He gestured toward a particularly thick patch of fronds, revealing a shape that had been almost obscured behind them: a statue of a figure, human or at least humanoid, carved of some kind of stone and gilded with something dully golden that reflected the light. The vaguely feminine figure wore an elaborately carved headdress set with either colored glass or actual jewels, and it held its arms crossed over its chest. It resembled no mythological deity or folkloric hero Reath knew of, but he felt a thrill anyway. This was a window into history—into legend.

But behind that thrill lurked a shiver. A shadow.

Staring at the statue, he said, “Do you feel that?”

“Yes,” Dez said. His voice had grown more thoughtful. “The shadow. It might not mean anything.”

Or it might, Reath couldn’t help thinking.

Affie Hollow neither understood what “shadow” Dez and Reath were talking about (which made no sense, since they were all bathed in light) nor cared. Whatever mysticism this brand of wizard-monk peddled was only mildly interesting to her. The station, however, was fascinating.

Not because of the antiquities the Jedi were already fawning over.

Because of objects far more recent than that.

Affie’s sharp eyes picked out the spanner first, then the anx. A handful of spacer’s tools, strewn in one corner—obviously abandoned for a while but not long enough for any vines to grow over them. The moss beneath them still seemed healthy and green, so they couldn’t have been there longer than—a few months. A couple of years? She wasn’t exactly an expert on moss. Maybe Geode would know. However, she was certain that it hadn’t been very long since other travelers had come through the station.

Probably some of them had been Byne Guild pilots. Why else would this system’s coordinates be preprogrammed into the Vessel’s computer? Definitely nothing else remotely interesting was to be found around there; even by the standards of open space, that area was bleak. So this station had to have been of some use to the Guild, sometime, or it wouldn’t be one of the places in their navicomputer.

Hundreds of places, she reminded herself. Maybe even thousands. We never counted them all—what’s the point? Some of that data might be old, out of use. Obsolete to how the Guild runs today. Scover built everything off preexisting navicomputers, back when she was first creating the Guild.

Then she remembered that Scover might at that moment be dead or injured because of a disaster far larger than anything they’d ever encountered before, and her heart ached anew. For the Jedi this disaster was of great but abstract concern; for her it was intensely personal. Remembering how hard her foster mother had worked to build her shipping fleet made Affie even more fiercely hopeful that Scover had lived. She deserved to live, to reap the benefits of all that effort.