The morning after the Choice felt like a different island.

  The stone was the same. The salt air was the same. The Lanai moved through the temple grounds in their usual purposeful patterns and the ocean did what the ocean always did and the sky was the same low gray it had been every morning since I arrived. None of it was different and all of it was different because I was different inside it, and the world has a way of reorganizing itself around a person who has changed in a fundamental way, not the world itself but the quality of attention you bring to it, which amounts to the same thing.

  I moved through the stone corridors with the orange crystal warm against my chest and the Force open and singing and I felt, for the first time since leaving Misith, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

  I saw him before the morning bells, near the training circle, leaning against the archway with his jacket open and his dark hair wind-pulled from sleep, and when our eyes met across the courtyard something in the Force between us moved the way a current moves when two streams join. He pushed off the wall and crossed to me and as the last of the other students filed past toward the library he drew me behind a moss-covered pillar with one hand at my waist and the other against the stone beside my head, and we were hidden from the path and the morning was cold and I did not feel cold at all.

  He kissed me briefly and with complete attention, the way you do something when you know you do not have long and you want to be certain it registers. His mouth tasted of salt and the particular warmth of someone who has just come in from the wind. When he pulled back his forehead stayed against mine for one more moment.

  "I have to leave," he said. "Outer Rim. Recruitment mission with Master Vos."

  "When do you return."

  "Moonrise." He said it simply, the way he said things he meant without qualification. Then that crooked small smile, the private one, the one I was still learning was different from the other ones, and he was gone into the mist before I had fully registered the cold where he had been standing.

  I held the crystal through my tunic and watched the empty archway for a moment.

  Then I went to find Morvin.

  My own mission took us off the island entirely, away from the salt and the stone and into the thick sulfurous atmosphere of Nal Hutta, a desert moon of golden palaces built over sprawling desperation, where everything smelled of money and everything beneath the money smelled of rot. The throne room of Lord Bargos was vast and dim and hot, the air heavy with incense that did not entirely succeed in covering the smell of something organic and large, which was Bargos himself, a Hutt of considerable mass and the particular manner of a person who has never in his life needed to want for anything and has therefore developed no patience for people who need things from him.

  "The Jedi bring credits," he said, the words arriving in a wet rattling rumble that moved through the floor. It was not a question. It was the opening position of someone who had conducted this kind of meeting many times and found it uniformly disappointing. "I have credits."

  I watched Morvin's grip tighten on his cane and understood the shape of the problem immediately. The credits were insufficient. The artifact Morvin needed was something Bargos had acquired not for its use but for its value as a bargaining piece, which meant the negotiation was not about price. It was about leverage. Bargos did not want what was being offered. He wanted to want it.

  This was my element in the way that the healing wards of Misith had been my element, not because I had been trained for it but because I had been watching it since I was old enough to sit at my father's table. I had spent my childhood at the edge of rooms like this one, watching my father read the want beneath the stated position and offer the thing that would make the stated position unnecessary.

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  I stepped forward.

  Morvin glanced at me. I kept my eyes on Bargos.

  "Lord Bargos," I said. The acoustics of the throne room were good and I let my voice use them, the crystalline carrying quality that my tutors had spent years cultivating. "Credits are a conversation about the present. I am here to have a conversation about the next decade."

  Bargos's eyes, which were the size of serving dishes and had seen a great many things, moved to me with a slowness that was not sluggishness but assessment.

  I told him about the oil reserves of Misith. The largest refined deposits in the Mid-Rim, currently in the process of seeking new trade partners for the coming cycle. I told him about priority access and I told him about the twenty percent discount on exports and I told him that a personal recommendation from the Crown Princess of Misith carried a weight in Core trade circles that credits, however numerous, could not replicate.

  I did not perform any of this. I stated it the way you state facts, clearly and without apology, because performing it would have told Bargos that I needed something from him, and I did not intend to need anything from him. I intended to offer him something he had not known he wanted until I described it.

  The air in the room changed. I felt it in the Force, a shift in the quality of Bargos's attention, the particular realignment of a person whose position has just been reframed without their permission.

  "The oil of Misith," he said slowly. The rumble was different now. More interested. "A tempting tithe, Princess."

  "Not a tithe," I said. "A partnership. In exchange for the pyramid."

  He looked at me for a long moment. Then he gestured.

  A servant brought the artifact forward on a velvet cloth. It was small and heavy-looking, a solid metal pyramid with its surface covered in runes that caught the dim light of the throne room and held it in a way that suggested the light was not simply reflecting but responding. I felt it in the Force before I could reach for it, a deep, slow pulse like the heartbeat of something very old and very patient.

  Before my hand reached the cloth Morvin's small green fingers closed around the pyramid and tucked it into the folds of his robe with a speed that was surprising for someone his age.

  "A fair trade this is," he said, bowing to Bargos. "The gratitude of the Prime, you have."

  Bargos made a sound that might have been satisfaction and the audience was over.

  On the transport back I tried to ask Morvin about the pyramid. He sat with it in his lap beneath his robe and his eyes closed and his hands folded over his cane and the expression on his face suggested that wherever his attention was, it was not in the cabin with me. I asked once and he did not respond and I understood that some questions had their own timing and this was not mine yet.

  I paced the small cabin instead and watched the stars outside the viewport and counted the hours until moonrise.

  It was full dark when we landed, the island silver and black under a thin crescent moon, the ocean catching the light in long, moving lines. I thanked Morvin and went up the steps at a pace that was not quite running and told myself it was not quite running.

  The barracks corridor was quiet. The mess hall was dark. I went to Warren's hut because the Force pulled me there the way it had been pulling me toward him for weeks, that warm and certain current, and I expected to see the light under his door and hear the particular sound his boots made on stone.

  His door was dark. The stone bench outside it was cold.

  I sat down on the bench and held the crystal and told myself the mission had run long. The Outer Rim was vast and negotiations took time and Master Vos was thorough and there were a hundred reasonable explanations for a recruitment ship arriving after moonrise.

  I closed my eyes and reached for Warren through the Force. Not deliberately, not as a trained exercise, but the way I had been reaching for him for weeks without thinking about it, the way you reach for a sound you have become accustomed to hearing, a presence that had become part of the texture of the island for me, steady and warm and organized in a way that made my own Force feel steadier and warmer in response.

  I reached.

  I found nothing.

  Not distance. Not the muffled quality of someone far away. Nothing. A hollow where a heartbeat should have been, a silence in the shape of a person, and the crystal against my chest dropped in temperature so suddenly and so completely that I pressed my hand flat over it and held it as though warmth was something I could transfer.

  The tide was turning below the cliffs. I could hear it in the change of the water's rhythm, the long pull of it drawing back before the next wave, and I sat on the cold stone and held the cold crystal and told myself there were a hundred reasonable explanations.

  The Force said nothing back.

  I sat there until my hands were numb and the crescent moon had moved a quarter of the way across the sky, and then I went inside and lay down in my clothes and stared at the ceiling and listened to the ocean and waited for a heartbeat I could not find.

  Sleep, when it came, was thin and colorless and did not rest me.