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So dark he might as well be blind.

"Depa," he said softly. "Kar. Come out. I know you're watching me."

His answer was a low, silky predator's growl that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

We don't have to be enemies.

Mace brought up his blade. He moved cautiously around the ruins of the monitor bank closest to the doorway.

Aren't we on the same side? We've won the planet for you, haven't we?

Mace reached into the Force, feeling for the emptiness below that would contain the transceiver. With each step, he worked his feet down, seeking solid footing on the floor before taking the next.

Do you really want to fight us? We are kin, you and I.

We are your own people.

"You were never my people." Mace spoke without emotion. "A man like you will always be my enemy, no matter whose side you're on. And I will always fight you."

Why do they name you a Master? You have mastered only futility. You cannot possibly win.

"I don't have to win," Mace said. "All I have to do is fight."

A low snarl was the only warning he got.

Nick's guns roared flame at a hurtling dark shape that leaped from nowhere. Sparks clanged in the gloom as Mace whirled instinctively and slashed at the shape and it vanished in a dive that carried it over the console bank. Before he'd even seen what it was.

He'd never felt it coming.

Dark power swirled around him.

He let his blade shrink away and crouched between two console banks, his heart hammering. "Nick!" he called. "Did you get him?"

"Don't think so." Nick's voice came out thin and tight. "Sounded like he took both on the shields. You?"

Mace smelled smoke: charred flesh. "Perhaps. A piece of him, any way."

"See where he came from?"

"No. I think-" Mace's breath hissed through his teeth. "I thin they're hiding among the bodies. Stay ready."

"You better believe it."

The low snarling growl became mocking. Your Force can't help yo here.

Here there is only pelekotan. And we are only pelekotani dream.

Mace crept his way silently along the console bank.

You didn't feel me coming at you. You can't.

"That wasn't you," Mace said, low.

But it was. One-seventh of me.

Your pardon: one-eighth.

He could feel the transceiver chamber now: two meters away o the far side of this console bank. Its ceiling began a meter and a ha below the floor.

You have lost her. Lost her to pelekotan. Lost her to pelekotan's drean a world free from Balawai.

Mace muttered, "We are all Balawai here."

He triggered his blade just long enough to stab into the leg well c the console under which he crouched, and carve an arch out of u back just large enough to crawl through. He pulled the cutaway piec free and laid it flat.

On the far side lay a knot of dead clones. Four. He had to crav over them.

Someone had taken off their helmets. Their eyes were open.

Jango Fett's dead face stared at him four times over.

Dead eyes looked into him and saw nothing but his guilt.

He kept moving.

The spot he needed was just ahead. Mace finally tore his attentio away from the dead clones, and froze.

Someone had been carving the floor there already. Blackene hunks of the command bunker's armor plating lay strewn around human-sized pit already nearly a meter deep. Beside them, a slu form in tattered brown robes lay crumpled on the floor.

Her lightsaber was still in her hand.

For one giddy instant, his heart sang: she had anticipated him. She hadn't fallen to the dark-it had been an act, all an act't't She had been cutting through the floor to help him-But it was only one instant. He knew better.

Of course she had anticipated him: she knew all there was to know about his style. She'd known exactly what his target had to be, and she hadn't been cutting into the chamber below in order to help activate the transceiver.

She'd been going there to destroy it.

Looked like the proton grenade blast had caught her just in time. She didn't seem to be breathing. In the blinding swirl of dark power