Their minds reached out as one, pushing the boundaries of their sphere through the entire room and beyond it. Something undefined within the idols snapped; Reath imagined he could hear it, a quick clean break. Still, darkness swirled around them, but in a very different, more diffuse way than it had before. The Force binding seemed to be in place.

He opened his eyes to see the other Jedi breathing hard and collecting themselves, just like him. As they turned in toward each other, Master Cohmac smiled. “The good news is, these idols are successfully bound,” he said.

Reath asked, “What’s the bad news?”

Orla answered him. “Now we’ve got to carry the things back to the Vessel. And they’re heavy.”

They were. But Reath had rarely carried such a burden with so light a heart.

Affie didn’t bother watching whatever weird magic ceremony the Republic monks were tinkering with. Instead, she busied herself getting visual records of every line of smugglers’ code.

As she ran the scanner along the walls, she couldn’t help trying to interpret more of the symbols. The two rings separated by an asterisk of jagged lines—was that a journey, maybe one interrupted by something disastrous? Surely one of the main functions of the codes must be to warn other pilots of risks.

It’s not all about cheating Scover, Affie told herself, a bleak kind of joke.

There, again, came the star symbol of the Byne Guild. She increased the resolution to make sure these scans were the sharpest and best of the bunch.

And then—

Affie scowled as she saw a drawing of what appeared to be a being’s head, one with a high ridge in the middle. Like a Bivall’s head.

Scover Byne was a Bivall.

They’re conspiring against her. Not just stealing—they’re after her, specifically.

Affie’s eyes focused again on the two rings with the jagged asterisk in the middle. Could that be an explosion? A hint at a future expedition that might be sabotaged?

“Thank the spirits we’re leaving this place soon,” she muttered as she quickly finished making records. There was no telling how far the plot had already gone.

Leox Gyasi had seen some strange things in his day. Enough that he tried not to use the word strange too often. To the prepared mind, no element of the galaxy should seem alien; they were all the same star stuff, merely taking different shapes from time to time.

And yet…