“Call your wife,” said Fett. “Get her to pick us up. We can’t run all over Coronet at this time of night. Too conspicuous.”
They crouched in the cover of thick bushes near the highway, and for a second Han had one of those out-of-body views of himself in his mind that sometimes left him reeling. Three Mandalorian assassins, fully armored, hiding from the Corellian Security Force in a nice, normal park as a government coup began a kilometer away. He opened the comlink.
What am I doing here?
“Hi, honey,” said Han. “Can you give us a lift?”
Leia’s voice was, as usual, all resigned calm. “Who’s us?”
“Some Mandalorian buddies I ran into.”
“That’s nice. I’m watching a lot of police activity from the apartment.”
“Ah, that’d be Cousin Thrackan …”
“How is he?”
“Dead,” said Han, his stomach torn between nausea and a lifetime’s worth of relief. “Very, very dead.”
GAG HEADQUARTERS, GALACTIC CITY, CORUSCANT.
“What happened to Barit Saiy?” Ben asked.
Shevu consulted the custody file and shook his head. “Not here. No record of transfer to CSF custody, either.”
“But every prisoner should be logged in and out, right?”
“Right.” Shevu stared at his datapad, lips compressed in a thin line. “I don’t like prisoners who disappear.” He managed a smile at Ben. “Maybe he was repatriated and nobody logged him out. We sent back a lot of Corellians in a hurry before the blockade.”
“Yeah …”
“It’s hard when you get personally involved,” said Shevu quietly. “Best to stand clear and do everything by the book.”
“Jacen doesn’t.”
“Colonel Solo is my commanding officer.”
It wasn’t an answer that made any sense on the surface, but Ben was learning fast: Shevu was saying that he wouldn’t give an opinion on Jacen’s behavior, whatever he thought of it. He was angry about Ailyn Habuur. Ben was distressed too. Jacen was all he wanted to be, and then suddenly he killed a prisoner-carelessly, not in anger, but she was still dead-and Ben wasn’t sure he knew him as well as he’d thought he did.
Is this what I want to be?
“I understand,” said Ben, and went off to the now empty gymnasium to practice his lightsaber skills with a remote as a target.
The small sphere danced and spun in the air as he swung and sliced, leaving a faint trail of light behind the blue blade with each stroke. When he became swept up in the movement and stopped concentrating, he always found himself on the edge of one perfect movement after another. It didn’t feel like a series of actions; it felt like one, his first and last stroke, frozen and repeated over and over again. There came a point as he pursued the darting silver sphere when his mind was completely blank. Not just clear; blank.
And in those moments he saw things.
It was as if his conscious mind had stopped its relentless chatter and left a door wide open. Then his mind wasn’t pure white light any longer but a detailed image with layers of data that he could understand intuitively but not read.
It stopped him dead in his tracks. The remote, responding to him, froze in midair.
Jacen was summoning him.
The remote presence of other Jedi was something he had grown up with, the way other kids heard their parents calling them. But this was different. He was being summoned, not called. It was an order. He felt it.
He retrieved the remote and ran to find Jacen. He could locate him easily these days, as if Jacen had an overwhelming presence in the Force like a signpost when he wanted it. Sometimes, though, he disappeared completely. Ben really wanted to learn to do that, too.
Jacen was sitting in one of the administration offices, staring at a holomap on the wall with his hands cupped over his mouth and nose as if he was thinking about something that upset him.
“Jacen?”
“Ah, Ben. I wasn’t expecting you to come so quickly. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
Like I had any choice. But Jacen always treated him like an adult. “Just lightsaber drill.”
“I’m looking at the areas we have to sweep now. We’ve got a running battle going on between Atzerri and Coruscanti in the lower levels, according to CSF, and the bomb disposal teams are investigating ten more suspicious packages. We deal with one problem, and another three spring up in its place.”
“What did you want me for?”
Jacen indicated a chair and motioned Ben to sit down. “It’s time I gave you more responsibility. We only grow when we’re given the chance to.”
Ben tried to imagine what extra responsibility he could be given. He had already gone on anti-terror operations and sabotaged weapons that could destroy whole worlds. It was hard to top that when you were thirteen.