THE FORCE WAS A MYSTERIOUS energy field that sprang from life itself; that much, every Jedi student knew. The Force could be used for many purposes: protection, persuasion, wisdom—even the manipulation of matter and the performance of great physical feats. Jedi taught younglings all of those things.

But they never taught how to make the Force go away when it wasn’t wanted. That was all Caleb—all Kanan had wanted from the Force for years. And the blasted thing had just shown up again on Cynda. It had saved his carcass, true—but if anyone had seen, Kanan’s life wouldn’t be worth a Confederacy credit.

He had left a moon in chaos. Zone Forty-Two’s ceiling had caved in, producing tremors that caused dangerous seams to open in some floors higher up. Thankfully, no chambers had vented to space: They were too far beneath Cynda’s surface. It was a miracle no one had been killed.

Kanan didn’t know if Count Vidian was still there or not, or if the Empire suspected Skelly of planting the charges that caused the collapse. It was a safe bet they did. It was mining in Zone Forty-Two that Skelly had warned about; perhaps he’d decided to bring the roof down before anybody else did. Cynda was laced with tunnels, but the Imperials had numbers. They’d find Skelly eventually, and he’d get what was coming to him.

Kanan had used one of those back tunnels to slip away, leaving Okadiah and his crew behind. Taking little-used elevators back to Expedient, he’d raised ship before security knew any better. He could hear over the transceiver that departures had been grounded. He doubted it would be a problem. The Moonglow techs below would vouch for his having warned them; no one would suspect Kanan of having planted the bomb, at least. He was just returning his ship safely to home base, on Gorse, like he was scheduled to do.

And that would be it. He’d never set foot on the moon again. And tomorrow, he’d find a way off Gorse. It was time to move on.

He’d been in motion since that dark day, years earlier. The darkest of days. The day when life as he knew it had fallen apart, had been blasted apart, by something he hadn’t then understood. He still didn’t understand much of it. There he’d been, fourteen years old, having relied for his entire life on the Jedi Order for everything: food, shelter, education, and security. Maybe not love, but at least stability, calm, sense.

And then, all at once, the Republic and its clone soldiers had turned against the Jedi. Depa Billaba fought to protect him—and he fought to protect her. She died. He fled. She died so he could flee, but to what end? What did she hope for him?

The young Caleb hadn’t known. He’d known only that, in the end, the Force hadn’t helped her. Or any of the other Jedi he’d heard about.

It’s not your friend, he’d told himself. It was one reason he refused to use it, even to make his life a little easier. He’d also refused to take up his lightsaber. He still had it: Besides the finicky Force, it was his last tie to the past. But what good were lightsabers? What good was the Force, if it allowed its most devoted followers to be cut down by rank betrayal?

“A Jedi uses the Force for guidance,” his first teacher had said. Yeah, guidance right into a freaking wall!

The problem was that the Force couldn’t be turned off like a switch. Many of the benefits it conveyed were subtle. They enhanced traits without his conscious effort. No act of will could make it stop; no lapse of belief could make it fully vanish. Kanan would always be better at some things. And that had been the problem of his life. He was still driven to take jobs that interested him, and to excel at them. That was just his way.

But excelling by too much, or for too long, risked notice. And that was something he had been told to avoid.

Obi-Wan had used the beacon to warn Jedi to avoid detection. It hadn’t taken long for Kanan to understand why. For days and weeks after the Jedi generals had been cut down by their own clone troopers, the new Empire continued to hunt and kill Jedi. It wasn’t just about hiding physically from the Empire. Avoid detection meant hiding from everyone the fact that he had a connection to the Force.

The Force was a death mark.

The early months had been a blur of terror for young Caleb. He’d lived constantly with nightmares of what could happen. The Empire had control of the Jedi headquarters. That surely included the database with whatever information the Jedi had on file for Caleb Dume. They would have learned his name, for sure, and likely had images of him taken by the training center’s security cams. What else did they have? He’d racked his brain many times trying to remember what, if any, biometric information the Jedi had taken from him over the years. Did they have a soundprint of his voice? A genetic sample? It bewildered Kanan now to think that the Empire might know more about his family history than he did.

Whatever had happened to the other Jedi Knights and their Padawans, he had to assume the Emperor would have been thorough about it. They’d have found a list, or constructed one. They’d have marked off everyone who fell. And they would’ve known Caleb Dume did not fall when Depa Billaba did.

So in the beginning, Caleb did everything right. When he took jobs to feed himself, he made sure not to excel too far beyond the expected norm. Personally distributing his own payloads on Cynda was a holdover from that; it kept his number of flights per day to a number that was merely exceptional, and not suspicious. He’d resisted friendships and long-term romantic connections, and he’d mostly restrained his chivalrous impulses. The teenager had done all those things, for fear of a middle-of-the-night visit by stormtroopers.

But weeks turned to months, and months to years, and no one came to his home—or cot, or tent, or patch of spacecraft floor—to wake him and drag him away. And the young man now known as Kanan Jarrus discovered that carousing eliminated those worries entirely.

So he’d done more of the same. He’d drunk to forget. He’d brawled to let off steam. He’d taken the dangerous jobs to fund his lifestyle—and then began it all again. He wasn’t some chivalrous nomad, skulking from planet to planet doing good deeds and leaving when things got too hot. No, he left when things got dull. When the drinking money ran out, or when the bar-owner’s daughter suddenly wanted to marry him. Kanan didn’t leave because the Empire moved in: He’d stared down Imperials like Vidian before and lived. They knew he was something to ignore. No, he left because where the Empire went, fun usually died.

And he also left whenever he got too comfortable. That was when the Force, tired of being suppressed, would sneak back like an ignored pet. He didn’t want it complicating his world, making him feel like somebody’s prey again. And he didn’t like being reminded about what had happened in that other life.

Watching Ultimatum growing in his cockpit window as he headed for Gorse, Kanan thought for the umpteenth time about the text portion of the message from Obi-Wan. Republic forces have been turned against the Jedi. There was something in that wording: have been turned. It suggested that maybe the people themselves hadn’t turned against the Jedi, despite the Emperor’s claims to the contrary.

That might have mattered years earlier, Kanan thought, but it hardly did now.

He had always been aggravated by how little Obi-Wan had shared. It made sense that he’d been short of time. And perhaps he hadn’t known much, yet, when he sent the warning. But why hadn’t he sent another? If he didn’t have access to the beacon on Coruscant any longer, wouldn’t he have found another way to get a message out, later on?

Kanan knew the answer. Because there probably aren’t any Jedi left to contact. And because Kenobi’s probably dead himself.

At one time, those had been hard thoughts to have; now they only produced a tired yawn. He couldn’t see Obi-Wan willingly hunkering down on some remote world, waiting for things to blow over. He’d have had a mission, if he were alive—an important one. He’d want people to know about it. And all the missions Kanan could imagine would have put Obi-Wan into motion all around the galaxy. No, if Kenobi lived, Kanan would have heard something.

But Kanan knew he wouldn’t care even if the Jedi Master popped up in the seat right behind him. Caleb Dume hadn’t yet been a Jedi Knight, and Kanan Jarrus wasn’t one now. None of it affected him, need ever affect him. He’d been dealt his hand, and that was what he would play. Play, for as long he could keep from stupid stunts like the one he’d pulled on Cynda.

He just wouldn’t play here anymore.

He would return Expedient to Moonglow; it would be a dumb starship thief indeed that would want it. He’d collect his back pay, gather his few goods before Okadiah got home, and be on his way. The Star Destroyer was still out there, he saw, but it hadn’t yet barred commercial flights from Gorse. He would pick a direction and be on his—

Kanan took a second look at the Star Destroyer, now ahead and to his right. From Ultimatum’s underside, two four-vehicle flights of TIE fighters emerged and headed in his direction.

Snapped alert, Kanan leaned forward and grabbed the steering yoke. Which way? They were headed right for Expedient. The ship had a little rock-shooter of a cannon, nothing more, and the vessel hadn’t been refueled since that morning, four lunar flights earlier. Kanan switched the comm system from channel to channel, listening for Captain Sloane’s voice. Someone, something to tell him whether he needed to fight or fly.

The voice he did hear came from the backseat—but it wasn’t Obi-Wan Kenobi, or even kindly old Okadiah. “They’re not after you,” it said. “They’re looking for me.”

Kanan looked back.

Skelly!