Then I asked him about the dead children.
It's the only time I've yet seen Nick angry. He wheeled on me like he wanted to throw a punch. 'What children?' he said. 'How old do you have to be to pull a trigger? Kids make great soldiers. They barely know what fear is.' It is wrong to make war on children-or with them-and I told him so. No matter what.
They're not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. He replied in staggeringly obscene terms that I should tell that to the Balawai.
'What about our children?' He shook with barely restrained fury. 'The jups can leave their kids at home in the city. Where do we leave ours? You've seen Pelek Baw. You know what happens to a Korun kid on those streets-,' know what happens. I was one of them. Better blown to pieces out here than having to-survive-like I did. So then, out here, how do you tell the gunners in those ships that the Korunnai they're happily blowing arms and legs off of, are only kids?' 'Does that justify what happens to the Balawai children? The ones who don't stay in the cities?' I asked him. 'The Korunnai aren't firing down at random from a gunship. What's your excuse?' 'We don't need an excuse,' he said. 'We don't murder kids. We're the good guys.' 'Good guys,' I echoed. I could not keep a bitter edge from my voice: the holographic images shown to Yoda and me in Palpatine's office are never far beneath the surface of my mind. 'I have seen what's left behind when your good guys are done with a jungle prospector outpost,' I told him. 'That's why I'm here.' 'Sure it is. Hah. Let me share something with you, huh?' Changeable as a summer storm, Nick's anger had blown away between one eye-blink and the next. He gave me a look of amused pity. 'I've been waiting for days for you to bring that up.' 'What?' 'You Jedi and your secrets and all that tusker poop. You think nobody else can keep their chip-cards close to the chest?' He rolled his eyes and waggled his fingers near his face. 'Ooo, look out, I'm a Jedi! I know things Too Dangerous for Ordinary Mortals! Careful! If you don't stand back, I might tell you something Beings Were Not Meant to Know!' It has occurred to me, on reflection, that Nick Rostu can be regarded as a test of my moral conviction. A Jedi might conceivably fall to the dark from the simple desire to smack the snot out of him.
At the time, I managed to restrain myself, and even to maintain a civil tone, while Nick revealed that he knew all about the jungle massacre and the data wafer.
It wasn't easy.
He told me that not only had he been there-at the very scene Yoda and I had viewed in Palpatine's office-he had been in the company of Depa and Kar Vastor when they'd thought the whole scheme up. He had helped them dress the scene, and later it was Nick himself who had tipped off Republic Intelligence.
Even now, hours later, it's hard for me to put into words how that made me feel.
Disoriented, certainly: almost dizzy. Disbelieving.
Betrayed.
I have been carrying those images like a wound. They've festered in my mind, so inflamed and painful I've had to cushion them in layers of denial. Pain like that makes a wound precious; when the slightest touch is agony, one must keep the wound so protected, so sequestered, that it becomes an object of reverence. Sacred.
But Nick told the story like it had been just some kind of practical joke.
Hmm. I find now another word for how I felt. For how I feel.
Angry.
This, too, makes meditation difficult. And risky.
It is as well that Nick left on Galthra some hours ago. Perhaps before he returns-,'/he returns-I will have found a place in my mind to put these things he shared with me, where they will no longer whisper violence behind my heart.
The whole massacre was staged.
Not fake. The bodies were real. The death was real. But it was a setup. It was a practical joke. On me.
Depa wanted me here.
That's what this has been about. From the beginning.
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.
But I'm learning. In learning, I'm changing. The more I change, the more I understand. That's what frightens me. I shudder to think what will happen when I really begin to understand this place.
By the time I finally get it, who will I be?
