No point in bothering with preliminaries. “Everything you told me was true, wasn’t it?” he asked. “The wreck, your parents, all of it. You just left out the part about being rescued by the Nihil.”

“Close, but not quite,” Nan said. Her face was blank, unreadable. Her grip on her blaster remained steady. “Our family joined the Nihil together. They offered us the chance for a better life than we could ever have had otherwise. My mother and father were proud of their choice. I’m proud of their choice. When they died in a raid, I was taken in by Hague. By then I knew I’d always be small—that I’d have to learn how to fight smarter, since I’d never be stronger. That I’d need strategic skills. Who better to teach that than a man who can no longer fight with his body and has to use his brain?”

The sureness in her voice—the clarity of absolute conviction—unnerved Reath. He was used to hearing Padawans speak that way, or Coruscant Patrol starfighter cadets. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone could still believe in violence as a creed, at least not by taking such pride in it. While he’d known such mindsets weren’t just artifacts from history, this was his first encounter with one. He longed to talk about this with her in depth, to understand the Nihil on their own brutal terms.

Getting into a philosophical discussion with a zealot was probably a mistake, though, especially when the zealot was holding a weapon on you.

“Makes sense.” Reath adjusted his stance slightly, as though moving his weight from one leg to another, hoping she wouldn’t realize he was triangulating their positions versus the nearest exit. “I can tell you’re a great strategist already. You got enough information out of me.”

The self-deprecating joke was meant to get Nan off her guard. It didn’t work. “I can’t claim any credit for that. You were overflowing with explanations, because that was your job, right? To tell the desperate frontier folk how glorious their lives will be now that the Jedi have come?”

“I don’t remember promising anyone glory,” he pointed out.

Nan shrugged, like, Fair enough. “You can stop looking for your escape route. I don’t intend to kill you.”

“Your blaster aim suggests otherwise.”

“You could deflect any shots,” she said, nodding toward the lightsaber he still hadn’t drawn from his belt. “Hand to hand versus a Jedi? Useless. That’s one more thing you taught me. When I kill a Jedi, it’ll be with my ship.”

Reath considered this. “You could’ve killed me when my back was turned. You didn’t.”

“No. I haven’t forgotten that you saved me from being kidnapped. You returned me to my fleet. That earns you one chance to walk away.” Nan’s finger massaged the trigger of her blaster. “One.”