «Who was that I just saw Jacen Solo walking off with»

"Prisoner," Jaina said sternly. "He slipped something into Tash's drink without her notice. Didn't know we were Jedi and would pick up on his intent before he actually had the chance to follow through. We're taking him up to our ship to see what the captain wants to do with him."

«Local law officers didn't want him» the smuggler asked.

Zak scoffed. "Come now, Farina. You know what the law enforcement here is like better than we do. Do you really think that they'd have done anything about it? He's been living here probably years; we've been here only days and plan to be gone soon. Local enforcers aren't going to see a terrible need to do anything about him. They'll just let him back out onto the streets and he'll go and try the same thing on some poor innocent that won't see it coming."

«I see» The smuggler scratched at her flabby chin for a moment in consideration. «Shuttle him to the Republic then, I assume» she asked. Zak nodded, and the alien muttered a choice string of rude comments under her breath, which Jaina chose not to translate. She smiled, though, and Farina's shoulders slumped in defeat.

Jaina turned at the sound of footsteps approaching from the port to see her brother jogging across the closest platform toward them. His hand clutched tightly to a comlink, so tightly, in fact, that his knuckles were white. Upon closer inspection, she saw that his face had gone deathly pale, and understood at once that he didn't have good news to share.

He stopped when he reached them, caught his breath quickly. "I just spoke to Uncle Luke," he said. His tone sent a sliver of warning through Jaina's mind, and she felt the same happening to Zak, almost as if he had been expecting it. "He says that we're to return to the Corellian Glory at once. There's been an unexpected development."

"Why?" Zak asked his friend guardedly. Farina watched the conversation with some interest, her thin arms crossed over her chest and her wings beating furiously. "What's happened?"

"It's Allina," Jacen replied.

Instantly, Jaina's mood soured. She'd have wagered every credit that her suspicions of the girl were about to be confirmed; that the trollop had finally finished biding her time and had effected an escape from her cell on the Glory. Right now, she could be leaving the system in a stolen shuttle, or even her own ship, racing off to the Imperium to tell them where to find their Jedi prey.

But what Jacen said next floored her, and it was not something she had ever considered might happen.

"She's dying."