“Can you see all this, Jaina?” Ben said.
She looked as if she was standing in a storage room. Behind her, the walls were covered with shelves loaded with cans and boxes, and the doors were slightly parted. Noisy conversation and the clinking of metal and transparisteel wafted through; a restaurant, maybe.
“I can see all of you, and the table, “she said.
“Okay…” Ben had to warn them. “This isn’t easy to hear. I’m going to show you the physical evidence first, and then a recorded conversation. I’m going to show you things that link Jacen to Mom’s death, and then what he told Captain Shevu about it. Remember that folks sometimes confess to things they haven’t done to look tough or to get attention, so compare the physical evidence with what Jacen says so you’re sure what’s true. I’m not going to say what I think. I’ll just show you what I’ve got.”
Ben took a breath. Oddly, it was easier from this point than he’d had expected. Using the datapads, and projecting the images onto the screen they used for small holocharts, he showed them a copy of the GAG StealthX log that proved when Jacen had left Coruscant, and when he’d returned the vessel to the hangar. He showed them the logs for Mom’s flight. He showed them the charts, with Mom’s known movements in Hapan space, provided by Hapan ATC, and Tenel Ka’s note confirming when Jacen had arrived at the palace and then left. He showed the forensics droid, cracked open, and explained how he and Shevu had used it to collect trace evidence from Jacen’s StealthX.
When Ben got to the data about his mother’s blood-contaminated hair, he caught his father’s eye after managing to avoid it so far, and then he nearly wavered. The locket. I’ve still got it. Dad needs that back. But Ben carried on, through the recordings he’d made at Kavan showing Mom’s body and the surrounding crime scene, to his own brief, detached statement that Jacen Solo had found his exact location even though he had no beacon, made no comms, and was shut down in the Force.
Then… he played the conversation between Shevu and Jacen, and sat back in silence.
He couldn’t watch this time, and just stared into his lap at his clasped hands, hearing Uncle Han inhaling every so often as if he was about to cough. When he risked a quick glance at Dad and Aunt Leia, both of them had adopted the same posture, right arm across the waist, right hand cupping the left elbow, left hand loosely held to lips.
The recording ended. Nobody said anything for a while. It was Jaina who jerked them out of it.
“Ben, “she said softly. “Ben, can you transmit that recording to me now, please? I need some time to study it.” “Yeah, sure. Sure.”
It was an excuse to stand up and occupy his hands while he thought of something to say. Aunt Leia, always the one who said the perfect thing at the perfect time and got everyone organized in a crisis, walked up to him, turned him around slowly by his shoulders, and just held him in silence. When she drew back, there were tears in her eyes. Ben had never seen her cry before.
“Thanks, Ben, “she said. “You did a good job, and you did it right.”
Ben hung on long enough to send Jaina the recording, and then just had to get outside. He scrambled up one of the nearest trees to a platform that had been part of an Ewok walkway into the forest and sat with his legs dangling, staring out into the haze over the valley.
Whether it was a few minutes later or much longer, Ben couldn’t remember, but he heard someone climbing the creaking ladder of twisted vines. Then his dad sat down next to him, letting his legs hang over the edge of the platform, too, but with a little less ease, as if his knees were stiff. Ben leaned against his shoulder. They ended up propped against each other, just looking out across the forested slope and watching the day run out of things to say to itself.
They didn’t talk, either. There was nothing to add, and both of them no longer needed words anyway.
It was a flame and garnet sunset, spectacular even by Endor’s standards.
BRALSIN, NEAR KELDABE: FENN SHYSA’S MEMORIAL
Jaina knew she should have commed Fett and told him she was going to be late for their training session.
He’d be annoyed; he never got angry, but his annoyance was bad enough. And she was professional enough to get a grip, however bad the news, and simply tell him she might be a little distracted today.
Instead, she ended up here under Fenn Shysa’s imagined scrutiny, cross-legged on the turf with a datapad playing a nightmare in her lap.
She replayed Jacen’s sweetly rational, polite explanation of why people had to die half a dozen times before she found that she didn’t get a pang of recognition when she saw his face, and his words sounded like an alien language, in the way that all words did when you repeated them in-cessantly. He did it. He really did.