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Mara took a chair with her back to the broad window, sank down, and withdrew deep into herself. Before she used the last of Vergere’s miraculous healing dose, she’d better know what she was up against. She was determined to do whatever she could, on her own. She and Cilghal had experimented with self-examination techniques, the only possible way to deal with a disease that continually mutated.

Focusing the Force finely, she confirmed that the odd sense focused deep in her uterus, on one side. It was a thickening of cells, almost like a tumor, multiplying more quickly than her normal cells. She probed deeper, for their cellular essence. Shifting her grip on the Force, she poised to destroy their blood flow.

Then she sensed something weirdly familiar. Besides the tumorlike echo of her own cellular essence—completely familiar, after fighting her disease for this long—she sensed another human life-signature.

It was Luke’s.

By all the star dragons ever spawned, that could mean only one thing.

Mara’s eyes flew open. Her arms and legs stiffened. Pregnant? This couldn’t have happened! She’d taken all precautions. Her bizarre disease had transformed molecules and cells and attacked discrete organs. It could be death or disfigurement—or some other, unimaginable horror—to an unborn child. She clenched a fist. What could she do? There were medical options—

Like a garu-bear defending her cub, she attacked that thought instantly. She would let no medical aide harm her child—

Again her own thoughts caught her up. Her child?

Did she carry her posterity or her death inside her?

The tall front door slid open. Luke plunged through, and before he even got close she felt his mind trying to grab her, protect her.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded. “Mara, what is it?”

“Do you always think you have to rush in and save someone?” she asked, making a vain stab at sounding wry and superior. But her voice shook.

Luke dropped to his knees beside her chair. He seized her hand. “Mara, what is it? The disease?”

She took his hand. She laid it over her abdomen. “Feel this,” she said softly. “Use the Force, and tell me what has happened.”

He arched his eyebrows and frowned up at her.

“Don’t argue,” she said. “Just do it. I want an unbiased second opinion.”

She watched his eyes. They narrowed, and the line of his eyebrows softened. He was preparing to comfort her, to do whatever he must.

Then his eyes widened, sending a sudden blue flash up at her face.

“This wasn’t my idea.” Mara swallowed on a dry throat. “It’s already in terrible danger. The disease could attack it—cause mutations—”

“Mara,” he interrupted. He seized her hand. “Mara, anything could kill any one of us, today, tomorrow. The Yuuzhan Vong could pull down one of Coruscant’s moons, or we could fall out a window.”

She nodded silently, struck once again by Luke’s unwavering faith in goodness and his hope in the light. He shifted his hand slightly, shaking his head in plain disbelief.

“Life is risk,” he murmured. “I don’t feel anything … dangerous about this.”

“Not yet,” Mara whispered. “But this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“I know,” he said. His hand shifted again. His eyes fell shut. She felt his desperate concern.

Softening a little, Mara laid her free hand over his, on her stomach. Finally, she dared to envision actually holding a child, looking into a face that was part Luke and part Mara—just as her niece and nephews were part Leia and part Han, but completely themselves. She’d pictured it many times, as an abstraction.

Then she pictured the monster her disease could make of a defenseless cluster of cells.

Defenseless? Not so long as I’ve got custody! Something deep inside her mind was shrieking, terrorized. Something else was dancing wildly, utterly and joyously abandoning itself to hope, to joy, to a new and total commitment.

Luke spoke softly. “Maybe Vergere’s medicine made you vulnerable to the Force, as an agent of life.”

She straightened her shoulders. “You want this. You’re glad,” she accused him.

“Until this moment,” her husband said, “I had no