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The dizziness swept over him like a wave on the soft, white sands at Varykino. Luke reached for something to steady himself, and all he found was the edge of the buffet table, laden with sweetmeats and glasses of champagne. It tinkled a little as his weight shifted it, but nothing collapsed.
One, he counted, just as Tonra had told him to.
Two. Too many people were watching him for him to faint at such a public function, to have his wounds—and the reasons for them—discovered.
Three. He blinked his vision clear again.
A star burned in his upper thigh, radiating across his leg and hip in angry bolts of pain. He tried to put weight on his left leg instead, and nearly ended up unbalancing himself again.
“Senator Nadala,” a voice at his elbow chirped. Luke pasted a smile on his face and glanced up, relieved to see Senator Pamlo, from Taris. A mild, sensible woman, who shared Luke’s distaste for the Empire but evidently had too much tact and decorum to get caught with it.
Luke had thought he did too, until last night. Apparently, he had not been as subtle as he thought.
“Senator Pamlo,” he responded as smoothly as he could, hoping that the jump in his breath could be attributed to surprise at being pulled out of his thoughts, not pain. “It’s lovely to see you—how was your leave on Taris?”
The Senate had only just been called back into session after the traditional annual leave period. This was Luke’s second year on Coruscant, and while the first had been both accidental and fraught, he’d been hoping this one would be quieter.
Clearly, he’d been wrong. This was the opening party—a ball that Emperor Palpatine threw for his senators to welcome them all back to Coruscant, remind them of the riches he could bestow upon them, and the implicit power of the Empire. Stormtroopers lurked in every doorway. Holocams and news reporters stalked the halls and wove through the crowd. Lord Vader loomed as a shadow. Palpatine even had footage from a recent round of executions on Chandrila playing from a small holoprojector at the far end of the hall. They were all being watched and threatened, before they returned to their seats of supposed power.
This was only the opening party, and Luke was already trying to hide a stab wound.
“It was restful,” Pamlo said, her broad smile bright against her smooth dark skin. “How was Naboo?”
His aunt and uncle had begged him to resign. His cousin had supported him, if lukewarmly. And he hadn’t even had the chance to talk to his father. Wherever he was—whatever he did—hadn’t allowed him to visit Naboo. He wouldn’t be happy that Luke was returning as senator, though. That was for sure.
Queen Dalné had been at her wit’s end. He’d agreed to step up to serve as senator, previously only serving as a minor council member, when their previous senator had been assassinated. But no one else had shown any interest in the role since then, though Dalné had looked, and now Luke was still here, even as it broke his family’s hearts. They’d already lost his mother to this job.
Naboo senators seemed to be assassinated at a higher rate than most. Last night proved that.
“It certainly wasn’t Coruscant,” Luke said and laughed. Pamlo laughed too, although even Luke wasn’t entirely sure what the joke was.
But that was the sort of thing senators said. He’d donned the makeup, wearing it like a mask totally alien to the contours of his real face, and he said the things that Queen Dalné wanted him to say. That was his job, in the Senate. He wanted to rebel, but he had a duty to Naboo; to his family, to stay alive; and he hardly knew what sort of sticking power he’d even have, here. Would Dalné finally find a replacement for him, as he requested? What was the point of doing anything beyond keeping up pretences if everything would fall away on a sigh?
Keeping up pretences took enough of his energy as it was.
Luke was no stranger to secrets. Not only had he worked in politics before, even if he’d never been a key player, but his own family were hardly open. He didn’t even know his father’s job, or where he lived. Anakin Skywalker had been a Jedi, he knew that. But whenever Anakin visited, his health always worse than before, he never answered Luke’s questions adequately. He just left Luke with his aunt and uncle on Naboo, insisting it was safer than the broader galaxy. He would not be happy with where Luke was now.
But why was the broader galaxy more dangerous than Naboo’s own cutthroat politics? With the place House Naberrie held within the old guard of Naboo, it wasn’t like the family had no enemies. His father had never explained what it was out here that Luke should be afraid of.
His leg smarted anew as he tried to smile at Pamlo, gritting his teeth all the harder. Why had that masked attacker come at him, yesterday? And why had they been wearing the Imperial cog on their shirtsleeve?
Pamlo said something, but another wave of dizziness crested and broke. His head was full of seafoam. It crashed through his mind, a fountain of white noise, the galaxy subsumed in its folds. He thought of his last visit to Otoh Gunga, how dark and cold it could be underwater, and wished for the warming lights of Representative Binks’s lifepod.
Wait for it to fade. Just wait for it to fade. One. Two. Three…
When he blinked the mirrored shards of pain from his vision, something inaudible blaring at the back of his head like a klaxon, he was gripping the table tightly enough to leave imprints in his thumbs.
“Senator Nadala?” Pamlo enquired. “Are you well?”
She didn’t seem afflicted with the same sort of attention he’d received. Perhaps he should warn her. “Simply preoccupied,” he admitted, though he hoped the frequent hitches in his voice betrayed his injury. “I received a message from, I believe, the Emperor last night. As always, I mean to consider his words carefully.”
Too practised a politician, she didn’t outwardly react. But he thought there was something in her that understood.
“Of course,” she said, taking a sip from her glass. The champagne within matched the colour of her dress. Luke envied her the ability to wear light, breezy colours, like he used to favour. Nowadays, he mostly wore dark blue, dark red, black.
Better to hide blood.
“Would you care for a dance?” Pamlo asked him, gesturing to the floor. She wanted to talk to him in more detail about this, he realised. She wanted a place they could murmur, heads bent close, without being overheard.
But there was no way Luke could dance. He shook his head. “I’m afraid I have two left feet, today.” He winced in pain when he shook his right leg.
Hopefully, she’d infer what he meant.
The wound in his thigh wasn’t getting any better. It seemed to have tightened and expanded its grip, in fact, encircling his whole leg and reaching up into his torso. Blood poisoning, Tonra had said, whistling through his teeth when he’d looked at it a few hours earlier. Luke needed a medic.
But they couldn’t walk into an Imperial medbay with this sort of wound and explain where he had received it.
A little longer. They were flying offplanet after this little party, to an independent medbay that Tonra knew wouldn’t ask questions. He just needed to get through this party.
And he did.
News drones buzzed around them like mosquitoes, but they had no questions for Luke. He wasn’t interesting; he’d done his best, against all his instincts, not to make himself interesting. It aggravated him—he hated the Empire! He wanted to stir things up! Surely, he could use his seat to make a difference! Already, he funnelled most of his Senate salary into offshore accounts that eventually met Rebel coffers. He could live off of his family wealth; he could not live with guilt. But couldn’t he do more?
No. If he did more, those offshore accounts would be discovered. He would be discovered. And…
His family couldn’t lose him too. Luke had long since had to reconcile himself to the fact that he would never wear the mask of politics as well as his mother had.
So. Pretend to be fine. Hold his breath. Get through it.
Get through tonight.
He smiled and made small talk with all the senators he knew. Thankfully, that wasn’t many. He wasn’t a particularly interesting senator to know, despite the mercy missions he liked to attach himself to. Some, like Senator Orn Free Taa, wanted to converse less than they wanted to monologue about the great things the Empire had in store, for his own planet as well as the galaxy. Luke was all too happy to oblige him, listening politely while he expounded, blue hands and lekku gesticulating. He did not point out that Ryloth was in open rebellion against the Empire under Cham Syndulla. His makeup smoothed his features into a smile without forcing him to maintain one; otherwise, his cheeks would ache by now.
He was constantly aware of how many eyes were scanning this room, looking for something out of the ordinary. Something to report; something to punish. Palpatine himself laughed from atop his throne. The holo playing the executions flashed; news droids whined. It was ridiculous, but Luke could had sworn Lord Vader was watching him.
Always, he made sure to stand next to a wall, or a table, or a chair. Something to lean casually against, when his leg threatened to give way.
The bandages felt loose. They must be slick with pus and blood by now. He’d been lucky that his attacker, ambushing him on the cold streets of Coruscant, hadn’t hit an artery. Or was it luck? The attacker had taken him down, immobilised him, and driven his knife very carefully into Luke’s thigh. If he had been aiming to kill him, how could he have missed?
His father would know, surely. Even as Tonra had bound up his leg, Luke’s thoughts had drifted back to Anakin treating Luke’s scrapes and bruises from when he’d got overenthusiastic with the speederbike, or the hoverboat, or just tripped and fell. The pale dome of his head always put Luke in mind of Onoam, half full in the daytime sky, its open mines matching the ridges and scars on his father’s face. For all its sordid political disputes, Onoam was the moon of Naboo that Luke looked to when he missed his father—when he wondered what the sole surviving Jedi Master was doing out in the galaxy. Saving innocents? Resisting the Empire?
It had to be important, for him to have left his son to be cared by in-laws who barely knew him.
It had to have been worth it.
Luke had spent his childhood staring up at Onoam and into the starscape beyond. The rest of the galaxy was dangerous, he’d been told. But the rest of the galaxy was where his father was.
The rest of the galaxy, he knew now, might kill him.
After Taa gave up on monologuing and went to acquire more from the buffet, Luke wandered. Knots of senators dotted the room, as impenetrable to him as a rock in the river, so he let the current pull him away. The dance floor beckoned, but as he’d suggested to Pamlo, there was no way he could handle that. Instead, he drifted—and found himself pulled toward the holoprojectors at the end of the hall.
The Rebels on Chandrila had been executed traditionally—in homage, the subtitles at the bottom reported the governor as proclaiming, to the Empire’s eternal respect for Chandrila’s history and customs. They had been hung, drawn, and quartered.
Luke remembered reading about that method as a child, when he devoured romantic books of adventure on other planets. Alderaan had used it once, too; so did Gatalenta. The ways to die during the process were outnumbered only by the ways to suffer. Hanging by the neck… having pack animals pull your entrails out of your body… being cut apart until your blood was glued to the executioner’s nails and hair… His stomach churned as he watched it, but he watched it.
This was what the Empire wanted him to see.
This was what the Empire must have wanted to remind him, last night.
They’d been able to think of no other explanation. Perhaps they knew of Luke’s connection to the Rebels, either through his money schemes or through the mother he was never allowed to claim. The latter was unlikely. His only acknowledgement of her was his regnal name: Nadala, a portmanteau of Naberrie and Amidala. But he likewise doubted they’d found his accounts, or traced Rebel credits back to him. If that was true, he would have been one of the executions playing at this party.
A warning, then? Just a random reminder to Rebel-inclined senators—or even simply senators who weren’t obsequious enough—what the Empire could do to them if they stepped out of line?
Perhaps it hadn’t been an Imperial attacker at all, merely a thug in a uniform—though, Luke thought wryly, that’s what most stormtroopers were. But if they weren’t Imperial, then their motivations were even muddier than before.
It had to be a warning. Just as this holo was a warning. Luke watched carefully, and this time his nausea was unrelated to his dizziness and injury, as another Rebel burst in a shower of blood. Only their writhing intestines remained on the ground.
What other reason could Palpatine have for threatening his life?
“Senator Nadala.”
Luke had been so preoccupied with his thoughts that he physically jumped and had to squash a scream of pain behind gnashed teeth. He hobbled in a semi-circle to stare. Red washed over his vision like the blood that had just splattered the holocamera’s lens in the execution feed, but—one, two, three—he waited for it to clear, even if he didn’t need to. He recognised that voice.
Darth Vader towered over him.
All the moisture fled his mouth. He opened and closed it a few times, swallowed, then tried to speak. “Lord Vader,” he returned. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Vader tilted his mask down. “Are you injured, senator?”
His vocoder was, by nature, totally uninflected. If there was intent or emotion behind that question, Luke had no hope of detecting it. But he had to wonder: was he gloating? Had Palpatine sent him here to frighten Luke further, to drill in the humiliation of his injury and the precarity of Luke’s place on Coruscant?
“A slight complaint in my leg, my lord.”
“It cannot be so slight if you have not danced all evening.”
He had noticed? Someone was watching Luke, then. Why, he had no idea. He hadn’t shown any open Rebel support—
Luke tried to crack a smile. “My pain tolerance is embarrassingly low. We’re quite coddled on Naboo, you know.” He’d heard it enough from some of the more sneering Imperial senators to think that might work on Vader.
“I see.” Vader’s hand came up to give Luke’s shoulder a shove. Caught off guard, Luke staggered back. His right leg spasmed underneath him, like his muscles were trying to pirouette away from the pain that lanced through them. The galaxy whited out; Luke flexed his fingers, hoping to grip something before he fainted—
What he gripped was supple leather, pulled over something hard. When his vision rolled back in, he realised he was holding Vader’s hand. He let go immediately and regretted it. He was still teetering on his feet.
“Coddled, yes,” Vader said. “I have often known Naboo senators to faint for no reason at all.”
Luke stared, uncomprehending. Was that supposed to be irony? There’d been nothing in his manner or voice to indicate it…
“You must dance at least once, this evening,” Vader said. “Come. Dance with me.”
This was the strangest threat Luke had ever received. Not that he had a long history of them. “My lord?”
Vader had already reached for his hand to pull him away. Perhaps he had reached for Luke during the fainting spell, then, not Luke. He hoped so. If Luke had grabbed Vader’s hand without invitation, he might die by asphyxiation before he even had the chance to die from embarrassment. Thoughts spinning, lost, in that particular whirlpool, he could only let Vader drag him to the edge of the floor, seize his arms, and begin to dance.
Luke was already skating at the edge of consciousness. He could see the abyss below him. It looked so warm and soft. One, he reminded himself fiercely. Two. Three. The velvet abyss faded before his eyes, replaced by the blinking lights of Vader’s chest plate.
“—bold of you to return for a second year in the Senate,” Vader was saying.
Luke shook his head. His feet felt glued to the floor, but he had bigger issues than dancing. He couldn’t ask Darth Vader to repeat himself.
Taking a stab at what he hoped Vader had asked, he said, as breezily as he could, “Until my queen can find a willing and suitable candidate, I will remain. Naboo needs a senator. We must all do our duties.”
“Must we?” Vader bit out.
It was such a bizarre comment that Luke decided he had hallucinated it—which was bad news in itself. If Luke was hallucinating, he really needed to leave this party as soon as possible.
“Dance,” Vader prompted.
“I…” Luke looked down. What were the steps? What music was this?
“It is a waltz,” his partner supplied. “A simple one. One, two, three. Follow my steps. One, two, three.”
One… two… three…
Was it true that Vader could read minds? Jedi could, Luke knew. His father could…
His feet fumbled for purchase. Was the floor made of ice? He clumsily followed Vader’s feet, looking down the whole time so he didn’t need to look up. A memory bubbled to the surface of his fearful, feverish mind: his father, dancing with him in the halls of Varykino.
Anakin almost never came to Varykino. He’d never said why until that visit, five years ago, when Luke had just turned thirteen. That was where he had married Luke’s mother, he’d admitted.
Luke had tried to push, but the strong face his father tried to wear had threatened to crack, so he’d stopped. Instead, his father had danced with him, laughing at how beautifully Naboo’s schools had taught Luke poise, elegance, rhythm, while Anakin admitted he relied on the Force for all of those. Still, he was a steady partner, like Vader was now. What he lacked in flourish, he made up for in stoic dependability. He put his feet wherever he needed to.
If Luke’s toes happened to be there, that was Luke’s problem.
The memory brought giggles, then sobs, jostling for space in his mouth. He shut his teeth together like blast doors, trying to hold them all back. They only surged as tears at the backs of his eyes. Too much. All of it was too much—
Why had he been attacked?
That was the question at the core of the evening, but there were more questions. There had always been such uncertainty about who he was, where he came from, what he was meant to do with the life his mother had left him. Luke’s universe was built on masks and deceptions, but this was one too many. That the galaxy was dangerous, he could accept. But not if he couldn’t understand why.
And he couldn’t. There seemed no reason to it—or, if there was, the deceptions kept it all well wrapped away. All he had left was a life-threatening injury that he had to pretend he didn’t feel. At least it wouldn’t be the first time he had to pretend not to be upset.
He thought of his father jetting away from him, in that sleek silver ship that used to belong to his mother. For ten years, he had refused to cry when his father left. It only upset Anakin more if he did, and then he might not come back.
The makeup on his face felt heavier and itchier than it ever had before, like it was giving him an allergic reaction. Someone had replaced his thigh with an active volcano. He hadn’t known Imperial bioengineering was that advanced.
“I would recommend you leave, Senator Naberrie,” Vader said.
Luke nodded like it didn’t make his head spin. One, two, three. His legs moved blindly. He took a breath. “I intend to soon. Tomorrow is a busy day at the Senate—”
“Leave Coruscant,” Vader corrected. “Leave the Senate. Return to Naboo, young one.”
Young one. Luke’s father called him that, sometimes. Luke had always complained that he wasn’t young, that he didn’t feel young, but he felt it now.
And…
Something else was wrong.
“Nadala,” he said. “I am Senator Nadala, Lord Vader. Not Naberrie.” How did he know? How had he made that mistake?
Was this a threat?
Every inch of him went cold. If Vader knew his name, that just added another layer to all of this: the urge to leave Coruscant, the questioning about his injury, the injury itself. How many ways did the Empire have of demonstrating its power over him?
“I’m afraid,” he said diplomatically, drawing on every fibre of his strength, “that I serve my queen, Lord Vader. While I appreciate your threat—”
Vader tilted his helmet. Luke realised his mistake.
“…advice,” he corrected. “While I appreciate your advice. I am bound to her will.”
“There are ways around servitude, senator.” Vader did not look toward Palpatine, but Luke thought he saw the mask twitch as if he had been about to. “One can always find numerous methods to defy and escape one’s duty to a superior, should something provide the appropriate motivation.”
Another threat? Really?
“I’m a highly motivated individual as it is,” Luke said. It was a terrible retort.
“I know, young one.”
What secrets did Vader keep? The thought itself felt treasonous in the worst way—as if it betrayed the Empire Luke claimed to serve and the Rebellion he believed in, just to believe that Vader might have hidden depths. He wore a literal mask, after all. No one even knew his face.
Luke’s father probably did. Vader was, most agreed, a former Jedi. Who else would have such powers as he? Which meant Luke’s father had known him. Known him and mourned him.
He stumbled. Vader caught his arms. “One,” he intoned, guiding Luke through the rush in his head, the numbing of his feet, the leg that felt like it was cracking apart beneath him. “Two. Three.”
Anakin had murmured aloud as they danced, to keep the rhythm straight for the both of them. It shouldn’t be so soothing coming from the worst weapon in the Imperial arsenal.
“Go home, Senator Nadala,” Vader repeated, careful to enunciate his name.
Luke went back to his senatorial apartments. But he did not go home.
There was more here than Luke could possibly understand. More secrets; more lies; more masks. He had no idea where his investigations would end, but he knew where to start.
Why had he been attacked?
One: His attacker had been apparently, flagrantly, Imperial.
Two: No one else, as far as Luke could see at the party, had been similarly threatened. All seemed well, if not happy.
Three: There was more to Vader than it seemed.
Luke couldn’t go home yet. He had his duties. And there was so much work to do.