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He glanced down at Kiara. She was huddled against the ground—against the stone surface she lay on, rather—and her face was turned upward, her eyes full of fear.

For a moment Ben was somewhere else, in a hundred other places with shivering refugees as squadrons, fleets of TIE fighters roaring past overhead. So that was the Empire, he thought distantly. Jacen had shown him that there were some things to admire about the old Empire, including the unwavering fashion with which it had imposed order, but now he could feel what that order was like from the other side.

He shook his head to clear the images away and looked up. He found the TIE fighter coming around for another pass. He reached for Faskus’s blaster pistol—

It was still out there on the snow, where he’d dropped it when examining his possessions. He bit off a curse and reached for it. Though he’d never summoned his lightsaber or any other object to himself from that distance, the blaster flew to his hand and he took aim with it.

Then he shook his head. A blaster pistol against an armored starfighter? He had exactly no chance to harm his opponent. He needed bigger weapons—

He needed the Force. He was a Jedi, after all, even if only an apprentice, and the Force was his great weapon, his great armor.

He looked around for a missile, then realized he was surrounded by them. He closed his eyes and concentrated as he had the other day, when freeing Shaker from the Y-wing.

He heard Kiara’s gasp as the stone that had just fallen over rose a few centimeters into the air.

The TIE fighter came on. Ben couldn’t so much sense it as he could sense the pilot at the heart of its ball-shaped cockpit. He felt the stone, he felt the pilot…and he tried to send one to the other.

Sluggishly, the stone rose into the path of the TIE fighter. Ben heard the scream of the lasers firing again and opened his eyes in time to see one green bolt hitting the wall far to his left, the other hitting the floating stone dead center, shattering it into a thousand shards.

The TIE fighter veered but could not get entirely clear of the cloud of debris. Ben heard the high-pitched klunks and pings as the left solar array wing hit the shards.

The TIE fighter suddenly gained a lot of altitude, circled once, and then climbed again until it was out of sight.

Ben looked down at Kiara again. “We’re fine for now,” he said. “The bad man went away.”

She nodded, half believing.

“No, really.” He paused, trying to think of what to say to convince her. Then he leaned down and embraced her, felt her shaking. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

Her reply was muffled: “Will he come back?”

“Yes, he will. But next time I’ll be ready for him.”

“Why does he want to shoot me?”

“Shoot you?” Ben drew back to look at her. “He doesn’t want to shoot you. He wants to shoot me.”

She shook her head, solemn. “No. He shot the Blacktooth while I was inside. That’s how Daddy got hurt. Daddy said they wanted to shoot him, but now they want to shoot me. They want me to be dead.”

“No, they don’t.”

“You wanted it.” Her tone wasn’t even accusing, just hurt.

“No, I didn’t. I just…” Ben paused to try to sort his words out. “I’m on an important mission, and I thought that leaving you, even leaving you to die, would make things work out better.”

“You changed your mind?”

“I did. I was wrong.”

Suddenly Ben felt dizzy. He sat down on the stone beside Kiara.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He couldn’t tell her, though he had a sense of it. He’d done just what Jacen had been doing, deciding that one thing was more important than another, one goal more important than one life, and he’d been too ready to sacrifice one, not willing enough to try to protect both.

He’d been wrong. Perhaps, sometimes, Jacen had been wrong, too.

Ben shook his head. No, Jacen was more than twice Ben’s age. He was older, wiser, more powerful. He wouldn’t make that kind of mistake, ever.

Unless he was human.

Shaker’s trilled query jarred Ben from his thoughts. “We’re all right,” he called out.