Neither of them answered.
Jacen’s mind raced ahead. This was perfect timing for Lumiya’s purposes-unnaturally so. The fact that he couldn’t feel her hand in this meant nothing. She seemed to be capable of deceiving him.
But that almost didn’t matter. Events had been unleashed that would have a life of their own. He was needed more than ever. He could avert total anarchy.
And that was a dangerous thought, but he thought it anyway.
Somebody had to. And somehow he needed to test Lumiya.
Chapter Three
Aliit ori’shya tal’din.
Family is more than bloodline.
-Mandalorian proverb
THE SKYWALKERS’ APARTMENT, CORUSCANT: 0800 HOURS.
Mara almost dropped her cup and steadied one hand on the table.
“What’s wrong?” Luke caught her shoulder and leaned over her. She began mopping spilled caf with her napkin, distracted. “Honey, are you okay?”
“Jacen,” she said.
Luke sought Ben in the Force immediately. He was there, with no hint of concern or danger. Jacen, though, was not. There was nothing of him to detect.
“He just blinked out,” said Mara. She opened her comlink. “I know he can do that when he wants to, but this felt weird.” She paused, eyes fixed in defocus at the far side of the room as she listened. “Ben? Ben, are you okay? .. . yes? … where’s Jacen? … no, nothing important, don’t worry. I’ll call you later.”
Luke didn’t hear Ben’s response, but he was clearly at Jacen’s apartment as he was supposed to be, and unharmed. Mara stood up and pushed her hair back behind her ears, still looking distracted. She was far more attuned to Jacen than Luke was, and he wondered if she kept tabs on her nephew as a precaution. That reassured him. Her old assassin habits hadn’t died; they were still very much a part of her, adapted, pragmatic, and useful.
“HoloNet,” she mumbled, and switched on the screen, looking for a news channel. “I get the proverbial bad feeling about this. I just need to know what’s going on.”
She was right: Luke began to sense a welling anxiety and disturbance, a sense of something growing like a bank of storm clouds. While Mara made fresh caf, he wiped up the rest of the spill, watching her carefully. They were finishing breakfast when the HNE newsflash announced that there’d been an explosion in the hotel district south of the Senate. There was, said the holoanchor, speculation that it was a bomb.
Mara opened her comlink instantly, face set in blank concentration, and waited. ” Jacen’s not answering,” she said.
It was easy to add two and two and reach a completely wrong total. Luke put his arm around her and squeezed.
“There’ll be a simple explanation. It’s a big planet and the chances of his being caught up in that are remote.”
“I tend to plan for worst scenarios,” she said, and returned the hug. “And right now I’ve got no idea whether we should be looking for him or not.”
Like all people used to being in control and taking action, Mara had that instinct to do something in a crisis, even if there was nothing obvious for her to do. Luke shared it. We can’t stay out of it, even if we don’t know what it is. The Force didn’t take a day off.
“If that really was a terrorist bomb,” said Luke, “then we’d better head over to the Senate, because Omas is going to want to discuss the implications.”
Mara’s blink rate had slowed right down and she had gone quiet. He thought of it as her sniper mode: assessing, planning, coolly rational. He was always impressed that she could salvage the beneficial parts of her past life as an Imperial assassin and discard the darker aspects. But he was still glad they were on the same side.
She grabbed a jacket, not one of her usual fashionable ones but something gray and functional, as if preparing for combat. “I hope nobody jumps to conclusions too fast. It’s one of those things that could tip people here into doing something rash.”
Luke wasn’t sure if she meant politicians or citizens. Perhaps it didn’t matter: one would trigger the other either way. He gestured toward the landing platform. “I’ll drive. You monitor the news.”
HNE kept using the word explosion and managed to make it sound like bomb every time.
Luke tried to slip the airspeeder through the increasingly congested skylanes as traffic backed up from the scene of the explosion. It didn’t take much to gridlock a crowded city that depended on tightly controlled transport.
He glanced at Mara. “What if it’s not a bomb?”
“People jump to conclusions. If they want to believe it’s a bomb, facts won’t get in the way.”