“Maybe it’s abandoned,” Sari reasoned.
“You think someone living by himself on an invisible moon in the Outer Rim is going to welcome us with a parade?” Dec replied.
“Good point, but now that you ask, that’s what I’d vastly prefer.” When Dec shot her a skeptical half scowl, Sari shrugged. “What? Parades are fun.”
They took a few steps forward before Dec put away his flashlight. “Light’s just bouncing off the mist,” he said. “We’re walking in blind.”
“Okay,” Sari said. Then, steeling herself, she added, “What’s the worst we could find?”
As they moved toward the bunker, a large paneled door slid up. Through the haze, they couldn’t see inside at all, but figures emerged from within. A gang of indistinct shapes, maybe a dozen of them, moved eerily to intercept Dec and Sari. Dec set his stun rod to charge. It hummed softly. Sari clenched her hands into tight fists the size of young Ewoks’ heads.
“What do you think?” asked Dec. “Guavian Death Gang?”
“Craygalon Marauders from Snowdn-4?” asked Sari.
“The Galgardi Syndicate?”
“Noreeno Horde?”
“Estipona Party Squad?”
Sari shot him a puzzled look. Dec explained, “They’re cannibals.”
“Oh.”
Dec and Sari hunched in ready positions. Maybe they would die on this invisible moon, and no one would ever know what happened to them. That they died fighting. That they died together, great friends, defending each other to the end.
“The Mangan Ring?”
“Bloody Montantis?”
“Droids.”
“Droids?”
“Look,” she said, pointing. “They’re droids.”
“We can definitely fight droids,” Dec said.
“They’re droids.” Sari shook her head, trying to explain. “We probably won’t have to fight them. How many territorial droids do you know? If they were sentries, they would have attacked already. No one sends a bunch of broken-down droids to fight. Do they?”
As the figures came more clearly into view, Dec saw that they were broken-down droids. A dozen of them, in various states of disrepair, all different classes and types. Some wobbly protocol droids of different heights. A floating probe droid with only a few spindly legs remaining. An astromech stutter-rolled, stopped, then continued toward them, emitting a low, prolonged tone. And more: a medical droid with half a head; a hulking construction droid; a lightweight navigation droid whose right hand had been replaced with the dual laser cannons of a B2 battle droid. She must have been their leader, for she met Dec and Sari first, stopping a couple of meters from them and raising her cannons. Behind her, her droid cohorts softly beeped and booped, blinking their signal lights.
Dec put down his stun rod and raised his hands. “We don’t want any trouble,” he said.
Sari put her hands in the air, too, and nodded. “No trouble.”
The navigation droid didn’t lower her cannons, even when all the robots lifted their heads skyward. A dirty gray-and-white astromech droid buzzed close to Dec. It passed him and his stun rod was gone.
“I might need that,” Dec said casually.
The B2 and the others all leveled their gazes at the interlopers. They moved forward again, surrounding Dec and Sari.
“What are they doing?” Dec asked. He was used to asking her things. Sari knew everything.
“Ask them,” she answered.
“They don’t seem real chatty.”
The oddball collection of droids walked, rolled, and hovered closer and closer.
“Too close,” Dec said, to no effect. He and Sari started pushing back, but the droids were solid. They wouldn’t be moved. Sari lost her footing and stumbled but didn’t fall; the droids around her were so tightly packed that they held her up. They held Dec just as firmly and started moving. As one, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, the droids pushed Dec and Sari along inside their metal cocoon, herding them toward the bunker.
“Let us out,” Dec managed, but he didn’t know which droid he was telling. Maybe all of them. He felt his jacket pulled off him. He grasped for it, tugging at the sleeve as it was stripped from him, but the droids were too strong. His satchel slipped to the ground and they walked over it.
He bumped against Sari, and she put her arm around him.
“Let’s go with them,” she said. “We don’t have a choice anyway.”
They stopped resisting and allowed the droids to carry them toward the dark open mouth of the bunker.
Some of the mist had cleared, the sun was shining harder and brighter than it had been, and Dec and Sari watched as the nav droid trekked out about halfway to their shuttle and raised her cannons again. There was a thrum as she activated them and then two electric spitting sounds—thoom! thoom!—as she fired. Plasma shots struck Dec and Sari’s shuttle and it exploded.
None of the droids moved against the thunderous noise or the hot fire that followed. Dec, catching Sari’s look, read in it his own thoughts precisely: They were stuck there. They were doomed. Things could not get worse.
Then they got worse.
Dec and Sari heard it before they saw it: a First Order scout shuttle descending outside the bunker where they’d just stood, where their smoldering wreck still remained. They saw the First Order pilot through the cockpit viewport, a stern-looking young man not much older than Dec himself.
The First Order shuttle touched down and the nav droid, now wearing Dec’s jacket, walked out to meet it.
Dec touched his head. He’d scraped it on one of the droid’s chassis during the pressed-in throng. It was bleeding. That was the least of his worries right then, though. The droids were about to turn him and Sari over to the First Order.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN wakefulness and sleep while he was a prisoner of the First Order on Vodran was, to Mattis, a negligible one. When the thick gray afternoon gave way to the inky darkness of night, Mattis lay on his mattress and stared at the springs of the bunk above him until it became too black to see even those. He listened to Cost’s whining, which fell to muttering, then to a fitful series of inhalations and exhalations as she dropped deeper into slumber. Across from him, Lorica was silent, only occasionally turning, growing annoyed in her sleep that she couldn’t find a comfortable position, then accepting her sorry state and returning to stillness.
Mattis heard all this for hours and hours until he finally drifted off to a poor approximation of sleep. It was never restful. Any sound, even from far away, woke Mattis with a start. He lived in an ever-present state of alarm, always at the ready, always prepared to fight or flee. It wouldn’t surprise him to wake one night to find the enraged Gigoran Ymmoss standing over him, her gargantuan paws ready to smother him or claw him to shreds. Nor would it astound him if Lorica jogged him awake to tell him it was time to go, that her plan had worked, that Ingo would free them, and all she had to do was promise Ingo her hand in marriage. His dread upon waking, Mattis both understood and feared, would be the same for either situation, and he dwelled upon both in his thoughts day in and day out. Occasionally, another notion surfaced: that he would celebrate birthday upon birthday, growing frail and gray-haired, in this detention center—first under Wanten’s irked command and then under Ingo’s more genial despotism. In that nightmare reverie, Lorica turned to the First Order and became Ingo’s paramour, the two of them—and sometimes Jo and AG, too—tyrannical in their treatment of the prisoners and of Mattis in particular.
And then, once in a rare while, Mattis allowed himself to hope. He thought, as he’d done upon first arriving at the detention center, of General Leia. He might even smile in those times, albeit briefly. He allowed himself to think of Dec and Sari and the possibility that they had escaped Vodran and would return for their friends.
It was Dec and Sari, arriving in their shuttle, animated by adventures of their own, that Mattis dreamed of now as the real-world sounds of his cellmates grew abstract and his friends’ arrival felt true. It w
as in this moment that thin fingers touched his shoulder and he jerked to a sitting position, throwing out his arms and, in the process, shoving Cost sprawling onto the floor.
“Hey!” Cost said.
“Shut up,” Lorica said. There was no sleep in her voice.
“Sorry,” Mattis said. “Cost woke me.”
“Don’t care,” Lorica groaned. Mattis heard her bedsprings complain as she rolled away from them.
It was too dark to see whether Cost had returned to her bed, but Mattis assumed she had. She hadn’t. Mattis felt those fingers return to his shoulder, pressing insistently.
“Hey! Are you awake now?”
He could just make out the shape of her kneeling beside him.
“Now, yeah,” he said.
“I don’t hear the scritching,” Cost told him.
“Good,” Mattis said, willing her away. “That’s good, Cost. Get some sleep.”
“Do you hear it?”
Mattis sat up in his bunk. Cost scrambled up, too, as if invited, and sat across from him with her legs crossed under her. Mattis cocked his head and listened for the scratching in the walls that he knew wasn’t there.
“I don’t hear anything,” he told her.
“Then it won’t hear us, either,” she said, nodding, confident.
“Is something wrong, Cost?” Mattis asked. He really wanted to ask if something was right. Mattis couldn’t remember Cost being quite so lucid in the time he’d known her.
“Everything’s wrong,” she whispered. She sounded haunted.
“Did you find something out? Did Ingo or one of the stormtroopers say something?” Mattis started to panic.
“I know some things,” Cost said.
“What do you know?” Mattis asked desperately. His voice was rising, and now Cost shushed him. A first.
“I know that there are things in this universe beyond us,” she said. “There are things beyond our understanding.”
“I see,” Mattis said, emitting a heavy sigh of relief. Cost wasn’t talking about anything happening at the detention center. No one was coming for them. She was talking about philosophy. She was talking about religion. She’d gotten to thinking about her place in the galaxy and the meaning of life itself. She was talking about the Force.
“You don’t understand,” Cost insisted.
“You’re talking about the Force. The energy created by all living things. It brings us together. Us, the galaxy, everything.” Mattis recited concepts he’d learned in his Phirmist temple back on Durkteel and ideas he’d gathered from the old stories he collected.
“You’re stupid,” Cost told him.
“I’m not! That’s what the Force is.”
“Not talking about any Force.”
Mattis felt he had to explain and defend himself. “Cost, the Force is the oldest and most powerful energy in the galaxy. In any galaxy!”
“Shhh!”
“Sorry. It’s just—there’s nothing else. If you’re talking about something overwhelming and ancient, that’s the Force. If you’re talking about things beyond understanding…well, most people don’t understand the Force. Except for Jedi.” He didn’t add that he understood the Force. That it was with him and that, someday, he’d have the opportunity to explore it fully. If he ever got out of this cell.
“Oh…” Cost said. Mattis saw her nodding in the dark. “Okay. You’re stupid.”
“Stop calling me stupid!”
“Stop being stupid!” she whisper-yelled. “And shhh!”
“Cost, if you don’t mean the Force, please tell me what you’re talking about.” Mattis was exhausted. This conversation was wearing him out even more.
“I’m talking about evil,” she said, her voice a thin whisper in the dark between them. A tremor climbed up and down Mattis’s spine. “Evil, old and strong. You don’t feel it in this place?” Cost shivered and inhaled sharply.
“I don’t feel it,” Mattis admitted. It was true. In this place, he felt afraid, he felt alone, he felt helpless and chilled to the bone, despite the planet’s crushing humidity. But he didn’t sense anything in the way that Cost was talking about. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“You know what this place used to be?”
“Harra the Hutt’s stronghold,” he said.
“Big mouths, stubby arms, big fat worms,” Cost said.
“I know what Hutts are.”
“The Hutt was mean.”
“All Hutts are mean.”
“Not all,” Cost said innocently. “But Harra was mean. Wookiee-who-had-her-lunch-stolen kind of mean.”
Mattis remembered the menagerie that Harra the Hutt had collected on this planet, the angry creatures who’d chased them down, the rancors who’d eaten Klimo. Those were pets for only the cruelest sort of being. Harra the Hutt must have been mean to trade in those creatures.
“You know what these boxes were?” Cost asked.
“You mean these cells?”
Cost nodded.
Mattis shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think about it.”
“These boxes were the Hutt’s torture pits.”
Again, that tremor wracked Mattis. But wait…it didn’t make sense. “These aren’t pits,” he told Cost. “They’re rooms. These were probably storage facilities.”
Cost laughed humorlessly. “Pit isn’t always a pit,” she explained. “Hutt kept her enemies in these cages, didn’t feed them, sent her guards in to torture and to torment.”
“Cost, were you here then? When this was Harra the Hutt’s palace? Were you in the torture pits?” Mattis felt his stomach lurch. If Cost had suffered under Harra the Hutt, that would explain her loose grip on reality.
“Cost was here. Cost is still here!” She patted his knee. “I’m tougher than any Hutt,” she told him. “I can stand it. The scritching and scratching, the muttering and complaining of the devil in the walls.”
There she went again. The devil in the walls.
“You don’t believe,” Cost said. “But believe, Mattis. This place isn’t just walls and bars. This place has scars. It remembers the evils done here over many years. They imprint on the structure, in its bones.”
“But you’re tough,” Mattis said, hoping to help Cost from the emotional well into which she was lowering herself.
“I am tough. But this place…it makes you forget hope. It makes you think you’ll never leave. Do you think that sometimes?”
Mattis admitted he did.
“That’s what the ghosts here do. That’s what the haunts here do. They suck it out of you, out from your heart. First sucks away your hope, and then it chews up your mind. You have to hang on to your mind.”
“I’m trying.”
“Don’t try. Do it. Do it, do it, do it. Because you don’t want to hear the rasping, scraping thing in the walls. Once you hear that, then you know. Hope? Gone. Mind? Going, going.”
Mattis clung to the edges of his mattress. He felt his face grow hot and clammy.
“Then, after all the scritching and scratching, you hear the laughter. Ha ha ha. So funny. The thing in there, the man in the walls, he thinks everything is a joke. But when you hear the laughing, Mattis, when you hear the laughing, that’s when you’re all done. Mind is gone. They could set you free that day. They could put you on a shuttle and send you back to your home, but you would still be here. You’d be a prisoner forever. Prisoner of Wanten, prisoner of Harra the Hutt, prisoner in your own mind.”
Mattis choked out a question. “What can I do?”
“Hold on to hope. Find her and keep her.”
“Hope?”
“She wants to fly away. She wants to be free of here, but you can’t let her go. You need her. In here, you need her most of all. You lose her, you hear the scraping, you hear the walls yammering and calling you names, and then you hear it laugh at you. You don’t want the walls to laugh at you.”
“I don’t,” Mattis said seriously.
She took his hand. Her hands were dry and f
elt fragile, like kindling.
“Did you lose hope, Cost?” Mattis asked her. He was afraid of the answer, but the way she was talking was the most coherent he’d heard her since arriving there. Even if her words were confusing or abstract, she clearly meant them earnestly and was distressed.
“Harra the Hutt kept her creatures,” she said.
“I’ve seen them. Up close.”
“Not all of them.” Cost stared through Mattis into the blackness behind him, maybe even through the wall, which was silent to her now. “Hutt took me from vacation. Snatched me out of camping site.”
“You took a vacation on Vodran?”
“I fish for dianoga. They make good soups!”
Mattis shook his head. That couldn’t possibly be true.
“Hutt’s bad friends, the ones who hung around her palace and ate her food and teased her animals, they found me and brought me to her. They thought I would make her laugh. Or maybe I could work. I couldn’t do either, though.”
She sighed, remembering sadly. “Harra the Hutt loved her creatures and mostly she loved to watch them fight. When they wouldn’t fight each other, she loved to watch others fight them. She made a Wookiee fight a rancor one time. Guess who won.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“The rancor won by eating the Wookiee. It took longer than you’d think.”
“Thanks,” Mattis said sarcastically.
“You’re welcome. It’s not a heartwarming story,” she admitted. “It’s really not even a story. It’s just something that happened that I saw. And it isn’t the worst thing that I saw.”
“Cost,” Mattis said. “When you couldn’t work and you couldn’t make Harra the Hutt laugh, did she make you fight a rancor?”
“I could never fight a rancor,” Cost said, as if Mattis were a fool for even asking. “I wouldn’t win. I would lose. It would eat me for sure.”
“I guess it’s good you didn’t have to fight a rancor, then.”
Cost looked at Mattis as if he were dumb. “Yes,” she said in a voice that told him he was as dumb as her look had suggested. “It’s good that I didn’t have to fight a rancor.” She shook her head as if to flick away the stupidity in the air. “Harra the Hutt had another pet. A bulgy, clumpy jelly-thing. Sticky with tentacloids that grabbed and drank and drank. It liked my sadness and my fear and my lonely feelings.”
Escape from Vodran Page 7