Only those of us who have been slaves can really taste freedom, he sometimes thought.

His favorite scavenger heap was down here, in the dark underbelly of the city. The glow lights were seldom repaired and the glittering lights of the city above didn't penetrate down this far. This was where the junk dealers dumped their unwanted heaps — the stuff even they couldn't sell. It was left in smoking, stinking gray piles for the lowest of the low to pick over.

Fights often erupted at these scavenger heaps. Anakin had been lucky to avoid the squabbles that could end in violence. In addition to the desperate, there were bands of Manikons, a tribe from a planet lost long ago to a civil war so devastating it had caused the small band of survivors to flee to Coruscant. Now the Manikons survived by their wits and their weapons. They were perfectly willing to fight to the death over a rusty hydrospanner.

Anakin slipped among the smoky piles. Normally he avoided this particular junkyard, but he had a difficult tech problem with a malfunctioning droid, and he had exhausted all his other venues for finding what he needed. He knew that his Master looked at his tinkering with droids and tech devices as a waste of his time. Maybe it was. Anakin didn't care. He had come to realize that he needed to occupy his mind in order to stop the voices in his head. The voices that doubted he'd ever be a great Jedi Knight. The voices that told him he'd abandoned his mother. .

Anakin shook his head. Working on the droids was the one slender thread that connected him to his childhood on Tatooine. It was a frayed thread he was not willing to snap off completely.