But she had been on ships that hosted aliens from the Navigators’ Guild, usually diplomatic or military vessels that wanted to maintain the illusion that the Chiss had no navigators of their own but also didn’t want to be at the mercy of those aliens if quick travel became necessary.

She’d asked one of the senior officers once what would happen if the regular sky-walker had to take over navigation and the alien navigator learned the Ascendancy’s secret. The answer had been vague, but there’d been a coldness in the officer’s eyes that had kept her from ever asking again.

But just because the aliens couldn’t be allowed to see her didn’t mean she wasn’t allowed to see them. On most of those trips, the ship’s commander was happy to let her watch one of the bridge monitor viewscreens, just to see how other navigators did things.

It was never as exciting as she expected. Mostly the navigators just sat there, sometimes with their eyes closed, sometimes with them wide open, occasionally twitching the controls as something loomed ahead that the ship had to avoid. It was a long time before she realized that her own sky-walker performance was probably just as dull to watch as theirs.

But here, on a Garwian ship, with her identity and former status of no interest to anyone, she might have a chance to actually observe the navigator up close. Maybe see if there was enough left of her Third Sight to sense what he or she was actually doing.

That was fiercely unlikely, of course. In fact, the chances were virtually zero. Third Sight always left a sky-walker by age fourteen or fifteen, and those years were far in Thalias’s past.

Still, as far as she knew, no one had ever tried putting a former sky-walker next to a functioning alien navigator. That alone made it worth trying. As Thrawn had once told her, negative information was still information.

The nighttime bridge crew turned out to be even smaller than the equivalent aboard Chiss ships: just three Garwians, plus of course the navigator. One of the Garwians, presumably the officer in charge, looked up as Thalias came through the hatch. “What are you doing here, Chiss?” she challenged.

“I am companion to Artistic Master Svorno,” Thalias said, bowing low and keeping her shoulders hunched. She and Thrawn had discussed just how much they wanted to broadcast her supposed hostage identity: too little and the Nikardun might not hear about it, too much and the fact it was allegedly a Chiss cultural secret could start unraveling. Their decision was for her to call herself a companion, but at the same time present the stance and manner of someone whose life was held in another’s hands.

A role that was proving disturbingly easy to settle into. “He asked me to note and memorize the artistic tattoos on our navigator’s face.”