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“Then what is it, little Jedi?” Luke kept his voice soft, soothing. And suddenly he knew. His own words had brought it clear to him. But before he could say anything, he heard his name. Jacen and Jaina were running toward him, looking as ravaged as Anakin.

“Hey, guys,” he said, gathering them around him.

“Uncle Luke,” Jaina said. “Daddy said you could talk to us.”

He didn’t know if they had felt the cold and heard the screaming. Many of his students hadn’t. But his students weren’t as talented in the Force as the children. Or maybe the children had felt some impact from the explosion. Whatever had happened to them, though, had traumatized them in a way the other adults weren’t able to deal with yet.

“Come on,” he said. He led them to a bench alongside the metallic wall. A medical droid passed without giving them a second glance.

“Did we do it?” Anakin asked.

“Do what?” Whatever he had expected, it wasn’t this.

“Hurt Mama.”

Luke set Anakin back on his lap. Jacen and Jaina squeezed beside him. They had obviously discussed this. Luke suppressed a sigh. Raising Force-sensitive children was more a trial than anyone had thought. Each time something new came up, he found himself wishing he could talk with his aunt Beru. She had managed with him despite his uncle Owen’s hostility, on a planet so far away that no one knew about it.

Except Ben.

She had probably talked with Ben.

“How could you have hurt your mother?” Luke asked.

All three children started to speak at once, hands moving, arms waving, voices raised in concern.

“Wait, wait, one at a time,” Luke said. “Jaina, you explain it, then you boys can add if you want.”

Jaina glanced at Jacen as if for support. The movement always made Luke’s heart ache. Would he and Leia have been like that if they had been raised together? They would never know.

“Something came into our nursery, Uncle Luke,” Jaina said. Her small face was a replica of Leia’s, round and beautiful, sincere brown eyes, and small, purposeful mouth. “It was cold and it yelled with a thousand voices. And it hit us all at once.”

As he had suspected. They had felt the deaths. Just as he had. As Leia had. He resisted the urge to close his eyes. When Leia was better, he had to talk with her. They had to realize that the children, though young, felt everything as strongly as others trained in the Force did.

“So we joined—” Jacen began.

“I’m telling it,” Jaina said. “We joined hands and beat it back.”

That caught Luke by surprise. “You what?”

“We made the room hot,” Anakin said. Jaina shot him a malevolent glance, but he ignored it. “It was my idea.”

“It was not,” Jacen said.

“Was too.”

“Anyway,” Jaina said loudly, “we pushed it out of the room, and then a little while later, the whole … the whole …” She took a deep breath. “The whole …”

“The whole building shook,” Jacen said, clearly finishing for her. “And Mother nearly died.”

“And sometimes,” Anakin said softly, “when I don’t plan it, something I do hurts somebody.”

Luke nodded. A lot of things he had done had inadvertently hurt someone. If he hadn’t bought Artoo and Threepio, his aunt and uncle would still be alive. But if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be sitting here now, with these precious beings beside him. But he couldn’t explain that. It would sound patronizing. Ben hadn’t tried when Luke returned from the ruined farm. Luke shouldn’t try either. They would learn it on their own.

“What you felt,” Luke said, “was something pretty terrible. Somewhere in the galaxy, thousands, maybe millions, of people died at one time. I felt the same thing, that deep cold, and all of their pain.”

“Did Mom feel it?” Jaina asked, her voice still quivering.

Luke nodded. “And a few of my students on Yavin 4 felt it too. That’s part of being a Jedi. When something destroys life on a grand scale, we feel it as if it happened to us. Because, in a sense, it did. It ripped the fabric of the Force for just an instant.”

The children’s faces were serious. Jacen’s mouth was set in a thin line reminiscent of Han’s when he was angry.

“Sending heat to that cold place was