hurt you first.”
The words left a bad taste in her mouth. She felt Zeerid’s eyes on her and dared not look him in the face.
Malgus, too, seemed almost puzzled, to judge from his furrowed brow and the tilt of his head.
“Go,” she said.
Zeerid accelerated and started to turn the speeder.
Anger went forth from Malgus. He reactivated Master Zallow’s blade and hurled it after them. Zeerid tried to wheel out of the way but the blade curled and kept coming at them. T7 beeped in alarm.
Aryn watched the weapon spin, felt it, and before it reached the speeder, she reached out with the Force and snatched it from Malgus’s mental grasp. The weapon turned upward over the speeder and descended hilt-first into her hand as Zeerid rose into the night sky and sped away. She deactivated it.
She looked back one last time to see Malgus standing atop the ruined temple, his blade in hand, his cape fluttering in the wind. He looked like a victorious conqueror.
And she hated him.
ZEERID FLEW LOW and fast through Coruscant’s streets, wheeling around buildings, careering down alleys, descending into the lower levels as he went. Soon, the sky was lost to the density of structures above them. They were in an industrial underworld, a series of metal-and-duracrete tunnels that covered the entire planet.
“Anyone following?” he said.
Aryn did not answer. She sat in the passenger seat and stared at her Master’s lightsaber hilt as if she’d never seen it before.
“Aryn! Is anyone following?”
“No,” she said, but did not look back.
Zeerid shot a glance behind them, above them, and saw no one. He let himself breathe easier.
“Blast, Aryn, what were you doing?”
She answered in a tone as mechanical as a protocol droid’s. “What I came here to do, Zeerid. Facing Malgus. What were you doing?”
“Helping you.”
“I didn’t need help.”
“No?” He stared at her across the speeder’s compartment.
“No.”
Zeerid thought otherwise. “Why’d you get in the speeder, Aryn?”
“I didn’t want you to get hurt. And I said I would help you get offplanet.”
“A lie,” Zeerid said. “Why not just stay there and finish it?”
She looked away from him as she answered. “Because …”
“Because?”
“Because killing him is not enough,” she blurted. “I want to hurt him.”
She hooked her Master’s lightsaber hilt to her belt and looked over at Zeerid. “I want to hurt him like he hurt me, like he hurt Master Zallow before he died.”
“Aryn, I don’t have to be an empath to feel your ambivalence. Revenge—”
She raised a hand to cut him off. “I do not want to hear it, Zeerid.”
He said it anyway. He owed her as much. “This doesn’t sound much like you.”
“We haven’t seen each other in years,” she snapped. “What do you know about me?”
The sharp tone cut him. “Not as much as I thought, it seems.”
For a time, silence sat between them like a wall.
“I hired on with The Exchange for a good reason, I thought. To provide a good life for my daughter.”
“Zeerid—”
“Just listen, Aryn!” He took a breath to calm himself. “And that one decision, that seemed so right, led to me running weapons, and then to running spice. One decision, Aryn. One act.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t like that, Zeerid. I know what I’m doing.”
He wasn’t so sure but decided not to press further. He changed the subject. “I think I can get us into the spaceport. There are ships there, from Valor, and Imperial troopers, but I have a plan.”
Without looking at him, she reached across the seat and touched his hand, just for a moment. “I’m sorry for the way I spoke, Zeerid. I’m not …”
He shook his head. “No apologies, Aryn. I know you’re hurting. I just … don’t want you to make it worse for yourself. I know how that can happen. Are you … seeing clearly?”
He felt ridiculous trying to provide an empath, of all people, with insight into her emotional state.
“I am,” she said, but he heard uncertainty in her tone.
“In the end, you have to live with yourself.”
He knew well how difficult that could get.
“I know,” she said. “I know. Now, what’s your plan?”
He told her.
She listened attentively, nodded when he was done. “That should work.”
“Tee-seven can do it?”
Aryn nodded, and T7 beeped agreement.
“I will help you get in and get a ship,” Aryn said. “But … I’m not leaving Coruscant.”
“I figured you’d say that,” he said, but in his own mind he had not yet conceded the point. He wrestled with whether to tell her about the Twi’lek.
“You are holding something back,”