“It hurts that much?” Reath frowned. “Let me see it.”

She started to hold out her hand, then slumped against the nearby wall and slid down to the floor. The mark on her wrist was already raised and livid, and streaks spread through it in ominous shades of purple and black.

Poison.

Orla paced through the center of the arboretum globe. At the moment, every other being docked at the Amaxine station had somewhere else to be, whether that was their own ships or the station’s lower ring. This gave her a chance to study the strange idols they’d found on board.

Unease rippled through her as she approached the statues, that ominous sense of warning emanating from them as surely as light from a flame. Maybe understanding what they were looking at would help determine exactly what this vague warning meant.

She stood face to face with the humanoid queen, the first of the idols to turn up. To Orla’s amusement, she realized that they resembled each other somewhat—strong cheekbones, thick brows, proud bearing. However, the stark simplicity of Orla’s white robes contrasted with the ornately carved and jeweled raiment of this long-ago ruler.

Although Orla wasn’t the scholar Cohmac Vitus was, she had her own gifts to bring to this analysis. Her connection to the Force was instinctive, almost primal; she trusted it to steer her. Sometimes preexisting knowledge stood in the way of discovery—putting boundaries on thought. This, she suspected, might be one of those times. With all his learning, Cohmac had studied these idols already and found only intriguing clues, no truths.

Let’s give instinct a try.

Orla stared at the dark red jewel that sat topmost in the idol’s crown. She let her mind fall into a kind of trance—not full meditation but a deep concentration that allowed random thoughts to rise to the surface. The practice gave the subconscious a chance to be heard.

A queen. Mighty and defiant. That much seemed inarguable.

Well. Mighty was inarguable. Why had defiant come to mind?

When are we defiant? When we are opposed.

Orla studied the queen’s lifted chin, comparing it to the rest of her bearing. The queen’s hands did not hold weapons; instead, a kind of scimitar lay at her feet. She had been forged not with her arms held high in some kind of salute or bearing plundered treasure; her arms remained at her sides, with coiled bracelets around each wrist.

Bracelets, Orla asked herself in a flash of insight, or chains?

It suddenly seemed so clear to her that she was shocked she hadn’t seen it before. The idols didn’t represent leaders or gods.

They represented the vanquished, representatives of the forces (civilizations? planets?) who’d been conquered by whoever built the statues.

“So,” she muttered, “who the hell were they?”