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“No.” Anakin’s chest clenched like a fist squeezing his heart. “I can’t—I’d have to tell him …”

“He’s your best friend, Annie. He must suspect already.”

“It’s one thing to have him suspect. It’s something else to shove it in his face. He’s still on the Council. He’d have to report me. And …”

“And what? Is there something you haven’t told me?”

He turned away. “I’m not sure he’s on my side.”

“Your side? Anakin, what are you saying?”

“He’s on the Jedi Council, Padmé. I know my name has come up for Mastery—I’m more powerful than any Jedi Master alive. But someone is blocking me. Obi-Wan could tell me who, and why … but he doesn’t. I’m not sure he even stands up for me with them.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“It has nothing to do with believing,” he murmured, softly bitter. “It’s the truth.”

“There must be some reason, then. Anakin, he’s your best friend. He loves you.”

“Maybe he does. But I don’t think he trusts me.” His eyes went as bleak as the empty night. “And I’m not sure we can trust him.”

“Anakin!” She clutched at his arm. “What would make you say that?”

“None of them trust me, Padmé. None of them. You know what I feel, when they look at me?”

“Anakin—”

He turned to her, and everything in him ached. He wanted to cry and he wanted to rage and he wanted to make his rage a weapon that would cut himself free forever. “Fear,” he said. “I feel their fear. And for nothing.”

He could show them something, though. He could show them a reason for their fear.

He could show them what he’d discovered within himself in the General’s Quarters on Invisible Hand.

Something of it must have risen on his face, because he saw a flicker of doubt shadow her eyes, just for a second, just a flash, but still it burned into him like a lightsaber and he shuddered, and his shudder turned into a shiver that became shaking, and he gathered her to his chest and buried his face in her hair, and the strong sweet warmth of her cooled him, just enough.

“Padmé,” he murmured, “oh, Padmé, I’m so sorry. Forget I said anything. None of that matters now. I’ll be gone from the Order soon—because I will not let you go away to have our baby in some alien place. I will not let you face my dream alone. I will be there for you, Padmé. Always. No matter what.”

“I know it, Annie. I know.” She pulled gently away and looked up at him. Tears sparkled like red gems in the firelight.

Red as the synthetic bloodshine of Dooku’s lightsaber.

He closed his eyes.

She said, “Come upstairs, Anakin. The night’s getting cold. Come up to our bed.”

“All right. All right.” He found that he could breathe again, and his shaking had stilled. “Just—”

He put his arm around her shoulders so that he didn’t have to meet her eyes. “Just don’t say anything to Obi-Wan, all right?”

MASTERS

Obi-Wan sat beside Mace Windu while they watched Yoda scan the report. Here in Yoda’s simple living space within the Jedi Temple, every softly curving pod chair and knurled organiform table hummed with gentle, comforting power: the same warm strength that Obi-Wan remembered enfolding him even as an infant. These chambers had been Yoda’s home for more than eight hundred years. Everything within them echoed with the harmonic resonance of Yoda’s calm wisdom, tuned through centuries of his touch. To sit within Yoda’s chambers was to inhale serenity; to Obi-Wan, this was a great gift in these troubled times.

But when Yoda looked at them through the translucent shimmer of the holoprojected report on the contents of the latest amendment to the Security Act, his eyes were anything but calm: they had gone narrow and cold, and his ears had flattened back along his skull.

“This report—from where does it come?”

“The Jedi still have friends in the Senate,” Mace Windu replied in his grim monotone, “for now.”

“When presented this amendment is, passed it will be?”

Mace nodded. “My source expects passage by acclamation. Overwhelming passage. Perhaps as early as this afternoon.”

“The Chancellor’s goal in this—unclear to me it is,” Yoda said