The morning had the particular energy of a day that does not yet know what it is going to become.

  A second transport sat on the landing shelf, its engines ticking as they cooled in the salt spray, and for the first time since our arrival there were people on this island who knew less than we did. Five of them filed down the ramp while we watched from the high shelf, two small children holding each other's hands with the white-knuckled grip of people who have just discovered that the world is much larger than they thought, two lanky teenagers from somewhere in the Mid-Rim who were trying to look unbothered and failing, and a Wookiee whose presence on the narrow stone shelf restructured everyone's understanding of available space.

  I watched them and felt something I had not expected to feel, tenderness. I remembered standing on that ramp. I remembered the smell of salt and the wind pulling at my crown and Vane's voice like grinding stone and the long climb up the steps with my silk pooling on the wet rock. These new ones did not know yet what they had arrived into. They were still in the part where it was only wonder.

  Master Morvin listened to the Wookiee's introduction with his eyes half closed and the expression he wore when something moved him, a slight softening around the jaw, a stillness that was different from his usual stillness. "From the shadow-lands of Kashyyyk," he said quietly, to those of us nearby. "A guardian of the trees. He speaks of a great web that connects the roots to the stars."

  I looked at the Wookiee, enormous and solemn in the gray morning light, and felt the Force move through him like wind through old growth, deep and unhurried and belonging to something far older than any of us, and I thought that the galaxy was very large and very strange and full of people who had found their way to the Force by paths that looked nothing like each other.

  Then I looked at the recruitment ship and the thought completed itself and stopped.

  Master Vos was there, his robes wind-whipped and carrying the particular dust of somewhere that was not Ahch-To. He was speaking to Thorne. Behind him, the other members of the recruitment team were unloading equipment from the hold.

  The space beside him was empty.

  I felt it before I understood it. Not a thought. A physical sensation, a drop in temperature that had nothing to do with the wind, a sudden absence in the Force where something had been present so consistently for so long that I had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a sound that has always been there, until it stops.

  I crossed the shelf to Vos before I had decided to cross it.

  "Master Vos." My voice came out even. I was proud of that, distantly. "Where is Warren. Did he stay behind on the mission."

  Vos looked at me with an expression that told me nothing. "He returned with us this morning. He said he needed rest. He should be in the barracks."

  I stood still for a moment.

  He was here. He was here and he had not come to find me. He had been back for hours and the Force, which had been telling me all morning that something was wrong, had been right, and I had been ignoring it because I did not want it to be right, because today was supposed to be the day the rest of our lives began and I had dreamed it so clearly that I had let the dream sit over the top of what I was actually feeling and call it certainty.

  I excused myself. I do not remember what I said. I walked away from the landing shelf and toward the stone huts and the orange crystal against my chest was cold in a way it had not been cold since Warren had looped it around my neck.

  I told myself he was tired. The mission had been long. The Outer Rim was difficult and draining and he had healed from a broken spine only weeks ago and perhaps the travel had cost him more than he had admitted. I told myself all of this in the same internal voice I used when I was trying to talk myself out of diagnosing something I had already diagnosed.

  The Force pulled me toward his hut without my asking it to. It was not the warm, guiding pull I had come to associate with it, the current running in a good direction. It was the pull of something inevitable. The feeling of walking toward a thing you would give almost anything to walk away from and being unable to stop your own feet.

  I reached his door.

  I did not knock. In my world, after the Choice, there were no more barriers between us. That was what the Choice meant. That was what I had told him when I came to his door in the dark in my white shift with the crystal glowing against my chest. No more barriers.

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  I pushed the door open.

  The room was dim. One candle burning low on the shelf, nearly gone. It threw enough light. It threw exactly enough light.

  Warren was not resting.

  I understood it instantly and completely and there was no confusion, not even for a fraction of a second, no moment of trying to make it into something else. The mind does that sometimes, offers you an alternative reading to buy you a moment before the real one arrives. Mine did not do that. Mine simply registered what was in front of me with a terrible, complete clarity and then went very quiet.

  Vane. The scar that split her left eyebrow. Her head turned toward the door, her hand still tangled in the dark hair of the man whose spine I had rebuilt with my bare hands on the floor of a cave while everyone watched.

  Warren bolted upright. The guilt on his face lasted exactly one second before something else replaced it, something harder and more practiced, the expression of a person defaulting to defense because they have no better option.

  "Velara." His voice was wrong. Small in a way his voice had never been. "It is not what it looks like."

  I did not speak. I was holding the door frame with one hand and I was looking at them and the orange crystal against my chest had gone completely cold and the Force, the Force that had been open and singing and full of light for weeks, had gone somewhere I could not find it. I reached for it the way you reach for a lamp in a dark room and found nothing where it had been. Just cold. Just a hollow where the current used to run.

  Vane did not move to cover herself. She looked at me over her shoulder with the slow, unhurried satisfaction of someone who has been waiting a long time for a particular moment and is now inside it.

  "Did you really think," she said pleasantly, "that a scavenger stays with one prize? He was done with your sacred rules before the ship left the atmosphere. He needed someone who was actually here, not someone performing a ceremony." She tilted her head slightly. "He needed a real woman, Princess."

  I looked at Warren.

  He reached for his tunic. He did not look at me. He did not speak. He pulled the tunic on with the specific focused attention of a person who has decided that if they concentrate hard enough on a simple physical task they will not have to be present for what is happening in the room.

  That was the thing that did it. Not Vane's words. Not the image of them together, not even the cold where the Force had been. It was the silence. It was Warren's hands moving over the laces of his tunic with careful deliberate attention while I stood in his doorway holding the door frame and the crystal against my chest was cold and he did not look at me.

  I had given him the Choice. I had given him the most sacred thing my blood carried, the thing my world built its understanding of love around, the thing I had been saving since I was old enough to understand what saving it meant. I had walked to his door in the dark and told him the Force had been guiding me to him since the beginning and I had believed it, I had believed it completely, and he had taken it and he had not told me, not then and not at any point since, that he had already made a different choice entirely.

  I let go of the door frame.

  The cold in my chest was not grief. I recognized grief. Grief was the clean exhausting weight of loss, the thing that moves through you like weather and leaves you wrung out and tender. This was not that. This was something with edges. Something that knew exactly where it was pointed.

  I had spent months on this island pressing things down. The heat in my hands after Vane's mockery. The static in my fingers on the training shelf. The dark thought in my hut that night, the one I had pressed flat against the cold stone floor until it faded. I had pressed all of it down because the light was stronger and the light was good and the Force was guiding me and love was the anchor.

  The anchor was gone.

  The Force came back. Not the warm open current of the last weeks. Something older and colder and far less interested in being careful. It came back through the floor of me and up through my hands and I felt the static begin in my fingertips and I looked at it and I did not press it down.

  I did not reach for a blade. I did not reach for a stone. I looked at Warren, who was still not looking at me, and I made a choice of my own.

  I raised my hands.

  The lightning came from somewhere below thought, below feeling even, from the place where the Force and the self meet at the very bottom of a person, and it was not the white static of the Protosaber sessions, not the undirected crackle of something finding its edges. It was focused. It was cold and precise and I directed it with the same deliberate attention I used when I healed, the same intimate knowledge of exactly where to put the energy to make it do what I needed it to do.

  It did not heal.

  The sound it made was not a crack or a hiss. It was a scream, the sound of something that had been held in place by an anchor suddenly released into a space with no walls, and the light of it was the light of every careful thing I had ever swallowed, every mocking laugh I had absorbed with my chin level and my spine straight, every bench that had emptied when I sat down and every silence that had closed over me like water, every moment I had reached for the Force and found it and used it to give and give and give and received in return a room that moved to the far end.

  Warren and Vane did not receive my mercy. That is all I will say about what happened in that room. The Force does not distinguish, at those depths, between the mechanism of healing and the mechanism of its opposite. I had always known that. Thorne had warned me, in his careful way, more than once. The door standing open works in both directions.

  I stepped back from the doorway and the cold air of the corridor hit my face and my hands were still lit, faintly, with the residue of it, and I stood in the narrow stone passage of the initiates' barracks and felt the Force move through me in a current I did not recognize, vast and dark and completely, terrifyingly calm.

  The anchor was gone. The light I had built everything on had been a lie told by someone who did not understand the value of what he was handling.

  What remained was this. The cold. The current. The open door.

  I began to walk.