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“Me?” Ben asked. His father would never actually beat him—but Vestara probably didn’t know that, and it would be good to see whether it mattered to her. “Why me?”

Luke shrugged. “You’re the one who keeps saying we can trust her.”

“I keep saying we should give her a chance,” Ben corrected. “There’s a difference.”

“So we’re giving her a chance,” Luke replied. “If you’ve got a problem with that, we can always flush her out an air lock.”

Ben let his breath out, then glanced back at Vestara. “Can I trust you?”

Vestara gave him a crooked smile. “This time.” She brought her knees together and began to dance on the deck. “And if you don’t, we’re all going to regret it.”

“Okay, okay,” Ben said. “But don’t make me …”

Vestara was already out the hatch and racing into the day cabin behind them.

Ben waited until her footfalls grew inaudible, then looked back to his father. “Dad, if she really had to go that bad, why wait until she knew where we were headed? I think she was playing us.”

“And you’re surprised?”

Ben nodded. “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “I can’t figure out why you let her go.”

“Because I need to send a coded message to Cilghal, and I can’t do that and fly the ship.” He reached into his tunic pocket and produced a pair of circuit boards. “And because … I also disabled the engineering hatch and the auxiliary comm station.”

Ben smiled. The precautions would prevent Vestara from sabotaging the vessel or reporting its location. “I guess that’s why you’re the Grand Master,” he said, shaking his head in admiration. “But I still can’t figure out one thing. How do you know Abeloth is going to Pydyr instead of Drewwa or Auremesh?”

“Easy.” Luke rose and stepped to the back of the flight deck, then closed the access hatch and secured it from the inside. “I know what Abeloth is looking for.”

Without offering any other explanation, he took a seat at the navigator’s station, then activated the subspace transceiver and opened a channel to the Jedi Temple. When the communications officer at the other end acknowledged the signal, Luke merely began to tap the mike in an irregular pattern that Ben quickly recognized as the Jedi flash code. Without the encrypting equipment aboard the Jade Shadow, it was the only way to communicate with the Temple securely, especially since there was every possibility that the Emiax would automatically—and secretly—be copying every outgoing transmission and sending it straight to Kesh.

And as Ben listened, he began to realize just how important it was that no one but Jedi comprehend the message. His father was not only reporting the latest events in the Maw, but also asking the Jedi to send reinforcements to Pydyr as soon as possible. He was fairly certain that Abeloth had gone into hiding there, and when he and Ben flushed her into the open, they were going to need help destroying her—a lot of help.

The hatch handle jiggled just as Luke finished the message, and Vestara called, “Hey, who locked me out?”

“Uh, sorry, Ves.” Ben glanced back at his father, who raised a finger and silently mouthed one second. “You must have tripped the security protocol when you rushed out of here. Just a minute.”

Luke nodded and remained in his seat as a series of taps and scratches began to sound from the transceiver. Ben listened with growing alarm as they heard what had been happening back on Coruscant—the use of Mandalorians to first storm and then lay siege to the Temple, Daala’s refusal to release Valin and Jysella Horn despite the evidence that all of the other psychotic Jedi had recovered from their illnesses, the vote of no confidence in Grand Master Hamner …

“Ben?” Vestara banged on the hatch. “What’s going on in there?”

“Hold on,” Ben called. “We’re, uh, busy with our approach.”

“Approach?” Vestara sounded doubtful. “Already?”

Ben did not reply. The interruption had caused him to miss a string of code, and he was still trying to figure out what the assassination attempt on Admiral Bwua’tu had to do with the trouble