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Satisfied with her reconnaissance, Mara put the chasm behind her and stared into the crowd. Hesitantly, she opened herself—just a bit—to the Force. Bubbles of emotional noise burst here and there, mostly from people near Anakin’s age. An older Quarren couple walked past quickly, heads down, shoulder to shoulder. She saw tension in their twitching facial tentacles. The taller individual kept glancing away from his partner. They kept a broad personal space around themselves.

Carrying something a little too valuable tonight, she concluded.

In the other direction swaggered two human males, one rather loose-limbed, his face glowing with the effects of several mugs of lum. She caught a few words as they passed. “… over to the Peace Brigade. That way, if the Vong get this far …”

The voice faded, leaving Mara frowning. Coruscant, long a coal bed of intrigue, was turning into a fear-driven focus cooker. Peace Brigaders, humans who had decided to collaborate with the Yuuzhan Vong, did not wear their clasped-hand insignia openly, but she guessed that time was coming.

She slipped one hand inside her long black vest. Beneath the pocketed credcards and her comlink, she wore a loosely hooded burnt-orange flight suit, and her blaster and lightsaber—the one Luke had given her. Long habit made her carry her shoulders at just the right angle to drape her clothing over her armament. Anakin’s tunic and loose pants did the trick well enough. He had one odd bulge at the belt, probably a Sabrashi fear stick, but a casual passerby would take them for a woman escorting her son on an evening out.

Son. Again she frowned. With every month that hurried past, driven by the invasion or paced by concerns about the fate of the Jedi, the urge to hold her own child tugged harder—and looked less plausible. Every month, she and Luke resolutely turned away.

Sometimes—according to Cilghal, Oolos, and the other healers—the bizarre disease that plagued her had killed its victims by breaking down the proteins that surrounded cell nuclei. Sometimes, she’d even felt that starting in, seemingly nibbling her bones or other specific organs. An illness that attacked cellular integrity could destroy an unborn child, or alter its cell structure to produce … to produce what? she wondered. If she ever had a child, would it even be human?

No, she would content herself with a gifted niece-apprentice and two talented nephews. She and Luke also sponsored—visited, when they could—a thirteen-year-old Bakuran orphan, Malinza Thanas. Malinza’s father had died of a lingering ailment, and her mother was killed at another Centerpoint crisis years ago. Luke still felt deeply responsible for the girl, adopted by a well-placed Bakuran family. At distant Bakura, at least Malinza seemed safe from the Yuuzhan Vong.

Thinking of Bakura made Mara imagine how the defeated Ssi-ruuk might have dealt with the Yuuzhan Vong. Did these new invaders, evidently dead to the Force, have life energies that could have been drained off to power Ssi-ruuvi technology?

That would be the ultimate humiliation …

Anakin eyed a transparent kiosk. At eye level, it showed a three-dimensional, animated holo of five levels in this area.

“Looks like the Leafy Green is two corridors north,” he said. “Want to catch another train?”

“We’ll walk,” Mara answered. “Stay sharp.”

She felt him hang back, on her left, as she melted into the flow of passersby. It was a good, defensible two-person formation, with master on point.

Mara turned her head slightly. “Tonight’s lesson,” she told Anakin. “It’s a review.” Anakin would never learn skulduggery from her husband, who stuck out in a crowd like a Sunesi preacher.

“Hm.” Anakin eyed a trail of moving lights, set like a slidewalk to draw pedestrians into a new restaurant.

“Evaluate constantly,” she said. “The more information you collect before shove comes to shake, the more choices you’ll have, and the fewer ways your enemy might surprise you.”

He held his hands folded in front of him, thumbs pressed together.