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Jaina returned the hug fiercely, then gave her brother a kiss on the cheek. “Yes. We’re recruiting new pilots and I’m helping to screen them. I monitor their reactions when we show them what the Yuuzhan Vong do in combat. We work on weeding them out based on performance and such things.”

Jacen smiled. “Jedi senses are good for that sort of thing.”

“I know, but what’s amazing is this: We compile our reports after simulations and interviews, and everyone on the board does it independently. Wedge Antilles and Tycho Celchu are helping, and it’s weird, but without using the Force, they seem to flag the same people I do as being unsuitable. Years of experience is serving them the way the Force does me.”

Anakin laughed lightly. “I don’t think years of experience will lift big rocks.”

Jaina gave him a big-sister frown. “You know what I mean.”

Jacen moved past his sister and seated himself on the tan couch. “Experience is one thing that can help anyone, including Jedi. Learn from things, don’t repeat mistakes.”

Anakin nodded, then resumed staring out the viewport. “Good thing some mistakes can’t be repeated.”

His sister sighed and started toward him. “Anakin, it wasn’t your fault—”

Anakin held up a hand, stopping her. He didn’t resort to the Force to do it, but Jacen sensed he would have, had Jaina not stopped and lowered her arms. “Everyone keeps telling me that, and I know it, deep down in my heart. Being cleared of blame, though, doesn’t mean I don’t still feel some responsibility. Maybe I didn’t kill him, but was there something I could have done that would have saved him?”

Jaina shook her head. “There is no way of knowing that.”

Anakin turned, and somehow banished a haunted expression. “If you are right, Jaina, then I’m doomed. I have to believe there is, so when there’s a next time—”

Jacen sat forward. “You’ve been through your ‘next time,’ Anakin. You saved Mara.”

“Sure, right up to the point where you and Luke saved me and her. Don’t think I’m not grateful, I am.” One corner of Anakin’s mouth cocked itself into a grin. “You got me halfway to an answer. I just have to get myself the rest of the way.”

Jacen nodded. It had not escaped him that Anakin had not actually spoken the name “Chewbacca.” The Wookiee’s death had hurt them all, terribly and deeply. He had always been a part of their lives, and when he was taken away, they saw how vastly and to what depth he had been involved with them. His death opened up a gaping wound that, for Jacen, had not yet begun to heal.

All three of them fell silent, turning inward. Anakin looked out the viewport again, but his eyes were focused too distantly to be watching any one thing. Jaina folded her arms across her chest and flounced down on the couch next to Jacen. Her brows furrowed, and Jacen could almost read the memories of Chewbacca radiating off her. For himself, he remembered the softness of the Wookiee’s fur and the gentle strength in his arms, his sense of humor and his infinite patience with human children possessed of Force powers.

“Hey, it’s so quiet down there . . .”

Jacen looked up at the stairs and saw a man standing there, but it took him a heartbeat to realize it was his father. The voice had helped, but the hitch at the end, and the raw nature of it, surprised him. His father’s clothes hung looser, and his flesh was tinged with a gray pallor instead of the rich bronze from being kissed by so many suns. Han Solo had swept his hair back out of his eyes, but wore it longer than Jacen could ever remember. The length hid some of the gray, but not all of it, especially at the temples.

The greatest discontinuity with his father, though, was the way his initial comment tailed off. Jacen had to have heard him utter the same line a hundred times, usually when things were grim, when the family needed tension broken. His father would smile, open his arms, and say, “It’s so quiet, did somebody die?” That you can’t say that, Father, tells me just how bad it really