Disclaimer: No, I still don't own Star Wars. I'm not even making a profit, which is why I think you should comfort me with feedback ... ;)

The Random Reader: Hey, thanks for the r/r! You're not wrong ...

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Anakin hit the ground and rolled, bruising himself all over. He pushed up to his knees, struggling to reorient himself, shaking his head to clear it. Ryn?

"Ryn!" he called, hoarse from the smoke. He'd lost his blaster in the explosion; there'd been no time to grab it as he jumped clear.

"I'm here," Ryn's voice said, and Anakin squinted in the direction of the sound and saw her getting slowly to her feet. "And I've still got the docs. Are you okay?"

An all-too-familiar airspeeder was setting down in the nearest open space. "Not for long," Anakin said. "Do you have your blaster?"

Ryn shook her head, shoving dark hair out of her face. "I dropped it when I fell." Grimace. "I'm sorry."

"No time for that," Anakin said, grabbing her arm. "Let's go."

[]

They turned down a nearby alley just as they were sighted and felt a fresh wave of blasterfire scorch the air behind them. They sprinted down the filthy permacrete, took the first turn, and then dodged between two buildings.

"We have to climb," Ryn panted. "It's the only way our whereabouts won't be obvious."

She was right, but .. "I"m not sure I can," Anakin admitted, trying to keep the strain out of his voice. "I think I hurt my shoulder when I jumped." That was stupid, he knew. Jedi weren't supposed to hurt themselves falling. But his concentration had wavered, just for a second, and now his shoulder throbbed and burned and sent waves of nauseating misery radiating outward, like ripples in a pool.

Ryn turned to him in concern. "Which one?"

"Right," Anakin gritted, and Ryn moved to lay her fingers lightly on the offending area.

What he saw in her face wasn't encouraging. "It's dislocated," she told him, eyes dark with worry. "I can put it back, but it's going to hurt a lot."

Anakin thought, More?

"Take a deep breath and hold it," Ryn said, flattening her hands on him.

There was a horrible wrenching, blinding pain, accompanied by a sickening pop. Ankain swayed, leaning his left shoulder against the nearest wall. Ryn pulled the neck of his tunic open so she could trail her cool fingers along his are shoulder, soothing away the pain. He couldn't feel her using the Force, but it had to be a Lorethan healing technique of some kind.

She pulled back and met his eyes. "Better?"

Anakin lifted his arm, ignoring the swift jangles of pain this caused. "I can move it now," he said, "so yes."

"Good. Can you climb?"

"I'll try," Anakin said, determined not to be the one who got them killed.

Ryn glanced back down the alley, evidently sensing an approach. "Let's try and get some distance first," she suggested, and they ran again.

Five minute later Ryn, who was leading now, stopped in front of an enormous dumpster.

"If you can do a Force-leap, you can probably use the dumpster as a step to reach that overhand." She pointed across the narrow alley to an awning about aw wide as the length of a lightsaber blade. "And from there we go in through a window. If I get one open, could you make the jumps, one-handed?"

"I think so," Anakin said. He hated having to let Ryn take the lead, being so unsure of his own body. A Jedi shouldn't care, but he just couldn't not.

"Okay," Ryn said, either oblivious or - more likely - politely ignoring his pointless resentment. "Let me go first and find a good window. Then you follow."

It's called teamwork, Anakin reminded himself.

She took off, bounding up and over with the kind of casual athleticism he'd come to expect from his non-Jedi friend, belying her supposedly weak connection to the Force. She disappeared between two panels of roofing, where the corners didn't meet quite right, and Anakin frowned; but then she was back, motioning him up.

Uninjured, Anakin could probably have made the leaps without calling on the Force. Now he reached into it for balance, letting it steady him as he jumped.

Ryn caught his left elbow for safety as he landed beside her. "There's just room, and the apartment seems to be deserted," she reported. "In and up. If they're not doing flybys, we've got a chance to escape over the rooftops." She vanished into the window she'd managed to pry open and then reached back for him, ready to help if he needed it.

Anakin waved her off. "I'm feeling better."

Ryn's expression as he joined her was unreadable. "Don't use up all your tough now," she warned him. "I have a feeling you'll need some later."

Well, that wasn't encouraging. "You've got to watch that careless optimism," he told her. "I"d hate for you to be disappointed."

Ryn gave him a wry smile, but she didn't answer, too busy finding their next step.

It turned out to be a rickety set of stairs, reminding Anakin uneasily of the ones that had collapsed behind them in the abandoned factory. If Ryn shared his apprehensions, she kept them to herself, jogging the stairs with the ease of someone who'd spent the past several months in a casual stair-running competition with one o the Jedi Order's fittest Padawans. It felt so familiar that Anakin's first instinct was to fall into step beside her, but a cautious perusal of the steps persuaded him that it was better to spread out the weight as much as possible. So he trotted along behind her, staying on eye-level with her butt.

Twenty-six floors later, they both breathed a sigh of relief when the stairs ended in a door. Ryn disengaged the locking mechanism and the two of them emerged cautiously into the mid-afternoon sunlight, shading their eyes to scan for signs of searchers.

"Clear so far," Ryn murmured, dragging a hand ineffectually over her sweat-drenched face. "Any thoughts on how we might get back to the Temple?"

"Commandeer a transport?" Anakin suggested.

"And prove you're a Jedi how?" Ryn asked him.

"Move things with my mind?"

"Yeah, because the owners are going to wait around for that. And move what?"

She was making some good points. "Okay. We could catch a ride on the back of an airspeeder. Several airspeeders."

Ryn's straight black brows lifted in disbelief. "Please be kidding."

"Okay. How about we get off this roof first, and then worry about getting back?"

Ryn didn't answer, but she turned to examine their surroundings. "Better up than down," she said, gesturing at the much taller building next door. "I'm not seeing any evidence of flybys, so if Ziro's men are looking for us, they are probably still near the surface. How's the shoulder?"

Agony. "Better," Anakin said. The rest of him felt rubbery and weak, and he knew Ryn wasn't feeling much better, but there would be time to rest once they got to safety.

Ryn nodded. "Well, it looks like this monster has utility rungs, so I guess I'd call that an invitation, wouldn't you?"

They crossed the roof and started to climb.

They had made about fifteen floors when Ryn said, "I'm sensing a lot of empty space just ahead. Time for a break?"

She sounded cheerful, but Anakin could feel her fatigue in the Force. It felt an awful lot like his own.

"Sure," he said, doing his best not to sound relieved.

"In here, then." Ryn wrapped one arm around the utility rung and squinted at a narrow transparisteel window. "Assuming I can work the lock on this thing."

She jiggled and chivvied and cursed, all to no effect.

"I can't get it," she said finally. "Not without cracking the transparisteel." She looked down over her shoulder at Anakin. "Some Jedi powers might come in handy about now."

Anakin grinned at her, despite his exhaustion and worry. "Good thing you brought your very own Jedi Escape Artist along, then." He nodded at the window. "Move up and let me have a look."

So Ryn scooted up the rungs and let Anakin peer in at the window's locking mechanism. Which was when he realized that looking would do no good; he needed to feel the lock in the Force.

Easier said than done. But after an embarrassing number of false starts, he managed it and the window slid open.

"Got it!" he called to Ryn. "I'm going in."

Anakin emerged into an unlit room, filled with dusty gray carpet and a duraplast desk. He stuck his head out into the hallway and found a corridor with more of the same: recently vacated offices, some of them still with desks and computer terminals intact.

"Nice place,' Ryn said behind him, and Anakin turned to see that she'd closed and locked the window as she came in. "Wonder why they all left."

Anakin shrugged. "Maybe it was a company that went out of business. Some kind of accounting or consulting firm."

"And they just left all this equipment?" Ryn slipped past him into the hall and leaned in the door of the next office. "Desks, computer terminals, who knows what else."

"Comm equipment, I hope," Anakin said. "It would make things a lot easier."

Ryn frowned at him as she wandered over to the desk. "I'm sure they had comm capabilities at some point. But surely nobody's paying power and comm fees for an empty floor."

Anakin looked around as Ryn trailed her fingers over the desk. "But this place can't have been vacant long," he said. "It hasn't been looted, and in this part of Coruscant ..."

"I take your meaning," said Ryn. "Can't hurt to try." She tapped a button to one side of the computer screen and almost jumped in surprise when the display activated, casting an eerie bluish illumination over her face. "What do you know?" she murmured, smiling.

She touched the screen, scrolling with her fingers, and tapped the display. "Here we go: comm access ..." She shook her head, frustrated. "It's asking me for activation codes."

"See if it will accept the Temple codes."

Ryn glanced up at him, waiting, and Anakin rattled off the sequence.

Ryn was shaking her head before he even finished. "It won't let me enter the passcode. I get an error message that says 'passcodes are numerical'. So the Aurebesh symbols won't go in."

"Let me see it." Ryn moved aside and Anakin tried the same thing with the same results. Ryn didn't say I told you so, but he was sure she was thinking it.

"There must be a way around this," he said, determined to find a way around the block.

"Sure," Ryn said. "Slicing the codes. But I can't do that from scratch. I need some kind of information to get started."

"Yeah." Anakin leaned back, discouraged. "I'm not such a great slicer, myself."

"Can't be good at everything," Ryn said. "What happens if you press HELP?"

"Oh." Good question. Anakin tapped the symbol she was pointing to and read aloud as the display came up. "Forgot password, manage accounts ... speak to a representative."

The representative, as it turned out, was not best pleased to be spoken to. She was even less pleased - and patently incredulous - when Anakin requested an emergency transmission to the Jedi Temple. But after half an hour, the better part of which was spent on hold, they were put through to the Temple comm center - collect - where Anakin's passcode did verify and the Padawan on duty snickered but took a message for Master Kenobi.

"Now what?" Ryn asked, when Anakin had given the message detailing their current address - which Ryn had discovered on a dropped business card while Anakin was on hold - and been unceremoniously disconnected.

Anakin shrugged. "I guess now we wait."

So they crouched together in the light from the window, and Anakin worked on translating the flimsis Ryn had stolen from the major domo's office. But since the content words appeared to be written in code - to disguise their illegal and potentially violent nature, if Ryn was right - knowing all the words didn't help much.

"Somebody has to go to Borsana Terce," Ryn told him, once he was sure he knew all the words and was hoping they were both wrong about the hidden meaning. "Somebody is going to have to track that delivery and make sure it doesn't change hands." She frowned. "Which also means that somebody had better go to Borsana Sexto. It's called an arms race for a reason."

Anakin tilted his head to look at her in the fading light. "I would have expected you to support their right to fight it out." The sovereignty of individual systems was an ongoing argument with them.

But this time, apparently, Ryn wasn't inclined to take her usual position. "Support whose right?" She snorted. "Both the Borsana colonies are ruled by highly unpopular dictators. They're waging war with armies of conscripts." She sounded outraged, and Anakin belatedly remembered that Loreth's army consisted of nobles and volunteers. The only people born into their plight were the members of Ryn's own class, the servants of the people. Power in Ryn's universe was a sacred duty; the abuse of it was a perversion of everything she believed in.

"Maybe we're interpreting the data wrong," Anakin suggested.

"How does that help?" Ryn asked him unhappily. "Even if we're wrong about Ziro's involvement, the war is still going on. Beings are still dying."

She sounded so miserable. Anakin put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. "Well, now if the Jedi decide to investigate, maybe they'll be able to do something. I guess we won't really know anything until we get back to the Temple."

Ryn sighed. "I hope Obi-Wan gets here soon."