I frowned. “You’re being dodgy again.”
He knew he was and winked. “I have to keepsomeallure, Starlight. Or else you won’t keep me coming around.”
I scoffed. If only he knew. “That’s not why I keep you coming around.”
He grinned. “So, you admit that youarecoming around to me.”
In more than one way, and in realizing that, I also realized I’d been caught red-handed. My face grew hot, so I scowled and turned back to the navicomputer. “That was a trap.”
He grinned. “You like it.”
“I despise you.”
“Liar.”
A smile tugged at the edge of my mouth, and I had to fight it down a little harder than usual. “Maybe a little,” I admitted. “I was born here on the ship, somewhere in the Mid Rim but who knows where, really. TheStarfarerwas in hyperspace at the time. I used to wonder what it was like to grow up planetside, you know? Like down there on Naboo.”
The glints of ships entering and exiting the atmosphere flared like diamonds. It was one of my favorite planets to watch. There was just something so peaceful about it.
“I’d probably be a different person if I had.”
“Right? You could’ve been like Emperor Palpatine.”
I rolled my eyes.“Ha.”
“But seriously, I don’t think so. I don’t think where you’re born dictates whether you’re good or bad. You can be raised in a perfectly lovely family and cause unfathomable amounts of pain.” He folded his arms behindhis head and leaned back in his seat, closing his eyes. “People aren’t born evil, you know? They choose it,” he said, his voice carefully neutral, “and it’s usually the easier choice. The choice that keeps you in power, the choice that ensures you’re comfortable, the choice that never challenges your worldview. Evil is easy.”
I scrunched my nose. “I think being good is easy, too. Valuing people, welcoming them, being respectful—”
“Is that being good or beingnice?” he asked. “Nice is different than good, Starlight.”
“Says the man who stole a lightsaber,” I replied.
He cracked open an eye.
“You’re not correcting me,” I pointed out.
“You’re right. I did steal it.”
“Then areyounice or good?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “My mentor—she was good, though she wasn’t nice. Not at all. She was crass, and stubborn, and drank too much. She’d never lift a finger for anyone if it wasn’t in her best interest.”
“Then how was shegood?”
He sat up in his chair and leaned against the armrest, crooking his finger for me to come closer. I decided to play along and leaned toward him. We were just far enough apart so we weren’t touching, but not by much. Close enough to whisper a secret, but far enough that I could deny that I liked this closeness. Though Ididlike it.I liked that I could count his silver eyelashes, and I liked that I could see a hairline scar across the bridge of his nose. I liked that, this close, in the low light of the flight deck, he could see no one else—as if I was his galaxy.
He put a finger to his lips, and I noticed the beauty mark below them looked indigo in this light. There was a ring on his first finger, made of dark metal and engraved in a language I didn’t understand, and his nails were tinted the same bruised color as his beauty mark. “There was once—allegedly—a bas-relief in Palpatine’s office when he was in power,” he began, his voice barely a rumbling whisper. I felt like he was telling me a forbidden secret, not the history of a piece of art in an office. “It depicted an age-old battle between the Jedi and the Sith. During the end of the Galactic Republic, Jedi would pass it and not think anything of it. They didn’t consider it at all, really. But rumor is, the bas-relief was taken from a frieze found in a Sith temple on Malachor. My mentor was obsessed with the relic—didn’t care where it came from. She wanted nothing more than to return it to its place of origin.”
I was confused. “Sith—aren’t they a faction of people who worshiped the dark side?”
“The way my mentor explained, Sith were the antithesis to the Jedi, but we don’t know very much about them—who they were, what they wanted.”
“But they were bad people.”
He shrugged. “My mentor always said that history wasn’t a prize to be hung on a wall—for anyone. Good or evil. It wasn’t ours to take, but ours to learn from.”
“But why not destroy it if it was evil?”
