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Raynar retrieved his artificial hand, then rose and stepped toward the door. “Would I be welcome?”

“That depends,” Han said. “Are you going to do your own chores?”

“The days when I considered myself above doing chores are long past, Captain Solo.” Raynar’s tone was more distracted than indignant, as though he was so consumed in thought that he had failed to notice Han was joking. He stood at the door considering his options, then shrugged and began to reattach his artificial hand. “I don’t know if I’m ready—I don’t know if they are.”

Before Leia could suggest that there was only one way to find out, Raynar turned away and started toward the interior of his cell. Cilghal shook her head in disappointment, Han sighed, and Leia bit her lip in frustration.

“Relax—I’m just going to pack,” Raynar called over his shoulder. “I have been here awhile, you know.”

Leia’s relief was bittersweet. She was happy to see Raynar leaving his cell, but it made her wistful as well, because incarceration and rehabilitation had never been a possibility for her son Jacen. He had been too powerful to capture and too menacing to leave free, and in the end there had been no choice except to hunt him down. Leia would go to her grave wondering how she had not seen him falling until it was too late, whether she had missed some flash of opportunity to save him—and she knew Han would, too.

Once Raynar had retrieved a small duffel and begun to pack his few possessions, Cilghal smiled and thanked both Solos, then started down the catwalk again. As they passed the next cell, Natua stopped scratching at her door locks and pressed herself to the transparisteel, her narrow eyes fixed on Han. A ruddy flush began to creep up her delicate face scales, and she slid a hand along the wall, reaching out in his direction.

“Captain Solo.” Even through the electronic speaker that relayed her voice to the catwalk, Natua’s voice was soft and cajoling. Leia was just glad that the Falleen’s powerful attraction pheromones were safely trapped inside her own cell. “Please … get me out of here. They’re hurting me.”

“Not as much as you’re hurting yourself,” Han said, pointing to the crimson streaks that her bloody fingertips were leaving on the wall. “Sorry, Nat. You need to stay here and let them help you.”

“This isn’t help!” Natua slapped the wall so hard that the resulting tung caused C-3PO to stumble back into the safety rail; then she began to curse in the strange hissing language Tekli had mentioned earlier. “Sseorhstki hsuzma sahaslatho Shi’ido hsesstivaph!”

“Oh my—Jedi Wan is promising to kill Captain Solo and his fellow imposters in a terribly unpleasant way,” C-3PO explained. “Fortunately, it appears she hasn’t thought through her plan very well. I don’t even have intestines.”

“Then you recognize the language?” Leia asked.

“Of course,” C-3PO said. “Ancient Hsoosh is still the Language of Ceremony in the best houses of Falleen.”

“Language of Ceremony?” Han echoed. “Like one they’d use to make formal vows?”

“Precisely,” C-3PO said. “The elite classes have kept it alive for more than two thousand standard years to distinguish—”

“Threepio, that’s not important at the moment,” Leia interrupted. She could tell by the way Han was clenching his jaw that he was truly disturbed to have a mad Jedi making death vows against them. A lecture on the history of ancient Hsoosh might be enough to make him yank out C-3PO’s inner machinery. “Wait here and let us know what else Natua has to say.”

C-3PO acknowledged the command, and Leia and Han followed Cilghal to the next cell. Seff was still kneeling in the far corner, facing away from them with his battered hands resting on his thighs. The slow, steady rhythm of his breathing—apparent from the barely perceptible rise and fall of his shoulders—suggested he was meditating, perhaps trying to calm his troubled mind and make sense of what had been happening to him.

Cilghal glanced back down the catwalk toward the turbolift, where Tekli was waiting with what looked like a meter-long recording