Sacrifice

Ben nodded, grim, very old eyes in a terribly young face. He really was just a kid even if he behaved like a man now. Mara was instantly so proud of him and so fiercely protective at the same time that the only cogent emotion she could identify was the instinct to seek out and kill whatever threatened him.

She could do that. It was her calling.

"I'll do it carefully," he said. "So Jacen doesn't realize I've found out that Lumiya is making him do all this."

Oh, sure she is. "That's right, sweetheart."

"I promise I won't hide in the Force from you, but ... I might have to do it to hide from her. Or even Jacen, if she's got him so far under her control that he's . . . taken over the government."

Sometimes you had to hear someone else say it to believe it.

"Tell you what," said Mara, smiling, "why don't you show me how you do it? Then maybe I'll get a better sense of when you're just hiding, and when to worry."

Ben nodded, eyes downcast.

There would be no holds barred now. Mara would use every means and weapon at her disposal, and there would be an end to this.

They spent the rest of the day doing something that they hadn't done in a very long time: just wandering around the Skydome Botanical Gardens, talking and having fun—or as much fun as could be had with a galactic civil war in progress and a military junta running the GA. The only evidence of the huge upheaval was that the CSF officer on patrol in the plaza had a Galactic Alliance Defense Force sergeant walking the beat with him.

Apart from that, nobody seemed troubled. Mara wondered if all cataclysmic events in history were noticed only by a handful. Like Ben had said —prophetically—over lunch only days before, perhaps it had been that way