Fi noted Atin's process of elimination. He looked as if he'd been doused in cold water. Fi suspected he'd wanted to be paired with Sev, and for all the wrong reasons.
“That leaves you and Fixer as White Watch, so you stay focused,” Skirata said, giving Atin a friendly prod in the chest. He'd spotted it, too. But then, Skirata spotted everything. “One watch on observation, one on intel collation, and two stood down.”
“What about everyone else?”
“Ordo's going undercover to find our mole, and Bardan and Etain will join the normal shift rotations until we need to break into a new phase. If needed, Vau and Enacca will turn to as well, and give us a hand.”
Jusik—looking convincingly unsavory in ordinary clothing and with his hair unbound—checked his snazzy S-5 blaster. Yes, Zey would go nuts when he saw the bill for this op. “Can we use the Force, Kal?”
“ 'Course you can, Bard'ika. As long as nobody notices. Or as long as you don't leave witnesses, anyway. Same goes for lightsabers. No witnesses. Might look a bit obvious.”
“When do we start?” Boss asked.
Skirata looked at his chrono. “Three hours. Time to eat, I think.”
Sev elbowed Fi, a little too hard to be friendly but not hard enough to start a fight. “So, you and me. The brains and the mouth. Don't get me killed.”
“I'm slumming it. I usually work with ARC captains.” Watching normal people leading normal lives? I'd rather charge a droid line. What happened to my certainty? Do the others feel like this? “But there's a war on, so sacrifices have to be made.”
“Can you do the dumb-trooper act?”
“You mean you're not doing it now?”
“I hope you're as good as you talk, ner vod.”
“Count on it,” Fi said, and noted that Darman had wandered off in the direction of Etain's exit. “Sometimes I'm not very funny at all.”
* * *
Etain felt she had held out pretty well, all things considered.
It was only when she closed the refresher door that she let herself vomit uncontrollably until tears spilled down her face and into her mouth. She ran water into the basin to cover the sound, and choked on her sobs.
She'd been so convinced she could handle it. And she couldn't.
Ripping into Orjul's soul had been even harder than outright physical violence. She had stolen his conviction from him, which was no great evil until set in the context of the fact that he would, she knew, die very soon without even the comfort of his beliefs, broken and abandoned and alone.
Why am I doing this? Because men are dying.
When do the ends cease to justify the means?
She vomited until she was convulsed by dry heaves. Then she filled the basin with cold water and plunged her head into it. When she straightened up and her vision cleared, she looked into a face she recognized. But it wasn't hers: it was the hard, long face of Walon Vau.
Everything I've been taught is wrong.
Vau was all brutality and expedience, as clear an example of the dark side for a Jedi as any she could imagine. And yet there was a total absence of conscious malice in him. She should have sensed anger and murderous intent, but Vau was just filled with … nothing. No, not nothing: he was actually calm and benign. He thought he was doing good work. And she saw her supposed Jedi ideal in him—motivated not by anger or fear, but by what she thought was right. She now questioned everything she'd been taught.
Dark and light are simply the perpetrator's perception. How can that be right?
How can Vau's passionless expedience be morally superior to Ski rata's anger and love?
Etain had struggled for years with her own anger and resentment. The choices were to be a good Jedi or a failed Jedi, with the assumption—sometimes unspoken, sometimes not—that failure meant the dark side awaited.
But there was a third path: to leave the Order.
She wiped her face on the towel and faced a hard realization. She remained a Jedi because she knew no other life. She pitied Orjul not because she had tortured him, but because he had been robbed of the one thing that held him together, his convictions, without which he had no direction. The truth was that she pitied herself—devoid of direction—and projected it onto her victim by way of denial.
The only selfless thing I have ever done that was not centered on my own need to be a good, passionless, detached Jedi was to care about these cloned men and ask what we're doing to them.
And that was her direction.
It was so very clear; but she was still raw and aching within. Revelation didn't heal. She sat on the edge of the tub with her head resting on her knees.
“Ma'am, what's wrong?” It was Darman's voice. It should have been the same as every other clone's, but it wasn't. They all had their distinct nuances in accent, pitch, and tone. And he was Dar.
She could sense Darman across star systems now. She'd wanted to reach out to him in the Force many times, but feared it might distract him from his duty and endanger him, or—if he knew it was her and didn't welcome it—annoy him.
After all, he'd had the choice of staying on Qiilura with her. And he had opted to stay with his squad. What she felt for him now, the longing that had developed only after they parted, might not be mutual.
He called out again. “Are you okay?”
She opened the doors, and Darman peered in.
“I don't want to be ma'am right now, Dar.”
“Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt—”
“Don't go.”
He moved a couple of steps into the room as if it were booby-trapped. She had been here before; she had been utterly dependent on his military skills when her life was at stake. He had been so focused, so reassuring, so competent. Where she had doubts, he had certainties.
“So you still don't find it any easier, then,” said Darman.
“What?”
“Giving in to anger. You know. Violence.”
“Oh, any Jedi Master would have been proud of me. I did it all without anger. Anger makes it the dark side. Being serene makes it okay.”
“I know it must have been hard. I know how Sergeant Kal reacted when he had to—”
“No. I was harming a stranger. No personal dilemma at all.”
“It doesn't make you a bad person. It has to be done. Is that what's upsetting you?”
“That, maybe. And having doubts.”
She didn't want to be alone with all that in her head. She could have meditated. She had the strength of will and the ancient skills to pass through this turmoil and do what Jedi had done for millennia—detach from the moment. But she didn't want to.
She wanted to risk living with those terrible feelings. The danger suddenly seemed to lie in denying them, just as she tried unsuccessfully to deny what she felt for Darman.
“Dar, do you ever have doubts? You always said you were certain of your role. I always felt you were.”
“You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I have doubts all the time.”
“What kind?”
“Before we left Kamino, I was so sure what I had to do. Now … well, the more I see of the galaxy … the more I see of other people, the more I wonder, why me? How did I end up here, and not like the people I see around me in Coruscant? When we win the war, what will happen to me and my brothers?”
They weren't stupid. They were highly intelligent: bred for it, in fact, and if you bred people to be intelligent and resourceful and resilient and aggressive, then sooner or later they would notice that their world wasn't fair, and begin to resent it.