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“What?”

“I’m hungry. Is there any food?”

Han shook his head, baffled. He nodded around at the stormtrooper corpses that littered the field. “Nothing but, y’know, Imperial ration packs. And they’re probably stale.”

“I don’t care.”

“Are you kidding?”

She shrugged, and gave him a smile that even now, even here, minutes from their deaths, made his heart race and his breath go short. “We’ll make it a picnic,” she said. “We’ll have a picnic and watch the sun rise. One last time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

He stripped some ration packs off dead troopers, and they sat together, shoulder-to-shoulder, eating in silence as the horizon began to blaze as though the planet were on fire.

“Well, one thing’s for sure.” Han pushed an echo of his old half grin onto his face. “This is one meal we’ll never forget as long as we live, huh?”

Leia smiled, though her eyes sparkled with tears. “Always the joker. Even now. Even here.”

Han nodded. “Well, y’know, we always get romantic when we’re about to die. It was getting repetitive.”

The ground beneath them spasmed once, then again, and Leia said, “I think we should respect the tradition.”

“You do?”

“Kiss me, Han. One last time.” She lifted a hand to his cheek. Her touch was warm and dry, and impossibly precious to him. “Once for all the kisses we’ll never get.”

He gathered her into his arms and lowered his face to hers—and then a great Wookiee yelp of joy that echoed all the way from the cockpit yanked his head up and popped his eyes open. “What? Chewie, you’re sure?”

Chewbacca pounded on the cockpit’s transparisteel and waved both his arms, frantically beckoning. Han sprang to his feet and lifted Leia as though she weighed nothing at all. “Han—what is it?” she gasped. “What did he say?”

“All those other kisses you were talking about?” His eyes alight, he pulled her toward the Falcon’s freight lift. “He said if we move fast, we might get every one of ’em after all!”

ONE BY ONE, INSIDE HIS HEAD, LUKE FELT THE STARS wink out.

Linked through Kar to Cronal, through Cronal to the Shadow Crown, and through the Crown’s ancient powers of Sith alchemy to every Melter mind in every scrap of meltmassif in the galaxy, Luke had shone upon them with the light of the Force. This light had drawn them as moonlight draws a shadowmoth, and they found that its inexhaustible flood could fill them to overflowing. Never again would they feed upon light; there would never be the need. They would forever shine with light of their own.

And so they came out from every place the Dark had put them.

Luke felt them go.

He felt them leave the gravity stations. He felt them leave the Shadow Crown, and Cronal’s body, and Leia’s and Kar’s and his own.

And he felt the stormtroopers, in all their thousands throughout the system. He felt every single man who wore Cronal’s black armor. He felt the uncontrollable rage and bloodlust, the almost-mindless battle frenzy that the crystals in their brains had triggered and now sustained. He felt the damage that had been done by the brutal force of the crystals’ growth.

He felt what the crystals’ exit would do.

He did not look away. He did not withdraw his perception. He owed these men that much. Enemies they might be, but still they were men.

None of them had wanted this. None had volunteered for this. None had even cooperated. This had been done to them with casual disregard for their humanity; Luke could not allow its undoing to be the same.

So he stayed with them as the meltmassif in their bodies and their brains liquefied. He stayed with them as it poured forth from their every pore. He stayed with them as the exit of the meltmassif triggered their deadman interlocks.

He stayed with them while every stormtrooper in the entire system, all at once in all their thousands, sagged and shuddered.

And died.

Luke felt every death.

It was all he could do for them.

WHEN HE FINALLY WITHDREW HIS MIND FROM THE Dark, Luke found himself in darkness of the wholly ordinary sort. The flicker of the energy discharge had fled from the chamber that