“We did just cause some damage,” Dez pointed out as he swung himself up through the snarl of vines to a place just below Reath. “I can see why they’d feel endangered.”

Nan’s round cheeks were flushed; both her arms were wrapped around the nearest thick root, but her legs dangled—because the pincers of an 8-T were snapping beneath her feet, keeping her from finding a steady perch. “Are we going to keep talking about droid feelings, or can you stop these stupid things?”

“Stay calm,” Reath said.

Which wasn’t generally a helpful thing to say, at least not to someone currently hanging by her arms with swarms of attacking robots on the way. But it kept everybody quiet for a moment, giving Reath a chance to think and center himself in the Force.

It also gave the 8-Ts a chance to assemble. Dozens of them were traveling down the tunnel’s curved walls, their magnetic treads gripping so well that they might as well have been speeding along a flat surface. Although their dark bodies didn’t show up well against the blackness of space, he could see them swarming by the way they blotted out the stars. Their tiny pruning claws, which not that long before had been cute, clicked and clacked ominously. Affie yelped as one of them clipped off the end of her long, braided hair. If those pincers could slice through thick vines or slender tree branches, they’d cut through flesh and bone, too.

Whatever long-ago zealot gardener had programmed these droids had done too good a job.

“Okay,” Affie said, huffing as she pulled herself into a more secure position within the labyrinth of vines. “This shouldn’t be a problem. You Jedi can fly, right? So just fly us out of here already.”

Dez shook his head. “We can’t fly. Some of us can levitate—”

“Same difference!” Affie insisted.

“—but it’s a complicated thing to do, and difficult under stressful situations,” Dez finished, as though she hadn’t spoken.

Affie made a face. “So you’re telling me you can only fly when you don’t need to? What good is that, exactly?”

Reath couldn’t help thinking she had a point.

Far beneath them, in the lower rings themselves, a strange light flickered—purplish, brilliant. “What was that?” he asked.

“Looks like some kind of an energy field,” Dez speculated. “There’s something interesting down there—whatever it might be.”

“Let’s figure that out once we’re safe from the attack of the killer gardeners—” Affie’s words were cut short with a yelp. “Oww. This vine has spines or something—it scraped me!”

“We have bigger problems,” Nan said, seemingly through gritted teeth, “than a scrape.”

Dez said, “Everyone stay calm until I get to Nan, all right?”