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power-hungry Sith overlord.”
    “Yes, I see your point,” Kem said, her eyes flaring at the terms he had used to describe her. She sighed and turned to Pagorski. “I cannot allow you to return to the Empire knowing my true—”
    “I won’t tell
anyone
!” Pagorski interrupted, clearly terrified. “I give you my word as—”
    “If your word had any value, you wouldn’t have been in a GAS detention center in the first place,” Kem retorted. “But there’s no need to kill you. I’m just going to use the Force to wipe away some of your memories.”
    Relief flooded Pagorski’s face. “I understand,” she said, visibly relieved. “Feel free.”
    “I wasn’t asking, Lieutenant.”
    Kem placed her hands on the sides of Pagorski’s head, then looked into the woman’s eyes and locked gazes. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, and Wynn thought the mindwipe might be as painless as it was mysterious.
    Then the air between the two women began to shimmer. Pagorski’s eyes opened wide, and her face twisted into a mask of horror. Rokari Kem’s fingers grew long and thin, and suddenly her arms dissolved into gray slimy tentacles, and in the Sith’s place stood the hideous thing that Wynn had glimpsed on waking, a slender sinuate form with coarse yellow hair and a mouth so broad that it reached from ear to ear.
    Abeloth.
    Pagorski’s jaw fell open in a wordless scream. The tentacles shot down her throat, into her ears and nostrils, and began to pulse. Horrible gagging noises erupted from her mouth. Her entire body went limp and hung, convulsing, by the ropy tendrils that had been inserted into her head.
    Finally, Pagorski’s expression went blank. Her complexion grew so pale and translucent that Wynn could see the tentacles throbbing inside her face, pumping something dark and viscous into her sinuses and her ears and down into her trachea. He began to scramble back, pressing himself against the wall behind him so fiercely it seemed to yield. The cell reverberated with a loud, growling howl that he did not recognize as his own voice until he found himself crouching in the corner, gnawing at his knuckles and banging his skull against the durasteel.
    The thing turned its gruesome head toward Wynn’s corner, then fixed its blazing white eyes on him and smiled a grin as deep and dark as the Maw itself.
    “Now that you’ll be serving me, you should know this about your Beloved Queen of the Stars,” Abeloth said. “She is
so
much more than a Sith.”

F OR THE TENTH TIME IN AS MANY MINUTES , B EN S KYWALKER GLANCED at the chrono hanging on the wurlwood panel across from him. The liberation of Coruscant was scheduled to begin … well,
now
, and he and Vestara were still sitting in the pages’ closet outside Senator Suldar’s office. Hovering before them was a float pallet bearing a large crate wrapped in glitterfilm, and in her hands Vestara held a silver tray bearing a small envelope addressed to MY DEAR FRIEND KAMERON .
    “You have a hot date waiting?” Vestara asked in a taunting voice. Dressed in the dark blue robe of a Senate page, she was wearing a custom-built disguise that would convince even the most sophisticated facial recognition software in the galaxy that she was a Falleen adolescent. “The way you keep checking the chrono, she must be a real dazzler.”
    Ben smiled. The only date he had was after the battle … with Vestara herself. “She’s quite beautiful—for a human.” Also dressed in the robe of a Senate page, Ben was disguised as a male Twi’lek. “But the party we’re going to, you can’t be late for.”
    Vestara arched one brow. “Then maybe she should go alone. If you don’t like human girls, she’d probably have more fun without you anyway.”
    “I don’t think so,” Ben said, still smirking. “She’s fallen for me pretty hard. I think it’s the head tails.”
    Vestara rolled her eyes. “Typical male—one little smile, and you think it’s love.” She turned