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“Fight what’s in front of you,” she said. “Let’s go find out more about this Prophet.”

* * *

“Can’t say the Vong have improved much on this,” Corran remarked, as they wound their way through the dark caverns that had once been Coruscant’s underworld. Now it was a mass of corroding metal, strange, pale growths, and luminescent lichen. It looked as if it had been abandoned for centuries rather than months. Despite the setbacks Jacen had engineered with the dhuryam—the World Brain—the Yuuzhan Vong shapers seemed to be making headway.

“Of course, it was never exactly homey down here,” he added.

“Yuuzhan Vong,” Tahiri corrected. “Did people live here back in the old days?”

“Lots,” Corran said. “The vast majority of people who lived on Coruscant weren’t what you would exactly call comfortable.”

Tahiri shivered. “I can’t imagine living like this, below-ground, surrounded by metal, no sky, no stars.”

“Is that Tahiri or Riina talking?”

There was something subtly testing in his voice. “Neither one of them would have liked this,” she said. “Tahiri grew up in the desert and in the jungles of Yavin Four. Riina grew up in a worldship. Both were surrounded by life.”

“Riina didn’t grow up anywhere,” Corran said. “Riina was created in a laboratory.”

“You think that makes a difference?” she asked, stung. “How do you know all your memories are real? If you found out your memories of Mirax were implanted, that there was no such person, would she be any less real to you?”

“Unh-unh,” Corran said. “Not buying the sophomoric philosophy. Part of you was once a real person. Part of you was created, like a computer program.”

“You think Threepio isn’t real?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Tahiri said. She’d pretty much had enough of this, because she didn’t know whether to cry or hit him. “And I’ll bet I’ve thought about it a lot more than you have. What I don’t know is why you’re pushing this, here, now. I thought we covered this before leaving Mon Calamari.”

Corran stopped, regarded her in the light of their lamps.

“No, we didn’t. Or, rather, none of my worries were really resolved. You asked if I trusted you. It’s not that I don’t trust you, Tahiri—I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what might be sleeping in you, waiting to wake up when the right stimulus comes along. And I can’t believe that you can be sure about that either.”

That was a tu’q, a solid hit. “No, of course I can’t,” she finally managed. “But I’m not part Tahiri and part Riina. There aren’t two voices in my head. Those two fought, and joined, and I was born. They were sort of like my parents. Nothing about either one of them is perfect in me. Even if I inherited something nasty from Riina, it will be flawed. I’ll be able to fight it.”

“Unless you don’t want to. Unless it’s something that would have appealed to both Tahiri and Riina.”

She conceded that with a nod. “You’ve already taken the risk, Corran. Why didn’t we have this conversation days ago?”

“Because I wanted to see something of who you’ve become.”

“And who have I become?”

“You’re bright and talented and far too confident. I’m not sure you’re afraid of anything, and that’s bad.”

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Fear. Anger.”

“The dark side.”

“Anakin saw me as a Dark Jedi with Yuuzhan Vong markings. He was strong in the Force.” She shook her head. “It’s not some hidden Yuuzhan Vong part of me that should worry you, Corran. It’s the Jedi part. Tahiri was trained as a Jedi from childhood. I—the person I’ve become—was not.”

His eyebrows beetled up. “That’s an interesting thing to say. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Most people haven’t.”

“Okay,” Corran said. “We’ll take this up later, when we aren’t skulking.”

“Are we skulking now?”

“Yes, because we’re almost at our destination. If there’s anyone waiting for us, I’d rather they didn’t interrupt an interesting conversation.”

A few moments later they passed an immense shaft of some sort. Faint daylight illuminated it, so she could guess that it was perhaps two kilometers in diameter. Looking up, she could see a