Sacrifice

"I won't say it."

"Fine."

"And not your fault, okay? Could have been any one of us." Zavirk tapped the button again and dragged the adjacent chair closer for Ben to sit down. "You heard that the boss is . . . well, really the boss now?"

"Yeah."

"Should be good news for us."

Ben knew that his father would say it wasn't good news at all. He sat in the monitoring room for a while, just grateful to be among the troopers, and then wandered off to find a quiet spot. If he couldn't handle this kind of stuff without being devastated, he'd be no use in the GAG. Every other trooper here got on with it. Shevu had probably had an awful conversation with Lekauf's parents, but when Ben walked by his office, he was hard at work, marking up a duty roster on the wall and getting on with things.

Okay, I'm fourteen. I could say, all right, I'm just a kid and I don't have to be tough when my buddies get killed. But I can't pick and choose when I act like an adult. I've got to get on with it, or go to school like every other kid my age.

And he was scaring his mother. She had enough problems of her own hunting Lumiya.

According to the roster display, Jacen was on duty. The time codes showed he'd been at HQ since about one in the morning. Ben couldn't feel his presence, but that didn't surprise him now. There was a time when Jacen had hidden in the Force when he had to; now he only showed himself when he seemed to feel it was necessary.

Without thinking about it, Ben found himself shutting down, too. As he walked down the corridor, the tiles still gleaming with spots of water because the cleaning droids were just meters ahead of him, he let himself