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  Silence. And then Anakin sighed softly. “Yes. It is. So what do you want to do?”

  “Well…” He scratched his beard, considering their tediously limited options. “You’re not wrong about the odds being in our favor, at least for the moment. I say we lengthen them by hiding the groundcar, then getting to that village we were aiming for.”

  “On foot?” Anakin heaved another sigh. “Yeah. Great. Because I was only just thinking that what I really need right now is blisters.”

  Oh, Anakin. “Cheer up. Things could always be worse.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Anakin. “Weren’t you listening? Blisters.”

  Truly, their situation was anything but funny, but still—he had to laugh. Anakin’s irrepressibly irreverent humor was one of his most endearing traits.

  “Come on,” he said. “That groundcar isn’t going to hide itself.”

  Once more working in wordless tandem they used the Force to lift and shift and drop and lift and shift and drop the mangled vehicle back to the straggle of trees they’d crashed through on their descent. The task proved brutally hard. They were both so tired and knocked about, and even Anakin’s intimidating powers weren’t limitless. But they had no choice.

  Done at last, bent over with his hands braced on his knees, his breathing harsh and fast, Anakin glanced up. “I don’t know if this is good enough. Wrecked or not, the kriffing thing still looks like a groundcar and there’s not enough cover here to hide it from a passing spy droid.”

  Obi-Wan leaned against a handy tree trunk. There wasn’t a finger’s-width of flesh and bone in his body that didn’t hurt. “I know.”

  Gingerly, Anakin straightened. “We’ll have to cut it up. Small pieces. Then we’ll need to scatter them. Spread dirt over them afterward so they don’t catch the light.”

  Anakin’s endless resourcefulness never ceased to impress him. “Good idea. And speaking of light…”

  At the far edge of the horizon a thin bright line was spreading like spilled plasma. Dawn. If they were going to do this they’d have to hurry. There was no telling how many spy droids were out looking for them, or how long it would take one to stumble on to their crash site. So they took out their lightsabers and dismembered the groundcar, hacking and slicing it into piles of scrap metal. After that they used the Force to scatter and camouflage the pieces.

  And after that, spy droids or no spy droids, they both collapsed to the inhospitable ground.

  “Wake me up this time next year,” Anakin muttered, sprawled full length, eyes closed in his filthy, blood-smeared face.

  Slumped cross-legged on leaf litter and small stones, Obi-Wan pressed his fingers to his aching temples. “I wish I could. But we can’t stay here, Anakin.”

  “I know.” Anakin sighed. The growing light showed a deep cut on his forehead and a blackish purple bruise on his cheek. His humble Lanteeban work clothes were badly stained and torn, and he looked to be favoring his right shoulder. There was a scorch mark along his side where he’d been clipped by a blaster bolt. “Just—” He cracked open one eyelid. “Let me catch my breath.”

  Anakin never admitted exhaustion. Concerned, Obi-Wan stared at him. I don’t think he’s been this pushed since Maridun. “Yes. All right. A few minutes. But then we must go.”

  A Jedi was taught from earliest childhood that the Force was to be used but never abused. And that used judiciously it would grant a feeling of well-being. Of buoyant energy. That it would replenish and nourish and gently nurture.

  Of course, the key word is judiciously. Anakin and I, on the other hand…

  He felt like he was ripping apart, in slow motion. The Force was never meant to be used the way they’d been using it these past few days. These past months. Ever since the war began, in fact.

  Bail’s right. We’re flesh and blood, not machines. We can’t keep doing this. One day the price will be simply too high to pay.

  “Hey,” said Anakin. “You all right?”

  Obi-Wan straightened his spine, wincing. “Truthfully? I’ve been better. Anakin…”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Anakin, resigned. “We’ve got to go.” He pulled up his knees. “Stang. My bruises have bruises.”

  “As have mine,” Obi-Wan said, allowing sympathy to show. “But we’ll feel better once we’re moving again.”

  “Yeah…” Anakin looked at him. “So who was it exactly nicknamed you the Negotiator? Because from where I’m lying you couldn’t sell water to a man dying of thirst.”

  He smiled. “Ouch.”

  “Sorry,” Anakin muttered. “But right now the only thing that would make me feel better is—”

  “What?”

  “Lok Durd’s head on a plate.”

  Was it his imagination or had Anakin meant to say something different? It was hard to tell; he’d covered his eyes with his forearm.

  “We will get him, Anakin,” he said quietly. “General Durd’s days are numbered.”

  “Everyone’s days are numbered, Obi-Wan,” Anakin retorted. “Not even Yoda’s going to live forever. The point is, we blew it. I blew it. I trusted Bant’ena—I pushed you into trusting her, too—and now look where we are.” Sitting up, he rubbed his hand over his face. “We should’ve taken out the lab while we had the chance. Blown that blasted bioweapon to smoke and debris.”

  It hurt to hear him this disillusioned and full of self-blame. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Anakin. You followed your feelings. You argued for what you thought was best. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “No?” Anakin’s eyes were bloodshot with weariness and strain. “Obi-Wan, trusting that woman nearly got us killed. You were right. She reminded me of my mother and I let that blind me. I’m sorry.”

  Anakin was a proud young man who hated to admit fault. But the point was he did admit it. Maybe not straightaway—often not straightaway—but still…

  Late is always better than never.

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now. What matters is that this mission isn’t over. If we act swiftly, I believe we can still thwart Durd before he can use that weapon. There’s even a chance we can recapture him.”

  Eyebrows raised, Anakin looked around them. They really were in the middle of nowhere. No birdsong. No speeders. No groundcars. No sense of even the most rudimentary, partially sentient life nearby. The silence was absolute. Only on the farthest edge of awareness, a whispered hint of the village they’d been trying to reach. They had no food, no water, no communications, no transport. No weapons, beside their lightsabers. No allies. No backup of any kind.

  “Yes. Well,” he added. “I didn’t say it would be easy.”

  Anakin pulled a face. “No kidding.” Then he fumbled to his feet and looked down. “Obi-Wan, we’re in so much trouble.”

  “I know.”

  “But a solution is bound to present itself? Maybe. Except one of these days that’s just not going to happen.” Anakin held out his hand. “You do know that, right?”

  Obi-Wan wrapped his skinned fingers around Anakin’s wrist and levered himself off the ground. “Yes. But it won’t be today.”

  For the briefest moment Anakin wasn’t General Skywalker, the Chosen One, scourge of the Separatists and hero of the Republic. He was instead the small boy who’d looked for reassurance from a stranger on the night of Qui-Gon’s funeral.

  “Promise?”

  Obi-Wan patted his former apprentice’s undamaged shoulder. “Promise. Now let’s go.”

  Keeping up a steady pace, eventually they came to the end of barren, uncultivated countryside and discovered a ferrocrete road, narrow but well maintained. No traffic in either direction. The Force prompted them to turn left, so they turned left and kept walking. The almost treeless landscape was sere, its sparse vegetation crinkled brown and thirsty. The intel provided by Special Ops Brigade Agent Varrak had mentioned drought, and here was the proof. Once these had been crop fields, but no crops grew here now. Scatterings of bleached bones and strips of desiccated hide sug
gested farm animals long since perished. Hinted at a prosperity lost, perhaps forever. Especially if Lanteeb could not be freed from Dooku. From the Sith.

  An hour passed. Another. And another. The sun crawled higher in the pale and cloudless sky, and the flat land around them gradually began to fall and rise in frozen ripples. Unnervingly aware of their ongoing danger, they told and retold their false life stories and quizzed each other on them until their recitations were faultless. They had to be. Weary as they were, they might have misread the Force. There could be a Separatist presence in the village, and if that was the case their first mistake would likely be their last.

  “All right,” Obi-Wan said eventually. “Enough. I doubt we’ll forget our new histories in a hurry.”

  “No,” Anakin agreed. “I’m pretty sure I’ll be dreaming about Teeb Markl when I’m ninety.”

  Let me reach ninety and I’ll happily dream about him, too. “That’s the general idea.”

  Skirting the small beginnings of a pothole in the ferrocrete road, Anakin squinted into the middle distance. “Stang. I thought that might be a mirage, but it’s not, is it?”

  Obi-Wan looked. “No. Those are hills.”

  One hand clutched behind his head, Anakin jigged in frustration. “Great. We’ve been walking for hours and what—now we have to go mountain climbing?”

  “Pimple climbing’s more like it,” he said, staring at him. “D’you know, I’m pleased we left Ahsoka behind. All this complaining is not what I’d call setting a good example. And if Rex could hear you…”

  Disgruntled, Anakin shut up and they kept on walking. Cultivating blisters. Ignoring their thirst and hunger and pain. Sliding in and out of the Force, they remained exhaustedly alert for the first signs of danger. The road they traveled remained empty of traffic, and so far they’d seen no sign of droid activity. No trundle carts, no mobile security cams, and certainly no battle units. But that could change at any moment, especially if the village they headed toward held some value for the Separatists. An unarmed civilian population could be effectively controlled by only a handful of armed droids. They’d seen that on Naboo, and on more than a dozen even larger planets since the outbreak of war.

  After a while Anakin slowed to a halt. “You feel that? I think the village is just on the other side of your pimple.”

  Halted beside him, Obi-Wan nodded. The village was only a few klicks distant now. Through the Force he could read its busy, sentient life. No stark fear or misery, no overwhelming sense of immediate danger or dread, just a dull, muffling sadness shot through with brighter threads of anxiety.

  “Doesn’t mean we’re out of trouble, though,” Anakin added, glancing sideways. “With our luck the place’ll be lousy with Sep droids. If it is, how do you want to handle them?”

  “Carefully,” he replied. “But I’m sure if we stick to our story, they’ll have no reason to suspect anything.”

  “Unless they’ve been beamed a security alert.”

  And you call me a pessimist? He wiped his torn and filthy sleeve over his sweaty face. “Unlikely. You said it yourself, Anakin—the last thing Durd wants is for Dooku to find out we evaded capture.”

  Sighing, Anakin pressed his fists into the small of his back. “Let’s hope so, because neither of us is in any shape for another fight.”

  “If we keep our wits about us there’ll be no need for fighting,” he retorted. “We’re humble laborers returned to our home planet after three long years in the galactic wilderness, remember? With the emphasis on humble.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Anakin muttered. Then he looked at the empty, undulating countryside surrounding them. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone build a village way out here? You’d find more life in the Jundland Wastes. At least the wastes have got herds of wild banthas. But there’s nothing out here except dead trees and dead grass.”

  “I don’t know,” Obi-Wan said wearily.

  Anakin flicked him an irritated look. “You’re not curious?”

  Oh, for pity’s sake… “Yes, Anakin, of course I’m curious, but I don’t have the energy to worry about it now. So I’m not going to worry about it now—if that’s all right with you, of course!”

  After that, they walked in silence.

  Some three klicks later they reached the foot of the hills. Resigned, they put their heads down and started for the top, breathing labored, sweat trickling, their bruised muscles shrieking, every cut and scrape and blaster burn awake. Drawing on the Force to help them, feeling it flow like fire through their veins, they pushed through the pain and didn’t stop walking until they reached the blunt peak.

  Below them, men and women toiled beneath the unclouded sun—and the village’s purpose became apparent.

  “That’s a damotite mine,” Anakin said, pointing to a heavily shielded shaft-and-sinkhole arrangement on its far right outskirts. “Isn’t it?”

  It was, if the intel Bant’ena Fhernan had collected was accurate. Which would explain the village’s isolation. Unrefined damotite’s toxicity virtually demanded that no other settlements be established within poisoning range.

  Obi-Wan sighed. “I’ve been very slow. I should’ve realized we’d find a mine out here.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Anakin. “You’re a simpleton, Obi-Wan. I’ve always thought that. I just didn’t want to say.”

  Ha ha. Shading his eyes, he stared down at the village. No Separatists that he could see, at least not in the open. A few old groundcars, some of them traveling to and from the mine. A handful of antigrav floaters. A huddle of cottages on the far left side of the settlement. What looked like a small factory placed between the rest of the village and the mine. Pale smoke drifted from a series of flat chimneys. Was that where they refined the raw damotite before transport? Probably. Beside the factory stood some kind of warehouse. There was a small, unsophisticated power plant and an irrigation system. Some crops; the two planted fields splashed bright greens and yellows and reds against the drab brown of everywhere else. A few domestic animals grazed another splash of green. Other buildings lined three sides of what looked like a central communal gathering area. There were even some children, playing with a ball. And unless he was mistaken, no battle droids…

  “Is it safe?” said Anakin, suddenly uncertain. “I think it’s safe. Does it feel safe to you?”

  “Yes. Now come on. We need to get out of the open.”

  So tired by this time they were close to staggering, they picked their way down the back side of the hill, making sure to stay close to the narrow road’s crumbling edge, just in case a vehicle caught them from behind. Stinging eyes fixed on the village, on salvation, they used every Jedi trick they knew to stay on their feet.

  They were well beyond the village’s boundary, unchallenged, past the mine and the refinery and nearing the village’s heart, when the playing children saw them and ran shouting for a grown-up. Soon after that an antigrav floater came toward them along the main street, guided by a tall, thin woman in a baggy brown tunic and trousers and synthafibe boots. Most of her gray hair was covered in a faded red scarf. She halted the floater in front of them, blocking the way.

  Watchful, suspicious, a length of old pipe in one hand, she slowly looked them up and down. “What do you want?”

  Obi-Wan took a deep breath. Humble, humble. Don’t alarm her. “Help,” he said, pitching his voice a little high. “Please, Teeba? My cousin and I need your help.”

  Chapter Two

  Count Dooku stirred out of uneasy sleep, one dark thought reverberating in his mind, in his bones, and through his gently surging blood.

  Something is wrong.

  He sat up. The shielded window in his cruiser’s stateroom was uncurtained. Starlight leavened the shadows and picked out the flecks of gold thread in his sumptuous bedcover. Holding out his hand, he admired the silvery wash across his skin. Such a simple, elegant beauty.

  Then he commed the bridge. “Why are we at sublight?”

  “My lord Count,
an irregularity was detected in the hyperdrive conversion chamber. It is being addressed now.”

  “Address it quickly,” he said, smiling at the subtle play of light and dark between his fingers. “Or I will be displeased.”

  “Yes, my lord Count.”

  The bridge officer’s fear warmed him. Complacency in one’s servants was anathema. And then, disconnecting from the comm board, he frowned. So was it this trouble with the hyperdrive that had stirred him from sleep? Or was some other mischief brewing? He closed his eyes to the starlight and let his superbly honed senses unfurl.

  Power hummed subliminally through the cruiser’s durasteel skeleton as it sailed the astral winds of the galaxy’s Mid Rim Territories. Touched with melancholy, he sighed. This was his life now: no permanent home, no civilized planet to call his own. Coruscant denied him. Well, at least for now. Until the pustuled boil that was the Jedi Order had been lanced and drained and the Republic once and for all set free of the hypocritical tyranny that Yoda and his minions represented… and perpetuated.

  Only the clarity of the Sith can save us.

  But until that clarity prevailed he was perforce a vagabond, cruelly destined to wander the stars. Chained to the likes of General Grievous and Nute Gunray and the other stunted slime of the Separatist Alliance, every last one of them venal and greedy and corrupt to the core. Breathing the same air as such creatures made him ill. Only because Lord Sidious commanded it could he stomach the task. Only his dreams of the day he would see them slaughtered eased the pain of dealing with them.

  “Fret not,” his exacting Master had told him. “They serve a purpose, and must live until that purpose is served. You may trust me implicitly, Tyranus—when they are no longer useful I shall see them cut down.”

  Cold comfort, perhaps, but comfort nonetheless. Still, even so—

  Something is wrong.

  Wrong, and elusive. Dooku withdrew himself from the Force and opened his eyes. The chrono on his nightstand glowed dim blue. A breath past midnight, ship time. He hadn’t been asleep for long. Clad luxuriously in silk, he slid from the bed and crossed to the shielded window. Where were they, exactly? He read the starry void beyond the transparisteel with careless ease, his knowledge of the Republic intimate and instant. Ah, yes. Currently his cruiser was skirting Kothlis, where the natives scrambled like desperate ants to prepare themselves in case of another Separatist attack.