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“No?”

“No.”

“Where is it, then?”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“Without your lightsaber, you may not have a ‘later.’ ”

“I don’t need a lecture, okay? How many times have we had this talk?”

“Apparently, one time less than we needed to.”

Anakin sighed. Obi-Wan could still make him feel about nine years old. He gave a sullen nod toward one of the droid bodyguards. “He’s got it.”

“He does? And how did this happen?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Anakin—”

“Hey, he’s got yours, too!”

“That’s different—”

“This weapon is your life, Obi-Wan!” He did a credible-enough Kenobi impression that Palpatine had to smother a snort. “You must take care of it!”

“Perhaps,” Obi-Wan said, as the droids clicked the binders onto their wrists and led them all away, “we should talk about this later.”

Anakin intoned severely, “Without your lightsaber, you may not have a—”

“All right, all right.” The Jedi Master surrendered with a rueful smile. “You win.”

Anakin grinned at him. “I’m sorry? What was that?” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d won an argument with Obi-Wan. “Could you speak up a little?”

“It’s not very Jedi to gloat, Anakin.”

“I’m not gloating, Master,” he said with a sidelong glance at Palpatine. “I’m just … savoring the moment.”

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, for now:

The Supreme Chancellor returns your look with a hint of smile and a sliver of an approving nod, and for you, this tiny, trivial, comradely victory sparks a warmth and ease that relaxes the dragon-grip of dread on your heart.

Forget that you are captured; you and Obi-Wan have been captured before. Forget the deteriorating ship, forget the Jedi-killing droids; you’ve faced worse. Forget General Grievous. What is he compared with Dooku? He can’t even use the Force.

So now, here, for you, the situation comes down to this: you are walking between the two best friends you have ever had, with your precious droid friend faithfully whirring after your heels—

On your way to win the Clone Wars.

What you have done—what happened in the General’s Quarters and, more important, why it happened—is all burning away in Coruscant’s atmosphere along with Dooku’s decapitated corpse. Already it seems as if it happened to somebody else, as if you were somebody else when you did it, and it seems as if that man—the dragon-haunted man with a furnace for a heart and a mind as cold as the surface of that dead star—had really only been an image reflected in Dooku’s open staring eyes.

And by the time what’s left of the conning spire crashes into the kilometers-thick crust of city that is the surface of Coruscant, those dead eyes will have burned away, and the dragon will burn with them.

And you, for the first time in your life, will truly be free.

This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker.

For now.

OBI-WAN AND ANAKIN 2

This is Obi-Wan Kenobi in the light:

As he is prodded onto the bridge along with Anakin and Chancellor Palpatine, he has no need to look around to see the banks of control consoles tended by terrified Neimoidians. He doesn’t have to turn his head to count the droidekas and super battle droids, or to gauge the positions of the brutal droid bodyguards. He doesn’t bother to raise his eyes to meet the cold yellow stare fixed on him through a skull-mask of armorplast.

He doesn’t even need to reach into the Force.

He has already let the Force reach into him.

The Force flows over him and around him as though he has stepped into a crystal-pure waterfall lost in the green coils of a forgotten rain forest; when he opens himself to that sparkling stream it flows into him and through him and out again without the slightest interference from his conscious will. The part of him that calls itself Obi-Wan Kenobi is no more than a ripple, an eddy in the pool into which he endlessly pours.

There are other parts of him here, as well; there is nothing here that is not a part of him, from the scuff mark on R2-D2’s dome