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Still smiling, she bent down and cupped his battered face in her hand, turning his head up to face her. “You know things, don’t you? Things that may prove very useful to me. Do be sure, Wynn, that I will learn what you know, who you know, what you have seen … one way or another. I may even permit you to live … if you learn to love me.”

Her smile, beautiful and sweet and kind and an utter lie, widened.

And widened.

It stretched across her face, too large for it, nearly reaching her ears. Her skin paled, her eyes began to sink back into their sockets. Her hair turned from blue-green and shiny to pale yellow, growing long, longer, all the way down to her feet. The hand that grasped his chin in a grip that would not release became slick, tiny tentacles forcing him to stare into her eyes. Eyes that looked like tiny stars in a black hole.

And he understood the full disaster that was about to unfold.

Abeloth and the Lost Tribe of the Sith had come to Coruscant—and were running the Galactic Alliance.

ABOARD THE JADE SHADOW

Vestara thought at first that part of her was forcing the numbness upon her. That perhaps what she had done was so heinous, so abominable, she couldn’t let herself feel the true impact of the choice she had made only a few hours earlier. Because she felt certain that she should be racked with guilt, horror, and self-loathing, and … she wasn’t.

The whole thing had taken on the quality of a dream. A bitter smile curved her lips at the irony as she lay staring up at the ceiling of the Jade Shadow, her thoughts racing as fast as the ship itself. A dream; a nightmare caused by the rhak-skuri? No, there was no such convenient and exonerating excuse for what she had done.

She, Vestara Khai, had murdered a Jedi Knight. And she had done so coldly, deliberately, and with full knowledge of her choice. It couldn’t even really be said that her act was as merciful as simple murder. Vestara had not merely executed Natua Wan. She had knocked off the Falleen’s mask, knowing that doing so would cause Natua to experience the terrifying hallucinations, and that the Jedi Knight’s horror would placate the rhak-skuri.

Vestara’s mask had been firmly in place the whole time.

The creature had wanted Ben, and she was not willing to let it have him. There was no other choice.

But that thought was as pleasant a fiction as telling herself she had been affected by the rhak-skuri’s pheromones. There was always a choice. She and Natua could have stood side by side, a Jedi Knight and a future Jedi Knight, fighting the creature. Maybe they could even have defeated it.

But she hadn’t taken that road. And even now, Vestara wasn’t wishing she had.

Search her feelings and thoughts as she might, she knew that given the same set of circumstances, she would make the same decision again. And she also knew that Ben, if he ever knew about it, would despise her for that choice. He would rather have died, horribly and in the grip of madness, than have an innocent’s blood on his hands.

Vestara supposed that it was a good thing the blood was on her hands. Ben need never know.

Never know that she had turned her back on the Jedi path and embraced the Sith method of handling such a painful decision.

She heard again the creature hissing in her mind and turned over, at last feeling something, even if it was vague unease. It had called her. It had wanted her to come with it.

Vestara hadn’t. Again, a choice, and she had chosen to stay with Ben.

She punched the pillow angrily. What did any of this matter? She had done what she had done—she had saved Ben. She did this because she had wanted to stay with him and become a Jedi.

And then she realized the bitter, inevitable, unforgiving illogic of the thought.

She would never be a Jedi. She would never learn to think like them. Never learn to think like Ben. Even at a point in her life when Vestara had thought she knew what she wanted, she had so easily, so familiarly, chosen the Sith way of getting it.

Vestara had never desired anything so badly in her life