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"Master Windu." Nick picked up the medpac case and glanced at the readout. "Lesh is way more advanced than this thing says."

"Medpac scanners are extremely reliable. I can't imagine it's wrong."

"It's not wrong," Nick said softly. He turned the case so that Mace could check the screen again. "These aren't Lesh's readings."

"What?"

Besh, looking at the ground, touched his own chest with the tips of his fingers, then sagged; he seemed to crumple in on himself, breath leaving him along with hope and fear. His Force aura shaded into black despair.

Mace looked from Besh to Nick and back again, and then at Lesh spasming on the rocks, and then at the spray hypo still clutched nervelessly in his hand. Not because the jungle kills you, Nick had said. Just because it is what it is.

Nick retrieved the medpac's scanner and waved it near Mace's head.

"You're okay," he said thinly, licking pale sweat from his upper lip. "No sign of infestation." He turned to Chalk, frowning down at the medpac's readout.

His shoulders slumped and his hand started to shake.

He had no words, but he didn't need any. She read her fate on his face.

She stiffened and her mouth went thin and hard. Then she turned away and marched downslope.

"Chalk-" Nick called after her helplessly. "Chalk, wait-"

"Getting the Thunderbolt, me." Her voice was squeezed flat, as unemotional as a navcomp's vocabulator. "Good weapon. Will need it, you."

Nick turned his stricken look on Mace. "Master Windu-" He held out the medpac scanner imploringly. "Don't make me do my own reading, huh?"

Mace quickly scanned Nick's spine and skull. The readings indicated a clear negative, but Nick didn't seem much relieved.

"Yeah, well," he said with understated bitterness, "if I was gonna die in the next day or two, I wouldn't have to worry about taking care of them."

"Taking care of them?" Mace said. "Is there a treatment?"

"Yeah." Nick drew his pistol. "I got their treatment right here."

"That's your answer?" Mace stepped in front of him. "Kill your friends?"

"Just Lesh," he said, his voice grim and hard, even though it trembled a little, like his hand. He didn't have Chalk's mental toughness. His eyes watered, and his face twisted, and he could barely make himself look at his friends. "Time enough to take care of Besh and Chalk when they start the twitches."

Mace still couldn't believe Nick was serious. "You want to just shoot them? Like Chalk's grasser?"

"Not like her grasser," Nick said. His face had gone gray. "Not in the head. Scatters the larvae. Some of them will be developed enough to be dangerous." He coughed. "To us."

"So it's not enough that he dies." Mace breathed Jedi discipline into a wall around his heart: to lock down his empathic horror at the gray rictus of Lesh's face. Pink-tinged foam bubbled from Lesh's lips. "The...

infested areas... have to be destroyed. Brain and spinal cord."

Nick nodded, looking even sicker. "With wasp fever, we usually burn the body, but..."

Mace understood. The escaped gunships would have transmitted their position. No telling what might already be on its way.

He could not believe what he was about to do. He could not even believe what he was about to say. But he was a Jedi. The purpose of his life was to do what must be done. To do what others would not, or could not.

No matter what it was.

He undipped the lightsabers from his belt. His own and Depa's both.

Green blade and purple sizzled together in the smoke-hazed air.

Besh looked up from the ground. Chalk went still on the slope, the Thunderbolt cradled in her arms. Nick opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but didn't know what it might be.

They all stared at Mace as though they'd never seen him before.

"He's your friend. Your brother." Mace took a deep breath, steadying his own fear and revulsion and his dark, dark loathing for what he must do.

"You might want to say good-bye."

Besh shook his head mutely. With an inarticulate sob compounded