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“I think you owed us the truth. Maybe we would have decided to help you if you had been straight with us.”

“And maybe you wouldn’t have. As long as you thought it was a superweapon, you were ready to go. But we’ve set them back here more than the destruction of any weapon. By the time they grow another one—”

“—their children start dying. Right. I get that. Bravo, Kyp. Well done. Except you used me. You made me tell your lie, and now the blood of every Yuuzhan Vong child who suffocates in space is on my hands, too.”

“There’s more to this universe than Jaina Solo, believe it or not,” Kyp said, very quietly. “I’m sorry you feel used, and I wish I hadn’t had to lie to you. But I did have to. You wouldn’t have helped me otherwise.”

“And I’ll never help you again,” Jaina said. “You can count on it. If you were dying of thirst on Tatooine, I wouldn’t even spit on you.” And with that she left, found the stateroom she had been assigned, turned out the lights, and wept.

The next day, with Gavin Darklighter’s permission, she left to find the Errant Venture.

FORTY-SIX

“It’s a weird thing,” Corran said, as the Errant Venture grew larger through the transparisteel lozenge of the Givin ship.

“What’s that?” Anakin asked.

“Being happy to see my father-in-law’s ship.”

“Ah.” Anakin tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He’d been searching for Aunt Mara in the Force. The results were ambiguous—at times he thought he had her, but at other times it didn’t seem like her at all. The feeling that she was dying had scarred his mind, and deep in his gut he feared she was already dead and his occasional sense of contact was merely a residual imprint of her living self.

He turned to go back and wake Tahiri and found her standing only a meter or so away. She gave him a brief smile.

“Uh … hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Tahiri replied. Her eyes refused to settle on his for long, but he could feel her uncertainty matching his own. “Looks like we’re almost there,” she pointed out unnecessarily.

“Yeah.” Why did his fingers feel like hammers and his legs like spongy pillars? This was Tahiri.

“And we can finally get out of these things for good,” Tahiri went on. “I never want to wear a vac suit again as long as I live.”

“Right. Me either.” The suits had made a recurrence of what had happened in the locker on Yag’Dhul Station impossible. What would happen when they were in shirtsleeves again?

It was a nearly terrifying thought.

“You think Mara’s okay?”

Anakin shook his head. “No.”

“She will be. She has to be.”

“Yeah.” A long, awkward silence followed as they drew near the Errant Venture. Corran was busily trying to prove they were who he said they were—despite the fact that they weren’t in the same ship they’d left in—so he could get clearance to enter the docking bay.

“Hey, Anakin?” Tahiri asked.

“Yeah?”

“What’s going on? You’ve hardly said two words to me since we left Yag’Dhul.”

“We were kind of busy, and I … I’m worried about Aunt Mara.”

“Uh-huh. Look, have you changed your mind?”

“About what?”

“About … you know. Are you sorry now? I mean, we were about to die and everything. It’s perfectly understandable, because we’ve been best friends for so long, but maybe now you’re thinking I’m too young, and remembering all the trouble I’ve gotten you into, and, well, maybe we ought to just forget …” Her green eyes did meet his then, with a sort of ionic jolt.

“Tahiri …”

“Right. I get it. No harm done.”

“Tahiri, I haven’t changed my mind. I’m not sorry at all. I don’t know exactly what it all means, and we are young, both of us. But I don’t regret kissing you. And, um … it wasn’t just because I thought we were dying.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, okay then.”

He was trying to decide what to say next without totally messing up the situation, when a staggering pain suddenly jolted through him.

“Aunt Mara!” he gasped. “Aunt Mara!” Another blinding wave of agony made his knees buckle.

* * *

The instant they were docked, Anakin bolted from the ship, pushing past the Jedi students who had come