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“I know what you truly want,” the shadow said. “I have only been waiting for you to admit it to yourself.” A hand—a human hand, warm with compassion—settled onto his shoulder. “Listen to me: I can help you save her.”

“You—”

Anakin blinked blindly.

“How can you help?”

“Do you remember that myth I told you of, The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?” the shadow whispered.

The myth—

… directly influence the midi-chlorians to create life; with such knowledge, to maintain life in someone already living would seem a small matter …

“Yes,” Anakin said. “Yes, I remember.”

The shadow leaned so close that it seemed to fill the world.

“Anakin, it’s no mere myth.”

Anakin swallowed.

“Darth Plagueis was real.”

Anakin could force out only a strangled whisper. “Real …?”

“Darth Plagueis was my Master. He taught me the key to his power,” the shadow said, dryly matter-of-fact, “before I killed him.”

Without understanding how he had moved, without even intending to move, without any transition of realization or dawning understanding, Anakin found himself on his feet. A blue bar of sizzling energy terminated a centimeter from Palpatine’s chin, its glow casting red-edged shadows up his face and across the ceiling.

Only gradually did Anakin come to understand that this was his lightsaber, and that it was in his hand.

“You,” he said. Suddenly he was neither dizzy nor tired.

Suddenly everything made sense.

“It’s you. It’s been you all along!”

In the clean blue light of his blade he stared into the face of a man whose features were as familiar to him as his own, but now seemed as alien as an extragalactic comet—because now he finally understood that those familiar features were only a mask.

He had never seen this man’s real face.

“I should kill you,” he said. “I will kill you!”

Palpatine gave him that wise, kindly-uncle smile Anakin had been seeing since the age of nine. “For what?”

“You’re a Sith Lord!”

“I am,” he said simply. “I am also your friend.”

The blue bar of energy wavered, just a bit.

“I am also the man who has always been here for you. I am the man you have never needed to lie to. I am the man who wants nothing from you but that you follow your conscience. If that conscience requires you to commit murder, simply over a … philosophical difference … I will not resist.”

His hands opened, still at his sides. “Anakin, when I told you that you can have anything you want, did you think I was excluding my life?”

The floor seemed to soften beneath Anakin’s feet, and the room started to swirl darkness and ooze confusion. “You—you won’t even fight—?”

“Fight you?” In the blue glow that cast shadows up from Palpatine’s chin, the Chancellor looked astonished that he would suggest such a thing. “But what will happen when you kill me? What will happen to the Republic?” His tone was gently reasonable. “What will happen to Padmé?”

“Padmé …”

Her name was a gasp of anguish.

“When I die,” Palpatine said with the air of a man reminding a child of something he ought to already know, “my knowledge dies with me.”

The sizzling blade trembled.

“Unless, that is, I have the opportunity to teach it … to my apprentice …”

His vision swam.

“I …” A whisper of naked pain, and despair. “I don’t know what to do …”

Palpatine gazed upon him, loving and gentle as he had ever been, though only a whisker shy of a lightsaber’s terminal curve.

And what if this face was not a mask? What if the true face of the Sith was exactly what he saw before him: a man who had cared for him, had helped him, had been his loyal friend when he’d thought he had no other?

What then?

“Anakin,” Palpatine said kindly, “let’s talk.”

The four bodyguard droids spread out in a shallow arc between Obi-Wan and Grievous, raising their electrostaffs. Obi-Wan stopped a respectful distance away; he still carried bruises from one of those electrostaffs, and he felt no particular urge to add to his collection.

“General Grievous,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”

The bio-droid general stalked toward him,