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Leia looked vaguely uncomfortable. “I wondered if I could quietly ask Admiral Ackbar to list Luke’s E-wing as missing.”

“You could do that,” Han said, “but you couldn’t do it quietly. It’d take about two hours for the whole fleet to be buzzing with ‘Luke Skywalker has vanished!’ Face it, Leia, anything involving Luke is news. Which might be exactly why he slipped out the back door. What does Streen say?”

“Streen says there’s nothing he can tell us. But I got the impression he was protecting Luke.”

“Protecting Luke’s privacy, maybe?”

“Maybe,” Leia said. “I suppose you’re going to tell me I should respect his privacy, and stop worrying about it?”

“It’s an idea,” Han said. “He’s a Jedi Master—and he’s out there in the best fighter we have, thanks to Admiral Ackbar. If anyone can take care of himself, my buddy Luke can.”

Leia flopped on her back on the bed. “Funny, when I think that thought, it comes out, ‘If anyone can manage to find trouble, Luke can.’ ”

“That,” said Han, “is the difference between a friend and a sister.”

“I suppose,” Leia said, sighing. “Speaking of sisters—did anything else happen today?”

“Well, let’s see,” Han said, crossing his arms over his chest and gazing at the ceiling. “After lunch, Jaina got tired of being ignored by Jacen again and started sabotaging his practice. They ended up in a fight that went on so long it made them both sick to their stomachs.…”

As soon as Luke shut down the engines, he could hear the wind howling outside. It rocked the E-wing on its skids and pelted its surface with freezing salt spray ripped from the crests of the waves breaking near the beach.

“Keep the stabilizers on,” Luke told R7-T1 as he unbuckled his harness.

The astromech droid chirped in response, and the words RECOMMEND WING DE-ICERS ON flashed on the cockpit monitor.

“Fine, keep the wing de-icers on, too.”

R7-T1 purred. PLEASE CONFIRM NEGATIVE RESPONSE TO CORUSCANT TRAFFIC CONTROL.

“Yes, I’m sure I don’t want you to notify traffic control of our arrival. Not a peep out of you—not even so much as a time synchronization check.” He reached forward and released the cockpit latch, and the seamless bubble tilted up on concealed hinges. Damp, bitterly cold air poured in with the sound of the surf. “I’ll be back when I’ve found the hangar.”

The beach was barely thirty meters wide, squeezed between an angry-looking greenish sea and a rocky cliff half again that high. Just beyond the breakers, sculpted spires of the same reddish-black rock jutted up from the water. Smaller chunks of rock were scattered through the surf and all along the beach, half buried in the coarse brown sand. Overhead, a thick gray mat of clouds churned as the wind drove it briskly along.

Oblivious to the cold and the wind, Luke walked slowly south along the rocky beach. He held one hand out in front of him, palm down, sweeping it methodically back and forth through the air, looking almost like a blind man feeling his way through an unfamiliar room.

Luke had not gone far when he stopped and looked up at the top of the cliff for a long moment, then out at the twin spires of rock. Dropping his chin to his chest and closing his eyes, he turned through two full circles, then looked back up at the cliff edge.

“Yes,” he said, the wind stealing the word from his lips. “Yes, it is here.”

He sat down on the sand, cross-legged and straight-backed, and brought his hands together in his lap, fingertip to fingertip. Concentrating on a picture in his mind, Luke dipped his awareness deeply into the flow of the Force beneath him. With eyes that looked inward, he found what he was seeking, like flaws in a near-perfect crystal. He extended his will.

The sand around him stirred. The rocks shuddered, shifted, then began to rise from the sea and the sand as though sifted from them by an invisible screen. Swirling through the air as they sought their place, the stones took shape as broken wall and shattered foundation, as arch and gate