[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(27)

And to think he’d been afraid that he was being lured to the Sith way by a lust for power.

He lowered his arms to his side and tried again to feel something that would explain the sense of a tightly grasped power that pervaded the building. It almost tingled in his fingers. It moved in his chest like a symbiont that had invaded his body.

It might be the ambition and pride of architects, craftspeople, builders. Don’t judge so fast.

But construction droids had done most of the work.

He couldn’t shake off the clear impression of the exercise of power-and the love of it-that felt as if it had built up like sediment in an ancient river over centuries. He hadn’t felt it before.

Marble and pleekwood created an understated, cool interior interrupted occasionally by faithfully copied busts of great Jedi Masters, displayed in niches in exactly the same places as they had been before the Yuuzhan Vong, and before the Temple had burned in the purges following Palpatine’s seizure of power.

Jacen paused again as he walked through the lobby.

There had been objections to the cost of the reconstruction of the Temple when so many urgent postwar restoration projects seemed more pressing. Some citizens couldn’t see the point. The government insisted. The Jedi council said it wanted to restore normality.

Uncle Luke, this was never the way you saw the order, was it? How did they talk you into this?

Jacen knew exactly where he was now, and it scared him. He had a finely tuned sense of where he was in space. Had he rolled back time by fifty-nine years to this exact distance from the planet’s core, this exact distance from the planet’s north pole, this very point in three dimensions, he would have been walking with his grandfather Anakin Skywalker.

But I can walk back in time.

Jacen could time-drift. He was almost too afraid to. But he did, almost without thinking. As he projected himself into the past and merged with its reality, he saw a young blond Jedi with his lightsaber drawn, flanked by troops in white armor. Jacen was looking at him from behind. He could see the muscles in his jaw twitching as his head turned, seeking something: he could feel his dread and determination.

Nobody spoke. They were searching, all of them looking to one side then the other, aiming rifles and lowering them a little. Something terrible was happening.

Anakin.

Anakin Skywalker held his lightsaber two-handed, and for a moment Jacen was one with his grandfather’s emotions. He was overwhelmed by a dread and reluctance-the same dread and reluctance he had felt himself when Lumiya told him his destiny. Jacen felt, too, a crushing sense of something terrible and deadly about to happen.

He hung back. He’d been spotted while time-drifting before and had been forced to withdraw. But he had to stay with this. He hardly dared think ahead.

I might be able to ask him. I might be able to ask Grandfather about his own fall to the Sith.

This would be his answer about his own path.

He touched Anakin’s emotions again, comparing them with his own, and then he felt something that was not within him at all: it was desperate, terrified loss. For a second he couldn’t identify it. Then it settled and became clear in the form of a tight sensation in his throat and the pressure of tears behind his eyes that stung and burned. It was very like the brief misery he had felt when he left Tenel Ka and his daughter. Anakin was facing separation from Padme, and was terrified by it.

But it wasn’t a moment’s emotion for his grandfather: it was the whole of him. Anakin had been driven to the dark side by agonized love. The revelation stunned Jacen because it was so narrow and so … selfish. Relief flooded him.

This is different. That isn’t what I feel, or what’s driving me.

And right then he wanted to talk to his grandfather more than anything he could imagine. It was a burst of love for a man he had never known-a man who had helped bring balance to the Force.

You’re insane. You’re going too far. Don’t even think about influencing the past

But he had absolutely no idea what the past really was, right up to the point where he saw the younglings approach Anakin, scared but clutching their lightsabers, telling him there were too many soldiers for them to drive off. Anakin stared down at them. Then he drew his own saber and Jacen tasted absolute grief and shame and duty.

He was hunting Jedi. He was killing them somehow for Padme’s sake. His reasoning was vivid and focused. Jacen knew that Anakin had done this, but seeing it-feeling it-living it-was agonizingly new and shocking because the emotion was so desperately animal in its intensity.

No, I’m not feeling this. It’s one of Lumiya’s vile tricks. I’m not seeing this.

Then one of the armored troopers appeared, raising his rifle, and Jacen jerked himself out of time and back to the present, heart pounding.