I arched up into Qui-Gon's touch when he fastened his teeth on my neck just behind the top corner of my jaw. I could feel his tongue doing fantastic, amazing, miraculous things -- even after so many years, I don't know what it is he does that turns my bones, my insides and my resolve into mush. I tried to pull him down -- I love to feel the pressure of his weight on me, particularly when we're both bare-chested -- but all it took was his right hand at the base of my sternum for Qui-Gon, his strength undiminished with age, to hold me down. His left hand remained at the inside curve of my shoulder, bracing me where I was so I didn't collide with the headboard, fingers stroking my neck and tangling in my hair as he held it back from the spot under my ear. My legs kicked uselessly; my hands wandered with no direction over Qui-Gon's back and sides; I could hardly breathe.

Qui-Gon shifted his body slightly, and I could feel the warmth of him fractionally closer to my leg. I wanted more. Just the warmth, just the pressure, the tangible, immutable proof that he's there with me, beside me, on me, is more to me than anything. I may have whimpered very slightly in the back of my throat; I inched as much closer to him as I could and turned my head so the worrying at my neck would have to become a kiss.

Indistinctly, I heard the front door open. I knew Qui-Gon had heard it too, but he growled and left my lips in favor of my throat. We heard rushing feet and someone shouting; Qui-Gon waved his hand behind him and locked the door to our bedroom. For my part, I used the opportunity to haul him down to me; with a grin that crinkled his eyes, he propped himself up on his elbows only far enough to kiss me again, before zeroing in on an even hotter spot just above my collarbone. Our legs tangled together. I could only gasp his name.

In impossible slow motion -- as though they were events that existed entirely independently in time, like twine that had been untwisted -- the bedroom door crashed open; Qui-Gon rolled off me with a roar the like of which I don't think I'd ever heard from him in twenty-seven years; and I caught my breath and opened my eyes and sat up far enough to see Sionnach, her back turned to us, her posture ramrod-straight and her shoulders square. My last thought before the twine wound back together and time sped up again was that I wished the word that had occurred to me hadn't been 'ramrod.'

"I'm so sorry, so sorry," Sionnach was saying, on the verge of hysteria. "Anakin sent me. He's still there. Master's gone to get Inayouk and Knight Ferriling, and --"

"Where is Anakin?" Qui-Gon pulled his shirt on and threw mine to me.

"He's with the Council," she said. "He tried to call you, but you weren't answering your comm, so he said I should come and --"

"What's he doing with the Council?" Qui-Gon interrupted as he yanked on his boots and got to his feet.

I buckled my belt and did the same. "And how long has he been in there?" I asked.

"Not long," Sion replied. "It's the chancellor."

"What?"

"Chancellor Palpatine came to meet the Council, and Anakin got them to agree that you should be there, only he couldn't reach you, so he stayed and he sent me after you." Qui-Gon and I grabbed our cloaks and moved swiftly for the door, sweeping Sionnach along with us as she saw us pass her. "I guess they believed him when he said you were the only Jedi who knew about the cloning thing, but of course he knew because he's your padawan. And he made them note that he objected to the whole meeting on your behalf," she added, hurrying to keep up with us. "But of course they kept going anyway. We're supposed to wait at my quarters -- Master is rounding up everyone else, and Ani will come and tell us what's going on. I'm sorry about your door."

"Never mind our door," I said. "You and I are going to go back to your quarters, but Qui-Gon, I think you should hurry to the Council chamber. Who knows what they're telling him."

"You're right," Qui-Gon said. He stopped abruptly and pulled Sionnach into his arms for a quick hug. "Good girl," he said, giving her a squeeze and letting her see the approval in his eyes. Those eyes then turned to me with a glow that I know nobody else is ever allowed to see, and Qui-Gon slid his hand to the side of my head. "I'll see you later," he murmured, leaning in for a whisper of a kiss and touching his forehead briefly to mine. He turned on his heel and strode away down the corridor, calling over his shoulder, "Sha, I'm very sorry we didn't answer the door."

Sionnach, now that she'd had a chance to take a breath and regain her composure, didn't even miss a beat. "It's hard to reach the door from the ceiling, Qui." He threw back his head and laughed at that, but kept right on walking. Sion turned to me. "I hope the quartermaster doesn't have a coronary episode when he sees the damage."

"The last thing we need to worry about right now is the quartermaster," I told her as we continued toward the quarters she shared with Joma. "You know what they say about the blind leading the blind, don't you?"

Sionnach nodded grimly and palmed open her front door. Inside, we found Joma standing on her dining-table addressing an assembly of twenty or thirty of our underground runners. Several heads turned when the door opened. "General!" Inayouk s'Deki waved, and I smiled. The kid had been calling me 'General' since the operation had begun, when it had been necessary to hide our identities from our fellow-Jedi as well as from civilians. With Qui-Gon acting as the point man with the Council, I was effectively the senior member of the underground, and Inayouk's joke had actually had very positive effect; it gave the group a structure and lent it legitimacy, so that everyone who was aware of us (without actually knowing who we were) knew that someone was in charge and responsible. We weren't just a gang of vigilantes. It was true that several of our number wanted to destroy all the confirmed clones; Qui-Gon, on the other hand, wanted to send them to a remote planet and let them have lives of their own. In compromise, we kept the clones in stasis in a hidden location, pending a decision.

The next hour or so was tense and quiet; none of us could plan anything without at least a sliver of an idea what was going on at the Council meeting. The Council knew there was an organized group taking out cloned senators; Palpatine knew things kept happening to his senators -- they were killed, injured, recalled, or any one of a dozen other things that would get them out of office -- and new ones kept arriving. We sat and waited and wondered how all this limited knowledge was being put to use.

The sound of the door chime roused us all back to alertness. Joma waved the door open to admit Qui-Gon, with Anakin behind him; they looked calm and unruffled, but as soon as the door had closed behind them, Anakin spun on his heel and struck it with his fist.

"Padawan!" Qui-Gon's voice was stern.

"Yes, Master." I could hear Anakin grit his teeth as he contained his anger and frustration, releasing it to the Force slowly and carefully so as not to harm anyone -- particularly Joma or Sion, the other Adepts in the room -- with all of it in one rush.

"It went well, then?" Joma asked conversationally.

Qui-Gon did his best not to glare at her. At its best, their relationship was cordial; this was hardly the time to get into the sort of disagreement that normally characterized it. He glanced at me, then spoke to the rest of the room. "The Council," he said, "in what we have no choice but to believe was an earnest effort to ameliorate the cloning situation --"

"Has gone and done the most -- sorry, Master," Anakin said. He folded his hands together, one fist inside the other, and very carefully sat still.

"The Council has told Chancellor Palpatine that the senators who have been replaced were clones," Qui-Gon said. A gasp went around the room, and several people started to speak, but Qui-Gon raised a hand for silence. "They still do not know we have organized to combat the clones; they believe the party responsible for replacing the clones, led by this mysterious general --" he smiled in my direction -- "is responsible to Senator Organa of Alderaan."

"What?" a girl said.

"It's Senator Organa's staff who arrange the meetings with the suspected clones that enable us to nab them," Inayouk pointed out. "Makes sense."

"The Council named Senator Delvin of Corellia and Senator Mothma of Chandrila as well," Qui-Gon continued. "The chancellor promised he would get to the bottom of this."

"That doesn't sound so bad," Sion said, caution in her voice. "What else happened?"

"After leaving the Council chamber, that idiot Palpatine went straight out and gave a speech promising to find who's been making the clones and deal with them summarily," Anakin said. "He got the people pretty fired up. They're calling for immediate action."

"But we've been acting," I said. "They know we've been replacing the clones. What more do they want?"

"They want us to find the clones faster," Qui-Gon replied, "and turn them over to them."

"What for?"

"Presumably so they can tear them limb from limb."

This was the trouble with the civilian population getting wind of the whole thing: they, by and large, were gangs of vigilantes. "Look," I said, "I can't speak to them directly, but we can use the usual channels and get the word out that the general is keeping the clones in stasis. Let them believe we'll hand them over eventually. Maybe they can get angry at the actual people responsible for all this instead, and we can sneak the clones out when they aren't looking." Everyone more or less agreed. "The situation isn't critical just yet, everyone," I went on. "But it could very well become so. Remain on the alert, and page me the instant you see anything that worries you." Nods all around. "And try not to go too far," I concluded. The meeting broke up, and our cohorts began drifting away.

As the apartment emptied, I stepped over to Qui-Gon. He was speaking quietly and earnestly with Anakin. I slid my arms around his waist. Qui-Gon moved his elbows out of my way and rested his arms on top of mine, acknowledging the embrace, but did not look back at me and did not pause in his conversation with Anakin. I laid my head between his shoulderblades and waited, and soon, Anakin had gone.

Qui-Gon bent his neck to look at my hands where they rested at his belly. "I seem to have sprouted some extra appendages," he murmured, gently stroking my fingers. I smiled and did not move. "Come, Obi-Wan." Qui-Gon unhooked my hands and turned around within the circle of my arms. He draped his own arms over my shoulders when we were face to face. "What shall we do now?"

"I can't imagine," I said. I raised myself up on tiptoe and nudged the end of Qui-Gon's nose with the end of mine. He turned his head enough that I could meet him for a kiss.

He dropped one arm from my shoulder to my waist and pulled me closer; I hooked my arm around his neck to compensate. I felt his hand flex on the small of my back, and we simultaneously parted our lips.

"Hey, now," Joma called, snapping her fingers and whistling through her teeth. "None of that. You have your own quarters, if I'm not mistaken."

Qui-Gon withdrew from the kiss and laid his cheek on the top of my head. "We thought we'd save Sionnach a trip," he muttered. I chuckled. "We can't go back to our own quarters, Knight Phrel."

"No?"

"Your padawan has blasted through our bedroom door," Qui-Gon said, winking at Sion. She blushed. "We'd have no more privacy there than here."

"There's one important difference, Master Jinn."

"What's that?"

"I'm not standing in your living room. Now get out of here." Qui-Gon and I grinned, joined hands, and complied.



Not five days later, Palpatine had found the source of the cloning operation. With a curious cross between ashen-faced shock and boiling fury, he reported to the assembled crowds that three of his own staff had been quietly kidnapping senators and replacing them with clones. This had apparently begun in an effort to secure votes for the Trans-Galactic Trade Commission. He took a couple of pointed digs at the Jedi in his speech; without actually overtly criticizing the Order, he implied quite nicely that we had known of this for some time and been unable to solve it, while he had rooted out the culprits within days of learning of the problem. We could tell the Council intended to speak to him about that.

"But rest assured," Palpatine told the cheering crowd, "that I have dismissed the individuals responsible for cloning your senators. Such treachery has no place in a representative government. They will be sent to Kessel tomorrow morning." At that point, I knew those staffers were dead. They'd very likely have died in the spice mines of Kessel anyway, whether from the dangers of the mine itself, an overdose of glitterstim, or the violence when their fellow-prisoners learned of their crime; but I knew then they would never make it to the transport ship. The mob would be waiting for them, and would crush them to death. I closed my eyes and shook my head. "And," Palpatine continued, shouting over the noise, "I have released the senators who were imprisoned while their clones were in office."

My instinct was to look sharply around to see if Qui-Gon, Anakin, Joma, Sionnach, or anyone else in our group had reacted to the chancellor's words as I had, but I managed to suppress it. Drawing attention to ourselves, even at this stage, would have been dangerous. But releasing those senators had been a stupid thing to do. The people knew, of course, which senators had been replaced when we'd removed the clones, and had been harassing Senator Organa's staff in attempts to learn the clones' whereabouts. It was too much to suppose that all those angry people would, upon seeing the released senator, assume he was the original and leave him be. More likely, they would assume he was the clone, and set upon him without bothering to determine which he was. Palpatine had endangered his own senators' safety by releasing them without consulting us.

Casually, unobtrusively, I made my way toward an entrance to the government complex, knowing that as many underground runners as could were doing the same. We would wander around inside for a while, letting Palpatine continue speaking to his supporters, seeing if we didn't meet the released senators first. We needed to get them and their replacements together to work out just who was going to continue to represent their constituents; this was a side of the problem Palpatine had evidently not considered. From Qui-Gon, I felt a hazy mental suggestion that he go to the clones and transport them all, en masse, to someplace far away, before anybody accidentally got hurt, and I agreed.

Once inside, I meandered for some time, mentally checking off a list of cloned senators as runners reported to me that they had them safely in custody. Distracted for a moment by the requirement that I think and walk at the same time, I crashed spectacularly into Anders Delvin coming around a corner. "Senator," I said. "Please excuse me. I'm very sorry. Here, let me give you a hand."

"Thank you." He let me help him stand up, and chuckled as he dusted himself off. "We don't often expect to see you folks over this way."

"No," I agreed, and we resumed walking in the same direction together. "Seems the chancellor's turned loose the senators who were cloned, without thinking that the mob outside can't tell the difference between a clone and a man. We don't want them to go after the real thing; we're trying to round them up and keep them safe."

Delvin looked impressed. "That's awfully decent of you," he said. "Many left to find?"

"Just three," I said. "Gewan, Eictorr, and Borsz. And I've got people all over the building." My commlink chirped. "See?" I grinned. "Excuse me. Kenobi," I said into the link, turning slightly away from Delvin.

"Ferriling here, General," the knight's voice said. "I have Senator Borsz here, and Senator Delvin of Corellia has offered to help us find Eictorr and Gewan."

I had been about to respond, but now I looked at the link in my hand, puzzled. "Say again," I instructed.

"Borsz is safe with us, and Delvin is helping us find the others," Ferriling repeated.

Without really looking at him, I reached over and laid a hand on the arm of the man next to me. "Knight Ferriling, tell me where you are," I said, walking more quickly and guiding Delvin -- was it Delvin? -- at my side, not letting go of his arm. Ferriling named a floor and a wing not far from where we were, and I turned down a corridor. "And tell me how you came to meet Senator Delvin," I went on, speaking quietly into my commlink. "Shouldn't he have been outside listening to the chancellor's speech?"

"I'd have thought so, but he wandered up and asked if he could help us," Ferriling replied. "Said he wasn't used to seeing Jedi over here in this building."

That sounded familiar. "And he's with you now?"

"No," Ferriling said, puzzled. "He's helping us look for those other two senators. He went off on his own about five minutes ago."

I stopped walking. So did Delvin, who was looking at me with a frankly worried expression. "Which way did you send him?" I asked, not bothering to hide my words from my companion any longer.

"Um ... when he left here, he went east. Said he was going to start at the top of J wing and work his way down."

I'd met Delvin -- literally -- in the second floor from the top of J wing. "All right. Thank you, Knight Ferriling."

"What's up, General?"

"You'll laugh; this whole thing must have me paranoid. I was afraid Delvin had been cloned without our knowledge. He's here with me now, but I was at the top of J wing, so he must just have come from you when we --" I was interrupted by the sounds of several men shouting, lightsabers humming, and a brief volley of blaster fire. "Ferriling! What in hells was that? Is the mob coming in to the building already?" Delvin and I took off again at a trot. There was no answer from Knight Ferriling. "Kustin!" I called. Still no answer. I switched the commlink to another channel. "Phrel, Skywalker, Boeler, Aah," I paged, "possible man down on G-26, repeat, incident on G-26, shots fired, possible man down, stop what you're doing and get over here and block whoever shot at him from leaving." I waited for four 'Yes, General's before putting away my link and breaking into a run, Delvin at my heels.

We reached G-26 just behind Joma and Sion. Ferriling and his padawan both lay on the floor, their lightsaber hilts in their hands; Ferriling had a blaster as well. Joma went swiftly to their sides and assured us both were alive, but unconscious. Several meters away, just this side of an intersection with another corridor, were three other bodies. Joma could tell us from where we were that they were dead. All four of us moved carefully -- weapons drawn, except Delvin, who had none -- toward them. The first two we didn't recognize, but the third --

The third was Anders Delvin.

Joma's lightsaber buzzed into life; she whirled around, her amber blade stopping just centimeters from the living Delvin's throat. "Which one are you?" she hissed.

"Oh, Joma, stop it," I said, "he's going to tell you he's the original either way. Sithspawn!" I swore. I paced back and forth; Joma hovered on the brink of severing the living Delvin's head; Sionnach stared open-mouthed at the dead one.

Anakin came running around a corner. "What's happened?" he asked. Knight Boeler and Master Aah arrived immediately after him. We filled them all in, briefly, and they looked from one Delvin to the other, all equally nonplused. Sionnach had just gone to try to revive Inayouk and Ferriling when Anakin's commlink chirped. He muttered a curse and yanked it off his belt. "Skywalker," he barked.

"Anakin," I heard, "Sen....ga....nap."

"What?" I whispered at Anakin.

He waved for us all to keep quiet. "Hello," he said, "Skywalker speaking. Master?"

"Anakin," Qui-Gon's voice repeated. "You must....scu....mediat."

"Master, where are you?" Anakin asked. "You're coming through very choppy."

Qui-Gon hadn't heard him. "No...mtolose," he said -- and then, wherever he was, he came into a spot where the signal was no longer obstructed and the next thing we all heard him say was "Senator Organa has been kidnapped."

I yanked the commlink from Anakin's hand. "What? Qui-Gon? When? How?"

"Obi-Wan?" Static interfered again. "It was....den. He s....d."

"Anakin, Joma, Sion, hang on for a minute," I ordered. "Shield up. I don't know how far away he is." When all three Adepts had nodded to me that they had braced themselves, I reached out with the Force to try to reach Qui-Gon's mind. [[Don't bother with the commlink, love,]] I said. [[Just Tell me.]]

[[He was with me when we put the clones on a safe transport,]] Qui-Gon projected, [[and I turned my back for one moment and he disappeared. I tried to raise him, and at first I got static, and then I got nothing. His commlink is either masked or destroyed. I can't find him in the Force. I need Anakin's perception.]]

[[Listen,]] I thought to him, [[I'll go with Anakin to try to find him. You keep in touch with Palpatine and the Council.]]

[[Anakin's my padawan --]]

[[I know that, Qui, but he's here with me now, and you're the one the Council trusts, and ...]] I trailed off, managing to stop myself from sharing the next thought in the queue.

But Qui-Gon could tell there was something else. [[And what?]]

Oh, out with it, Kenobi. [[And I'd prefer that Organa be grateful to me rather than to you.]]

[[Do you really think --]]

[[I think he's besotted. He knows you're off-limits, but that doesn't stop him swooning over you. Not that any of this is a good reason for me to be the one to go; I should be the one to go because I'm more likely to succeed.]]

I could hear Qui-Gon's smile. [[Now, that's not --]]

[[And the longer we stay and chat, the farther away he gets. I'm taking Anakin with me. Get someplace where your commlink isn't masked, and keep talking to Sionnach.]]

[[Yes, sir.]]

[[Right. I'll talk to you later.]]

[[And I love you,]] Qui-Gon murmured, just before we withdrew back into our own minds again.

[[Love you, too, Master,]] I smiled, though I wasn't sure if he could hear me. I turned to the others. "Right," I said. "Boeler, Aah, keep looking for Senator Gewan and Senator Eictorr. Joma, Sion, stay here with Ferriling and s'Deki. Anakin, you're coming with me. We're going to find Organa."

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Joma asked, gesturing to the man at the end of her saber.

I shrugged out of my cloak and handed it to Sionnach. "I have to make all the decisions? Ani, grab their guns," I said, gesturing to the three dead men on the floor. I picked up the blaster Kustin Ferriling had dropped and checked the charge. "We'll have to determine if he's the original or the clone, Joma. Now, Sionnach. Qui-Gon is going to call you and want you to tell him how we're doing," I said. "Anakin's going to be pretty easy for you to find, so just keep a lock on him, all right?" She nodded, her eyes wide. "Good. We won't be long." I hugged her quickly; Anakin did the same. "You might also keep a mental eye on us, Joma," I mentioned. "If you're not too busy." I grinned, and Anakin and I ran away down the hall.



"Still got him?" I whispered.

Anakin nodded. "If that's him," he whispered back. Quickly realizing that trying to find Senator Organa in the Force would be a fruitless effort, as the man was not sensitive to the Force and therefore had no distinct Force-presence, Anakin had felt for and locked onto the strongest sense of fear he could locate in the immediate area. "Even if that's not Organa, odds are whoever took him is scared witless," he'd decided.

The fear-beacon had brought us to a secured wing of the Senate compound, a collection of conference rooms and communications centers set apart from the areas where most of the governing of the galaxy took place. The guards had been easy to distract with a touch of the Force to their suggestible minds, and Anakin and I crept stealthily through dim corridors toward, it seemed, the chancellor's private residence. "Looks like he didn't get the right staff members," I commented.

Anakin nodded again. "Close by," he murmured, then looked sharply at the wall next to us. "Here." He stepped to the wall, placed his hand on it, and closed his eyes. Even I could feel the waves of concentration radiating from him now. He grimaced with the effort. "On the other side of this wall," he reported. "Around that corner somewhere there must be an entrance to --"

A blaster bolt came out of the wall centimeters from Anakin's head. He jumped back and lit his lightsaber at the instant I lit mine; evidently satisfied now that he was no longer touching it, the wall did not shoot again.

We exchanged glances. Sabers at the ready, we advanced slowly toward the rigged wall; it did not seem to sense our approach. "It can't be solid," Anakin said. "So we ought to be able to get through it."

"Quicker than going around," I agreed, "and if the wall's shooting at us, we're probably in the right place. But be careful."

I made sure no part of my body touched the wall as I brought my lightsaber close to it and began to melt through, as Qui-Gon had done on the Trade Federation's flagship all those years ago. Anakin busied himself with locating the wall's guns, which -- as he destroyed them -- turned out to be more like land mines than anything else. I could never have made it here, much less through this wall, on my own. Anakin, with his Adept sensitivity and reflexes, could find the hot spots where the wall was armed without actually touching the wall, and thus stab through them before they detonated. The contact from his saber did explode them, of course, so the fireworks around us ended any hope we had of remaining concealed. I was nearly through the wall.

A wedge of the wall fell away, leaving a space large enough for a man to fit through, and Anakin pulled me back. "Let me go first," he offered, stepping in front of me preemptively. "You'll be safer." He held his lightsaber in front of him in his left hand, ducked his head, and stepped through the gap, steadying himself with his right hand on the jagged edge I had cut away.

The spot under his hand exploded, and Anakin screamed.

I had pulled him back through the gap in the wall before I realized what I was doing, and now genuine blaster fire was coming through it. We ended up on opposite sides of the hole. Anakin still held his saber in his left hand; his right hand was tucked under his left elbow, and his jaw was clenched so tight I thought he would crush his teeth to powder. "What happened?" I yelled over the din.

"Missed a mine right next to the gap," he told me. "Stupid stupid stupid sonofa ..." he winced when he moved to try to deflect the blaster bolts back at their shooters.

"Let me see it!"

"It's fine," he called back. "I can fight one-handed. Let's get the blasted senator and get out of here."

"Go back! I'll get him!" I, too, was intercepting blaster fire as we argued.

"Due respect, Knight Kenobi, but you can't do this by yourself."

"You haven't --"

"And the longer we stay and chat," he said, forcing a smile, "the farther away the senator gets. I tell you I'm staying."

I hated it, but he was right. If I'd been injured, I told myself, I'd never have left him behind. As long as I could stand and hold a blade, I'd keep fighting. "How bad is it?"

"It's fine. Let's go!"

"Let me see it," I called again.

His face contorting with the pain, Anakin extracted his right hand from under his left elbow and held it up, palm facing me.

Or he would have, if a hand had been there. At the end of the wrist was a charred, bloody half of a hand. The thumb was where it belonged, but the index finger ended at the first knuckle, and the other three fingers and most of the palm were gone. The bone and sinew and ash dragged from the severed edges of the wrist and hand. My mouth went dry. "Now let's get the damned senator," Anakin repeated.

I gritted my teeth and nodded. Anakin tucked the stump of his hand under his left elbow again, and this time, I went first. Careful not to touch the wall at all, I stepped through the gap, deflecting blaster fire the whole time. I could hear Anakin behind me, neatly parrying the bolts that missed me. As he came fully into the room, he moved to my left side, bouncing fire back toward the right; taking the right angle, I directed my fire back toward the left, and soon it was much less.

The room was dimly-lit, presumably only illuminated when it was in legitimate use, but through the laser light and the smoke we could make out three human figures. Two were firing on us with both hands; one had an inert form draped over its back, but had a gun in one hand and hadn't let up on the trigger. Two more were slumped on the floor; we'd hit them with their own shots.

Five blasters on two lightsabers; five hands on three. Keeping my lightsaber in my right hand, I reached blindly for the blaster I'd taken from Kustin Ferriling. "Come and get us, Jedi!" I heard one of the men call. The next shot I deflected burned the gun out of his hand. Four blasters on two lightsabers. "You'll run out of luck before we run out of ammunition!"

I stopped concentrating on deflecting their fire and let the Force take over. Focusing on my left hand, I shot one of the men in the knee. He screamed, fell to the floor, and stopped shooting. Three guns on two lightsabers. "We don't want to kill you," I called, my blaster trained on the man without the body over his shoulder. "Give us the senator and we'll go."

"You'll have to kill us to get him," the wounded man on the floor said, taking aim again at Anakin. Anakin deftly bounced the shot back at the man's right hand, blasting it clean off. The man screamed again and passed out from shock.

"That was uncomfortably satisfying," Anakin said as he took a step closer to the remaining two adversaries.

"I think you'll find that you'd rather have given us a choice," I said, advancing steadily.

"You'll find that you have no choice," said the man with the body on his back. He shifted his burden so that the senator's body shielded his own.

Undaunted, Anakin and I moved toward the pair. The charge ran out on one of the two-handed man's guns, and he threw it aside. Two blasters on two lightsabers and a blaster. Three hands on three. Our opponents had begun to back away. When Anakin had taken down the man not carrying the senator, the last adversary stopped shooting at us and pointed his blaster at Organa's head. "Don't come any closer," he said. "I'd prefer not to kill this guy until after we've cloned him, but I'll do it now if I have to."

"That's stupid," I said. "If you give him to us, we'll take him and go. If you kill him, we'll kill you. Which would you rather?"

"If I let him go, I'll be killed, no mistaking that," he shot back. "Don't come any closer!"

"We're not coming any closer," I said soothingly. I was sure the mind-control would have its effect, but to be safe, I did not close the distance between us. Anakin stayed where he was; I moved on an arc, away to his right, slowly.

"Why don't you put the gun down," Anakin suggested evenly. I stared at him. Mind-control was one thing, but it was more effective at convincing a target of 'truths' than at persuading him to actions.

"Don't be stupid! Why would I put the gun down?" Then I saw Anakin's purpose. He hadn't really been trying to mind-control the man; he'd been trying to make him think he was trying to mind-control him, in the process distracting his attention from me. So he was, in effect, controlling his mind ... I stopped thinking about it and took two more steps to my right.

"It'll be a lot easier for both of us if you put the gun down, put the senator down, turn around, and walk away," Anakin said. I took three more steps. Soon, soon, I'd be able to blast the gun from the man's hand without endangering the senator. "See, and I can hardly even fight you. Your mined wall took off my hand." Peripherally, I could see Anakin display his maimed hand to the captor. Two more steps.

"I tell you my only choice is to --" I shot the gun from the man's hand. He whirled around, presenting Organa's body as the largest target, and swore out loud at me. "Kill him, then!" he shrieked. "You'll have to kill me to get him, and he'll die before I do! You --" Now that there was no more danger, I dropped my lightsaber so I could reach out with the Force. Quickly, I lifted Organa from the man's grasp and set him well out of reach. Before the man could realize what I had done, I had flicked my blaster's setting to stun and shot him three times. He fell gracelessly to the floor.

Anakin rushed up from behind him. His left hand, holding his lightsaber, shook; actually, his whole body shook, and he was glaring at the heap of the man on the floor with a look in his eyes like -- "Anakin!" I said sharply.

Anakin blinked and shook his head, and stared at the man on the floor and then at me, still trembling. In his eyes I saw only pain and exhaustion, and it occurred to me that he was trembling with fatigue, not with rage.

"We have the senator," I said, pointing to where I had dropped him.

Anakin clipped his lightsaber to his belt and hurried over to Organa. "Let me carry him," he insisted when I approached and tried to take the burden myself. "I'm bigger than you are, and you have two good hands. This way's more efficient."

"Carry him on your back," I said. "You can still reach your saber if you need it."

"Let's go." We hoisted Organa to Anakin's back, and hurried back the way we had come.

As we reached the far wall with the gap in it, a blaster shot flew past us on the right; I reset the gun to kill, whirled around, and shot the man on the floor -- how had he revived so soon? -- without giving it another thought. "Force forgive me," I whispered.

"It will," Anakin grunted. "It gave you those reflexes. Come on." And we ducked through the hole in the wall and ran as fast as we could for home.

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