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Tahiri found Nen Yim at the helm of the ship gazing out at the stars. She stood there for a moment, trying to control her feelings.

But she needed to talk to the shaper.

“Jeedai,” the shaper said, without turning.

“Master Yim.” She said it in Yuuzhan Vong.

“So some of our implants did take.”

Anger flared again, but Tahiri fought it down. “Yes,” she said. “I am no longer human and I am not Yuuzhan Vong. Congratulations.”

“Congratulate my late master, not me.”

“So you take no blame for me?”

“Blame? What blame is there? Mezhan Kwaad was a shaper. She shaped you. Had I been in charge of the project, I would feel no remorse for what you’ve become.”

“Right,” Tahiri said. “No remorse. No pain. No passion. There’s nothing in you, is there, Nen Yim? Except maybe curiosity and duty.”

“Duty?” Nen Yim murmured, still staring out at space. “Do you know when the last time I gazed on stars like this was?”

“Should I care?”

“It was on the worldship Baanu Miir, one of the older ones. Its brain was failing, and an involuntary muscle spasm ripped one of the arms open. I stood in the vacuum staring at the naked stars, and I swore that no matter what, I would save that worldship and the people on it. I practiced heresy to do so, and still I failed. Even yet, the people might have lived, if your infidel friends hadn’t obliterated the new worldship we were meant to move to.”

Now she did turn to Tahiri, and despite her calm tones, her eyes blazed. “I have risked my life, and I have taken life and shaped terrible things for my people so that we never have to live in the abyss between galaxies again. I have risked even more to see the secrets encoded in this universe around us and solve their riddles. Perhaps you do not call this passion. But hatred, I think, might fairly be called that. You, Jeedai, slew my mentor. Jeedai destroyed the new worldship and doomed thousands to miserable, honorless deaths. I have hated Jeedai.”

“And you hate them still?”

“I have stepped back from my hate. My heresy requires that I see things as they are, not as I wish them to be, not as I fear them to be. The riddle of Zonama Sekot may well be the central question of Yuuzhan Vong existence, and the Jeedai seem to be involved. Since I must place the good of my people before my own whimsy, I must remain open to all possibilities, even the possibility that the creed of this ridiculous Prophet has salience.”

“And what about me personally?”

“You?” She shrugged. “Mezhan Kwaad sealed her own doom. She practiced her heresy too openly, almost flaunted it. Worse, she ruined a noble warrior merely because she feared he would disclose their illicit affair. That brought about her downfall. You were the instrument of her death, and that again was rooted in her failure—had her shaping of you been competent, you could never have turned on her. I hated you for a time. I find now I do not. You hardly knew what you were doing.”

“Oh, yes I did,” Tahiri said, recalling the crystallized fury of that moment. “I remember it very well. I could have disabled her instead of killing her. But after the pain she put me through, that you helped put me through—”

“And so you hate me?”

That’s a good question, Tahiri mused. “In the Jedi view,” she told the shaper, “hate is to be avoided. If there is hatred in me for you—and there may be yet—I do not want it. The Yuuzhan Vong have taken much from me—my childhood, my identity, someone I loved. But I am as much a part of you now as I am native to this galaxy. I have reconciled my different natures. Now I want to help see that reconciliation between my parent peoples.”

“You seek an end to the war?”

“Of course.”

Nen Yim nodded. “I do not see the same honor in pointless slaughter the warriors do, I must admit. Pursuit of it has bred stupidity. We have taken far more worlds than we need, and probably more than we can defend. Shimrra, I sometimes think, is mad.” She cocked her head, and the tendrils of her headdress did an odd, squirming dance and settled in a new arrangement. “How are your wounds?”

“Better,