He could not guess what he should do next.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU I should have been working my way toward Depa already. I could have headed for the Highland Green Washeteria, to make new contact with the remaining Republic Intelligence agents onworld. I could have hired my own team: though the bribe to Geptun wiped out the credit account of "KinsalTrappano"-it never contains more than a few thousand-that account is monitored by the Jedi Council. New funds would be added as required. A steamcrawler wouldn't be hard to come by, and the streets were filled with dangerous-looking people who might be willing to hire on. I could have done any number of things.
Instead, I drifted with the current of the crowds.
I discovered that I was afraid. Afraid of making another mistake.
It's an unfamiliar feeling. Not until Geonosis did I truly understand that such a thing was even possible.
At the Temple, we teach that the only true mistake a Jedi ever makes is to fail to trust the Force. Jedi do not "figure things out" or "come up with a plan." Such actions are the opposite of what being a Jedi means. We let the Force flow through us, and ride its currents to peace and justice. Most of Jedi training involves learning to trust our instincts, our feelings, as opposed to our intellects. A Jedi must learn to "unthink" a situation, to "unact": to become an empty vessel for the Force to fill with wisdom and action. We feel the truth when we stop analyzing it. The Force acts through us when we surrender all effort. A Jedi does not decide. A Jedi trusts.
To put it another way: we are not trained to think. We are trained to know.
But at Geonosis, our knowing failed us all.
Haruun Kal has already taught me that the tragedy of misjudgment that was Geonosis was not an isolated event. It can happen again.
Will happen again.
I don't know how to stop it.
To have come here alone made sense. but it was intellectual sense, and the intellect is a deceiver. To go after Depa myself feels right. but my feelings can no longer be trusted. The shadow on the Force turns our instincts against us.
I didn't know what to do, and I didn't know how to decide what to do.
There were instincts, though, that had little to do with Jedi training. It was one of these Mace followed when he felt a Hey, buddy nudge on his shoulder, and looked around to find no one there. The nudge had come through the Force.
He scanned a sea of faces and heads and steamcrawler smoke. Limp cafe banners dripping in the moist air. A cart with a ragged mange-patched grasser in the traces. The driver flourished an elec-troprod. "Two creds, anywheres in town. Two creds!" Nearby, a Yuzzem with alcohol- bleared eyes snarled. He was harnessed to one of the two-wheeled taxicarts. He turned in the traces and snatched a human out of the seat, holding him overhead in one enormous hand while the other displayed wickedly hooked claws. His snarl translated: No money? No problem. I'm hungry.
Another nudge- Mace got a glimpse of him this time. The crowd made one of those smoke-random rifts that let him see a hundred meters along the street: a slender Korun half Mace's age or less, darker skin, wearing the brown close-woven tunic and pants of a jungle ghoshin. Mace caught a quick flash of white teeth and a hint of startling blue eyes and then the young Korun turned and moved away up the street.
Those startling eyes-had Mace seen him before? On the street the night before, maybe: around the time of the riot.
Mace went after him.
He needed a direction. This one looked promising.
The young Korun clearly wanted him to follow; each time the crowds would close between them and Mace would lose him, another Force-nudge would draw his eyes.
The crowds had their own pace. The faster Mace tried to move, the more resistance he met: elbows and shoulders and hips and even one or two old-fashioned straight-arms to the chest, accompanied by unfriendly assessments of his walking manners and offers to fill that particular gap in his education. To these, he responded with a simple "You don't want to fight me." He never bothered to emphasize this with the Force; the look in his eyes was enough.
One excitable young man didn't say a word, deciding instead to communicate with a wild overhand aimed at Mace's nose. Mace gravely inclined his head as though offering a polite bow, and the young man's fist shattered against the frontal bone of Mace's shaven skull. He briefly considered passing along some friendly advice to the excitable youth about the virtues of patience, nonviolence, and civilized behavior-or at least a mild critique of the fellow's sloppy punch-but the agony on his face as he knelt, cradling his broken knuckles, put Mace in mind of one of Yoda's maxims, that The most powerful lessons, without words are taught, so he only shrugged apologetically and walked on.
The pressure of the crowds brought his pursuit up against the law of diminishing returns: Mace couldn't gain on the young Korun without attracting even more attention and possibly injuring any number of insufficiently polite people. Sometimes when the Korun flicked a glance back, Mace thought he might detect a hint of a smile, but he was too far away to read it: was that smile enouraging? Friendly? Merely polite? Malicious?
Predatory?
The Korun turned down a narrower, darker street, still shadowed with the lees of night.
Here the crowds had given way to a pair of Yarkora sleeping off their evening's debauchery arm in arm, perilously close to a pool of vomit, and three or four aging Balawai women who had ventured out to sweep the walkstones in front of their respective tenement doorways. Their morning rite of mutual griping broke down as Mace approached. They clutched their brooms possessively, adjusted the kerchiefs that bound whatever thin hair they may have had left, and watched him in silence.
One of them spat near his feet as he passed.
Instead of responding, he stopped. Now off the main streets and away from the constant rumble of voice, foot, and wheel, he could hear a new sound in the morning, faint but crisp: a thin, sharp hum that pulsed irregularly, bobbing like a cup on a lazy sea.
Repulsorlift engine. Maybe more than one.
Echoes along the building-lined street made the sound come from everywhere. But it wasn't getting louder. And when he got another Force-nudge from Smiley up the street and moved on, it didn't get fainter, either.
On the opposite sides of the buildings around, he thought. Pacing me.
Maybe swoops. Maybe speeder bikes. Not a landspeeder: a land-speeder's repulsorlifts hummed a single note. They didn't pulse as the vehicle bobbed.
This was starting to come into focus.
He followed Smiley through a maze of streets that twisted and forked. Some were loud and thronged; most were quiet, giving out no more than muttered conversation and the thutter of polymer cycle tires. Rooftops leaned overhead, upper floors reaching for each other, eclipsing the morning into one thin jag of blue above permanent twilight.
The twisting streets became tangled alleys. One more corner, and Smiley was gone.