“Oh!” Tahiri exclaimed, wrinkling her nose. “It stinks.”
“Yep,” Corran agreed. “Welcome to Eriadu.”
Anakin agreed, as well, albeit silently. But it was a complex stink. If he imagined this stuff Eriaduans sucked in every day as a painting, an oily, bitter, hydrocarbon stench would be the canvas. Sulfury burnt yellow swirled over it, interspersed with starbursts of white ozone spangles and green chloride stars, all under a gray wash of something vaguely organic and ammoniac.
A light rain was falling. Anakin hoped it wouldn’t burn his skin.
“Is Coruscant like this?” Tahiri asked. She had already forgotten the smell and was tracing with eager eyes the clunky but sky-reaching industrial buildings on all sides of the spaceport. Low leaden clouds dragged over the tallest structures, though the canopy opened in places to a more distant, pastel yellow sky.
“Not really,” Anakin said. “For one thing, the buildings on Coruscant aren’t this ugly.”
“It’s not ugly,” Tahiri said. She sounded defensive. “It’s different. I’ve never been on a world with this much … stuff.”
“Well, Coruscant’s got more ‘stuff,’ and now that I think about it, the lower levels make this look like a cloud city. But at least the air is clean. They don’t muck it up like this.”
“You mean this isn’t natural, this smell?” Tahiri asked.
“Nope,” Corran said. “They make things cheap and dirty here. The perfume you’ve noticed is one of the byproducts. If they don’t watch it, Eriadu will become another Duro. Well, what Duro was before the Yuuzhan Vong got hold of it, anyway.”
“I don’t think you ought to go barefoot here, Tahiri,” Anakin remarked.
Tahiri looked down at the grimy duracrete landing field and grimaced. “Maybe you’re right.”
Off to their right, a bulk freighter cut its underjets and settled on repulsorlifts.
“Okay,” Corran said. “I’m going to arrange for the supplies we need. You two—”
“Stay and guard the ship, I bet,” Anakin muttered.
“Right.”
Tahiri’s brow ruffled. “You mean I came all this way and don’t even get to see the place?”
“No,” Corran said. “When I get back, we’ll go into town and find someplace to eat. We’ll do a little exploring. But I don’t want to stay long; there’s no reason for anyone to double-check our transponder code, but if they do, we could run into a little trouble.”
“Well … okay,” Tahiri assented. She sat on the landing ramp, legs folded underneath her. Together she and Anakin watched Corran flag a ground transport and enter it. A few moments later, the blocky vehicle vanished from sight.
“Do you think people from here think clean worlds smell weird?” Tahiri asked.
“Probably. What did you think of Yavin Four, after all those years on Tatooine?”
“I thought it smelled weird,” she concluded, after a bit of thought. “But in a good way. Mostly in a good way. I mean, part of it smelled like a kitchen midden or a ’fresher sump. But the blueleaf, and the flowers …” She trailed off, and her expression changed. “What do you think the Yuuzhan Vong did to Yavin Four after we left? Do you think they changed it, you know, like they did some of the other planets they captured?”
“I don’t know,” Anakin said. “I don’t want to think about it.” It had been hard enough to see the Great Temple where so much of his childhood had been spent destroyed. To imagine that the verdant jungle and all of its creatures were also gone was more than he was willing to put himself through without proof.
Tahiri’s face stayed long.
“What?” Anakin asked, when she didn’t say anything for a while.
“I lied a minute ago.”
“Really? About what?”
She nodded at the cityscape. “I said it wasn’t ugly. But part of me thinks it is.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s all that attractive,” Anakin replied.
“No,” Tahiri said, her voice suddenly husky. “It’s not like that. It’s just that part of me sees this and thinks abomination.”
“Oh.”
The Yuuzhan Vong had done more to Tahiri than cut her face. They had implanted memories in her—of their language, of a childhood in a crèche, of growing up on a worldship.
“If you hadn’t rescued me, Anakin, I would be one of them now. I wouldn’t remember any other life.”
“Part of you would have always known,” Anakin disagreed. “There’s something in you, Tahiri, that no one could ever change.”
She shot him a startled frown. “You keep saying things like that. What do you mean? Is it good or bad? You mean I’m too stubborn, or what?”
“I mean you’re too Tahiri,” he said.
“Oh.” She attempted a smile and half succeeded. “I guess I’ll take that as a compliment, since you never give me any obvious ones.”
Anakin felt his face warm. He and Tahiri had been best friends for a long time. Now that she was fourteen and he was sixteen, things were getting very confusing. It was like her eyes had changed colors, but they hadn’t. They were just more interesting somehow.
She had cut her hair, right before they left for Eriadu—that had been a shock. She now wore it in a kind of bob, with wispy little bangs that tickled at her eyebrows.
She noticed his regard. “What? You don’t like my hair?”
“It’s fine. It’s a nice cut. About the same length as my mom’s is now.”
“Anakin Solo—” Something inside her cut her sentence off short.
“Did you feel that?” she asked in a hushed voice.
And at the moment, he did. Something in the Force. Fear, panic, resolution, resignation, all bound up together.
“It’s a Jedi,” he murmured.
“A Jedi in trouble. Bad trouble.” She uncoiled like a released spring. “Where are those shoes?”
“Tahiri, no. I’ll go. Someone has to stay with the ship.”
“You do it then. I’m going.” She stood up and went into the ship. Anakin followed. She found a pair of walking slippers in her locker and put them on.
“Just wait a second. Let me figure this out.”
“I don’t need you to figure anything out for me. One of us is in trouble. I’m going to help.”
She was already on her way out and down the landing ramp.
Repeating some of his father’s more inventive expletives, Anakin hurriedly sealed the ship and ran after her.
He caught up with her at the customs-and-immigration line. She breezed past everyone else, but was stopped at the force gate, where a gray-haired official frowned down at her.
“You have to go to the back of the line.”
“No, I don’t,” Tahiri said, passing her hand impatiently.
“You don’t,” the woman agreed. “But I need to see your identification.”
“You don’t care about that,” Tahiri insisted.
“Never mind; don’t bother,” the official replied. “What’s the purpose of your visit to Eriadu?”
“Nothing that would interest you. I have to get through, now!”
The woman shrugged. “Okay. Go on through.” She dropped the force barrier, and Tahiri dashed past.
“Next.”
“I’m with her,” Anakin informed her. “You need to let me through, right now,” he added.
“You need to be with her,” the official said, dropping the force gate again, long enough for Anakin to get through.
Behind him, he heard the next person in line say, “Why don’t you just let me through, as well?”
“Why would I do that?” the official wondered caustically.
Naturally, he’d lost sight of Tahiri, but he knew where she was going. The Jedi they were both feeling was in more distress than ever.
Anakin pushed his way through the rain-slickered portround crowd, through vendors and street performers, past long rows of cantinas and tapcafs and souvenir shops full of mostly fake lacy shellwork and grossly caricatured statuettes of Grand Moff Tarkin.
Three streets in, the crowd seemed to dissipate, and the grubby lanes were almost empty, except for the occasional six-legged rodent. Here the scent of hot metal was overpowering, though the streets were relatively cold and the rain had increased. And ahead of him somewhere, a Jedi’s feet were slowing.
Anakin turned into a long cul-de-sac formed on the left by a chrome-facade skyscraper and on the right by the ribbed-steel wall of a ten-story-high heat sink, steaming in the rain. The end of the alley was the back of another building faced in blackened duraplast. A crowd of vagabonds was gathered, watching a murder about to happen.
The victim was a Jedi, a Rodian. He stood against the heat sink, trying to keep his lightsaber up. Five beings faced him—two with blasters, three with stun batons. All had just turned to face Tahiri, who was about six meters from them, arriving at a dead run, her lightsaber swirling bright patterns over her head.
Anakin saw all of this from a distance of fifty meters or so. He tried to coax his feet to lightspeed.
Taking advantage of Tahiri’s distraction, the Rodian lurched forward. One of the men with a blaster shot him, and the descending screech of the bolt reverberated in the alley.
Tahiri’s blade sheared through a stun baton, nearly taking the hand of the thickset woman wielding it. Anakin winced; Kam had been working with Tahiri on her lightsaber technique, and she was a quick learner, but still a novice.
Novice or not, the thugs with the stun batons backpedaled, drawing blasters instead of taking up the fight hand to hand. Tahiri pressed on, catching one of them and snipping the end of his weapon off. The next man back fired at her and missed. They started to encircle her.
Finally, Anakin arrived. He recognized the Rodian Jedi as Kelbis Nu. The man who had shot the Rodian saw him coming, took careful aim, and fired twice. Two bolts winged into the alley walls, courtesy of Anakin’s lightsaber. He was running past the man, deftly slicing the blaster in half as he went, when he felt a gun pointing at him. He dropped and rolled as the bolt screamed over his head.
A person screamed, too—the man who had shot Kelbis Nu. The blast meant for Anakin had struck him high in the chest, and he fell, legs kicking.
Anakin came back to his feet and found Tahiri facing two men still armed with blasters and two unarmed. They looked uncertain.
It was only then that Anakin realized, by their patches and uniforms, that they were Peace Brigade.
The thugs started backing out of the alley in a small knot, blasters pointed defensively. Anakin stood about a meter to Tahiri’s right and a little in front of her.
“Let’s take ’em,” she said. Her voice had a furious, cold quality to it that Anakin had heard twice; once when she was under the heaviest influence of her Yuuzhan Vong conditioning; once in a vision he’d had of her as a dark Jedi, her face mutilated by the scars and tattoos of a Yuuzhan Vong warmaster.
“No,” Anakin said. “Let them go.”
His generosity didn’t stop the Peace Brigaders from taking a parting shot as they ducked around the corner.
“Jedi brats!” one of the men shouted. “Your days are numbered!”
When he was sure they weren’t just hiding around the corner, waiting for his guard to drop, Anakin turned to survey the damage.
The Peace Brigader had stopped moving. Kelbis Nu was still alive—barely. His glassy eyes were looking beyond Anakin, but he reached up a hand.
“Ya …,” he said weakly.
“Tahiri, use your wrist comm. Try to find the local emergency channel.” He took Nu’s hand and pulsed strength from the Force into him. “Hold on for me,” he said. “Help will be here soon.”
“Ya—ya—ya …,” the Rodian gasped.
“Don’t try to talk,” Anakin told him. “Waste of strength.”
Suddenly Kelbis Nu went still, his trembling ceased, and for the first time he seemed to actually see Anakin.
“Yag’Dhul,” he whispered, and behind that whisper was a stormwind of danger.
That was all. The Jedi’s life left him with his last breath.
Tahiri was shouting at someone over her wrist comm.
“Never mind, Tahiri,” Anakin said. “He’s gone.” Tears started in his eyes, but he battled them down.
“He can’t be,” Tahiri said. “I was going to save him.”
“I’m sorry,” Anakin said. “We got here too late.”
Tahiri’s shoulders began to twitch, and she made a sound like hiccuping as she fought to control her tears. Anakin watched her, wishing he could help, that he could make the grief go away, but there was nothing he could do. People died. You got used to it.
It still hurt.
“He said something at the end,” Anakin told her, hoping to distract her.
“What?”
“The name of a planet, Yag’Dhul. It’s not far from here, right where the Corellian Trade Spine and the Rimma Trade Route meet. And I felt … danger. Like he was trying to tell me something bad is happening there.” He glanced down at the bodies. “C’mon. We’d better go.”
“We have to do something,” Tahiri said. “We can’t just let those guys get away with it.”
“We can’t hunt them,” Anakin said.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re Jedi, not assassins.”
“We could at least tell security or whoever enforces the law around here.”
“We’re supposed to be here anonymously, remember? If we draw attention to ourselves, we endanger the mission.”
“Some mission. Getting supplies. This is more important. Anyway, we’ve already drawn attention to ourselves.” She nodded at the crowd of vagrants drifting toward them, the curiosity of two dead bodies overcoming their fear of two live Jedi.
And as if to highlight her point, a trio of groundcars arrived at the end of the alley and disgorged armed, uniformed people.
“I guess we’ll be talking to security after all.” Anakin clipped his lightsaber to his belt and held up his hands to show they were empty.
The officers approached warily, led by a lanky, craggy-faced man with the fading remnants of a black eye. He looked down at the two bodies and back up at them. Then his eyes focused on their lightsabers—Tahiri still had hers in her hand.
He raised his gun. “Place your weapons on the ground,” he said.
“We didn’t do this,” Tahiri exploded. “We were trying to help.”
“Put it down, now, girlie.”
“Girlie?”
“Do as he says, Tahiri,” Anakin said, carefully detaching his weapon and placing it near his feet.
“Why?”
“Do it.”
“It’s good advice, kid,” the officer said.
Radiating anger, Tahiri placed her lightsaber on the duracrete.
“Good. As officers of the judicials, it is now my duty to inform you that we are detaining you for questioning and possible prosecution.”
“What? You’re arresting us?” Tahiri said.
“Until we sort this out, yes.”
“Ask the crowd. They saw what happened.”
“We will; don’t worry. There will be a thorough investigation. Make this easy on yourselves.”
But words are only the shadows of thoughts, and behind the officer’s words, Anakin felt something that suggested that this was going to be anything but easy.