Indeera felt her concentration waver, just for a second. They all did. It was clear to see why. The final sky-island was falling, but even that, terrible though it was, wasn’t their biggest danger. A Nihil ship was almost upon them, laser cannons glowing and ready to fire. There was nothing they could do. If they broke formation and scattered, the bond they’d achieved would falter and the people would fall; Porter, too, for that matter. If they fought back, the same result would follow. The people they had worked so hard to save—human, Thodian, Sneevel, and Nihil—would die the most horrible death.

Words flashed across Indeera Stokes’s mind, words she hadn’t used since she was a Padawan, words that had brought a stinging rebuke from her Master.

It’s not fair.

But the universe was rarely fair; she knew that, as did every member of their drift. All they could do now was strive to calm those who had been caught up in the conflict, whose hope was about to be snatched away.

And then the world changed once again.

She felt the wave of emotion hit before it happened. One second the Nihil ship was preparing to fire, and the next it was obliterated. The sky-island had changed direction, slicing up where moments before it was tumbling down, soaring through the air like a discus thrown by a giant.

It continued out into the bay, carving a looping arc through the Nihil armada to splash spectacularly into the lake, but Indeera wasn’t looking, she was shouting an order in the confines of her cockpit, the Sneevel hugging the nose of her craft.

“Down! As quickly as possible.”

Nib and the others couldn’t hear her, but they obeyed the command all the same, the drift dipping down. They had been given a second chance, but Indeera couldn’t ignore the chill that wouldn’t leave her. The wave of emotion she’d felt, that had saved all their lives, had originated from a Jedi, but was fueled by the darkest of passions.

Whoever had wielded such power would pay a terrible price.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Fair park, Valo

Elzar Mann knew what he had done, what he had unleashed. The drift was safe, the sky-island sinking to the bottom of the lake far from those it would have crushed. He had saved lives, but he had also taken them. So many lives. The Nihil on those ships, on his rampage through the park, even the brute who lay nearby, his skull caved in. He couldn’t even remember killing him.