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Dark pillars ascended to the striated green-and-gold glass of the vaults. Shadows chased one another across the dull gold intricacy of the floor.

Palpatine’s audience hall. Why did she dimly hear the funky jizz-wailing of that horrible band Jabba the Hutt had kept to play in his palace? Why did she smell, behind the perfumes and incense and subtle hurlothrumbic gas with which the Emperor had flooded his court hall, the rank stink of Hutt, the greasy odor of mercs and soldiers of fortune?

She walked farther. The fear that came over her she attributed to the gas. Her father had warned her about it, the first time she’d had an audience with the Emperor, when she was a youngster. “Don’t be afraid,” Bail Organa had murmured as he opened the door for her. “It’s just a trick he’s playing on you, to make you think he’s more dangerous than he is.”

She had been afraid, but had known it wasn’t real. That memory remained with her, that knowledge, whenever afterward she felt fear.

There was someone on Palpatine’s throne.

Leia stepped clear of the pillars. A robed figure, stooped forward, face in the shadow of a hood. She saw the gleam of eyes. At the foot of the throne huddled a woman, nearly naked in scraps of gold and silk, long chestnut hair braided down her back and a chain collar around her neck.

Herself, eight years ago. Eyes downcast, beaten, submissive as she had never been, not even in Jabba’s awful palace. Hopeless, knowing that this time there would be no rescue.

Her hand went to the lightsaber at her belt, but she remembered what Callista had said, that it was better not to use a weapon until she knew against whom to use it. Leia stood still, but her heart hammered in her chest.

“Draw it,” drawled a deep voice, a woman’s voice, like smoke and honey, and she recognized the voice as her own. The robed figure on the throne put back her hood. Leia saw herself, matured and beautiful, beautiful beyond description: nearly six feet tall, with the attenuated, slender grace she had always envied Mon Mothma and Callista. Though there was maturity and wisdom in her face the crow’s-feet around the eyes were erased, the mouth was fuller and stronger and redder, the hair a cinnamon cloud. Every beauty idealized and raised to terrifying perfection.

“Draw it. You must give it to one of us.”

She stood up from her throne, shrugged aside Palpatine’s robe so that it folded down her back in dark curtains. Leia saw that she, too, wore the gold slave harness, jeweled and flashing, but she wore it like an Imperial gown. The Empress Leia leaned back her head and laughed and stretched forth her hands to the shadows of the ceiling. Force lightning rained from her fingers, crawled up the pillars, illuminated the perfect cheekbones, and cold auburn eyes. Behind her, as in Jabba’s palace, Leia could see on the wall a man frozen in carbonite, but the contorted face was Luke’s, not Han’s.

She didn’t know where Han was. Dead, she thought.

Dead of the Death Seed, somewhere in Meridian sector. And she, the Empress, was free of him at last.

“Which of us will you give it to, Leia?” The Empress jerked the golden chain, pulling the slave Leia sprawling. The wretched girl buried her face in her arm and wept, as Leia had sometimes longed to do at that time, in that place, in her life. “Draw your lightsaber, and give it to one of us. This is what you must do.”

Leia unhooked the weapon from her belt. She hefted it in her hands, slender and silvery, the weapon she had made under Luke’s tutelage and later feared to use. The hands of the slave Leia, clutched into fists of frustration and hopelessness, were nerveless and weak. Those of the Empress before her throne were large, strong as a man’s, long-fingered, and white as Leia had always wished her hands could be. Behind the throne she could see Jacen and Jaina, smiling, lightsabers in their hands, and just visible was the corner of her father’s white robe, the one he had been wearing in her other dream, when Anakin had cut him dead.

There