Chapter Twenty-Nine The Truth
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The Truth
The danger the Starfarer faced wasn’t on the ship. It was here—with me.
My stomach turned.
Stars, I’d kissed him. Shared deep feelings with him. Started to fall in love with him—
I felt sick.
Because Val was right.
Sian’s voice interrupted my thoughts, a deep and quiet murmur of “Starlight?” as he set the lightsaber down and shrugged out of his jacket. I’d let down my guard, and now I couldn’t even look at him, afraid my face would betray my horror.
The glint of the pin was harsh in the shine from the night sky. My hands began to shake.
He sat up, finally realizing something was wrong. “What’s wrong?” And then, with a bolt of fear, he checked his pockets, but I already had what he was looking for. He turned those strange galaxy eyes back to me, and then to the pin in my hand.
At the same time, my gaze fell on the lightsaber.
The next moment was a blur. I reached for it, and so did he, but he was a moment too late.
I grabbed it and lurched away from him to my feet, pointing the saber at him like a weapon I knew how to use, and I most definitely did not.
The metal was cold against my skin, but my resolve steadied. My hands had stopped shaking.
“Ardent…” he started, palm raised toward me as if to calm a wild animal.
Oh, he did not know just how wild I was about to be.
“Ardent, I can explain.”
So he was First Order.
I aimed the mouth of the saber at him and pulled my thumb over the button. It was broken—something I very much knew. We both did. I could do nothing with a broken saber, but he still needed it, so…I pulled it behind my head, ready to throw it.
He shot to his feet. “Chuta,” he cursed. “Wait a moment—”
I glared at him. “I trusted you,” I spat, my voice sharp and cold. “The men on Coruscant—you planted that First Order code cylinder, didn’t you? You tricked me into thinking they were the bad guys, but it was you the whole time.”
His eyebrows shot up. “I…what?”
“You’re a monster,” I ground out.
His eyes widened with sudden hurt. Then his shoulders slumped, and he suddenly looked very, very tired. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“I trusted you,” I seethed.
He swallowed thickly. “I know. But…” His gaze didn’t stray from mine even as I tensed to throw the saber, as if it wasn’t as important to him. “I didn’t plant anything on those men, Starlight. They were actually First Order.”
“Right, and you’re going to tell me this isn’t yours?” I opened my other hand, where the pin had pressed into my palm.
“No, it is.” He glanced down at it and then back at me. His white pupils dilated for a moment—an anxious pulse—before he reined them in again. “I just could never bring myself to throw it away.”
I tightened my grip around the saber.
“I promise. The academy that I told you about? It was a First Order school. They kidnapped children and took them there to train them to be mindless soldiers. That was my pin.”
I gritted my teeth. “Why should I believe you now? Why shouldn’t I just toss this and then go with Val and leave you stranded here?”
He set his mouth in a thin line. “Because I have nothing to lose.”
“Says someone caught red-handed.”
“Ardent, I wouldn’t—”
“I don’t believe you,” I announced.
His face flickered with determination. Then he plucked a closed bud from the vine that twined around the tower’s pillar and popped it into his mouth and chewed. “I’m not lying,” he replied, wincing at the taste. “That’s awful.”
“Get that out of your mouth!” I yelped in alarm. “You don’t know if it’s poison!”
“I’m not lying,” he repeated, his heated gaze on mine. He tucked the half-chewed flower into the corner of his mouth and talked around it. “I promise I’m not lying, Ardent.”
Again, he said my name. Not Starlight, but my name. Soft at the front, sweet at the back. Like some sort of tender word, even when he sounded desperate.
My hands curled tightly around the saber again even as I lowered it. “Then whose is this?” I asked. “Why is it so important?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just know that my mentor thought it belonged to”—he gritted his teeth and then sucked in a breath—“to Luke Skywalker.”
My eyes widened. I looked down at the broken piece of junk in my hands. I guessed it wasn’t so much junk after all.
“Oh,” I said faintly. “That would be a reason why people want it.”
“Apparently he hasn’t been seen in a few years, so”—he shrugged—“I guess it’s proof of death?”
“Or proof of life,” I argued, because Luke Skywalker, hero of the Republic, wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be. Just…missing. Though, if this was his saber, then where was he? Those were questions I couldn’t think about right now.
He extended his hand to accept the pin back, and so I returned it. He felt the indentations with his fingertips, flipping it over. “What I wouldn’t give to live in your world, Starlight.” He sighed.
I frowned. “You do.”
“Nah, because in your world everything is nice and right and kind,” he said, talking more to the pin than to me. “Where the good guys always win, and orphans are reunited with their families, and everyone lives happily into old age—it’s a good story.”
“I don’t think I live in that world,” I replied, “but I want to. Do you think I don’t have to convince myself every single day that the galaxy is good and kind?
That it doesn’t take effort? It does,” I declared.
“Being angry at the galaxy is easy, but being kind to it? Searching for something good in all of this bad? You should try it sometime, because when you do you’ll see how exhausting it is. ”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because I want to hope that someday it won’t be so hard,” I told him earnestly. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. I guess your pessimism rubbed off on me.”
“I’m sorry I lied,” he replied.
I motioned to his mouth. “You haven’t for the last few minutes. Though you might die soon, so I accept your apology.”
He barked a laugh and opened his mouth, revealing the flower sitting prettily on his tongue.
He then tucked it back into his cheek. “They’re not poison, by the way.
My mentor experimented with them the last time we were here.
You can even ground up the roots to make a powder.
It’s very fine—ends up looking a bit like sand—but it works the same way as the pollen. ”
“I don’t want to ask how she found that out.”
“She was something else.” Then he looked back at his pin, rotating it in his fingers.
He took a deep breath, turned to face one of the arches of the tower, and threw it away.
The metal hexagon arced high into the air, glinting in the starlight, and disappeared into the night.
Then he turned back to me. “Look, this saber has cost me so much. I don’t apologize for keeping things from you.
I just—I didn’t want to see anyone else killed.
I thought if I kept enough from you, even with you helping, you’d somehow…
” He closed the distance between us and took my hands again, squeezing them tightly. “You’d get out of this.”
“I know.”
Which made what I needed to say next even harder, but it was really the only thing to do at this point. The Starfarer was coming here, and Val was after the lightsaber. I was sure of that now. I took a deep breath and said, “Take the lander and go.”
He gave a start. “What? But—what about you? Your brother? You know he’s—”
“Yeah. He’s a pretty awful brother, but he’s still mine.
And if you can get out of the First Order, then he can, too.
” I was grateful it was nighttime, because the flowers couldn’t stop me from saying what I needed to.
“I’ll be fine. Go. Like you said, the saber’s important.
What it represents is important. As long as stories persist…
” I added, quoting part of the Starfarer’s motto.
Though I wasn’t sure how much of that I believed anymore. Because there were some stories that didn’t persist, that couldn’t.
Some stories were simply forgotten with the last person who’d remembered them.
And I wouldn’t let that happen today.
“I’m glad I met you, Sian…” And then I laughed, more at myself than at our predicament. “I just realized I don’t know your family name.”
“Alakor,” he replied.
“After the planet?”
“After my mentor, who named the planet after herself.”
I smiled at how much I loved that—and didn’t want to dwell too long on that word, on love, not now. “I’m glad I met you, Sian Alakor. I hope I see you again. I know that makes me naive—”
He grabbed the back of my head urgently and pulled me close.
“It makes you brave, Starlight.” Then he kissed me, desperate and crushing.
In all the serials I’d read, whenever the author said that a kiss tasted like goodbye, I rolled my eyes, because what did goodbye even taste like?
But now I understood. It tasted like salt.
It tasted like tears. It tasted tinny with fear.
I decidedly hated the taste.
We broke apart and descended the tower together.