Sacrifice

As she straightened up, he looked her in the eyes—calm, eerily calm—and swung his lightsaber in a single decapitating arc.

Now he could breathe again.

KAVAN: STORM WATER TUNNELS

Ben sat in the tunnel with his mother for a long time, and that fact in itself was the start of his investigation.

At first, he deluded himself that she was in a deep healing trance, even though the Force never lied, and the void that had opened in it would have been felt and understood by every Jedi.

He'd run straight to her side, through country he didn't know, and found her. He wanted to think she wasn't dead because she was there, still much as he'd last seen her except for the blood and scrapes of a new fight.

So he sat with her, waiting.

He wanted to clean her face and make her beautiful again, but his GAG training said not to remove evidence, not to tamper with a crime scene.

Ben the fourteen-year-old son, lost and grief-stricken, willed his mother just to be in a deep trance. Ben the lieutenant knew better but didn't mention it to his child-self, and was careful to note everything around him, take holoimages, make notes of smells, sounds, and other ephemeral data, and begin to form a logical sequence that would tell him how his mother had met her death.

He was still sitting there, taking in every pore of her skin and every speck of brick dust on her jacket, when he heard someone picking his way over debris toward him.

He couldn't feel the person in the Force.

"Hello, Jacen," he said, and turned to look at him.