Were the droids relieved? Plotting revenge? Reath didn’t know and couldn’t care, not when they’d finally reached the last, most secret part of the Amaxine station.

Once Affie had clambered into the lower rings, she felt vaguely let down. It wasn’t all that different from the upper rings—same tilework, same rails—except that it was entirely devoid of plant life, and she didn’t yet see any signs of smugglers’ code on the walls. Yet.

The ring that welcomed them was very narrow; other curving corridors, yet unexplored, must’ve made up the rest of the circumference. Without the purple glow of the energy field, the only illumination came from the station above. Still, they had glow rods, so that was enough light to search by.

“So, let’s split up,” Affie suggested. “Check different passageways on our own.” Could you be any more obvious? she scolded herself.

But apparently nothing about her suggestion struck Dez or Reath as suspicious. “Sure,” Dez said. “Doesn’t seem like there’s anything too dangerous down here. Might as well cover ground as quickly as possible.”

Affie nodded like that was exactly what she’d been thinking.

Finally they broke up, and she was free to delve into one of the passageways by the light of her glow rod. Affie wondered whether she’d find codes, whether the others would, too, and whether they’d be able to make sense of them as quickly as she had.

Sure enough, after the first bend, the first lines of writing appeared. She went right up to them, eager to translate as best she could. Above all, she hoped to find something that would vindicate her mother and prove to Leox that there was a corrupt element at work within the Guild.

“There,” she whispered. Her fingers touched the metal just next to the star symbol of the Byne Guild, still stark against the whitish background. This hadn’t been written that long before—a decade at most, she’d guess. She tried to follow along, uncertain how to interpret the next few marks, until she came to a small drawing of a bird of prey, beak down, tail feathers up.

Affie stared until the image seemed to be burning into her eyes. She recognized it immediately but refused to believe that it could mean what it so clearly seemed to mean.

There could be tons of other interpretations, she told herself. True.

But her parents—her biological parents, the ones she only dimly remembered but still dearly loved—their ship had been named the Kestrel’s Dive.

Whoever wrote this had been talking about her parents.

That, or it had been written by her parents themselves.