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“You can hide from this behind a mug for a while, Den,” Klo Merit said. “If you do, two things can happen. One: the mug will have to get bigger and bigger, to keep shielding you from whatever it is you don’t want to look at. Eventually, you’ll fall in.”

“And the other thing?”

Merit shrugged. “You look. And you deal with what you see.”

“Terrific,” Den said. He activated the portal and stepped out into the glare of the setting sun. “You’d make a lousy pubtender, Doc.”

5

Drongar’s tropical twilight had begun when Jos finally left the OT. He saw Uli sitting on a bench under a broadleaf tree. The kid had dumped his gown into the recycler and was wearing a Republic army one-piece that looked too large for him. A small cloud of fire gnats buzzed about him, but he was evidently too tired to even wave them away.

Jos ambled over. He pulled a chunk of spicetack from a pocket and held it out. “Here. You look like you could use this.”

The kid hesitated. “Go ahead,” Jos told him. “It’s safe enough. A mild rejuvenant. You’ll still feel like you’ve been dragged through a thorn-needle bush—just not backward.”

Uli took the spicetack and wadded it into his mouth. “Are you kidding?” he asked around his chewing. “I lived on this stuff during my residency. Like everyone else I knew.”

Jos sat down. “Yep. I remember it well,” he said with a sigh. “Stimcaf and spicetack—the diet of champions.” He nodded toward the OT. “You handled yourself pretty well in there. Better than I thought you would, frankly.”

Uli rubbed his eyes. Jos noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. “Is it always like this? And please don’t say, No, usually it’s worse.”

“Okay. But it is.”

The youth glanced at him with eyes far too old for so young a face. “The first one I worked on had been hit by an agonizer.”

Jos nodded grimly. The agonizer was new, an experimental hand weapon that targeted the limbic system with a high-collimation microsonic beam that somehow stimulated runaway prostaglandin formation. The result was intense pain without any physical trauma. It couldn’t be blocked by somaprin or other heavy soporifics, and it was often so intense that the patient died from sensory overload. The only way to override it was to sever the nociceptor synapses in the thalamic cortex. This required a delicate neurolaser procedure—just the sort of operation ill suited for quick-and-dirty mimn’yet surgery.

“I think I did pretty well, all things considered,” Uli said, his voice hollow. “Stopped the pain. Of course, he’ll have severe dyskinesia and motor ataxia for the rest of his life…”

Jos grimaced in sympathy. Neither spoke for a moment. Then Uli said, “I heard about what happened to Doctor Yant. I’m sorry, Jos. I can see how you wouldn’t want a new kiosk mate just now.”

Jos said, “Sometimes I feel like finding whoever started this rankweed war and performing a pneumonectomy with my bare hands.”

“Really.”

“For starters, yeah.”

Uli chuckled. He glanced at Jos, and Jos, after a moment, grinned. Then, suddenly, they were both laughing, hard gusts and whoops that were not about mirth so much as about anger, loss, frustration…

After a minute they subsided—although neither was really laughing anymore.

“I know how you feel,” Uli said, wiping his eyes. “I lost a good friend, nearly two years ago, in Mos Espa on Tatooine. There was some battle going on between a couple of bounty hunters and she was too close to it.” He hesitated. “It never goes away, does it?”

“No,” Jos said. “No, it doesn’t. But it does get easier to bear.”

“I can’t do anything about it,” Uli said.

“That’s right. And you need to understand that you can’t. Blaming yourself because you couldn’t save your friend, or stop this war, is a waste of effort and energy. It isn’t your fault, Uli. None of it is your fault.”

Jos stopped, realizing that he was speaking more to himself than to the boy. He shook his head again. Easy to say that. Harder to believe.

But maybe, just maybe, easier with time.

Kaird was again