“Remain calm,” Hoole said steadily. “I have already discovered the cause of the occurrences. I assure you, everything is under control. Now follow me.”
Zak and Tash were so relieved to see their uncle, so calm and in control, that they followed him willingly. This time when Zak spied a movement out of the corner of his eye, he ignored it. Whatever the creature from The Nightmare Machine was, Hoole would deal with it.
But the Shi’ido led them straight to the administration building at the heart of Hologram Fun World.
“Wait!” Zak almost shouted. “We can’t go back there!”
Hoole didn’t even pause. “The answers to your questions are within.”
Tash and Zak looked at one another. They had no choice but to follow their uncle.
Like the rest of Fun World, the administration building seemed deserted. The silence made Zak even more nervous. Alone, the three rode a turbolift to the top of the building and entered Danna Fajji’s office. The baron administrator sat at his desk with his hands folded neatly in his lap.
“Welcome, welcome,” Fajji said. “I understand you’ve had quite a day here at Hologram Fun World.”
“Quite a day!” Tash snapped. “Your holograms killed our friend! They almost killed us!”
Fajji chuckled. “Oh, no, no, no. I assure you no one has been killed. At least, not yet.”
With startling quickness, the smile fell away from Fajji’s face.
Then Fajji’s face itself fell away.
The baron administrator’s skin crawled across his frame, and in two blinks of an eye he had changed shape.
Tash and Zak were looking at another Shi’ido.
“Gog!” Zak cried. But the presence of the evil scientist was not nearly as terrifying as what happened next. Gog turned to Uncle Hoole and nodded satisfactorily. “Excellent work, Dr. Hoole.”
Hoole shrugged. “It was quite simple. They are trusting.”
“You can’t be working with him!” Tash insisted in a panic. “He’s your enemy.”
“He’s your enemy,” Hoole replied. “Gog and I have been working together since the beginning of Project Starscream.”
Zak shook his head. “It can’t be true!”
“It is,” Gog said. “And now we’ll prove it. Hoole, destroy these two interlopers.”
A blaster appeared in Uncle Hoole’s hand. He put it right between Zak’s eyes.
CHAPTER 15
Zak felt the cold metal of the blaster press against his forehead and braced himself for the shot.
Hoole did not fire right away. He waited, prolonging the moment of terror with an evil laugh. A quiver of terror ran through Zak like a groundquake, and he hugged himself to keep still.
His hand brushed against something hard in the pocket of his tunic.
He felt the square shape of the sabacc card shuffler and pulled it out.
“Enough torment, Hoole,” Gog said. “End this once and for all.”
Hoole nodded and began to squeeze the trigger. But before he did, Zak shoved the sabacc shuffler in Hoole’s face and squeezed. The sabacc cards rattled and flew out of the shuffler chute. A deck full of hard plastic wafers slapped Hoole in the face. The Shi’ido grunted and reeled backward, waving his free hand before him to clear his sight.
“Run!” Zak yelled.
Tash was already ahead of him, racing for the turbolift. Zak slipped into the lift just as the doors closed.
“Everything’s gone crazy! Everything!” he shouted at the walls.
Tash’s only answer was a violent shudder and a whisper: “One of us must die.”
The lift doors opened and they ran for the exit. As they reached it, they heard another turbolift open, and a blaster shot burned a hole in the wall to their left. Hoole was chasing them.
They were running through a horror-filled amusement park, being chased by their own uncle, who was working for the galaxy’s most evil scientist. Zak realized that Tash might be right-they might not get out of Fun World alive.
A blaster bolt passed so close to Zak, he heard it burn the air around his ear.
“In here!” he panted, and ducked into the nearest doorway.
He stumbled forward and found himself floating in deep space.
This time, however, it was not the lifeless cold of real space. Zak was standing in the cavernous Star Chamber, which he and Tash had visited on their first day in Hologram Fun World. Stars and planets whirled past his head.
“Zak? You okay?” Tash said weakly. He saw her in the light of a passing sun, nine planets spinning around it.
“I feel like you sound,” he answered.
“I’m miserable,” she replied. “This is worse than anything, Zak. I thought it hurt when Mom and Dad died, but this…” she choked on the rest of her words. “And I failed. I could have saved you from those machines. I could have used the lightsaber. But I blew it. I want to be a Jedi so badly, but I was always afraid to fail…”