“I barely knew him,” Cohmac acknowledged. His face was impassive, but his dark eyes bored into Orla’s, reflecting the challenge back at her. “And yet I knew him enough to understand that he was full of life and vigor, that he was always willing to help those around him, that he ought to have had decades more. So when I think of his…meaningless, useless death—only one in the wake of the countless deaths caused by this hyperspace disaster—I grow angry.”

Orla nodded. “Of course. We all have to overcome our anger—”

“Why? Why should I overcome it? If I cannot feel anger over the loss of such a life, then I cannot feel anything at all. The Order asks us to excise the deepest parts of ourselves—and for what? So that a young man might die unmourned?”

That stopped Orla short. For all her disagreements with the current direction of the Jedi leadership, she never doubted the fundamentals of their teachings. “So that we may not fall into the path of darkness,” she said to Cohmac as gently as she could manage. “There is no emotion so justified or noble that it cannot lead to madness, if not kept in proper proportion.”

This is also about Master Simmix, Orla realized. Cohmac’s master had been dead a quarter of a century, and yet the loss still marked him.

“You’ve carried that burden a long time,” Orla said, speaking as gently as she could. “You realize you didn’t do anything that wrong, back then? And we all shared in those mistakes, not just you.”

Cohmac shook his head. “I have come to realize that it was not my mistakes that scarred me then. I dwelled upon them because the Order would not allow me to grieve. My sorrow had no other outlet. And this, they tell us, is the proper Jedi way.”

She wondered if she should probe more deeply, but that would only prolong Cohmac’s brooding over an incident he should’ve put behind him decades before.

Or is that an excuse? Orla asked herself. A reason to avoid examining the flaws of a friend too closely?

By the time she had questioned her own motives, however, the moment to speak had passed. “You’ve always found this part of the path easier than I have,” Cohmac said. With that, he returned to his preparations for the binding exercise.

Self-doubt flickered in Orla’s mind. Am I leaving to become a Wayseeker because it’s truly the Force’s will? Or am I merely pushing myself away from other people?

Leox and Geode were tasked with readying a storage area aboard the Vessel, which for some reason Leox seemed to consider a very tricky procedure, one that should only be handled by professionals. (“We’ve got it. Don’t worry your heads about it. No need to even come back here till we’re done. Trust me.”)