I hope I never forget the fierce conviction on his face as he helped me climb the extended leg of the ankkox and clambered up onto its dorsal shell. “Just because Kar beat you like a rented gong doesn’t mean he was right. Just because he won doesn’t mean you were wrong to challenge him. I can’t believe you’d ever say those things.”

His answer came from within the curtained darkness of the howdah at the top of the curved shell.

“If you spend much time around us, Nick, you will learn …” Depa’s voice was strong and clear and as sane and gentle as it has always been in my heart. “You will learn that Jedi do not always tell the truth.”

Nick stopped, suddenly scowling as though he found himself unexpectedly deep in thought. “Don’t always—hey …” he muttered suspiciously. “Hey, wait one second here—”

She pulled back the curtain once more, and pushed open the small swing gate in the rail. “Come on in. You look like you might want to lie down.”

“I might,” I admitted. “This hasn’t been my best couple of days.”

She took my hand to steady me as I stepped into the howdah, and she made room for me on the chaise. “I have to hand it to you, Mace,” she said with a softly ironic smile. “You still take a beating as well as any man in the galaxy.”

Nick’s eyes bulged as though his head might explode. “I knew it!” He shook a fiercely triumphant fist in my face. “I knew it. I knew you could take him!”

I told him to keep it down, because Vastor and the Akk Guards were still moving through the trees nearby, and I had no idea how sharp Vastor’s ears might be. I didn’t tell him to shut up altogether because it wouldn’t have done any good.

“I’ve got you figured. You hear me? I’ve got your Jedi butt scanned to the twelfth decimal point! I shoulda known you were gonna dive when you started in on Kar like that—you were spinning him up to make the confrontation more personal, like. The more you insulted him, the less he was gonna worry about taking anything out on me. And you kept on taunting him so that booting your Jedi can into next week felt so good that he basically forgave you for letting those Balawai go!”

I told him he was half wrong.

“Which half?”

Depa answered for me. “The part about letting Kar win.”

She knows me so well.

“You mean he really beat you?” Nick couldn’t seem to believe it. “He really, really beat you?”

“We share a bond in the Force now, Nick. Did it feel like I threw the fight?”

He shook his head. “It felt like you were a smazzo drummer’s trap skin.”

“As you said earlier: Vastor is a difficult man to lie to. He would have known if I was holding back. Then the beating would have been much worse, and he might very well have killed me. What I did was pick a fight I knew I couldn’t win.”

“Couldn’t?”

“Vastor is … very powerful. Half my age and twice my size. Training and experience can compensate only up to a point. And he is naturally ferocious in a way that no Jedi can duplicate.”

“You’re telling me you twisted his nose like that, knowing he was gonna beat you so bad your whole family would bleed?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t have to win. All I had to do was fight.”

“Kar’s shatterpoint,” Depa murmured. “You saw it all along.”

I nodded. Nick wasn’t familiar with the term; when I described shatterpoint as a critical weakness, he shook his head. “I didn’t see anything weak out there.”

With a sidelong glance at Depa’s thoughtful frown, I quoted Yoda: “You see, but you do not see.

“Kar’s great strength is his instinctive connection to pelekotan. The jungle lives in him as much as he lives in it. And like I keep telling you: even in the jungle, there are rules.”

I explained that a fight between Kar and myself was inevitable: two alpha males in the same pack. I could smell it on him even during the battle at the outpost when we first met. My only hope of a good outcome was to make it personal and immediate.

And unarmed.

If the fight hadn’t happened, he and the Akk Guards might very well have killed Nick and me both for setting free the prisoners. If he and I had gone at it blade to shield, I would be dead now—even if I’d killed him, the guards and the dogs would have torn me to shreds—and Depa, too, if she’d tried to save me; we’d only barely survived being attacked by three akks in the Circus Horrificus.

Against a dozen—

Well. It didn’t happen that way. Because I knew what Kar really wanted, in the grip, as he was, of his alpha-male jungle instincts.

He wanted me to submit.

And like many other pack hunters, once his rival submitted, his instincts led him to allow that rival to peacefully sniff around the fringes of his pack—so long as I did not renew my challenge.


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 12