Hallena edged her way to the front of the line, drawing surly and envious glances as if she were being accorded some kind of privilege. As she turned sideways to edge between two men-remember, mind your body language, think pa.s.sive, think humble-she caught the eye of one of them, and it was a moment of reminder, of revelation. She looked into the eyes of a starving man; not literally, because he seemed solidly built, but a man desperate to find a day's work, and perhaps she had s.n.a.t.c.hed it from him. The man stared back. It was just a heartbeat, not even a second.

She had never seen that look on Coruscant, not up close. Suddenly she understood the heart of the enemy she was facing; and it scared her more than warships and invasions because it could not be shot down, bombed, or brought to a negotiating table. It was the face of desperation, of a fear and need so primal that it could be mobilized to do anything.

We've picked a loser here.

This place is ripe for revolution. No wonder the Seps want to move in. One push, one coup...

"What are you kriffing well waiting for, then?" the overseer yelled. "You want this job or not? I got a hundred ready to take your place, sweetheart."

"Sorry, sir." Arrogant barve. I hope I have cause to drop you . . . "Right away, sir."

Hallena jerked her eyes away and pushed through the line. She hadn't realized it had been that obvious. It was just a split second's glance. She'd have to be much more careful in a society where everyone was clearly geared up to watching and denouncing their neighbor to survive.

She held out her fake identichip to the overseer. He took it, slipped it into a chip reader, and stared at the display. It wasn't the first time that she'd stood on that knife-edge between life and death, hoping that her cover wasn't blown, but...

Hey, I'm not behind enemy lines yet. I'm here with the Regent's consent and knowledge. Why am I feeling like this?

The overseer smirked as he glanced at the readout. It must have shown him her prison record. "Learned your lesson, then, troublemaker?"

"I just want to keep my head down and put food on the table," she said.

"If I get a single sniff of you stirring up the rabble in here, I'll personally cut your throat."

Yes, this was the hardest part of undercover work. Not staring down the muzzle of a blaster; not dreading discovery and a lonely, anonymous death, undiscovered and a long way from home. The most unbearable moment for Hallena Devis was biting her lip while a piece of sc.u.m like this insulted her intelligence, and not dispensing the instant justice he richly deserved.

But she could find a few moments for that in her busy schedule later, she was sure.

"Like I said," she murmured, eyes lowered, hating herself for even being able to feign submission, "I want to eat. That's all."

The supervisor seemed to feel that he'd made his point. "Report to the personnel office," he said, and stepped back to let her pa.s.s into the compound. The rusty main doors parted to let her in, and the clanging, hissing, throbbing noise of a busy factory spilled out in a deafening wave. It hurt her ears as she walked with her head lowered through the cavernous hangar, past a.s.sembly lines where scores of workers were sealing small canisters or checking durasteel components against measuring rods, but n.o.body took much notice of her. One man glanced up, smiled, then went back to riveting a durasteel sheet around the curve of what looked like an exhaust. By the time Hallena got to the personnel office-a shabby cubicle at the far end of the factory floor-a scruffy droid that looked in worse shape than the metal being hammered all around her was watching intently.

While one arm continued shuffling flimsi and the other tapped on an accounting pad, it reached out behind itself with a manipulator mounted on its back. A broom arced around in that third hand and almost smacked her in the legs. If anyone was doing an efficiency study, the droid scored a clean hundred every time. Hallena wondered what it was doing with its legs under the desk. No limb was idle, that was for sure.

"One broom," the droid said. "You break it or lose it, you pay for it. You sweep the entire production area floor plus the refreshers and the corridors. Ten-minute meal break when the klaxon sounds. You go home when the place is inspected and approved by the overseer. If he approves, you get paid and come back again in the morning. If he doesn't, you get nothing and don't come back. Any questions?"

Hallena was tempted, but her discipline had kicked in fully now. She didn't even think a sharp retort.

"No," she said, and took the broom in both hands, quarterstaff-style. "I don't need a floor plan to find my way around, do I?"

The droid was incapable of sneering, but it managed to convey its disdain pretty well simply with pauses that would have made an actor envious.

"What's to find?" it said at last. "Eyes down, find the dust, push the broom. Stop when you can see the original color of the tiles. Anything else you find dirty-clean it."

So Hallena had managed to disappear instantly into the shrouded existence of the workforce. So far, so good. She headed for the refreshers and concentrated on looking authentic.

Stang, they stank. If she needed any excuse to hide away from the factory floor, a pail of disinfectant and a brush would be the perfect cover to retreat out of here. She got to work. A quick and discreet sweep with the bug sensor set in her wrist chrono showed there was no surveillance cam making sure the workers didn't linger too long in here with a copy of a holozine.

Is the rest of the planet as vile as this?

Republic Intel said it was. But it wasn't the Republic's problem. All that mattered was stopping the Separatists from over-throwing the Regent and invading the planet.

Maybe they can overthrow the regime when the war's over. This isn't an ally I like very much . ..

The one good thing about living in a dictatorship like Jan-Fathal, though, was that the information underground, the exchange of whispered news and gossip, was a lot faster and sharper than in the complacent walkways of Coruscant, where they were more worried about smashball scores and scandalous holovid actresses. That was democracies for you: they didn't know what they had until they lost it. Here, information was precious. Secrets mattered. And within an hour, Hallena backed out of a refresher cubicle to find the path of her broom blocked by two workers in dark gray coveralls.

Their working clothes had probably been another color once, but that gray dust got everywhere.

Hallena paused and leaned on her broom.

"My mama used to say to lift your feet when a lady was doing the cleaning ..."

The two were familiar. They should have been. She'd studied their holoimages for long enough.

"Sister Taman," the worker said, holding out her hand. "I think you're among friends again. I'm Merish Hath, and this is my comrade Shil Kaval. We're union."

"Union," Hallena said slowly, "got me a few years in jail."

"Times are changing," said Shil. "But not fast enough."

Hallena went back to sweeping. "Don't expect me to help you speed 'em up . . ."

Merish had effectively blocked the exit. It was all working better than Hallena had hoped. "They say you were a committed activist in Nuth before the Regent had the town razed to the ground."

Oh, great briefing, Intel. What? Razed when? "Don't want to talk about it."

"And we've got more supportive friends to call on now the war's kicked off."

Hallena paused, straightened up, and maintained a skeptical face. Desperate people did indeed do desperate things. This was, just as Intel had said, the route to the Separatist infiltration here. It was going to be a more straightforward job than she thought.

Maybe just a few weeks. Maybe-I can find some time with Gil.

Maybe I won't feel bad at all when I look back at how I stopped these people putting their Regent's head on a well-deserved spike.

"This had better be good," she said. "I'm not doing any more time inside."

"You won't need to," said Merish. "All that's going to change."

Hallena managed one more careful moment of hesitation and then shook the woman's hand. Shil patted her on the back.

Now-now she was behind enemy lines.

Chapter Two.

Do you seriously believe that half a galaxy would side with Nute Gunray because all those planets, all their inhabitants, are evil? What does evil mean anyway? How can that many beings be just. . . evil? For every scheming Trade Federation politico out to crush the Republic, there are trillions of beings who have real reasons to hate the Coruscant regime. All they were waiting for was a leader to give them an excuse to do something about it.

-Cormen A'Lanti, political a.n.a.lyst, HNE SENATOR AMIDALA'S APARTMENT BLOCK, SENATE DISTRICT, CORUSCANT.

Padme loved surprises. She was certainly going to get one now.

Anakin Skywalker teetered on the parapet two stories above her balcony, judging the leap he would need to make to land on the rail below and then slip through the transparisteel doors unseen. There'd be the security cam recording to erase, of course- a little Force wipe, swiftly and discreetly applied-but he'd become very good at that. He understood the need to protect politicians in a war like this. His own wife didn't need protecting from him, though.

This is crazy. It shouldn't be this way.

He stared out over Galactic City. At night, it was magical, a starfield in its own right; scattered pinpoints of every color across the spectrum, hubs of intense light, nebula-like effects of an illuminated tapcaf sign seen through the gauze of a steam vent. And for all that light, all that life above and below and around him, he was invisible. n.o.body noticed a man in a dull brown bantha wool cloak merging with the shadows and contrasts of a building that stretched a thousand meters into the night sky.

Beautiful.

Anakin took a breath, held it, and jumped.

The wind caught his cloak and slowed him, but he was braking his descent with the Force anyway. The sensation was not one of falling but of feeling the world accelerate past him. When his boots. .h.i.t the permacrete fifteen meters below, the cushioning effect made him wonder what it was like for ordinary beings to fall that far.

Painful. Lethal. Do I really know what danger feels like to other people?

No, he didn't, and it made him marvel again that ordinary men, his troopers, would follow him into situations that he could stroll through with Force a.s.sistance and they could not. He hoped he never forgot that.

He opened the side door carefully and slipped in, still ready to deflect a blaster bolt if he startled her. "I'm home," he called. "Padme?"

The bedroom doors parted sharply and she stepped out into the living room, face covered in a thick white paste and a towel wrapped tight around her hair.

"You could have called first. . . ," she said, lips hardly moving. She sounded like one of those voice-throwing acts where a guy made his performing akk dog look as if it were talking. "Don't make me crack this. I have to leave it on for an hour."

Anakin tried to hug her as best he could without getting close to whatever the goop was on her face. It seemed to have set hard, like plaster. "You don't need all that. You're beautiful enough without it."

"Even a Senator is ent.i.tled to a girl's night in with a beauty mask and a holozine."

"I can go back to the Outer Rim if you like ..."

"Don't you dare."

"Have you heard the one about the Trandoshan who goes into a tapcaf ?"

"Don't make me laugh."

"Well, the Trando goes up to the barkeep and says..."

"Don't."

"-he says, 'I'll have four mugs of-' "

"Don't!" Padme froze for a moment and then burst into giggles, hands pressed hard to her face. When she took them away, chunks of the mask fell off like the collapsing facade of a building. "Oh, I've cracked it. . . great. All that waiting, and now I've got to apply it all over again."

"No, you don't," he said, and took her hand. "Come on. I've taken a couple of days off, and we're not going to spend it on beauty treatments ..."

Padme followed him to the refresher door. "Days? Where's Ahsoka, then?"

"I left her with Rex." Anakin ushered her gently into the room. "Rinse all that gunk off. Come on."

Padme turned on the faucet and splashed her face with water. "You do place a lot of responsibility on Rex, Ani. Above and beyond."

"He can handle it." Anakin watched the white-faced stranger transform back into his wife. He had so little time with her, and it was always furtive time, stolen time, so even these silly moments felt intense and precious. "Ahsoka might talk like she's the Grand Admiral of the Fleet, but she respects Rex. And I suspect some lessons are easier when learned from him instead of me."

"Rex can be very charming when he wants to be."

Anakin bristled instinctively and then felt stupid about it. "He can also bring her back down to ground level pretty fast when needed."

"So we have a couple of days."

"And it's not like we can go out and be seen together, is it?"

"I get the idea." She grinned as she dried her face, then unwound the towel around her hair. "Discretion . . . look, this city runs on gossip, and we can never be too careful. Make some caf, darling, would you? I'll just tidy myself up."

We can never be too careful.

She'd said it before; he knew that well enough, even though he resented it more each day. Just walking around Coruscant-any world, in fact-reminded him that they couldn't do the trivial things that any ordinary couple took for granted: a stroll in a park, a drink in a tapcaf, a trip to the theater. Sometimes he struggled with his simmering anger about it all, and at others he wondered how he could take his Jedi calling seriously while deceiving not only the Jedi Council, but Obi-Wan as well.

If I don't believe the Order is right about attachment. . . what else am I going to reject? Where will it stop?

This war was the only clean-cut thing about his life apart from Padme; he had a real, tangible enemy trying to kill him, and he loved Padme to the point of sickening fear at the thought of her ever being taken from him. Those were the twin certainties in his life. So he fought, and he loved, because he knew how to do both.

But philosophy was much harder to grasp in his hand than a lightsaber.

"Ani, have you gone to Charra to grow that caf yourself?"

Anakin looked up, jerked out of his thoughts as he stood with the container still in one hand and the caf pot still empty. Padme glided into the kitchen in one of her elegant gowns, fierce electric blue sateen that cast a turquoise reflection on the glossy white cabinets.

"Just thinking," he said.

Padme gave a theatrical sigh. "You just can't get good help these days."

She took the caf container from him and started making a pot herself. See, there's an ordinary moment. A Senator, a queen, a woman who can change the galaxy, making caf like any Cor-uscant housewife. Why not? Isn't that what life really is? Anakin wasn't sure how long he could keep this up. He wondered why Obi-Wan didn't sense what was going on. How could he miss the turmoil and pa.s.sion in the Force, right under his nose?

"Have you seen the latest on Senator Herbin?" Padme held the caf container to her nose and inhaled deeply. It wasn't a dis-tracted moment. Anakin knew when she was making an effort to look unconcerned. "It's all over HNE. Dating that awful holovid actress from Republic Medcenter. The one who protests about the war."

"I don't know Herbin," Anakin said. "I don't care about gossip. There's a war on."

"I meant that politicians are vulnerable to prying."

"So what's the scandal?" Anakin reached for the cups, translucent porceplast from Naboo that still had a royal crest on it. "That he's a married man, that he dates a protester, or that he's obviously got lousy taste in holovids?"

"You know what I mean. We have to be more careful. We have to be more aware that people notice things. The way you look at me in public, the way we talk. All the little signs."

That didn't sound like Padme. She hadn't been this nervous to begin with. "Has someone said something to you?"