than you know yourself. I nursed you after the Battle of Alderaan, when you lay near death from that Jedi witch. You speak the words in earnest—conflict, evolution, perfection—but belief does not reach your heart.”
He stared at her, the twin stalks of her lekku framing the lovely symmetry of her face. She held his eyes, unflinching, the scar that stretched across her throat visible under her collar.
Struck by her beauty, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. She did not resist and pressed her curves against him. He slipped his respirator to the side and kissed her with his ruined lips, kissed her hard.
“Perhaps you do not know me as well as you imagine,” he said, his voice unmuffled by the mechanical filter of his respirator.
As a boy, he had killed a Twi’lek servant woman in his adoptive father’s house, his first kill. She had committed some minor offense he could no longer recall and that had never mattered. He had not killed her because of her misdeed. He’d killed her to assure himself that he could kill. He still recalled the pride with which his adoptive father had regarded the Twi’lek’s corpse. Soon afterward, Malgus had been sent to the Sith Academy on Dromund Kaas.
“I think I do know you,” she said, defiant.
He smiled, she smiled, and he released her. He replaced his respirator and checked the chrono on his wrist.
If all went as planned, the defense grid should come down in moments.
A surge of emotion went through him, born in his certainty that his entire life had for its purpose the next hour, that the Force had brought him to the moment when he would engineer the fall of the Republic and the ascendance of the Empire.
His comlink received a message. He tapped a key to decrypt it.
It is done, the words read.
The Mandalorian had done her job. He did not know the woman’s real name, so in his mind she had become a title, the Mandalorian. He knew only that she worked for money, hated the Jedi for some personal reason known only to herself, and was extraordinarily skilled.
The message told him that the planet’s defense grid had gone dark, yet none of the thousands of sentients who shared the plaza with him looked concerned. No alarm had sounded. Military and security ships were not racing through the sky. The civilian and military authorities were oblivious to the fact that Coruscant’s security net had been compromised.
But they would notice it before long. And they would disbelieve what their instruments told them. They would run a test to determine if the readings were accurate.
By then, Coruscant would be aflame.
We are moving, he keyed into the device. Meet us within.
He took one last look around, at the children and their parents playing, laughing, eating, everyone going about their lives, unaware that everything was about to change.
“Come,” he said to Eleena, and picked up his pace. His cloak swirled around him. So, too, his anger.
Moments later he received another coded transmission, this one from the hijacked drop ship.
Jump complete. On approach. Arrival in ninety seconds.
Ahead, he saw the four towers surrounding the stacked tiers of the Jedi Temple, its ancient stone as orange as fire in the light of the setting sun. The civilians seemed to give it a wide berth, as if it were a holy place rather than one of sacrilege.
He would reduce it to rubble.
He walked toward it and fate walked beside him.
Statues of long-dead Jedi Masters lined the approach to the Temple’s enormous doorway. The setting sun stretched the statue’s tenebrous forms across the duracrete. He walked through the shadows and past them, noting some names: Odan-Urr, Ooroo, Arca Jeth.
“You have been deceived,” he whispered to them. “Your time is past.”
Most of the Jedi Order’s current Masters were away, either participating in the sham negotiations on Alderaan or protecting Republic interests offplanet, but the Temple was not entirely unguarded. Three uniformed Republic soldiers, blaster rifles in hand, stood watchful near the doors. He sensed two more on a high ledge to his left.
Eleena tensed beside him, but she did not falter.
He checked his chrono again. Fifty-three seconds.
The three soldiers, wary, watched him and Eleena approach. One of them spoke into a wrist comlink, perhaps querying a command center within.
They would not know what to make of Malgus. Despite the war, they felt safe in their enclave in the center of the Republic. He would teach them otherwise.
“Stop right there,” one of them