“He’s not some creature,” Mace responded with reflexive certainty. “He’s a boy. His name… his name is…” His voice trailed away as his eyes finally made sense of what Vastor was pointing at. “Terrel…”
Besh and Chalk lay on the stone floor midway between where Vastor stood holding Terrel and where Keela, Pell, and the two younger boys cowered. The clothing of the thanatizine-bound Korunnai appeared inexplicably rumpled, even tattered, and over their torsos it glistened a wet oily black. A full second passed before Mace realized that it was the light from his blades that robbed color from the wet gleam on their clothes; he figured it out by the smell, strong even through the reek of the burning compound outside.
It was the smell of blood.
Someone had been hacking, inexpertly but with considerable enthusiasm, at the two helpless Korunnai.
Hacking at two human beings Mace had sworn to protect.
Hacking at sad Besh, who could not speak. Who’d lost his brother only yesterday.
Hacking at fierce Chalk, the girl who had made herself strong enough to survive anything. Anything but this.
They had lain down in this cold bunker floor and taken into their veins the drug that had swallowed them in a false death, trusting that a Jedi Master would watch over them to prevent a real one.
On the floor below Terrel’s dangling feet was a short stub of knife, smeared with the same dark blood. The blade was only half a decimeter long, its tip now a sharp straight slant—
Terrel’s knife. The one Mace had sliced in half on the slope outside.
Strength drained from Mace’s knees. “Oh, Terrel,” he said, letting his lightsabers swallow their blades. “Terrel, what have you done?”
Don’t worry, was the meaning of Vastor’s rumbling growl. He won’t do it again.
Mace threw himself into a Force-spring, both his blades blazing to life again as he streaked through the darkness toward Vastor’s back—and in that instant he saw himself arguing again with Nick on the trail, heard again his orders within this shattered bunker, saw the steamcrawler carrying children teeter at the lip of the precipice, saw Rankin step into the circle of light, faced Vastor inside a steamcrawler crowded with wounded. He couldn’t see what he should have done differently—what he could have done differently and remained the Jedi he was—to lead to any moment other than this one: this moment where he knew already he would be too late, too slow, too old and tired, too beaten down by the inexplicable cruelties of jungle war—
Too useless to save the life of one single child.
Mace could only roar a futile denial as Vastor struck. The vibroshield sank deep into Terrel’s body. And as the lor pelek ripped the life out of the boy, the blood fever told Mace what he should have done differently.
He should have killed Kar Vastor.
He’d been too late to save Terrel, but in the bunker there were four other Balawai children whom Vastor could reach with a single stride.
Still in the air, Mace drew back both lightsabers and whipped them forward and down with the full grim intention to carve Vastor into pieces so small it’d take a bioscan to tell they’d ever been human.
The lor pelek cast aside the boy’s corpse with one flick of his massive wrist and whirled, shields flashing in the lightsaber glare as they flicked upward and met Mace’s downward strokes. Mace used the Force to drive the blades; he would cut through the shields, through both of Vastor’s arms, slash deep into his chest to quench the blades’ fire in Vastor’s smoking heart—
But the shields did not cut, and they did not give way.
Their singing whine hummed into Mace’s hands, up his arms, to shiver in his chest and buzz in his teeth.
Then he was past, flipping over Vastor’s head. Keela and Pell and the two boys shrieked and clung to each other on their knees, cowering back from his path. He landed and whirled to face the lor pelek, his blades crossed in the defensive X.
Vastor stared at Mace from a motionless fighting crouch. His eyes smoldered; his growl said, We have gone to considerable trouble to bring you here, dôshalo. Must I kill you?
“I told you before.” Mace’s growl matched Vastor’s. “I am not your dôshalo.”
It will hurt Depa to find you dead. Stand down.
Mace’s whole body thrummed with his need to strike: his need to dive into Vaapad and allow its dark storm to drive his blades. His veins sang with blood fever, and the black migraine hammered his skull. He needed to hit Vastor, to hurt him. To punish him.
But a lifetime of Jedi discipline held him in place. Jedi do not revenge. Jedi do not punish.
Jedi defend.
Mace ground his teeth together, panting harshly. “Leave this place, Kar Vastor. I won’t let you harm these children.”
Vastor lifted shields that still shone mirror bright; Mace’s lightsabers had not even scarred their surface. Blood fever surged in Mace’s heart. Vastor moved toward him with the ponderous menace of a hungry rancor. I see flames in your eyes, Jedi Mace Windu: jungle green and stormcloud purple. I hear echoes of blood’s thunder in your ears.
He brought the curved backs of his vibrating shields together to make an earsplitting squeal that shot chills across Mace’s back, and his fighting grin showed teeth filed sharp as a vine cat’s. You have decided to take my life.
“I won’t let you harm these children,” Mace repeated.
Vastor shook his head in slow, grinning denial. I have no interest in them. I do not make war on children.
Mace’s response was a grimly silent stare at Terrel’s corpse.
He was man enough to kill, was the meaning of the shrug in Vastor’s growl. He was man enough to die. What he did was not war, but murder. What should I have done? Look around you, dôshalo: in this jungle, have you seen a jail?
“If I had,” Mace said through his teeth, “I would put you in it.”
But instead you stand there, panting with hope and fear.
“Jedi do not fear,” Mace told him. “Hope, I left behind on Coruscant.”
You hope I will threaten the children. You fear I might not. You hope I will give you an excuse to kill me. You fear to simply act.
Mace stared.
In his reflection on Vastor’s humming shields, he saw himself as though he looked upon a shatterpoint in his own nature.
What Vastor had said: it was true.
It was all true.
He burned with blood fever: ached to kill the lor pelek the same way that Vastor had killed Terrel. And for the same reason. In putting himself between Vastor and the children, he hadn’t been seeking to defend innocent lives.
He’d been seeking justifiable homicide.
A perfectly Jedi murder.
Like a faceful of icy water, it shocked him from a dream: now for the first time, the flame-lit bunker looked real. Vastor was now human, only a man; a man of power, to be sure, but no longer the embodiment of the jungle’s darkness. Terrel had been a boy, merely a child, yes, but a boy whose dead arms were still wet to the elbow with the blood of Chalk and Besh.
Until now, Mace had looked at them—at this whole world, and all that he had seen within it—with Jedi eyes: seeing abstract patterns of power in the swirling chiaroscuro of the Force, a punctuated rhythm of good and evil. His Jedi eyes had found him only what he’d already been looking for.
Without knowing it, he’d been seeking an enemy. Someone he could fight. Someone who would stand in for this war.
Someone he could blame for it.
Someone he could kill.
Now, though—
He looked at Vastor with his own eyes, truly open for the first time.
Vastor looked back intently. After a moment, the lor pelek relaxed with a sigh, lowering his weapons. You have decided to let me live, was the meaning of his wordless grumble. For now.
Mace said, “I am sorry.”
For what? Vastor looked frankly puzzled. When Mace did not answer, he shrugged. Now that I may safely show you my back, I will go. The fig
ht is over. I must deal with our captives.
He turned toward the bunker’s door. Mace spoke to his back. “I won’t allow you to kill prisoners.”
Vastor stopped, glancing back over his shoulder. Who said anything about killing prisoners? One of my men? His eyes took a feral gleam from the light of Mace’s blades. Never mind. I know who it was. Leave him to me.
Without another word, Vastor stalked out into the firelit night.
Mace stood in the flickering dark, his only light the shine from his blades. After a time, his hands went numb on the handgrips’ activation plates, and his blades shrank to nothingness.
Now the only light was the bloody glow on the bunker’s ceiling cast by the fires outside.
He noted absently that Besh and Chalk hadn’t bled much from their wounds. The thanatizine, he guessed.
A low whimper from behind reminded him of the children. He turned and looked down at them. They quivered in a group hug so tight he couldn’t see where one child ended and the next began. None of them returned his stare. He could feel their terror through the Force: they were afraid to meet his eyes.
He wanted to tell them that they had nothing to fear, but that would be a lie. He wanted to tell them that he wouldn’t let anyone hurt them. That was another lie: he already had. None of them would ever forget seeing their friend killed by a Korun.
None of them would ever forget seeing a Jedi let that Korun walk away.
There were so many things he should say that he could only keep silent. There were so many things he should do that he could only stand holding his powered-down lightsabers.
When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.
And so he stood motionless.
“Master Windu?” The voice was familiar, but it seemed to come from very far away; or perhaps it was only an echo of memory. “Master Windu!”
He stood staring into an invisible distance until a strong hand took his arm. “Hey, Mace!”
He sighed. “Nick. What do you want?”
“It’s almost dawn. Gunships fly with the light. It won’t take them long to get here. Time to saddle—” Nick’s voice stopped as though he were choking on something. “Frag me. What did you—I mean, what did they—who would—how—?”
His voice ran down. Mace finally turned to face the young Korun. Nick stared speechlessly down at the bloody messes that were Besh and Chalk.
“The thanatizine has slowed their hemorrhaging,” Mace said softly. “Someone who’s good with a medpac’s tissue binder might still be able to save their lives.”
“And—and—and—are those children—?”
“Apparently some Balawai don’t leave them in the cities after all.”
“What are those kids doing here? What happened to them?”
Mace looked away. “I saved their lives.” His shoulders lifted with his sigh, then fell. “Temporarily.”
Nick grunted. “Huh. Always is.”
Mace looked at him.
“When you save someone’s life.” Nick cocked his head in a Korun shrug. “It’s always temporary, y’know?”
Mace drifted toward the bunker’s shattered doorway. “I suppose it is. I’d never thought about it that way.”
“Hey, hold on. Where do you think you’re going?”
“Parents of these children were out there. They may still be alive.”
“But Besh and Chalk,” Nick insisted. “What about Besh and Chalk? You can’t just walk out of here and leave them—”
“They are in your care now. I could not protect them.” Mace lowered his head as he walked away, and lowered his voice as well. “I could not even protect myself.”
“But Mace—Master Windu—” Nick called after him. “Mace!”
Mace stopped and looked back. Nick stood framed in the bunker’s dark mouth, its twisted jags of durasteel surrounding him like teeth. “What about the kids? What am I supposed to do with them?”
“Pretend they are your own,” Mace said, and turned away.
The compound was full of armed Korunnai, who were looting the scattered corpses with the same swift efficiency Mace had seen from Nick and Chalk and Besh and Lesh, back in that Pelek Baw alleyway. These Korunnai wore clothing that seemed to be all patches; most of the guerrillas bore wounds of one kind or another, and many of them showed signs of malnutrition. Only their weapons were well tended.
They clearly took better care of their blasters than they did of themselves.
As Mace moved through the compound, the new realness of the world he saw intensified, and fragmented: a scatter of hyper-real details that he could not fit into a complete picture.
Vivid as a nightmare.
A severed hand and forearm lay on the ground at the edge of a pool of burning flame-projector fuel, fingers slowly curling into a fist as it cooked.
A black splash of puddle that did not burn might have been water. Or blood.
A half-melted blaster gas cartridge ruptured, sending it skittering wildly across the ground, spraying a jet of bright green flame.
A pair of Korun teenagers danced like demented Kowakian monkey-lizards, dodging flame puddles as they tried to catch ration packs being flung out through the hatch of a smoking steamcrawler.
The sky burned with dawn as though the clouds had caught fire.
The twelve akks now stood in a ring around a couple of dozen shivering Balawai. The captives huddled together, holding each other, watching the guerrillas, eyes empty of hope and blank with terror.
The Korun whom Mace had kicked sat on the angled armor skirt of a steamcrawler beside the ring of akks, glaring at Mace as the Jedi Master diffidently approached. The Korun’s shields were pushed up onto his forearms, freeing his hands, which were engaged in massaging a massive lump of black bruise over his right eye. The skin there had split, and half his face was painted with blood that had sprung from that bruise to join another trickle from a similar swelling on the same side of his mouth.
A flash of intuition connected the Korun’s glare, the lumps on his face, and what the lor pelek had said to Mace as he had left the bunker.
Vastor must have a devastating left hook.
“Want what, you?” the Korun growled. He rose and pushed his shields back down to his fists, and they whined to life. “Want what?”
“Back off,” Mace said expressionlessly. He walked past the bigger man. “I seem to have been looking for someone to kill. Don’t let it be you.”
He didn’t need to introduce himself to the akk dogs who guarded the captives; the pack parted at his approach as though they recognized him instinctively. A simple question to the nearest captive led him to the father of the two young boys. When Mace told him that Urno and Nykl were still alive and as safe as any Balawai here could be, the man burst into tears.
Relief or terror: Mace could not tell.
Tears are tears.
Mace could summon no sympathy for him. He could not forget that this was the man who had fired the first shot into the bunker. Nor could he pass any sort of judgment upon him; he could not say that if this man had held his fire, any of the dead here would instead be alive.
Rankin was not among the captives. Nor was the girls’ mother.
Mace knew neither had escaped.
Rankin… Though he and Mace could not have trusted each other, they had been, however briefly, on the same side. They had both been trying to get everyone out of here without anyone dying.
Rankin had paid the price of that failure.
Perhaps Mace had started paying it as well.
One more question to one more captive, and then the akks moved aside for him again.
Vastor was nearby, growling and barking and snarling the Korunnai into groups organized for the withdrawal. In his disconnected state, Mace felt no surprise to discover that he could not now understand the lor pelek. Vastor’s voice had become jungle noise, freighted with meaning but indecipherable. Inhuman. Impersonal.
Lethal.
…not because the ju
ngle kills you, Nick had said. Just because it is what it is.
Mace put out a hand to stop Vastor as the lor pelek swept by him. “What will you do with the captives?”
Vastor rumbled wordlessly in his throat, and now again his meaning unfurled in Mace’s mind. They come with us.
“You can take care of prisoners?”
We don’t take care of them. We give them to the jungle.
“The tan pel’trokal,” Mace murmured. “Jungle justice.” Somehow, this made perfect sense. Though he could not approve, he could not help but understand.
Vastor nodded as he turned to move on. It is our way.
“Is that different from murder?” Though Mace was looking at Vastor, he sounded like he was asking himself. “Can any of them survive? Cast out alone, without supplies, without weapons—”
The lor pelek gave Mace a predator’s grin over his shoulder, showing his needle-sharp teeth. I did, he growled, and walked away.
“And the children?”
But Mace was talking to the lor pelek’s departing back; Vastor was already snapping at three or four ragged young Korunnai. What he might be ordering them to do, Mace couldn’t say; Vastor’s meaning had departed with his attention.
Mace drifted in the direction the last captive he’d spoken to had indicated. He stopped at the edge of a smoldering puddle of flame-projector fuel. It had burned nearly out; black coils of smoke twisted upward from only a few patches of dawn-paled flame.
A step or two in from the edge of the puddle lay a body.
It lay on its side, curled in the characteristic fetal burn-victim ball. One of its arms seemed to have escaped its general contraction. The arm pointed at the near rim of the puddle’s scorch mark, palm-down, as though this corpse had died trying to drag itself, one-handed, from the flames.
Mace couldn’t even tell if it had been a man, or a woman.
He squatted on his heels at the edge of the scorch, staring. Then he wrapped his arms around his knees, and just sat. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
He had asked that last captive where she’d last seen the girls’ mother.
He could not possibly determine if this corpse had once been the woman who’d given birth to Pell and to Keela; if this smoking mass of charred dead flesh had held them in its arms and kissed away their childish tears.
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