“Are we on the same side or not?”

Skirata was ashen. “We'll go it alone then.” Fi had rarely seen him truly angry, but when he had been pushed too far he went white and quiet and dangerous. “Come on, son. We've got work to do.”

He took Fi's elbow and steered him to the doors. It didn't bode well. Fi looked back over his shoulder at Obrim—a man equally white, equally tense—and the captain shook his head.

“Okay, Kal, I'll give it to you anyway, but may the Force save your sorry backside if this goes wrong.”

Skirata turned. He seemed genuinely surprised: he hadn't been bluffing. He really had been storming off and cutting Obrim out of the loop. “What happens if it does go wrong, Jailer? You get into trouble with your bosses. But my boys die.”

“Yeah, and so might mine if they get in the way by accident.”

“Then don't get in the way.”

“Okay, what time did your people grab the woman?” Obrim asked.

“Midafternoon.”

“Well, there was someone trying to get hold of our irresistible friend here via a government comlink shortly before CSF went to his home an hour ago.”

“You mean there's someone else in the GAR working with him?”

“Yes, and if we could pin down the transmission source, I'd have given it to you.”

Skirata's shoulders sagged. “Thank you, my friend.”

“Don't mention it. Just try to give me a warning before you start another war here, okay?”

“That was a nice smokescreen line to the media, by the way. Gang war indeed.”

“It's very nearly true. But thank your oily friend Mar Rugeyan for that. You'll owe him one, I'm sure.”

Skirata rolled his eyes. Fi continued to be surprised by the machinations of political life in Coruscant. He was grateful—and not for the first time—that all he had to do was shoot or be shot. There was no time to worry or plan: either you did a better, faster job than the enemy at that particular moment or you died.

“Rugeyan wants good news,” Skirata said. “Let's see if we can find some for him.”

Obrim smiled ruefully at Fi and made a gesture of tipping back a glass of ale. “Don't forget that drink, will you?”

They left Obrim in the morgue and took the service turbolift to disappear into the late-night crowds around the CSF complex and emerge at a taxi platform to wait for Jusik to collect them. Skirata simply glanced at three innocent Coruscanti citizens waiting there, too, and they decided they had urgent business elsewhere. Kal'buir could look anything but paternal when he felt like it.

Fi pulled his collar up, still feeling horribly exposed without his armor. Skirata rummaged in his pocket, took out a bar of candied fruit, and broke it in two. He handed Fi the bigger piece.

“What now?” Fi said.

“It's the only solid lead we've got,” Skirata said. “And it's a mess, but I'm reluctant to let it go and start over.”

“I bet the Seps are looking for another source of supply for their explosives now. If this were Qiilura or any other mining planet, they could do it easily. On an urban world like this … well, scoring a few blasters is easy, but shopping for explosives is going to attract attention. Maybe this is where we use Ordo's little cache of stuff that goes bang.”

Skirata stopped chewing. “I'm never sure if we have the same ideas because they're common sense, or because I trained you and now you're as crazy as I am, son.”

“Well, they know their original consignment didn't arrive, so now you might as well use the stuff as bait.”

“And there's Qibbu.”

“Now, that's dangerous.”

“No, that's when Hutts come in useful. They're like one big scum want-ad service. Seeing as he thinks we're doing a bit of private business without the GAR'S consent anyway, why disappoint him? He can put the word out that Kal has something to sell.”

“But then we've pinpointed our operational base for them.”

“You think Qibbu will want to advertise that we're in his precious hotel, with the possibility of unpleasantness and lots of damage following him home, too? He won't discuss locations. He likes being alive.”

“But you're going to tell Obrim, right?”

“Only the location when we have a delivery set up with our new customers,” Skirata said. “And then only to warn off CSF.”

He lapsed into silence. Around them—keeping a sensible distance, because Skirata looked remarkably gangsterish himself right then—ordinary citizens and tourists from dozens of species were making their way in and out of brightly lit clubs, restaurants, and shops. They were dressed in exotic, colorful clothes, chattering and enjoying themselves: they were arm in arm with friends, or holding hands with lovers, or accompanied by gaping children who had never seen a city-planet like this at night.

Fi knew how those kids felt. It was still as much a spectacle of miraculous delight to him as it had been when he first saw it from the crew bay of a police cruiser. But it was also now something alien to him, something he had no stake in and could never fully understand.

The civilians around him could have no idea of what was happening right in the middle of their safe daily lives. A few meters from them, a mercenary and a soldier who had no official orders were planning to unload enough explosives on the black market to destroy whole quadrants.

But it was a fair trade. Because Fi had no idea of what their lives were about, either.

We live in parallel worlds. We can see each other, but we never meet.

At least Darman seemed to have found a bridge to a normal life, if you could call a Jedi normal. Fi wondered if his brother realized that everyone knew what was going on with him and the general.

If he were Darman, he wouldn't care.

Operational house, Qibbu's Hut, 0056 hours, 381 days after Geonosis

Ordo placed the tight-wrapped packs of five-hundred grade thermal plastoid explosive on the table and stacked them in piles of ten. Darman picked one up and fondled it with the fascinated expression of a connoisseur of explosives.

It was interesting, Etain thought, to note what made Darman feel relaxed and confident, because sitting on fifty kilos of ultrahigh explosives didn't reassure her at all.

“Dar, cut it out,” Niner said. “We'd like the hotel to still be here when Vau arrives. Reckon you can avoid blowing the place up for the next hour?”

“This stuff is perfectly safe unless you stick something metallic in it and trigger an electrolytic reaction,” Darman said. He smiled at Etain before lobbing a hand-sized pack at Niner. “Udesii, ner vod.”

Niner caught it and swore. Then he threw it back.

Etain could hear the shower running in the 'fresher. She could also see Atin wandering around, eyes fixed in defocus on the grubby carpet as if he was rehearsing a speech in his head, and he was trailing a disturbance in the Force that felt like the aftermath of a battle. She'd felt Atin's raw grief on Qiilura, the pain at losing his original brothers at Geonosis, and she could taste the dark depths in him all too easily.

Fi, even without the ability to use the Force, seemed to be able to do the same. From time to time he got up and gripped his brother by his upper arm, talking very quietly and earnestly to him.

Much of the conversation was in Mandalorian, which she didn't understand well enough, but she certainly picked up one word that needed no translation: Vau.

Boss, Jusik, and Scorch had gone back down to the bar. Sev and Fixer were out on the landing platform—now looking like a normal hotel roof covered with assorted transport from speeder bikes and airspeeders to a couple of taxis—providing a discreet perimeter defense in case someone had tracked the strike team back to Qibbu's. The whole place simmered with tension and—yes, it was there, very subtly, but it was there—fear.