Chapter 12: The Council Hears What It Chooses to Hear

Coruscant rose out of hyperspace exactly as Arthur remembered it — not with memory, precisely, since he had been here only once, but with the particular recognition of a thing that has already impressed itself upon the mind too completely to seem new a second time. The planet filled the viewport like a wound that had healed over badly: a surface that should have been sky and earth and river, paved instead into a single continuous argument about what civilization was for.

He had not slept in hyperspace. He had intended to, in the soldier's way, taking rest when rest offered itself regardless of circumstance. But the boy had been awake in the passenger cabin, sitting with his knees drawn up and his eyes fixed on something that was not the bulkhead in front of him, and Arthur had found, after the third time he'd checked, that his own eyes would not close with that particular vigil ongoing in the next compartment.

He had not gone to Anakin. The boy had not asked him to.