For a time, Eleena said nothing, and the hum and buzz of Coruscant filled the silent gulf between them. When she finally spoke, she sounded like the shy girl he had first rescued from the slave pens of Geonosis.
“Constant war will be your life? Our life? Nothing more?”
He understood her motives at last. She wanted their relationship to change, wanted it, too, to evolve. But his dedication to the perfection of the Empire, which allowed him to perfect his understanding of the Force, precluded any preeminent attachments.
“I am a Sith warrior,” he said.
“And things with us will always be as they are?”
“Master and servant. This displeases you?”
“You do not treat me as your servant. Not always.”
He let a hardness he did not feel creep into his voice. “Yet a servant you are. Do not forget it.”
The lavender skin of her cheeks darkened to purple, but not with shame, with anger. She stopped, turned, and stared directly into his face. He felt as if the cowl and respirator he wore hid nothing from her.
“I know your nature better than you know yourself. I nursed you after the Battle of Alderaan, when you lay near death from that Jedi witch. You speak the words in earnest—conflict, evolution, perfection—but belief does not reach your heart.”
He stared at her, the twin stalks of her lekku framing the lovely symmetry of her face. She held his eyes, unflinching, the scar that stretched across her throat visible under her collar.
Struck by her beauty, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. She did not resist and pressed her curves against him. He slipped his respirator to the side and kissed her with his ruined lips, kissed her hard.
“Perhaps you do not know me as well as you imagine,” he said, his voice unmuffled by the mechanical filter of his respirator.
As a boy, he had killed a Twi’lek servant woman in his adoptive father’s house, his first kill. She had committed some minor offense he could no longer recall and that had never mattered. He had not killed her because of her misdeed. He’d killed her to assure himself that he could kill. He still recalled the pride with which his adoptive father had regarded the Twi’lek’s corpse. Soon afterward, Malgus had been sent to the Sith Academy on Dromund Kaas.
“I think I do know you,” she said, defiant.
He smiled, she smiled, and he released her. He replaced his respirator and checked the chrono on his wrist.
If all went as planned, the defense grid should come down in moments.
A surge of emotion went through him, born in his certainty that his entire life had for its purpose the next hour, that the Force had brought him to the moment when he would engineer the fall of the Republic and the ascendance of the Empire.
His comlink received a message. He tapped a key to decrypt it.
It is done, the words read.
The Mandalorian had done her job. He did not know the woman’s real name, so in his mind she had become a title, the Mandalorian. He knew only that she worked for money, hated the Jedi for some personal reason known only to herself, and was extraordinarily skilled.
The message told him that the planet’s defense grid had gone dark, yet none of the thousands of sentients who shared the plaza with him looked concerned. No alarm had sounded. Military and security ships were not racing through the sky. The civilian and military authorities were oblivious to the fact that Coruscant’s security net had been compromised.
But they would notice it before long. And they would disbelieve what their instruments told them. They would run a test to determine if the readings were accurate.
By then, Coruscant would be aflame.
We are moving, he keyed into the device. Meet us within.
He took one last look around, at the children and their parents playing, laughing, eating, everyone going about their lives, unaware that everything was about to change.
“Come,” he said to Eleena, and picked up his pace. His cloak swirled around him. So, too, his anger.
Moments later he received another coded transmission, this one from the hijacked drop ship.
Jump complete. On approach. Arrival in ninety seconds.
Ahead, he saw the four towers surrounding the stacked tiers of the Jedi Temple, its ancient stone as orange as fire in the light of the setting sun. The civilians seemed to give it a wide berth, as if it were a holy place rather than one of sacrilege.
He would reduce it to rubble.
He walked toward it and fate walked beside him.
Statues of long-dead Jedi Masters lined the approach to the Temple’s enormous doorway. The setting sun stretched the statue’s tenebrous forms across the duracrete. He walked through the shadows and past them, noting some names: Odan-Urr, Ooroo, Arca Jeth.
“You have been deceived,” he whispered to them. “Your time is past.”
Most of the Jedi Order’s current Masters were away, either participating in the sham negotiations on Alderaan or protecting Republic interests offplanet, but the Temple was not entirely unguarded. Three uniformed Republic soldiers, blaster rifles in hand, stood watchful near the doors. He sensed two more on a high ledge to his left.
Eleena tensed beside him, but she did not falter.
He checked his chrono again. Fifty-three seconds.
The three soldiers, wary, watched him and Eleena approach. One of them spoke into a wrist comlink, perhaps querying a command center within.
They would not know what to make of Malgus. Despite the war, they felt safe in their enclave in the center of the Republic. He would teach them otherwise.
“Stop right there,” one of them said.
“I cannot stop,” Malgus said, too softly to hear behind the respirator. “Not ever.”
Still heart, still mind, these things eluded Aryn, floated before her like snowflakes in sun, visible for a moment, then melted and gone. She fiddled with the smooth coral beads of the Nautolan tranquillity bracelet Master Zallow had given her when she’d been promoted to Jedi Knight. Silently counting the smooth, slick beads, sliding them over their chain one after another, she sought the calm of the Force.
No use.
What was wrong with her?
Outside, speeders hummed past the large window that looked out on a bucolic, beautiful Alderaanian landscape suitable for a painting. Inside, she felt turmoil. Ordinarily, she was better able to shield herself from surrounding emotions. She usually considered her empathic sense a boon of the Force, but now …
She realized she was bouncing her leg, stopped. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. Did it again.
Syo sat beside her, callused hands crossed over his lap, as still as the towering statuary of Alderaanian statesmen that lined the domed, marble-tiled hall in which they sat. Light from the setting sun poured through the window, pushing long shadows across the floor. Syo did not look at her when he spoke.
“You are restless.”
“Yes.”
In truth, she felt as if she were a boiling pot, the steam of her emotional state seeking escape around the lid of her control. The air felt charged, agitated. She would have attributed the feelings to the stress of the peace negotiations, but it seemed to her something more. She felt a doom creeping up on her, a darkness. Was the Force trying to tell her something?
“Restlessness ill suits you,” Syo said.
“I know. I feel … odd.”
His expression did not change behind his short beard, but he would know to take her feelings seriously. “Odd? How?”
She found his voice calming, which she supposed was part of the reason he had spoken. “As if … as if something is about to happen. I can explain it no better than that.”
“This originates from the Force, from your empathy?”