Mace didn’t trouble with the distractions that had made Vastor’s path jag like a bolt of lightning; he went straight for the door’s shattered gape as though launched from a cannon. He reached it only steps behind the larger man.

And froze.

Froze despite the chilling whine of those teardrop shields, despite Vastor’s rumbling snarl like the hunting-cough of a hungry vine cat. Despite a sound Mace could no more ignore than he could reverse the rotation of the planet: the shrieks of children screaming in terror.

The burning compound below lit the bunker’s ceiling with shifting light the color of blood, casting Mace’s shadow huge and wavering, indistinct but utterly black: a shadow that shrouded all within. The only light that fell upon the core of his shadow was the unnatural wash of mingled green and purple glare from his lightsabers.

Vastor stood within, hunched like a gundark, his right arm drawn back to strike. Dangling from hair tangled in Vastor’s left fist, feet kicking above the floor, sobbing uncontrollably about how all you stinkin’ kornos have to die, was Terrel.

[...]

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—

But the shields did not cut, and they did not give way.

Their singing whine hummed into Mace’s hands, up his arms, to shiver in his chest and buzz in his teeth.

Then he was past, flipping over Vastor’s head. Keela and Pell and the two boys shrieked and clung to each other on their knees, cowering back from his path. He landed and whirled to face the lor pelek, his blades crossed in the defensive X.

Vastor stared at Mace from a motionless fighting crouch. His eyes smoldered; his growl said, We have gone to considerable trouble to bring you here, dôshalo. Must I kill you?


- Shatterpoint, Chapter 8