He turned Ben toward the door, and one of the GAG troops took his arm and led him out into the passage. The noise outside was leaking into his awareness; he felt the Force torn and twisted by a riot in progress. He’d started it. It was all his doing.
He caught a snatch of conversation.
“He’s a kid.” Shevu’s voice. “He’s a boy.”
“He’s a Jedi and he has to learn,” Jacen said. “He was already handling weapons at the same age you were learning to add.”
Ben took a breath and surrendered himself to blind reflex again. By the time he got out onto the walkway, CSF officers were using snare rifles on parts of the crowd that wouldn’t disperse and the air was hazy with smoke. The thrum of assault ship drives made his back teeth vibrate. A CSF officer grabbed him and bundled him into one of the police personnel carriers and he sat with his back against the bulkhead, silent and stunned, until a familiar face appeared in the hatchway with his visor pushed back.
“Hey, Ben,” said Corporal Lekauf. “You okay?”
“Kind of.”
“It’s never easy, kid.”
“What isn’t?”
“Killing someone. You need someone to talk to, I’m here-anytime.”
Ben knew he should get out of the carrier and get back to fighting, but a small, scared voice inside said that he was only a kid and it wasn’t fair and that he wanted his mom. He shook himself out of it. Mandalorian boys his own age would already be warriors. They’d spit on Ben for being such a baby. He pulled himself to his feet and scrambled out of the personnel carrier, stumbling back down the walkway as if wading through deep snow.
At some point-and it was probably only moments later-Jacen caught his arm and passed him to Shevu. They were pulling out. The black assault ship drew level with the walkway and Shevu heaved Ben aboard. On the flight back to base, Ben sat sandwiched between Shevu and Jacen, thinking that if they moved he’d just collapse.
“It doesn’t get any easier,” Jacen whispered. “The day it gets easy is the day you have to stop this business.”
Ben found his voice somehow and it didn’t sound like his own. It echoed in his head. “Will you teach me to shut down my presence in the Force, Jacen?”
“Why?”
His instinct was that it would protect him one day. He also had another reason. “So if I want Dad not to find me, I can.”
“You can’t hide from your father every time you do something he doesn’t approve of.”
“I know, but I just want … to be on my own sometimes. Really on my own.”
Jacen studied his face as if looking for something. “You did okay today, Ben. You don’t have to hide.”
The last few weeks had been a constant series of cliff edges that Ben felt he had stepped from and somehow he hadn’t fallen. But they had changed him each time, and he had a sense of never being able to step back onto the cliff edge again. And today-today really had changed him. He knew it. He wanted his old self back, but he knew that the Ben he had once been was gone forever.
He wanted to cry. But he was a soldier now, and he had to live with what he did.
Dad must have gone through this, too. And Mom.
He wondered if he would ever be able to talk to them about it. He doubted it.
Chapter Nineteen
What is he playing at? Either he’s running the Guard or he isn’t. I know he gets results, but he has to make up his mind about whether he’s a fighter pilot or a special forces colonel. I don’t know if he just likes playing with X-wings, or if he’s trying to score points with the admirals. Maybe both.
-Captain Girdun, in a message to his wife, on the subject of Colonel Jacen Solo
THIRD FLEET BASE, CORUSCANT.
It was a dream: a real dream, Luke hoped, the kind caused by eating too close to bedtime or enduring too much stress, and not a Force-vision.
But it had woken him early. His son Ben appeared, head in hands, crying, sobbing: “It’s too high a price. It’s too high a price.”
That didn’t sound like the kind of thing Ben might say, but then Ben was changing into a man almost before his eyes now. Luke sat in the deserted wardroom of the Third Fleet’s shore base and waited for Jaina. He let his gaze rest on the row of ship’s badges that were hung neatly along the pleekwood paneling behind the bar.
No, military discipline was none of his business. But Jacen Solo was.
Jaina arrived still wearing her orange flight suit and sat down in the chair beside him with slow care.
“Thanks for coming, Uncle Luke.”
“I wanted to hear your side of it. I don’t believe Jaina Solo would ever turn tail and run during an engagement.”