The Great Hangar was a cathedral of natural basalt, carved by water and time into a space so large that the ceiling disappeared into darkness above us and the sound of the ocean outside arrived as a low, continuous pressure rather than anything as specific as waves. It was deep enough to shelter the Jedi transports from the salt spray and the gales, and it smelled of stone and engine oil and the particular cold of places where the sun never reaches.

  It did not smell like that today.

  Today it smelled of something organic and sharp, the smell of a large number of living things in an enclosed space, and the silence that usually lived in the rock was gone. In its place was a sound I had not heard before and did not want to hear again. A rhythmic clicking that came from everywhere at once, from the walls and the ceiling and the dark spaces between the grounded transports, a sound made by many throats in loose coordination, like a language spoken by something that had no interest in being understood.

  "They are not nesting," Thorne said beside me. His spectacles had fogged immediately in the damp air and he was peering through them anyway, his quill for once not in his hand. "They are feeding."

  I saw the Lanai first. A group of eight or ten of them huddled in the far corner of the hangar behind an overturned supply crate, their gray robes shredded, their wide eyes catching what little light there was. Above them and around them, moving through the dark in fast, leathery arcs, were the Syrinx-Bats.

  They were larger than I had been told to expect. Six feet of wingspan at minimum, the skin of their wings translucent enough that the faint light of the hangar showed the bones within, thin and numerous as fingers. Their mouths were open as they moved and the teeth inside were not the flat grinding teeth of something that ate plants. They were serrated and needle-fine and had clearly been designed, over whatever long span of evolution had produced them, for something specific. Several of them had found the fuel lines of the nearest transport and were working at the casing with methodical, focused industry.

  "Blades out," Warren said.

  It was not a shout. It was the tone he used when he had already assessed a situation and moved past the assessment into action, quiet and final, and everyone who heard it responded to it the same way.

  The fight was loud and close and chaotic in the specific way that fights in enclosed spaces are chaotic, with too many directions to watch and the sound of the creatures filling the air so completely that communication became almost impossible. I positioned myself between the Lanai and the nearest swarm and held my ground. I was not a hunter. Kit was a hunter, spinning and leaping through the dark with his blade a constant blur of blue light, driving the bats away from the transports with a ferocious precision that was almost beautiful to watch. Mobe-Joan used the Force in great sweeping motions, catching the creatures mid-flight and redirecting them into the cave walls with controlled, devastating force.

  I was a wall. I stood between the Lanai and whatever came toward them and I did not let anything through and that was enough, that was its own kind of work, and I understood it and did it without resentment.

  Warren was everywhere. That was the only way to describe it. He moved through the hangar like weather, appearing at each new crisis point before anyone had named it as one, his scavenger instincts reading the shape of the fight several seconds ahead of where it actually was. He was not careful. He fought with a recklessness that I watched with one part of my attention even while the other parts were occupied, an awareness of where he was in the room that I could not entirely account for as tactical.

  "Velara, secondary tunnel, get them moving," he called, somewhere to my left, and I turned to begin guiding the Lanai toward the back passage.

  I heard rather than saw what happened next. A change in the quality of the clicking above us, a single note rising above the rest, and then the sound of something large dropping from the ceiling.

  The Alpha Syrinx was bigger than the others, its eyes lit with a cold bioluminescence that cast pale green light across the floor of the hangar as it dove. It was aimed at the cluster of Lanai still moving toward the tunnel. Warren saw it at the same moment I did.

  He did not call for help. He did not redirect it with the Force. He jumped.

  He caught the creature mid-dive and his weight brought it down and they hit the obsidian rock at the edge of the hangar floor together, a tangle of limbs and leathery wings and the crack of the creature's neck giving way, and then silence from that corner of the room, and Warren did not get up.

  I was moving before I had decided to move.

  The terror came first, a cold flooding thing that started in my chest and moved outward to my hands. That was the first thing. Simultaneous with it, rising through it the way a current rises through cold water, was something else entirely, not calm, nothing so composed as calm, but focus. The kind that comes when the situation is too serious for anything except the next necessary action and the one after that.

  Both arrived together and I ran.

  I dropped to my knees on the stone beside him. The obsidian was sharp and I did not register it. Warren was on his back across a pile of jagged rock, the Alpha Syrinx dead beside him, and his face was the color of old ash. He was breathing. Short and shallow and wrong, the breathing of someone whose body was trying to compensate for something it could not fix.

  "Warren." I put my hand on his chest. His eyes found mine.

  "I cannot feel them," he said. His voice was very quiet. In all the time I had known him I had never heard that particular quality in it, the quality of someone who has just encountered the edges of themselves and found the edges closer than expected. "Velara. My legs. I cannot feel my legs."

  I looked at his back without moving him. The wool of his tunic was torn and beneath it the line of his spine was wrong in a way that did not require medical training to read, a displacement that meant the damage was serious and immediate and would become permanent very quickly if nothing was done.

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  "Move back," I said to the people around me. My voice was level. It was the voice I used in the healing wards on Misith when the situation required that someone be the still point in the room. "Everyone. Now. Give me space."

  They moved. The whole hangar went quiet around us, the last of the bats dealt with or fled, the Lanai still, the other students standing in a loose ring without anyone asking them to form one. Kit had his blade down. Mobe-Joan had her arms at her sides. Even Vane had stopped moving.

  I placed one hand flat on Warren's chest and the other directly over the damaged vertebrae and I closed my eyes.

  I did not reach for the Force gently this time. I did not offer or invite or ask. I went into it the way you go into cold water, all at once, because doing it slowly only prolongs the shock. I found the injury immediately, the jagged displacement of bone, the compressed and screaming nerves, the spinal cord bruised and threatened but not, not yet, severed. I found the architecture of what it was supposed to be and I held that picture steady in my mind and I began.

  The bones were the first thing and the hardest. Moving them without causing further damage required a precision that was different from any other healing I had done, slower, more deliberate, each fraction of a millimeter navigated with full attention. I felt the sweat on my face and did not register it. I felt my hands begin to glow and did not look at them. I felt the Force moving through me in a volume that made the air around us warm and the stone beneath my knees hum at a frequency below hearing.

  I felt the bone slide back into alignment.

  The nerves were next, the severed communication between his spine and his legs, and I moved through them like a seamstress moves through damaged cloth, finding each broken thread and drawing it back to its neighbor and holding it there while the Force did what the Force did when you showed it clearly enough what needed to happen.

  Warren made a sound. Not a word. Something that came from much deeper than words.

  I held the connection for a long moment after the structural work was done, feeling for anything I had missed, any secondary damage hiding behind the primary, the way injuries do sometimes, and then slowly, carefully, I withdrew.

  I opened my eyes.

  The hangar was absolutely silent.

  Warren's hands were moving. He looked at them for a moment as though confirming they were his. Then he placed them flat on the stone and pushed himself up, slowly, to sitting. He moved his feet. He bent his knees. He stood, one careful movement at a time, and when he was fully upright he stood still for a long moment with his eyes closed and his jaw working.

  Then he turned and looked at me and the expression on his face was not the one I was used to from him. It had no performance in it at all.

  The hangar remained silent. I became aware of it as I got to my feet, my legs unsteady from the output, the particular exhaustion of deep healing settling into my bones like something poured in. Kit was looking at the ground. Mobe-Joan had her hand pressed flat against her sternum in a gesture I did not know the meaning of but understood the feeling of. Even the Lanai were still, their wide eyes moving between Warren standing and me standing and the space between us where something had just happened that did not have a simple name.

  Vane said nothing. For once, nothing at all.

  Thorne was writing. Of course Thorne was writing.

  We made our way back up to the temple as the last light left the sky, slowly and without much conversation. I walked at my own pace and let the others move ahead and listened to the ocean below the cliff and felt the exhaustion move through me in long, slow waves. My hands had stopped glowing but they still felt warm, the residual warmth of deep work, and I held them loosely at my sides and breathed the salt air and did not think about anything in particular.

  I was sitting on my pallet in the dark of my hut, my boots still on, too tired to remove them, when the knock came.

  Soft. Two knocks. Then nothing.

  I opened the door.

  Warren stood in the narrow stone doorway and he looked, for the first time since I had known him, like someone who did not know what to do with his hands. The jacket was gone. The smirk was gone. His eyes were different, quieter and more direct than usual, the eyes of someone who has spent several hours alone with a thing they cannot explain away and has stopped trying.

  "May I come in," he said. It was not quite a question. It was not quite a statement either. It landed somewhere between them, uncertain in a way I had never heard from him.

  I stepped back from the door.

  He came in and stood in the center of the small room and looked at me for a long moment without saying anything. The candle on the shelf threw unsteady light across his face and I could see the tension in him, the effort of being here, of having knocked on the door at all, which for Warren was its own kind of courage.

  "I have been lying on the ground of that hangar in my head," he said finally, "every hour since it happened. Feeling that. The nothing where my legs were." He stopped. Started again. "I grew up on ships. I have been in bad situations. I have never been afraid the way I was afraid in that moment."

  "I know," I said quietly.

  "I know you know." He reached into the pocket of his tunic and his hand came out holding something small. A cord, plain and thin, and hanging from it a shard of Kyber crystal the size of my thumb, unrefined and raw, glowing with a soft light that was neither blue nor green nor white. It was orange, deep and warm, the color of the last light on a horizon just before the dark comes in and you realize the day was a good one.

  He held it out and looked at it rather than at me, and I understood that looking at it was easier than looking at me for what he was about to say.

  "I found it at the back of the cave on the first mission," he said. "I was going to trade it. I kept not trading it." A pause. "I know what the Choice means, Velara. I have been thinking about what it means since you told me. What it means to be chosen that way. What it would mean to be worth it." He looked up. "I am not certain I am worth it. I want to be honest with you about that. But I want to try to be. And I want you to have this so that when you are deciding, you have something in your hand that came from me and was not easy to give."

  He stepped forward and reached around me and looped the cord over my head and settled it against my chest. His hands stayed at my shoulders for a moment, not pulling me closer, just resting there, present and still, and then he touched his forehead to mine the way my father had touched his forehead to mine on the boarding ramp of a ship that felt like a very long time ago now.

  We stayed like that for a moment that had no particular length.

  "The Choice," he said, very quietly. "I think I understand it now."

  Then he straightened and stepped back and looked at me once more with those quiet, unguarded eyes, and he left. The door closed softly behind him and I stood in the candlelight with the orange crystal warm against my sternum and my hand closed around it and I did not move for a long time.

  He is the one, I thought. The thought arrived without drama or ceremony, the way true things arrive, simply and completely and without asking permission.

  He is my forever.

  I sat down on the pallet and held the crystal in both hands and let myself believe it fully, without reservation, without the small careful voice that usually followed me around reminding me to be sensible. I had been sensible my whole life. I had been careful and precise and I had kept my hands open and my expectations modest and it had kept me safe and it had kept me alone, and I was done with it.

  The crystal glowed orange in the dark of the hut and I held it and I believed in it and I slept better than I had since leaving Misith.