"Being a Jedi is a discipline imposed upon nature, just as civilization is, at its root, a discipline imposed upon the natural impulses of sentient beings.

"Because peace is an unnatural state.

"Peace is a product of civilization. The myth of the peaceful savage is precisely that: a myth.

Without civilization, all existence is only the jungle. Go to your peaceful savage and burn his crops, or slaughter his herds, or kick him off his hunting grounds. You'll find that he will not remain peaceful for long. Isn't that exactly what happened here on Haruun Kal?

"Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are.

Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.

"Kar's power comes from natural instinct-but he is also ruled by instinct, in a way no Jedi ever is. A single Jedi who succumbs to his natural drives for power, for respect, for success or revenge, could do damage that is literally unimaginable." "Mace," Depa interrupted me softly, "are we still talking about Kar? Or is this about Dooku?" Or, I wondered silently, was it about her.

I sighed and lowered my head, suddenly aware of how exhausted I was. But still I finished the thought, less for Nick's benefit than for Depa's.

And my own.

"Our only hope, against beings whose instincts control them, is to absolutely and utterly control our own." -

JEDI OF THE FUTURE N

ight in the jungle.

Korun bedrolls scattered in clumps. Low voices blending into the background mutter of the jungle. Smells of hotpack ration squares and smoke from homemade cigarras of green rashallo leaves.

Mace sat on a borrowed bedroll a few meters from where Depa's wallet tent had been pitched in an abandoned ruskakk nest under a tangled arch of thyssel bushes. While Nick treated his injuries, he had been watching her vague silhouette cast on the tent wall by the light of a captured glow rod.

When the light winked out, it was as though she'd never even been there.

The muddy pastel pulse of glowvine light had Nick squinting at the medpac's scanner.

"Looks like we took care of your internal bleeding," he said. "One more shot of anti- inflammatory, to keep the concussion swelling in your brain under control." Mace leaned his head to one side as Nick pressed the spray hypo against his carotid artery.

The Jedi Master stared sightlessly off through the night; he didn't even feel the brief sting of the injection.

He was tracking his lightsaber.

"He's not settling," Mace said.

IL "Who's not what?" "Vastor. He's pacing. Circling. Like a rancor staked out in the desert." "You surprised?" "I shouldn't be. He probably senses that even though the fight was real, my submission was fake. He's just not sure what to do about it." Nick clipped the spray hypo back into its receptacle. "Unless your idea of fun is quality time with me and a medpac, I'd suggest you stay out of his way." He tapped the bacta patch that covered the bite wound on Mace's trapezius. "You wouldn't believe how many different kinds of lethal bacteria I found in there. I do not want to know what he's been eating." "I am less concerned with what he's eating," Mace said, "than with what's eating him." "One easy guess." Nick nodded toward Depa's tent. "How is she?" Mace shrugged. "As you saw." "No-I mean, that whole dark side crap. Like what we were talking about before I left you at the outpost." "I. can't say." Mace's habitual frown deepened. "I would like to say she's fine. But what I would like has little to do with what is. She seems. unstable." "Well, y'know, a few months in the war could do that to anybody." "That's what I'm afraid of." FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I am not sure what time it is. After midnight, I suspect, with some hours to go before dawn. I cannot be more accurate, as this datapad's chronometer function has suffered the same fate as its concealed transmitter. There is a time of night here when even the glowvines mute their light, and the prowling predators go quiet, and sleep seems the only activity that has meaning.

Yet here I am awake, though I have slept little in the past three days.

It was Depa's scream that woke me.

A raw shriek of impossible anguish, it yanked me from nightmares of my own. It was not fear, that scream, but suffering so profound that it could have no other expression.

Her scream woke her as well, and her first thought was to open her tent and exhaustedly reassure us that it had been only a dream. That seems always to be her first thought: to reassure the Korunnai, and me. From this I take considerable comfort.

It's the third time this has happened so far tonight.

And yet-injured as I am, and unused to sleeping on a Korun bedroll on the open ground- I find I have slept as well as I have yet managed on this planet.

Depa's screams are a mercy.

Because my own nightmares don't wake me.

My nightmares suck me down, drowning me in a blind gluey chaos of anxiety and pain; they are more than simple anxiety dreams of wounds or suffering or the varieties of gruesome maiming, dismemberment, and death available in the jungle.

In my dreams here, I have seen the destruction of the Jedi. The death of the Republic. I have seen the Temple in ruins, the Senate smashed, and Coruscant itself shattered by orbital bombardment from immense ships of impossible design. I have seen Coruscant, the seat of galactic culture, become a jungle far more hostile and alien than any on Haruun Kal.

I have seen the end of civilization.

Depa's screams bring me back to the jungle and the night.

A week ago, I could not have imagined that to wake up in this jungle would be a relief.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Tomorrow we leave this place.

This is what I've been telling myself all day long, riding cross-legged on the ankkox's shell, talking with Depa. I should say: listening to her, for she seems to hear me only when it suits her.

All day, I left the shell only to stretch my legs or relieve myself. and sometimes as I would climb up the shell to my spot, she'd be talking already, in that same low blurry murmur she used to speak with me-as though our conversation had been going on in her head, and my arrival was only a detail.

When the gunships came and rained fire upon us, or blasted away randomly with their cannons, the guerrillas who were lucky enough to be near the ankkox often ducked beneath it for shelter, but Depa never did, so neither did I. She lay on her chaise within the howdah, and I sometimes leaned my back against its polished rail, so that her soft voice drifted in over my shoulder.