The old Mando walked out with arthritic dignity, paused again at the door to stare at Fett, and went on his way.
“You made his day,” said Venku.
“I shouldn’t ask.”
“Then don’t.” Venku sighed, then put his hands to his helmet to pop the seal. The rustle of fabric muffled his voice as he lifted the buy’ce. “Oh, all right, then.”
Boba Fett was looking into the face of a man perhaps ten or fifteen years younger than him: dark hair with a liberal threading of gray, strong cheekbones, and the very darkest brown eyes. He’d looked much like that himself twenty years ago. The nose was sharper and the mouth was a stranger’s, but the restit was a Fett face.
He was looking into his own eyes, and into the eyes of his long-dead father.
“I’m Venku,” said the Mando with the motley armor. “But you probably know me better as Kad’ika. Interesting to meet you at last … Uncle Boba.”
OSARIAN TAPCAF, CORUSCANT
I couldn’t think who else to tell,” Ben said. “Or who else would listen to me if I did.”
Mara wondered if he’d been crying about Lekauf or Jacen’s breathtaking betrayal. He’d been crying about something, though, and he was doing a reasonable job of disguising it.
“I believe you, Ben.”
“Maybe I did imagine it.”
“You didn’t.” No, he certainly couldn’t imagine Lumiya having a friendly chat with Jacen, dissecting their run of triumphs, and deciding when Niathal would no longer be useful.
And discussing their lies. No daughter to avengeand wiping out Ben’s memory of what happened to Nelani.
Ben had the useful ability to recall things he’d seen or heard with nearly complete accuracy. Mara’s scalp had tightened and tingled as she heard her son, her precious kid, relating the exact words of that Sith cyborg and her accomplice, like an innocent possessed by a demon.
Accomplice.
Mara realized she’d shifted her position by a few parsecs. Not a vain, conceited, naive victim of a manipulative Sith: an accomplice. Jacen wasn’t weak-minded enough to fall that far and that fast unless he wanted to.
“I haven’t told anyone else and I don’t want to,” Ben whispered. “Not Dad, either. I mean, you can tell him if you really think he needs to know, Mom, but I don’t want to see the look on his face when he finds out what a moron I’ve been.”
But I defended Jacen. When did I get stupid? “No more of a moron than the rest of us, sweetheart.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I won’t ask you to do anything.” Mara had let her drink get cold. She couldn’t swallow it anyway, even if it hadn’t tasted like the Millennium Falcon’s hydraulic overflow, because her throat was tight with rage. “Ben, you have a choice. I told Jacen that Lumiya was trying to kill you, and he was all innocence.”
“So you knew about Ziost, then …”
“No, I don’t know anything about Ziost. But you’re going to tell me.”
Ben’s face fell. She had to gather what intel she could, but it was also good for Ben to learn that it was all too easy to give away information accidentally. Just the word Ziost made all the pieces start to fall into agonizing place.
“Jacen sent me on a mission to Almania to recover an Amulet that had some dark side power. I ended up on Ziost and a ship attacked me, but I found a really weird vessel and got away.”
“Just like that.”
“It wasn’t Lumiya, actually. It was a Bothan.”
“And how did you find this ship?” Mara was trying to work out the scam. She knew what she’d done to Lumiya’s ship, and that the transponder was now showing it was stationary on Coruscant. If the last thirty-six hours hadn’t been total mayhem, she’d have paid her another visit by now. “Just parked, hatch open, with the key in the drive?”
“It … look, I’m not insane, but it spoke to me.”
“Ohhhh …” Mara had enough pieces in the puzzle now to see the rough shape of the picture that would emerge. “Spherical. Orange. Like a big eye.”
Ben’s face drained completely of color. “Yes.”
“Tell me about it.”
He struggled visibly with something. Mara guessed he’d been sworn to secrecy. It was way too late for all that loyalty bunk.
“I’ve seen the ship, Ben. It spoke to me, too. It said it thought I was the ‘other one’ like me, and I thought it’d mistaken me for Lumiya, but it meant you, didn’t it? Somehow it picked up on our similarities.”
Ben gulped in air as if the relief of being able to share the awful experience were saving him from drowning.