"You're the chosen one, Anakin," Mace said, his voice going thin with strain. This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade. "Take him. It's your destiny.'"

Skywalker echoed him faintly. "Destiny ..."

"Help me! I can't hold on any longer!" The yellow glare from Palpatine's eyes spread outward through his flesh. His skin flowed like oil, as though the muscle beneath was burning away, as though even the bones of his skull were softening, were bending and bulging, deforming from the heat and pressure of his electric hatred. "He is killing me, Anakin-! Please, Anaaahhh-"

Mace's blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. "Anakin, he's too strong for me-"

"Ahhh-" Palpatine's roar above above the endless blast of lightning became a fading moan of despair.

The lightning swallowed itself, leaving only the night and the rain, and an old man crumpled to his knees on a slippery ledge.

"I ... can't. I give up. I ... I am too weak, in the end. Too old, and too weak. Don't kill me, Master Jedi. Please. I surrender."

Victory flooded through Mace's aching body. He lifted his blade. "You Sith disease-"

" Wait-" Skywalker seized his lightsaber arm with desperate strength. "Don't kill him-you can't just kill him, Master-"

"Yes, I can," Mace said, grim and certain. "I have to."

"You came to arrest him. He has to stand trial-"

"A trial would be a joke. He controls the courts. He controls the Senate-"

"So are you going to kill all them, too? Like he said you would?"

Mace yanked his arm free. "He's too dangerous to be left alive. If you could have taken Dooku alive, would you have?"

Skywalker's face swept itself clean of emotion. "That was different-"

Mace turned toward the cringing, beaten Sith Lord. "You can explain the difference after he's dead."

He raised his lightsaber.

"I need him alive!" Skywalker shouted. "I need him to save Padme!"

Mace thought blankly, Why? And moved his lightsaber toward the fallen Chancellor.

Before he could follow through on his stroke, a sudden arc of blue plasma sheared through his wrist and his hand tumbled away with his lightsaber still in it and Palpatine roared back to his feet and lightning speared from the Sith Lord's hands and without his blade to catch it, the power of Palpatine's hate struck him full-on.

He had been so intent on Palpatine's shatterpoint that he'd never thought to look for Anakin's.

Dark lightning blasted away his universe. He fell forever.

Anakin Skywalker knelt in the rain.

He was looking at a hand. The hand had brown skin. The hand held a lightsaber. The hand had a charred oval of tissue where it should have been attached to an arm.

"What have I done?"

Was it his voice? It must have been. Because it was his question.

"What have I done?"

Another hand, a warm and human hand, laid itself softly on his shoulder.

"You're following your destiny, Anakin," said a familiar gentle voice. "The Jedi are traitors. You saved the Republic from their treachery. You can see that, can't you?"

"You were right," Anakin heard himself saying. "Why didn't I know?"

"You couldn't have. They cloaked themselves in deception, my boy. Because they feared your power, they could never trust you."

Anakin stared at the hand, but he no longer saw it.

"Obi-Wan-Obi-Wan trusts me . . ."

"Not enough to tell you of their plot."

Treason echoed in his memory.

. . . this is not an a.s.signment for the record . . .

That warm and human hand gave his shoulder a warm and human squeeze. "I do not fear your power, Anakin, I embrace it. You are the greatest of the Jedi. You can be the greatest of the Sith. I believe that, Anakin. I believe in you. I trust you. I trust you. I trust you."

Anakin looked from the dead hand on the ledge to the living one on his shoulder, then up to the face of the man who stood above him, and what he saw there choked him like an invisible fist crushing his throat.

The hand on his shoulder was human.

The face . . . wasn't.

The eyes were a cold and feral yellow, and they gleamed like those of a predator lurking beyond a fringe of firelight; the bone around those feral eyes had swollen and melted and flowed like durasteel spilled from a fusion smelter, and the flesh that blanketed it had gone corpse-gray and coa.r.s.e as rotten synthplast.

Stunned with horror, stunned with revulsion, Anakin could only stare at the creature. At the shadow.

Looking into the face of the darkness, he saw his future.

"Now come inside," the darkness said.

After a moment, he did.

Anakin stood just within the office. Motionless.

Palpatine examined the damage to his face in a broad expanse of wall mirror. Anakin couldn't tell if his expression might be revulsion, or if this were merely the new shape of his features. Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.

"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."

He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office's ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine's hand.

He remembered playing a Force game with a shuura fruit, sitting across a long table from Padme in the retreat by the lake on Naboo. He remembered telling her how grumpy Obi-Wan would be to see him use the Force so casually.

Palpatine seemed to catch his thought; he gave a yellow sidelong glance as the robe settled onto his shoulders.

"You must learn to cast off the petty restraints that the Jedi have tried to place upon your power," he said. "Anakin, it's time. I need you to help me restore order to the galaxy."

Anakin didn't respond.

Sidious said, "Join me. Pledge yourself to the Sith. Become my apprentice."

A wave of tingling started at the base of Anakin's skull and spread over his whole body in a slow-motion shockwave.

"I-I can't."

"Of course you can."

Anakin shook his head and found that the rest of him threatened to begin shaking as well. "I-came to save your life, sir. Not to betray my friends-"

Sidious snorted. "What friends?"

Anakin could find no answer.

"And do you think that task is finished, my boy?" Sidious seated himself on the corner of the desk, hands folded in his lap, the way he always had when offering Anakin fatherly advice; the misshapen mask of his face made the familiarity of his posture into something horrible. "Do you think that killing one traitor will end treason? Do you think the Jedi will ever stop until I am dead?"

Anakin stared at his hands. The left one was shaking. He hid it behind him.

"It's them or me, Anakin. Or perhaps I should put it more plainly: It's them or Padme."

Anakin made his right hand-his black-gloved hand of durasteel and electrodrivers-into a fist.

"It's just-it's not . . . easy, that's all. I have-I've been a Jedi for so long-"

Sidious offered an appalling smile. "There is a place within you, my boy, a place as briskly clean as ice on a mountaintop, cool and remote. Find that high place, and look down within yourself; breathe that clean, icy air as you regard your guilt and shame. Do not deny them; observe them. Take your horror in your hands and look at it. Examine it as a phenomenon. Smell it. Taste it. Come to know it as only you can, for it is yours, and it is precious."

As the shadow beside him spoke, its words became true. From a remote, frozen distance that was at the same time more extravagantly, hotly intimate than he could have ever dreamed, Anakin handled his emotions. He dissected them. He rea.s.sembled them and pulled them apart again. He still felt them-if anything, they burned hotter than before-but they no longer had the power to cloud his mind.

"You have found it, my boy: I can feel you there. That cold distance-that mountaintop within yourself-that is the first key to the power of the Sith."

Anakin opened his eyes and turned his gaze fully upon the grotesque features of Darth Sidious.

He didn't even blink.

As he looked upon that mask of corruption, the revulsion he felt was real, and it was powerful, and it was-Interesting.

Anakin lifted his hand of durasteel and electrodrivers and cupped it, staring into its palm as though he held there the fear that had haunted his dreams for his whole life, and it was no larger than the piece of shuura he'd once stolen from Padme's plate.

On the mountain peak within himself, he weighed Padme's life against the Jedi Order.

It was no contest.

He said, "Yes."

"Yes to what, my boy?"

"Yes, I want your knowledge."

"Good. Good!"

"I want your power. I want the power to stop death."

"That power only my Master truly achieved, but together we will find it. The Force is strong with you, my boy. You can do anything."

"The Jedi betrayed you," Anakin said. "The Jedi betrayed both of us."

"As you say. Are you ready?"

"I am," he said, and meant it. "I give myself to you. I pledge myself to the ways of the Sith. Take me as your apprentice. Teach me. Lead me. Be my Master."

Sidious raised the hood of his robe and draped it to shadow the ruin of his face.

"Kneel before me, Anakin Skywalker."

Anakin dropped to one knee. He lowered his head.

"It is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?"

There was no hesitation. "Yes."

Darth Sidious laid a pale hand on Anakin's brow. "Then it is done. You are now one with the Order of the Dark Lords of the Sith. From this day forward, the truth of you, my apprentice, now and forevermore, will be Darth ..."

A pause; a questioning in the Force-An answer, dark as the gap between galaxies-He heard Sidious say it: his new name.

Vader.

A pair of syllables that meant him. Vader, he said to himself. Vader.

"Thank you, my Master."

"Every single Jedi, including your friend Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi have been revealed as enemies of the Republic now. You understand that, don't you?"

"Yes, my Master."

"The Jedi are relentless. If they are not destroyed to the last being, there will be civil war without end. To sterilize the Jedi Temple will be your first task. Do what must be done, Lord Vader."

"I always have, my Master."

"Do not hesitate. Show no mercy. Leave no living creature behind. Only then will you be strong enough with the dark side to save Padme."

"What of the other Jedi?"

"Leave them to me. After you have finished at the Temple, your second task will be the Separatist leadership, in their 'secret bunker' on Mustafar. When you have killed them all, the Sith will rule the galaxy once more, and we shall have peace. Forever.