26

Happy New Year!

The chapter of unanswered moral and philosophical questions…

Everyone stared at me. I stared at the ground. Suddenly, a sob tore out of my body, and I collapsed.

"Akite!" Jiimo shouted. "What did you do to her?"

Daru dropped to his knees and put his arms around me. He spoke warningly in Okutushu to Tokan.

Slowly, I felt Iru Tokan lower his wings. "Child," he whispered.

But he was wrong. I wasn't a child. None of us were. We held responsibility, the power to injure or kill, and we used it. The things we had seen, the things we had done, the things we could do had banished childhood.

I clung to Daru and cried.

I was surrounded by hate and destruction. How close I had come to joining it. But I wasn't going to add to anything that could make another Fang die. Another Zefel.

Children don't make those choices.

I felt the downrush of giant wings, but I still sensed Tokan in front of me, unmoving. His companions were leaving.

I just cried.

Finally, I noticed two new Force-sensitive presences nearby, but I didn't have the strength to get up and face Moyek and Master Sual.

"Akite! What in the Force-cursed galaxy –"

Moyek stopped. I could feel her taking in the sight of me crying in Daru's arms with the two young Mibir, Jiimo, and Iru Tokan watching silently.

"Akite," she whispered. She gently pulled me from Daru's embrace. "Akite?"

I shook my head.

Another downrush – Tokan launching himself into the air. Nobody thought to stop him.

I felt Master Sual pull Jiimo aside and ask him something. Jiimo replied. I shouldn't have left him to explain alone, but I was still on the ground, held by Moyek and Daru.

Finally, I felt the first drops of rain. I wondered if Tokan was ahead of the storm. I wasn't sure why I cared.

But I did.

Because he was just a person. A person that had chosen the wrong response to tragedy.

The storm broke, bloodrain pouring down, soaking my hair and clothes, washing my face clean of tears as quickly as I shed them. Daru moved closer as if to shield me, but I was beyond wanting or needing that.

My tears slowed, then stopped. I licked rain from my lips, dust and all.

Because it was just rain. Rain that had picked up something perfectly natural from the environment. There was no malice – only sentient creatures were far enough from nature to feel that there was. In fact, there was just the opposite. Bloodrain, like all rain, brings life.

We walked back to the palace through the pouring rain. Nobody spoke. Nobody even suggested that Daru, Kaoritsu, or Kerai shouldn't come with us.

The guards at the gate asked no questions. Just Moyek's look made them let us all in.

We streamed bloodrain over the golden-yellow floor in the entry of the consciously anti-red palace. There, we awoke. I finally pulled out of the Force, relieved to stop seeing the billions of connections it showed me, frightened to lose its clarity. Kerai finally spoke, shattering the haunted silence.

"Of course you belong here," Master Sual responded to her complaint. "You've fought for us. You've done more than we have."

Someone came to dry us off. All seven of us reported to Tiku Lasir. I think that meeting him had been Daru's fondest dream, but at that moment, he felt nothing.

Why? I wondered as Jiimo and Daru related my hopeless, grief-crazed mission. I had started it. I had made the choice.

Well, they could have stopped me.

I still remember what Tiku Lasir said about Iru Tokan when they were finished. He always – in our language, what we would say means that his words were slippery."

"A silvertongue," Moyek offered.

"Yes, that is good. But I believed that I knew which of his words were true. I could have been mistaken on some. What mistakes to make!"

I spoke for the first time since before I had dropped my lightsaber, which Moyek now carried. "Who would you have believed?"

He looked only at me. "You."

"Me?"

"You. Your masters were uninvolved. Your friends I do not know. Tokan does not have honesty. You do. I would have believed what you said.

So that was for nothing? "What can we do?" I asked pleadingly.

"Nothing, perhaps. I may order his arrest. He may be arrested. But the courts, even in this time, are the authority. My trust in you does not constitute evidence."

I bowed my head. I had known he would get away since I had dropped my lightsaber. There was no hope for a trial in this place at this time. Who would believe the victims? Who else would stand up?

We – the Jedi – were sent to our rooms to clean up and rest. The other three were given rooms and clean clothes.

Moyek was sitting on my bed when I came out of my long shower. She held my lightsaber in her hands.

"Sit."

I sat next to her.

"Tell me about the colors of lightsabers."

I was taken entirely by surprise at this. "Well, Sith have red ones because we won't let them get real crystals, and Jedi have blue or green. And Master Windu has violet."

"Yes, but what do blue and green mean?"

"Life?"

"And Sith and Master Windu aren't alive?"

If she hadn't been so serious, I would have laughed. "No, it represents a dedication to life."

"All right, but that still excludes Master Windu, and that wasn't actually my question. Why does a Jedi choose the color she chooses?"

"It feels right."

"What does it mean?"

"Blue is for most Jedi – especially padawans. It represents – represents the will to fight to defend, but that's not fair to us, is it?"

"And green?"

"The will to teach, to study the Force more than fighting. But – well, I know I'd like to teach, but we don't really fit that."

"Do we? Are you missing something?"

I groped for the answer. My brain was exhausted.

"Perhaps," she said after an agonizing wait, "Green involves not fighting. Not physically. To find the other answers. To see the other ways."

"But – but Fang and – and Zefel were blue."

"I'm sure Fang would have grown out of it. It's just the young Jedi's attraction to seeing visible strength as the answer. He was male."

He was also desperate to be seen as powerful even with his lack of strength in the Force. And he would never have agreed to teach.

"And I don't think Zefel ever saw any answers or ways."

I turned my head away. That was true.

"But you do. Even better than I do. So, perhaps, that is why your lightsaber is green." She tossed it to me. "Or it could just be a pretty color."

Moyek and I didn't speak more about what had happened. I admired her patience. I would have been burning to hear. We meditated for two hours. I tried to put my thoughts in order in preparation for answering her – or the Council's – questions.

We were going home.

But I wasn't sure what home would seem like anymore. I had lost too much in my months in Kebro – and gained too much.

When we returned from meditation, we ate with Jiimo, then met Daru, his friends, and Master Sual in Tiku Lasir's meeting room. The Tiku's face was unusually grim, but I'm sure he mirrored ours.

"Let me start by saying that we are not yet confident of our assessment of this, but there has been a notable occurrence," he told us. I could ell that "notable" was a terrible understatement. "Less than an hour ago, a bomb detonated at the base of an apartment building which several Zabrak families still inhabited. The building collapsed. Preliminary estimates claim forty to fifty death, but we will not know until the militia further investigates.

Moyek swore quietly next to me.

"At the site of the detonation, the militia found the remains of a person. The bioscans seem to indicate that this was Iru Tokan."

He let us work that out. My mind spun. Tokan was too smart to have been there accidentally, and it was a Zabrak apartment.

"It sounds like he committed suicide," I said in surprise.

"And decided to take others with him," Tiku Lasir finished, nodding. "I believe that he may have been afraid of my reaction to what you would tell me."

"Or maybe he felt guilty – well, not too guilty," Moyek commented.

Whatever his reason, I knew that it was my fault. I had chosen against it, but I had killed him all the same. This wasn't the first time I had come across the idea – it seems fairly common – but I had never entirely believed it.

"He killed himself, Akite. It wasn't your choice," Moyek told me as we left.

"And forty or fifty others!" I whispered, still in shock.

But had it been worth making my choice? One leader was gone. That was all. And he had killed so many.

But he could have killed more if I had let him live.

Yes, it was worth it. There are few enough Jedi. I was just one, but the galaxy needed me, and I couldn't have killed him in my anger without serious repercussions for me as a Jedi… I had done right.

Hadn't I?