Fett's scalp tightened and prickled. It was exactly what he'd said, and it was too stupid and juvenile a line for anyone to make up on the spot. No, he has to have information, he has to be putting on a show, he got the information from someone . . . but how?

The man took a deep breath and hesitated before speaking again.

"You told her that you'd make Lenovar pay for what he did to her, and she tried to talk you out of it—"

It was too much for Fett. "Enough." He thrust out his hand, palm up. "So you can read the stone."

Venku lowered his chin. Even without sight of the man's face, Fett knew the expression behind the visor was fearless and protective anger.

The old Mando took a gentler approach than his bodyguard. "Just tell me what you want to know," he said. "I know these things can be painful."

Mirta didn't give Fett a chance to answer. It was just as well: he couldn't bring himself to say it. To onlookers, he was just being typically silent and surly.

"I want to know how she spent her last hours," Mirta said. "I want to find her body."

The old man put the heart-of-fire on the table while he removed his helmet. He had a fine-boned, thin face and a wispy beard that was whiter than his hair, which still showed traces of sandy blond. He was sweating: picking up the memories and traces of time embedded in the stone's molecular structure seemed to be exhausting him.

And he didn't have a Kiffar facial tattoo. But then neither did Mirta, despite the fact that Ailyn had embraced the Kiffar culture completely. In some

lines of work, a permanent identifying mark had its drawbacks.

"It doesn't give me the memories in order," said the veteran. "It's all random, like flashbacks. I see images, hear sounds, smell aromas, and so on. Making sense of it isn't easy."

He laid his helmet on the table and picked up the stone again, this time pressing it between both palms. Venku put a steadying hand on his shoulder, and Fett felt inexplicably uneasy.

"Do you want me to . . . find acts of violence?"

Fett glanced at Mirta, not for agreement but because he couldn't help it. Her brow was creased in a little frown. Dry-eyed; focused. Not a pretty girl, but a good strong bone structure.

"You'll find plenty of that," she said. "She was a bounty hunter."

"You're not in here, Mirta . . . ," said the old Mando, eyes tight shut.

"She died before I was born. I want to know who killed her."

There were a few more people now in the tapcaf than there had been.

Fett indicated the door with a jerk of his thumb. "Out. I'll let you know when you can finish your drinks."

I want to know who killed her, too. It's too long ago, but I want to know.

"She wore this all the time." The old man looked almost in pain, and Venku squeezed his shoulder. "She was angry a lot of the time.

Scared, too. There are so many people passing through here . . . but I keep coming back to a chart of Phaeda. Red skies, and someone she was following. Resada? Rezoda?"

Mirta didn't blink. She seemed transfixed. "Grandmama didn't tell anyone where she was going, or who she was hunting."

The man opened his eyes and took a rasping breath. "Phaeda.

Whatever it was, it happened on Phaeda." He jerked back and stared at the stone. "And she fought to hang on to this. She fought hard."

Fett managed not to swallow. He was sure they'd all hear it. "She lost."

"I want to know," said Mirta.

Venku stepped in. "He's had enough. Maybe later." He retrieved his helmet and tried to steer the old man away. "Come on."

"I don't know about the when," the old man said, pulling from Venku's grasp, "but I know it's Phaeda. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."

He handed the stone back to Mirta, placing it in her cupped palms with both hands as if it were a live fledgling. Fett had never been comfortable around that mystical kind of thing. He simply observed.

"It's okay," Mirta said. "You've told me a lot, and I'm grateful.

Let me buy you an ale."

"Maybe another day, ner ad'ika," Venku said. "But thank you."

Mirta watched the door close. As she turned back to Fett, the door opened again and disgruntled drinkers filtered back in, giving the two of them a wide berth.

"Well? Was he right, Ba'buir?"

Fett shrugged. It had shaken him, like all the painful memories that flooded back without his permission. "On the nail."

"Well, we can follow that lead."

Fett dreaded what else the old man had seen in the stone. Old man.

He was only ten or maybe fifteen years older than Fett. "I don't think I've ever been to Phaeda."

The tapcaf owner lined up fresh ales on the bar. "I see you've met Kad'ika, then, Mand'alor."

"Yeah. Fascinating."

"The old man with him—don't see him around much. Gotab, I think. I used to think that was Kad'ika's father, but apparently not."

The name didn't mean a thing to Fett, but he filed it mentally under subjects to investigate later. Phaeda. He'd scour Slave I's databases, maybe hack into the Phaeda archives. Mirta was examining the stone closely.

"Must have cost every credit you had, Ba'buir."

She passed the heart-of-fire to Fett and he turned it over in his fingers, touching the carving on the edge. Only the most skilled cutter could facet the uncut stones without shattering them, let alone carve them.

"It's rare to find one with all the colors in it. They're usually red or orange, but the light ones with the whole rainbow . . . they cost."

"I saw a blue one once," Mirta said.

"I was sixteen. I couldn't afford a blue one."

Fett could afford one now, any number of them, even the rarest of deep royal-blue stones that showed their incredible range of multicolored fire only in bright sunlight. But he no longer had a lover to give them to. It had been a very long time.

"Tell me something about Ailyn," he said. "Was she ever happy?"

Mirta chewed over the question. "I don't think so."

The only thing Fett knew about his own daughter beyond the people she'd killed and what she'd stolen was that she had never been happy, never called him Dad, and that she'd taught Mirta to hate him. He still hadn't questioned the girl about that. The time never felt right.

"Were you ever happy?" Mirta asked.

Fett never considered if anyone wondered if he was happy or not.

There seemed to be a blanket assumption that Boba Fett coasted along on a narrow path of dispassion, never angry, never happy, never sad.

"I was happy as a kid," he said at last. "I stopped being happy on Geonosis and I never bothered trying again."

But he'd been angry, all right: angry, grief-stricken, terrified, lonely, and hostile. He'd run through all the negative emotions at full intensity in those days after his father's death, crammed in the spaces between doing what he had to do to survive, when he needed to be all cold logic. It was a switch he had to throw, off and on, off and on, until one day it didn't switch on again, and the pain was gone. So were the joy and the love.

If he did what his dad wanted, it might come back. If he did an honorable job, and tried to at least understand the remnant of his own family, he stood a chance of recapturing some of what was ripped from him in that arena on Geonosis.

"Drink up, Ba'buir" Mirta said. "I want to go and do some digging about Phaeda."