It is still following us, said the ship.

"What did you think of your last pilot?" Lumiya asked.

Not like us.

"Not Sith material, then."

No. The ship knew Ben wasn't fit to be Jacen's apprentice. Less like us

than the one who follows.

The meditation sphere dropped out of hyperspace and made convincing speed for the asteroid. Lumiya gave it a mental image of marking time until the pilot on their tail had located them again, and then showed it her habitat on the asteroid.

They prepared to dock, Lumiya and the ship, somehow one mind for brief moments. Ben had proven he wasn't the right apprentice for Jacen.

For all his fierce courage on Ziost, the boy had still succumbed to a sentimental Jedi urge and risked his life to rescue that child. He lacked the ruthless edge a Sith needed. But at least he had done something right: without him, she wouldn't have this rare vessel. It would be instrumental in Jacen's future. She could see it in the Force. Somehow her own future wasn't linked with it, but she'd look after it until the time came to relinquish control.

Ben. She bore the boy no ill will, but he was simply surplus to requirements now.

Is it him, though? Is this who Jacen has to kill?

Perhaps the Force had spared Ben from her plot for a reason.

Perhaps it was his destiny to help his Master by sacrificing his life, and so it wasn't Lumiya's to take.

I don't know what Jacen has to do. I just don't know. I can't see the bridge he has to cross to become the Sith Lord he's destined to be.

Did Jacen believe that she had no more answers to that question than he did?

She doubted it.

He had to immortalize his love—to kill it, to destroy what he loved most.

As the meditation sphere slipped into the docking bay of her habitat, Lumiya pondered on what Jacen Solo loved and couldn't bear to lose, the sacrifice that would take him beyond the mundane world and into greatness. His sister, Jaina? No, he'd already tried to have her court- martialed. His parents? He'd ordered their arrest. But punishment was one thing, and killing was another.

Home, said the ship. I can defend you against the one who follows.

"Thank you." Lumiya was taken aback. "It's not necessary. Let the other ship land."

Would it be Ben Skywalker? The boy was the nearest Lumiya had seen to someone Jacen loved. He wanted Ben to succeed. He ignored the weakness in the boy.

Luke Skywalker? No, Jacen cared nothing for Luke, and perhaps even despised him. Mara? She might have been the last person to stand by Jacen, but he had less feeling for her than for his own parents. Ben, then. It was almost certainly Ben.

Or . . . maybe it wasn't a person. Maybe he had to kill an organization, or something abstract. Perhaps he didn't have to kill anything at all. Lumiya fought impatience; whatever Jacen's destiny might be, whatever pivotal act he had to perform, it would be soon. She could almost feel the fabric of the Force anticipating it. And perhaps . . .

it's going to be me he kills.

But she was Sith, and any Sith would expect that of her pupil. It was a price she had to be ready to pay.

Very broken, said the ship, snapping her out of her thoughts.

Lumiya got to her feet and stood in front of the bulkhead. The glowing pumice thinned to transparency, but it wasn't a visual illusion; the bulkhead opened to the atmosphere and a ramp formed from the ship's casing. When Lumiya walked down it into the hangar area, an old Conqueror

The hatch popped and someone emerged, partly swathed in a cloak but with a distinctive limping gait.

"You take your risks, dancer." Lumiya was beginning to find Alema Rar a liability. "I might have fired on you."

The Twi'lek threw the cloak back from her face and tilted her head.

It was the practiced pose of a woman who had spent so much of her life being coquettish that it had become unconscious habit. She had been used to male attention and still behaved as if she deserved it, even if there were no males around, and even if her looks had been ruined by lightsaber wounds. The severed stump of her lekku gave her a grotesquely comic look.

But Alema wasn't a laughing matter at all. She was, as the ship put it, broken. This was a damaged, vengeful creature that wanted to lash out, and Lumiya had no patience with lack of discipline. Alema was also insane, and a Dark Jedi with those problems was a very dangerous complication.

"But you didn't." The Twi'lek's eyes were on the meditation sphere.

"We find this ship interesting."

"I thought you might." Lumiya indicated the doors leading to her chambers. Home wasn't the word. "Seeing as you're here, you might as well come in."

Alema prowled around the ship, gazing at it from all angles, clearly fascinated.

"It thinks," she said. "This ship thinks"

"Thinking's useful. Try it sometime." Lumiya knew she ought to handle a madwoman more carefully, but she was short on tolerance today.

She strained to sense what the ship might be saying, but all she could detect was its watchfulness, its sensors taking a wary interest in Alema.

It could probably taste her darkness. "What brings you here?"

"We have been tracking the Anakin Solo. We have considered Jacen Solo's attitude to his parents, and we think we might gain access to Han and Leia Solo by working with Jacen."

Alema put a caressing hand on the meditation sphere, and Lumiya felt it flinch, then somehow soften. It knew Alema was damaged. Its duty was to aid, to take care of its pilot. That tendency seemed to make it oddly sympathetic to those in need of assistance.

Lumiya sighed to herself. That was the last thing she needed: a Sith vessel that felt sorry for a crazy Twi'lek trollop. She sent the ship a sharp image of Alema, face twisted with psychotic rage, crashing the sphere into a jagged mountain. The ship got the idea right away.

Alema pulled back as if burned.

"It would be helpful for all of us," Lumiya said carefully, "if you avoided crossing Jacen Solo's path at the moment. There's a war on, you know . . ."

"We have our task, and you have yours. Ours is to have Balance for what the Solos did to us. Leia will still be trying to bring her precious son back to the light, and that means he remains good bait for our purposes."

"Let me put it another way," Lumiya said kindly, steering her toward the doors. "Get in my way, and I'll kill you."

Alema gave her a curious lopsided smile but allowed herself to be ushered into the living quarters.

"Do you know who you're dealing with?" Alema asked.

Lumiya probed Alema's presence again. It felt like shards of broken glass

in her mouth, as alien as any being she'd ever encountered. She'd been in the minds of the insane before, but never a Jedi, and never one this deluded. It was almost frightening. It was the sense of us that was most disturbing. She found it hard to pick her way between the hive-mind elements and the fragmented personality of one being.

"Yes, I do," Lumiya said. "And I'll still kill you if you let this feud ruin bigger strategies. There'll be time for you to have your revenge later. Interfere with my plans and I'll kill the Solos myself, and then you'll never have your Balance." Lumiya lowered her voice to a soothing whisper. "And you know I can do that, don't you?"

Seemingly unperturbed, Alema gazed around Lumiya's quarters. They were sparsely furnished now because she'd taken most of her necessary possessions back to the safe house on Coruscant—or the latest address, anyway—except for duplicates of the equipment she kept to maintain her cybernetic prosthetics, and basic essentials for a brief stay. Alema had the look of someone sizing up an apartment and deciding whether to buy it.