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Lowbacca began to howl in protest.

“I know it’s not your fault,” Jaina yelled as she jinked to avoid several pink streaks exploding from X-wing laser cannons. “You didn’t get us lost. This is Coruscant.”

“This was Coruscant,” Zekk murmured, his voice hollow with shock and grief.

Ganner thrust him out of the way and dropped into the gunner’s seat. “Line them up, Jaina, and I’ll take them out.”

A tiny blue comet flared toward them. The missile blinked out of existence meters from the ship. Immediately a secondary attack—a barrage of laserfire—hammered the coral hull. The frigate shuddered. Fine, black dust showered down over the Jedi.

“Those were Republic ships,” Ganner said grimly. “I can’t return fire on them!”

Instead, he sent a plasma bolt hurling toward a Yuuzhan Vong skip. Alema Rar lunged at him, seizing his arm with both hands and jerking his hand free of the targeting glove.

“We came dressed for the wrong party,” she reminded him. “Keep that up, and everyone will be firing at us!”

Jaina opened her mind, reached out as far as the ship’s considerable sensors could span. Information engulfed her. The data was staggering, the conclusion inescapable:

Coruscant was lost, and the fleeing New Republic ships were badly outnumbered by the invading force.

The Twi’lek was right: any attempt to help would only draw the ire of the Yuuzhan Vong and place the Jedi survivors squarely between the warring factions.

She glanced at Lowbacca, tilted her hooded head at an inquiring angle. For a moment, the Wookiee’s face reflected her own conflicted thoughts. He offered a halfhearted comment about the enemy of an enemy being a friend.

Before Jaina could respond, a warning sizzled through the hood and into her mind. Her gaze darted toward a proton torpedo cutting a livid blue streak toward them.

“Something tells me,” she replied as she dodged the Republic ship’s missile, “that we won’t be making many friends today.”

Leia grimaced as a painfully familiar X-wing darted directly into the Falcon’s flight path.

“Are you sure Kyp Durron wasn’t hooked up to that scrambled yammosk?” she said tartly.

“Watch,” Han said in a smug tone. He delivered an open-handed whack to the control panel. A concussion missile exploded toward the Jedi pilot’s ship. As if he’d expected this, Kyp whipped his X-wing into a hard, rolling turn. Han’s missile put a solid hit on the skip pursuing Kyp.

A quick grin tugged at one corner of Han’s mouth. “Taught him that one myself.”

“Are you bragging or confessing?”

“Kyp’s fighting on the same side we are,” he reminded. “Not everyone agrees with his methods, but no one gives more than he does.”

Leia closed her eyes as the ever-present grief swept over her in waves, followed swiftly by the stark fear that came from knowing she could lose two more children. “That’s true enough. Kyp was more than willing to give your daughter to the cause.”

Han fell silent for several moments, negotiating his way through a floating graveyard of newly dead ships with far more care than the effort warranted.

Too late, Leia realized how deeply her words had cut. Han had lost Chewbacca on Sernpidal. There was enough superstition in Han’s makeup to view that planet’s graveyard as a sort of interdiction field for Solo luck. To his way of thinking, Jaina’s mission to Sernpidal had been a near miss, a tragedy just barely averted.

She glanced over at her husband. His bleak expression and haunted eyes recalled the terrible months after Chewbacca’s death, and his struggle to accept the vulnerability of those he loved. When the realization of Anakin’s death seared through her, she’d been too engulfed by her own agony to ease Han into that knowledge; in fact, from what she remembered, she’d thrown the terrible news at him like a brick of duracrete. Right now, he looked as if she’d hit him squarely between the eyes.

Remorse jolted through Leia. She was not the only one who had lost a son.

She touched Han’s arm lightly. “Grief has a