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Tenel Ka felt a little flicker in the Force—from behind her, not from Jacen’s direction. She stopped and spun, igniting her lightsaber.

There was no attack coming from that direction, but the diplomatic shuttle was now flush against the hangar’s stone wall. And Tenel Ka’s sense of dread, of anticipated attack, grew.

“Get back!” Her words could not possibly carry to the security officers surrounding the shuttle, but she poured her anxiety and intent into the Force, broadcasting her command on an emotional level. “Get behind cover!”

Suiting action to words, she leapt behind one of the natural stone columns lining the hangar bay and put her back to it. She turned her head to glance toward Jacen.

He looked straight at her, offering a tight little smile, then held up a comlink. He pressed the button on it.

The universe went white and the column kicked against Tenel Ka’s back…

Tenel Ka heard her daughter calling for her. But the Hapan queen stood in red mud up to her knees, with Allana nowhere in sight. Broken columns tilted at odd angles, and severed arms and legs the size of public transportation speeders protruded from the mud—as far as the horizon, in every direction.

“Mommy—”

Tenel Ka opened her eyes and sat up, looking around wildly for her child.

Her head hurt and her ears rang like someone playing a tympani on a gong. She recognized her surroundings, one of the numberless waiting rooms up at the royal residence level. This one, decorated in subtle variations of purples and off-whites, was adjacent to Allana’s playroom. She must have been dreaming.

Tenel Ka sat on a morphing divan that had been adjusted to daybed dimensions. Isolder rose from where he’d been sitting on a chair opposite her. “Lie down. You’re hurt.” His words were dim, hard to hear over the ringing in her ears.

Instead, she stood, wobbling in sudden, passing dizziness. “Where’s Allana?”

“Jacen Solo has her.” Isolder’s face was pale, as ashen as it had been the day his wife had died. “The shuttle blast, a shaped charge, was sufficient to blow a hole in the hangar’s exterior wall large enough for his starfighter. He made orbit in his X-wing and escaped.”

The coldness in Tenel Ka’s gut spread to envelop her entire body. Her legs shook. Her father put his hands on her shoulders, steadying her. “Please, sit. We have battle cruisers and Battle Dragons strung along the routes between here and Coruscant. But it’s likely that he will have picked an escape route we can’t predict.”

She let Isolder guide her back down to the divan’s surface. “How long—”

“Two hours ago. The diplomatic party has been detained and is being interrogated.” Isolder’s voice was grim. “The shock they’re expressing…I can only guess at this point, but I think it’s genuine. It looks like they thought they were on an actual mission of negotiation, and that Solo used them only as a diversion.”

“Has he communicated—has he sent terms for her return?”

Isolder’s expression became even more sour. “He left a message. A datachip handed to me by the little girl who acted as Allana’s double. I’ll play it for you.” He rose and moved to a table to activate the monitor upon it.

“Who is the girl?”

“A Coruscanti orphan named Tika. Solo promised that if she would do this one thing for him, he’d take her to a world where there were thousands of beautiful women, one of whom would become her new mommy.”

Tenel Ka clapped her hand over her mouth. It was just one more horror, and the least of the ones she had endured in just a few waking minutes, but it somehow pointed more starkly to Jacen’s inhumanity than all the murders he had perpetrated to seize Allana.

Isolder stepped away from the monitor. Jacen Solo popped up on the display, somber, dressed in his Galactic Alliance Guard colonel’s uniform.

“Greetings to the esteemed Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium.” His voice did not exactly drip with sarcasm, but the excessive formality he employed, treating Tenel Ka as some distant ruler, ignoring all that they had been to each other, was just as hurtful. “At