On the floor below Terrel’s dangling feet was a short stub of knife, smeared with the same dark blood. The blade was only half a decimeter long, its tip now a sharp straight slant—

Terrel’s knife. The one Mace had sliced in half on the slope outside.

Strength drained from Mace’s knees. “Oh, Terrel,” he said, letting his lightsabers swallow their blades. “Terrel, what have you done?”

Don’t worry, was the meaning of Vastor’s rumbling growl. He won’t do it again.

Mace threw himself into a Force-spring, both his blades blazing to life again as he streaked through the darkness toward Vastor’s back—and in that instant he saw himself arguing again with Nick on the trail, heard again his orders within this shattered bunker, saw the steamcrawler carrying children teeter at the lip of the precipice, saw Rankin step into the circle of light, faced Vastor inside a steamcrawler crowded with wounded. He couldn’t see what he should have done differently—what he could have done differently and remained the Jedi he was—to lead to any moment other than this one: this moment where he knew already he would be too late, too slow, too old and tired, too beaten down by the inexplicable cruelties of jungle war—

Too useless to save the life of one single child.

Mace could only roar a futile denial as Vastor struck. The vibroshield sank deep into Terrel’s body. And as the lor pelek ripped the life out of the boy, the blood fever told Mace what he should have done differently.

He should have killed Kar Vastor.

He’d been too late to save Terrel, but in the bunker there were four other Balawai children whom Vastor could reach with a single stride.

Still in the air, Mace drew back both lightsabers and whipped them forward and down with the full grim intention to carve Vastor into pieces so small it’d take a bioscan to tell they’d ever been human.

The lor pelek cast aside the boy’s corpse with one flick of his massive wrist and whirled, shields flashing in the lightsaber glare as they flicked upward and met Mace’s downward strokes. Mace used the Force to drive the blades; he would cut through the shields, through both of Vastor’s arms, slash deep into his chest to quench the blades’ fire in Vastor’s smoking heart—


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 8