As the transport lifted him away from the ruins of the Jedi Temple, wind whipped around the bay and pawed at his cloak. He stood at the edge of the ramp and used the Force to anchor himself in place. From there, he surveyed Coruscant, the planet that should have been destroyed.

Most of the urbanscape was lit, so night did not hide the destruction. A haze of smoke hung like a funeral shroud over the still smoldering ruins. The air carried the faint, sickly sweet tang of burned bodies and melted plastoid. He tried to guess the number of the dead: in the tens of thousands, certainly. A hundred thousand? He could not know. He did know that it should have been billions.

Shafts of steel stuck like bones out of piles of shattered duracrete. Here and there droid-assisted excavation teams sifted through the rubble, seeking survivors or bodies. Frightened faces turned up to watch the transport pass.

“You should be dead,” Malgus said to them. “Not merely frightened.”

Quadrant after quadrant of Coruscant had been reduced to rubble.

But not enough of it.

Most buildings still stood and most of the planet’s people still lived. The Republic had been wounded, but not killed.

And there was nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.

Malgus had difficulty containing the anger he felt. His fist reflexively clenched and unclenched.

He had been misled. Worse, he had been betrayed. A score of his warriors had died for no reason other than to strengthen the Empire’s negotiating posture.

Sirens screamed in the distance, barely audible over the wind. Far off, unarmed Republic medical ships whirred through the sky. Speeders and swoops dotted the air here and there, the traffic light and haphazard.

Malgus had learned that Darth Angral had dissolved the Senate and declared martial law. But with the planet pacified, Angral had allowed rescuers to save whom they could. Malgus imagined that Angral would soon allow free civilian movement. Life would start again on Coruscant. Malgus did not understand Angral’s thinking.

No. He did not understand the Emperor’s thinking, for it must have been the Emperor who had decided to spare Coruscant.

Nothing was as it should be. Malgus had intended, had expected, to turn Coruscant into a cinder. He knew the Force intended him to topple the Republic and the corrupt Jedi who led it. His vision had shown him as much.

Instead, the Emperor had given the Republic a slight burn and begun to negotiate.

To negotiate.

A squad of ten Imperial fighters sped past, their wings reflecting the red glow of a nearby medical ship’s sirens. Smoke plumes from several ongoing fires snaked into the sky.