Mace paused, and looked back over his shoulder. At the mouth of an upper passageway stood Kar Vastor and his Akk Guards. Behind them crouched all twelve of Vastor’s Force-bonded akks. The lor pelek met Mace’s gaze and nodded.

Mace returned the nod, spreading his hands as though to say, Whenever you’re ready.

Vastor and his akks marched grimly down into the grasser cavern. The akks spread out in huge leaping springs, knocking over panicked grassers on all sides, crouching over them to let drool fall from razor teeth and moisten the fur on their necks. The humans stayed together in a flying wedge with Vastor at the point, moving in to manually separate struggling grassers, intimidating the winners and slaughtering any who had been too badly injured to walk.

Mace watched, stonefaced. It was wasteful. It was brutal.

It was necessary.

He turned once again to his own task.

He gestured and the mass of struggling beasts and men parted before him, and the smoke and dust cleared, and he saw her.

She sat on a ledge like a natural gallery that coursed one long-curving wall of the cavern. Her feet hung over the lip, dangling free: a child in a chair too tall for her. Her face was buried in her hands, and even from across the cavern his chest ached with a silent echo of her sobs.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 17