CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LACK OF FAITH

RUNE

Mustafar. With Sidious's betrayal certain they had not dared any of their more luxurious haunts, the massive ion-sheathed bunkers they'd built for themselves on a dozen remote rim worlds. No. Those places would be watched. CIS fleets were probably already burning in their atmospheres if Rune was any judge. On rocky, murderous, poison-aired Mustafar, they would be safe. Rune, lounging on a sun deck protected by a custom radiation field, thought of his staff he had abandoned on Coruscant and felt a twinge of guilt.

The cliffside compound was built alongside a broad, sluggish magma flow where teams of some insectile species Rune had never heard of used magnets to extract raw ore in silvery, melting globs from the river of fire. They went about tented in heat-retardant black vestments, eyes hidden behind goggles, long snouts encased in rebreathing filters. They had ceded their compound, a vast fortress ribbed with durasteel and shielded by intricate air-permeable energy fields from the heat, without complaint to the threat of Confederate guns and battle droids. A few floated by on a magma barge, their pole-like trawling wands held out over the flow. They watched Rune. He ignored them.

The holonet screamed constantly of Palpatine's coronation. The pundits were calling it a special investiture, an emergency reconstruction effort. The great man himself, scarred and jaundiced, looked appropriately somber in all the interviews. He sat in repulsor chairs, legs crossed, fingers interlaced, and spoke humbly of the work to come in repairing the damage the Civil War had done.

Rune had figured it out months ago. Palpatine and Sidious were either in league or else one and the same. He, or they, had played the galaxy like a fiddle. Now they were sweeping up the stage, re-tuning their strings. The fun was over. Time to govern.

"More wine," he told the protocol droid hovering at his elbow. The scream of ion engines split the smoking sky. Wat Tambor, standing by the sun deck's edge with his hands behind his back, let out a startled squawk as a TIE fighter with a cowled, raptor-like profile shot across the sky a quarter mile above the fortress. It was gone in a trice but Rune was already on his feet, fumbling inside his ver-silk robe for the useless holdout blaster he kept strapped to his upper arm.

"What is it?" Tambor shrieked, running in panicked circles.

"Shut up, you idiot," Rune hissed through gritted teeth. He squinted up into the ashy murk of the atmosphere, trying to mark the TIE's course. "Get inside and deploy the fuckingdroids."

Tambor turned, goggled countenance waxen, robes flapping in the arid breeze, and then a spear of blue-white light plunged through the heat-field and drove slantwise through his skull. Electronics popped and squealed. Blood spattered on the black fiberplanks of the deck. Tambor swayed, hands grabbing at nothing, and then fell. Sparks from his ruined rebreather unit made a halo around his bald green-yellow pate.

Skywalker hit the platform a moment later, landing on his feet in Tambor's odious blood. He bent, staggering, and straightened like a puppet pulled upright by its strings. The Jedi's skin was blistered, his scalp inexpertly shorn, his eyes jaundiced and underscored by black crescents. He held out a gloved hand and the lightsaber buried in Tambor's skull withdrew itself and thumped into his palm. Rune stared at the man, his bowels aquiver, his palm sweaty on the grip of his blaster.

"I'm going to kill you," Skywalker said.

"Alright," said Rune, shaking. He dropped his blaster and wiped his forehead with a clammy hand. "That's alright."

He turned his back on the Jedi. It was ten steps to the platform's edge. He gripped the rail, looking out over the cracked landscape. Magma flumes surged and burst in the distance. Ash rained down on the black rock plains and scabrous scarps. A covey of scaly avians came flapping out from the mouth of a cave across the burning river.

"Ugly fucking planet," Rune said.

It didn't hurt.

OBI-WAN

The remnants of the droid armada floated dead in the black around Mustafar. Obi-Wan let the autopilot take him in. The Reminder's sensors tagged Anakin's fighter circling in a holding pattern over a mining facility near the planet's southern pole. He wasn't trying to hide. Obi-Wan could feel him there, a knot of empty guilt, rage, and fear churning like the sucking mouth of a maelstrom at sea.

He left the cockpit. His lightsaber hung at his belt, a scarred cylinder of metal and polygrip, its activation stud worn by the print of his thumb. This was all I was, he thought, turning it over in his hands. How did it happen?

In the ship's narrow hold the settled down cross-legged on the deck, hands upturned on his knees, and opened himself to the Force as the Reminder entered the planet's atmosphere. This time there was no struggle. It was a straight drop, breathless and tingling, to the waters that surged through the heart of the universe. He struck the flow and plunged beneath, bubbles streaming in his wake. He pulled for the surface with all his might, limbs thrashing at the ice-cold water. His head broke the surface and he sucked in air, struggling to tread water as he did.

The dead were waiting for him. They walked atop the raging current, calmness rippling out from their bare feet. Their shadows jumped and wavered like old flags caught in a tearing wind.

"Drink nothing," Qui-Gon said. His hair was greying. He smelled of blood and smoke.

"Master," Obi-Wan cried, reaching for the older man's robes. "Help me."

Qui-Gon knelt, arms open, and Obi-Wan ran to him down the echoing Temple hall. His Master faded, though, and a wall of water came rushing down the corridor. A woman ran before it, fleet and lean, her shaved head gleaming in the dark. "General Kenobi," she hissed through crooked teeth, lightsabers blazing to scarlet life in her hands. "What a pleasure."

She pirouetted to attack, shadows writhing around the island of red light she ran with, and then the river took him, sweeping him away into the bowels of the Temple where a woman in black wept by the bank, the hem of her skirt soaked in blood. She turned to watch him pass and he saw that her guts were bared by a horrible gash. "Surely," she said, her voice echoing in the moldering gloom, "there must be something you can do?"

"I'm so sorry," he said, but when he came out of the water and took her hand, she was no longer there. A hall loomed before him, boma-wood reliefs paneling its walls. The historical reliefs outside Palpatine's office. He moved forward, leaving the Temple basement behind, and traced the carvings with his fingers as he walked. The doors slid open at his approach and he stepped down into the Chancellor's sanctum. The man's great antique desk lay smashed against the wall, blood oozing out from under its wrecked bulk. Glass and fragments of pottery lay strewn on the floor like the spiral arms of dying galaxies.

Mace Windu sat cross-legged at the center of the wreckage. "Hello, Obi-Wan," he said, smiling. "Welcome back."

Behind him, the shattered windows yawned like mouths and the winds of the city-planet screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

"Destination," came the flat voice of the autopilot.

Obi-Wan rose and walked down the Reminder's boarding ramp onto the smoking surface of a duracrete landing pad. Above him loomed a skeletal fortress of black stone and durasteel, its walls ribbed like the belly of a beast, its cooling towers clawing at the flanks of a mountain of basalt. Magma roared in rivers to the east and spilled in burning fingers over crumbling cliffs.

Anakin stood at the top of a narrow, crooked stair set into the cliffside and terminating in the shadow of the complex's vast arched entryway. Distance made him a cruel black spike, an iron nail discarded in the lee of the necropolis.

Obi-Wan drew his lightsaber, though he did not ignite it. One last time, he told himself.

The cries of children drifted on the wind. Ash blew over the landing pad.

ANAKIN

The Force had grown heavy. He dragged it behind him, his back bent under its leviathan weight, his wrists chafed raw by its acidic manacles. Behind him lay a lake of blood, the butchered leadership of the CIS choking the facility's empty halls. It hurt to breathe the planet's stinging atmosphere. It hurt to stand in the light of its dying sun. He squinted down at Obi-Wan, his eyes watering in the grit and heat. "Have you come to kill me?" he screamed, his voice raw.

The Jedi began to climb the mining facility's steep and winding stair. Anakin's chest felt tight. He paced the mouth of the entryway like a chained krayt dragon, bare feet slapping against blistering stone. His chapped lips twitched and curled over his teeth. The Force, like an anchor lashed to him by a bevy of chains, screeched and squealed over the rocks. His neck and the base of his skull burned with blinding pain. "I know you think I killed her," he threw into the wind. "I know the rumors about what I did in the Temple! It's lies, Obi-Wan!"

The Jedi climbed the steps in the red-black distance. His beard was uncombed and untrimmed, his red-brown hair greasy, slept on. He wore a simple grey tunic and leggings, and in his right hand was his unlit saber. Two hundred meters distant, he came on inexorably.

"You never believed in me!" the words blew spittle from his lips. He clutched at his own breast with his dead hand, his skeletal claw. He tore his glove off with difficulty and cast it aside so that the durasteel stood out stark against the ugly point of union with his stump. Irritated flesh. Old suture scars. "You were afraid of what you knew I could do! You held me back, made sure the Order kept me from getting what I wanted! What I deserved."

Obi-Wan did not slow. He did not quicken his pace.

"I loved you like a brother and you ignored me," the anger pulled at his heart, tugging like a whirlpool at the mouth of all the emptiness inside him where his furnace walls had broken. Columns shook. Dust rose from the stones and duracrete. He pointed with his claw, accusing. "Where were you when I buried my mother? Where were you when the rebels tried to kill my wife?"

He tasted iron and bile. Side effect of his exposure to the great battle station's core, though he couldn't remember it very well. The surgeon droids had removed the worst of his cataracts, injected him with a dozen chemical cocktails, and pronounced him fit for duty. He paced more quickly, as though by moving he could leave behind that blazing room, the body lying on the deck in a pool of its own congealing blood.

"I loved you." He flung it at the older man like a clod of filth. His voice was a vulturous screech, harsh and choked. "I loved you, Obi-Wan!"

Obi-Wan paused at the final step, hesitation written on his lined, strong features. He was shorter than Anakin remembered, drab and small and windswept in the fiery atmosphere. "I am sorry, Anakin," he said. His lightsaber ignited with a crackling hiss. "Please, forgive me."

Anakin flung himself at his old master. They crashed together in a tangle of limbs, rolling down the steps with bone-jarring force to come to a breathless halt on a windswept landing. With his living hand he seized the wrist of Obi-Wan's sword hand, and with his dead one he gripped the older man's throat. They stared at one another across a half-meter gulf, Anakin pinning his master against the scorching rock. Obi-Wan's eyes were clear and depthless, his expression one of sorrow. "Don't pity me," screamed Anakin. "I could crush you! I will crush you!"

He tightened his durasteel fingers, feeling tendons creak and muscles strain beneath their grasp. A feral smile split his sunburned face, displaying bloody gums. Sweat soaked the back of his coat. "Where did you take them, Obi-Wan? What did you do with my children?"

His false arm burst. Circuitry ruptured. Batteries shorted. Shards of metal pierced his skin as the skeletal claw came apart with a flash of red-white light and a deafening bang. He fell back against the stones, calling his lightsaber to hand with the Force, and scrambled away from Obi-Wan as the older Jedi lunged to his feet and swung. His lightsaber clove through Anakin's, shorting out the blade in a puff of evanescent bluish gas. Anakin's stump, still freighted by dead wiring, screamed with pain as he slumped back against the steps, the cliffs and the burning rivers hard on his left.

The point of Obi-Wan's lightsaber hovered at Anakin's throat. "It's over," the older man said. "Come with me, Anakin. It's over."

Things fell away from Anakin's soul. They fell wetly, weakly. Like rotten trees toppling. Dead stillness reigned in the wake of that putrid collapse. A black lake stretching on and on into eternity. He let out a long, rattling breath, and then he clasped Obi-Wan's hand in his own.

OBI-WAN

He hardly felt it coming. There was no warning ripple in the Force, no sign on Anakin's gaunt and blistered face. Their fingers laced together. Anakin's grip was like iron. "It isn't over," he hissed. "It will never be over." And then he pulled with all his might, broad shoulders twisting, neck straining, and Obi-Wan lost his footing.

They plunged together from the steps and toward the stones below. Blackness rushed up to greet them as Anakin clasped Obi-Wan close. The younger man's eyes were the yellow of festering sores, and when he bared his teeth they glistened with rot. The wind tore at them for a moment, a thundering plunge, and then they struck a hill of black shale together. Flesh tore. Bones broke. They came apart, rolling down the hillside as little landslides eddied out from where they'd landed. Obi-Wan scrambled to his feet, sinking up to his ankles in the sharp and shifting shale, and cast about for Anakin. I have to finish this.

The younger man surfaced, floundering, covered in pale lacerations. He screamed in pain and rage. Stones whirled around him as his anger smote the world. Below, a river of magma wound its way through the basin of a valley of basalt. Above, the mining fortress loomed like judgment. Anakin stood perhaps ten meters below Obi-Wan's uncertain position. He screamed again and stones, ash, earth, and wind assailed his old master. Obi-Wan waded forward down the hill, weathering Anakin's storm like a pillar of granite. Heat lightning crackled and snarled around them.

Anakin, his stump leaking blood and integument fluid, scrambled up the hillside like an insect. His hand was bloody, his face livid, and as he neared Obi-Wan he sprang up in a flying kick, one foot aimed straight at his master's jaw.

Too easy. Anakin struck the shale and slid a meter downslope on his back, mouth opening and closing like a fish's. The stumps of his legs smoked in the heat-rippling air. Obi-Wan deactivated his lightsaber and let the Force fall away, let himself feel the pain of his broken ankle, the strain of his torn biceps. His skull was fractured, three ribs cracked, two broken. He sobbed, crying out, and turned his face away from Anakin.

"Please," the voice was a crumbled wheeze. The voice was an empty house. The voice was blood in the Temple halls. "Please, kill me."

Obi-Wan's hand tightened on the hilt of his lightsaber. He looked back at his apprentice, at the emptiness behind the young man's eyes. The howling void enshrined in burnt and broken flesh.

He walked away without a word, limping through the shale along the cliffside. Ahead, a broken plain of stone. Below, the burning river.

ANAKIN

He screamed when they came for him, the ghouls in their white armor, faces skull-masked. He screamed and broke their bodies with his will. They swarmed over him like beetles, dragged him into the knotted intestines of their shuttle, and bore him back into the nothing-nothing-nothing between stars. Their minds were a pleasant, neutered hum of sameness.

Anakin wept like a child in the medical bay. Surgical droids washed his burned and lacerted skin in bacta. They stripped him of the remnants of his ruined arm. They pulled stone fragments from the stumps of his legs. He stopped crying. Stared at the ceiling like a corpse. The droids went about their plucking, picking work with fingers like needles and the legs of spiders.

On Coruscant Tarkin, that skeleton, met them at a secret hospital facility far from the light of the sun. They offloaded Anakin onto a crumbling duracrete pier over a gulf in the planet's fissured skin. Tarkin stalked beside the repulsor stretcher as the clones directed Anakin through the drizzling, filthy under-city rain and toward the durasteel doors of the hospital facility.

"The Emperor is attending peace talks with the rebel senators," said the senator. He drew out that word, rrrebel, like some aristocratic joke. "He wished me to express his deepest condolences."

"Leave," Anakin managed. Speaking felt like vomiting fire.

Tarkin bowed, a mocking light in his dead black eyes, and left.

The doors slid open. Inside, droids and surgeons bustled in an operating theater behind a duraplast airlock. Diagrams of droid prostheses cluttered the walls. Tanks of vitreous fluids bubbled and roiled. The stretcher glided through the doors, and Anakin closed his eyes as tears rolled down his furrowed, ruined cheeks.

The airlock hissed as it depressurized, pumping contaminated air back out into the city-planet. It cycled open. A surgeon's voice cut through the stony silence.

"We're ready to begin, Lord Vader."