[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(10)

Sometimes he almost missed Boba Fett. Fett, at least, had no family axes to grind. It was just business.

Thrackan would send Fett. Han just knew it.

CORUSCANT: THE SKYWALKERS’ APARTMENT.

The shrouded man wouldn’t leave Luke alone now.

The image of the man-cloaked, hooded, anonymous, intent on evil-intruded on his dreams more frequently, not in the way of normal nightmares but as a clear vision in the Force; and that was worse than any nightmare.

It had the potential to be real, if it wasn’t already.

He couldn’t see the man’s face. In his dream, he was chasing him, trying to grab that hood from his face, but he always woke up at the point where he felt his fingers close on the fabric. It felt like lightweight bantha wool.

His fingers clutched again. Both the robe and the man dissolved, and Luke woke, heart pounding, fighting a feeling of overwhelming despair and anger at himself for not seeing what was close enough to touch.

He decided he wasn’t going to get back to sleep and got up as quietly as he could to avoid waking Mara. With the light that spilled from Galactic City’s twenty-four-hour activity and his own Force-sense, he didn’t need to switch on the lights to pour himself a glass of water.

There were messages on the comm board-the routine fretting of C-3PO informing him that Mistress Leia and Master Han were well, and that the Noghri were becoming most agitated at the separation, and was it really necessary for the droids to remain at the Solos’ Coruscant apartment when they might be needed … elsewhere?

Luke managed a smile, something he was finding increasingly hard to do lately. He had long suspected that droids had something in them far beyond their programming. C-3P0 was as anxious and protective as any human relation would be of his family members, and it always gave him pause when anyone said, “just a droid.”

“Yes, my friend,” he said aloud. “Because the last thing they need is a big gold-plated droid advertising their presence … wherever that might be.”

Nobody ever said Corellia, but it was very hard to misplace your sister and your best friend in the Force. Luke wished them some kind of peace. He knew how hard it was to find peace when the front line ran through the heart of his own family, even if his misgivings over Jacen’s influence on Ben were a little way short of a full-scale feud.

Luke drank while he watched the constant movement of lights from the window. His discomfort over Jacen was definite in some ways-the lengths his nephew seemed prepared to go, the ways he used the Force-but vague in another way, a far deeper and more troubling one: he feared for Jacen. Maybe the hooded man was someone who would threaten Jacen or attempt to corrupt him. Whatever the man represented, he was a danger: not danger in the immediate sense, like someone wielding a weapon, but something far more general and all-pervading.

Luke didn’t deal in words like evil, but that was the only word that felt as if it fit.

Maybe it’s a vision of war. Well, I don’t need a Force dream to warn me of that. Nobody does.

He felt Mara walk up behind him and give him a soothing touch from the doorway, just a brief warm reassurance at the back of his mind.

“You could have made us both a cup of caf,” she said. “If we’re going to give up sleeping, might as well do it right.”

“You’d think I’d take times like this in my stride by now.”

Mara tidied her hair with one hand as she fumbled with the caf dispenser. “Politics? I don’t think that ever gets easier-not when your own family is tied up in it.”

“It’s Ben I’m most worried about.”

“He gave a good account of himself at Centerpoint.”

“But he’s thirteen. Okay, I let him go, but he’s still a child. Our child.”

“How old were you when you dived headlong into the Rebellion? Not that much older . .

“I was eighteen.”

“Whoa, veteran, huh?” She winked. He saw the grim, cold girl she’d been when he met her, and thought she looked lovelier now that life had been kinder to her for a few years. “Sweetheart, Jacen is taking care of him. He couldn’t have a better teacher.”

“Yeah …”

“Okay, I know we aren’t going to agree on that.”

“You know how I feel. Jacen makes me uneasy. I’ve never felt that way before. I can’t ignore it.”

Her smile faded. “I feel something a little different.”

“I can’t shake it.”

Mara looked about to snap back, but she nodded to herself a few times as if rehearsing a more measured response. “I feel some worrying things in the Force, too, but I’ve got a theory.”

“I’m all ears.”