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“Refugees?”

“Yes,” the former queen said, expressing a considerable amount of distaste with a single word. “You will be my guests, however, you and your friends. I will meet you at the palace.”

It occurred to Jaina that the former queen mother seemed surprisingly, perhaps suspiciously, eager for their arrival.

Her first impulse was to ask why. A childhood spent under the tutelage of a fussy protocol droid, however, was not easily dismissed. Leia Organa Solo’s daughter exchanged a few moments of proper small talk with Ta’a Chume, speaking as carefully and listening as intently as she’d observed her mother do over the years. But Ta’a Chume was no less skilled, and when the communication ended, Jaina had to admit it was a draw.

She slumped back in the pilot chair. “Ta’a Chume is up to something.”

“How do you know?” Ganner asked.

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “She always is.”

A joyful Wookiee bellow split the air. Lowbacca came whirling into the cockpit, spinning Tahiri in some sort of exuberant dance. He set her down and swept one paw toward the navibrain in a dramatic gesture.

“We did it,” Tahiri said obligingly, but without spirit.

“You found Tenel Ka?”

Lowbacca grinned and slipped into the navigator’s chair. He yanked the hood down over his head, and his massive shoulders hunched in anticipation. Moments passed, and Jaina could sense his surge of anxiety through the Force.

Using the cognition hood, she switched her focus to navigation. The answers that came to her yielded a faint mental picture, a shadow of what Lowbacca must have been seeing.

“The escape pod is moving away from Hapes!” she said. “Either she’s off course, or someone picked her up.”

The Wookiee moaned an agreement, then began to set course for pursuit.

Tenel Ka felt the sudden jolt of contact, heard the scrape of grappling hooks finding purchase on the irregular coral hull. The moment of capture unleashed a flood of raw, recent memory. Pain and loss and fury—all the emotions engendered by her days in Yuuzhan Vong captivity—flooded the Jedi in a torrent.

She heard a mechanical whir and realized its meaning. Small drills busily bolted the ship to the grappling arms to ensure retrieval. No Yuuzhan Vong would sully their hands with such machines.

Reassured, she removed the cognition hood and smoothed her warrior’s braids into place as best she could.

Now that the burden of flying the pod was lifted from her, Tenel Ka eased the shields she’d placed between herself and the tiny living ship. Fiercely independent, she used the Force only when necessary. To her way of thinking, maintaining some distance between herself and the Yuuzhan Vong or any of their creatures was absolutely essential.

Suddenly her unshielded mind flooded with a familiar mixture of warmth and humor, friendship and frustration.

“Jacen,” she said wonderingly, recognizing the presence that meant more to her than any other.

For a moment Tenel Ka knew complete happiness, something she had deemed illusive since the day she’d realized that when Jacen looked upon her, he saw only an old friend. But happiness was a gift as fleeting as it was sweet. The light that was Jacen faltered, then blazed up into an agonizing white heat.

Tenel Ka, despite her stoic courage and superb conditioning, shrieked in rage and pain.

Her reserve shattered, and a lifetime of emotions carefully controlled and shielded erupted like a Dathomir volcano. Mindlessly she thrashed at the walls of her prison, pounding the coral with her one fist, determined to get out, to reach Jacen, to fight and die to free him.

Then the light was gone, and its absence was a blow more devastating than the first.

For a long moment Tenel Ka sat in the sudden darkness, stunned and silent. Her lips moved, shaping words of denial that she could not force past the unfamiliar lump in her throat.

The escape pod jolted heavily against the ship. Cutting tools hummed as they dug through the coral shell. Tenel Ka wearily regarded the discarded cognition hood.