Instinctively, Jaina ducked to one side. Jacen threw himself in the opposite direction as a blast struck the hard ceiling and arrowed back down through the spot where he had stood only a moment before.
“Run!” Tenel Ka said. “Faster!”
They raced along the tunnels, climbing toward the surface as the guards launched after them, still firing … still missing. Anew alarm sounded; one of the guards must have reported his coordinates and called for reinforcements.
“Do not stop yet,” Tenel Ka advised.
“Save the lightsabers for close-in, hand-to-hand fighting,” Jaina said.
“I vote we put that off as long as possible,” Jacen added.
“I agree,” Raynar said, puffing.
More guards joined the chase, converging from different directions.
Turning a corner, Tenel Ka spotted a tarpaulin-covered alcove marked with a glowing blue triangle. She recognized the armory symbol immediately. “Aha,” she said. “Here.” She grabbed the tarpaulin and tore it aside to reveal the smallweapons storage area.
“Are we supposed to just grab some weapons and shoot?” Raynar asked. “I’ve never fired a blaster before.”
The sound of footsteps echoed from several corridors at once. The angry guards bellowed.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Jaina said. She dashed into the alcove and emerged with a thermal detonator in her hand. “We don’t have much time,” she said. “But I have a feeling this is going to cause a lot of damage. Everybody split up.”
She gestured in different directions. “Raynar, go that way. Jacen and Tenel Ka, you head down that corridor.”
With the time-lock fuse set on the thermal detonator, she tossed it into the weapons storage area, then raced after Raynar. A contingent of guards burst into the intersection and howled as they saw their prey disappearing in two different directions.
But before they could follow, Jaina yelled, “Time!” She pulled Raynar with her into the shelter of a shallow niche in the rock wall. In the opposite tunnel, Jacen and Tenel Ka dove together to the floor.
The thermal detonator went off like a planet exploding. The weapons storage alcove blasted out with the force of a turbolaser battery. The remaining thermal detonators exploded in a sympathetic eruption. Power packs from the stored blasters added fuel. Rock walls crumbled. Aftershocks trembled through the corridors. The low ceiling collapsed, and stunned guards tried in vain to cover their heads. Curving walls sloughed into rubble. Smoke and fire gushed in all directions, invading every open pathway.
Feeling the heat singe his jumpsuit, Jacen rolled and tried to cover Tenel Ka’s unprotected skin. His ears popped from the overpressure wave.
Within moments the shock front raced past the place where they’d taken shelter. Jacen stood up and brushed himself off. Tenel Ka touched his arm. “Thank you, Jacen,” she said. “That was very brave.”
“Just my protective instinct,” he said with a lopsided grin. He turned to look back up the corridor and discovered that the walls had collapsed, cutting them off entirely from his sister and Raynar.
“Looks like we’re on our own,” he said.
“We will manage,” Tenel Ka answered. “We must get outside, where Lowbacca can find us.”
Hearing distant shouts of alarm approaching from an open passage, they limped wearily off down the tunnel before they could be captured again.
Raynar and Jaina plodded ahead. They had not been harmed by the avalanche or the explosion, but they stumbled from exhaustion.
“I hope Jacen’s all right. And Tenel Ka,” Raynar said.
Jaina could sense that her twin brother and her friend had not been harmed. “They’re fine. But we have to put some distance between us will converge there. Jacen and Tenel Ka can take care of themselves.”
“Of course.” Raynar forced a smile. “They’re Jedi Knights, aren’t they?”
“They know where to meet us in the mountains—if we can get out there, that is.”
They ran uphill, away from the fading dust of the explosion. Neither Jaina nor Raynar had a map of the catacombs, nor did they have Tenel Ka’s instinctive sense of direction. But if they continued uphill, they decided, sooner or later they would break out to the surface.
“I think I see light ahead,” Raynar said after what seemed like hours. “Natural light.”
As if in response, alarmed shouts and nervous blaster fire rang out from behind, though the guards could not possibly have seen them. Yet.
Jaina and Raynar sprinted ahead toward the light.
“It’s a passage to the outside!” Raynar said. “We made it.”
“But I’m not so sure we want to go there,” Jaina replied. “We’ve gone a couple of kilometers laterally—we may not come out in the narrow temperate zone.”
But they hurried along anyway until they reached the opening. A blast of heat struck Jaina’s face. She looked out upon the fiery day side of Ryloth, with its unrelenting, pounding sun and scalding-hot rocks.
“I’ve got a bad feeling this isn’t where we wanted to be,” she said.
Flaming light seared a desolate landscape incapable of supporting life in anything but the deepest shadows. Farther in the distance, cracks and rivers of running lava broke up the landscape.
Blackened outcroppings slumped like rotted teeth, eroded by temperatures near the melting point.
Behind them, though, the shouting of Diversity Alliance guards seemed to be coming closer.
Jaina looked out at the hellish landscape, wondering what use the Twi’leks could possibly have had for this opening. Did they send criminals out into the heat to die under the burning sun?
“C’mon, Raynar, we don’t have much choice,” she said. “Maybe if we keep to the shadows…”
Picking their way carefully through the rocky debris, they left the cool tunnels behind and were soon swallowed up by the heat.
Jacen and Tenel Ka stood at the end of the passageway. They had run for kilometers, escaped numerous groups of guards, fled from every approaching noise. Tenel Ka said they had gone through the core of the mountains—and now they stared out a large opening across a glacial landscape with frozen mountains, ice floes, and a night sky so clear and cold the stars looked like chips of ice floating in a black lake.
“We won’t survive out there for long,” Jacen said with an involuntary shiver. “But we can’t survive long in here with those guards and Nolaa Tarkona still after us.”
“She will not hesitate to kill us this time,” Tenel Ka said. Her lizardskin armor gleamed in the dim light, but it offered little protection from the cold winds outside.
Jacen stood next to his friend. He and Tenel Ka were both trained in the Force. They weren’t completely helpless.
“We have our wits, our lightsabers, our Jedi skills,” Jacen said. “We shouldn’t need anything else to keep ourselves alive.” He smiled bravely.
They had to find their way back to the temperate zone somehow and meet up with Lowie.
Tenel Ka nodded. “I agree, Jacen, my friend.”
16
Lusa waded into the sparkling green pool at the base of the waterfall.
Spreading her arms, she closed her eyes and let the droplets of cool spray caress her face.
There was a strange tingling sensation along the back of her neck. She had always been sensitive to the Force and, though she’d never had much training, she was sure Jaina and Raynar had described this as a sense of impending danger. Raynar, the twins, and Tenel Ka had been gone for nearly six days now. She knew something was wrong … but what could she do about it?
Lusa waded deeper into the pool, and when the frothing water rose above her flanks, she swam straight toward the pounding waterfall. She had promised Raynar that she would try not to worry for at least three days, and she had resisted the urge to wallow in thoughts of the perils her friends might encounter while rescuing Lowie from the cruel Diversity Alliance. Although each day, the tingling at the back of her neck had returned, each day it had faded again.