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By him. On purpose.

Here in the General’s Quarters, he had looked into the eyes of a living being and coldly decided to end that life. He could have chosen the right way. He could have chosen the Jedi way.

But instead—

He stared down at Dooku’s severed head.

He could never unchoose this choice. He could never take it back. As Master Windu liked to say, there is no such thing as a second chance.

And he wasn’t even sure he wanted one.

He couldn’t let himself think about this. Just as he didn’t let himself think about the dead on Tatooine. He put his hand to his eyes, trying to rub away the memory. “You promised we would never talk about that again.”

“And we won’t. Just as we need never speak of what has happened here today.” It was as though the shadow itself spoke kindly. “I have always kept your secrets, have I not?”

“Yes—yes, of course, Chancellor, but—” Anakin wanted to crawl away into a corner somewhere; he felt sure that if things would just stop for a while—an hour, a minute—he could pull himself together and find some way to keep moving forward. He had to keep moving forward. Moving forward was all he could do.

Especially when he couldn’t stand to look back.

The view wall behind the General’s Chair blossomed with looping ion spirals of inbound missiles. The shuddering of the ship built itself into a continuous quake, gathering magnitude with each hit.

“Anakin, my restraints, please,” the shadow said. “I’m afraid this ship is breaking up. I don’t think we should be aboard when it does.”

In the Force, the field-signatures of the magnetic locks on the Chancellor’s shackles were as clear as text saying UNLOCK ME LIKE THIS; a simple twist of Anakin’s mind popped them open. The shadow grew a head, then shoulders, then underwent a sudden mitosis that left the General’s Chair standing behind and turned its other half into the Supreme Chancellor.

Palpatine picked his way through the debris that littered the gloom-shrouded room, moving surprisingly quickly toward the stairs. “Come along, Anakin. There is very little time.”

The view wall flared white with the missiles’ impacts, and one of them must have damaged the gravity generators: the ship seemed to heel over, forcing Palpatine to clutch desperately at the banister and sending Anakin skidding down a floor that had suddenly become a forty-five-degree ramp.

He rolled hard into a pile of rubble: shattered permacrete, hydrofoamed to reduce weight. “Obi-Wan—!”

He sprang to his feet and waved away the debris that had buried the body of his friend. Obi-Wan lay entirely still, eyes closed, dust-caked blood matting his hair where his scalp had split.

Bad as Obi-Wan looked, Anakin had stood over the bodies of too many friends on too many battlefields to be panicked by a little blood. One touch to Obi-Wan’s throat confirmed the strength of his pulse, and that touch also let Anakin’s Force perception flow through the whole body of his friend. His breathing was strong and regular, and no bones were broken: this was a concussion, no more.

Apparently Obi-Wan’s head was somewhat harder than the cruiser’s interior walls.

“Leave him, Anakin. There is no time.” Palpatine was half hanging from the banister, both arms wrapped around a stanchion. “This whole spire may be about to break free—”

“Then we’ll all be adrift together.” Anakin glanced up at the Supreme Chancellor and for that instant he didn’t like the man at all—but then he reminded himself that brave as Palpatine was, his was the courage of conviction; the man was no soldier. He had no way of truly comprehending what he was asking Anakin to do.

“His fate,” he said in case Palpatine had not understood, “will be the same as ours.”

With Obi-Wan unconscious and Palpatine waiting above, with responsibility for the lives of his two closest friends squarely upon him, Anakin found that he had recovered his inner balance. Under pressure, in crisis, with no one to call upon for help, he could focus again. He had to.

This was what he’d been born for: saving people.

The Force brought Obi-Wan’s lightsaber to his hand and