"Things aren't too good between Jacen and your aunt and uncle at the moment, sweetheart," she said. "But whatever he tells you, they still care about him and want him to be okay."
"It's not personal," Ben said. "Hey, I tried to arrest Uncle Han because it was my job. I didn't mean him any harm."
Luke thought about Jacen's haste to abandon his parents during the attack on the resort satellite. He couldn't see Ben doing the same thing.
If he could, he didn't want to see it.
"Dad, was the Empire really a reign of terror?"
"Just a bit . . ."
"I know you and Uncle Han and Aunt Leia had a rough time of it, but what about ordinary people?"
Mara chewed with slow deliberation, her gaze in slight defocus on a point
in the mid-distance. "You might want to ask Alderaan. No, wait—it's gone, isn't it? Oops. That's what happened to ordinary people, and I know better than most."
Because you did some of it. Luke faced up to the fact that he couldn't expect Ben to believe a word either of them said to him. They'd both done things that they were telling him he couldn't do now.
"But most people didn't really notice, did they?" Ben seemed to be fixed on course. "Their lives went on as before. Maybe a few people who were political got a midnight visit from a few stormies, but most folks got on with their lives, right?"
"Right," Mara conceded. "But living in fear isn't living at all."
"It's better than dead."
"You think the Empire was okay, Ben?" Luke asked.
"I don't know. It just seems that a handful of people can think they have the duty—the right—to change things for everybody else. It's a big decision, rebellion, isn't it? But most decisions that affect trillions of beings get made by a few people."
Luke and Mara looked at each other discreetly and then at Ben. He'd acquired political curiosity somewhere along the line. Whatever mission Jacen had sent him on—and he had, Luke was certain—it had made the boy think.
Or maybe Luke was just losing touch with the fact that his kid was a young man now, and changing fast. When he left, though, Mara still helped him on with his jacket. Luke almost expected her to ask him if he was brushing his teeth every day. But, being Mara, she did her maternal fretting in more pragmatic ways and pressed a matte-gray object into Ben's hand.
"Humor me," she said, and kissed his forehead. "Carry this. You never know."
Ben stared into his palm. "Wow."
"That," she said, "was the best vibroblade the Empire could buy. It saved me more than once. A lightsaber is great, but a lightsaber and a vibroblade is even better."
"Plus a blaster," Ben said. He grinned. "That's better still. The triple whammy."
"That's my boy."
After Ben had left, Mara cleared the plates. "When did we produce a communally minded political analyst?"
"Too many Gorog buddies, maybe."
"Does that look like an out-of-control, screwed-up boy to you?"
"No," Luke said, "but it's not Jacen's influence that's making a man of him, even if he's the only one who seems to be able to handle Ben."
"Luke, we still have to do something."
"Oh, now we have to do something? What happened to 'Leave him with Jacen, he's good for the boy . . .'?" Luke almost had to bite his lip to avoid saying that he'd told her so, which he'd always thought was the mark of someone who wasn't looking for a solution to the problem, just points to score. "Besides, he doesn't seem to be getting corrupted by what's happening. Maybe he is that good man on the inside. Maybe you were right to make me let our kid join the secret police—"
"I meant about Lumiya." Mara had a way of bracing her shoulders that said she knew she'd made a big mistake but he didn't have to rub her nose in it. "Okay, I've changed my mind. Jacen's gone bad. My fault we've wasted a few months placating Ben. Satisfied? Now what about the root cause of this?"
"We haven't picked up her trail again."
"And then what happens when we do?" Mara smacked the plates down on the counter so hard they rattled. "What are you going to do, hold her hand again?" He should never have told her that Lumiya had offered him her hand when they were fighting. It was eating away at her. "Because the poor old girl doesn't mean any harm? Lumiya? Queen of the stanging Sith?"
"There really was no ill intent in her."
Mara rolled her eyes. "Of course there wasn't. She doesn't want to kill you. She wants to kill our son." She grabbed Luke's face in both hands and made him look into her eyes. "Luke, you could have killed her.
Cut her in two. Finished the job. But you didn't."
Luke felt inexplicably ashamed. "I couldn't."
"I know. We come from different schools of justice, don't we?"
"Sweetheart—"
"She's not your father, Luke. There's nothing good left in her to redeem. She's a threat that needs to be taken out, and that's what I'm trained to do, and you're not. Forget this take her alive if possible garbage. The only way anyone's taking her is dead."
Luke had had a feeling Mara might say that. He knew when she was building up to something. She might have thought she could keep things from him, but he knew her well enough by now to see the cogs grinding and the plan forming.
He'd missed his chance with Lumiya. He wouldn't get another.
"You're telling me you're going after her."
"You might tag along if you could be trusted not to go soft on her." Mara let him go and looked embarrassed. Her cheeks were flushed.
"You can have Alema. She needs a serious attitude readjustment with a lightsaber, too. It's not as if we haven't got enough kill-crazy stalkers to go around."
No matter what happened, Luke knew he didn't have that assassin's ability to kill someone who wasn't trying to kill him right there and then. If he had . . .
So Ben wasn't the only one navigating a moral maze. Luke had been doing it for decades, but the maze was only acquiring more twists and turns each year.
"Let's see how much Jacen perks up with Lumiya gone," he said.
Wait, did I just bless an assassination? "And with Alema out of the way, then Leia and Han can come back into the fold, and we can face this war as a family again."
Mara patted his cheek with a regretful smile and set a droid on cleaning the dishes. She spent the rest of the afternoon assembling and checking an array of weapons that definitely didn't come from a civilized age.
"I never knew you had one of those," he said, pointing to a blaster that had the widemouthed muzzle of a grenade launcher. "How are you planning to use it?"
"With a flechette cartridge. Let's see her try a lightwhip on that."
"Do you want to take my shoto?"
"You offering?"
"Good-luck token, maybe."
"Under-the-rib-cage token, more like. Unless that's all durasteel, too."
This was his wife. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of the woman she once had been, and she was a stranger for a second or two.
"How are you going to track her? She hides very-well.'"
"I can hunt very well." Mara took the shoto hilt and spun it like a blade. "A little bait, a little investigation, and a little Force help."
She ignited the energy beam. "Plus, if Alema is trailing after her, as seems to be the case, then one of them is going to slip up and show herself."
"Lumiya doesn't slip up."
"Well, she's not running the galaxy right now, so I guess she does sometimes . . ." Mara spun the shoto into the air and caught it by the hilt as it fell. "And she keeps showing up lately, so I'll be ready."
"Just keep me informed where you are, okay?"