"Slim, and fat." "Okay." Nick carefully lifted empty hands. "Okay, everybody. Stand down.

Relax, huh? Shee, how twitchy are we, huh? Listen, you need us, too, Windu-" "MasterWmdu." Nick blinked. "You're kidding, right?" "I worked very hard to gain that title, and I've worked even harder to deserve it. I prefer that you use it." "Urn, yeah. I was saying you need us, too. I mean, you're not from around here." "I was born on the north slope of Grandfather's Shoulder." "Yeah, okay. Sure. I know: you're from here. But you're still not from here. You're from the galaxy." Nick's hands clutched as though he were trying to pull words from the air. "Depa says-you know what Depa says?" "Master Billaba." "Yeah, okay, sure. Whatever. Master Billaba tries to explain it like this. It's like, you live in the galaxy, y'know? The other galaxy." The other galaxy? Mace frowned. "Go on." "She says. she says that you-all of you, the Jedi, the government, everybody-you're, like, from the Galaxy of Peace. You're from the galaxy where rules are rules, and almost everybody plays along. Haruun Kal, though, we're a whole different place, y'know? It's like the laws of physics are different. Not opposite, not up is down or black is white. Nothing that simple. Just. different. So when you come here, you expect things to work a certain way. But they don't. Because things are different, here. You understand?" "I understand," Mace said heavily, "that you're not my only option for local guides. Republic Intelligence set up a team to take me up-country-" The looks exchanged among the Korunnai stopped Mace in mid-sentence. "You know something about that upcountry team." It wasn't a question.

"Upcountry team," Nick echoed derisively. "See, this is what I'm talking about. You just don't get it." "Don't get what?" Some of that manic glitter snuck back into his bright blue eyes. "Who do you think we left dead in that alley just now?" Mace stared.

Nick showed him those gleaming teeth of his.

Mace looked at Lesh. Lesh spread his hands. His thyssel-stained smile was apologetic.

"Does talk true, Nick: things are different, here." Besh shrugged, nodding.

Mace looked at Chalk: at her eyes, incongruously dark in her fair-skinned face; at the way she cradled the massive Merr-Sonn Thunderbolt on her lap as though it were her child.

And many things suddenly fell into place.

"It was you," he said to her wonderingly. "You shot Phloremirrla Tenk." The blistering afternoon sun dissolved the departing groundcar into heatshimmer and dust.

Mace stood in the road and watched it go.

This far from the capital, the road was little more than a pair of ruts filled with crushed rock snaking through the hills. Green foliage striped its middle: the jungle reclaiming its own from the center out. For this short patch, the road paralleled the silver twist of Grandmother's Tears, a river of snowmelt from Grandfather's Shoulder that joined with the Great Downrush a few klicks from Pelek Baw. They were well above the capital now, on the far side of the great mountain.

Nick and the others were already hiking uphill through an ankle-high litter of bracken and scrub, weapons slung across their shoulders. The living wall of the jungle loomed twenty meters above. In the far distance, Mace could just make out a segmented line of gray blotches: probably tame grassers. The Balawai government used teams of the great beasts to clear the jungle back from the road.

"Master Windu-" Nick had stopped on the hillside above. He beckoned for Mace to follow, and pointed at the sky. "Air patrols. We need to make the tree line." But still Mace stood in the road. Still he watched dust rise and twist in the groundcar's wake.

Nick had said: You're from the Galaxy of Peace.

And: things are different, here.

A deep uneasiness coiled behind his ribs. Were he not a Jedi and immune to such things, he might call it superstitious dread. An unreasoning fear: that he had left the galaxy behind in the groundcar; that civilization itself was bouncing away down the road to Pelek Baw. Leaving him out here.

Out here with the jungle.

He could smell it.

Perfume of heavy blooms, sap from broken branches, dust from the road, sulfur dioxide rolling down from active calderae upslope on Grandfather's Shoulder. Even the sunlight seemed to carry a scent out here: hot iron and rot. And Mace himself.

He could smell himself sweat.

Sweat trickled the length of his arms. Sweat beaded on his scalp and trailed down his neck, across his chest, along his spine. The tatters of his bloodstained shirt lay somewhere along the roadway, klicks behind. The leather of his vest clung to his skin, already showing salt rings.

He had begun to sweat before they'd even left the groundcar. He had begun to sweat while Nick explained why Republic-supported partisans under the command of a Jedi Master had murdered the station boss of Republic Intelligence.

"Tenk's been playing her own game for years now," Nick had said. "Upcountry team, my bloody saddle sores. You, Master Windu, were on your way to a seppie Intel camp in the Gevarno Cluster. It goes like this. One: she turns you over to the'team.' Two: the'team' reports an 'accident in the jungle.' Your body's never recovered-because you're getting what's left of your brains sucked out in a torture cell somewhere in Gevarno. Three: Tenk retires to a resort world in the Confederacy of Independent Systems." Mace had been shaken. Too much of it made too much sense. But when he asked what evidence Nick had of this, the young Korun had only shrugged. "This isn't a court of law, Master Windu. It's a war." "So you murdered her." "You call it murder." Nick shrugged again. "I call it slipping your jiffies-" "Off the roaster. I remember." "We've been waiting for you for days. Depa-Master Billaba-described you to us and told us to watch for you at the spaceport, but we had a little militia trouble and missed you. We didn't pick you up again until you were coming out of the Washeteria with Tenk. And we almost lost you then, too-got a little hung up in a food riot. Then before we could get to you, you managed to get your Jedi butt stunned into next year. Fighting a pitched battle with the militia on an open street in Pelek Baw is not a high-percentage survival tactic, if you know what I mean." "You couldn't have just warned me?" "Sure we could. Which woulda decloaked us to Tenk and her Balawai pals. Gotten us killed for nothing. Because you wouldn't have believed us anyway." "I'm not sure I believe you now." Mace had turned his lightsaber over in his palm, feeling the unpleasant way the portaak amber gripped his skin. "It's not lost on me that I only have your word on this. Everyone who might contradict your story is dead." "Yeah." "That doesn't seem to trouble you." "I'm used to it." Mace frowned. "I don't understand." "That's what war is," Nick said. His voice had lost its mocking edge, and sounded almost kind. "It's like the jungle: by the time the Whatever-It-Is that's moving through the trees out there is close enough that you can see for sure what it is-or who it is-you're already dead. So you make your best guess. Sometimes you're right, and you take out an enemy, or spare an ally.