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Luke thought for a moment. There were many he still could ask, but the urgency had left them. He believed she would answer them all, in their turn. “Yes, one,” he said finally. “Did you love Andras?”

“That isn’t the question I expected,” Akanah said, and bit her lower lip. “Yes. I loved him. He held me lightly. He found something in me that he thought was beautiful, and he never tried to change me. And he was never cruel. It was like being a child—like being a child should be. I wish that it could have lasted.”

Curiously, J’t’p’tan wasn’t in the skiff’s navigational database. Since the spelling was so odd, he pressed Akanah about it.

“It isn’t a Basic word,” she said, calling forward to him from the refresher. “It’s the Basic transliteration of four mystical glyphs in H’kig—‘jeh,’ the immanent; ‘teh,’ the transcendent; ‘peh,’ the eternal; and ‘tan,’ the conscious essence. Only ‘tan’ may be written out in full. The H’kig consider the others too sacred. The spelling I gave you is the convention that respects that belief.”

“You could have just said ‘I’m sure,’ ” he said with mock grumpiness.

“Next time, I will.”

The failure of the skiff to identify their destination forced Luke to make a query to Coruscant, and Mud Sloth to linger a while longer near the Oort Cloud. When the Astrographical Survey Institute returned the requested coordinates, they caused Luke’s eyes to widen.

“A long way,” he said, zooming and scrolling the nav chart across the primary display. “And we can’t go there directly, because that’d put us on the wrong side of the Borderlands for the whole middle third of the trip.”

“Which would be unsafe, I take it.”

“There are Interdictor patrols all in through there,” Luke said. “But that’s okay, because it’s too far to go in one jump anyway. We’d be twenty hours over the skiff’s endurance. I’m going to have to pick a stopping place somewhere along the way.” He waggled a finger over one section of the map. “Somewhere in here—that’ll keep us on the right side of the line.”

“I’ll leave that decision up to you.”

Luke drew a small square around their destination and zoomed the map in to a more familiar scale. Legend marks and other identifiers popped into view. “Farlax Sector,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“Talking to myself,” Luke said. “I’m tired. My mind’s already lying down in the bunk.”

He zoomed the map another order of magnitude. Not just Farlax—Koornacht Cluster, he realized with a troubled frown. Pulling the datapad from the tie-down keeper, he brought up the news abstract and searched it for J’t’p’tan. It was a relief not to find it listed among the worlds involved in the fighting.

Still frowning, Luke next turned to the PIO reports still waiting in the message queue. Skimming, he found confirmation for the key element in the news reports—some colony worlds within Koornacht had been attacked, and their populations exterminated, by the Yevetha. Some colonies were given by name, some only by the origin of the colonists. But J’t’p’tan was not mentioned. Nor were the H’kig.

He zoomed the navigation map once more and studied the geography of Koornacht Cluster. J’t’p’tan lay in the interior, out of scanning range for a ship on the edge of the Cluster. If something had happened there, Coruscant might not have any way to know.

Do I tell her? Do we wait here until we know more, or do we go?

As he plotted an alternate course—one that would take them as close to the border as possible without crossing the line—he allowed himself to consider the horrendous possibility that the Yevetha had fallen on J’t’p’tan and exterminated the Fallanassi. It was possible that he and Akanah had set out on their journey too late—by no more than a few tens of days. It was possible that Nashira had been alive that short a time ago—and was now dead.

Akanah emerged from the refresher, and Luke pushed the datapad back in the keeper as she came forward. I can carry this. I can tolerate this uncertainty—she can’t, he told himself as he blanked the secondary display.

“We have a good