“Nowhere is safe,” Mace said, and walked out to join Vastor at the edge of the cliff.

I have tried, Vastor purred when Mace reached his side. I have done all that can be asked of me. Not even Depa can say I did not try to spare your life. But you will not be reasonable.

“It is not in my nature.”

It is as you said earlier: you have made my choice for me. There is only one way to protect her from you.

“That is true.”

Mace reached down inside himself until he found the calm center within his exhaustion and his pain. He breathed himself into that center until he was fully within it, and all pain and fatigue and doubt were left behind outside.

“Do we fight, now?”

We must.

It is bitter, that we last men of ghôsh Windu must be enemies. I wish this could have turned out differently, but I did not expect it would. Depa has told me that you do not lose well.

“I haven’t had much practice.”

Vastor bent his head in a regretful nod of respect. Goodbye, Mace, Jedi of the Windu.

A tiny surge of the Force—

Just a twitch. A shrug. The slightest nudge, not even directed at Mace; sent off somewhere into the trees below the pass—

A signal.

The scene, frozen in time, locked in the amber of Mace’s Force-sense: Vastor standing with arms folded, not the slightest hint of threat, his shields pushed high on his arms, those arms still crossed to bury the lightsabers that he held under his massive biceps—

Mace beside him, exposed on the lip of the cliff, unarmed—

Gunships rippling the jungle canopy far below in shock wakes, silent with distance—

Nick behind in the cave, rifle leaning against the rock, one hand yanking the butt of his holstered pistol in a draw that to ordinary eyes would be blinding—

And a man hidden in the shadows of the jungle a kilometer away, smoothly squeezing the trigger of a high-powered sniper’s blaster rifle to send one single packet of murderous scarlet energy clawing up toward the meadow from the jungle below—

Centered on Mace Windu’s heart.

All this Mace kenned in a single instant, effortlessly, and the shatterpoint he found and struck by instinct was Vastor’s balance at the lip of the cliff.

Calmly, without any particular haste, Mace put his hand on Vastor’s shoulder and gave the lor pelek a shove.

Over the edge.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 15