Shatterpoint

This is why so few students even attempt the style.

Vaapad is a path that leads through the penumbra of the dark side.

Here in the jungle, that shadow fringe is unexpectedly shallow. Full night is only a step away.

I must be very, very careful here.

Or I may come to understand what's happened to Depa all too well.

Mace lowered his head. The electric sizzle of combat drained from his limbs, leaving them heavy and hurting: he had a variety of superficial burns from plasma splatter and splinters of half- molten rock.

He made himself look back up the slope into the pass, through the dying flames and the black twists of fading smoke. In the pass above were dead akks, dead or wounded grassers, and Chalk and Besh and Lesh.

He recalled his Force-flash of this morning.

"Come on, settle down," he told Nick. It was astonishing how tired he'd suddenly become. "I think we have casualties." They worked their way up the ramp of scree. Above, Chalk limped over to her wounded grasser and shook her head: it had been terribly burned. One whole flank was only a mass of char. She walked back up the six-meter length of its body, dropped to one knee, and stroked its head. It made a faint honk of pain and distress, and nuzzled her hand as Chalk drew her slug pistol and shot it just below its crown eye.

The pistol's single sharp pop echoed from the cliff walls that bound the notch. To Mace, it sounded like a punctuation mark: a period for the end of the battle. The echoes made it into sardonic applause.

Besh and Lesh still huddled in the shadow of the dead akk. With the akk on one side and a huge crag on the other to shelter them from the flames, Mace thought they might have made it through.

Chalk got there before Nick and Mace. All the way down from the L

corpse of her grasser, her eyes stayed locked on where the brothers must have been, and from her face Mace could tell that what she saw was bad. She glanced over at Nick as he and Mace came up, and she gave that same slow expressionless shake of the head.

Besh sat on the ground by the dead akk's head. Hugging his knees. Rocking back and forth.

Scattered on the ground around him were contents of a standard medpac: hand sca

Lesh was in convulsions.

His face had twisted into a rigid mask, a blind gape at the empty afternoon sky. He bucked and writhed, hands clutching spastically, heels drumming the rocks. Mace's first thought was head wound-shrapnel or rock splinters in the skull could trigger such seizures-and he couldn't understand why Nick and Chalk and his own brother just stood as though they were helpless to do anything but watch him suffer. Dropping to a knee, Mace reached for the medpac sca

He was infected.

Unidentified bloodborne parasites had collected in his central nervous system. They had now entered a new stage in their life cycle.

They were eating his brain.

The previous night in the wallet tent made sense to Mace now: Lesh must have been sick with these parasites already. And Mace had thought it was nothing but stress and thyssel intoxication.

"Fever wasps," Nick said hoarsely. He was almost as pale as Besh. He could face violent death with a wink and a sarcastic one-liner, but this had his face shining with pale sweat. He stank of fear. "No telling when he might have been stung. Thyssel chewers go faster. The larvae like the bark. When they hatch-" He swallowed and his eyes went thin. He had to look away.

"They'll hatch from his skull. Through his skull. Like an, an, an eggshell." The pure uncomplicated horror on his face told Mace this wouldn't be the first time he'd seen it happen.

Mace set the medpac on a cool spot by the dead akk. "It says here he can still be saved." It took only a second to charge a spray hypo with thanatizine. "We can put him in suspended animation. Slow down the. wasp larvae. until we can get him to Pelek Baw and a full hospital. Even if he's identified-" Besh looked up at him, and shook his head in a mute No.

Mace brushed past him and knelt at Lesh's side. "We can save him, Besh. Maybe it'll mean giving him up to the militia, but at least he'll be alive," Besh caught Mace's arm. His eyes were raw, spidered with blood. Again, he shook his head.

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

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 sca

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 sca

"Yeah, well," he said with understated bitterness, "if I was go