That data wafer wasn’t a frame, and it wasn’t a confession. It was a lure. She wanted to draw me from Coruscant, bring me to Haruun Kal, and drop me into this nightmare jungle.

Many of the corpses were indeed jungle prospectors, Nick told me. Jups, when they’re not harvesting the jungle, act as irregulars for the Balawai militia. They are vastly more dangerous than the gunships and the detector satellites and all the DOKAWs and droid starfighters and armies of the Separatists put together. They know the jungle. They live in it. They use it.

They are more ruthless than the ULF.

The rest of the corpses in that staged little scene—they were Korun prisoners. Captured by the jups. Captured and tortured and maltreated beyond my ability to describe; when the ULF caught up, the first thing the Balawai did was execute the few prisoners who were still alive. Nick tells me that none of them escaped. None of the prisoners. And none of the jups.

The children—

The children were Korunnai.

This Kar Vastor—what kind of man must he be? Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who nailed that data wafer into the dead woman’s mouth with brassvine thorns. Nick told me it was Kar Vastor who persuaded the ULF to leave the corpses in the jungle. To make the scene so gruesome that I’d be sure to come here to investigate. To leave dead children—their own dead children—to the jacunas and the screw maggots and the black stinking carrion flies so full of blood they can only waddle across rotting flesh—

Stop. I have to stop. Stop talking about this. Stop thinking about it.

I can’t—this isn’t—

Nothing in this world can be trusted. What you see is not related to what you get. I don’t seem to be able to comprehend any of it.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 6