Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force Read Online Free

that populated the cityplanet would afford more than enough protection for the individual who sought a lifetime of anonymity. Coruscant—Kaj shook his head in annoyance, reminding himself again to refer to the newly renamed ecumenopolis as
Imperial Center
in both thought and speech—Imperial Center was home to literally trillions of beings from across the length and breadth of the galaxy, and finding a single one among them all was more difficult by far than finding a single grain of sand on Tatooine, Bakkah, and all the other desert worlds combined. Hidden in the teeming multitude, he was safe—as long as he didn’t use the Force.
    Which was no more difficult than, say, swallowing white-hot lava.
    When he went for some time without actively using the Force, but instead simply kept it pent up within, it
burned
. It was like having a big chunk of fire lodged behind his sternum. He found it hard to breathe, harder to sit still. It quite literally raised his internal temperature; after a few days Kaj found himself sweating and running a low-grade fever. If he kept it bottled down much longer than that—say, another week or so … well, he’d only done that once. When he’d woken up in the middle of the night, he’d felt at first blessed relief—followed by heart-stopping fear.
    The bed of the cheap resiblock he’d rented for the night had been soaked with sweat, and in the far wall a circle a meter wide had been charred into the paint.
    After that, Kaj tried to “bleed off” whenever he feltthe Force building up out of control. He concentrated on small telekinetics, levitating pieces of food or other objects, as those seemed to provide the most relief for the amount of effort expended. So far, it had worked—but he still quaked with the fear of being sensed by one of the malevolent Inquisitors every time he had to do it.
    Kaj’s gaze wandered back to a kiosk some twenty meters distant, at which several shoppers were haggling with the vendor over the assortment of produce—most of it illegal. The kiosk had food bins on three sides and was open at the back. That was unfortunate, but the booth next door had a tatty fabric awning, one corner of which was tied down not far from the back of the produce vendor’s kiosk.
    With his usual front-door methods rendered too risky, Kaj decided on a less direct approach. He pulled the cowl of his cloak up around his face and eased into the crowd. The stew of energies, aromas, and stenches flowed around him; the heat of someone’s regard when he accidentally bumped into her caused him to cower. He tamped down the anger that seemed to crawl to the surface of his mind when he was confronted by large crowds of people intent on their own business. He supposed he was no different in that from any of the beings here.
    But he was different in other ways.
    He drew level with the awning and ducked sideways out of the flow of traffic, making his way around to the back of the booth. It was even darker back here than in the shadowed arcade, and he took advantage of that to slip into the deeper blackness of the narrow passage that ran the width of the booth between its fabric back wall and the ferrocrete surface of a cloudscraper’s dingy exterior.
    When he emerged from the narrow slit on the other side of the booth—which, from the wild dance of aromas, he realized was an herbalist’s shop—he found himselfless than three paces from a row of fruit bins containing little that was familiar and much that was not. Not wanting to risk discovery for something that might not even be edible to a human, he scanned the bins for something familiar. Finally he saw what he was looking for: a basket of daro root.
    Mouth watering, he edged beneath the tightly pulled corner of the awning and crouched, his eyes on the treasure. Daro root grew on several worlds that humans had colonized. His had been one of them. As a child he had developed a taste for the sweet, creamy golden flesh of the root and now,