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“Why did Luke send you? Really?”

“I didn’t lie to you. He’s trying to pull the Jedi back together.” She paused. “He also wanted to know what you were up to.”

“That’s very paternal of him,” Kyp remarked. “Almost as paternal as planting a tracer in my ship last time I was on Coruscant.”

“You found—” She suddenly recognized that Kyp had been nudging her very subtly in the Force.

“Don’t ever do that,” she snapped.

“I do what I must,” Kyp replied. “I guessed there was a tracer. I couldn’t find it. Must be something new. I had to trick you into confirming it, though, and I respected your intelligence enough to believe you wouldn’t fall for such a simple ruse without a nudge. I do apologize, but then, you did come to spy on me.”

“If you think that, you don’t know much about me,” Jaina replied. She glared across the empty space at him.

“Perhaps that’s true. But you didn’t willingly tell me about the tracer.”

“That’s not my secret to give out.”

“Neither are mine. Do you understand?”

Jaina thought about that a moment, then nodded. “Understood.”

“Okay.”

“No, not okay. I’m still not happy with you, Kyp. I don’t think I like who you’ve become.”

“I’ve become what I need to be. What your uncle Luke was in the war against the Empire.”

“Boy, you must love your mirror.”

“No. I’m not saying I like what I’ve become either, Jaina. Your uncle Luke eventually went to the dark side—”

“Hey,” Jaina snapped. “At least he fought it. You spent what, a week training to be a Jedi before the dark side seduced you?”

Kyp laughed easily. “Something like that.”

“And you blew up a planet, right? If it hadn’t been for Master Skywalker speaking for you, you’d be in prison to this day, if not dead. And my father—”

“I know what I owe Han,” Kyp said. “I won’t forget it. I haven’t even begun paying off that debt.”

“Or the one to Uncle Luke. But that doesn’t stop you from bad-mouthing him all over the galaxy, does it? It doesn’t stop you from undermining him as a leader.”

“Any time Luke is ready to be a leader again, I’m ready to follow him,” Kyp said.

“Riiight. Just so long as he tells you to do things you already want to and doesn’t tell you to do anything you don’t want to.”

“You’ve just described what a real leader does.”

“Yeah? And that’s what you are, aren’t you? A leader. I see the way your squadron looks at you. You like it too much. I doubt very much you would give that up, whatever course of action Master Skywalker might lead us on.”

“Jaina,” Kyp said, after a moment, “I won’t say you don’t have a few good points there. Maybe I am addicted to this now. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Every day, thousands of living, breathing beings are sacrificed to the Yuuzhan Vong gods. There’s a pit on Dantooine. I’ve seen it. It’s almost two kilometers across and full of bones. And the slaves, what they make the slaves do …”

He stopped, and she felt waves of anger, pity, and grief lap over her. “The Vong obliterate whole worlds, and yes, I know I did that once, but I’m not crazy enough to think it was right. The Vong think it’s a holy obligation. Maybe Master Skywalker is right to urge a passive role. Maybe that’s what the Force really asks of us. But I don’t believe it. Luke Skywalker risked everything in his war, the war against the Empire. Everything, including the peril of turning to the dark side as his father did. That was his war, Jaina. That was his war. This one is ours. Luke wants to protect us from ourselves. I say we’re all grown up. The old Jedi order died with the Old Republic. Then there was Luke, and only Luke, and a lot of fumbling to re-create the Jedi from what little he knew of them. He did the best he could, and he made mistakes. I was one of them. His generation of Jedi was put together like a rickety space scow, but from it something new has emerged. It’s not the old Jedi order, nor should it be.”

His eyes burned across the space between them like quasars. “We, Jaina, are the new Jedi order. And this is our war.”

TWENTY

The Millennium Falcon was purring, and the controls felt