[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(129)

He’d handled a lot of dead bodies. If you were a bounty hunter, it went with the job. It was only when he fumbled fastening the leather cord at the back of the neck and had to remove his gloves that he actually touched Ailyn.

Her hair was coarser than he’d imagined. Her skin was icy silk.

And that was the point at which he truly knew that he had lost his only child. He had never been there for her, and that was a pain he knew would never fade, not like his memory of Sintas. His father had been there for him. But he’d failed to live up to him in the most important way of all: by being as good a father as Jango Fett.

“Let’s go,” said Mirta. “We’re taking her home.”

It had suddenly become we. “Where’s home? Not Taris.”

“Mandalore.”

“I don’t actually have a property there now.”

“Time you got one, then.”

Boba Fett and Mirta returned to Slave I and laid Ailyn Vel in the refrigerated hold that had been designed for prisoners whose warrant had included the word dead. It didn’t feel right, but it was the only practical solution for the journey back to Mandalore.

Whoever that Kad’ika was, he had a point. Sometimes you really needed somewhere to call home forever. Fett made his way back up through Slave I’s central hatch and settled in the pilot’s seat. Mirta, still silent, slipped into the copilot’s position.

“Beviin says we Mandalorians rarely bury our dead,” said Fett. “But I never was much of a Mandalorian.”

“Mama was Kiffar.”

Okay. “What do you want to do, then?”

Mina’s eyes brimmed. “I don’t know right now.”

Fett lifted off his helmet. “We’ll head back to Mandalore. By way of Geonosis, because that’s where I buried my dad. Family needs keeping together.”

It was the longest conversation about anything other than business that he’d had with anyone since he was a kid. It was personal, agonizingly so, and the effort hurt. He finally let the tears run down his face in silence.

Mirta cried beside him, occasionally gulping for air. It was all very quiet and embarrassed, as if neither was willing to admit they could weep, but the truth was that they both could, and hard.

They were family now. It was the worst possible way to forge a bond. But it was a bond, even if there was no affection, and for the first time in his life it was one that Boba Fett would try to approach as a father himself, not as a man constantly living in the past in search of one who would never return.





Chapter Twenty-Three


He will strengthen himself through sacrifice.

He will ruin those who deny justice.

He will immortalize his love.

-Prophecy of the Sith, foretold in tassel artifact

LUMIYA’S SAFE HOUSE, GALACTIC CITY.

Jacen had the dream again, the one where he found himself staring at a weapon in his hands and sobbing.

The dream had taken a number of forms in the last few days. In the first, he held his lightsaber; in those that followed, he held a Yuuzhan Vong amphistaff, or a blaster, or a lightwhip. In one, he even held a weapon he didn’t recognize at all.

The recurrence bothered him enough to seek Lumiya’s advice. He stood at the doorway of her apartment block and looked up into the Coruscant sky to see if he could detect any light from the window. She was there, he knew.

Luke knew, too. He just didn’t know where she was, how very close. An airspeeder could cover the distance from the Skywalkers’ apartment to the safe house in under an hour. But did it matter? Events were moving faster than his uncle would ever believe. They were almost moving too fast for Jacen to comprehend, and he let himself be carried with them, trusting the Force.

Inside the apartment, Lumiya sat meditating, her face veiled again. There was no Force illusion this time; the apartment looked like any other rented apartment with basic furniture and taupe carpet, a strangely mundane setting for such pivotal events.

In her hands Lumiya held the tassels whose knots and threads were a language, a prophecy, an arcane instruction book of what Jacen had to do to achieve full Sith knowledge and power. On the low table in front of her was a candle, burning steadily and occasionally guttering in a draft.

“I have dreams,” he said. “Dreams of weapons that I’ve used.”

“And they distress you,” said Lumiya.

“All I recall is that I’m looking at a weapon in my hand and feeling enormous grief.”

“It might just be a dream and not a vision.”

“The weapon is different each time.”

“Perhaps just a dream, then.”

He hoped so. Even Jedi had dreams like normal people, fed by the day’s events and fueled by stresses and strains and unresolved conflicts. If he was having bad dreams, no doctor would be surprised. In a short time he had learned to do things … no, he had instigated things that he would never have thought he was capable of doing. When he looked at the shock and revulsion on the faces of those close to him-his father, his mother, even Ben-he could stand back and see reflected in their eyes how much he had changed.