Then he fell.
14/Dropouts
“LUSSK.”
Rance Lussk stopped walking, paused a moment, and turned around. He had been on his way to the academy’s library for an afternoon of solitary meditation and study when the voice piped up behind him.
It was Ra’at.
The smaller, wiry-framed apprentice stood with both hands behind his back, gazing at him defiantly through the veil of falling snow. He looked radically different from the last time Lussk had seen him—something changed in his posture, his bearing, the way he held his shoulders. Even his voice was bolder, more direct and confrontational. His eyes were polished stones, filled with a new and willful sense of determination.
“What do you want?”
“You weren’t at lightsaber practice this morning.”
Lussk didn’t even bother to shrug, communicating his indifference solely through lack of expression. Everyone at the academy knew that he only attended training sessions when he felt like it, when he wanted to test himself or prove a point to one of the Masters. He took a step closer to Ra’at. They were alone here behind the library’s immense sprawl, the academy’s Masters and students otherwise engaged in training or the rigors of midday study. Above them, the tower stood, its shadow banded across the walkway like premature twilight, and it occurred to Lussk that this, too, might have been deliberate on Ra’at’s part. Perhaps he had hoped Lord Scabrous might happen to be looking down.
“Well, what is it?”
Ra’at brought his hands out from behind his back, revealing what Lussk had already guessed would be there: a pair of training lightsabers glinting in the gray afternoon light.
“Does Blademaster Shak’Weth know that you ran off with two of his toys?” Lussk asked.
Ra’at didn’t smile; the intensity of his expression never wavered. “I challenge you.”
Cocking an incredulous eyebrow, Lussk asked, “Now?”
“Now.”
For an instant, certainly no longer, Lussk almost considered it. Then he shook his head. “You don’t want to do that.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“From you?” Lussk blinked lackadaisically. “Boredom, for a start.”
“Then I’ll be sure not to bore you,” Ra’at said, and tossed one of the blades in Lussk’s direction. Lussk caught it on reflex but lowered it to his side.
“I’m busy right now,” he said. “If you’re determined to humiliate yourself, you’ll have to do it publicly in front of the—”
Masters, had been the last word of that sentence, but Lussk didn’t get a chance to say it before Ra’at jumped at him, his feet hardly seeming to touch the ground. As opening salvos went, it was brutal but effective, a move whose grace would have been easier to admire if it hadn’t ended with Ra’at’s blade thwacking him across the chest, raising a hot streak of pain just below his collarbone.
Lussk spun back, blade up, aware now that he was in this whether he wanted to be or not. And with Ra’at, he realized, it wouldn’t be as simple as flattening him—an example would need to be made, or else every student would be out here trying him. More than anything, Lussk felt a kind of exasperation. Hadn’t Nickter been enough of a lesson? Was Ra’at suicidal, or simply insane?
He dived forward with his own blade, tensed for impact, but Ra’at wasn’t where he’d been just a second before, seeming almost to have vanished in a cloud of snow. Lussk looked up. The other apprentice was somersaulting directly over him, spiraling down, and Lussk’s instincts flung him out of the way a split second before Ra’at landed.
“Your Ataru has improved,” Lussk grunted. “You’ve been practicing.” Pivoting hard, he brought his own blade around where he predicted Ra’at would be, and this time he was right. When Ra’at looked up, he found himself facing the tip of Lussk’s blade. One stroke would finish the duel; two would kill him.
But there was another option.
“Now,” Lussk said, meeting the other apprentice’s stare and letting the Force flow through him like an electric current. “Drop your blade.”
Ra’at held his mouth taut until the tendon stood out in his jaw. His arm quivered, but he didn’t release the blade.
“Drop your blade,” Lussk repeated.
Still Ra’at didn’t move. Lussk felt real anger taking hold of him, the kind of rage he rarely experienced. Without hesitation he thrust his own blade at his opponent. If Ra’at was so determined to die like this, out here behind the library, then Lussk would oblige him.
As he swung forward, he heard a window shatter overhead.
Looking up, he saw something explode out of the top of the tower, momentarily arrayed in a glinting halo of broken glass. At first Lussk thought it was some kind of alien species—it had too many arms and legs—and then he realized he was actually seeing two people, one wrapped around the other.
The drop from the tower had to be a hundred meters or more. They fell together, twisting midair, plummeting downward, slamming into the rocky, snow-covered walkway with a sickening, meaty crunch.
Despite his reputation for toughness, Lussk had to look away. Gravity had made a meal of the corpses, contorting them into unfamiliar shapes. Broken bones punctured the flesh. One of them—a shirtless, blood-smeared sack of leaking viscera—lay at such an angle that Lussk could see its right eye protruding from the socket.
Then it sat up.
Lussk gaped at it, paralyzed by a dozy wave of perfect awe. That’s impossible, he thought. Nobody survives a fall like that. Nobody—
His thought, whatever was left of it, broke off cleanly. The blood-smeared one was looking straight at him with its one good eye, a savage, inhuman smirk swimming over what remained of its face. Besides knocking the eye out, the fall had done something to its spine and shoulders, wrenched them around sideways, jamming the clavicles outward, shoving the bone of his arm up through the skin. It looked like a suit of flesh-colored clothes that had been recklessly draped on its hanger.
Yet it was still moving.
Its broken arms grabbed the other corpse, scooping it up in one flopping, eager gesture, and raked it toward its mouth, and that was when Lussk realized that behind the broken bones and layers of blood, he was looking at the mangled bodies of Wim Nickter and Jura Ostrogoth.
The thing that had been Nickter bobbed its head and buried its teeth in the pulpy remains of Ostrogoth’s face. Almost immediately Lussk could hear the noises, a series of greedy, slobbering grunts. Ostrogoth—what was left of him—made no move to resist.
“What is that?” Ra’at’s voice was murmuring behind him. “What is that thing?”
Lussk shook his head, stepping back. He had no idea what he’d just seen—this would all take time to process, to decide how he was going to fight it or use it to his own advantage—but for the moment, he’d take it on its own terms.
“You figure it out.” Tossing his blade aside, Lussk turned on Ra’at and grabbed the smaller apprentice by the tunic with both hands, yanking him forward hard enough to snap Ra’at’s teeth together like castanets. Ra’at’s shock had left him vulnerable, an easy target. Ra’at’s own blade slipped from his hand, clanking off rocks before it stuck in the new-fallen snow.
“Wait, what are you doing?” Ra’at asked. “You can’t—”
Lussk spun him around and shoved him backward, as hard as possible, in the direction of the slobbering, eating thing that was crouched over Jura Ostrogoth. Ra’at squealed, arms pinwheeling as if something in the air could hold him up. Almost immediately his feet tangled beneath him and he stumbled, staggered, slid, and finally fell, landing first on his knees, then on his back.
The Nickter-thing lifted its head. Fresh blood drizzled from its jaw, dripping off its lips. Its one functional eye shivered like a raw egg in a cup. It thrust Jura’s corpse aside and devoted its full attention to Ra’at with the appetite of a creature being offered live meat.
“No,” Ra’at was saying, scrambling upward, or trying to. “No, n
o—”
Lussk turned away, legs already tensed to run. The last thing he heard, the moment before he bolted into the library, was Ra’at’s scream.
15/Triage
IT TOOK SCABROUS LESS THAN THIRTY SECONDS TO FLUSH THE WOUND ON HIS FACE with saline, start an IV on himself, and activate the auto-diagnosis cuff. Everything was exactly where he’d left it. He worked steadily, without the slightest hesitation, the swift and practiced smoothness of his movements betraying none of the anger that sat in his chest like a scalding red lump of coal.
There was a faint electronic beep from his right wrist, denoting the thirty-second mark. He checked the cuff’s glowing blue readout and saw that it was still calibrating the initial blood sample.
Meanwhile, the girl—the Jedi scum—was already gone.
Scabrous hadn’t seen her leave, but he’d known, of course, that she would try to flee the second she got the chance. That was a given. No matter—the orchid had done its job, and there would be plenty of time to catch up with the Jedi later. She would serve her purpose well enough when the time came.
At the moment he had more pressing matters to attend to. He continued working, holding his emotions carefully in check. Critical thinking was what had gotten him this far with the project; his mind was an engine of clinical detachment and he had an absolute unwavering commitment to do whatever was necessary to make the experiment a success. The emotions that fueled that engine—ambition, boundless rage, a natural depraved indifference toward anything except himself—lay carefully insulated in the dark vessels of his heart, where they would not be permitted to distract him from his goal.
And yet, all the same, he hated her.
Hated her with the brutal, grinding hate of the entire Sith war machine; hated her with the blazing intensity of ten thousand dying suns—this Jedi, whose orchid was the linchpin upon which everything would revolve, and whose very presence here would allow him to see the project through to fruition.
And it was good to know that hate was there, where he could access it whenever he wanted, like a fine wine to be decanted and sipped sparingly. It would be good to find her and to—
Well, to finish things.
Hestizo Trace would die screaming.
And he would live forever.
Beep! The one-minute mark. Scabrous flicked his eyes down to the auto-analysis unit. The blue numbers pulsed red. He frowned, just a little. Initial contamination levels were higher than expected: peaks and waves that the system was already rediagnosing, in order to isolate the specific antigen and lay the groundwork for the next step.
He couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The hemodialysis pump was portable by design, a flat shoulder pack that held six liters of fresh blood and a vacuum tube system. Sliding the straps over his shoulders, Scabrous attached the pump to the IV in his right arm and started the first infusion. A steady feeling of warmth crept up through his arm, filling his chest, loosening the tension, allowing him to breathe more deeply. He set the counters. At the current rate, the blood supply would last him six hours—assuming things didn’t change dramatically in the meantime.
Scabrous bypassed the turbolift, crossing directly toward the shattered window, casting his gaze out at the broken, snow-stricken terrain spreading out into the horizon. A feeling of confidence stirred within him, bringing with it a renewed sense of purpose. This was his academy, his planet—nobody knew it as well as he did. There was nowhere that the Jedi could hide that he could not find her.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he sprang forward and jumped out the broken viewport. He cleared it easily, plunging out into the night, knifing downward through the air, using the Force to guide his descent a hundred meters down. At the base of the tower, he hit the ground running. His mind was humming now, his body inhaling doses of fresh blood, sucking it down like pure oxygen, feeding muscle and brain.
Activating his comlink, he brought it to his ear and waited for the voice on the other end to respond.
“Query: Yes, my Lord?” the HK droid asked.
“Activate all outer perimeter barriers in all quadrants,” Scabrous told it. “Target is Hestizo Trace, the Jedi. Scan the lab for DNA and pheromone sample.” He paused, but only for a second, the wind blasting over him. “Use whatever means necessary. But I want her alive.”
16/Convocation
HESTIZO?
Zo was still running when the orchid’s voice rang through her head. It was enough of a surprise that she faltered, almost halting in her tracks.
She hadn’t stopped moving since she’d left the tower’s turbolift. Whether that was ten minutes ago or half an hour, she didn’t know. Time had become wildly subjective, a crazed and illogical sprawl, much like the landscape of the academy itself. Sprinting down between the gray, partially collapsed buildings and ruined temples, she’d focused on putting as much distance as possible between herself and the tower, but every time she looked back, the tower seemed to be in a different place.
Her head was swimming. She tried not to think about what had happened up there, but those thoughts kept seeping through her defenses like a cut that wouldn’t stop bleeding. She saw the face of the boy—was it a boy?—as he’d crawled out of the cage and jumped at Scabrous, the way he’d smelled, the noise that he’d made. He’d been like an animal, but far worse.
Hestizo, the orchid’s voice cut in, stop. Stay. Crouch.
Zo looked around. She was standing in front of an enormous statue of some ancient Sith Lord that had fallen over on its side, so that the right half of its features had been worn smooth, abraded by decades of wind and snow. Sinking to her knees, she heard other voices—several of them—talking among themselves from the far side of the monument.
She peered over.
A group of students was making their way down a walkway, twenty meters in front of her. An older man, a Master, she presumed, strode in front of them. His long gray hair was pulled back from his face in a single silver braid, accentuating the angular, hawk-like structure of his nose and forehead. The late-afternoon light threw his shadow straight ahead across the crisp, freshly fallen snow, the black outline of his robe making it look as though he had wings.
How many? the orchid murmured in her mind. How many, Hestizo?
She counted twelve, eighteen, twenty-four, and then looked again, across a hillock of rock and ice, where a second, much larger group of students had gathered with two or three other Masters in attendance, the group too large to count. Apparently some kind of outdoor assembly or group meditation was in progress. For a moment Zo just watched. Despite the fact that they walked together, some of them even talking among themselves in low voices, she had never seen a group of individuals so utterly detached from one another. When they exchanged glances, she saw only coldness in their eyes, as if they were sizing one another up, trying to find some advantage over the others.
“Attention.” The Master’s voice was flinty and sharp, one hand upheld. “Silence.”
The students down on the other side of the walkway fell silent, many of them drawing in closer to listen.
“For those of you who just arrived, I will explain this only once.” The words were strident, rising up effortlessly over the windy terrain. “Although in truth, I shouldn’t have to explain it at all. Your own Force sensitivity ought to be sufficient for you to realize that we’re dealing with an unforeseen development at the academy—a chain of events that, at this point, is still unclear.” He squared his shoulders and faced the group. “Most of you have already detected a disturbance in the normal daily routine. At this point, we suspect that the academy has been targeted by some form of sabotage, and that it may have spread outward from the tower.”
Despite herself, Zo found herself listening, and as she did, she realized that the group of students had grown. Now there appeared to be several hundred of them, perhaps the majority of the entire student body, all looking up in the Master’s direction.
“As a precaution, we are suspending all lessons an
d drills until further notice. Evening meal will be served as usual. Otherwise you are to return to your dorms for private study and await further instructions. One of the Masters will be in contact when our course of action changes.”
Zo realized as she listened that she could hear a slight but unmistakable tremor of concern in the Master’s tone. He was doing everything he could to cover it up, and perhaps the students were fooled, but to her mind he might as well have been wearing a placard: I’M DOING MY BEST TO SPIN A SITUATION THAT I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO ABILITY TO COMPREHEND, LET ALONE CONTROL, AND—
Hestizo! The orchid’s voice was urgent, alarmed. Get down, now!
She turned her head to the right, and realized that one of the students at the edge of the group was staring straight at her.
The student’s name was Ranlaw. Like the rest of his classmates, he’d been feeling increasingly jumpy this entire afternoon, and he didn’t know precisely why—it had affected his sparring performance earlier, and he was still angry about the black eye it had cost him. But something had gone wrong here at the academy. The Force was telling him to watch his back, and the Masters’ calling them to convocation only affirmed it.
When he saw the girl looking at him from behind the statue, he’d stopped walking and gazed back at her, sensing that she had something to do with it.
She’s a Jedi.
That realization was all it took. Ranlaw felt a bright spark of violence leap up in his chest. Whatever purpose the Jedi girl had for spying on them, he’d drag her to the Masters himself, and they could beat it out of her.
The rest of the group was listening to Master Traan, no one noticing that Ranlaw had been looking the other way. That was fine with Ranlaw, who fully intended to get all the glory of this discovery. In a single leap he sprang up over the fallen statue, tackling the girl and throwing her to the ground, pinning her by her wrists. She was easy prey—almost too easy.
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