The body of the thing fell still, deflated.
For what felt like a long time, neither of us moved. Then Nagma reached up and wiped his mouth and spat, and with great effort, started to stand up. I reached out and helped him rise to his full height. He nodded his thanks.
“I suppose… this means…” He hitched in a breath and glanced over where the bulb of snot garlic still sat, “…I owe you again…?”
“Forget it.” I wiped off the bottom of my boot, scraping it against a pile of discarded droid parts that had been left in the corner. “Just so I don’t ever have to look at that thing again.”
Nagma stood there in the corner for a long time without speaking. Looking at the way he stood now, with his back and shoulders held straight, I thought I understood something about him now, the connection that I hadn’t grasped earlier.
And I saw why he’d asked for the snot garlic, and why it was so important to him. Why, in the midst of this living hell, it did matter.
True, we inmates of Cog Hive Seven walked around with bombs implanted in our chests, and we couldn’t know when the algorithm might send us into a bout… but there were still some things that we had control over. A part of us that the guards and the warden and the fights couldn’t touch. And I guess I knew what the word for that was. It was a strange word to use in a place like this, but it fit.
Freedom.
“Zero?”
I looked at him. “Yeah?”
“I can’t help but wonder…” He stared at me, hollow-eyed and haunted. “What if I didn’t get it all? What if part of it broke off inside of me? What if…?”
He didn’t finish, and in the end, he just went back to his cell, alone.
All of this was a long time ago, several years at least, although time has a funny way of passing differently here. Sometimes when I’m lying in my cell waiting to go to sleep, I wonder why Nagma sent for me that night. It might’ve been because I was the only one he’d told about the Worm, or maybe I was the closest he had to a friend in this place… or he’d just wanted to make sure that someone was around to finish the thing off. Someone who wouldn’t hesitate in the moment when it mattered the most.
Two weeks after those hideous few minutes in Nightside, his number was matched by the algorithm, and he went up against another inmate. It wasn’t much of a fight. Nagma’s opponent killed him within just a few minutes. I never had another opportunity to find out what happened with the Worm, whether there was any left inside.
But at night sometimes, when the hours draw out and I can’t find sleep, I do wonder.
I think about the holovid of Nagma’s Match — I’ve watched it several times — and what happened at the very end, when his slack face hit the floor. I think about the thing that might not have been his tongue that came out from the corner of his slackened lips. The detail and resolution on the holovid isn’t great, and no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t quite be sure.
But it makes me think about that thing, the Worm that came all the way from Monsolar inside of his belly, and how it got here and discovered something that the rest of us only think about in the abstract, something that under the circumstances might not have been good for the rest of us at all.
And sometimes I think about the last comment that he made to me, before going back to his cell that night. Not a statement but a question, one that I couldn’t answer — not that he seemed to expect one.
I just wonder… What if I didn’t get it all? What if part of it broke off inside of me?
And that’s when I think about the Worm inside the dark recesses of the Hive, the ductwork and the walls, moving in silence and growing fat on the blood of the cons that die in the fights.
What it might find here, in the dark.
And I think about that word again. That terrible word. Freedom.
EXPANDED UNIVERSE
Darth Maul Lockdown will be available from January 21, 2014
See more of John VanFleet’s art at www.johnvanfleet.com
From Insider 146 (01-2014)
11.6.18.15.14.5-1
Star Wars - The Syrox Redemption Page 2