“When you find something you’re good at, you stick to it,”Dane said with a cocky assurance Anakin did not quitebelieve.
“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,” hesaid slowly. “I know I am being of service. That makes thepath easy to walk.”
“Well, I’d rather go down my path in a nice, techno-maxedcruiser,” Floria said. “So I guess I’m stuck with bountyhunting.”
“Here we are,” Obi-Wan called from a short distance ahead.”We left the path here, when we thought someone wasfollowing 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 outof his mind. Earlier, finding clues had been fun. Now, itwould be serious.
It didn’t take long to find the next clue. After a fork inthe path, they found a few crumbs from a blumfruit muffinleft 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 knowthat Wren would never have left this clue.”
Anakin briefly tasted the crumbs. He looked up at hisMaster, his face grave. “These are from the Temple.”
“Are you sure?” Obi-Wan asked.
Anakin nodded. “I’d know Jedi Knight Alicka’s muffinsanywhere. This must mean that - “
“The bounty hunter definitely has Wren. He has raided hissurvival pack.”
They hurried on. They had lost a good deal of time, andAnakin could tell that his Master was worried about Wren’sfate.
They followed the path until it curved along a ridge thatoverlooked a meadow full of tall, slender, flowering trees.From above, the flowering branches formed a solid carpet ofpink. Anakin stopped and examined a large boulder on theside of the trail. He hopped from one boulder to the next.
“This way,” he called to Obi-Wan. “He went down from hereto the meadow.”
He looked back up at his Master. Obi-Wan’s gaze swept thetrees below. “wren is near. I can feel it. Let’s proceedcarefully.”
Then they made their way carefully down the slope, jumpingfrom rock to rock. Floria and Dane followed at a distance.When they reached a meadow, the perfume of the floweringtrees 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 overwhelmedby simple things such as flowers and grasses.
The trees had slender triangular trunks, but the brancheswere thick and wide. The flowers were so large and densethat 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 … notright,” he murmured. “I get no sense of the Force fromWren.”
Anakin frowned. His Master was right.
Obi-Wan took a step forward. But it was not in thedirection Anakin had been looking.
“Master?”
Anakin saw that his Master had headed toward Wren. But thiswas 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 merelyprojections 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 Floriaand Dane. “We will handle this.”
“Be my guest,” Dane answered, his eyes darting to the manyWrens.
“Teleq wants us to run into the meadow,” Obi-Wan murmured toAnakin. “He wants us to race from one Wren to another. Sowe 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 tothe Force even stronger, made their ability to gather itmore urgent.
Obi-Wan felt the power of Anakin’s grasp of the Force. Asalways, it staggered him.
He scanned the meadow once more, and this time he knew whichof the images was not an image. Which one was Wren. Whenhe 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 morethan a whisper. His leaving his spot was no more than adisturbance in the air. Yet he was gone, across the meadow,racing toward Wren. He could feel rather than hear Anakinbehind him.
Suddenly Wren’s body snapped into the air. Obi-Wan watched,his heart in his mouth, as Wren was hoisted up into thetrees. There was no question in Obi-Wan’s mind that Wrenmust have been given a paralyzing drug of some kind. Hecould tell by the boneless way Wren’s legs and arms floppedas if he were a puppet.