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Higher, a plunging vehicle—a boxy cargo ship, engulfed in flames—came streaking through a horizontal autonavigation lane, surrendering some of its velocity to a violent collision with a public transport pod before continuing its fiery plunge toward the bottom of the canyon.

Mace tracked the ill-fated ship for a moment, then tilted his head back and put the edge of his hand to his brow. Distant buildings shimmered, as if miraged by heat.

The district’s defensive shield had been raised!

Higher still, something was wrong with the flickering sky. Light flared behind stratified clouds, and thunder of a kind reverberated from the summits of the taller buildings. Far to the south, Coruscant’s pale blue mantle was hashed into triangles and slivers by white contrails.

In their oblate pools of white skin, Shaak Ti’s eyes were wide when she looked at Mace.

“An attack,” she said in stunned disbelief.

Comlink already in hand, Mace activated the Jedi Temple frequency and held the device to his ear.

“Nothing but noise.”

“The deflector shield,” Shaak Ti said.

She craned her neck, striped montrals and head-tail quivering. “Or could they be jamming transmissions?”

Mace’s nostrils flared. “Crowd control!” he told the commandos. To Shaak Ti, he said: “Find Palpatine. See to it he’s conveyed to safety. I’ll send backup.”

In the ruined archive hall of LiMerge Power’s plasma facility, Count Dooku waited for Kenobi and Skywalker to arrive. The room was enormous by any standard, thirty meters high and three times that in circumference. Dooku could imagine it when it had hummed with life and activity, before the catastrophe. Still, that it had remained intact was a testament to its builders. And with its curved walls of holobooks and data storage disks—irradiated beyond salvage—he accepted that some might believe that secrets of the most sinister sort were concealed here.

Jedi like Kenobi and Skywalker, who wanted to believe as much.

Despite their gullibility, they were nothing if not tenacious and—dare he admit it?—exceptional.

In the risks they undertook.

In how deluded they were—about so many things.

In their unabashed zeal to capture him they had actually piloted their starfighters straight through the roof of the largest of the facility’s containment domes, and had managed to survive. Such superhuman feats were almost enough to convince Dooku that they still had the Force with them.

If only they weren’t so naïve and easily manipulated.

Once again, Darth Sidious had divined the actions they would take well in advance of their own deciding. The talent had less to do with being able to peer into the future, than with having access to streams of possibilities. Sidious wasn’t unerring. He could be surprised or taken off his guard—as at Geonosis, as in the case of Gunray’s mechno-chair—but not for long. His mastery of the dark side of the Force endowed him with the power to decipher the currents that comprised the future, and to comprehend that while those currents were manifold, they were not boundless.

Such mastery was one of the skills that distinguished Sidious from Yoda, who believed the future was so much in motion it could not be read with any clarity—especially during times when the dark side was on the ascendant. But how could Yoda be expected to see the whole picture with one eye closed?

Deliberately closed.

The Jedi accepted as a matter of faith that embracing the dark side meant cutting themselves off from the light, when in fact the dark side opened one to the full range of the Force.

There was, after all, only the Force.

It was unfortunate for the Jedi that they believed the Force was theirs alone to use and honor. That sense of entitlement was evident in the way Kenobi and Skywalker called on the Force in their fervor to confront him: opening doors with waves of their hands, clearing obstacles from their path with similar gestures, moving with what appeared to be numinous speed and agility,