"Where are yours?" Floria snapped. Suddenly her face shut down and became defensive and angry.
"My mother lives on Tatooine," Anakin said. "She is a slave."
Floria's face softened slightly. "Oh. I'm sorry. Our parents are dead. I don't come from Aaeton. That was a lie. Dane and I are from the Inner Core world of Thracior. We grew up in peaceful times, but five years ago the warlords of Thracior began to argue over territory. Raids began between the different tribes. My mother was Hnsi, my father a Tantt. They were killed because they intermarried. The Hnsis burned our house down and killed our baby sister. Dan and I escaped."
Floria told the story in a monotone, her eyes on the mountain trail. Ahead of them, Dane did not turn or acknowledge he was listening, but Anakin saw his neck flush red.
"Dane and I had to make our way as best we could," Floria said. "We had lost everything, so we had to work. We found jobs in a caf© at a space station, washing up and serving food. Our boss we a very cruel man. We discovered he was wanted by the security forces of a nearby planet. We tricked him into getting caught. We got the reward, but we had to leave the planet. So we kind of fell into bounty hunting. We've been moving around the galaxy ever since."
"When you find something you're good at, you stick to it," Dane said with a cocky assurance Anakin did not quite believe.
"It sounds like a hard life," Anakin remarked.
Floria cocked an eyebrow. "And is yours so easy, Jedi?"
Anakin took the question seriously. "In a way, it is," he said slowly. "I know I am being of service. That makes the path easy to walk."
"Well, I'd rather go down my path in a nice, techno-maxed cruiser," Floria said. "So I guess I'm stuck with bounty hunting."
"Here we are," Obi-Wan called from a short distance ahead. "We left the path here, when we thought someone was following us."
"That was me," Floria said.
Obi-Wan nodded. "Let's find the next clue, Anakin."
Anakin left Floria's side. He pushed their conversation out of his mind. Earlier, finding clues had been fun. Now, it would be serious.
It didn't take long to find the next clue. After a fork in the path, they found a few crumbs from a blumfruit muffin left near flat rock alongside the trail.
"He is clever," Obi-Wan told Anakin, squatting by the clue. "He is leading us on without tipping us off. But we know that Wren would never have left this clue."
Anakin briefly tasted the crumbs. He looked up at his Master, his face grave. "These are from the Temple."
"Are you sure?" Obi-Wan asked.
Anakin nodded. "I'd know Jedi Knight Alicka's muffins anywhere. This must mean that — "
"The bounty hunter definitely has Wren. He has raided his survival pack."
They hurried on. They had lost a good deal of time, and Anakin could tell that his Master was worried about Wren's fate.
They followed the path until it curved along a ridge that overlooked a meadow full of tall, slender, flowering trees. From above, the flowering branches formed a solid carpet of pink. Anakin stopped and examined a large boulder on the side of the trail. He hopped from one boulder to the next.
"This way," he called to Obi-Wan. "He went down from here to the meadow."
He looked back up at his Master. Obi-Wan's gaze swept the trees below. "wren is near. I can feel it. Let's proceed carefully."
Then they made their way carefully down the slope, jumping from rock to rock. Floria and Dane followed at a distance. When they reached a meadow, the perfume of the flowering trees hit their nostrils. Under any other circumstances, Anakin would have paused to drink in the beauty of the spot. After growing up on desert world, he was often overwhelmed by simple things such as flowers and grasses.
The trees had slender triangular trunks, but the branches were thick and wide. The flowers were so large and dense that the top of each tree was a waving mass of frothy pink.
Anakin scanned the meadow, alert for trouble. But instead, he saw Wren sleeping under a tree.
"Master — "
"I see him." Obi-Wan paused. "Something is. not right," he murmured. "I get no sense of the Force from Wren."
Anakin frowned. His Master was right.
Obi-Wan took a step forward. But it was not in the direction Anakin had been looking.
"Master?"
Anakin saw that his Master had headed toward Wren. But this was a different Wren, sleeping under a different tree.
And then Anakin saw another Wren, and another, and another. None of them was the real Jedi. They were merely projections of his image.
"Holograms," Obi-Wan said.
"All of them?" Anakin asked.
He looked at his Master. There was no way to know.
Chapter Eleven
"Stay here and don't try anything," Obi-Wan warned Floria and Dane. "We will handle this."
"Be my guest," Dane answered, his eyes darting to the many Wrens.
"Teleq wants us to run into the meadow," Obi-Wan murmured to Anakin. "He wants us to race from one Wren to another. So we won't."
They didn't need too. They would use the Force.
Obi-Wan and Anakin reached out and gathered it around them. A fellow Jedi was in danger. That made their connection to the Force even stronger, made their ability to gather it more urgent.
Obi-Wan felt the power of Anakin's grasp of the Force. As always, it staggered him.
He scanned the meadow once more, and this time he knew which of the images was not an image. Which one was Wren. When he looked directly at Wren, he felt the answering surge. Anakin had also honed in on the real Wren.
The sound of Obi-Wan lightsaber leaving his belt was no more than a whisper. His leaving his spot was no more than a disturbance in the air. Yet he was gone, across the meadow, racing toward Wren. He could feel rather than hear Anakin behind him.
Suddenly Wren's body snapped into the air. Obi-Wan watched, his heart in his mouth, as Wren was hoisted up into the trees. There was no question in Obi-Wan's mind that Wren must have been given a paralyzing drug of some kind. He could tell by the boneless way Wren's legs and arms flopped as if he were a puppet.
Rage bloomed in his chest, Obi-Wan absorbed it and let it go. He did not need rage to fight this. He need disciple. Calm.
He anticipated the attack before it came. He had known Teleq was luring them on, but he did not care. He was ready to meet the bounty hunter.
He had just not expected the attack to come from above. A shower of poisonous darts rained down from the trees.
"Flechette canisters," Obi-Wan told Anakin. She shifted his focus to the branches over his head. Now he could see Teleq. He was a long-limbed being with hooked fingers and toes, making him adept at climbing and swinging through trees.
Perched on the branches we also flocks of birds. Their feathers were the same bright pink as the flowering trees, allowing them to blend into their surroundings. They were almost as big as Anakin, with large wings folded back against their bodies.