The Twi’lek nodded, gave a single, short outburst that might have been a pained laugh. “He hurts even those he himself loves.” She smiled, and her soft voice sounded like rainfall. “These men and their wars. His name is Veradun, Jedi. And he would kill me if he knew I told you. But names are important.”

Aryn had to work to keep hold of her anger. The Twi’lek seemed so … fragile, so hurt. “I don’t care what his name is. You were there with him. In the attack on the Temple. I saw it.”

“The Temple. Ah.” She nodded. “Yes, I was with him. I love him. I fight at his side. You would do the same.”

Aryn could not deny it. She would have done the same; she had done the same.

The anger she’d carried since feeling Master Zallow’s death began to shrink, to drain out of her in the face of the Twi’lek’s pain and sadness, in the realization that her own pain was not the moral center of the universe. The loss of her anger startled her. Since his death, she had been nothing but anger. Without it, she felt empty.

Pain by another name, the Twi’lek had said. Indeed.

“Please be quick,” the Twi’lek said. “A clean death, yes?”

The words sounded not so much like a challenge as a request.

“What is your name?” Aryn asked.

“Eleena,” the Twi’lek said.

Aryn stepped toward her. Eleena’s eyes went to Aryn’s blade but she did not shrink from Aryn’s approach. She stared into Aryn’s eyes and Aryn into hers, each measuring the other’s pain, the other’s loss.

“Names are important,” Aryn said. She flipped her grip on her dead Master’s lightsaber, deactivated the blade, and slammed the pommel against Eleena’s temple. The Twi’lek collapsed without a sound.

“And I won’t kill you, Eleena.”

In so many ways, Eleena was already dead. Aryn pitied her.

She still felt compelled to avenge Master Zallow, but she could not murder Eleena to make Malgus suffer. Master Zallow would never have countenanced it. Aryn could not avenge him by betraying what he stood for. Perhaps he had failed. Perhaps the Order had failed. But both had failed nobly. There was something to that.

She remembered the dream she’d had of Master Zallow, of him standing on the Temple’s ruins silently mouthing words at her that she could not then understand.

She understood them now.

“Be true to yourself,” he had said.

Hadn’t Zeerid been trying to tell her the same thing all along?

“I AM SORRY, my lord,” Kerse said as they hurried through the spaceport. “I assumed they had evacuated, and we had not yet had a chance to take a head count—”

“Save your excuses, Kerse,” Malgus said and resisted the urge to cut the man in two.