Sacrifice

lightsaber's blade, ready to fight when she rounded the next hull.

This is it, Lumiya. No more games.

She sprang into the gap, lightsaber humming.

Staring back at her wasn't a veiled figure with a lightwhip but a single, disembodied, flame-red eye ten meters wide. Her instinct said it was alive, an alien being, but it was clearly a ship of some kind, and that meant only one thing: Lumiya was inside.

It was a trap, Mara was sure of that.

Fine. But sometimes traps swallow prey that's way too big for them

. . .

She looked over the hull for a hatch, but the roughly textured surface—was it stone?—was unbroken.

Come inside.

Mara wondered why she was thinking that and then realized that the thought was actually a voice inside her head, in the fabric of the Force itself. It was inanimate, yet sentient; and it wasn't a droid.

It was the ship.

Mara concentrated hard on sensing Lumiya, but she could detect nobody inside the vessel. Suddenly an aperture appeared in the hull and a ramp extruded. It was too tempting, and she was too old a hand at this kind of game to walk straight in, but she had to know what was going on.

The wake ended here. Lumiya had used this ship. But—

I can take her. This is all mini games. I'm not falling for it.

If Lumiya was waiting within, hiding somehow, then Mara would kill her. If