Now what? Anakin wondered as he descended from the air taxi and looked from right to left.

He closed his eyes and summoned the Force. He felt it rise from the red dust and bound off the hills back at him. And then he felt the Living Force as a wave that gathered momentum and broke over him in a shower of light.

There.

He took off toward the hills to his left. Well, if this mission was supposed to teach him about the Living Force, he doubted there was much to learn. Sometimes he thought he was in better touch with the Living Force than his Master. Obi-Wan lived in his head. His emotions were reserved.

Anakin often had no idea what his Master felt or thought. Sometimes he seemed to respond to the beings they met on their travels simply as ways to get something accomplished. A scrappy pilot with hair-raising stories of smuggling tech parts through the Outer Rim systems was just a means to get from the Manda spaceport to Circarpous Major. A tavern owner who kept pet dinkos was a contact to discover the location of a possible weapons cache.

A young brother and sister bounty-hunting team was taken along just to provide an answer to the mystery of who was behind a Jedi's kidnapping.

It wasn't that Obi-Wan lacked compassion, Anakin mused. It was just that there was a little more distance between him and other living beings.

Qui-Gon had not been able to pass along his connection to the Living Force to his Padawan, Anakin felt.

Anakin treasured his Master. But sometimes he wondered what it would have been like to have Qui-Gon as a Master instead. Would Qui-Gon have shared his feelings more easily? Anakin had felt a connection to Qui-Gon from the start. It had taken more time with Obi-Wan. It was still taking time.

He reached the hills, which were covered with thorny green bushes and small, squat trees. Anakin followed the hillside until he spotted scorch marks, then an abandoned hydrospanner. He was close.