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plunging through reams of syncloth.
    The two droids were built to an identical design, humanoid and tall, but there the resemblance ended, as if they had been twins separated at birth, one to live in a palace, while the other was doomed to be an outcast, scraping out a hardscrabble existence in alleyways and gutters. The first droid was immaculately painted in an ornate livery, cream with crimson piping on his limbs, the blood-and-ivory colors repeated in a formal checker on his torso. The red was somewhat light and shaded with brown, like the color of fox fur, or dried blood. The cream was tinged with yellow; the color swatch at the store where the droid had last retouched his paint had called the tint “animal teeth.”
    The outcast droid had long since worn down to bare metal, and never been repainted. His scratched face was gray, scuffed as if from countless years of hard service. He paused to look up into the rain. He was careful to scour himself every night, but still the rust crept into his joints and scratches, and his face was pocked where flakes and patches of metal had started to rust and been ruthlessly rubbed away.
    The droids sat at the edge of the roof. The scuffed one kept his visual receptors on the game, but his richly painted partner was constantly glancing up, looking out onto the canyon between buildings, the busy slidewalks and the constant flow of fliers humming by, and, farther off, the wide entrance and towering spire of the Jedi Temple.
    Of course, from this little terrace, it would be very difficult to observe much of anything happening at the Temple. At such a distance, and with the rain falling, too, it would have required the eyes of a Horansi to see a bedraggled figure come splashing up to the Temple’s front doors. To resolve that figure as an angry Troxan diplomat carrying a curious-looking diplomatic pouch would have taken something far beyond biological sight: something on the order of the legendary Tau/Zeiss telescopic sniperscope—etched transparisteel or neural implant reticle available on request—whose ability to hold its zero through a full range of adjustment from X1 to X100 had never been matched in the four hundred standard years since the last T/Z production line fell silent.
    The cream-and-crimson droid paused, its fingers motionless over the board. Several kilometers away, through a shifting curtain of rain, the Troxan diplomat was arguing with the young Jedi standing sentry duty at the Temple doors. The packet changed hands.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” his drab, gray partner asked.
    The diplomat splashed back through the rain to a waiting flier. The youngster disappeared into the Temple.
    The liveried droid’s fingers bent down through the holographic warriors on the circular gameboard to move a piece. “Waiting,” he said.

    The xeno-ethnologists of Coruscant have estimated the number of sentient species in the universe at around twenty million, give or take a standard deviation or two depending on just what
sentient
means at any given time. One might ask, for instance, if the
Bivalva contemplativa,
the so-called thinking clams of Perilix, are really “thinking” in the usual sense, or if their multigenerational narrative semaphores reflect something less like conversation and more like hive building. Still, twenty million is the usual number.
    Of all of these species, an observer watching Jedi Master Maks Leem lift the hem of her robe and go hurrying through the Jedi Temple, late in the evening some thirty months after the Battle of Geonosis, might argue that it was the three-eyed, goat-headed Gran whose faces were most particularly suited to expressing
worry.
The three shaggy brows above Master Leem’s anxious eyes were tensely furrowed. Her jaw was long and narrow, even by Gran standards, and when she was anxious she had a tendency to grind her teeth, a ghostly holdover from the Gran’s cud-chewing ruminant past.
    Master