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“Well, this ought to be interesting,” Tahiri murmured.

Jaina silently agreed. “Are you sure they’ve got Tenel Ka?”

“She’s been picked up, all right. The ship is mechanical, not organic. That’s good news.”

“But no guarantee of safety,” Ganner added. “For all we know, they could be Peace Bri—”

He broke off abruptly, and the expression on his face suggested that someone had just hit him between the eyes with a hydrospanner.

Before Jaina could make sense of this, white-hot pain exploded through her senses. She ripped off the cognition hood, but the agony didn’t lessen in the slightest. Dimly she realized that it came not from the ship, but from the other Jedi aboard. She felt them all, and all of them formed a single thought:

Jacen.

The surge ended abruptly, and the sensation disappeared.

For a moment Jaina sat frozen, stunned beyond speech. Jacen had appeared in the Force—but not to her.

Jaina could accept that her own grief and anger blocked Jacen’s ability to contact her. But as Jaina looked from one stunned face to another, she saw a different, darker truth. Her brother’s death was written on Lowbacca’s furred face and in Tekli’s rodent-black eyes. It was in the sorrow that flowed from all of them.

Jaina was dimly aware of Zekk nudging her aside and taking over the pilot’s chair. She slumped against the rough wall. Her whirling thoughts screamed denial, rejecting a truth she could neither sense nor accept.

Then a second storm hit her, a searing frenzy that was barely recognizable as Tenel Ka. Jaina felt the other woman’s emotional storm, the rawness in her hand from beating against the walls of the escape pod.

But why could she feel nothing of her own?

Tenel Ka’s grief turned to rage. Jaina experienced this, too, and with the same benumbed detachment. One part of her was startled by the depth and intensity of Tenel Ka’s reaction. She’d been troubled by her father’s response to Chewbacca’s death, but Han’s denial and detachment made more sense to Jaina than her friend’s heartbroken frenzy.

Maybe her family wasn’t a reliable measure of such things. The Skywalkers and Solos were no strangers to conflict, and they’d all stepped up at an early age. In matters of relationships, however, every one of them seemed a little vague on the coordinates. Her mother, conditioned through training and experience to hold the New Republic paramount, had nearly accepted Prince Isolder’s offer of marriage. Leia had known that Han loved her, but somehow she’d misplaced the access codes to her own emotions. Had Jacen done the same thing? Had he loved Tenel Ka and never fully realized it?

Yeah, Jaina decided numbly. That sounded like Jacen—forever thinking about everything under a hundred distant suns rather than focusing on what was right in front of him.

As she herself was doing. With great effort, Jaina pushed herself away from the wall.

“Tenel Ka is still out there,” she said in a cool, steady voice. “We need to focus on her.”

For a moment every eye fixed upon Jaina. A symphony of emotions ranging from incredulity to anger to pity washed over her.

Ganner was the first to pull himself together. He threw himself in the gunner’s chair. “You got it. Let’s hunt them down.”

Tesar hissed his approval and scuttled off to his station, his armored tail rasping against the rough coral floor. The rest of the Jedi set to work or strapped in for the pursuit.

As they neared the Hapan ship, they noted the small flight of Hornet Interceptors that followed it. These scattered and fled at the approach of the Yuuzhan Vong frigate.

“They’ve got the escape pod,” Zekk confirmed. “Just pulled it through the hatch.”

Ganner swore softly. “What I wouldn’t give for a good ion cannon right about now. Something that would take out the controls, but not the ship.”

“Force lightning,” Jaina suggested.

“Oh, great,” Tahiri muttered. “How Sith is that?”

“I’m serious.” Jaina placed a hand on Zekk’s shoulder. “We could do this. You graduated from the Shadow Academy. They must have taught