Disoriented, certainly: almost dizzy. Disbelieving.

Betrayed.

I have been carrying those images like a wound. They've festered in my mind, so inflamed and painful I've had to cushion them in layers of denial. Pain like that makes a wound precious; when the slightest touch is agony, one must keep the wound so protected, so sequestered, that it becomes an object of reverence. Sacred.

But Nick told the story like it had been just some kind of practical joke.

Hmm. I find now another word for how I felt. For how I feel.

Angry.

This, too, makes meditation difficult. And risky.

It is as well that Nick left on Galthra some hours ago. Perhaps before he returns-,'/he returns-I will have found a place in my mind to put these things he shared with me, where they will no longer whisper violence behind my heart.

The whole massacre was staged.

Not fake. The bodies were real. The death was real. But it was a setup. It was a practical joke. On me.

Depa wanted me here.

That's what this has been about. From the beginning.

That data wafer wasn't a frame, and it wasn't a confession. It was a lure. She wanted to draw me from Coruscant, bring me to Haruun Kal, and drop me into this nightmare jungle.

Many of the corpses were indeed jungle prospectors, Nick told me. Jups, when they're not harvesting the jungle, act as irregulars for the Balawai militia. They are vastly more dangerous than the gunships and the detector satellites and all the DOKAWs and droid starfighters and armies of the Separatists put together. They know the jungle. They live in it. They use it.

They are more ruthless than the ULF.

The rest of the corpses in that staged little scene-they were Korun prisoners. Captured by the jups. Captured and tortured and maltreated beyond my ability to describe; when the ULF caught up, the first thing the Balawai did was execute the few prisoners who were still alive.

Nick tells me that none of them escaped. None of the prisoners. And none of the jups.

The children- The children were Korunnai.

This Kar Vastor-what kind of man must he be? Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who nailed that data wafer into the dead woman's mouth with brassvine thorns. Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who persuaded the ULF to leave the corpses in the jungle. To make the scene so gruesome that I'd be sure to come here to investigate. To leave dead children-their own dead children-to the jacunas and the screw maggots and the black stinking carrion flies so full of blood they can only waddle across rotting flesh- Stop. I have to stop. Stop talking about this. Stop thinking about it.

I can't-this isn't- Nothing in this world can be trusted. What you see is not related to what you get. I don't seem to be able to comprehend any of it.

But I'm learning. In learning, I'm changing. The more I change, the more I understand. That's what frightens me. I shudder to think what will happen when I really begin to understand this place.

By the time I finally get it, who will I be?

I'm afraid that the man I was would despise the man I am becoming. I have a terrible dread that this transformation is exactly what Depa had in mind when she decided to draw me here.

She said there was nothing more dangerous than a Jedi who'd finally gone sane.

I think she is dangerous.

I'm afraid she wants me to become dangerous, too.

I should-I need to change the-think about something other than- Because I asked Nick about her.

I couldn't help myself. Hope blossomed along with my anger-if the holo was a setup, maybe what she'd said was no more than. atmosphere. Local color. Something.

Despite my determination to hold myself unbiased until I could see her, speak with her, feel her essence in the Force-despite my resolve to ask nothing, and hear nothing-despite all my years of self-discipline and self-control- The heart has power that no discipline can answer.

So I asked him. I told him of Depa's words on the data wafer: how she called herself the darkness in the jungle, and how she said that she had finally gone sane.

How I fear that in fact she has fallen to the dark, and is irretrievably mad.

And Nick- And Nick- "Crazy?" he said with a laugh. "You're the one who's crazy. If she was crazy, nobody'd follow her, would they?" But when I asked if he meant she was all right, he responded, "That depends on what you mean by all right." "I need to know if you've seen her act from anger, or fear. I need to know if she uses the Force for her personal gratification: for gain, or for revenge. I need to know how much hold the dark side has on her." "You don't have to worry about that," he told me. "I've never met someone kinder or more caring than Master Billaba. She's not evil. I don't think she could be." "This isn't about good and evil," I told him. "This is about the fundamental nature of the Force itself. Jedi are not moralists. That's a common misperception. We are fundamentally pragmatic.

The Jedi is I

altruistic less because to be so is good, than because to be so is safe: to use the Force for personal ends is dangerous. This is the trap that can snare even the most good, kind, caring Jedi: it leads to what we call the dark side. Power to do good eventually becomes just power.

Naked force. An end in itself. It is a form of madness to which Jedi are peculiarly susceptible." Nick answered this with a shrug. "Who knows the real reasons why anybody does anything?" This was not a comforting response, and the rest of what he told me was worse.

He says the words on that crystal are just how Depa talks, now. He says she has nightmares-that screams from her tent tear through the camp. He says no one ever sees her eat-that she's wasting away as though something inside is instead eating her. He says she has headaches that painkillers cannot touch, and sometimes cannot leave her tent for days at a time.

That when she walks outside in daylight, she binds her eyes, for she cannot bear the light of the sun.

I am sorry I asked. I am sorry that Nick told me.

I'm sorry that he did not lie.

It is very un-Jedi to fear the truth.

I'll continue the story. Putting experience into words is a gain in perspective. Which I need.

And it's a way to pass the hours of the night, which I also need. Even for a Jedi Master, accustomed to meditation and reflection-trained for it-there is such a thing as spending too much time alone with one's thoughts.