Why Revan Doesn't Drive

My friends and I - three humans and a Codru-Ji currently in her nonsentient wyrwulf phase of life - stared blankly at the speeder. It was a good enough model, gently used, nothing spectacular, the kind of thing any well-to-do Coruscant native might buy. There were a good number of similar ones sitting around the Temple Speeder Hangar-Garage Complex, sharing space with luxury fliers and battered junkers. The middle-income speeder was smallish but sturdy and maneuverable, with crash-avoidance repulsors installed in the hull, perfect for outings or commuting on any city world. Not at all remarkable here, in a lot filled with nearly identical vehicles. There was of course a crucial problem with it, one that I had not noticed on the way here. It lacked autopilot.

Nareaux spoke first. "I've got the key, but I can't drive anymore. I earned a license, but... I just can't do it anymore. I keep getting- " he tapped his forehead with one finger, meaning visions- "and you know how I get when I see things. It'd be fine with wide open spaces, but here? We'd crash. I'm not driving."

"Cimo certainly can't drive," I said for the wyrwulf, who was lying on her side and panting, oblivious. "She isn't going to learn for ten, maybe fifteen years. And I sure as hells won't. You'll have to do it, Laury." Kae, explaining away her latest problem as a "recreational outing", had driven us here, to a gallery of old holographic posters promoting equally old films, then left the speeder here so that she could be picked up for "an examination". I hoped it would do her good, although I couldn't understand why Jedi healers were suddenly not an option.

"I can't drive either, Revan. I've been too busy and never learned." Laury shook her head, bewildered. "We get a lot of cases with idiots who crash these things, but I have no idea what all these knobs and buttons do."

"Most of them are for climate control or music, or seat configurations. Luxury stuff. It's not as complicated as managing spacecraft," I said idly, then realized that they might think I knew a great deal about speeders or spacecraft or both. "You have to know how to drive, Laury! Haven't you ever rode besides the pilot?"

"No." Her voice was flat. "On Dantooine it was almost always you or Malak in front. I haven't been on a speeder on Alderaan, and we were with Cimo in the back coming here. Your Master was driving and Nareaux was in the second seat."

"And I told you, I can't drive anymore," Nareaux added helpfully. "Something about movement triggers them. I had four on the way here. Four. My Master says it's getting worse."

I frowned, getting an inkling about where this was heading. "Laury, what about on the way back from downtown Garang? Weren't you-"

"No. That was when you broke half the bones in your hand and I was... upset. That hurt, and you were barely wincing, damn you." Her face and voice suggested that I had hurt myself just to get at her. She might well think that; at times the novice healer's ego was incredible.

"High pain tolerance." I was unashamed. "It's a Jedi thing. I guess you're right, Laury... the only time I remember you sitting up front was when I tore that thing in my knee..."

"You've been up front before. Often. Besides, Malak's your best friend, and he's been a flying fanatic ever since he turned seven."

"Six," I corrected wearily. "He first started babbling about and sneaking aboard these things on Alderaan, when he was six. Before we came to Dantooine and met you." Annoyed at the interruption, my friend pretended that I hadn't spoken.

"Okay, so you don't have a license and you're not quite old enough to even apply for one. As long as you don't get caught, it isn't really illegal. Just kind of." On the ground, Cimo gave an odd sort of groan as she yawned hugely. Laury ignored the wyrwulf too. "You know what does what. You know how. Drive." Laury pinned me in place with her uncompromising glare.

I protested, "What?! No! I won't! Haven't you ever seen me drive? Impossible. Otherwise you wouldn't even think that. Might as well give a lightsaber to a toddling baby. Someone always gets hurt, and we end up with massive property damage." I winced a little, remembering the last time I'd gotten behind the yoke. It's been two years and Master Nisi still hasn't forgiven me.

Laury, cross, told me "Everyone crashes at least once, Revan." just as Nareaux said "I've seen you drive. You're not bad."

I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at Nareaux. He was most definitely the "runt" of our age group; at just under fifteen he still looked eleven. As usual his wide, lashy eyes looked dazed, but his gaze was direct, at least. Under my glare his already dark cheeks darkened until he confessed, "Well, maybe it wasn't you. But I saw someone, and it looked almost exactly like you!"

"It?" I inquired despite myself. Nareaux was both clairvoyant and precognitive, and he almost never talked about the contents of his visions. I couldn't come up with a why, but when he was awake he saw the present; asleep, he saw the future in the form of often abstract dreams. The trouble was that his present-visions usually involved people the rest of us didn't know or care about, and his future-visions were usually terrible nightmares that he would never share. Nareaux said that mentioning them made them more likely to come true, somehow.

He darkened some more, defensive. "You're not like Laury or Nehya or the other girls. You're also not a boy, and sometimes you feel like one. I'm just saying what it feels like."

"Ooooh, maybe she's a freemartin!" Wicked Laury clasped her hands together, grinning and talking very rapidly, like she always did when accusing someone of having an odd condition. "Shared the womb with a male twin, was exposed to too much androgen, maybe developed as a hermaphrodite!"

I covered my eyes with one hand, pained. "I am not a freemartin. Furred creatures are freemartins, not humans. And I think I would know, or you would, if I was born a hermaphrodite. It's unlikely enough to be born Force-Sensitive without dragging every strange condition you can think of into the equation, too. Bogan and Ashla, Dark and Light, why am I friends with you?"

Sadistic, Laury flipped a lock of her thick, curly hair over her shoulder to declare, "You can't resist my looks and charm - and if not me, who would keep you from bleeding to death every time you went outside? Freemartin." Another new nickname. Spectacular. At least we're the only ones in the speeder lot just now.

"It's much too far to walk, especially on Coruscant," I decided, trying to turn the subject back to useful things without having to drive. "If we were closer... this neighborhood isn't bad, but we'd have to cut across some which are. Kae wanted Nareaux and I not to dress like Jedi, and lightsabers or no lightsabers nobody will believe us if we tell them. Hmm. Do we have enough money to hire a skytaxi? Or even to buy an airbus ticket?"

"I hate the airbus," Laury said, not for the first time. "There are more lower life forms on one of those things than in the whole Alderaanian Temple. Last time I was in an airbus one of them sneezed in my face and I contracted viral pleuritis." Nevertheless, she joined Nareaux and I in turning out pockets.

The collective contents made a fair-sized pile. Lint, hair, scraps of felted fur, about three meters of rolled cord, some beads, datapads and datacards, bleached bones from multiple small animals, a small, clear crystal egg, a rag with oil stains, bits and pieces of lightsaber, the waxy papers which had once contained blocks of chikk, the wadded-up wrappers from our noon meal, a packet of treats for Cimo, half of a deconstructed grenade, a vibroknife, a tiny glowrod, a packet of disinfectant wipes, elastics of all sizes, a set of fine tweezers, about a kilo of rolled-up bandaging, assorted pressure patches, some sinister-looking liquids in bottles, a syringe and some skinpoppers, and eight point seven five credits.

"Are you trying to set up a clinic, Laury?" I asked, amused. She looked up at me loftily, then sniffed.

"Why not? You'll keep me in business, especially with that grenade. It's illegal to carry one of those on any civilized world, particularly this one, without a permit, you know. A permit that you don't have."

"It's not mine. Malak's the one who picked it up; I'm just trying to see how it works. No worries. It's a dud." I'd started to take an interest in machinery over the past year, and had been unable to resist the urge to grab and dismantle a real grenade, operational or not, after my best friend had offered. I found it oddly soothing to tinker with it at odd moments.

"Tell that to Security when they arrest us." We wouldn't have been able to sell anything around this area, so the assorted contents went back into the pockets from whence they came.

I looked at the credits as if doing so would make them multiply. Naturally enough, they didn't. "This is only enough for one airbus ticket back to the Temple. We have enough to get two within walking distance, but no more." It was definitely not enough for a skytaxi, even a shifty one.

Laury clasped her fingers together. "Maybe one or two of us could ride on the inside and the rest could cling to the roof?" She wrinkled her nose, aware of how bad that sounded but unwilling to stop. "Like in a holo."

"Wouldn't work. They've got electric current running through the roofs to discourage indigents and hawk-bats; we would fall off and... and..." Nareaux paused, staring blankly into space. "I've seen that. I... don't really want to die that way."

I touched his bony shoulder reassuringly. "We won't. Besides, how would we take Cimo?" Hearing her name, the wyrwulf heaved herself up onto her six paws and butted my hand with her head. I scratched her ears absently, considering. "We could just stay here until Master Kae comes and gets us."

"Bad idea." Laury crossed her arms over her chest, scowling in one of her typical lightning mood changes. "Your Master's already fifteen minutes late and she didn't leave us with any way to contact her. I recognized the speeder that picked her up. What kind of medical examination, particularly a confidential one, would she need random outsiders for? Force-Sensitive Healers are the best medics you could wish for. If her gallbladder's acting up again, a simple diagnostic technique-"

"She wouldn't say. Kae's been sick in the mornings for a few weeks, and having cramps. I've seen her taking things for tiredness and headaches." I frowned as I considered. Another thought came to me - Kae had warned me about Healers and their penchant for gossip. Did she have something to keep secret? "She's also been eating more, and lately I think she's started to wear looser clothing and she won't tell me why. But she told me not to worry, it was harmless, and she doesn't just lie. It's really strange."

"I'll say." Laury stared into space for a few moments, tapping her chin with one small, delicate finger. Then she shrugged. "I'm not really sure what kind of disease would do that, but I can look it up or ask my mentor. That's not the issue right now." She started jabbing that finger into the palm of her other hand for emphasis. "We. Have. To. Get. Back. To. The. Tem. Ple. If I don't show up in time, I won't be able to make that appointment. I've only just been promoted to nurse! I can't miss appointments yet! Not for anything less than a genuine emergency!"

"If I drive, you won't just be late. Odds are you won't make it at all. Laury, I'm serious!"

Nareaux shifted from one foot to the other. "I've lived here for a year, you know, so I have a permanent room. Not like you two, you're visitors, so you get the dorms. There's an, an inspection today. I kind of forgot until now... I have a few things that I don't want on my record. Nothing bad," he added hastily, "I have a few packs of sweets and some holodramedies and a brass burning-dish, at the least. You know how strict they are about keeping anything in this Temple. If you can't buy it inside, it's illegal contraband. I'll be labeled a smuggler, or worse."

His master would defend him, I knew, but there would still be a black mark on my friend's record. On Laury's too, for that matter. How did we get into this? I thought almost frantically. What dark god did we offend? "I suppose Cimo gets shampooed today, too? Am I the only one without some pressing need?"

Cimo sat down at that and whined at me, plumy tail waving. I glared at her, then looked at the speeder, reaching down into that part of my mind where my precognition rode. Low-level precognition like mine is one of the most common Jedi talents, even more so than telekinesis. Unlike Nareaux's, common precog is little more than a flash of warning or direction. It's what keeps us alive in situations where the speed and accuracy of a reaction is the deciding factor, mostly emergencies and fights. It can also warn us when we're about to walk into a trap or do something very, very stupid, if we know how to listen.

My precog was silent, even when probed. The unease that I felt was entirely mine. Maybe this won't end badly? On the other hand, I realized, the proximity of my friends might be damping my extra senses down. "Talent contamination", it was called. No, that couldn't be it; when I thought about Laury's half-formed cling-to-the-outside-of-an-airbus plan I felt a definite warning.

Sensing my sudden weakness, Laury pounced. "We can still make it!" Not bothering to support her point or argue further, she unlocked the speeder and all but pushed me through the door. Minutes later, somehow I ended lifting off with the novice Healer riding in the second seat, and Nareaux sharing the back with Cimo, whose harness had been clipped to the safety restraints. Within a few breaths, it was too late to turn back.

And, oddly, it wasn't quite as bad as I'd expected. I'm not a good driver; I make no pretensions about that fact. I have feet of permacrete; a pedal touched by my foot ends up fully depressed more often then not. My driving was a series of small taps at the acceleration pedal, building speed until I realized that I was moving too fast, jabbed at the brake, and started tapping the acceleration again. And I weaved around the lane like a drunkard; I couldn't manage to aim the speeder squarely forwards, so I had to move the yoke every few seconds. Fortunately, there wasn't too much traffic at this time of day, not even in the great multi-lane skyways between Coruscant's colossal structures.

Unlike Malak, I just couldn't quite bring myself to forget that driving puts me in command of a multi-tonne box of machinery complete with pockets of liquids both caustic and flammable, a box which can go from a standstill to a few hundred kph in an instant if I am careless and mash the accelerator. Safety features or no safety features, it would be all too easy to kill someone if I swerved in the wrong direction or accidentally hit the wrong pedal. I found myself citing speeder crash statistics, and it was only with a supreme effort of will that I was able to put them aside.

Instead I kept myself unusually aware of the physical surroundings, although I was definitely bright enough not to open myself completely to the Force, not here. This sector and level of Coruscant was occupied mostly by people who had steady sources of income, could usually keep up the rent on their housing, and generally had a little money to spend, but weren't what I would call "rich". This meant that the faces of the monolithic buildings to every side, looming like the walls of an impossibly vast set of canyons, were in decent enough repair. Not particularly well-lit, scoured clean, or shiny like in higher-income districts and levels, but the lights cast decent illumination and were intact, and there were no silica parasites or illegal constructions clinging within view. Graffiti was present but minimal, none of the holographic advertisements could be considered overly offensive, and the Atmospheric Reclamation Project was working well enough that I could only taste a hint of the various undesirable pollutants in the air.

If I looked up, I knew, I would see the sky as a wide grayish ribbon between the looming, lightening walls. If I looked down, I would see a similar ribbon of darkness at the last extremity of my vision. In either direction I would also see bridges and walkways connecting the buildings, turbolifts heading up or down, the streams of traffic in the skylanes above and below, and perhaps flying animals winging about. I knew better than to distract myself by craning my neck and gaping like a provincial farmhand, though. Coruscant, Coruscant, bright center of the galaxy, an old, old poem went. It didn't translate well into Basic, but still. Everything that is right about sentience sits here, packed cheek-to-jowl with everything wrong and all that is neither. The Republic itself in miniature.

Irritated, I shook my head violently. The speeder responded by swerving right, then left, then right again, until I was able to correct it. Very consciously I released and took a fresh grip on the dampened steering yoke; my sweating hands, clenched on the thing, were white-knuckled and stiffening. I've been here for three days. I'm not a tourist, I've seen city worlds- what does Kae call them? ecumenopoli? before. Stop gawking, I told myself sternly. Coruscant will still be here when we get back to the Temple.

A Duros in a passing speeder called out a rude statement, something about his brood-mother's brood-mother being a better flier than me, and I grimaced. If I can get us back to the Temple, anyway. Belatedly it occurred to me that we could have found a public comlink and called the Jedi Temple, explained things, and had someone come out and pick us up. But then, Kae wouldn't have liked that- oh, Bogan. Kae. She'll finish her appointment and come back for us, and we won't be there. I hope she has her personal comlink on her so I can call from her quarters. I knew this was a bad idea.

I passed too close to one of the many great Hutt - dwarfing pipes set into the superstructure that circulated air between the Atmospheric Reclamation Sites and the rest of Corusucant. Driven by great fans, the blast of cold, hyperoxygenated air rocked the speeder madly under us, making Nareaux sigh and Cimo, who had been sticking her head out into the wind, yelp and whimper. Laury twisted around in her seat, tying her thick hair back with an elastic, and told me, "I don't think you should fly so close to those things. Could be dangerous." I ignored her, easing back into the correct lane.

The throaty roar of the Reclamation Project's fans, the various speeder and other machine-related noises, and the endless babble of voices, at least, had long ago slipped into the category of "background noise", ignored unless something changed enough to remind me of it. As I focused on it the noise seemed to be louder, mixed in with snatches of music blaring in the other speeders. I couldn't help smiling a little as I picked up on several other drivers cursing me; they might think I was doing a poor job, but for me, this was excellent flying. Nothing had been broken, nobody was scared out of their wits...

Laury pointed excitedly as we passed through an intersection where another set of parallel skyways crossed ours. "Revan! Revaaaan! You're missing it! Hey, hey, Coruscant to Revan, please acknowledge. Come on, Revan, the Temple's that way!" She scowled. "Damn. We missed it."

I waited a moment until it appeared she was done then told her, mildly, "Did you or did you not see how much traffic there was that way? There's more than one way to reach the Temple. I know where I'm going, don't worry. We can enter the bloc at a point ahead and pass through it." I didn't dare take my eyes off where I was headed, but I knew her expression. "I'm a Jedi, remember? Looked at the infrastructure map?"

"You're a Jedi Padawan, and you don't have eidetic memory," my friend said stubbornly, but she was willing to concede the point. Instead her attention turned to the dashboard. "I'm getting bored. Which one of these doohickeys turns on the Holonet radio?"

Nareaux answered, and so I didn't have to tell her that I was trying to concentrate. "That one. No, to your left. More. More. Not that much. Down. Yes. Volume is the up-and-down lever, channel is left-to-right..." He settled back into his seat with another sigh. Through the Force, I could feel his attention shifting. "Oh. Gray Man is angry today. He gets uglier every time I see him... I hope he doesn't tear anyone else apart. He won't have any flunkies left if he keeps doing that."

A flat holographic image formed on the windscreen; two newsanchors side-by-side in a studio of some kind. After registering this, I returned my attention quite firmly to the skylanes ahead, not wanting to brush up against anyone or veer out of the lane entirely. Still, I couldn't quite filter out their voices.

One of the anchors, the token "female nonhuman", an Iridonian Zabrak by the sound and inflection of her voice, was midway through a report. "-ing that a large fleet of ships recently left Trukara, a system on the Outer Rim hosting one of the few remaining Dashade colonies. The scout team that captured these images has requested anonymity, but their attempts to hail the colony have thus far proven futile. Among our staff of experts there are several who claim that the ships are of Mandalorian manufacture. If this is true, it makes this incident the first time in over twenty years that Mandalorian forces have been sighted outside of Mandalorian space."

The other anchor, a human male with a very confident voice, took over. "In other news, the semifinals of the widely acclaimed Miss Coruscant beauty pageant are well underway." He kept talking, but, distracted by the all-too-brief previous story, I hardly registered his voice.

Mandalorians?

Once, unwisely, I had image-shared a lesson with Nareaux, and he had seen a vision during the process. It had been a relatively mild one as far as his clairvoyance went; a lovely human woman woke with a small pool of blood sunk into the sheets around where her legs met her body, and reacted by sighing heavily, taking up the reddened bedclothes, and carrying them to load into some kind of laundering machine. Neither of us had known about the predilection of fertile human females to bleed periodically, but the fact that the woman hadn't had much of a reaction made it odd and surreal and, somehow, more disturbing than if she'd started screaming or had held a bloody knife. Through Nareaux, I knew what it felt like to be gripped by the kind of vision that blocked out the rest of the senses.

But this one, although vaguer by far than the one I had shared, was vastly more unsettling.

The towers and spires of a city I had never seen stabbed into a cloudy crimson sky that seemed to be roiling in anguish, lanced through by red darts which moved faster than thought. Whatever they hit exploded, and the remains caught fire, belching black, oily smoke. A ship, shaped unlike any of the ones I had ever seen, swooped low over the burning city, strafing it with more of the quick red darts - turbolasers. I could not see any of the city's inhabitants, but I could feel them, blind panic and confusion and the shocks of death and wounds mixed together and flowing like the contents of an overturned barrel.

The city faded, replaced by a succession of habitations on other worlds. Cities, towns, ruins with people hiding in them- strafed and burned. I started to hear a kind of low babble composed of many voices in the background, a stream of hushed words and phrases that sounded almost frantic. The next image was of bright armored humanoids running through a village square, firing blasters at thatched huts and the people that rushed out of them. Fire rose in tongues like ghosts, producing a rushing, crackling sound that almost drowned the babble out.

I saw a succession of similar images. Towers fell; flames rose, people screamed and cried out and were cut down. Now and again ships stood in defensive formations around planets and were decimated by more of the unknown ships, but mostly I saw habitations with people in them. The voices that composed the babble began to go silent, but the remaining ones were clearer. "I don't see the problem. This is just another conflict on the Outer Rim." "It isn't slaughter when it happens to others, it's just retribution." "If we participate in another war, disaster will follow." "Maybe they'll be satisfied. Maybe they'll go away." "We are nothing and no one. If we are quiet, they will pass us by." "We can't get involved; no one will help, we will be crushed. If we surrender, some of us might live." "It isn't me... it's not me..."

As a column of bound captives were urged along by more of the bright-armored humanoids, the remaining voices started to fade out. One of the humanoids stopped walking to turn, slowly, and look directly at me. Set into its helmet was a black T-shaped visor that seemed to expand until it was all I saw, as if I was nose-to-nose with the armored figure. "It's not me... it isn't me..." The final voice faded to nothing. Silence.

What do you want? I thought at the waiting visor. I felt... curious. Hardly afraid at all. What am I supposed to do? I'm not a hero. How could I change that, if the rest of the galaxy just stood and waited? It seemed to me that the visor was about to respond-

A soft-fingered hand closed around my arm and tightened as something agonizing rushed out of it and through my body. I jerked and came back to my senses as the visor evaporated, replaced by-

Wall! I jerked the yoke and the speeder banked, hard, wrenching me and my friends towards the wall which was now passing very rapidly on one side. As I tried to continue the turn, the speeder's back end fishtailed dangerously close to the wall and the windows in it, and the crash-avoidance repulsors on that side kicked in, shoving us away and into the path of another Atmospheric Reclamation pipe. This time the wash of cold air was almost enough to flip us upside down; everything that wasn't attached securely pitched out over the side and fell. The safety restraints saved my friends and I, but from the hiss that escaped Laury I knew that someone had been bruised in the process.

Other drivers cursed us as my turn cut us across them and then over the "margin", the stripe of empty air that separated parallel lines of traffic. In the brief respite of crossing it, I was able to quite calmly say, "Laury, you don't need to keep shocking me. I'm paying attention now" and reopen myself to the guidance of the Force before we plunged into the skylanes across the margin. In the back Cimo made a low, miserable moan. I couldn't really blame her. The traffic here was heading the opposite way; I didn't know how much of the situation the wyrwulf understood, but whipping at a right angle into the mass of speeders hurtling along like this was a frightening prospect to anyone with sense.

My heart was beating hard enough to feel. As I twitched the yoke enough to miss an airbus by centimeters, I realized that I was grinning like a maniac, overcome by an exhilaration that was as much fear as anything else. In a strange, crazy, wild way, this was fun. Silently, I apologized to my best friend for not understanding why he loved to fly, for thinking that he was obsessed. If this was what it felt like, I really couldn't blame him.

The speeder was just maneuverable enough to complete a U-shaped turn at this velocity, although it came close enough to the wall that the crash-avoidance repulsors kicked in again, veering us back into the skylanes. They were crowded enough that I had to rely completely on the Force to guide my hands and boost my reflexes; I was moving much faster than any of the other vehicles, which were keeping to the speed limit. I would have braked, but that would have lurched us to a complete stop and allowed some other speeder to hit us from behind, my precognition warned me. I didn't really have "slowing" down.

But I didn't really mind. The near-misses and close calls, the sensation of eking out the next second of life by the tips of my fingernails, gave me the same dangerous, reckless joy of a really intense lightsaber session. I felt alive, as if the Force flowing through me was lending me more than strength and guidance, as if the speeder under me was part of me, part of the glorious whole that was life. I felt untouchable, immortal. Passing so close under a heavy truck that one of the speeder's antennae bent scraping the larger machine's belly, I laughed.

My friends, sadly, didn't share the sentiment. Opened as I was to the Force, I could feel them. None of them were more than bruised, but Cimo was still moaning like a dying animal, Laury had released my arm to fervently clutch the grips attached to the seat she was in, and Nareaux was copying Laury . I could hear him talking rapidly, convinced that we were all about to die.

"We're not supposed to die here none of us should die here, I'm supposed to be killed by a Jedi Laury is supposed to burn out and fade away Cimo is supposed to outlive us all and die in her sleep Revan you psychopath is supposed to be suffocated by her shadow this isn't right!" The manic grin on my face widened. Nareaux was always previewing our dying in spectacular ways and warning us not to eat the fish in certain establishments or bathe in slippery ceramic tubs, but he was right in one thing. None of us would die today.

I laughed again and whipped the speeder hard into a tunnel in the wall, one of many that gave speeders in the skylanes access to the blocs, the great buildings that housed everything of importance on Coruscant. One could, I speculated idly as the Force helped me skirt a pack of swoop bikes which scattered in my wake, if one was so inclined, liken the skylanes to arteries and veins, and liken the places where they enter the blocs to smaller and smaller blood channels, going all the way down to the capillaries, exchanging things with the body at the smallest level. It doesn't really bother the whole if some of these exchanges don't work out, but disrupt things too much and you have a disaster. The idea of traffic and transport being the blood of the world amused me, and I spent some time exploring it as I avoided traffic and headed deeper and deeper into the bloc.

When I judged the location to be right, I stood the speeder on its tail to head straight up through a maintenance shaft and, eventually, to the top of the bloc. In theory, shortcutting on a speeder through a maintenance shaft is illegal for everyone except law-enforcement agencies. In practice, desperate and mad people cut through the shafts without incident unless they hit something. In this enclosed space, the repulsors would bounce a speeder rapidly from one side to the other and back, losing their charge faster then they could build it up. Eventually the hapless vehicle would smash into the side with enough momentum to completely destroy itself and any passengers. We passed through without such a hitch, although Cimo's moaning turned into a yelp more than once. For kilometers and kilometers, all of the blocs around the Jedi Temple were level and flat, a good klick shorter than the top of the Order's tall Temple Spire. For one reason or another this sector was called the Processional Way. I had bled off enough speed with that vertical maneuver that it was not a great hardship to join a skylane near the top that would take us to the Jedi Temple in good time.

The Force released me, leaving me to steer clumsily and tap at the acceleration pedal, using the same hesitant technique that I had at the start of this wild flight. It was actually more dangerous than that insane ride, at least in that I was fairly likely to bump or brush against the speeders around me. And although there were a number of junkers and average-make speedercraft up here, there were also more than a few high-end models, the owners of which would not take kindly to a dent. This time I kept a tight focus on what I was doing, and suffered nothing worse than insults and expletives while I drove.

At last we touched down on the hangar floor and keyed the speeder off. I sagged back in my seat, feeling muscles that I had not known were tense loosen. After a moment I pried my sweat-slicked hands off of the yoke; they had become locked into a grasping position and moved with painful reluctance. My friends were undoing their safety restraints with great haste, fumbling the straps with their sweaty, stiffening fingers. Nareaux freed Cimo first. The wyrwulf leaped out and shook herself violently, then sat and panted as if nothing had happened.

Laury finished next. I suspected that she wanted to vault clean out of the speeder, but instead she put one arm and one leg over the edge and half slithered, half fell out. She caught herself on the none-too-clean hangar floor and stood up, looking ruffled and worn. Nareaux, understated as ever, simply opened his door, stepped out, and closed it. I followed his example and found that I had to lean against the speeder for a moment, as my knees were unwilling to bear my weight. The adrenaline was wearing off. I pressed one hand to my chest to feel my heartbeat starting to slow.

"I told you," I said, for lack of anything else. To my surprise, my voice was hoarse and strained-sounding, as if I had been shouting or screaming. Or laughing a lot more than I thought I was... "I told you it's dangerous to make me drive. Flying is for pilots. And droids," I added.

Laury screwed up her face to say, "I believe you. Trust me, I believe you." Her voice sounded as bad as mine. "The next time you tell me something, Revan, I'm not doubting it." She scanned the hangar walls until her eyes lit on a chronometer. "Huh. I still have time to wash up before that appointment... I'm going to need to, after this. Later." She walked away, almost limping, projecting weariness. It was a sign of that weariness that she didn't check our bruises and try to scold me for my lack of driving skills, although I didn't doubt she would remedy both lapses later, when she had recovered.

A Service Corpsman, one of the ones who serviced speeders and ships, approached me with a complaint, telling me that I had parked in the wrong place and needed to answer some questions so he would know what, if anything, he had to look at. It took a bit longer than I had hoped. I had started to try and cultivate friendships among Coruscant's Temple staff, and at the least, that meant taking some time out to be polite and thorough, even when I was tired and fully ready to lie down and sleep. He might have let me go sooner had I been a Knight, but members of the Jedi Service Corps hold little respect for Padawans. They have higher status than we do.

At any rate, it took some time before he told me that the Force must have smiled on me, since I had barely been noticed by the authorities who police traffic, and then summoned an assistant to move the speeder to the appropriate place. By that point Nareaux had taken Cimo and vanished into the Temple itself - although, actually, he might have left at any time. The runt is by far the quietest of our group, and the least inclined to drama and theatrics, quite content to be completely overlooked. He might well have decided that a parting statement was unnecessary and simply left.

Willpower sustained me when the adrenaline was completely gone. I made it out of the hangar and draped myself over one of the unforgiving benches that lined the Temple's corridors just as the shakes hit. My memory took me back ruthlessly, and I relived each and every one of the many times when I had come close to disaster. There had been more than I'd thought. It also seemed that, in trying to avoid hitting me, several craft might have collided with each other. If the traffic police tracked me to the Temple, there would be definite problems. Jedi drove like that on occasions, but generally they had actual reasons, like trying to hunt down a desperate murderer.

Reasons, and not... whatever that was. The news report involving what might have been the Mandalorians had triggered it, I knew. I wasn't given to having unprovoked strokes or hallucinations, and I couldn't think of any plausible way to explain away what I had seen. What I had seen hadn't felt entirely knew. It seemed that I had seen something similar, once... not long after my previous driving adventure. But I'd written that experience off as a hallucination, a dream brought on by the fact that my forehead and the windscreen had met at high speed.

Sooner or later, I really should tell someone about one or both of those... who, though? Maybe Nemo... Kae's been so flustered recently that I doubt she'd notice anything I said. I would go to my Artistic Appreciations teacher more easily than I'd go to Kreia. Maybe... Vrook? Next time I see him? Everyone says he likes me. I haven't seen that, but maybe I'm not looking right.

I didn't really have vision-type precognition, but maybe Nareaux's proximity had affected me, allowing me to see a possible future. It was another interesting thought, but it would have to wait.

Bogan! I have to call Kae!