After they ate, Lesh would often pull a soft roll of raw thyssel bark from his pack and offer it around. Nick and Mace always refused. Chalk might take a little, Besh a little more. Lesh would use his belt knife to carve off a hunk the size of three doubled fingers and stuff it into his mouth. Roasted and refined for sale, thyssel was a mildly stimulating intoxicant, no more harmful than sweet wine; raw, it was potent enough to cause permanent changes in brain chemistry. A minute of chewing would pop sweat across Lesh's brow and give his eyes a glassy haze, if there was enough vinelight to see it by.

Mace learned a great deal about these young Korunnai-and, by implication, about the ULF-during these nights in camp. Nick was the leader of this little band, but not by any reason of rank. They didn't seem to have ranks. Nick led by force of personality, and by lightning use of his acid wit, like a jester in control of a royal court.

He didn't talk of himself as a soldier, much less a patriot; he claimed his highest ambition was to be a mercenary. He wasn't in this war to save the world for the Korunnai. He was in it, he insisted, for the credits. He constantly talked about how he was getting ready to "blow this bloody jungle. Out there in the galaxy, there's real credits to be made." It was clear to Mace, though, that this was just a pose: a way to keep his companions at arm's length, a way to pretend he didn't really care.

Mace could see that he cared all too much.

Lesh and Besh were in the war from stark hatred of the Balawai. A couple of years before, Besh had been kidnapped by jungle prospectors. His missing fingers had been cut off, one at a time, by the Balawai, to force him to answer questions about the location of a supposed treasure grove of lammas trees. When he could not answer these questions-in fact, the treasure grove was only a myth-they assumed he was just stubborn. "If you won't answer us," one had said, "we'll make sure you never answer anyone else, either." Besh never spoke because he couldn't. The Balawai had cut out his tongue.

He communicated by a combination of simple signs and an extraordinarily expressive Force projection of his emotions and attitudes; in many ways, he was the most eloquent of the group.

Chalk proved a surprise to Mace; guessing what he had of what had happened to her, he'd expected that she would be fighting out of a personal vendetta not unlike Lesh and Besh. On the contrary: even before joining the ULF, she and some members of her ghosh had hunted down the men who'd molested her-a five-man squad of regular militia, and their noncom-and given them the traditional Koran punishment for such crimes. This was called tan pel'trokal, which roughly translated as "jungle justice." The guilty men were kidnapped, spirited away a hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement, then stripped of equipment, clothing, food. Everything.

And released.

Naked. In the jungle.

Very, very few men had ever survived tan pel'trokal. These didn't.

So Chalk did not fight for revenge; in her own words, "Tough girl, me. Big. Strong. Good fighter. Didn't want to be. Had to be. How I lived through what they did, me. Fought, me.

Never stopped fighting. And lived through it. Now I fight so other girls don't have to fight. Get to be girls, them. You follow? Only two ways to stop me: kill me, or show me no girls have to fight." Mace understood. No one should have to be that tough.

"I am impressed by how you move through the jungle," Mace said to her once, in one of these cold camps. "It's not easy to see you even when I know you're there. Even your grasser is hard to track." She grunted, chewing bark. Her dismissive shrug was about as casual as Mace's question.

That is: not very.

"That's an interesting way of using-" He dredged from the depths of thirty-five-year-old memory the Koruun word for the Force. Pelekotan: roughly, "world-power." "-pelekotan. Is this something you've always been able to do?" What Mace was really asking-what he was afraid to ask outright: Did Depa teach you that?

If she was teaching Jedi skills to people who were too old to learn Jedi discipline. people with no defense against the dark side.

"You don't use pelekotan," Chalk said. ""Pelekotan uses you." This was not a comforting answer.

Mace recalled that the strict, literal translation of the word was "jungle-mind." He discovered that he didn't really want to think about it. In his head, he kept hearing:.' have become the darkness in the jungle.

The grasser's lumbering pace was smooth and soothing; to make better time, it walked on both hind and midlimbs. This put its back at such an angle that Mace's rear-facing saddle let him recline somewhat, his shoulders resting on the grasser's broad, smooth spine, while Nick rode the foreshoulder saddle, peering over the top of its head.

These long, rocking rides through the jungle struck Mace with a deep uneasiness. Facing only backward, he could never see what was ahead, only what they had already passed; and even that had meanings he could not penetrate. Much of what he looked at, he could not be wholly sure if it was plant or animal, poisonous, predatory, harmless, beneficial-perhaps even sentient enough to have a moral nature of its own, good or evil.

He had a queasy feeling that these rides were symbolic of the war itself, for him. He was backing into it. Even in the full light of day, he had no clue what was coming, and no real understanding of what had passed. Utterly lost. Darkness would only make it worse.

He hoped he was wrong. Symbols are slippery.

Uncertain.

During the day, he saw the akk dogs in glimpses through the jun gle as they ranged the rugged terrain around. They went before and behind, patrolling to guard the others from jungle predators, of which these jungles hid many that were large enough to kill a grasser. The three akks were bonded to Besh, Lesh, and Chalk. Nick had no akk of his own. "Hey, growing up on the streets of Pelek Baw, what would I do with an akk? What would I feed it, people? Heh, well, actually, now that I think about it-" "You could find one now," Mace said. "You have the power; I've felt it. You could have a Force-bonded companion like your friends do." "Are you kidding? I'm too young for that kind of commitment." "Really?" "Shee. Worse than being married." Mace said distantly, "I wouldn't know." Mace would often get drowsy from the heat and the grasser's smooth gait. What little sleep he got at night was plagued by feverish dreams, indistinctly menacing and violent. The first morning after he'd triggered his wallet tent's autofold and tucked it back into its hand-sized pocket in his kitbag, Nick had heard his sigh and saw him rub his bleary eyes.

"Nobody sleeps well out here," he'd told Mace with a dry chuckle. "You'll get used to it." Day travel was a dreamlike flow from jungle gloom to brilliant sun and back again as they crossed grasser roads: the winding strips of open meadow left behind by grasser herds as they ate their way through the jungle. These were often the only times he'd see Chalk and Besh and Lesh, their grassers, and their akks. Using the akk dogs to keep in contact, they could spread out for safety.