Ty couldn’t help but laugh. What she’d shared with Elzar Mann had been … intriguing, but she had no intention of pursuing that particular connection. She still wasn’t convinced that Elzar was completely stable, and besides, their brief union had stirred up memories she’d tried hard to forget. Klias. The Yallow Shrine. No, she had gotten close enough. Worst of all, it seemed that the Jedi, conflicted as he was, had rubbed off on her. The old Ty would have let Klerin find her own way offplanet, but the new, improved Ty found it impossible to simply abandon the girl. Klerin had just lost her mother, albeit a mother who had carted around unrefined recainium. Ty thought back to the girl who had stumbled into a war-cloud looking for them after their arrest. There was no way Klerin could manage by herself. At the very least, Ty would get her to a waystation before returning to KL-03 and Rover.

However, if they were going to arrange transport, they needed to get a move on before all the spaces were filled, which meant Klerin had to stop flitting from computer to computer and go register.

“None of them are going to work,” Ty told her as Klerin tried the fifth console in a row.

“You don’t know that,” the Kuranu replied and was proved right when the screen flicked on.

“What are you looking for?” Ty asked, peering over the girl’s shoulder.

Klerin ignored her, working through an obviously fragmented file system.

“No,” she muttered, quietly at first and then with more urgency as she flicked from section to section. “No, no, no, no!”

The last exclamation was punctuated with a fist to the keyboard, the computer beeping in indignation.

“They’re gone,” Klerin said, slumping in her seat.

“What are?” Ty’s patience was wearing thin. “Talk to me, Klerin.”

“Mother’s plans … for the nullifier.”

“And that’s a bad thing, why?”

Klerin looked at her as if she was talking to a child. “Because the Nihil raided this ship …”

Ty’s heart dropped to her boots as realization dawned. If the Nihil had access to a device that could knock out energy weapons …

She sighed, surrendering to the inevitable. “What was that you were saying about my Jedi friends?”

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Valo Jedi archive

Valo Outpost’s Jedi archive was not how its architect had intended it to look. The large chamber, with its sweeping staircases and elegant data stacks, had been transformed into an emergency operations center. Everywhere you looked, Republic and Jedi staff worked alongside each other, sitting at hastily installed comm terminals as they coordinated the evacuation of those who were stranded on the planet.