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“I know,” Mara said shakily.

Her certainty felt like ferrocrete. Luke sat down, pushing his fingers back through his hair, trying to think. He nearly jumped at the sound of a distant sonic boom—probably just some hotshot pilot practicing atmospheric maneuvers over the sea.

“I can have you at a medical facility in ten minutes,” Hamner told Mara.

“No!” Mara nearly shouted. “Then we’d lose our chance to escape Fey’lya.”

“Mara, we don’t have a choice,” Luke said.

She sat up again. This time Luke didn’t try to stop her. “We do,” she insisted. “I won’t have my child born under house arrest. If I don’t take the tears, I should be fine. Isn’t that right, Emdee?”

The droid whirred and nodded. “Present danger has passed. Avoidance of the substance will prevent recurrence.”

“What if it wasn’t the tears at all?” Luke said, exasperation escaping with his words.

“It is,” Mara replied. “I know it is.”

“Then there was something wrong with the synthetic drug. If we’re to synthesize a new one, we need to be here, on Coruscant.”

“If we stay, they’ll button us in so tight we’ll never be able to escape. We’ll be at their mercy, and what then? Suppose Fey’lya changes his mind and decides to give us to the Yuuzhan Vong? We’ll be trapped, and how am I supposed to fight in this condition? Or worse, with an infant? Luke, it’s time. You know it; I know it. So we have do this.”

Luke closed his eyes and searched the back of his lids for options. He found none.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Kenth, if you could be so kind as to take us to our apartments.”

“Absolutely,” Hamner said. “I am at your command.”

In moments they were airborne. So far as Luke could tell, Mara was fine now. He himself was shaken to the core.

He activated the comm unit and placed two calls—one to Cilghal, the Mon Calamari Jedi healer, the other to Ism Oolos, a Ho’Din physician of great renown. Both agreed to meet him at their apartments. A third call—to the Ithorian Tomla El—revealed the healer was offplanet, working to aid refugees from his destroyed homeworld.

Hamner deposited them on the landing area of their roof. Cilghal was already there, and the reptilian Ism Oolos arrived shortly thereafter.

Luke and Mara thanked Hamner. The liaison wished them luck and departed.

“You pack, Skywalker,” Mara said, once they were inside. “We have to be gone in two hours.”

“A thorough examination will take much longer than that,” Oolos complained. “Some analyses I must do in my laboratory, to be certain of my results.”

“You have to think of your child now,” Cilghal agreed softly.

“No one needs to remind me of that,” Mara said gruffly. “Get on with it.”

Meanwhile, Luke reluctantly began preparation for their flight, but each step he took in that direction felt heavier. Coruscant had the best medical facilities in the galaxy. How could he deny his wife and child that?

He could feel Cilghal, concentrating, reading Mara in the Force, trying to glean information from its generation and interaction in her cells. He caught glimpses of Oolos taking skin and blood samples and sonic readings and feeding the data into his medical datapad.

Mara gave them an hour, then cut them off. Luke stopped what he was doing and came back into the room.

“Conclusions?” Mara asked.

Oolos sighed. “The MD droid was correct. The synthesized tears are having an unforeseen effect on the placenta. The actual attack was triggered by stress, but continuing to take them might well lead to the death of the child.”

Cilghal nodded her bulbous head in agreement. “I concur,” the Mon Calamarian said.

“Can you resynthesize them?” Luke asked. “Reconfigure the substance so it won’t have that effect?”

Oolos clasped his scaled hands together. “We still do not know why the original tears worked,” he said, a note of apology in his voice. “We were able to duplicate them without ever really comprehending them.”

“Something must be different, though,” Luke said, “or this wouldn’t be happening.”

“Unfortunately,” Oolos replied, “I do not believe that to be true. The nature of cell reproduction in a fetus