"Tash Arranda," said a voice.

Tash practically jumped out of her skin. As she wiped her eyes, though, she discovered that she had wandered over to the Y-wing—and, of course, who would she find there but the ship's pilot? From up in the astromech socket, R2-Q8 whistled a greeting.

Meanwhile the man shrank back, clearly embarrassed. "Hey, sorry. I didn't mean to scare you." He tilted his head. "What are you doing out here? Is everything all right?"

Tash blew out a breath, too relieved to be annoyed at the question. "Yes, I—I'm okay, there's no problem. I just wanted to walk somewhere and, and—" She hesitated, her eyes sliding around doubtfully. "—get some fresh air."

"I'm afraid you've come to the wrong moon for that, Miss Arranda."

They chuckled together and she said, "You don't need to call me that. Tash is fine."

"All right, then you've got it, Tash."

They fell silent for a moment, looking around—at the landed ships, their ragtag companions, their ugly surroundings, each other. Finally Tash thought of something to say.

"I should thank you. Both of you," she said, raising her voice a little to include R2-Q8. "What happened to Shaparo and the others is...is terrible. But you're the ones who got that information out of Searchlight and back to the rest of us. We probably wouldn't have a chance otherwise of finding Zak and these bad people."

The astromech beeped on at some length, but Kentamine Farwanderer looked a little comfortable. "Well...I'm happy to help any way I can," he said, "but neither of us would've gotten out of Orion Base if not for my friend, Ru Murleen. In fact, this is her Y-wing we're borrowing." He reached over to slap one of the landing gear struts. "Yeah, I'm gonna owe Ru something big when this is all over...if I ever see her again."

There was something wistful in his eyes now, something joyful and sad at once—but it faded before Tash could ask about Kent's friend. "Besides," he went on, "that information hasn't gotten us anything yet."

R2-Q8 buzzed from above. Kent tilted his head up toward the droid. "I'm only calling it the way it is. We have a saying back on Tatooine: one bantha out in the Dune Sea may as well be a thousand."

"Beedee-puuzurseep?"

"It means not to act like you've got something when you haven't got it yet."

"You're from Tatooine?" asked Tash. "We've been there a few times."

Kentamine laughed once. "Most people have. The stars only know why. Did you have a good time?"

"I almost got eaten by a sarlacc. And the B'omarr monks took out my brain, but Uncle Hoole made them put it back."

The pilot stared at her, blinking once. "I guess that's a no, then."

Tash didn't need the Force to tell her the man was skeptical, but she didn't take offense. Unlike Zak, she was more aware that people didn't doubt their stories just because they weren't adults. It was also because the Arrandas really were strange people who lived a very, very strange life.

So she smiled and said, "Yeah, I wouldn't want to vacation there—no offense."

"None taken. I hear you're from Alderaan, like Wade. Believe me, I get why Core Kids don't care for dirtball worlds on the Rim. There's nicer places to live, but if you come from Tatooine...well, let's just say you never get the sand out of your flight suit."

They laughed again. It occurred to Tash that she actually liked talking to Kentamine Farwanderer, and it was more than his easygoing personality. When they first met in that conference room aboard the Bloodshark, she had felt a connection with him even though they barely traded a word. It was an instinctive sense that she could trust him, that he was good, that they were two of a kind...and that the Force quietly sang within him too. Luke Skywalker had given Tash the exact same feeling, the few times she'd met him—though with him it seemed to be a lot stronger. In fact, with his blue eyes and sandy brown hair, Kentamine even looked a little like Skywalker. The two couldn't be related, and yet the stories Tash had heard about him, from the Bryar Force and from the Rebel Alliance, were almost eerily similar: ace pilots from Tatooine, hailing from families of moisture farmers, famed for many combat missions against the Empire.

Tash opened her mouth to ask Kentamine if he had ever met Luke, only to remember someone mentioning that he didn't like those kinds of questions. Apparently in the Rebellion the two had been confused a lot.

R2-Q8 interjected just then. Apparently the droid was running some kind of diagnostic on the Y-wing's systems and had found an anomaly. Tash absent-mindedly scratched her arm as Kentamine turned his attention to his starfighter. She was trying to decide whether to wait or else return to the Bloodshark when a strange, powerful feeling came over her.

Go outside. Go outside. Go outside.

It was not audible. There were no words, but that was the feeling: an urge, a need. Go outside.

Tash froze, her breath caught in her throat. Kentamine and the Y-wing and the docking bay blurred just a little and she listened to her own heartbeat, parsing the strange feeling. Maybe it was her imagination. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it would fade...

It didn't fade. If anything it grew stronger, more urgent. Go outside. Go outside...

The room returned to focus. Kentamine Farwanderer had pried open a panel on the side of the Y-wing's main hull and was arm-deep in its mechanical guts, the astromech chattering at him incessantly. "Sorry—just a second, Tash," he said over his shoulder. "R2, what you mean, the stabilizers are..."

Tash looked around. The other Bryar Force members were in a cluster thirty meters away, talking while ambling around the front of the assault transport. A door in the hangar wall was off to her left—perhaps unlocked, if the grimy green lights were any indication.

She looked back at the pilot, who seemed more absorbed in the ship with each passing standard second...and the tug to go outside was likewise growing progressively more urgent. It was a sign from the Force, surely—and it was telling her to go now.

Blaster bolts, why does the Force have to be so inconvenient sometimes?!

Tash fumed. She knew full well how dangerous Nar Shaddaa would be, and how mad these adults would get if she snuck off by herself. But Kentamine had practically forgotten she was there. Tash even called out to him, but R2-Q8 was practically shouting, and the Force was telling her to go now.

So after allowing herself another second or two to fume, Tash simply let go and headed quickly for the door.

It was unlocked. It didn't lead directly outside, but a few twisty corridors led to another door, which opened onto one of the public thoroughfares of the Vertical City.

Tash felt as though she had stepped back in time to her last visit with Zak and Uncle Hoole. It was a wide, gray bridge strewn with trash, lined with rundown establishments where graffiti snaked across permacrete like growths of Bothan borscii vine. It was dark, but Tash wasn't used to Nar Shaddaa; for all she knew, the night could have been genuine, or it could have just been smog blocking out the Y'Toub system's primary star. The passing crowd had the consistency of sludge—neither thick nor thin—and included all the shady-looking characters Tash would expect and then some. There were Weequay muscleman and cyborg Gank killers (the latter gave Tash a shudder). Here and there an emaciated Twi'lek or Zelton woman in a pecular state of dress (or rather undress) posed beneath a street glowlamp for purposes Tash preferred not to contemplate.

Two gangs of gunmen, one of Zabrak and the other Zygerrian, swarmed down the street together, speaking in loud and jocular tones. From time to time one of them discharged a blaster pistol into the murky sky, prompting nearby pedestrians to squeal and run for cover, chased by raucous jeers or thrown food items from the gangs. Clusters of grubby locals—humans, Kubaz, Koorivar, Gossam, and yet other species—gathered around flickering burn barrels, some of which had been converted from the bodies of astromech droids.

This was a small fraction of what Tash Arranda saw as she stood gaping from the outside corner of Jorble's Star Stable. More than the noises and the smells, she could feel that this was a tiny sliver of hundreds upon hundreds of billions that walked, flew, and crawled across the surface of Nar Shaddaa. All of them were parts of an interconnected web beyond mortal comprehension; the sheer life of the moon was practically overwhelming.

So much so that she instinctively retreated, reached for the door control—only for it to beep forbiddingly. The light on this side, she noticed, was red. Unwittingly, she had locked herself out.

That could prove to be a problem. Not quite as big a problem as it might be for most people, but even so—

She turned back to the seething, stinking, mass of life, marveling at its hunger, wondering how something so ugly, something almost majestically terrible, could be a component of something as beautiful and transcendent as the Force. She could hardly think of a time when she had more dearly missed her uncle and her brother and even their droid tutor, DV-9—who was hopefully still living a safe and uneventful life on Koann.

Meanwhile, Tash Arranda's life remained very eventful...and, she realized, it might become very unpleasantly uneventful in the next few minutes. She knew Kyle Katarn hadn't been lying. Even if the Empire's bounty on the Arranda family was not still open (and it almost definitely was), the open streets of Nar Shaddaa was still one of the most dangerous places for an unaccompanied subadult female human to be.

And yet that was exactly where Tash had gone, because the Force had prompted her to go outside, and now that she was outside, she felt it prompting her again, as urgently as before...

Walk.

And that was it.

Just walk.

Tash was confused, and she was frustrated, and she was terrified—and then she took a deep breath, reasoned that it couldn't be any more dangerous than being shot at by Boba Fett, and started walking.

Though she kept her head down, she seemed to draw a lot less attention than she expected, skirting around tight groups of pedestrians and keeping away from lumbering Herglics, wading through pools of garish light that flowed from the windows of businesses. Sharp calls came out of the crowd, of course, but Tash decided she couldn't tell if they were meant for her or not. With each passing second she had less and less attention to devote to studying her surroundings—because it took progressively more effort to keep from doubting, from panicking, from wondering what in the galaxy could be so important that she needed to come out here alone without knowing why...

Her mounting desperation, she continued to look around, hoping to find whatever the Force wanted her to, but there was noise and color and movement everywhere—all of it repulsive. Bodies shuffling or gyrating or crawling or lying around (there were plenty of panhandlers in old cloaks or rags)—nothing seemed to stand out. The grotesque pantomime seemed to last for several standard minutes, yet when Tash checked the nearest street sign, she found she hadn't even traveled a single block from Jorble's.

The girl's attention was only caught by necessity when a Talz nearly squashed her. To be fair, it wasn't on purpose; the tall, fur-covered, multi-eyed alien emerged quite suddenly from the nearest alley, dragging a thin, dirty humanoid figure by the hood of her threadbare cloak.

"Augh—please, sir gentleman!" sputtered the weeping humanoid. "Spare your pities for a lonely old woman, with no one to care for her!"

The Talz dropped her onto the sidewalk directly in front of Tash like an overstuffed sack of rotten Iridonian potatoes. Spreading muscular legs and squatting before the old woman, it gave a furious babble of chirps and buzzes from a waggling proboscis, shaking one fist while another clawed hand pointed into the murky alley from which it had emerged.

"Mercies! Your many mercies, please, good sir! Vima did not know..."

The unfortunate creature—a gaunt, elderly human with thin silver hair and a face full of crags—continued to sputter and beg. Her batterer, however, was not paying attention.

Instead its rows of black eyes, each reflecting the multicolored lights of the street like a kaleidoscopic vortex, were fixed on Tash Arranda. Tash, who had backed up a step before falling still, transfixed by the horrid sight. Having seen nothing else—no context, no details, no name—she nevertheless was deeply appalled and felt an overwhelming need to come to this poor old woman's defense.

But panic sank its envenomed fangs into her mind as she realized the Talz had noticed her. Tash had a few tricks up her sleeve, thanks to the Force, but she had a lot of trouble using them when she was not calm and focused, which was very much the case there on the streets of Nar Shaddaa—inundated with the moon's malodorous aura, caught off-guard by this sudden incident of violence. Frantically she reached into her pockets, but found nothing except her holoreader; in her haste to leave the Bloodshark, she had not taken the CDEF stun blaster that Kyle Katarn had given her.

Rising to its full height—two and a half meters, greater than any Wookiee—the Talz stepped over the sprawled old woman. Tash screamed as massive clawed hands reached for her face and throat.

CHAPTER COMPLETE

PASSWORD: JAINA