Deceived Read online

  “Fine.” Zeerid drew a deep breath. “You done talking, Oren?”

  “I’m done.”

  “Then I’ve got one more thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “The more I come to know you, the more I want to shoot you in the face. Just so you heard it from me at least once. Two hundred thousand or no two hundred thousand.”

  “This is why I like you, Z-man,” Oren said. “Put your ship down as Red Dwarf and follow the docking instructions. I will contact you when the cargo is ready.”

  “You loading Fatman, or am I flying something else?”

  “I don’t know yet. Probably we’ll load Fatman in the usual way—a modified maintenance droid. You’ll know when I know.”

  “If it ain’t Fatman, make kriffing sure it’s something else fast.”

  “I will be in touch.”

  “Fine,” Zeerid said, though it wasn’t fine. He closed the channel, sat back in his chair, and stared out into space.

  DAR’NALA DISMISSED ARYN AND SYO, presumably so she, Satele, and Senator Am-ris could take private counsel with Master Zym. With nothing to do and nothing more to say, Aryn returned to her chambers to …

  To what?

  She did not know what to do. She felt as if she should be doing something, but she had no idea what. So she ate without tasting, paced the floor, and meditated, trying to keep the pain at bay by staying busy.

  When that did not work, she checked the HoloNet for news. Unsurprisingly, the reports were filled with breathless speculation about the Imperial attack on Coruscant and what it meant for the peace negotiations. She could not bear the sound of the newscasters, so she muted the vidscreen.

  There was no footage of Coruscant post-attack so Aryn assumed the Empire must have jammed communications. Instead, the footage showed old images of the Republic’s capital. Millions of speeders, swoops, and aircars moved in organized lines above the landscape of duracrete and transparisteel. Thousands of pedestrians strode the autowalks and plazas.

  The image changed to a view of the Jedi Temple taken from an airborne recorder. Aryn could not take her eyes from the image, the towers, the tiered layers of the structure. Towering statues of old Masters, lightsabers pointed skyward, lined the broad avenue that led to the enormous doors to the Temple.

  She remembered the sense of wonder she’d felt walking under those statues for the first time, side by side with Master Zallow. She’d been a child and the Temple and the statues had seemed impossibly big.

  “This will be your home now, Aryn,” Master Zallow had said, and smiled at her in his way.

  She wondered how the Temple looked now, after the attack, wondered if it even still stood.

  She imagined Master Zallow, commanding the Jedi Knights and Padawans, fighting Sith warriors in the shadows of those statues, just as she had fought the Sith warrior in the midst of the Alderaanian statues. She imagined him falling, dying.

  Tears welled anew. She tried to fight them but failed. She could not level out her emotional state, wasn’t even sure she wanted to. The pain of Master Zallow’s death was all she had left of him.

  A thought struck her, and the thought transformed into an urgent need. An idea rooted in her mind, in her gut, and she could not unseat it.

  She wanted to know the name and face of Master Zallow’s murderer. She wanted to see him. She had to see him. And if she could see the Sith, learn his name, then she could avenge Master Zallow.

  The more she pondered the notion, the more needful it became.

  But she could learn nothing on Alderaan, as part of a peace negotiation. She knew what Zym, Dar’nala, and Am-ris would decide, what they must decide. They would put up a show of negotiating, then they would accept whatever terms the Sith offered. They would betray the memory of Master Zallow, of all the Jedi who had fought and fallen at the Temple.

  It was obscene, and Aryn would not be party to it.

  Unable to contain her emotion, she shouted a stream of expletives, one after another, a wide and long river of profanity of the kind she had not uttered since her adolescence.

  Moments later, an urgent knock sounded on her door.

  “Who is it?” she called, her voice still rough and irritable.

  “It is Syo. Are you … well? I heard—”

  “It was the vid,” she lied, and powered off the vidscreen. “I want to be alone now, Syo.”

  A long silence, then, “You don’t have to carry this alone, Aryn.”

  But she did have to carry it alone. The memory of Master Zallow was her weight to bear.

  “You know where to find me,” Syo said.

  “Thank you,” she said, too softly for him to hear.

  She passed the hours in solitude. Day gave way to night and no word came from Master Dar’nala or Satele. She tried to sleep but failed. She dreaded what the morning would bring.

  She lay in her bed, in darkness, staring up at the ceiling. Alderaan’s moon, gibbous and hazy, rose and painted the room in lurid light. Everything looked washed out, ghostly, surreal. For a moment she let herself feel as if she’d stepped into a dream. How else could matters have transpired so? How else could the Jedi have failed so?

  Master Dar’nala’s voice replayed in her mind, over and over: I fear we will have no choice.

  The pain of the words came from the fact that they were correct. The Jedi could not sacrifice Coruscant. The Republic and the Jedi Council would accept a treaty. They had to. All that remained was to negotiate terms, terms that must be favorable to the Empire. In the end, the Empire’s betrayal, the Sith betrayal, would be rewarded with a Jedi capitulation.

  While Aryn recognized the reasonableness of the course, she nevertheless could not shed the feeling that it was wrong. Master Dar’nala was wrong. Senator Am-ris was wrong.

  Such a thought had never entered her mind before. It, too, brought pain. Everything had changed for her.

  Her fists balled with anger and grief, and she felt more shouts creeping up her throat. Breathing deeply, regularly, she sought to quell her loss of control. She knew Master Zallow would not have approved it.

  But Master Zallow was dead, murdered by the Sith.

  And soon he would be failed by the Order, his memory murdered by political necessity.

  Her mind walked through memories of Master Zallow, not of his teachings, but of his smiles, his stern but caring reprimands of her waywardness, the pride she knew he’d felt when she was promoted to Jedi Knight.

  Those were the things that had bonded them, not pedagogy.

  The hole that had opened in her when she’d felt his death yawned still. She feared she might drain away into it. She knew the name of the hole.

  Love.

  She’d loved Master Zallow. He’d been a father to her. She had never told him and now she never could. Losing something she loved had ripped her open in a way she had not expected. The pain hurt, but the pain was right.

  The Order had wrought a galaxy in which good capitulated to evil, where human feelings—Aryn’s feelings—were crushed under the weight of Jedi nonattachment.

  What good was any of it if it brought matters to this?

  Her racing thoughts lifted her from bed. She was too restless for sleep. She put her feet on the carpeted floor, hung her head, tried to gather the thoughts bouncing chaotically in her brain.

  She realized that she still wore her robes, not her nightclothes. She crossed the room and stepped through the sliding doors to her balcony. The brisk wind mussed her hair. The scent of wildflowers and loam saturated the air. Insects chirped. A night bird cooed.

  It would have been peaceful under other circumstances.

  A hundred meters down, the Alderaanian landscape unrolled before her, a meadow of tall grasses, shrubs, and slim apo trees that whispered and swayed in the breeze. She could not see the walls of the compound through the vegetation.

  It was beautiful, Aryn allowed. Yet she still had the sense that she was standing at the scene of a crime. The cool night
air and calm setting did nothing to assuage the feeling that the Jedi had failed catastrophically. She gripped the top of the balcony so tightly that it made her fingers ache.

  Beyond the compound, in the distance, the surface of a wide, winding river shimmered in the moonlight. The running lights from a few boats dotted its surface. She watched their slow, hypnotic traverse over the water. The sky, too, was dotted with traffic.

  She found it infuriating that life went on as it had for everyone else, while for her, everything had changed. She felt as if she had been hollowed out.

  “Thinking of jumping?” a voice said, a gentle smile in the tone.

  She started before placing the voice as Syo’s. For a moment, he had sounded exactly like Master Zallow.

  Syo stood on the balcony of his own chambers, five meters to her right. He had to have been there the whole time. Perhaps he could not sleep, either.

  “No,” she said. “Just thinking.”

  His usual calm expression was marred by a furrowed brow and worried eyes. “About Master Zallow?” he asked.

  Hearing someone else speak her master’s name at that moment pierced her. Emotion welled in her, put a fist in her throat. She nodded, unable to speak.

  “I am sorry for you, Aryn. Master Zallow will be missed.”

  She found her voice. “He was more to me than just a master.”

  He nodded as if he understood, but she suspected he did not, not really.

  “To speak of nonattachment, to understand it, that is one thing. But to practice it …” He stared at her. “That is another.”

  “Are you lecturing me, Syo?”

  “I am reminding you, Aryn. All Jedi must sacrifice. Sometimes we sacrifice the emotional bonds that usually link people one to another. Sometimes we sacrifice … more, as did Master Zallow. That is the nature of our service. Don’t lose sight of it in your grief.”

  She realized that there was more separating her from Syo than five meters of space. Her grief was allowing her to see for the first time.

  “You do not understand,” she said.

  For a time he said nothing, then, “Maybe I don’t. But I’m here if you need to talk. I am your friend, Aryn. I always will be.”

  “I know that.”

  He was silent for a moment, then stepped back from the ledge of his balcony. “Good night, Aryn. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night, Syo.”

  He left her alone with her thoughts, with the night.

  Sacrifice, Syo had said. Aryn had already sacrificed much in her life, and Master Zallow had sacrificed all. She did not turn from sacrifice, but sacrifice had to have meaning. And she saw now that it had all been for nothing. Always she had quieted her needs, her desires, under the weight of sacrifice, nonattachment, service. But now her need was too great. She owed Master Zallow too much to let his death go unavenged.

  Dar’nala and Zym and Am-ris and the rest of them could accede to onerous Sith terms to save Coruscant. That was a political matter. Aryn’s matter was personal, and she would not shirk it.

  She returned to her room and flicked on the vidscreen. More commentary on the attack, a Cerean pundit offering his analysis of how it changed the balance of power in the peace negotiations. Aryn watched the vids to distract her, barely saw them.

  Vids.

  “Vids,” she said, sitting up.

  The Temple’s surveillance system would have recorded the Sith attack. If she could get to it, she could see Master Zallow’s murderer.

  Assuming the Temple still stood.

  Assuming the recording had not been discovered and destroyed.

  Assuming the Jedi did not surrender Coruscant to the Empire.

  It should not come to that, Master Dar’nala had said. Should not.

  Aryn would not leave her need to chance, not this time.

  She was thinking of jumping after all.

  Having made the decision, she knew she had to act on it immediately or let doubt assail her certainty. She rose, feeling light on her feet for the first time in hours. She gathered her pack, tightened her robes, and stepped back out onto the balcony. The wind had picked up. The leaves hissed in the breeze. The next step, once taken, was irrevocable. She knew that.

  She spared a glance at Syo’s room, saw it was dark.

  Heart racing, she turned and leapt into the open air, following her thoughts groundward, untethered from the Order, from nonattachment, from everything save her need to right a wrong.

  Using the Force to slow her descent, she hit the ground in a crouch and sped off. No one had seen her leave and no one would mark her absence before dawn. She would be at her ship and gone well before that.

  She’d need to figure a way to get to Coruscant, and she had an idea of who could help her. She wanted those surveillance vids. And then she wanted to find the Sith who’d murdered Master Zallow.

  The Order might be forced to betray what it stood for, but Aryn would not betray the memory of her master.

  THE REST OF THE SITH FORCE had returned to the fleet, but Malgus lingered. He stood alone among the ruins of the Jedi Temple. He powered off his comlink, putting him out of touch with Imperial forces, and communed in solitude with the Force. Walking the perimeter of the ruins, he loitered over the destruction, pleased at his victory but flat with the realization that he had defeated his enemy and no obvious replacement was apparent.

  He longed for conflict. He knew this of himself. He needed conflict.

  There would be more battles with the Jedi and the Republic, of course, but with the capture and razing of Coruscant, the fall of the Republic was a certainty, only a matter of time. Soon his Force vision would be realized, then … what?

  He would have to trust that the Force would present him with another foe, another war worth fighting.

  Scaling a mound of rubble, he found a perch that offered an excellent view of the surrounding urbanscape. The cracked face of the statue of Odan-Urr lay atop the mound beside him, eyeing him mournfully.

  There, astride the ruins of his enemy, Malgus waited for the Imperial fleet to begin the incineration of the planet.

  An hour passed by, then another, and as twilight gave way to night the number of Imperial ships prowling the sky over Coruscant began to thin rather than thicken. Bombers returned to their cruisers, and fighters took up not attack but patrol formations.

  What was happening? The Imperial fleet did not have the resources to manage a long-term occupation of Coruscant. Imperial forces had to raze the planet and move on before Republic forces could gather for a counterattack.

  And yet … nothing was happening. Malgus did not understand.

  He activated his comlink and raised his cruiser, Valor.

  “Darth Malgus,” said his second in command, Commander Jard. “We have been unable to raise you for hours. I was concerned for your well-being. I just dispatched a transport to search for you at the Temple.”

  “What is happening, Jard? Where are the bombers? When will the planetary bombardment begin?”

  Jard stumbled over his reply. “My lord … I … Darth Angral …”

  Malgus’s hand squeezed the comlink as he surmised the meaning behind Jard’s stuttering response. “Speak clearly, Commander.”

  “It seems the peace negotiations are continuing on Alderaan, my lord. Darth Angral has instructed all forces to stand down until matters there crystallize.”

  Malgus watched a patrol of Mark VI interceptors fly over. “Peace negotiations?”

  “That is my understanding, Darth Malgus.”

  Malgus seethed, stared at a smoke plume thrown up by a burning skyrise. “Thank you, Jard.”

  “Will you be returning to Valor, my lord?”

  “No,” Malgus said. “But get that transport to me now. I require an audience with Darth Angral.”

  THE TERMS OF THE NEGOTIATIONS prohibited either the Imperial or Republic delegations from posting external security around the High Council building and compound. Instead, both had
their extended delegations posted in nearby cities.

  Moving with Force-augmented speed, Aryn easily avoided the Alderaanian guards posted on the grounds of the compound. A canine with one of the guard teams must have caught her smell. It growled as she passed, but before the guards could turn on their infrared scanners, Aryn was already a hundred meters away. She did not exit through any of the checkpoints. Instead, she picked her way among the gardens until she reached the compound’s walls, veined in green creepers blooming with yellow and white flowers.

  Without slowing, she drew on the Force, leapt into the air, and arced over the five-meter wall. She hit the ground on the other side, free.

  To her surprise, she did not feel a pull to turn back. She took this as a sign that she had made the right decision.

  The High Council building perched atop a wooded hill. Winding roads, streams, and scenic footpaths led down the hill to a small resort town nestled at its foot. Lights from the town’s buildings blinked through the trees and other foliage. The susurrus of traffic and city life carried up the hill.

  It was late, but not so late that she couldn’t hail an aircar taxi and get to the spaceport before her absence was noted.

  Without looking back, she sped off into the night.

  When she reached town, she located a line of automated aircar taxis parked outside an open-air eatery filled with young people. A Rodian chef manned the central grill, his arms a whirl of cleavers and knives. The smell of roasted meat, smoke, and a spice she could not place filled the air. Music blared from speakers, the bass causing the ground to vibrate. She kept her hood drawn over her face and hopped into the first taxi in line. The anthropomorphic droid driver put an elbow on the seat and turned to face her. It wore a ridiculous cloth hat designed to make it look more human. Given her own fragile emotions, Aryn was pleased to have a droid driver. Droids were voids to her empathic sense.

  “Destination, please.”

  “The Eeseen spaceport,” she answered.

  “Very good, mistress,” it said.

  The door of the taxi closed, the engine started, and the car climbed into the air. The town fell away underneath them.