“Where is she, Tee-seven?” he asked.

The small droid chattered, whistled, and beeped so fast that Zeerid could scarcely follow. In the end, he gathered that Aryn had left the apartment after a short rest, and that she did not tell T7 where she was going.

But Zeerid knew where she would go. She’d go to where Master Zallow died.

“Let’s go, Tee-seven,” he said, and loaded the droid up onto the speeder.

ARYN’S EMOTIONS ROILED, her mood as dark as the night. Ordinarily, the artificial lights of hundreds of thousands of businesses and advertisements lit Coruscant’s night sky. But the attack had knocked the power out over huge swaths of the planet, and the dark silence made the city feel like a mausoleum.

Aryn picked her way through the black darkness and approached the Temple along the wide, stone-paved processional that once had led to the Temple’s grand main entrance. Malgus must have used the same approach, she realized, and it appalled her that the last person to walk the processional before the Temple’s fall had been a Sith. She found it obscene.

She fancied she was retracing his footsteps, her boots effacing the wrongness of his passage.

She slowed, steeling herself, as the rubbled structure materialized out of the darkness before her. The attack had turned the Temple’s once curved lines and elegant spires into a shapeless mound of ruin, a burial cairn for the Jedi Order.

The sight of it scratched the scab from the wound of her grief. As she approached, the ghosts of her past rose out of the ruin—her time in the Temple as a youngling, as a Padawan, the ceremony when she’d been promoted to Jedi Knight. The Temple had been her home for decades, and her father had been murdered in it.

In her mind’s eye she saw the final blow that had slain her master, as clear as if she were once more watching the vid in the Temple’s surveillance room. She saw Malgus spin, reverse his grip, and drive his lightsaber through Master Zallow. And once more she saw the look in Master Zallow’s face as the light went out of his eyes, the despair there. He had failed and he had known it. Maybe he had also known, as Aryn now did, that the Jedi Order had failed, too.

The thought of her master dying with despair in his heart drove a hot spike of rage through the sore of her loss.

And yet … she could not shake the look she had seen in his eyes in her dream. It had looked like concern, a warning maybe. He had wanted to tell her something …

She shook her head. It had been but a dream, not a vision, just a projection of her own subconscious. She dismissed it.

She would find Malgus and she would kill him.