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Besh shrugged, nodding.

Mace looked at Chalk: at her eyes, incongruously dark in her fair-skinned face; at the way she cradled the massive Merr-Sonn Thunderbolt on her lap as though it were her child.

And many things suddenly fell into place.

"It was you," he said to her wonderingly. "You shot Phloremirrla Tenk."

The blistering afternoon sun dissolved the departing groundcar into heatshimmer and dust. Mace stood in the road and watched it go.

This far from the capital, the road was little more than a pair of ruts filled with crushed rock snaking through the hills. Green foliage striped its middle: the jungle reclaiming its own from the center out. For this short patch, the road paralleled the silver twist of Grandmother's Tears, a river of snowmelt from Grandfather's Shoulder that joined with the Great Downrush a few klicks from Pelek Baw. They were well above the capital now, on the far side of the great mountain.

Nick and the others were already hiking uphill through an ankle-high litter of bracken and scrub, weapons slung across their shoulders. The living wall of the jungle loomed twenty meters above. In the far distance, Mace could just make out a segmented line of gray blotches: probably tame grassers. The Balawai government used teams of the great beasts to clear the jungle back from the road.

"Master Windu-" Nick had stopped on the hillside above. He beckoned for Mace to follow, and pointed at the sky. "Air patrols. We need to make the tree line."

But still Mace stood in the road. Still he watched dust rise and twist in the groundcar's wake.

Nick had said: You're from the Galaxy of Peace.

And: things are different, here.

A deep uneasiness coiled behind his ribs. Were he not a Jedi and immune to such things, he might call it superstitious dread. An unreasoning fear: that he had left the galaxy behind in the groundcar; that civilization itself was bouncing away down the road to Pelek Baw. Leaving him out here.

Out here with the jungle.

He could smell it.

Perfume of heavy blooms, sap from broken branches, dust from the road, sulfur dioxide rolling down from active calderae upslope on Grandfather's Shoulder. Even the sunlight seemed to carry a scent out here: hot iron and rot. And Mace himself.

He could smell himself sweat.

Sweat trickled the length of his arms. Sweat beaded on his scalp and trailed down his neck, across his chest, along his spine. The tatters of his bloodstained shirt lay somewhere along the roadway, klicks behind.

The leather of his vest clung to his skin, already showing salt rings.

He had begun to sweat before they'd even left the groundcar. He had begun to sweat while Nick explained why Republic-supported partisans under the command of a Jedi Master had murdered the station boss of Republic Intelligence.

"Tenk's been playing her own game for years now," Nick had said.

"Upcountry team, my bloody saddle sores. You, Master Windu, were on your way to a seppie Intel camp in the Gevarno Cluster. It goes like this.

One: she turns you over to the'team.' Two: the'team' reports an 'accident in the jungle.' Your body's never recovered-because you're getting what's left of your brains sucked out in a torture cell somewhere in Gevarno.

Three: Tenk retires to a resort world in the Confederacy of Independent Systems."

Mace had been shaken. Too much of it made too much sense. But when he asked what evidence Nick had of this, the young Korun had only shrugged.

"This isn't a court of law, Master Windu. It's a war."

"So you murdered her."

"You call it murder." Nick shrugged again. "I call it slipping your jiffies-"

"Off the roaster. I remember."

"We've been waiting for you for days. Depa-Master Billaba-described you to us and told us to watch for you at the spaceport, but we had a little militia trouble and missed you. We didn't pick you up again until you were coming out of the Washeteria with Tenk. And we almost lost you then, too-got a little hung up in a food