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later with my right hand as well. Both swings connected, but the ghest connected, too. Its head got above and through my awkward defenses and it sank its teeth into the soft tissue between my left shoulder and my neck. It didn’t bite through or try to move up to my throat, however; by the time we hit the ground, its head and shoulders weren’t connected to the rest of the body. The swing I’d taken with my lightsaber had shorn through entirely, leaving me alive but with a dead ghest’s teeth buried in my flesh.
    Soonta rushed over to help. “Are you all right?” she asked.
    “I’ll live. I think.”
    “Most people don’t survive being attacked, so that was well done.”
    The soggy head affixed to my body didn’t make me feel like a winner. “Ugh. It wasn’t really a skill thing. More like panicked reflexes and really good weapons. You were right, there’s no way I would have gotten off a blaster shot in time.” I thumbed off the lightsabers and shook a little bit from adrenaline and the thought of how close I’d come to death. A couple of centimeters more and the ghest would have had my throat, and I would have bled out regardless.
    The ghest’s jaw hadn’t locked up, so prying it loose was more painful than difficult. “We need to get you to the infirmary,” Soonta said, tossing the head into the swamp before helping me to my feet. The ghest’s long serpentine body trailed off into the water, a greenish log that ended in blood on the rock. “The sooner the better. Limping into town doubled up on the speeder will be a bit faster than going back for another one and returning.”
    She took holos of the damaged speeder and the ghest’s body with her datapad before we left. “I need to explain what happened if I don’t want to have my pay docked.”
    We crowded onto the remaining speeder; I wrapped my right arm around Soonta’s waist and did my best to deal with her personal pungency. I knew that later I’d look back on the experience and count it as a good one on the whole, because there was no telling what I could learn from Huulik’s lightsaber, but at the time, feeling weak and light-headed from blood loss, foul smells, and excessive humidity, I thought that was the worst speeder ride ever.

ONCE I WAS PATCHED UP and back in my room in Toopil, I was too wired to sleep and could think of no better use of my time than to take a closer look at Soonta’s gift.
    Doing my best to relax and leave myself open to the Force, I activated Huulik’s lightsaber and marveled again at how the hilt didn’t feel quite right; even though I’d wiped it down with a damp cloth and removed all hints of debris, it still seemed to want to escape my grip with a slippery, viscous surface tension that was absent from my own lightsaber. Was it a function of Rodian versus human manufacture? Or was my lightsaber better suited to me because it had been constructed by my father?
    The blade was not pure light, of course: It was energy from the same sort of power cell that fueled blasters, given form by passing through a kyber crystal as superheated plasma that arced at the top and returned to the hilt. It didn’t give off heatuntil it touched something solid; the rest of the time its power was contained by a force field. I knew that much but very little else. I wanted to see how it worked—how it was constructed. I had never dared take apart my lightsaber for fear that I wouldn’t be able to put it back together again, but Soonta had given me Huulik’s lightsaber to learn something if I could, so I was going to risk it.
    I deactivated it and inspected the hilt closely. There were no screws or switches or any of the usual markers of assembly. Except for the button to turn it on and the dial that adjusted its strength, it appeared to be a solid artifact, as if it had been shaped that way in nature. Perhaps the barrel was a solid piece, albeit hollow, that had been slipped over the rest of the assembly. And perhaps the key to