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“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Do we need to talk about what happened back on Eriadu?”

She didn’t answer.

Anakin hesitantly pushed on. “That was a Yuuzhan Vong battle cry. When you broke in to rescue me.”

“I know. It just sort of … came out. Anakin, all of the words they put in me are still there. The other stuff faded, or most of it. But their language—I still hear it. Sometimes I think in it.”

“It, um, worries me.”

“It shouldn’t. I’m okay.”

He wound up his courage a little tighter. “I should have told you this a while back,” he said. “I waited because you already had enough to worry about, after we got off Yavin Four.”

“What?”

“I had a vision about you. At least I think it was a vision.”

“Go on.”

“You were grown up. You were, umm, scarred up and tattooed like Tsavong Lah. You were Jedi, but dark. I could feel the darkness radiating from you.”

“Oh.”

“It worried me.”

“And you didn’t tell me this? You didn’t think I should know?”

“When you killed the shaper, I saw the look in your eyes. The look she had.”

“By she you mean me, of course. The she I might have been if you hadn’t rescued me.”

“Something like that.”

“You don’t think … you don’t still think that could happen to me? That I could end up like the me in your vision? How could I? You saved me from them, stopped them before they finished.”

“I thought so. Think so. But when you came through that door speaking Yuuzhan Vong—”

“It’s nothing,” Tahiri insisted. “It’s just words. And I would never hurt you.”

That rang strange. “Who said anything about you hurting me?” Anakin asked.

“I just assumed, in your vision, I was threatening you.”

“No,” he said, a little suspicious but not willing to push it. Had she had a vision, too? She somehow didn’t sound surprised at his. “No,” he continued, “it was like I was looking through someone else’s eyes, not my own. I don’t think I was there. But whoever was—you said something about them being the last. Just before you killed them.”

“Anakin, I’ll never join the Yuuzhan Vong. Believe it.” Even through two helmets, her voice rang with utter conviction.

“Okay,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you. I thought you ought to know.”

“Thanks. Thanks for not keeping me in the dark.”

“You’re welcome.”

Their helmets were still touching, and she didn’t say anything else. He was glad he couldn’t see her face, because he would have had to look away.

And yet he wished he could see it.

Her gloved hand came up slowly. He took it and felt something almost like an electric jolt. They stood that way for a long time, until Anakin felt suddenly very … awkward.

He was about to let go when the asteroid suddenly began to vibrate, a faint tactile buzz coming from everywhere. At the same time, Anakin felt weight, dragging him not toward the surface of the asteroid, but against the wall of the fissure.

“What?” He suddenly thought to switch his comm back on.

“… under acceleration!” Corran was shouting.

It took only an instant for the implications of that to sink in. Then Anakin flicked on his lightsaber. The blade limned the stone around them in purple light.

Anakin sliced through the stone, five strokes that set a chunk of nickel-steel floating to butt against the new “down” of the fissure wall.

The stone went down only about twenty centimeters. Below that was yorik coral.

“This is a ship, too!” Corran shouted.

To prove him correct, the g forces continued to mount.

NINETEEN

Jaina was awakened by a blaring horn and the arrhythmic thumping of running feet. She sat up, trying to remember where she was.

The walls, ceiling, and floor were of blue-black ice. She’d been sleeping in her flight suit inside a thermoskin. Right, she had it now. Kyp’s hideout.

The other two people sleeping in the chamber—a human female named Yara and a disheveled Bothan whose name she had forgotten—were clambering to their feet. Jaina shrugged on her parka and followed them into the corridor and down to the command center.

Kyp was there, calmly giving orders. He saw Jaina