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“Thank you for responding to our distress call,” he yelled over the driving rain in thickly accented Basic. When I told him that I hadn't received any distress signals, he said: “Through your ship, you mean.” I confirmed it, but he only nodded. I was here, he told me, and that was what mattered. His name, he said, was Noneen.

I followed him into the rain, asking if he knew why the attack had been launched.

“The Imperials didn't explain,” he said calmly.

It emerged, however, that the governor of the planetary sector was believed to have angered the Emperor, and Hijado was being made an example. It sounded all too familiar, and what with the number of dead surrounding me I must have allowed my despair to show.

But Noneen only said: “Don't mourn for us. There was no dying here; only going.”

At the time I interpreted the words as merely poetic, little realizing the import they would take on in the coming weeks, months, and, ultimately, years.

In what amounted to a local week, I assisted in the retrieval of more than five hundred bodies, all of which were ritually burned in the remains of a place of worship. When not rooting about and helping to haul corpses, my droids and I tended to wounds, burns, and broken bones in the small clinic the Falcon became. It took some time to set in, but gradually I realized that I had yet to encounter an elderly person among the injured or the dead, and I asked Noneen about it.

At first he didn't understand my question. Then he pointed to a woman perhaps a bit older than he was and said: “Magan has one hundred one stellar cycles.” Then he pointed out a slightly older-looking man. “Sonnds has one hundred forty cycles.”

Since I already knew that Hijado's year was roughly equivalent to Coruscant's, the ages Noneen quoted had to be wrong.

“How many cycles do you have?” he asked me. When I told him twenty-eight, he said that he would have thought I had many more.

Now, I don't know many young women who enjoy hearing that they look older—much older—than they actually are. But Noneen was right. Those of his people who were my chronological peers looked much younger. Still, I found it difficult to accept. Data on Hijado wasn't very extensive, but it was an established fact that the planet's human population had migrated from the Core several millennia earlier. So either Hijado's humans had evolved into longer-lived beings, or there was something about the now ravaged planet that had granted them unusual longevity.

Within a month of my arrival Noneen and the others were already rebuilding their homes. If they had grieved for the dead, they had done so in private, for I had yet to see so much as a tear shed by anyone. Then one afternoon while I was collating the data I had compiled on the group's rapid ability to heal—physically and emotionally— Noneen and several others returned from a trek into the forest with a dozen or more huge vats of tree sap, all of which had been colored with fruit extracts, clay, and ground minerals. Without bothering to consult me, they were soon painting the Falcon with the saps, turning her from white to deep red, and replacing the medical symbols with enigmatic sigils. When they were done, the ship sported a snarling mouth and a row of fanged teeth, clenched fists at the tips of the mandibles, and flaming feathers covering her dorsal surface. The laser cannon had become a kind of fiery flower; the cockpit an angry eye.

When I finally asked Noneen for an explanation, he told me that the Falcon was being prepared.

“Prepared for what?” I asked.

His response was matter-of-fact: “Vengeance for those who went.”

If he meant literal vengeance on Hijado's Imperial base, he had some news coming, and I provided it. “First of all,” I told him, “I'm a healer, not a soldier.”

“I am also a healer,” he said. “What difference does that make?”

I told him that I dealt in saving lives, not sowing death.

“By avenging those who left,” he said, “we will be saving lives.”

I told him I wasn't a combat pilot, and that the droids weren't capable of executing more than basic