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JUNGLE TO JUNGLE

Mace stood on the roof, staring into the emerald gleam of Depa's blade.

Either she'd given it to Smiley, or he'd taken it off her corpse. Mace hoped it was the former.

At least, he thought he did.

The Depa he knew-would she lend out her lightsaber? Would she give away part of herself?

Something told him it hadn't exactly been a Concordance of Fealty.

After a few seconds, he released the activation plate. Her blade shrank and vanished, leaving behind only a tang of ions in the air. He slipped the handgrip into the inner pocket of his vest. It didn't go in easily: the grip was tacky with a thin layer of goo that had an herbaceous scent.

Some kind of plant resin. Sticky, but it didn't come off on his hand.

He shook his head, scowling at his palm. Then he sighed. And shrugged.

Perhaps it was time he stopped expecting things on this planet to make sense.

He leaned out over the roof rim. Four bodies below in the alley, plus the pilot lying amid the wreckage of his speeder bike in the al ley. Include the one who'd crashed into the building, and that was all of them.

Smiley and the Korunnai were swiftly and efficiently looting the dead.

Mace's jaw tightened. One of the dead-the talker, maybe-had a deep blood-lipped gash from ear to ear.

Someone had cut his throat.

A sick weight gathered in Mace's chest. Some things did make sense after all, and the sense this made turned his stomach.

The Force gave him no sign of guilt from any of them; perhaps the violence here was so recent that its echoes washed away any such subtleties. Or perhaps whichever of them had done this felt no guilt at all.

And these killers were his best hope-perhaps his only hope-of reaching Depa.

But he could not simply let this pass.

Another lesson of Yoda's came to mind: When all choices seem wrong, choose restraint.

Mace slid down the rope.

Smiley nodded him over. "You're a mess, you know that? Take that shirt off." He reached down to pull a medpac off a dead man's belt. "There'll be spray bandage in here-"

Mace took Smiley's upper arm with one hand. "You and I," he said, "need to reestablish our relationship."

"Hey-ow, huh?" Smiley tried to jerk free, and discovered that Mace's grip would not suffer by comparison with a freighter's docking claw: trying just hurt his arm. "Hey!"

"We got off on the wrong foot," Mace said. "We're going to make an adjustment. Do you think we can manage this peacefully?"

The other Korunnai looked up from their looting. They stood, faces darkening as they turned toward Mace and Smiley, shifting grips on their weapons. Fingers slipped through trigger guards.

"Bad idea," Mace said. "For everyone concerned."

"Hey, easy on the arm, huh? I might need it again someday-"

Mace's hand tightened. "Tell them what we're doing."

"You want to lay off the bone-crushing grip?" Smiley's voice was going thin. Beads of sweat swelled across his upper lip. "What, you like my arm so much you want to take it home with you?"

"This isn't my bone-crushing grip. This is my don't-do-something-stupid grip." Mace tightened it enough to draw a squeak of pain through Smiley's lips. "We'll graduate to bone-crushing in about ten seconds."

"Um... when you put it that way..."

"Tell them what we're doing."

Smiley twisted his neck to look over his shoulder at the other Korunnai.

"Hey, you kids stand down, huh?" he said weakly. "We're just... uh, reestablishing our relationship."

"Peacefully."

"Yeah, peacefully."

The other three Korunnai let their weapons dangle from their shoulder slings and went back to looting the bodies.

Mace released him. Smiley massaged his arm, looking aggrieved. "What exactly is your malfunction, anyway?"

"You didn't lead me into a trap. You used me to lead them into a trap."

"Hey, Captain Obvious, news flash: this wasn't a trap."

Mace frowned. "Then what would you call it?"

"It was an ambush." Smiley smirked.