Entoo blooped.
Sian swallowed thickly. “What does she mean?Regrettably?You can fly this, right? She’s done it before, right?” he added, looking back at the droids, but when neither of them answered, he whirled his attention to me.“Right?”
I sucked in a breath between my teeth and looked at the console panel in mock confusion. “Oh, stars, how do I take off again?”
Through the shuttle comm, the port master said,“Starstall,you’re not clear to take off yet. Maintain position.”
I buzzed back. “No can do, sorry!”
Veebee told Entoo, “We’ve had a good run, old friend. I am glad you were my partner.”
“Bloop,” Entoo agreed.
Sian shook his head. “No,no—no!”
Or at least I thought he said no, but I really couldn’t tell if it was that or a scream, because at the same moment, the lights on the console blinked green. Our Jawa friends werewaytoo close for comfort, and if I put another scratch on the lander, then Dad wasreallygoing to kill me, so I took hold of the controls and pulledStarstalloff the ground. The ship banked into the air, quick and sharp, toward the impossibly wide sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Inheritance
The first time Dad let me pilot theStarfarer, he had sat me on his lap, because I couldn’t yet reach the controls, and folded his arms around me, his chin resting on my head. I remembered how incredibly large the galaxy had looked outside the viewport, how frozen with indecision I felt bombarded by the idea—the poetry—ofeverywhere.
Come to think of it, looking out into the wide and impossible galaxy felt a little like looking into Sian’s eyes. I should’ve been frightened, or at least a little discombobulated, faced with suchbigness, but…
I never feared the expanse of darkness and the light of distant stars.
“It’s big, isn’t it?” Dad had whispered.
Mom was in the copilot seat, humming softly to herself as she made small tweaks to the navicomputer, hypotheses for shorter routes, faster ways to get places, safer lanes. She was always working, always flicking hereyes from the wide sky to the navicomputer and back again.
She said in her soft, patient way, “But don’t let that scare you.”
“Are all those stars places?”
“A lot of them,” Dad replied. “We can go there, if you want.”
“We can find a route,” Mom agreed.
Sitting at the back of the flight deck, my brother flicked through a holobook about Jedi and other fairy tales. He was nine, I was six, and that was the happiest we’d ever be. “Let’s go somewhere cool. I wanna fight some monsters!”
Mom laughed. “How about you, love? Where do you want to go?” she asked me.
I didn’t have a specific answer. “Everywhere.”
Places I didn’t know the names of yet, places I hadn’t even dreamed of. If I opened my eyes wide enough, I imagined I could see branching paths, glimmering and twisting and turning, knitting together like threads of string, taking me anyplace I wanted. I used to think that if I chased those strings in the galaxy, I’d find a path that, to anyone else, didn’t exist.
Dad had scrubbed my head with a laugh. “Then let’s go everywhere.”
But we never did go everywhere, especially not afterMom died. No, we stuck to the safe planets, the well-treaded routes.
The memory filled my heart with heaviness as I looked out at the countless stars, the feeling anchoring me to my chair. My eyes caught glimmers in the darkness. I felt an incessant pull in my middle. Like gravity. But every time I tried to fall, the promise of uncharted places pulled away from me like I didn’t belong anymore.
Unchosen.
I eased the shuttle out of the atmosphere, and after a brief check of the systems, I punched in the coordinates for Geonosis, and the navigation did the rest. Once we were clear of the shipping lanes and past the two closest moons, I pushed us into hyperspace, flipped on the autopilot, and unbuckled my seat belt.
We’d catch up to theStarfarerin a few hours. I had to believe that.
