Anakin stayed on Utapau three more nights, hoping to find some other hint as to where Grievous had gone, but his search proved in vain. After a while, he was forced to conclude that there was nothing more on this planet, and climbed reluctantly back into the tiny cockpit of his fighter.

Privately, Anakin would have liked to be able to fly triumphantly back to Coruscant only a few days after leaving the city planet, with Grievous safely in custody. But it didn't take a genius to see that this was simply wishful thinking, and Anakin decided instead to head back to Coruscant and put this problem to wiser heads than his. After another agonizing thirty-six hours, half of which he spent rubbing his aching legs, Anakin was finally back home.

The first thing he did upon arrival at the Temple was seek out his former Master. Windu, as it turned out, was in with his class of younglings. Anakin, standing outside the door, was content to wait until Windu was finished, but the Master sensed him and called out, "You can come in, Anakin." The door slid open, and Anakin stepped inside.

As one, the younglings looked up at him as he entered, momentarily distracted. Something twisted painfully in Anakin's chest as he saw that now there were only thirteen of them.

Windu looked faintly surprised. "Did you find Grievous?" he asked. Anakin shook his head. "You're back very soon. Did you even look for him?"

"Well, yes, I did," Anakin said slowly. "But then I thought I had better come back and show you what I found."

Before Windu answered, he turned back to the class, which had stopped moving in its entirety and was now watching the exchange eagerly. "Keep practicing," Windu instructed sternly, and the children reluctantly went back to whatever it was they were doing. Only then did Windu return his attention to Anakin. "And what did you find?"

"This." In Anakin's palm rested the torn piece of flimsy. Windu took it, looking questioningly at Anakin. "They're orders from Grievous, I think, to the rest of the Separatist leaders."

Windu's eyes were scanning the flimsy, registering its contents swiftly. He looked up after a moment. "This was all you found?"

"Yes," Anakin said. "It was in Grievous's hideout on Utapau. I looked for the rest of it, but there wasn't anything else there."

"That's too bad," Windu murmured, looking down again at the scrap of flimsy. "It could have told us a lot."

"At least we know now that Dooku is involved in it," Anakin pointed out. Windu nodded slowly.

"I'll show this to the rest of the Council," he said finally. "Maybe combined we'll be able to make something of it. In the meantime, can I count on you to keep searching?"

"Of course," Anakin said, then added, "But I'd like to try and figure it out as well, if you don't mind, Master."

"Be my guest. I'll give it back to you when the Council has finished with it, if we don't find anything."

Contented with this promise, Anakin left the room. It was a relief to be back at the Temple he loved—although he had hardly been gone for a week, it felt like much longer. With no particular destination in mind, his feet traced the familiar path back toward his rooms. Anakin flopped down on his couch and muttered into it, "Must have adequate troops, but this needs be done—" Done how? Surreptitiously? Quickly? Over a long span of time? No, that was no help at all…

The inevitable hitch was, of course, that what had begun as an exciting mystery swiftly faded into a hateful and frustrating problem as days flew past. Anakin, who in the beginning had made a subconscious vow to himself to somehow understand what Grievous had meant by the message, now found that he would reach for the copy he had written out for himself, then put it back wearily and think, by way of excuse, I won't make any progress anyway. He had read the kriffing thing so many times by now that, had someone asked him to, he could have recited it backwards and still perfectly while asleep and being held underwater, or so he believed wholeheartedly.

Although the Council usually tried to keep Jedi in the dark as to other Jedi's missions unless it was necessary for them to know something, Ferus's Master was Siri, and Siri's old Master was Adi Gallia, who had been and still was on the Council. Through this trail of information, Ferus soon knew about Anakin's peculiar task, and long after Anakin was dead sick of that stupid message, Ferus kept pressing him to keep thinking. At times in the past, Anakin had to admit, his friend's persistence had been his saving grace. Right now, it was just annoying.

"All right, so we know he didn't mean Abregado-Rae," said Ferus, drawing a red line over the little green sphere on the map that was splayed out between the two of them on the table. There were many such lines on this map. "Unless you're not entirely sure…"

"I spent almost a week there," Anakin said bitingly. "Trust me, I'd know. Wherever Grievous is, it's not there."

"Right." Ferus let the red line stand. His fingers absently walked across the thick piece of flimsy that displayed every planet from Coruscant to the Outer Rim. It was one of the most comprehensive maps ever drawn, and beyond what it showed very few people had traveled, so Ferus and Anakin had thought themselves safe in excluding anything beyond the Rim. This map represented four months of work, of sitting around Ferus's table for hours, of Anakin shooting off suddenly at some distant planet, only to report that no, Grievous was certainly not there, and another red mark would appear.

They had started by crossing of all the planets in the Utapau system, then, after a few quick searches, felt safe in crossing out all the planets that were exceedingly close to that system as well, like Mon Calamari, Quirmia, and Tund. After that, they began searching for reports of any soldiers, clone or droid, seen in groups in a specific area more than once. Now that the factory on Geonosis had been shut down, they had a better chance of finding any other factories that might have been running and taking care to look in that area especially. And whenever they thought they had a very good lead, Anakin was sent to take a look.

And yet, somehow, the red lines kept appearing, and Grievous was still missing in an extreme.

"Well, this is good," Ferus said bracingly. "We've already eliminated about half."

"Half?" Anakin repeated disbelievingly. Oh, Force, had Grievous just disappeared from the universe entirely? Was that it? Or maybe he was dead. Maybe he was dead and they just hadn't found out yet. "Let me see that." He flipped the map around so that it was facing him.

Ferus was right—at least fifty percent of the planets marked on their map bore the ominous red mark. Technically, it should have been considered great progress. But every day that went by without finding Grievous always ended with Anakin going to bed feeling like a failure. It was his first real mission, his first solo mission, a simple search-and-destroy, and he couldn't do it, not even with the help of his über-eager best friend. With a sigh, Anakin pushed the map back towards Ferus, who had that look on his face that meant he was thinking something but deciding whether or not to let it out.

"Anakin," he said finally, "Have you thought that maybe this was what they wanted us to do?"

"What?" asked Anakin, not understanding. Ferus elaborated slowly.

"I mean, what if Grievous meant for the Jedi to find this? He must have known that the Jedi would search his hideout on Utapau. He might have planted it—what if it's a false lead?"

"If it were a false lead, it would lead somewhere," Anakin muttered under his breath. But he shook his head. "I don't think so. It didn't feel deliberate. And besides, if they'd wanted us to go off on a wild-bantha chase, they would have left us the other half of the note, which, by the way, I would actually prefer to the current scenario."

"I'd like to have the other half too, but we have to work with what we have," Ferus said patiently.

"I meant I'd prefer it was a wild-bantha chase," Anakin retorted. "I hate having this thing—" he gestured angrily at the copy of the note "—between me and Grievous!" Fed up, he shoved his chair back forcefully and stood. With nowhere to go from there, he simply turned around, running a hand over his face in frustration.

Ferus, knowing as only he could how frustrating this was to his friend, decided to keep silent, and kept his gaze firmly on the map. Anakin, now looking up at the ceiling, made a disgruntled noise and stayed where he was. He had just about decided to calm down and turn around, however, when Ferus spoke again. His voice sounded very strange all of a sudden—tight, as though he were afraid of letting something out.

"It could be Mustafar."

Anakin made the noise again, louder this time, but conceded sullenly, "Well, it's not close to Utapau, anyway—"

"No!" Ferus burst out, his voice quick and almost excited. "You don't get it!" The intensity with which he spoke was such that Anakin turned around and stared at him. "It's not 'far'; it doesn't mean that it's a long way from Utapau. We never had the entire note. The word wasn't 'far', it was 'Mustafar', and we only saw the end!"

Disbelief was written on every inch of Anakin's face. He swore loudly and fiercely, stepped forward and grabbed the map from Ferus, as though to assure himself that a planet called Mustafar really did exist. His anger was not directed towards the fact he knew Ferus was right, but rather that they had gone four months without realizing the truth.

"You know how much time we wasted?" Anakin demanded, after he had exhausted his entire Tatooine vocabulary in both Huttese and Basic. "Grievous could be anywhere by now, and all we had to do was look at a kriffing map and think twice!"

"Then go, fast," Ferus urged him, standing; his face was flushed with exhilaration. "I'll tell the Council, you go and catch up with him."

Anakin paused; even in the midst of his storm of anger, he realized how selfish that would be. "But you figured it out," he said reluctantly, bravely ignoring the great heave of protest that rose in his head at these words. He would fail his first real mission and lose the chance for which he had thirsted so long, but the credit belonged to Ferus, and so did the reward. "You should go find him."

A thin, knowing smile passed across Ferus's face. The sacrifice Anakin offered was not lost on him. "Not me," he said. "You're the hero, remember? And anyway, it is your mission."

Relief washed over Anakin before he could help himself; his was not a willingly sacrificial nature. He went quickly from the room, pausing only to grab a few protein cubes out of Ferus's fridge droid, then ran to the east hangar, which happened to be the closest.

Anakin's feelings as he sat once more in the seat of a fighter faltered from chagrin to anxiety and back again. How could he not have seen what was right before his eyes, and what, oh what would he do if Grievous had gone already? He took some comfort in the fact that it was not an easy thing to quickly transport "adequate troops", but then again, Grievous had had months to do whatever he needed.

Trapped inside the close confines of his starfighter, knowing that his target was out there somewhere but not yet knowing his fate, Anakin knew he was sure to go mad if he allowed his mind to dwell on it for long. Instead, he leaned his head back against the seat and pushed himself again into a Force-trance. Under normal circumstances, he could have stayed like that for days, unaware of his surroundings and lost in the workings of the Force, but he purposely did not allow himself to lose himself so deeply. That way, when the soft beeping that meant he was approaching Mustafar began, Anakin was aware of it and opened his eyes, tense, almost painful excitement thrilling through him.

Instantly alert, he made a quick scan for life forms on Mustafar's immediate surface with his ship's instruments. There was a great deal of movement, and also a great deal of heat—both of these were due to the massive rivers of lava that thundered across the mountainous crags of the planet, and it made it difficult to distinguish any living beings. As he got closer, however, Anakin saw an outcrop over the river that flowed beneath him that looked a bit too neat to be natural. Rounded and smooth—it was a docking bay.

Anakin's heart fluttered wildly with relief; until now, he had been sure in his own mind that Ferus had been right, but there had been no proof on paper. Only someone desperate to be hidden would come here. And, he thought suddenly, such a place could hardly fail to hold appeal for a man held in the Dark Side's grasp. The planet was raw, unaltered power shaped into a ball, with roiling waves that tossed in burning oceans and the harsh cut of the rocks that jutted against the sky, which was red, tainted with the color of the lava. The golden warmth of its sun never reached here; instead, it was drowned out and replaced with the fierce heat and crimson shadows of flame.

As soon as Anakin landed his fighter and stepped out, he gasped at the sudden change of temperature. Almost choking on the heat, he threw off his cloak and left it beside the fighter, then sought in the Force for anything living. He found no traces of life nearby—hardly surprising in such a forsaken place—but wherever Grievous was, it had to be close to the docking bay.

Anakin squinted into the distance; it was so difficult to see through the clouds of smoke that covered everything, but then his Force-sharpened eyes picked out a long metal bar that appeared to be a few hundred feet away, suspended horizontally across what looked like thin air. He followed it with his gaze, stumbling vaguely towards it as he tried to see what it was, and thought he saw it disappearing into the rock. No, not the rock—a building! The bar was a railing of some sort, and underneath it was a door—

So focused was Anakin's attention that he failed to watch his feet, which, in this place, was not a mistake one could afford to make. His ankle turned painfully on a loose rock, and he slid, dangerously out of control, down the bank and to within inches of the powerful lava river beside him. For one frightful second, Anakin thought he would keep going—then he skidded to a halt, and pebbles sprayed from beneath his feet helplessly into the lava. They were swallowed in an instant, and Anakin breathed a shaking sigh of relief. Cautiously he pushed himself back up onto safer ground, and took care where he put his feet from then on.

The building before him was becoming clearer now, larger than Anakin had supposed at first. It towered over him in the red dimness like a giant creature, and Anakin had the impression as he walked toward the door that he was about to be swallowed. Dismissing this notion from his head, he reached out with the Force again, to find whether the door was locked. No, there was no lock—but it could only be opened from the inside. To Anakin's surprise, however, the mechanism was quite simple to undo with a twitch of his hand. He would have thought that such a place deserved the best security, but then, he considered, probably they had not been expecting to be found.

He stepped inside, to see a long hallway, stretching down for a long, curving ways, with many smaller passages branching off it. Its floor, walls and ceiling were all made of the same dull stone, embodying that bleak simplicity which seemed so characteristic of the Sith. Long glo-lamps, painfully glaring against the rock, were placed horizontally on the walls all along the passages, to light what would be otherwise a perfect and unfathomable darkness.

Anakin's heart was in his mouth; he moved swiftly down the main hallway, muffling his footsteps with the Force, until he heard another pair of feet coming fast down the hall toward him. Immediately he ducked into a side passage—if only there were a shadow to hide in, but the light was everywhere—and veiled himself with the Force as best he could, willing whoever it was to pass him by without comment. For the first time, he wondered with a panicked start what he would do when he found Grievous—then he forgot all about the general as he saw who it was that walked past him.

The clone apparently saw nothing out of the ordinary as it made its rounds, but Anakin could hardly breathe. Grievous had the clones. The Separatists—the Sith—had the Republic's soldiers. They had twice the army, and the Republic had nothing. The clone moved into another hallway, and Anakin slipped back into the main passage, his task far more urgent than before.

That one clone was the only one he met as he continued; security was indeed very lax here. Anakin followed the hallway as silently as he could, until he found at its end another large steel door. This one did have a lock, but he undid it easily and stepped inside.

The room that met his eyes was very large indeed, with a much higher ceiling than that of its preceding hall. Like the hallway, there were no decorations on the walls or floor to hide the asceticism of the rock, but there was a computer terminal on the other side of the room, beside another door. Ignoring the door for the moment, Anakin stepped quickly toward the terminal. It was blank, but he tapped a key, and the screen blinked to life.

"PASSWORD REQUIRED", it now read in stark white letters. Sometimes, Anakin knew, the wrong password could set off an alarm—playing it safe, he left the terminal alone and looked around on the desk. It was immaculate: there were no leftover flimsies here. Then the thought struck him, and Anakin quickly checked the computer itself—at the push of a button, a small datachip popped out into his hand.

He winced, glanced up at the screen, but it had not changed. Anakin looked down at the chip in his hand; to his satisfaction, it was labeled, albeit not very clearly. On it, someone had written the letters BA-ST, and then something unintelligible underneath that, presumably a translation. If he could take this back to the Council, surely they would be able to break into it. Anakin placed the chip in his pocket, and then, just before the voice came from behind him, he felt another presence in the Force break suddenly upon him. He whirled.

"There is a saying, young Skywalker; perhaps you've heard it?" inquired Dooku amusedly, looking down at Anakin with a wry little smile on his face. He was standing on a walkway above the door through which Anakin had entered, and which the Jedi had entirely failed to notice. "If you stick your nose into other people's business, you'll get it cut off."

Anakin's heart, which had begun beating rather rapidly at Dooku's entrance, gradually began to slow. Despite the Sith's calm front, he could sense Dooku's frustration and annoyance in the fact that he had been discovered. This did nothing, however, to ease the nervous fear that gripped at Anakin's chest. He was not fool enough to believe that his victory over Palpatine had been anything but luck—and perhaps this time, he would not be so lucky.

"I've heard it," Anakin conceded; his tone was cocky in his reluctance to betray any fear. "What about the one that goes, 'The Jedi win, and the bad guys get what's coming to them'?"

In one movement, so swift that Anakin flinched in spite of himself, Dooku leapt lightly from his perch above the door to the floor below him. He made no noise when he landed on both feet, and then he gave a soft chuckle. His voice was as Anakin remembered it, elegant and hard, but easily cruel in a moment's time.

"How quaint," he murmured patronizingly. "I remember those antiquated Jedi views quite well—oh, yes, bad and good and right and wrong. I even remember when I believed them with all my heart and soul, just as you do." Dooku looked at Anakin almost pityingly. "It is a shame that you refuse so stubbornly to give them up."

Anakin just barely refrained from rolling his eyes. "I've already had this conversation with your Master," he said. "Just before I killed him."

He would have thought such a statement could only anger the Sith, but to his surprise, Dooku only shrugged. He stood easily, casually, but Anakin could see he was alert. "Well, you saved me that trouble, anyway," he said.

Since even before becoming a Jedi, Anakin had been well acquainted with the horrors of the Sith, but somehow this still managed to shock and repulse him, and it showed on his face. Dooku only laughed again, throwing back his white head.

"Yes, I would have killed him, Skywalker—are you surprised? I'd had quite enough of playing apprentice to his senile whims. He never knew, of course; he thought me to be perfectly obedient to him." Dooku was watching Anakin with an almost wary look in his eye, as though watching for the Jedi's response. "But of course, if there is one thing you can count upon in a Sith, it is that you can never trust them!"

At these words, his arm shot up without warning—Anakin reacted instinctively, without thinking, for if he had tried to think he would have been blasted. His lightsaber activated, he held it before him as he had seen Obi-Wan do, and the lightning that flew from Dooku's fingers was absorbed in its blade. Amazing that so much could happen in a single second—Dooku was still watching him, but with something like approval in his gaze.

"You have learned since the last time we met," he said. "I can see why my Master thought so highly of you." His own lightsaber blade, blood red, shot out of its hilt at his side. "Unfortunately, I am not such a fool as he was. I can see that nothing I say will persuade you of your mistakes." The lightsaber twirled lazily over his hand. "So I think I will be forced to kill you."

His attack this time came with just as little warning as before, but this time Anakin was expecting something of the sort, and when the Sith lightsaber came crashing down over his head, it was blocked with Anakin's of bright blue. He threw it off him and parried the next stroke, breathless.

But Dooku's determination to see Anakin dead pounded down incessantly upon the Jedi. Anakin himself was forced to move with a dangerous speed to stay one step ahead of his assailant, sacrificing safety for survival. He was moving gradually towards the wall, forced backwards by Dooku's ever-present rain of blows until only a few feet separated him from the end of the room. Before Dooku had any time to gain an advantage with this, however, Anakin dove under the Sith blade and found himself on Dooku's other side. The Sith whirled, but now his back was to the wall.

Anakin's thoughts crystallized in an instant: if he could keep Dooku against the wall, tire him out without letting him get in one good hit, then there was a chance in Anakin's favor. But even as he thought it, Dooku's face twisted in anger—tired of games and chases, he lashed out with a ferocity Anakin had not expected. The red blade flashed, and Anakin saw, as though in a daze, his mechanical hand clatter to the ground, severed at the wrist, his lightsaber clutched tightly in its useless grip.

No sooner did the awful sight cross his vision than he felt a painful tightening around his throat, and saw his feet lift off the ground. Dooku's hand was outstretched in his direction, clenched around skin and bone that it did not touch. It was the most terrible feeling, opening his mouth for air and finding nothing. Anakin gasped and choked, tearing uselessly at the invisible grip at his throat with his remaining hand. He expected it to throw him across the room, but instead it only tightened again.

"It's a pity," Dooku was saying, undeterred by the noises coming from Anakin's throat. "We'd planned on staying here a while longer. That's changed now, of course—I'm sure you've told the Jedi Council where you are, and I can't have them barging in on me."

Anakin's vision had begun to swim—oh, his lungs would burst! But an idea struck him suddenly: he had heard of Jedi Masters, ancient and powerful, who could make themselves appear dead, even to other Force-users. Anakin had only the vaguest idea of how they'd done it, clinging to a single thread of life and letting go of all others, and it was unimaginably dangerous, but if he could manage it…

He could feel himself already going faint—rather than fight it, Anakin let himself slide into it, breaking one more tie with the living world each second. His eyes were closing—no, it was too fast, he thought, panicked. But it was too late; he was desperate now, clutching at any shred of life, but the carefully held thread was slipping from his fingers. He couldn't move a muscle—no, no, it was too fast, he had lost control, he couldn't stop himself from going too far!

But here…here there was air…he breathed it in slowly, an unassailable peace stealing over his mind as the panic faded. His head sank limply onto his chest. The pain at his throat was fading.

The last thread snapped, and Anakin crumpled to the ground.