She had to get away, to think. It felt like Marchion had trapped her in a box, and she could barely understand its shape. It was like the Great Hall—the walls were invisible, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there.

“Look, Marchion,” Lourna said. “I’m gonna get back to my people. They had some questions—like why you sent my whole Tempest to rescue a few Strikes and a Cloud. Kind of like overkill, you know?”

She pointed her thumb at the homesteader, the man they’d grabbed, the one remaining family member from the group Dent’s Cloud had grabbed. He was still unconscious, ankles and wrists all lashed up in binder cuffs, propped up against a crate in the hold.

“My feeling is that it has something to do with that guy. Fine, whatever—you don’t need to tell me why he’s so valuable. You can even run the ransom, if you want. I don’t care about the Rule of Three. You can have it all. Maybe just throw some of the proceeds back down my way so I can spread them around to my people.”

Marchion Ro walked across the hold, the sound of his boots echoing off the durasteel walls.

“This guy?” he said, looking down at Ottoh Blythe.

He pulled the lightsaber from his belt again, igniting it and bringing it down in the same motion, a golden slash right across the man, dead in an instant, cut apart.

A weird smell filled the hold, and Lourna Dee wanted to get away from that particular odor as quickly as she could, but she was frozen.

Marchion’s lost his mind, she thought. His entire mind.

“I don’t care about that guy,” he said. “Never did.”

Marchion Ro shifted the lightsaber, pointing its blade a meter or so to the left, at the other person Lourna Dee had pulled from the ship above Elphrona. The owner of the weapon Marchion had just used to murder someone.

The dark-skinned Twi’lek Jedi.

He was bound even more thoroughly than the Blythe—triple-strength binders, chains, stun-packs, and a gag. She was glad, too, because the man’s eyes were not friendly. She’d heard a lot of stories about Jedi; everyone had. She didn’t know which were true, but she could now verify that at least one was false. Clearly, the Jedi could not shoot death-beams from their eyes, because if they could, then Marchion Ro would be stone-dead.

She couldn’t believe Marchion had taken the man’s weapon and used it to kill someone right in front of him. It seemed like tempting fate, even with the Jedi all tied up. You never knew what they could do.