Chapter 27: Sidious Speaks to Anakin

The invitation arrived in the form of a Senate messenger, which was the first thing wrong with it.

Anakin noticed this only afterward, turning the detail over in his mind the way he turned engine problems over — looking for the mechanism beneath the symptom. A personal message from the Supreme Chancellor's office should have come through the Temple's communication channel. A Senate messenger meant the message had been composed and dispatched from Palpatine's senatorial office rather than his new chancellery suite, which meant he had written it before his election was formally processed, or he had kept the old office for correspondence he preferred to route through older, less observed channels.

Anakin was nine years old. He filed this observation in the same place he filed most of his observations — a mental space that was not yet equipped to sort urgency from interest — and went to find Obi-Wan.