“What are you doing?” Aryn asked him. She guzzled the water to get the grit out of her throat, then peeled the wrapper on the bar and ate.

The speeder’s engine hummed to life and Zeerid popped back up from under the instrumentation.

“I’m taking this speeder. We can’t walk all the way to the Jedi Temple. Get in.” He must have read the look on her face. “It isn’t stealing, Aryn. It’s abandoned. Come on.”

She climbed in and strapped herself into the seat. Zeerid launched the Armin into the sky.

They made rapid progress. There was little traffic. Zeerid flew at an altitude of about half a kilo. For a time, Aryn looked out and down on Coruscant, but the rubbled buildings, smoldering fires, and black holes in the urbanscape wore her down until it all began to look the same. When she realized she had become inured to the sight of the destruction, she sat back in her seat and stared out the windshield at the smoke-filled sky.

“The Temple is ahead,” Zeerid said, coming around. “There.”

When she saw it, her heart sank. A hole opened in her stomach and she felt as if she were falling. She extended a hand to the safety bar and held it tight, to keep from falling.

“I’m so sorry, Aryn,” Zeerid said.

Aryn had no words. The Temple, the Jedi sanctuary that had stood for millennia, had been reduced to a mountain of smoking stone and steel. The destruction wrought by the Sith on Coruscant generally had left her pained. The destruction of the Temple left her gutted. She had to remember to breathe. She could not take her eyes from it.

Zeerid reached across the speeder and took her hand in his. She closed her fingers around his and held on as if she were sinking and he was a life ring.

“I don’t think we should set down, Aryn. No data cards survived that.”

“Fly closer, Zeerid.”

“You sure?”

She nodded, and he took the speeder in for a better look. Smoke leaked from between blackened stones. The remains of the towers lay in chunks across the ruins of the main Temple, as if they had folded over on it.

Broken columns jutted up from the ruins like broken bones. Aryn braced herself for bodies, but thankfully saw none. Instead, she saw broken pieces of statuary here and there, the jagged remains of the stone corpses of ancient Jedi Masters.

Thousands of years of honorable history reduced in a day to dust and ash and ruins by Imperial bombs. The fires would smolder for days, deep in the pile. Loss suffused her, but she was too dried out for tears.

How wonderful and terrible, she thought, was the capacity of the mind to absorb pain.