She leapt high into the air and landed beside Zeerid in the speeder.

“Death is too easy, Sith,” she called to Malgus, the venom in her tone surprising even to her. “I am going to hurt you first.”

The words left a bad taste in her mouth. She felt Zeerid’s eyes on her and dared not look him in the face.

Malgus, too, seemed almost puzzled, to judge from his furrowed brow and the tilt of his head.

“Go,” she said.

Zeerid accelerated and started to turn the speeder.

Anger went forth from Malgus. He reactivated Master Zallow’s blade and hurled it after them. Zeerid tried to wheel out of the way but the blade curled and kept coming at them. T7 beeped in alarm.

Aryn watched the weapon spin, felt it, and before it reached the speeder, she reached out with the Force and snatched it from Malgus’s mental grasp. The weapon turned upward over the speeder and descended hilt-first into her hand as Zeerid rose into the night sky and sped away. She deactivated it.

She looked back one last time to see Malgus standing atop the ruined temple, his blade in hand, his cape fluttering in the wind. He looked like a victorious conqueror.

And she hated him.

ZEERID FLEW LOW and fast through Coruscant’s streets, wheeling around buildings, careering down alleys, descending into the lower levels as he went. Soon, the sky was lost to the density of structures above them. They were in an industrial underworld, a series of metal-and-duracrete tunnels that covered the entire planet.

“Anyone following?” he said.

Aryn did not answer. She sat in the passenger seat and stared at her Master’s lightsaber hilt as if she’d never seen it before.

“Aryn! Is anyone following?”

“No,” she said, but did not look back.

Zeerid shot a glance behind them, above them, and saw no one. He let himself breathe easier.

“Blast, Aryn, what were you doing?”

She answered in a tone as mechanical as a protocol droid’s. “What I came here to do, Zeerid. Facing Malgus. What were you doing?”

“Helping you.”

“I didn’t need help.”

“No?” He stared at her across the speeder’s compartment.

“No.”

Zeerid thought otherwise. “Why’d you get in the speeder, Aryn?”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt. And I said I would help you get offplanet.”

“A lie,” Zeerid said. “Why not just stay there and finish it?”

She looked away from him as she answered. “Because …”

“Because?”

“Because killing him is not enough,” she blurted. “I want to hurt him.”

She hooked her Master’s lightsaber hilt to her belt and looked over at Zeerid. “I want to hurt him like he hurt me, like he hurt Master Zallow before he died.”

“Aryn, I don’t have to be an empath to feel your ambivalence. Revenge—”

She raised a hand to cut him off. “I do not want to hear it, Zeerid.”