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Papa.

That was it.

Dear Papa:

I hope you are feeling better, and that the hurts you have recently suffered have been well tended.

It was such a stupid way to begin, so strange to express such a thought. Of course his injuries would have been well tended. But to begin a communication with such a sentiment was itself a tremendous indicator of the difference between the Lost Tribe and the cultures of the Galactic Alliance. The words tasted strange in her mind, but she thought that she did not dislike the taste.

Nor did she necessarily dislike recasting her father, Gavar Khai, in a different light, softening his ruthless drive for perfection and accomplishment to something else. Something like Luke Skywalker.

The other night, seeing Ben blindsided by reminders of his mother, seeing how her loss still affected him, and seeing how his father instinctively reached out for him, to comfort him, I was of course reminded of you. And I wonder sometimes what I would be like if I had grown up with a sire—

She knew that was the wrong word. She backed up and corrected her words.

—grown up with a father who was cold and indifferent, or determined to drive me toward a hard destiny in a more cold and ruthless world. I’m not sure I would like myself, and I’m so—

The next word was almost impossible to add, so foreign was it to her nature. She forced herself to continue down that alien path.

—happy that you have always been kind and supportive.

Finally the lie was too big for her. She set the datapad down and turned away from it for a moment. She needed to regain her sense of self.

The very language she was employing was foreign, phrases and sentiments she’d heard when studying the holodramas of these people. They celebrated gooey, impractical emotions. They saw weakness as a virtue.

Except, perhaps, it was not precisely weakness. Ben was not weak. His sentimentality made him vulnerable, but she could no longer apply the word weak to him. What, then, was the right word?

Perhaps supple. She, Vestara, was like a hardwood tree, one that stood tall and proud no matter what was thrown at her.

Ben, instead, was a flexible tree, perhaps not capable of holding up so much weight, but also capable of leaning and bending to remain unharmed when the greatest winds came at him. Those winds might uproot Vestara, might topple her … kill her. And in the short time since she was separated from her fellow Sith—separated by more than distance, separated by her involvement with the death of their leader Taalon, which would earn her a death warrant from her own kind—she felt increasingly as if those winds were hammering at her.

She picked up her datapad again.

Luke told us a story the other night, a story of his first visit to this world. A woman brought him a tsil crystal, back before anyone knew they were living, intelligent things, and demonstrated how they could be reprogrammed through application of electrical current. She attached leads from a recharger to it, and the lines of its natural internal circuitry changed.

It also, it turns out, experienced the destruction of its mind, an event similar to a near-instantaneous, agonizing death. The experience was broadcast through the Force, hurting Luke badly, if temporarily. And shortly afterward, the crystal was dropped and shattered. Luke felt the tragedy of it all without understanding it. I have to wonder at the minds of the Newcomers here who still resist thinking of the tsils as sapient, who experience no sorrow at the thought of a needless, accidental death like that, an event that had to have been replicated by the dozens or the hundreds in those years …

Once again, the sticky sentimentality of her thoughts got the better of her. She saved her text and shoved the datapad back into her belt pouch.

One must do this sort of thing to understand the minds of potential enemies, she told herself. One must understand their weaknesses if one is to exploit them.

“Are you all right?