This is why so few students even attempt the style.

Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side.

Here in the jungle, that shadow fringe is unexpectedly shallow. Full night is only a step away.

I must be very, very careful here.

Or I may come to understand what's happened to Depa all too well.

Mace lowered his head. The electric sizzle of combat drained from his limbs, leaving them heavy and hurting: he had a variety of superficial burns from plasma splatter and splinters of half- molten rock.

He made himself look back up the slope into the pass, through the dying flames and the black twists of fading smoke. In the pass above were dead akks, dead or wounded grassers, and Chalk and Besh and Lesh.

He recalled his Force-flash of this morning.

"Come on, settle down," he told Nick. It was astonishing how tired he'd suddenly become. "I think we have casualties." They worked their way up the ramp of scree. Above, Chalk limped over to her wounded grasser and shook her head: it had been terribly burned. One whole flank was only a mass of char. She walked back up the six-meter length of its body, dropped to one knee, and stroked its head. It made a faint honk of pain and distress, and nuzzled her hand as Chalk drew her slug pistol and shot it just below its crown eye.

The pistol's single sharp pop echoed from the cliff walls that bound the notch. To Mace, it sounded like a punctuation mark: a period for the end of the battle. The echoes made it into sardonic applause.

Besh and Lesh still huddled in the shadow of the dead akk. With the akk on one side and a huge crag on the other to shelter them from the flames, Mace thought they might have made it through.

Chalk got there before Nick and Mace. All the way down from the L

corpse of her grasser, her eyes stayed locked on where the brothers must have been, and from her face Mace could tell that what she saw was bad. She glanced over at Nick as he and Mace came up, and she gave that same slow expressionless shake of the head.

Besh sat on the ground by the dead akk's head. Hugging his knees. Rocking back and forth.

Scattered on the ground around him were contents of a standard medpac: hand scanner, spray hypos and bandages, bone stabilizers. He didn't seem to be injured, but he was pale as a dead man, and his eyes were round and blankly staring.

Lesh was in convulsions.

His face had twisted into a rigid mask, a blind gape at the empty afternoon sky. He bucked and writhed, hands clutching spastically, heels drumming the rocks. Mace's first thought was head wound-shrapnel or rock splinters in the skull could trigger such seizures-and he couldn't understand why Nick and Chalk and his own brother just stood as though they were helpless to do anything but watch him suffer. Dropping to a knee, Mace reached for the medpac scanner. Chalk said, "Leave it." Mace looked up at her. She gave him the head shake. "Dead already." Mace picked up the scanner anyway, and slid the medpac cover open to activate the display. The readout said Lesh wasn't wounded.

He was infected.

Unidentified bloodborne parasites had collected in his central nervous system. They had now entered a new stage in their life cycle.

They were eating his brain.

The previous night in the wallet tent made sense to Mace now: Lesh must have been sick with these parasites already. And Mace had thought it was nothing but stress and thyssel intoxication.

"Fever wasps," Nick said hoarsely. He was almost as pale as Besh. He could face violent death with a wink and a sarcastic one-liner, but this had his face shining with pale sweat. He stank of fear. "No telling when he might have been stung. Thyssel chewers go faster. The larvae like the bark. When they hatch-" He swallowed and his eyes went thin. He had to look away.

"They'll hatch from his skull. Through his skull. Like an, an, an eggshell." The pure uncomplicated horror on his face told Mace this wouldn't be the first time he'd seen it happen.

Mace set the medpac on a cool spot by the dead akk. "It says here he can still be saved." It took only a second to charge a spray hypo with thanatizine. "We can put him in suspended animation. Slow down the. wasp larvae. until we can get him to Pelek Baw and a full hospital. Even if he's identified-" Besh looked up at him, and shook his head in a mute No.

Mace brushed past him and knelt at Lesh's side. "We can save him, Besh. Maybe it'll mean giving him up to the militia, but at least he'll be alive," Besh caught Mace's arm. His eyes were raw, spidered with blood. Again, he shook his head.

"Master Windu." Nick picked up the medpac case and glanced at the readout. "Lesh is way more advanced than this thing says." "Medpac scanners are extremely reliable. I can't imagine it's wrong." "It's not wrong," Nick said softly. He turned the case so that Mace could check the screen again. "These aren't Lesh's readings." "What?" Besh, looking at the ground, touched his own chest with the tips of his fingers, then sagged; he seemed to crumple in on himself, breath leaving him along with hope and fear. His Force aura shaded into black despair.

Mace looked from Besh to Nick and back again, and then at Lesh spasming on the rocks, and then at the spray hypo still clutched nervelessly in his hand. Not because the jungle kills you, Nick had said. Just because it is what it is.

Nick retrieved the medpac's scanner and waved it near Mace's head. "You're okay," he said thinly, licking pale sweat from his upper lip. "No sign of infestation." He turned to Chalk, frowning down at the medpac's readout.

His shoulders slumped and his hand started to shake.

He had no words, but he didn't need any. She read her fate on his face.

She stiffened and her mouth went thin and hard. Then she turned away and marched downslope.

"Chalk-" Nick called after her helplessly. "Chalk, wait-" "Getting the Thunderbolt, me." Her voice was squeezed flat, as unemotional as a navcomp's vocabulator. "Good weapon. Will need it, you." Nick turned his stricken look on Mace. "Master Windu-" He held out the medpac scanner imploringly. "Don't make me do my own reading, huh?" Mace quickly scanned Nick's spine and skull. The readings indicated a clear negative, but Nick didn't seem much relieved.

"Yeah, well," he said with understated bitterness, "if I was gonna die in the next day or two, I wouldn't have to worry about taking care of them." "Taking care of them?" Mace said. "Is there a treatment?" "Yeah." Nick drew his pistol. "I got their treatment right here." "That's your answer?" Mace stepped in front of him. "Kill your friends?" "Just Lesh," he said, his voice grim and hard, even though it trembled a little, like his hand. He didn't have Chalk's mental toughness. His eyes watered, and his face twisted, and he could barely make himself look at his friends. "Time enough to take care of Besh and Chalk when they start the twitches." Mace still couldn't believe Nick was serious. "You want to just shoot them? Like Chalk's grasser?" "Not like her grasser," Nick said. His face had gone gray. "Not in the head. Scatters the larvae. Some of them will be developed enough to be dangerous." He coughed. "To us." "So it's not enough that he dies." Mace breathed Jedi discipline into a wall around his heart: to lock down his empathic horror at the gray rictus of Lesh's face. Pink-tinged foam bubbled from Lesh's lips. "The. infested areas. have to be destroyed. Brain and spinal cord." Nick nodded, looking even sicker. "With wasp fever, we usually burn the body, but." Mace understood. The escaped gunships would have transmitted their position. No telling what might already be on its way.