Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force by Michael Reaves Page A

seemed to end in a pocket of charged and warped air.
    He hesitated, heart thudding. How was this possible? The interstice in which he stood was formed by a cancellation effect. The two fields’ overlap was unstable, but the instability was linear. There was no way the two opposingfields could meet and meld in that way, no power that could—
    He peered beyond the barrier, through the fluctuations in the cul-de-sac. Beyond them, out in the open debris field, he saw a lone figure standing atop a slab of ferrocrete. A figure with a bright mane of pale hair, rippling and warping as if viewed beneath the surface of a storm-tossed sea.
    The dance of energy on the left side of his face alerted Tesla to the fact that he had hesitated too long. He had barely enough time to stiffen his Force shield against the lightning before it struck, exploding the tiny pocket of relative calm in which he stood—
    When Jax first emerged from the cut into what passed for daylight at this level of the city, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. At the far end of the plaza, between the walls of two massive buildings, a pair of indistinct figures struggled within what looked like a writhing bowl of transparent, gelatinous light. It looked like the interstice between two force fields, but Jax had never encountered such a thing except in theory.
    He glanced at Laranth, who gave the Twi’lek equivalent of a shrug, both lekku lifting slightly before settling again, the shorter one just brushing her shoulders.
    That both combatants possessed the Force in abundance was obvious. They knocked each other off their respective feet several times before one hurled a ball of such brightness at the other that it was painful for Jax to look at it, even from meters away.
    Laranth stopped in midstride, peering at the unstable slot between the fields. “What was that? It didn’t look like Force-lightning.”
    A second charged ball erupted toward the figure nearest the entrance to the flux. This time the would-be victim met it with his lightsaber—his bright
crimson
lightsaber.
    “Sith,” hissed Jax under his breath as the repulsor fields lit up like a festival barge. “Or an Inquisitor.”
    “Then who’s the other guy?”
    “I’d love to know.” Jax activated his lightsaber and moved cautiously toward the fray, keeping low and moving from cover to cover, Laranth at his back.
    They had reached a particularly large block of ferrocrete when the fault between the two fields erupted in a fitful blaze of blue-white light that seemed to grow exponentially.
    “Now that
is
Force-lightning,” Jax murmured.
    “From the Sith?”
    “Must be. The other one just disappeared.”
    The other one reappeared suddenly, shooting out through the narrow interstice at a height of at least two stories. Clear of the repulsor fields, he executed a perfect somersault in midair and landed on the slab of ferrocrete beside which Jax and Laranth sheltered. With a motion that suggested the closing of a curtain, the youth—for he couldn’t have been more than about fifteen or sixteen—closed the lips of the flux zone, sealing the Sith within. A heartbeat or two later, the fields blazed brighter than the noonday sun on Coruscant’s uppermost levels and gave a sound that made Jax think the sky was splitting. The concussion hurt his ears and buffeted him even in the lee of the ferrocrete block, and it knocked the boy from his high perch to the ground.
    He wasn’t unconscious when Jax and Laranth got to him, but he was stunned. Aware of the other’s obvious power, Jax projected feelings of calm as he knelt beside him.
    “That was a pretty neat trick you did with that field back there,” Jax said mildly. “Is that dead end going to last much longer?”
    The boy blinked and shook his head.
    “Then we’d better get you out of here. That Inquisitor’s going to be pretty mad when he comes to.”
    “If he’s still alive,” Laranth murmured.
    “Who are you?” the boy asked, confusion