"Why do you want to know?"

"You put the first round into Sal-Solo. Take the million credits and get lost."

Her face was a mask of contempt. "You know what you can do with your credits."

She was family all right. He knew it at a gut level, anyway. "Got any brothers or sisters?"

"No. And no kids, either."

He never thought to ask that. "You're too young anyway."

"I was married. We marry young, don't we?"

Oh, how we repeat history. I don't need this trouble. I've got enough of my own.

Fett didn't ask why she wasn't married any longer. Her sour manner might have had something to do with that. But he'd started to respect her; and she was his granddaughter.

She was all the family he had.

No, you need her to find the clone, and she knows what happened to Sintas .. .

He was playing games with himself, justifying his sentimentality with bogus pragmatism. He could find the clone on his own. He didn't need to know what happened to his wife. No, he was driven by the same craving that had made his father ask Dooku for a cloned son as part of his fee for being the progenitor of the clone army: he badly wanted family. It would have been simpler to find a wife and settle down, but Boba Fett was no more capable of that than his father had been.

"So we're going to fight over a corpse."

"You just want to win," said Mirta. "Doesn't matter what you win."

Fat couldn't even be angry with her. He leaned against Slave I's hull and gazed up at the sky through his helmet's macrobinocular visor, waiting for the Millennium Falcon to appear as a speck in the sky and drop onto the landing strip. Mirta waited beside him-but not with him. He could almost feel the invisible wall she had placed between them.

It was a long half hour.

The Falcon swept across the strip and then looped back to land fifty meters away. Fett straightened up and went to meet her, Mirta at his heels.

Leia Solo was first off the ship and walked toward him as if barring his way. "I'm truly sorry about this, Fett. You, too, Mirta."

Fett walked past her and climbed the open ramp into the cargo hold. Han was maneuvering a repulsor gurney into the main bay, and he glanced over his shoulder at the two of them.

"Are you going to put us back on your hit list?" Han asked. "If you're thinking of going after Jacen, he's too tough a quarry, even for you."

Fett shook his head in slow, measured contempt. "I don't have to punish anyone, Solo. Your son orders his own sister to fire on civilians and then suspends her from duty when she refuses. No, I think I'll leave you to your happy family. I've got more pressing business."

He watched Han look at Leia, and Leia look at Han, and knew that he'd dropped a thermal detonator on them. So they didn't know.

Fierfek, that's my daughter in that body bag.

The silence was that heavy moment before a thunderstorm, pressing down on all of them.

Leia-yes, his predecessor Fenn Shysa had been very sweet on Leia, way back before she married the s.p.a.ce b.u.m-made a helpless gesture toward the hatch.

"I can get someone to arrange a funeral for you, Fett."

"No," he said. "She's mine." Time for a gesture. "She's ours."

"Okay." Leia's voice was low and careful. "Take it easy."

"I want to see her body."

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"Princess Leia, I said I want to see my daughter's body."

Mirta took hold of his arm. Is that for her comfort or mine? Fett was once again glad of his helmet, because he didn't want Han Solo to see his grief. His voice gave nothing away.

"And I want to see my mother," said Mirta.

Leia stepped back, but Han hovered. Fett couldn't stop his voice hardening. "Leave us for a few minutes, Solo."

"Fett-"

"I said leave us."

Han looked embarra.s.sed and Leia steered him toward the hatch. Fett and Mirta were now alone in the cargo bay anteroom with the trolley.

They both hesitated and made a move for it at the same time. Fett stood back for Mirta, and she eased open the cover, eyes fixed and staring.

It was only the slight jerk of her chin that told him she was shocked. He stood beside her and saw a stranger. Ailyn Vel's face was bruised and cut but surprisingly peaceful: she wore a Kiffar tattoo, three black lines from her left brow to cheekbone, like her mother Sintas had done. Her dark hair was heavily streaked with gray.

That's my little girl.

He tried very hard to feel that the body of a middle-aged woman he didn't recognize was the child he had once held.

They said that your kids never stopped being your babies, however old they were, but Fett couldn't make that connection.

But I want to. I want to feel that.

You missed her whole life. Everything. Did she ever call me Dada? No, I don't recall that she did.

Mirta leaned over, placed the heart-of-fire around her mother's neck, and laid her cheek against hers. Then she straightened up and stood back, as if to give him s.p.a.ce to take his leave of Ailyn as well. And that was hard. He hesitated, because he could feel another memory, one that he hadn't suppressed and didn't want to, crowding in on him. He was in a dusty arena on Geonosis sixty years before, picking up his father's helmet.

Jedi always take everything from me.

Fett would have to remove his helmet to kiss her goodbye and he wasn't ready for that, not here. He tidied Ailyn's hair with gloved fingers and was about to close the body bag when the urge not to lose the heart-of-fire overcame him. It was all he had of a happier time.

He unfastened it and found Mirta staring at him, grim and unblinking. She wanted it to rest with Ailyn's body.

There was a solution.

Hearts-of-fire had a grain, a crystalline structure that created lines of weakness that jewelers used to cleave the stones into smaller, workable pieces. Fett set the small disc on its edge and took out his blaster. A couple of hard cracks with the stock split the stone down the cleavage line, and it fell into two slices. Fett eased one piece off the leather thong and handed it to Mirta before placing the remains of the necklace around Ailyn's neck again.

He'd handled a lot of dead bodies. If you were a bounty hunter, it went with the job. It was only when he fumbled fastening the leather cord at the back of the neck and had to remove his gloves that he actually touched Ailyn.

Her hair was coa.r.s.er than he'd imagined. Her skin was icy silk.

And that was the point at which he truly knew that he had lost his only child. He had never been there for her, and that was a pain he knew would never fade, not like his memory of Sintas. His father had been there for him. But he'd failed to live up to him in the most important way of all: by being as good a father as Jango Fett.

"Let's go," said Mirta. "We're taking her home."

It had suddenly become we. "Where's home? Not Taris."

"Mandalore."

"I don't actually have a property there now."

"Time you got one, then."

Boba Fett and Mirta returned to Slave I and laid Ailyn Vel in the refrigerated hold that had been designed for prisoners whose warrant had included the word dead. It didn't feel right, but it was the only practical solution for the journey back to Mandalore.

Whoever that Kad'ika was, he had a point. Sometimes you really needed somewhere to call home forever. Fett made his way back up through Slave I's central hatch and settled in the pilot's seat. Mirta, still silent, slipped into the copilot's position.

"Beviin says we Mandalorians rarely bury our dead," said Fett. "But I never was much of a Mandalorian."

"Mama was Kiffar."

Okay. "What do you want to do, then?"

Mina's eyes brimmed. "I don't know right now."

Fett lifted off his helmet. "We'll head back to Mandalore. By way of Geonosis, because that's where I buried my dad. Family needs keeping together."

It was the longest conversation about anything other than business that he'd had with anyone since he was a kid. It was personal, agonizingly so, and the effort hurt. He finally let the tears run down his face in silence.

Mirta cried beside him, occasionally gulping for air. It was all very quiet and embarra.s.sed, as if neither was willing to admit they could weep, but the truth was that they both could, and hard.

They were family now. It was the worst possible way to forge a bond. But it was a bond, even if there was no affection, and for the first time in his life it was one that Boba Fett would try to approach as a father himself, not as a man constantly living in the past in search of one who would never return.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

He will strengthen himself through sacrifice.

He will ruin those who deny justice.

He will immortalize his love.

-Prophecy of the Sith, foretold in ta.s.sel artifact LUMIYA'S SAFE HOUSE, GALACTIC CITY.

Jacen had the dream again, the one where he found himself staring at a weapon in his hands and sobbing.

The dream had taken a number of forms in the last few days. In the first, he held his lightsaber; in those that followed, he held a Yuuzhan Vong amphistaff, or a blaster, or a lightwhip. In one, he even held a weapon he didn't recognize at all.

The recurrence bothered him enough to seek Lumiya's advice. He stood at the doorway of her apartment block and looked up into the Coruscant sky to see if he could detect any light from the window. She was there, he knew.

Luke knew, too. He just didn't know where she was, how very close. An airspeeder could cover the distance from the Skywalkers' apartment to the safe house in under an hour. But did it matter? Events were moving faster than his uncle would ever believe. They were almost moving too fast for Jacen to comprehend, and he let himself be carried with them, trusting the Force.

Inside the apartment, Lumiya sat meditating, her face veiled again. There was no Force illusion this time; the apartment looked like any other rented apartment with basic furniture and taupe carpet, a strangely mundane setting for such pivotal events.

In her hands Lumiya held the ta.s.sels whose knots and threads were a language, a prophecy, an arcane instruction book of what Jacen had to do to achieve full Sith knowledge and power. On the low table in front of her was a candle, burning steadily and occasionally guttering in a draft.

"I have dreams," he said. "Dreams of weapons that I've used."

"And they distress you," said Lumiya.

"All I recall is that I'm looking at a weapon in my hand and feeling enormous grief."

"It might just be a dream and not a vision."

"The weapon is different each time."

"Perhaps just a dream, then."

He hoped so. Even Jedi had dreams like normal people, fed by the day's events and fueled by stresses and strains and unresolved conflicts. If he was having bad dreams, no doctor would be surprised. In a short time he had learned to do things . . . no, he had instigated things that he would never have thought he was capable of doing. When he looked at the shock and revulsion on the faces of those close to him-his father, his mother, even Ben-he could stand back and see reflected in their eyes how much he had changed.

"I find myself pursuing the memory of my grandfather with increasing frequency."

Lumiya fondled the strands of the ta.s.sels and ran the knots between her thumb and forefinger. She seemed to be reading them.

"You depend on location to flow-walk in time," she said. "So you can only see what happened to Lord Vader on Coruscant."

"Is that your way of telling me I need to find out more elsewhere?"

"No, I'm saying that if you look for vindication in the past, it will be at best selective."

"I feel I'm reliving parts of Anakin Skywalker's life. I'd be crazy if I didn't try to learn from that."

"But you already know that your path differs. He was seduced into errors. You won't be."

"All right, let me ask again. What more do I need to learn to fulfill my destiny?"

Lumiya slowly extended her arm and held out the ta.s.sels she had been running between her fingers. He reached out and took them. They felt suddenly red-hot, and he tossed them a little in the air out of pure animal instinct, as if he had grabbed a hot breadstick from an oven. When the threads fell back into his hand they were cold.

"This is your final trial, Jacen. You've sacrificed a great deal-the approval of all those who meant most to you. You've taken extreme measures to deal with those who deny justice.

Now you must consider the third prophecy."