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“Then all is well. I have others to serve me—and other plans to execute.” And that quickly, Abeloth’s transmission ended. Annax leaned back in the chair she had occupied since Khai’s departure, and a slow smile spread across her lovely features.

Captain Tola Annax had such a nice ring to it.

Had Abeloth permitted a holographic transmission instead of a simple verbal one, Tola Annax would have seen something that might well have haunted her for the rest of her days, if it had not snapped her mind permanently.

On the “floor” of Ship’s interior was a collection of pulsing, half-formed body parts, attached in a way that no student of any kind of anatomy would recognize. It shifted and writhed, a human foot popping out here, a tentacle there, then subsiding back to a no-shape thing that undulated for a moment, before a face formed with gray eyes to see. It was a human face, peering out from the otherwise formless, undulating mass that was Abeloth.

The gray eyes were fixed on the wall, which was transmitting images from dozens of different holonews channels. Beings of all species were reporting—on uprisings, on the latest word from the interim government of the GA, on the Jedi, on the Imperial Remnant, on the influx of new Senators. Abeloth saw the jowly face of Padnel Ovin of Klatooine, the beaming, charming smile of Rokari Kem of Qaras, the reptilian visage of Jedi Master Saba Sebatyne glaring at holocams being shoved in her face, and the elegant Senator Haydnat Treen courting those same holocams, protestors marching. She saw funeral pyres for the slain Octusi, the grave face of Perre Needmo announcing a scholarship in the name of the late journalist Madhi Vaandt.

The human mouth smiled, widening slowly, stretching across the face as the gray eyes grew black with tiny pinpricks of light.

Oh, yes. Other plans to execute, indeed.

ABOARD THE JADE SHADOW

DEAD. GAVAR KHAI, SITH SABER, WAS DEAD. IN THE BIZARRE PATH THAT had taken him from the Lost Tribe to Abeloth’s side, he had forsaken his people, permitted his wife to die, and attempted to slay his daughter. Vestara Khai was an orphan. And try as she might, she just couldn’t seem to wrap her mind around the cold, brutal fact.

She lay in her cabin aboard the Jade Shadow, sleepless, staring at the ceiling, going over the battle in her mind’s eye, hearing again the heart-lacerating words that cut deeper than any lightsaber.

I will start fresh. A new wife, a new child. Both are easily replaced.

No. They weren’t. Nor was a father.

She saw again the contempt in his dark eyes, felt again the warm wetness of his spittle. The realization of the abandonment—not just of her, but of the Tribe; the out-of-control nature of his fighting; the feeling of savage rightness when she harnessed her own emotions, both the dark and the light, in order to defeat him: these things played over and over again in her mind’s eye, like a holovid on endless repeat.

There was a sickening inevitability about it all. Each mental path she went down led her to the same conclusion. If she had gone with him—he would have killed her. If she had not fought as hard as she could—he would have killed her. The galaxy, so vast and complicated, had suddenly become very small, and very clear. A Khai had needed to die, and when it came down to it, Vestara had been unwilling to be a sacrifice.

Growling softly in her frustration at being unable to sleep, she rose and went to the small computer built into the bulkhead. It had been a while since she had read the two letters, but now she wanted to revisit them. To feel the comfort of the happy and utterly fictitious relationship she had created, now that there was no chance of ever restoring even what they’d once had. Once, she had been loved, in a way, and she knew it.

She hesitated, then dived into the file she had created. She had known it would have been safer to leave the letters in her head, that she was tempting fate to write them down. But seeing the words on the screen had