Uneasy, he turned over to nudge Mara. "Up. Get up."
She stirred again, eyes not yet open, "Mmm?"
"Mara- wake up."
This time she opened her eyes, voice and sense instantly awake, remembering where she was, of the danger they were both in simply by being together here, "What's wrong?"
"Something just happened- did you sense it?"
"Sense it? no." She was confused more than anything; that he would even ask her such a thing.
"You did." he said tightly, "You have your hand to your head."
"I have a headache, that's all."
"Something changed."
Mara frowned as he rose, padding over cold fossilstone floors to the tall windows, keying the photovoltaic blackout down to let the glow of early dawn seep through, pale and diffuse.
"Get dressed." There was an urgency to his voice, a tenseness to his body as he turned without looking back. "Quickly."
"What did you sense?"
"I don't know. Nothing specific." he said, "It's... hidden. Something happened... something's happening right now, right here. You need to leave."
She nodded once, knowing better than to waste time with questions now; Luke wasn't the type to get spooked easily... and despite his outward calm, this was the most nervous she'd seen him in years.
.
.
She left moments after Luke, he leaving his private rooms to walk the long way round through rambling hallways in his sprawling apartment to the Morning Room, his surprised bodyguards in tow, affording Mara a hasty, unnoticed exit by carefully making her way to the Music Room, avoiding the main corridor as much as possible.
She'd admitted to Luke long ago that there was a concealed stairwell in the large storeroom attached to the Music Room and they'd fallen back on it several times since then- enough that it had developed its own name in their coded shorthand; the Reserve.
.
Luke stood alone in the Morning Room amid tall paneled walls of ornate relief-carved wood, gazing out without really seeing, his shirt untucked and loosely buttoned, his feet bare, mind still completely lost in examining that ambiguous shift in the Force, the magnitude and the extent of it exceptional.
He was wrong; something hadn't happened. It was about to happen; was happening right now, events tumbling forward like an avalanche gathering momentum, the mere fact that it was coming sufficient to send a shockwave sheeting through the Force.
Something... some elusive twist within it, originating here in the Palace, was radiating outwards with sweeping tendrils of cause and effect, some already in motion, others yet to fulfil.
He sighed, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, frustrated and tired, the hour so early it was almost still night. But every time he grasped some sense of heightened perception it scattered and he was left with nothing; vague impressions and hidden traces, like trying to follow the course of a single droplet in a gushing river...
His thoughts went instantly to Master Yoda, some distant memory triggered with acute intensity- but even as the thought came to mind it was lost, comprehension lying just beyond his reach, strangely reluctant to come, the path to that memory broken from moment to moment... somehow... withheld rather than forgotten. Luke closed his eyes, searching within for an answer that he knew was bigger than himself.
Alternately goaded and coerced by Palpatine, Luke's attunement to the Force had increased exponentially in the last few years until it ran like oxygen in the blood through his veins, affording him a connection and a clarity like never before, a fact he kept carefully hidden from his Master, reluctant to offer further reasons for Palpatine to invoke claims of Force-induced inception or vague prophesies which bound Luke to some preordained destiny just as it had his father.
But it was still there, the connection which he had once strived so hard to achieve now as natural as breathing. And now every single fiber of his being told him that knowledge was barred; that the Force itself witheld-
But it didn't work like that- not for Luke, not anymore.
Jaw clenched he pressed on, tracing tiny embers, pushing through the barrier, searching for that denied connection, for that hair's-breadth sliver of access which remained always exposed at the verge of the shadows and the light-
Yoda's words, long ago, coalesced with ominous portent in Luke's mind; 'Like the flow of a river, some say the path of the Force is; that an individual- a Jedi- may alter the course occasionally, like a stone in water, but ultimately it still flows to the sea.'
Why that - why now? Luke struggled to see the connection, to resolve muted intuition, diffuse and scattered, almost intentionally evasive. As if simply by searching he was pushing against the will of the Force; a path not meant to be challenged, secrets never disclosed...
He crouched to a huddle, knees to his chest, arms out before him resting against his knees- and stilled physically and mentally; pinpoint focus, light and subtle, drifting into precise, flawless alignment with the Force; lost in the current, slipping through the flow like a fish in a river...
And within it was a sense of... convergence, a defining moment reached; a breach being resolved-
A fracture restored...
And then it was gone, the momentary empathy rebuffed, cold reality closing about him, making him shiver in the sharp dawn chill.
It occurred to him to contact his father; surely he too had sensed the disturbance. Vader had already been in the Palace when Luke had arrived three days earlier, his father having returned to Coruscant to await the first stage of the Executor's DEMP-refit.
But to contact his father now, so soon after the Force-shift, would raise the Emperor's suspicion when Luke had worked so hard to successfully mollify Palpatine over the past months.
He closed his eyes, head lowering in concentration, trying again to see the path - but the Force twisted in on itself, shadows within shadows.
All he knew for sure was one fact;
"Something's happening." he whispered to the dawn.
Chapter 30
Mara arrived for her shift as normal almost an hour later. Luke had returned to his three private rooms, Mara crossing the dark, empty dining room to enter the lofty drawing room where Luke and Reece were talking. Reece glanced up, automemo in hand, from his seat opposite Luke in the drawing room, his back to the bedroom. He held her eye for just a moment in acknowledgement, then turned back to Luke. "... which require your attention, though they can wait until your return if you'd prefer?"
Luke too turned about to glance briefly over to Mara as she entered, then turned back to Reece, "No, put the documents on my 'reader, I'll deal with them on the flight over then transmit them back to you. I need to get moving as soon as possible."
Reece nodded, marking his own notes as such. "If so they can be in place by the time you return; it should only take three days to have all the reassignment details operative. Core-Fleet personnel will be assembled onboard the Patriot to be transferred to Project Redress when it next returns. Rim-Fleet personnel will board at Sullust."
"Good."
"Also Flight Con contacted your office. Your shuttle and escorts are prepped as per your request; they requested a departure time- at your convenience."
"Did you contact Lord Vader's Aide?"
Luke knew he had to be in Mosiin Province, two hour's south, by midday on another minor errand for the Emperor which any number of people here could have attended to, but it was also an opportunity for him to pick up a little new technology; Ghent, Karrde's prodigy slicer, was waiting there to load a new cipher code onto Luke's automemo, ready to download into various systems, downlinks, uplinks and comlinks in his offices here on Coruscant.
Aware that his existing ciphers must be the sole interest of a good many slicers under many masters, not just the Emperor, Luke had long held the habit of employing several codes, both official and unofficial, replacing them at random intervals rather than when he felt his security may be compromised- one thing his stint with the Rebels had taught him was that if you even suspected it, then it was probably too late.