“Get that out of your mouth!” I yelped in alarm. “You don’t know if it’s poison!”
“I’m not lying,” he repeated, his heated gaze on mine. He tucked the half-chewed flower into the corner of his mouth and talked around it. “I promise I’m not lying, Ardent.”
Again, he said my name. NotStarlight, but my name. Soft at the front, sweet at the back. Like some sort of tender word, even when he sounded desperate.
My hands curled tightly around the saber again even as I lowered it. “Then whose is this?” I asked. “Why is it so important?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just know that my mentor thought it belonged to”—he gritted his teeth and then sucked in a breath—“to Luke Skywalker.”
My eyes widened. I looked down at the broken pieceof junk in my hands. I guessed it wasn’t so much junk after all.
“Oh,” I said faintly. “That would be a reason why people want it.”
“Apparently he hasn’t been seen in a few years, so”—he shrugged—“I guess it’s proof of death?”
“Or proof of life,” I argued, because Luke Skywalker, hero of the Republic, wasn’tdead. He couldn’t be. Just…missing. Though, if this washissaber, then where was he? Those were questions I couldn’t think about right now.
He extended his hand to accept the pin back, and so I returned it. He felt the indentations with his fingertips, flipping it over. “What I wouldn’t give to live in your world, Starlight.” He sighed.
I frowned. “You do.”
“Nah, because in your world everything is nice and right and kind,” he said, talking more to the pin than to me. “Where the good guys always win, and orphans are reunited with their families, and everyone lives happily into old age—it’s a good story.”
“I don’t think I live in that world,” I replied, “but Iwantto. Do you think I don’t have to convince myself every single day that the galaxy is good and kind? That it doesn’t takeeffort? It does,” I declared. “Being angry at the galaxy is easy, but being kind to it? Searching for something good in all of this bad? You should try itsometime, because when you do you’ll see howexhaustingit is.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because I want to hope that someday it won’t be so hard,” I told him earnestly. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. I guess your pessimism rubbed off on me.”
“I’m sorry I lied,” he replied.
I motioned to his mouth. “You haven’t for the last few minutes. Though you might die soon, so I accept your apology.”
He barked a laugh and opened his mouth, revealing the flower sitting prettily on his tongue. He then tucked it back into his cheek. “They’re not poison, by the way. My mentor experimented with them the last time we were here. You can even ground up the roots to make a powder. It’s very fine—ends up looking a bit like sand—but it works the same way as the pollen.”
“I don’t want to ask how she found that out.”
“She was something else.” Then he looked back at his pin, rotating it in his fingers. He took a deep breath, turned to face one of the arches of the tower, and threw it away. The metal hexagon arced high into the air, glinting in the starlight, and disappeared into the night. Then he turned back to me. “Look, this saber has cost me so much. I don’t apologize for keeping things from you. I just—I didn’t want to see anyone else killed. I thoughtif I kept enough from you, even with you helping, you’d somehow…” He closed the distance between us and took my hands again, squeezing them tightly. “You’d get out of this.”
“I know.”
Which made what I needed to say next even harder, but it was really the only thing to do at this point. TheStarfarerwas coming here, and Val was after the lightsaber. I was sure of that now. I took a deep breath and said, “Take the lander and go.”
He gave a start. “What? But—what about you? Your brother? You know he’s—”
“Yeah. He’s a pretty awful brother, but he’s still mine. And if you can get out of the First Order, then he can, too.” I was grateful it was nighttime, because the flowers couldn’t stop me from saying what I needed to. “I’ll be fine.Go.Like you said, the saber’s important. What it represents is important. As long as stories persist…” I added, quoting part of theStarfarer’s motto.
Though I wasn’t sure how much of that I believed anymore. Because there were some stories that didn’t persist, that couldn’t.
Some stories were simply forgotten with the last person who’d remembered them.
And I wouldn’t let that happen today.
“I’m glad I met you, Sian…” And then I laughed,more at myself than at our predicament. “I just realized I don’t know your family name.”
“Alakor,” he replied.
“After the planet?”
