“Let’s go, but slowly.”

He took a few steps ahead, toward the burning house. They passed a corral, where several terrified steelees rushed and stamped, their eyes huge, nostrils flaring. Porter lifted a hand.

“Easy, friends,” he said, and the beasts calmed immediately, sinking to their haunches, huddling together in their pen.

“Wrecked speeder,” Loden said, pointing at a smoldering pile of wreckage not far from the house. “Bodies, too. And a bunch of mining droids—taken out by blasterfire. My guess is the family tried to use the droids to defend themselves. Didn’t work, or not well enough.”

Porter called out from over at the steelee corral, where he was squatting, peering closely at a patch of disturbed ground by its gate.

“The Nihil took some of the family’s steelees when they lost their speeder. I can see the whole story right here in the dirt. Six people, four captives.”

He stood, and his face seemed cold enough to extinguish the fire.

“Two of them are kids.”

Bell looked more closely at the house—there was something on the door. It looked odd, like writing, or…

He stepped closer. The door to the Blythes’ home had been marked by three jagged lines zigzagging from top to bottom. The edges were ragged, savage, as if carved by a vibroblade running low on charge.

“There’s something here,” he said, and took another step.

The lines looked like…lightning. Three jagged lightning strikes. The heat from the fire was intense, but the symbol was fascinating, in some primal way. He moved closer, needing to see it as clearly as he could.

Ember barked, a sound of sharp, unmistakable alarm.

Bell stopped and turned to look at the charhound.

“What is it, girl?” he said, and then he noticed why Ember was trying to warn him—four trails of raised dirt, moving toward him at incredible speed.

Mole mines, Bell had time to think, and then he did two things.

First, he pushed Ember with the Force. He tried to be gentle, but the point was to shove her back out of harm’s way. Whatever damage he did to her, it couldn’t be as bad as getting caught in an explosion. Then Bell leapt, straight up, unholstering his lightsaber as he did.

The mole mines were designed to race toward their target just below the surface of the ground, and then shoot up into the air, exploding at roughly a meter high, sending out a ring of horizontal shrapnel along with a crown of intense heat and flame. They were deadly, and cruel—most people never even had a chance to recognize they were being attacked before they were killed.