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we’d better get out of here.”
    Luke followed Han’s gaze and found the gray blemish on the ceiling beginning to blister. There was no froth yet, but a long shadow down the center suggested the surface would soon start bubbling.
    Luke was about to turn toward the exit when his dangersense made the hairs on his neck stand upright. He did not sense anything unusual from the eavesdroppers who had been watching them—no hardening of resolve, no cresting wave of anger or gathering lump of fear. He remained where he was, pretending to study the blemish on the ceiling as he opened himself more fully to the Force.
    But instead of expanding his awareness as he would normally do when searching for an unseen threat, Luke waited quietly, patiently, without motion. He was trying to feel not the threat itself, but the ripples it created in the Force around it. The technique was one he had developed—with his nephew, Jacen—to search for beings who could hide their presences in the Force.
    “Uh, Luke?” Han had already taken a dozen steps toward the exit and was standing in the middle of a long column of Saras porters. The insects were swinging their line around him, rushing a load of five-meter hamogoni logs into the hold of a boxy Damorian SpaceBantha freighter. “You coming?”
    “Not yet,” Luke said. “Why don’t you go on ahead and ask about a place to stay? I’ll join you in a few minutes.”
    Han frowned, then shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
    “Perhaps Artoo and I should go with Captain Solo.” C-3PO was two steps ahead of Han. “He’s sure to need a translator.”
    But R2-D2 remained behind. Luke had been forced to remove a motivation module to preserve a secret memory cache that had surfaced last year, and now the little droid refused to leave his side.
    As Han departed, Luke worked to quiet his mind, to shut out the booming and banging and whirring of the busy hangar, the swirling mad efficiency of the Killiks and filmy hot weight of the dank air, to sense nothing but the Force itself, holding him in its liquid grasp, lapping at himfrom all sides, and soon he felt one set of ripples that seemed to come out of nowhere, from an emptiness where he sensed only a vague uneasiness in the Force, where he felt nothing except a cold, empty hole.
    Luke turned toward the emptiness and found himself looking under an old Gallofree Star Barge that was listing toward a collapsed strut. The shadows beneath its belly were so thick and gray that it took a moment to find the source of the ripples he’d felt, but finally he noticed a pair of almond-shaped eyes watching him from near the stern. They had green irises surrounded by yellow sclera, and they were set in a slender blue face with high cheeks and a thin straight nose. The thick tendrils of a pair of lekku curled back from the top of the forehead, arching over the shoulders and vanishing behind a lithe female body.
    “Alema Rar.” Luke let his hand drop to the hilt of his lightsaber. “I’m glad to see you survived the trouble at Kr.”
    “ ‘Trouble,’ Master Skywalker?” The Twi’lek scuttled forward into the light. “That’s a pretty word for it.”
    Alema was dressed in a Killik-silk bodysuit, the color of midnight and as close fitting as a coat of paint. The cloth was semitransparent, save for an opaque triangle that covered the sagging, misshaped shoulder above a dangling arm. Luke’s danger sense had formed an icy ball between his shoulder blades, but both of the Twi’lek’s hands were visible and empty, and the only weapon she carried was the new lightsaber hanging from the belt angled across her hips.
    Luke began to quiet his mind again, searching for another set of unexplained Force ripples.
    “Worried, Master Skywalker?” Alema stopped a dozen paces away and stared at him, her eyes as steady and unblinking as those of an insect. “There’s no need. We’re not interested in hurting you.”
    “You’ll understand if I don’t believe