Maz hummed, putting her hands behind her back. “Heroes are never as stagnant as their stories. They’re just people, even if they are called to greater things, and in their different seasons they take up many differentweapons. In the end, some are lost, some await new owners, and some find themselves in the precarious hands of new stories.”
I looked down at the bits of the broken one, its crystal soft and golden. New stories? I liked the possibility of that.
“So my mentor was right,” Sian whispered. He blinked, tears at the edges of his eyes. “She…always knew. Sheknewit was his. She just didn’t know where it belonged, with Luke Skywalker missing.”
The old woman leaned in close, as if to whisper a secret. “There is a Jedi temple on Tempes. It belongs there.”
He sat up straight, excited, until he realized—“Oh. I can’t return it in pieces.”
Maz clicked her tongue in thought. Then she snapped her fingers. “Ah!I think I know someone who can help. At the Black Spire Outpost on Batuu.”
He snorted. “Can they fix lightsabers?”
Maz grinned and replied, “I’ll tell Savi to expect you.”
So Sian would be leaving.Reallyleaving this time. Sosha’s people had given him a ship—it was a clunker, but it’d get him where he needed to go as long as he didn’t need to get there fast. And now he had a heading, a destination: Batuu. And then he’d be gone—forevergone—out of my life just as suddenly as he came into it. The thought pulled at something in my chest, deep and yearning and as old as I was. Something that had as much to do with Sian as it did with the going. There was a whole galaxy out there, and for a moment I’d glimpsed it, and it was beautiful.
“Maybe the Force be with you,” she said with a playful wink, squeezing his shoulder, and walked away from the party into the darkness of the woods, like a ghost dissipating in mist.
I never saw her again.
Daaricreallyowed me a better story about his time before theStarfarer. With a boss like that? There was no way it wasn’t full of at least two near-death experiences.
“Oh! That reminds me.” I took the celestialabe out of my pocket and handed it to Sian. I’d snatched it from my dresser drawer when I got the datatape earlier. “Can you tell me what this is?”
He turned it over, inspecting the letters carved into it and the different star charts. “Aaaah, is this the infamous celestialabe you wanted to return?”
I stuck out my tongue at him. “Imagine if Ihadn’t.”
He grinned. “I can’t. You’re not the stealing type.”
I mocked a gasp. “I stealsomethings!”
“Sure, and what do you steal?”
“This,” and I kissed him quick on the mouth andwon that argument immediately. I decided that I liked winning arguments with kisses. “So is it real? The celestialabe?”
His attention dropped to my lips, and then he cleared his throat. “Sadly not. It’s a tourist trinket from the Corellian Engineering Corporation. Before the Galactic Civil War, they gave these out to kids who aced a navigation quiz.” He handed it back to me. “You’re more authentic than this thing.”
I slipped it back into my pocket. Maybe it was just a trinket, but it had given me some good luck, I thought, so why not keep it. “Well then, this authentic celestialabe would like a dance.” I pushed myself to my feet and offered him my hand.
He accepted it without a moment of hesitation. “I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The Starlight
We danced so long, laughing and trying not to hurt ourselves more than we already had, that I didn’t notice until Entoo put on a slower song that it was almost morning. Already? It had been barely dusk an hour ago, it felt like. And soon it would be tomorrow, and I didn’t know what sort of tomorrow that would be.
“You look lost in thought.” Sian’s voice drew me out of my head. We swayed slowly, at the edge of the party.
“Everything is going to change now,” I said.
“I guess so.”
“And I guess you’ll be going, too?” I went on, because it couldn’t be helped. The tour had come to an end, and like every other one, I was expected to say goodbye. To become barely a passing footnote in the lives of everyone else.
He clicked his tongue, pondering the question. “Maz gave me a lead to get this lightsaber fixed, so I think I’m going to figure out how to get to Batuu.”
