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Hmmm, Yoda thought. A problem this is …

Blade-to-blade, they were identical. After thousands of hours in lightsaber sparring, they knew each other better than brothers, more intimately than lovers; they were complementary halves of a single warrior.

In every exchange, Obi-Wan gave ground. It was his way. And he knew that to strike Anakin down would burn his own heart to ash.

Exchanges flashed. Leaps were sideslipped or met with flying kicks; ankle sweeps skipped over and punches parried. The door of the control center fell in pieces, and then they were inside among the bodies. Consoles exploded in fountains of white-hot sparks as they ripped free of their moorings and hurtled through the air. Dead hands spasmed on triggers and blaster bolts sizzled through impossibly intricate lattices of ricochet.

Obi-Wan barely caught some and flipped them at Anakin: a desperation move. Anything to distract him; anything to slow him down. Easily, contemptuously, Anakin sent them back, and the bolts flared between their blades until their galvening faded and the particles of the packeted beams dispersed into radioactive fog.

“Don’t make me destroy you, Obi-Wan.” Anakin’s voice had gone deeper than a well and bleak as the obsidian cliffs. “You’re no match for the power of the dark side.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Obi-Wan said through his teeth, parrying madly, “but I never thought I’d hear it from you.”

A roar of the Force blasted Obi-Wan back into a wall, smashing breath from his lungs, leaving him swaying, half stunned. Anakin stepped over bodies and lifted his blade for the kill.

Obi-Wan had only one trick left, one that wouldn’t work twice—

But it was a very good trick.

It had, after all, worked rather splendidly on Grievous …

He twitched one finger, reaching through the Force to reverse the polarity of the electrodrivers in Anakin’s mechanical hand.

Durasteel fingers sprang open, and a lightsaber tumbled free.

Obi-Wan reached. Anakin’s lightsaber twisted in the air and flipped into his hand. He poised both blades in a cross before him. “The flaw of power is arrogance.”

“You hesitate,” Anakin said. “The flaw of compassion—”

“It’s not compassion,” Obi-Wan said sadly. “It’s reverence for life. Even yours. It’s respect for the man you were.”

He sighed. “It’s regret for the man you should have been.”

Anakin roared and flew at him, using both the Force and his body to crash Obi-Wan back into the wall once more. His hands seized Obi-Wan’s wrists with impossible strength, forcing his arms wide. “I am so sick of your lectures!”

Dark power bore down with his grip.

Obi-Wan felt the bones of his forearms bending, beginning to feather toward the greenstick fractures that would come before the final breaks.

Oh, he thought. Oh, this is bad.

The end came with astonishing suddenness.

The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength. The shadow released its power for an instant, long enough only to whirl away through the air and alight upon one of the delegation pods as it flew past, and the creature leapt to follow—

Half a second too slow.

The shadow unleashed its lightning while the creature was still in the air, and the little green freak took its full power. The shock blasted him backward to crash against the podium, and he fell.

He fell a long way.

The base of the Arena was a hundred meters below, littered with twisted scraps and jags of metal from the pods destroyed in the battle, and as the little green freak fell, finally, above, the victorious shadow became once again only Palpatine: a very old, very tired man, gasping for air as he leaned on the pod’s rail.

Old he might have been, but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight; he scanned the wreckage below, and he did not see a body.

He flicked a finger, and in the Chancellor’s Podium a dozen meters away, a switch tripped and sirens sounded throughout the enormous building; another surge of the Force sent his