ARYN UNWRAPPED and ate the protein bar Zeerid had given her. She and T7 had sheltered in one of the apartments. She sat on a dusty couch, the stink of a burning planet in her nostrils. She replayed in her mind Master Zallow’s death, the look on his face. She saw once more the ruins of the Temple and she knew that his body lay beneath the mountain of rubble.

Fighting the rising tide of grief, she adopted a meditative posture, closed her eyes, and tried to drift into the Force.

“Still heart, still mind,” she intoned, but both proved impossible.

Eventually, she sat back on the couch and stared up at the sky. The omnipresent smoke looked like black clouds against the stars. Now and again she saw a ship’s lights in the distance and presumed them to belong to an Imperial patrol craft.

In time, her emotional and physical exhaustion chased her down and she drifted off to sleep.

She dreamed of Master Zallow. He stood before her on the ruins of the Jedi Temple, his robes billowing in the breeze. The cracked stone face of Odan-Urr watched them. Master Zallow’s mouth moved but no sound emerged. He seemed to be trying to tell her something.

“I cannot hear you, Master,” she said. “What are you saying?”

She tried to get closer to him, picking her way through the debris, but the closer she tried to get, the farther he moved away. Finally her frustration got the better of her and she screamed, “I don’t know what you want me to do!”

She woke, heart pounding, and found T7 standing before her. He whistled a question.

“No, I’m fine,” she said, but she wasn’t.

She stood and pulled her cloak tight about her.

She checked her chrono. Zeerid had been gone for over an hour. He would probably be gone another hour, at least.

Her dream had left her shaken. She took the hilt of Master Zallow’s lightsaber in her hands, turned it over, studied its craftsmanship. Its design mirrored his personality: solid, without flourish, but wonderful in its plainness.

She wanted to return to the Temple, to the scene where murder had occurred. She should have made Zeerid set down the speeder when they’d been over it earlier. She wanted to walk among the ruins and commune with the dead. She hooked Master Zallow’s weapon to her belt.

“I have to go somewhere, Tee-seven. I’ll be back soon.”

He whistled another question, alarm in the beeps.

“Tell him I’ll be back. There is nothing to worry about.”

She left the ruined apartment building and headed back toward the Jedi Temple.

There was something there for her. There had to be.

WHEN ZEERID RETURNED to their safehouse in the ruined apartment building, he found Aryn gone. Her absence put a lump in his throat. T7 whistled to him from one of the apartments.