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a difference to you.”
    “It didn’t, honest.”
    “I bet.”
    The firm set of her jaw and the way she folded her arms across her chest told Corran she didn’t believehim. There was a fair amount of anger in her words, but also some hurt. Anger he could deal with—there wasn’t a smuggler or criminal who hadn’t been angry when he was around. The hurt, though, that was unusual and made Corran feel uncomfortable.
    “What makes you think I hold your coming from Kessel against you?”
    “The way you act.” Lujayne’s expression softened a bit, and some of the anger drained away, but that just let more anxiety and pain bleed into her words. “You tend to keep to yourself. You’re not associating with the rest of us—beyond a narrow circle of pilots you think are as sharp as you are. You’re always watching and listening, evaluating and judging. Others have noticed it, too.”
    “Ms. Forge, Lujayne, you’re making meters out of microns here.”
    “I don’t think so, and I don’t want to be judged for things over which I had no control.” Her chin came up and fire sparked in her eyes. “My father volunteered to go to Kessel under an Old Republic program where he taught inmates how to move back into society upon their release. My mother was one of his students. They fell in love and remained on Kessel—they’re still there, along with most of my brothers and sisters. They’re all good people and their work with inmates was designed to make your job easier by giving criminals other skills so they’d not return to crime when they were released.”
    Corran sighed and his shoulders slumped. “I think that’s great, I really do. I wish there were thousands of people like your parents and kin doing that sort of work. The fact is, though, that even if I’d known that, I’d still have gone after you in the exercise.”
    “Oh, my being from Kessel had
nothing
to do with it?”
    He almost dismissed her question with a glib denial, but he caught himself and she clearly noticed his hesitation. “Maybe, just maybe, it
did
have something to do with my flying. I guess I decided that if you were from Kessel and could fly, you had to be a smuggler, and it was important for me to fly better than you could.”
    She nodded once, but her expression did not shift from one of concern to smug triumph as he had expected it would. “I believe that, and I can understand it. Still, there’s something more there, right?”
    “Look, I’m sorry if what I did made you look bad in the exercise, but I really don’t have the time to talk about this now.”
    “No time or no inclination?”
    Whistler hooted something in an utterly carefree manner.
    “
You
stay out of this.” Frustration curled his hands into fists. “You’re not going to let this go, are you, Ms. Forge?”
    With a smile blossoming on her face, she shook her head. “If you’d gotten this far in an interrogation, would you give up?”
    Corran snorted a laugh. “No.”
    “So, explain yourself.”
    He definitely heard a request for more than an explanation of his conduct in the
Redemption
scenario in her voice. For a split second he flashed on the times at CorSec when his human partner, Iella Wessiri, had made similar demands of him.
Iella had been a conciliator—always the one to be patching up the disagreements between folks in the unit. That’s what Lujayne is trying to do, which means I’ve managed to alienate a number of the other pilots trying to get into the unit
.
    “Concerning the exercise, I really just wanted to see how good you were. I’d been able to figure out where some of the other pilots stood in relationship to me, but I’d not flown against you. You know, you’re not bad.”
    “But I’m not in a class with you and Bror Jace.”
    Corran smiled quickly, then covered it with a frown. “True, but you’re still very sharp. I’d like to think the rest of the pilots are going to be at least that sharp. I’d even be set up to fly against