Ben had the useful ability to recall things he'd seen or heard with nearly complete accuracy. Mara's scalp had tightened and tingled as she heard her son, her precious kid, relating the exact words of that Sith cyborg and her accomplice, like an innocent possessed by a demon.

Accomplice.

Mara realized she'd shifted her position by a few parsecs. Not a vain, conceited, naive victim of a manipulative Sith: an accomplice.

Jacen wasn't weak-minded enough to fall that far and that fast unless he wanted to.

"I haven't told anyone else and I don't want to," Ben whispered.

"Not Dad, either. I mean, you can tell him if you really think he needs to know, Mom, but I don't want to see the look on his face when he finds out what a moron I've been."

But I defended Jacen. When did I get stupid? "No more of a moron than the rest of us, sweetheart."

"What are we going to do?"

"I won't ask you to do anything." Mara had let her drink get cold.

She couldn't swallow it anyway, even if it hadn't tasted like the Millennium Falcon's hydraulic overflow, because her throat was tight with rage. "Ben, you have a choice. I told Jacen that Lumiya was trying to kill you, and he was all innocence."

"So you knew about Ziost, then . . ."

"No, I don't know anything about Ziost. But you're going to tell me."

Ben's face fell. She had to gather what intel she could, but it was also good for Ben to learn that it was all too easy to give away information accidentally. Just the word Ziost made all the pieces start to fall into agonizing place.

"Jacen sent me on a mission to Almania to recover an Amulet that had some dark side power. I ended up on Ziost and a ship attacked me, but I found a really weird vessel and got away."

"Just like that."

"It wasn't Lumiya, actually. It was a Bothan."

"And how did you find this ship?" Mara was trying to work out the scam. She knew what she'd done to Lumiya's ship, and that the transponder was now showing it was stationary on Coruscant. If the last thirty-six hours hadn't been total mayhem, she'd have paid her another visit by now.

"Just parked, hatch open, with the key in the drive?"

"It . . . look, I'm not insane, but it spoke to me."

"Ohhhh . . ." Mara had enough pieces in the puzzle now to see the rough shape of the picture that would emerge. "Spherical. Orange. Like a big eye."

Ben's face drained completely of color. "Yes."

"Tell me about it."

He struggled visibly with something. Mara guessed he'd been sworn to secrecy. It was way too late for all that loyalty bunk.

"I've seen the ship, Ben. It spoke to me, too. It said it thought I was the 'other one' like me, and I thought it'd mistaken me for Lumiya, but it meant you, didn't it? Somehow it picked up on our similarities."

Ben gulped in air as if the relief of being able to share the awful experience were saving him from drowning.

"I worked out how to pilot it. It communicates through the Force."

"And it's soaked in dark energies. I know. Go on."

"I don't know how it works, but if you visualize what you want it to do, it does it. It sticks out parts of itself and forms them into cannons, all kinds of weapons."

Perfect. Perfect. Mara was getting a better picture by the second.

Lumiya could think at the ship and it'd rush to do her bidding—maybe even extrude a cable, whip it around Mara, drag her away, and nearly throttle her.

It wasn't a droid. I got bushwhacked by a living ship, a Sith ship.

That old, cold clarity and pitiless sense of purpose flooded Mara's body, and instead of making her gut churn, as any mother's might at hearing the kind of risk her son had been subjected to, it settled her into a calm and rational state close to transcendence. She was the Hand again, planning her move.

"So what happened to the ship between the time you found it and when I came across it the other day?"

"Where did you see it?"

"Hesperidium. When I caught up with Lumiya."

Ben's shoulders sagged. He folded his arms on the table and lowered his head onto them. Mara waited, stroking his hair because she assumed he was crying again.

He straightened up, face stricken but eyes dry. "I flew it back to the Anakin Solo and handed it over to Jacen."

Everything fell into place. The only pieces missing now were how she would put an end to this, but that was her specialty, and it could wait awhile until she'd made sure Ben was safe.

"Okay, I think you know how serious this is," she said. Their heads were almost touching over the table. To the Osarians who used the restaurant and who spoke very little Basic, they probably looked like mother and son having a tearful argument over homework and poor grades.

They would never have guessed that it was about the fate of the galaxy.

No, it's not about the galaxy. Enough of the galaxy. The galaxy can look after its own problems for a while. This is about my child, my only child, and some Sith scum trying to kill him while his own cousin, my own nephew who should be looking after him, helps her do it.

It all became very clear and simple from that moment onward.

"Ben, will you accept a suggestion from me?"

"Anything, Mom. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"

"Hey, I'm the one who should be sorry." I trusted a monster. I shouted down my husband. I ignored every single sign that Jacen was trouble. "But you're in real danger, and it's going to be more than you can handle, so I want you to be very cautious. I want you to behave like a coward for a change. Take no risks. In fact, I'd like you to report in sick, and get as far away from Jacen as you can until I get this fixed."

Ben nodded, grim, very old eyes in a terribly young face. He really was just a kid even if he behaved like a man now. Mara was instantly so proud of him and so fiercely protective at the same time that the only cogent emotion she could identify was the instinct to seek out and kill whatever threatened him.

She could do that. It was her calling.

"I'll do it carefully," he said. "So Jacen doesn't realize I've found out that Lumiya is making him do all this."

Oh, sure she is. "That's right, sweetheart."

"I promise I won't hide in the Force from you, but ... I might have to do it to hide from her. Or even Jacen, if she's got him so far under her control that he's . . . taken over the government."

Sometimes you had to hear someone else say it to believe it.

"Tell you what," said Mara, smiling, "why don't you show me how you do it? Then maybe I'll get a better sense of when you're just hiding, and when to worry."

Ben nodded, eyes downcast.

There would be no holds barred now. Mara would use every means and weapon at her disposal, and there would be an end to this.

They spent the rest of the day doing something that they hadn't done in a very long time: just wandering around the Skydome Botanical Gardens, talking and having fun—or as much fun as could be had with a galactic civil war in progress and a military junta running the GA. The only evidence of the huge upheaval was that the CSF officer on patrol in the plaza had a Galactic Alliance Defense Force sergeant walking the beat with him.

Apart from that, nobody seemed troubled. Mara wondered if all cataclysmic events in history were noticed only by a handful. Like Ben had said —prophetically—over lunch only days before, perhaps it had been that way

during the Empire, too, and most people's lives were the same under Palpatine as they had been under the Republic. She didn't want to think it was true. Luke certainly didn't.