Lance turned and ran, the Force surging through him, pushing his speed and reflexes past anything he’d known before.
He wove through traffic and pedestrians alike, light on his feet as a predator, clearing whole stretches of street in single bounds.
Nothing in his path mattered.
Only the Temple mattered.
What should have taken half an hour took less than five minutes.
He burst into the comm room and dialed his Master’s channel.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Every second stretched impossibly long while he waited.
Then the holoprojection flickered to life: Plo Koon.
“Padawan.
What’s happened, that you’re this shaken?”
The galaxy was vast enough that day and night meant something different in every system.
Night had fallen on Coruscant, but on Cato Neimoidia the sun was still up, and Plo Koon was mid-patrol, piloting a starfighter with two others flanking him over one of the cities below.
Lance laid it out, the dream and what he’d just seen with his own eyes woven together: Palpatine and Anakin had killed Mace Windu.
Inside Palpatine’s private chambers, the last pieces were already falling into place.
Palpatine had spent years working Anakin’s fears against him.
The loss of his mother had left a wound that never closed, and the thought of losing Padmé the same way had become something close to a private terror.
That fear was the thread Palpatine had pulled on, slowly, patiently, until it led exactly where he wanted.
Anakin had gone to Yoda once, looking for something to hold onto.
What he got back was a lesson about letting go of attachment.
That was never going to be enough for him.
He was the most gifted Jedi Knight of his generation, driven to become the strongest the Order had ever produced, certain that his fate belonged to no one but himself.
And every step of it had been moving exactly where Palpatine intended.
Fear becomes anger.
Anger becomes hatred.
Hatred becomes suffering.
Any one of the four could tip a person toward the dark side, and together they were the very engine the Sith ran on.
Palpatine had spent years feeding Sith philosophy into Anakin a little at a time, always from the shadows, always through conversations that seemed harmless enough in the moment.
Now those seeds were finally bearing fruit.
The moment had come.
He no longer bothered hiding what he was.
The first task he set for his new apprentice was simple: walk into the Jedi Temple and end the Order himself.
Anakin sat frozen in his chair, torn in two.
On one side stood the Order that had raised him, and Obi-Wan, both teacher and friend.
On the other stood Padmé, and everything he couldn’t bear to lose.
Conscience fought obsession, and in the end, obsession won.
Palpatine watched him go, the wrinkles on his ruined face pulling into something like a smile.
Scarred as it was from his own lightning, the expression looked closer to a mask than a face.
He turned to the comm console, hood shadowing what remained of his features, and pressed the channel open.
A low, ragged voice followed.
“Execute Order 66.”
Back aboard his fighter, Plo Koon felt something twist in his chest as Lance finished speaking.
A wave of unease rolled through the Force, closing in fast, like something enormous was about to arrive.
He glanced toward the fighters flanking him and caught the faint glow of a holoprojection lighting up inside each cockpit.
A cloaked figure, giving some kind of instruction.
He tried to make out the face.
The projection cut out before he could, and the dread in his chest spiked all at once.
The instant the order reached those two clone pilots, the inhibitor chips buried in their brains switched on, and their memories twisted with them.
The Jedi who’d pulled them out of danger more times than either could count became, in their minds, something monstrous.
Both fighters dropped speed and opened fire on Plo Koon.
A few explosions later, the channel went dead.
Lance froze, then scrambled to reconnect, but got nothing back except the hollow beep of an open line going nowhere.
No.
That’s not possible.
He forced a breath, forced himself still.
His Master was out in the Outer Rim, too far for panic to help him now.
What mattered was warning the rest of the Order.
He punched in Master Jocasta Nu’s channel next.
She was already asleep, brow tight even in rest, caught inside a dream full of half formed images: faces she knew falling one after another, screams she couldn’t place.
Despair rose through it like floodwater, until it closed over her completely.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The comm woke her with a jolt.
She sat up gasping, one hand pressed to her chest as she’d just come up from underwater.
“Lance.
What’s happened?”
Something in his voice, paired with what she’d just seen in her own sleep, told her before he even answered that this was bad.
Her instincts weren’t wrong.
“Palpatine.
Anakin.”
The words alone should have been impossible to believe.
But everything in her told her he was right.
She pulled up the surveillance feeds and found what she was afraid she’d find: a figure in black robes walking toward the Temple, a wall of clone troopers behind him.
Other feeds told the same story.
The Temple was already surrounded.
She didn’t hesitate.
Using her clearance as the Temple’s chief archivist, she triggered the highest level alert the building had.
Sirens tore through the Temple grounds.
Gates that had never once closed in living memory began sealing themselves shut, alloy plates grinding into place.
Preset protocols fired automatically, sending warnings out to every Jedi still reachable.
Anakin reached the Temple gates in black robes, a cold, heavy darkness rolling off him.
Behind him marched an unbroken line of clone troopers, blasters raised, murder hanging in the air around them.
Overhead, fighters and shuttles filled the sky nearly edge to edge.
All of it belonged to the 501st.
The best soldiers the Republic had ever fielded.
That was when the alarm cut through everything, and the Temple’s massive alloy gates began grinding shut, meters thick, faster than anyone expected.
Anakin stopped dead in front of them, surprise flickering across his face.
High above, watching Coruscant spread out beneath him, Palpatine froze too.
His smile cracked.
For just a moment, something like astonishment broke through the calm, satisfied expression he’d been wearing.
“This reaction…”
He stared toward the Temple, brow drawn tight.
He’d spent considerable effort clouding the Jedi’s sense of the future through the Force itself.
By any reasonable measure, they shouldn’t have moved this fast.
The entire plan hinged on catching them completely off guard.
This wasn’t part of it.
His eyebrow rose slightly.
Then his composure settled back into place.
“Even so.
What does it change?”
“The outcome was decided long before tonight.
This is nothing more than a few extra moments of struggle against something already finished.”
He allowed himself a thin smile, malice flickering behind his eyes.
“The Jedi will fall regardless.”
“And the galaxy will belong to me.”