Fett noted Orade looking at Mirta as if he was more worried about her than about Fett’s wrath for once. “That’s going to be a significant date, I assume.”
“It is. I found he had an outstanding estate, which is what Phaeda calls leaving stuff of value without a will or anyone to claim it. The state can’t claim it, so they store it. The state lawyer’s really annoyed about still having to store stuff, and he says if we want to file a claim, he’ll be a happier man. It’ll take some time.”
Fett wasn’t sure that news of a very dead scumbag’s leavings was worth interrupting his Bes’uliik moment. But Mirta wasn’t the drama-queen kind. This had to be something about Sintas’s death that would make him very, very focused. She’d worked out that he’d been touchyand then someabout slights to Sintas, even if he had left her.
“Mirta,” Fett said firmly. He rarely used her name. “Just tell me the seriously bad bit.”
She handed him the datapad. The screen was already set to show images of what was stored in Rezodar’s lockup, all numbered by the inheritance court division. Fett thumbed through them.
“Just look for the carbonite slab, Ba’buir.”
Fett didn’t like the sound of that.
When he got to it, he couldn’t quite make out the contours, so he magnified the image.
Oh, fierfek …
He wanted to blurt out something, but no sound came anyway, and nobody was any the wiser with a man in a helmet. His legs threatened to give way. He handed the datapad back to her, taking a deep, slow breath to try to control the tremor in his guts.
“What do you need from me to get this released?” Fett was sure his voice was shaking. “Credits? Signature?”
“Is that it?” Mirta demanded.
“Just tell me.” It can’t be true. It can’t be.
“I can do it myself.” She looked hurt, which wasn’t easy for a hard-faced girl like that. “A thousand credits.”
“I’ll pay.” Fett could hardly believe the words that were coming out of his mouth, all in the voice of a calm stranger. “She wasshe’s my ex-wife, after all.”
Sintas was alive.
Sintas Vel, his first and only wife, was alive, provided nothing had gone wrong with the carbonite process.
She was going to have quite a bit of catching up to do with the galaxyand her shattered family.
Ailyn, what can I say?
“Okay” Mirta was all sour grit again. “Play the hard man in front of your burc’yase, but I know you by now.”
Fett had decided to visit the refresher before the sortie. Now was a very good time. “I bet you do.”
He strode off, same as ever, because that was what everyone expected, then shut the refresher doors and leaned his back against the wall. He slid all the way down it and squatted there, head in his hands, shaking.
Sintas was alive.
He waited a few minutes, then got to his feet and walked out onto the landing strip to join his Bes’uliik as if nothing had happened.
CAPTAIN’S DAY CABIN, SSD ANAKIN SOLO
I see it now. I know what I loved most and what had to be killed.
Jacen had laid on his bunk for hours, trying to slot the last piece into the puzzle that tormented him. It was the prophecy. It didn’t fit.
He will immortalize his love.
It was only when Jacen considered that he might not refer to himself that he started down a complex path that showed the prophecy in its multifaceted complexity. It didn’t just have one meaning: it had many.
And this is why I’m now Lord of the Sith.
There’d been no pyrotechnics, and no cataclysmic shift in the Force; and yet, from where he stood now, Jacen looked back and saw a landscape that had changed utterly. It had changed footstep by footstep, act by act, death by death, a change so gradual and incremental that he hardly noticed its passage until
Until now.
He wasn’t the same Jacen Solo who was shocked when Lumiya had told him he was destined to be a Sith Lord.
If he looked back far enough, Jacen saw its beginnings in Vergere’s oddly concerned avian eyes as he suffered physical torment that had changed him forever, showing him that there was nothing he couldn’t endure and pass beyond if his will wanted it.
And he’d killed not a person he loved, but something precious whose absence he was going to find very hard to handle. It was already searing a hole in him. It had mattered. And it still had the appearance of being alive, but it was walking dead.
What he’d loved and yet killed was Ben’s admiration and devotion to him. Jacen had grown to love that adulationand he had loved robbing Luke of the role of adored father and mentor.
He will immortalize his love … where immortalize means “dead.”