Sacrifice

transition to Sith Lord, he'll settle down fast.

And she'd be no more use to him after she found him a replacement for Ben Skywalker. Lumiya accepted that her days were numbered.

She lost herself in meditation, wondering who might be Jacen's apprentice to come, when an explosion of feeling shook her as if she'd been grabbed by the shoulders and kissed by a total stranger. The Sith sphere reacted, too, a great soaring excitement that seemed to bounce between her and the ship's bulkheads.

"What's happening? Ship? What is it?"

But she already knew: it was Jacen, slipping out of his permanently repressed Force state and allowing himself intense, overpowering emotion for the first time in ages. The image the ship threw into Lumiya's mind was one of gulping down an icy glass of water after weeks in a burning desert. The sensation was intense enough to bring Lumiya to the point of gasping.

He has love, said the ship. He has loves there.

So Jacen Solo had a lover.

Stupid boy.

He could have had any number of lovers—after he achieved his full power. Passion was fine, attachment could magnify strength, but running around the galaxy for a secret assignation smacked of a teenager's total surrender to hormonal crisis.

Jacen, you're thirty-one, thirty-two, and a grown man doesn't have to sneak light-years away for a little romance, not even one in your position.

Unless . . .

Lumiya could think like Jacen now, even if his more vulnerably human side caught her wrong-footed.