“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Ziara said. “I’m blood, and I’m an honored member of the fleet who just helped save eight thousand lives. I don’t know how far all that will take me, but I’d rather like to find out. You game to find out with me?”

“I don’t know,” Thrawn said hesitantly. “I don’t want you to get in trouble on my behalf.”

“I’m not worried about it,” Ziara said. “Did I mention that my grandfather was an amazingly passionate art collector?”

Thrawn smiled. “If I haven’t mentioned it recently, Ziara, you have a knack for seeking out and exploiting your opponents’ weaknesses. Very well. Shall we once again charge headlong into danger?”

“We shall,” Ziara said. “Besides, we’ve just survived an encounter with a malicious gas giant planet. Really, how bad could my family be?”

The area around the Csaplar spaceport was loud and busy, crowded with people, hotels, restaurants, and entertainment of all sorts. The Irizi homestead was about three hundred kilometers to the northeast, on the far side of the city. Ziara got them a two-person express overground tube car and they headed off.

Across the city. Not, as was usually done, around it.

She wasn’t supposed to do that, she knew. Thrawn wasn’t supposed to know the truth about the Ascendancy’s capital city—no one except senior syndics, flag officers, and the Patriarchs of the Nine Families knew the full truth—and there were plenty of tunnel car routes that would avoid the aboveground sections entirely.

But once again, she didn’t care. The fleet and Aristocra had treated Thrawn shamefully, and her lingering anger over that had awakened a peculiar but surprisingly delicious sense of defiance.

Besides, she reminded herself as they left the spaceport and headed through the buildings and parks and the maze of other overground tubes, it would be an interesting tactical exercise to see how long it took Thrawn to figure it out.

Not long at all, as it turned out. They’d crossed a little more than a third of the sprawling metropolis, and she was watching his expression closely as he stared out the viewport, when his eyes suddenly narrowed. “Something’s wrong,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Ziara asked.

“There don’t seem to be any people here,” Thrawn said. “Not since we left the spaceport area.”

“Of course there are,” Ziara said, pointing across the way at another tube car paralleling theirs in the distance. “You can see two people right there.”

“They’re the exceptions,” Thrawn said. “The other cars we’ve seen have been empty.”

“Maybe they’re just too far away for you to see inside,” Ziara said, feeling both guilty and surprised at how much fun this game was. “You can see that the car exteriors tend to be reflective.”