If she thought tunnels would even the odds, she was wrong. He’d bury her here.
Mara found the perfect trap at the end of one of the culverts. She could hear Jacen’s running footsteps and she had a good fifty meters on him.
From here, the vaulted ceiling became lower, and even Mara had to run at a crouch. It wasn’t the place to swing a standard lightsaber. The tunnels were in poor condition, and the brick arches were starting to sag and collapse in places.
So he wouldn’t oblige her by revealing his physical position in the Force. Fine. She spotted a rusty metal sheet about half a meter wide and laid it carefully across the tunnel floor, propped on stones so he’d tread on it and give her an audible warning when he reached that point. An intense Force shake of the brickwork and arches in front of and behind the metal plate weakened them, and then she stopped them from collapsing by Force pressure.
Hold ‘em up. Wait for him to hit that plate …
Going after Jacen would never work. He could never be allowed to set the agenda. He could come after her.
Trap, immobilize, kill.
It wasn’t pretty, and it wouldn’t capture the public’s imagination like a lightsaber display at the academy, but her training was in destruction. Jacen’s was in deception.
She could hear him breathing, and the irregular vzzzm-vzzzm-vzzzm of his lightsaber as he stalked, jumping and turning to be sure she wasn’t behind him. Then she could hear that he wasn’t swinging the blade so much; the short staccato hums and buzzes told her he was running out of room.
She was trapped too, of course, unless she counted the ventilation shafts every fifty meters. But when she said she was leaving here over his dead body, she meant it.
She felt the beginning of a compassionate human thought about Leia, but killed it stone-dead. It would weaken her.
Jacen’s boots crunched over bricks. He was impatient. She was in his way, holding him up when he wanted to get on with something.
Crunch … crunch … crunch.
If she’d timed it right, he was close to stepping on that rusty plate.
Clang…
The rumbling began. She brought down both sections of tunnel, before and behind, with a massive exertion in the Force that made her breathless. She didn’t hear him call out. Even in the damp conditions, clouds of fine debris filled the air and made her choke.
Mara waited, one hand over her mouth and nose, shoto drawn, and listened in the Force.
There was whimpering and the chunk-chunk sound of the last falling bricks. She didn’t expect that weight of debris from a low ceiling to cause impact injury, but to engulf and immobilize him. He wouldn’t be deadyet.
She waited in silence, a nonexistent presence herself, until she could hear no more movement.
Okay. Let’s see what I have to do to end this.
An arm was all that protruded from the rubble. Through a fist-sized gap, she could see the wet, blinking glint of an eye and bloodstained face. A hand reached out to her, fingers splayed, bloody and shaking. Other people might have felt an urge to take that hand, the most distinctively human of things, but it was an old, tired Sith stunt, and she’d used it herself too many times.
She took her blaster and leveled it at the eye, one-handed, forefinger resting on the trigger. She had the shoto ready in case a coup de grace was called for.
She felt as detached and steady as she’d ever been as the Emperor’s Hand.
“Tell my mom I’m sorry I failed her,” Jacen whispered.
“She knows,” Mara said, and squeezed the trigger.
chapter twenty-one
Nu kyr’adyc, shi taab’echaaj’la.
Not gone, merely marching far away.
Mandalorian phrase for the departed
KAVAN
They said that the human body was capable of extraordinary feats of strength when in extremis. For a Jedi, it was something else entirely.
Jacen Solo wasn’t ready to die, not now, not so close to his ascendance, and not in a stinking drain like vermin.
He deflected the energy bolt with one last surge of the Force and sent the rubble erupting off his crushed and bleeding body like a detonation. Bricks hammered the walls and rained fragments, knocking Mara flat like a bomb blast. She made an animal noise that was more anger than pain and flailed for a moment as she tried to get up.
The effort froze Jacen for two vital seconds. But he knew if he didn’t get up now and fight back, Mara would come in for the kill, again and again, until he was worn down and too weak to fend her off.
He scrambled to his feet, staggering more than standing, and suddenly understood.
It was Mara who had to die to fulfill his destiny.
Killing her was the test: the words of the prophecy were meaningless, and at a visceral level he knew that her death was the pivotal act. He didn’t know how, and this wasn’t the time to stop and think about it. He surrendered totally to instinct for the first time in ages. Whatever guided a Sith’s hand had to guide him now.