She parsed the words. “Meaning what? It’s mood-activated?”
“I do not know,” the droid said.
“There might be nothing inside. This whole place might be useless to us.”
“I acknowledge the possibility,” the droid said.
Quell craned her neck and stared.
* * *
—
She’d been studying the tower a long while when the lens began to glow, refracting the warped, fiery light of the ascending black hole. Quell stepped backward, maneuvering so she could look through the prongs crowning the structure. The lens seemed to ripple and flare with every motion. She felt detached from her body as she observed, vaguely aware of the wind but fully focused on the eye rising into view.
She recalled watching an eclipse as a child aboard Gavana Orbital—staring through polarized goggles, watching the orb of a moon cross the path of the sun too slowly to fully perceive. She’d been transfixed then as she was now.
The burning eye reached the center of the lens. The pupil pulsed, as if the lens’s curvature altered with each beat of her heart and caused the black hole to expand and contract. The iris became the outermost boundary of her vision, and her attention was pulled inward.
She felt the tug of gravity and she fell into the dark, into the crushing grip of the black hole.
Into the cold of space.
Into the blackness of her mind.
When her sight returned she was enveloped by the bright yellows and blues of a siltstorm. Mud sprayed her face and plastered her hair as she walked through a rising bog already as deep as her thighs. The chill did not disturb her. She looked around at domed buildings formed from rough duracrete as they were blasted by the wind and painted with fierce hues. Thunder rumbled, barely audible over the scream of the storm and the shriek of ion engines high above.
Yrica Quell knew exactly where she was.
Ahead of her, down a flooded street, a lighthouse swayed in the gale. Lightning flashed and struck the top, sending stone plummeting to the mud and leaving metal scaffolding aglow. She heard yelling and turned to watch churning floodwaters slam a white-haired man against the side of a house. The tides of the storm battered him against the duracrete over and over, and each cycle he attempted to grasp a window frame from which arms extended, trying to grasp him; to no avail. Quell couldn’t tell whether he’d gone limp before or after he was swept away. The window sealed shut as the mud rose.
Quell knew the home’s inhabitants would not survive. No one survived Nacronis.
The houses drowned. The airspeeder pilots who fell out of the clouds drowned. Metal doors tore from their hinges and the storm entered apartments and schools and workshops. The scream of TIE engines echoed. Quell watched it all, taking no action as the mud rose to her neck and the street became clogged with corpses. Her hands found clammy skin ravaged by blasts of silt. She felt the wind thrash the barriers in her mind until the utter indifference that gave her safe harbor cracked and splintered and tore away; until the horror of it all saturated her in an instant. Then she was no longer among the victims of Nacronis but flying in a TIE fighter, firing at the planet’s defenders to protect her squadron and committing to the plan—the strategy that Major Soran Keize had laid out and the Emperor’s Messenger had decreed. Quell stepped back through moments, defying the flow of time, and saw each choice she had made that had allowed her to keep fighting, to keep stoking the storms of the planet.
She could have turned on her squadron. She could have sabotaged the bombers. She could have sent a message to Nacronis en route or convinced her comrades not to act or strangled Major Keize aboard the Pursuer. Instead she had done everything possible to ensure the success of Shadow Wing’s mission and reduced a world to a swamp where the dead would mummify and remain uncounted for centuries to come.
This was the legacy of Yrica Quell, and nothing she could ever do would change it.
When she saw the black tower and the red sands of the nameless planetoid again, she was on her knees. She convulsed with cold and retched, trying to purge herself, but nothing came.
* * *
—
“You were incapacitated for some time,” the droid said. “Several hours, perhaps. I have been monitoring your life signs.”
She remained on her knees, her forehead buried in her arms against the dust. She must have looked like she was praying, but the position tamped down her nausea.
“I’m alive?” she asked.
“You are alive,” the droid said, “and you are suffering. I offer you my sympathies, for what little they are worth.”
She nodded. Her chin touched sand. She forced herself to lift her torso upright. “It was the tower,” she said.
“Yes,” the droid agreed. “The tower was also monitoring your life signs. The scanning equipment in the edifice was active throughout your experience, and the mechanisms appeared to respond dynamically.”
She looked at the droid. “Respond how?”
“I am not entirely certain. It appeared that the deeper you withdrew from consciousness, the more processing power the equipment in the doorway demanded. Additional scanners came online at biophysical thresholds keyed to your heart rate, brain activity, and more.”
Quell considered this. She was surprised by the clarity she mustered, despite the lingering sensations of mud and corpses against her skin. “It was looking for something from me,” she said. “Looking for a specific reaction before it opened.”
“That is a possibility.”
“Then I need to do it again to get inside. I need to get it right.”
The droid’s humming seemed deeper than usual, like a recording played at half speed. “You would need assistance. You would need to determine the full array of biophysical conditions the door requires, and how to bring yourself to that state.”
Quell paused, unsure what answer she would receive if she spoke again.
“You can help me,” she said.
“Yes,” the interrogation droid replied.
II
Life among the cultists was at once numbing and excruciating. The woman known to the Children of the Empty Sun as Maya Hallik was designated a “seeker of the first insight.” That meant, essentially, she had access to select areas of the palace compound; she got to pick out her meals before the faithless refugees but after the four hundred cultists who’d joined up earlier than Maya; and she was welcome to sleep indoors when the ash-sleet came down.
Chass wasn’t sure if the ash-sleet had just been “sleet” before the New Republic’s liberation of Catadra. She chose not to ask.
In return for the privileges of being a junior cultist, Maya Hallik was expected to join the prayer songs each dawn. (She found she recognized the melodies from songs in her lost collection, but the lyrics had been changed from paeans to ancient civilizations to pabulum about community and fellowship; each morning, she grew stiff with outrage yet nearly wept at the songs’ beauty.) She was expected to speak to those outside the cult only when encouraging them to join, otherwise building relationships with fellow Children. (She largely abided by this, deciding anyone not part of the cult was too useless to bother with.) She was expected to help with cooking and sweeping and patching the crumbling walls of the palace.
Most of all, she was expected to watch broadcasts from Let’ij, the fungus-faced woman who had founded the Children of the Empty Sun and called herself not Sweetbishop or Holy Carnifex or Enlightened Mother—as Chass had bet with herself beforehand—but Vessel. This morning, she’d chosen to lecture on galactic politics.
“There’s no use in distress over the return of the Empire to Catadra. One oppressor is the same as another,” the hologram said. “It’s true that Emperor Palpatine and his deputies thought little of us—thought little of any of Catadra’s sects, and there were once many.
Yet the New Republic differs in its words, not its deeds.”
Chass sat in a common area where cultists normally cooked and played cards and listened to headsets. It might’ve been the refugee camp on Troithe, only every single person put down their cards and pots and headsets and looked up at Let’ij when the broadcasts began.
“Imperial soldiers openly disdained nonhumans, and the ruling class did little to intervene. But how often have we heard the New Republic chancellor talk about ending xenophobia while handing out medals to all-human death squads? We’ve met the New Republic’s troops, and it is still humans who outnumber the rest.
“The Empire forced religious orders from Catadra to Jedha to truck with smugglers and embezzlers simply to survive, no matter how we might have wished otherwise. The New Republic calls a self-proclaimed ‘Jedi Knight’ one of its greatest heroes; can we trust it not to endorse that sect’s rebirth above all others?”
The speech was delivered without anger. Let’ij, as she always did in her lectures, spoke with serenity and placid amusement. It was almost enough to keep Chass’s attention.
“Yet seeking peace through bureaucracy is a fool’s errand, so what does it matter whether it’s the Empire or the Republic—old or new—dropping bombs? The only true peace is found in the Force, and the Force is cultivated through harmony and community and the vision of blessed individuals.”
Half a dozen cultists seated near Chass mouthed the last sentence along with Let’ij. Chass found her own lips moving and barely refrained from spitting on the floor.
You’re here for a reason, she told herself. You’re not one of them.
Every lecture led down the same path. Each began with a bitter truth about the galaxy. Each ended with the promise that the Children of the Empty Sun were the reaction and solution to that bitter truth. It was an old con artist’s trick—you accepted the former, it was easy to accept the latter.
Chass snatched a headset off a blanket and clapped it over her ears. It was easy—but only a simpleton actually did it.
* * *
—
When she wasn’t pretending to be a good cultist, Chass na Chadic abandoned the pretense of Maya Hallik and searched the compound. The palace’s marble hallways were vast, decorated with gilded pools empty of water—save one, where people crouched and scrubbed laundry. Dark alcoves contained bedrolls and cutlery and children’s toys. In some chambers the ceilings had collapsed, though these rooms were largely empty and the draft was blocked by plastic curtains affixed to doorways with gobs of gray sealant.
She didn’t expect to find anything useful in the areas of the palace she was permitted to wander. But she memorized the locations of sealed doors and access-restricted lifts. She watched the cult’s trusted members disappear down stairways guarded by muscular Gamorreans and a spidery Harch. Once she tried to walk the outer perimeter of the palace to figure out how large it really was, but she got lost in the Catadran streets and didn’t try again.
Somewhere the cult had a prisoner they’d taken after the battle with Shadow Wing. Chass grew more confident in this daily—she caught snatches of conversation referring to “the guest” more than once, and had to resist the urge to throttle the speakers and demand more information.
The cult probably had a ship primed to evacuate its leader in the event of riot or rebellion somewhere, too. Maybe even a hyperspace transmitter Chass could use to contact the New Republic.
She would find them all. But the prisoner first.
She was scouting the lower reaches of the palace one afternoon when the sound of chanting led her into a wide chamber lit a fiery, flickering red. The noise emitted from a small black speaker that doubled as a lantern, suspended above what appeared to be a cremation furnace. A robed cultist stood beside the conveyor, surveying a procession of refugees approaching like peasants before a king. Chass observed through the doorway, careful to conceal herself.
A long-eyed Gran stepped forth from the line, knelt before the cultist, and—to Chass’s bewilderment—held out a rifle in both hands.
“Do you forgo violence and the instruments of violence?” the cultist cried, and the Gran nodded. “Do you pledge yourself to the Speaker and Vessel of the Force, who tends to the Children of the Empty Sun?”
The Gran nodded again. The cultist grasped the weapon, set it gently on the conveyor, and sent it rolling through the arms of a nullifier field and into the flickering light.
“Then welcome, sister,” the cultist proclaimed. “Shed the anarchy of rebellion and find truth with us.”
The Gran moved away, and another cultist passed the Gran a robe folded like a platter, on which sat a gleaming square package that could have been a meal ration. The next refugee in line stepped forward and drew an antique scattergun, and the process began anew.
Chass attempted to suppress a gag of distaste—she wondered how many of the cultists whom she slept beside nightly had given up their weapons and their freedom for a single meal. She focused on the guns: A DH-17 pistol rolled down the conveyor, fed to the fires; probably stolen off the body of a rebel. A primitive beam tube went next; Chass wondered if it had been salvaged from some ancient temple.
She felt an eagerness, a hunger and greed she’d forgotten she was capable of. If she had to live with the cult any longer, she intended to do it armed.
She indulged the fantasy of racing in, grabbing a gun, and shooting her way out—crawling through the palace like a guerrilla fighter until she’d freed the prisoner and located a means of escaping the planet. Next she considered her realistic options: Steal a blaster off one of the would-be cultists in line? Smash the lantern and grab a weapon in the dark?
The solution came to her, shockingly obvious, when she spotted the cultist’s unctuous smile as he accepted another gift.
Chass waited two hours before the ritual ended and the donors and cultists filed out a second doorway. The lantern dimmed but didn’t go out. She scampered to the conveyor, lowered her body to the belt, and crept like a stalking cat through the entrance. She could see nothing inside where the fires had burned.
But there was no heat. She fumbled, arms outstretched, touching flat lenses and the spokes of gears. She touched grease and jabbed her palm on something sharp. Finally her hand closed on the leather grip of a hold-out blaster.
Of course the cult wouldn’t destroy the weapons when it could stockpile them instead. The guns’ destruction—like everything else in the palace—was a lie.
She was out of the furnace in a matter of seconds, off the conveyor and down the hallway so fast she tripped and propelled herself forward by will alone. As she turned a corner she tucked the weapon into her pants, under her shirt at the small of her back. A moment later she bowled into a body that howled in surprise.
Chass and the newcomer tumbled onto the floor together. She kicked and tried to disentangle herself, reached for the blaster and hoped it was charged as the man—whose face was covered in burn scars—wobbled to his feet, laughing.
As Chass regained her footing and clutched the weapon behind her she recognized him. When his expression changed to one of astonished bliss, she realized that he recognized her as well.
“You survived!” Gruyver cried and spread his arms wide. “You found your way to us.”
Chass stroked the blaster’s trigger guard and watched the man who’d saved her from the Vurk at Winker’s and from suffocating in the depths of space. If he wasn’t a brainwashed lunatic he was something worse—a willing agent of the Children of the Empty Sun, a knowing part of the con game.
“I guess I did,” she said, and let her hand fall to her side.
She had a gun now. She could always shoot him later.
* * *
—
She told Gruyver the story of Maya Hallik, whose tale wasn’t entirely unlike that of Chass na Chadic.
Maya, too, was a New Republic fighter pilot, and Maya, too, had been raised in a religious fellowship. “My mother picked it because the leader was Theelin. Said he was the reincarnation of an old Theelin god, and we were following old Theelin customs,” she said, before slurping up a mouthful of watery wheat noodles from a narrow thermos in the cult’s kitchen. “All lies, of course. Why I reacted badly on the skiff. And at Winker’s. Don’t really trust cults.”
“You came, though,” Gruyver said. “You came anyway.”
Chass grunted and sucked up another mouthful. Broth dripped down her lower lip, burning the skin. “Where else was I supposed to go? Crashed on a strange planet, not a lot of options.”
Gruyver laughed and rubbed his hands together above a mug full of broth and almost no noodles. Chass was sure he knew she was lying—about her reasons, maybe about her name—but he said only: “I’m glad you did. I promise—there’s no reincarnated gods here.”
Spare me, she thought, and waited for him to preach.
“Eat,” he said, and poured half his broth into her thermos. “Tell me about flying.”
She saw no escape from the conversation, so they talked.
Gruyver, it turned out, had never left Cerberon. He spent their meal asking questions about hyperspace travel—what it looked and felt like, whether Chass was brave enough to jump to lightspeed in a one-person fighter, and on and on. The questions were penetrating but not insistent, and Chass found she could avoid answering simply by shrugging.
Eventually she asked him—making an effort to sound casual and instead sounding like a drunk woman pretending to be sober—“Anyone else end up here after the battle? Do you know?”
“One that I’m aware of,” he said, “found adrift, much like you. She’s still in the medical suite, I believe.”
“Huh.” Chass nodded. If she asked more—if she asked to see the prisoner—she’d certainly be refused. On the other hand, if she didn’t ask it would be much too obvious she was onto them.
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