CHAPTER SEVEN: I Sense Much Fear In Him

ANAKIN

He climbed the steps of the Jedi Temple with the clones of the 501st marching behind him. Before, the galaxy's clamor had been unbearable, but now he had harnessed it. No more did he keep a furnace in his chest, waiting in terror for the day its walls must melt; now he moved with the maelstrom, and the hands on the reins were his own. Jedi waited at the door. Coleman Trebor, Oppo Rancisis, a handful of others he didn't recognize.

"What is the meaning of this, Jedi Skywalker?"
"Kill them," said Anakin, not slowing.

The clones to his either side opened fire, bathing the steps in a withering hail of light. Rancisis alone managed to draw his lightsaber, but he deflected only a handful of blaster bolts before hot plasma ripped his serpentine body apart and left him oozing black blood onto the steps, still scarred by Grievous's assault. Anakin walked through the carnage without a thought. He watched as one of his clones put his blaster to the still-twitching Trebor's head and pulled the trigger, blasting the alien master's skull to red-hot pieces.

His boots tracked blood into the grand antechamber. The Jedi were coming, some dressed for bed, others awakened by the horrors Anakin had perpetrated at the Senate Round. Their lightsabers glowed in the marmoreal gloom, but they were ancient weapons, outdated and small. Blaster bolts scarred the walls and floors, blasting chunks of superheated marble through the air. Anakin split his legion again and again, the tramp-tramp-tramp of their armored boots ringing in his ears as he stepped over the steaming bodies of the fallen. The wildness in him exulted. He fed on death, and the storm he walked with grew stronger. His power cracked the marble walls.

What was there to lose? The Order foundered. He watched its last self-important scions choking on their blood in the echoing halls. He cut down the valiant few who threw themselves at him. With the Temple in ruins he could keep his family, work with the Chancellor to bring the war to an end, ensure that his children would never suffer under the yoke of slavery. I can do real good, he thought as he led a platoon of clones through the vaults of the Great Jedi Library. Jocasta Nu came at him from some hidden place within the stacks. Her lightsaber blazed to life in the instant before she struck, and a clone lost an arm before Anakin rammed her through a viewing screen with the Force. She lay on the floor, glass puncturing her body in a hundred places, blood seeping out of her.

"Coward," the old woman breathed. "Monster."

Anakin left her to die. He led his men through the labyrinth of old, dark stone, through the rooms where once the Masters of the Temple had taught him to limit himself, to silence his emotions, to shut out the roar of the Living Force as though it were a voice that could be silenced. None of them knew, Anakin told himself, consoling his bruised pride as he watched a pair of older Mon Cal Padawans fall to sniper fire from the galleries above the Grand Atrium. None of them understood.

Even Obi-Wan had failed to grasp the gulf between his own experience with the Force and Anakin's daily struggle, the hell of sensation Qui-Gon's training had subjected him to. Anakin gripped the railing, watching as one of the Padawans dragged herself shakily onward. A blaster bolt caught her spine and she dropped, but he could feel the life in her, the vital rage. He reached out and crushed her lungs, her liver, her heart.

Dozens escaped him. Yoda. Aayla Secura. Evan Piell. Obi-Wan, who he'd both longed and feared to find. Could he kill the man who had been father and brother to him? His real hand itched to close around that smug ascetic's throat, to crush the life from the man who had belittled him at every turn, who had tried to drive him away from Palpatine when the Chancellor had only wanted to help... Except that wasn't it, was it? said a small, nagging voice in the back of Anakin's head. He told it to be silent as, alone and shaking, he climbed the steps to the Council Chamber. He was a Sith. He wanted your allegiance, not to help you.

He never loved you. He doesn't love you now.

The diary could be lies.

He's using you.

The doors accepted his palm print. It sent a guilty thrill up his spine, tickled the Tatooine desert-rat inside him that his hand secured access to one of the seats of galactic power. The doors slid open on the Temple's children, the offspring of a hundred races crowded into the city-lit gloom of the chamber with only the empty seats of the Councilors to guard them. A stocky Gamorrean female looked up at him with sad, wide eyes from beside his own black bench. She couldn't have been older than six. "Master Skywalker," she said. "We locked the doors like Master Yoda said, but there are too many of them! What should we do?"

They looked at him, imploring, desperate to place their faith in an adult, to let the nightmare end and restore their quiet world to its proper order. Anakin felt the tears hot on his cheeks. The little Gamorrean stumbled back, comprehension dawning on her face as he drew his lightsaber and ignited the blade. Fear bloomed in the chamber, hothouse-rich and sharp.

Snap-hiss.

When it was done he sank down into Obi-Wan's seat and shoved the still-warm hilt of his lightsaber into his mouth. The stench of charred flesh filled his nostrils. He wept. He screamed. He raged until the windows broke, until the council seats tore loose from the floor and the ceiling cracked wide open. He pressed the emitter surface against the roof of his mouth, wrapped both hands around the hilt, and rocked back and forth while the little bodies cooled around him, while outside lights whipped past in the coming dawn and the clones of the 501st executed Temple staff in the courtyard below. He slumped back against the worn arm of Obi-Wan's seat and sobbed until he could hardly breathe and the room spun drunkenly around him, and then he pulled the lightsaber from his mouth and laughed like a madman until his throat was raw.

On Boz Pity he had saved a million lives. On Mon Calamari he had rescued the Prime Minister and her children from a plot to bomb her box at the yearly sea races. At the war's start he had saved Naboo from the Separatist blockade. This, though, would be the moment the galaxy remembered. Anakin Skywalker, hero of the Republic, standing knee-deep in butchered children at the heart of the Order he'd gutted with his own two hands.

This would be his legacy.

"Lord Skywalker," came the harsh, vox-filtered voice of one of the clone commanders. The armored figure stood in the doorway, pitiless black visor looking out uncaring over the killing floor. "Your transport awaits, sir."

Anakin looked up at the man, the thing, the pasty copy with Fett's face hidden by the skull-like mask. Two others waited at the commander's back. Like stacking blocks. Anakin reached out with the Force, with shadow-arms gnarled and warped by fulminating rage, and seized the commander by the neck. He jerked the clone up into the air and squeezed, grinding his teeth together like millstones while the white boots swung and danced above the marble floor. When bones broke he let the clone drop and stood, his ragged cloak trailing in the blood on the floor. "You," he pointed at the nearer of the two survivors, "you're promoted.

"Clean this mess up. The Jedi killed the children before we arrived."

"Yes, Lord Skywalker." The clone saluted.

He strode out of the Council Chamber. "When you're done," he rasped back over his shoulder, "burn the whole thing to the ground."

His footsteps echoed in the gathering dark while the clones piled dead children atop one another like cordwood, or chunks of peat. Things that would burn, soon.

PALPATINE

His guards had come for him, both Jango's square-jawed dopples and the silent red-robed elite he had bred for himself. No need for tongues when their only purpose was to guard his person, as the Mandalore's guards had before the raiders' defeat and collapse. Palpatine had tolerated their concern only long enough to trip the switch he'd paid so exorbitantly to have installed in his custom-built army: Order 66. Every clone, in every remote posting across the Galaxy, would turn against their Jedi generals without rancor, without feeling, without the slightest touch of anything out of the ordinary, anything a Jedi might sense.

It would be over in minutes. On all the war-torn worlds of the Republic and the CIS the clones would check their comlinks, note the message on the encrypted Imperial Channel, and gun down the beings who had led them through hell and high water without a second thought. Revenge, thought Palpatine as the spidery medical droid set his nose, broken by Windu's kick. How many thousands of us did they slaughter? Let them reap what they've sown. He was alone, but for the droid, in his secret office beneath the rotunda. The whir and hiss of the great round's repulsorlift platforms settling back into their spiral galactic configuration sounded through the curved glass walls behind which a dwarf Colo Claw-fish swam in restless circles, its prison four hundred thousand gallons of brine.

"We're finished, Chancellor," the medical droid chimed. It folded its many limbs up into its black carapace and stepped back respectfully.

Palpatine fingered the light gossam-silk bandage set across the bridge of his nose. His face still felt sore, and to have his true appearance exposed at last had been thrillingly nerve-wracking for hours after his duel with Windu, but now of course the ravages of the Dark Side were his battle scars. He had escaped the tyrannical Jedi usurpers and Anakin Skywalker, heroic patriot, had slain them all in righteous fury. Already Amedda was preparing a slate of commercials and public speakers denouncing the Jedi, laying out their plot to seize control over the Republic, perhaps suggesting their complicity with the CIS. It really didn't matter anymore.

Windu, though, had pulled the ripcord early. Palpatine had expected another month in which to plan before he accepted Dooku's gracious surrender on the Senate steps. Next in his plan came the Count's decapitation, providing he hadn't managed to have Dooku pushed off a ledge or shot before then, but that detail could wait. "Oh, no!" Palpatine cried, miming distress with his hands. "The treacherous Count has betrayed his oath! He tried to stab the Chancellor in his sleep just hours after signing the articles of surrender!

"How fortunate that Skywalker was there to behead him and burn the corpse!"

He cackled to himself, spinning in his seat like a child. The hollow vastness of the round above him seemed like an egg waiting to crack open, the vast seed of a cosmic empire that would stretch from the glittering skylanes of Coruscant to the barren plains of Tatooine. There were Jedi to hunt down, true, but no more than a few score. Lost and broken beings, bereft of the trappings of their power, hated and feared by the Separatists they'd fought so valiantly against and by the Republic they'd betrayed. Of all the scattered Jedi, only Yoda and Kenobi were real threats, Yoda for his cunning and knowledge, Kenobi for his connection to Skywalker. The boy might still crack beneath the pressure, if Kenobi applied the right leverage to his fragile psyche.

Force him to slaughter his mentor, though, and his journey would be complete. Palpatine had foreseen their meeting years before, the crash of their contest a duel between a pair of giants, one bright and terrible and sad, the other a raging inferno bound up in fraying skin. Worlds would tremble, but in the end Skywalker would prevail and Kenobi would fall to nothing at his feet. It was clear as glass in Palpatine's memory, the sweetness of that vision.

The door chimed and Mas Amedda stepped into the office, his horns wavering in the green light. "The Senators are en route, Chancellor," he said. "They'll be here within the hour."

"Good," said Palpatine. He stood, hands on his desk, looking down at his ruined reflection. "Leave me. I require time to concentrate."

The chagrian bowed, horns dipping, and then swept from the room, his long robes trailing behind him. Palpatine had chosen somber black for the occasion, a simple robe without embellishment or decoration. Amedda was too given to his little indulgences. Thousand-credit suits, expensive Corellian wines, prostitutes drawn from any of a dozen different species at no small expense. Palpatine had been careful to hide his aide's little transgressions from the public eye; Amedda was good at twisting arms, putting the stick about. That was about to end, though.

Palpatine shelved the problems of the day and sank down into the emptiness that was the Force. It had always been easy for him, like drawing aside a curtain, and at the center of the great abyss that was Coruscant, a world swamped in grief, in hate, in riotous violence, it was easier still. Like a stone he dropped through the void of his power, the cancerous emptiness that he and he alone could work and wield. In the void he saw the signs and symbols of his victory.

On a nameless moon clones executed a kneeling line of drugged Jedi Padawans. In the thinning skies above Ramphoros, two Republic fighters dropped down behind a third and loosed their cluster rockets. The Jedi fighter broke up in a cloud of flames, its pilot snuffed. An ailing Talz Master sleeping in a Rodian slum woke as a clone soldier drove a vibro-knife through her breast. A Twi'Lek bounding through the jungles of Felucia in pursuit of a CIS transport took a sniper's plasma bolt to the small of the back and collapsed amidst the rotting fungal matter, her skin burnt and smoking. Boots tramped through the muck. More shots.

The galaxy echoed with the death rattle of the pompous and the vain, the weak and the corrupt. Whole worlds had been cleansed of their insurrectionist impurity. Whole sectors had burned to make way for the triumph of the galaxy resurgent, a Sith Master returned to the helm of history. As in the echoing round above him the Senators arrived to hear his trembling speech, his heartfelt admission that he had been deceived by the galaxy's protectors, Palpatine smiled.

PADME

He stumbled through the doors near dawn, spattered with blood and reeking of smoke. Padmé ran to him, let him wrap her in his arms. For a while he sobbed against her shoulder like a wounded animal, insensate with grief. She felt as though she were standing in the heart of a storm. Her mother's handmade claywork rattled on the display shelf by the door. In the kitchen a glass fell from the counter and smashed on the cold tiles.

"Anakin." Her heart was a hard, cold stone inside her breast. She'd sat awake since her dream, drinking linum-wine and smoking in the unlit kitchen. "What happened?" Her own secrets writhed in her belly like serpents. She could not tell him.

He closed. The tempest vanished, and the glassy coldness in his eyes was worse. He kissed her cheek, lips dry and chapped, and pulled away to pour himself a drink. "The Jedi rebelled," he said, his voice flat. A long, shallow burn ran the length of his right arm, his real arm, from elbow to thumb. "I saw Master Windu try to assassinate the Chancellor." His mouth twitched. "I stopped him."

"No." The denial was absolute. A hollowness came into her, a sense of weightless plummeting. "That can't be true."

"I watched it happen," Anakin said. He drank, liquid running in dark droplets down his throat. His hand shook as he set the glass down on the counter. "He brought half the Council with him to the Chancellor's office. I...I had no choice. I had to save him, Padmé. All he's done for me," his mouth firmed into a bitter line. "For us." He poured himself another glass of the strong Corellian brandy.

The children began to cry. Padmé felt cold. "Of course," she said. He took her hand in his false one, and that was when she saw them: children stumbling back in terror, the stink of charred meat, small eyes wide with fear in the flashing shadow of a wide, dark room. She forced herself to say nothing, forced herself to take him in her arms. He smelled like blood and sweat. This is impossible. "Nuodo," she called, her voice cracking. "Please-"

"No," said Anakin, pushing her away. "I'll do it."

He must have sensed her fear. His expression grew hard and he pushed past her into the living area. He went into the nursery. Padmé stayed behind. She cinched her synth-silk nightgown closed and tried to suppress the scream boiling up within her. There were knives on the magnetic racks over the sink. She could take one. She could kill him while he slept, wrapped up in nightmares. He reemerged from the nursery with the twins wailing in his arms. "They're not safe," he said, coming toward her. His eyes were bloodshot, his stubbled scalp sweaty and burnt.

"What?" It was too much. She could hear the high, thin note of panic in her voice. "Anakin, we're under guard here. What are you talking about?"

He shoved past her again, the front door sliding open at his approach. "None of us is safe," he said. His voice rasped like he'd been breathing smoke. She hurried after him, her daughter's small red face peering at her over her husband's shoulder. The girl was howling miserably, mucous glistening on her upper lip. Anakin quickened his pace and Padmé had to jog to keep up with him. He was heading for the top-floor flight deck.

"Please, just talk to me," Padmé cried. "We can send them to Naboo once everything quiets down, to my parents and my sister! Anakin, please!"

She grabbed hold of his sleeve and he jerked his arm roughly from her grip. He halted, turning, and his stare was colder than vacuum. "You should go with them," he said. "I don't trust this district. I don't trust this planet." His mouth hardened. "You'll go."

"I won't," she said. She could hardly meet his eyes. "I'm not going, Anakin. Please, don't send them away. Not now, not before we know what's happened-" Not until I know why you did what you did. Not until I can get them away, get them from you.

He started walking again. She followed, tears stinging the corners of her eyes, and then they were emerging onto the rooftop deck and a shuttle was dipping down toward them, its atmospheric wings folded for descent, its floodlights sweeping the low dormers and skylights of the apartment building's summit. A boarding ramp slid down from the shuttle's port side to the duracrete deck. Anakin strode toward it and Padmé just stared after him, clutching her robe shut with both hands as the downdraft of the shuttle's engines pressed it flat against her body. Two armored clones with the clenched fist emblem of the 501st legion on their breastplates came tramping down the ramp. They fanned out, covering the roof with the barrels of their blaster rifles.

"Anakin," she was being torn apart, hand yanking at her guts. "Anakin, where are you sending them? Why are you doing this? Anakin...please."

More soldiers came down the ramp and Padmé could taste the uncomprehending fear in her children as their father handed them over. She wanted to rip the helmets off the clones, to scratch their eyes out and drop the remains off the building. She clutched at herself, nails digging into her own skin. The clones took her children up into the belly of the shuttle. The others followed them. Anakin, his dark cloak whipped around him, turned back to her as the ship lifted into the air with a thrum of repulsors firing.

"They'll be safe," he said, and when he smiled she saw the Council Chamber and the flames and the blade and the little bodies cut and ruined, raining down around him to the hard stone floor.

OBI-WAN

Obi-Wan sat huddled behind a mountain of trash in an alley that stank of smoke and blood. His hood was raised, shadowing his features for all the good it would do. Filthy water dripped down on his robe from high above. His beard was untrimmed, his hair greasy, his left hand blistered by a close graze from a clone trooper's blaster. They had turned on him like sharks after he'd led them back from an assault on a Confederate-held warehouse. Before that, though, he had felt voices cry out. He had felt his brothers and sisters, his comrades, die. Snuffed out.

He'd barely escaped the warehouse with his life. For two weeks he'd lost himself in the war-torn depths of Coruscant. He'd crawled down into the blackest levels of the city-planet's underworld where pale cast-offs foraged in the fungal dark. He'd dodged kill squads in the pounding factory districts south of the Senate Rotunda. It all felt like a dream. Now, in this alley, he stared down at his bandaged hands. His robes were rotting in the moist, caustic air. His tunic stank of mildew. He had received a letter in the flophouse where, after convincing the drunken Aqualish proprietor that he was a solicitor for Rothana Arms, he had taken a room three nights previous.

The letter had said only one thing: come, and then an address for a burned-out boutique in a dreary part of the fashion district. A ventilation shaft yawned hugely a half-block away, its updraft warm and fetid as bad breath. The Force hummed and jittered with disruptions. Obi-Wan had seen holo-feeds of the fighting, the Republic's push against a suddenly wrong-footed Confederacy. He saw it for what it was. Palpatine had been playing both ends against the middle. He had blinded them all while he set his pieces into place.

Anakin was in the middle of it, somehow. Obi-Wan had felt his searing anguish from the temple district on the night of the disaster, but the younger man had survived. He was alive and free; that much Obi-Wan could be certain of. What did you do, Anakin? He passed a hand over his unshaven face. What did you do to us?

"Master Kenobi."

The familiar gravelly tone drew Obi-Wan out from his reverie. Yoda stood a short distance away, rain falling around him as he leaned on his cane. He looked little better than Obi-Wan felt, but just the sight of him, the quiet depth of his presence, drew some of the despair out of the dank, dark alleyway. Obi-Wan stood and bowed to his Master. He felt a weight drop from his shoulders. "Master Yoda," he said, trying to keep the tears from his voice. "The temple, the...the children-"

Yoda shook his head. "Talk we will not of these things," he said. "At peace they are. One with the Force." He smiled a sad, tired smile. "Luminous beings are we, Master Kenobi."
Obi-Wan believed. He wanted to believe. All he felt was a ringing emptiness in the pit of his stomach. "Are there others?"

"Some," Yoda allowed. "Short our time grows, though, and powerful have the Sith become." He walked past Obi-Wan, his cane tapping against the moldering duracrete. "Come quickly, Master Kenobi. Much work lies before us."

Obi-Wan followed, head bowed against the rain, his cloak wrapped close around him.