Deceived

by Paul S. Kemp

  And he did.

  She and Darth Malgus bounded across the ruins of the Temple, their blades flashing, locking, the speed of their duel so fast Zeerid could barely follow their movement. Despite himself, he found the combat beautiful.

  He slowed the speeder and T7 beeped a question.

  Aryn had done what she had come to Coruscant to do—she was facing Malgus.

  And Zeerid had seen what Malgus had done in the Temple. The Sith deserved death.

  But he worried over Aryn’s reasons. The line between seeking justice and seeking revenge was thin indeed, but Zeerid could see that Aryn had stepped over it. She wanted Malgus dead because she wanted revenge. And there would be no undoing it once it was done.

  He knew that better than most.

  He made up his mind and accelerated the speeder to full.

  ARYN AND MALGUS LOCKED BLADES.

  “I am more than your match, Sith,” she said over the sparks of their joined lightsabers.

  “Your Master was not,” Malgus said, grunting, and shoved her with a telekinetic blast of such force that she flew backward and slammed into the rock and rubble. She used the Force to cushion the impact, but she still landed on her back and the impact blew the breath from her lungs.

  Malgus leapt high into the air, shouting with rage, his blade held high for a killing stroke. She rolled aside as he came down and his blade sank to its hilt in the rubble of the Temple. She leapt to her feet and unleashed a backhand crosscut at his throat. He got his blade free and vertical to parry it, but at the same time she pointed the blade end of Master Zallow’s lightsaber at Malgus and activated it.

  He must have sensed his danger at the last moment for he slid partially aside. Still, the green line of Master Zallow’s blade pierced his armor and side and elicited a snarl of pain and rage. Before Aryn could follow up, Malgus drove an open hand into the side of her face.

  She was unready for the blow. The Force-augmented impact exploded a spark shower in her brain and sent her cartwheeling away from Malgus; she slammed into a rock and landed on her side ten meters away. Adrenaline pulled her to her feet, though she swayed unsteadily. She spat a mouthful of blood and held both lightsabers at the ready.

  Malgus stood astride the ruins, his blade sizzling, eyeing the smoking hole in his armor, the furrow in his flesh.

  Seeing an opportunity, she did not hesitate.

  Using the Force to guide it, she hurled Master Zallow’s lightsaber at Malgus. The blade cut a glittering green arc through the air as it spun end over end toward Malgus’s head.

  Despite his wound, the Sith slapped aside Aryn’s Force-hold on the blade and snatched it out of the air, as quick as a sand viper. He deactivated the blade, held the hilt in his hand, studied it. He looked up and over at Aryn, his eyes burning. She imagined him smiling under his respirator.

  “This weapon did not avail him and it will not avail you.”

  The sound of an engine pulled Aryn’s head around. She whirled, her blade ready, and saw the Armin speeder roaring out of the sky like a comet, Zeerid in the driver’s seat. T7 sat in the rear. He came in too hard and the thrusters could not completely stop the speeder from slamming into the ruins. Metal creaked. Dust flew up.

  “Aryn!” Zeerid called. “Get in!”

  Zeerid looked past her to Malgus, seemed to consider unloading a blaster shot, but thought better of it.

  “Come on, Aryn!” Zeerid shouted, and T7 backed him up with an urgent whistle. “Please. You said you would help me.”

  She hesitated.

  Malgus looked at her, brandished Master Zallow’s hilt, a taunt to keep her there.

  She made her decision.

  She wanted to efface the smugness she’d heard in his tone, to see in his eyes what she had seen in Master Zallow’s. Killing him was not enough. She wanted to see him in pain. She just had to figure out how to do it.

  She leapt high into the air and landed beside Zeerid in the speeder.

  “Death is too easy, Sith,” she called to Malgus, the venom in her tone surprising even to her. “I am going to hurt you first.”

  The words left a bad taste in her mouth. She felt Zeerid’s eyes on her and dared not look him in the face.

  Malgus, too, seemed almost puzzled, to judge from his furrowed brow and the tilt of his head.

  “Go,” she said.

  Zeerid accelerated and started to turn the speeder.

  Anger went forth from Malgus. He reactivated Master Zallow’s blade and hurled it after them. Zeerid tried to wheel out of the way but the blade curled and kept coming at them. T7 beeped in alarm.

  Aryn watched the weapon spin, felt it, and before it reached the speeder, she reached out with the Force and snatched it from Malgus’s mental grasp. The weapon turned upward over the speeder and descended hilt-first into her hand as Zeerid rose into the night sky and sped away. She deactivated it.

  She looked back one last time to see Malgus standing atop the ruined temple, his blade in hand, his cape fluttering in the wind. He looked like a victorious conqueror.

  And she hated him.

  ZEERID FLEW LOW and fast through Coruscant’s streets, wheeling around buildings, careering down alleys, descending into the lower levels as he went. Soon, the sky was lost to the density of structures above them. They were in an industrial underworld, a series of metal-and-duracrete tunnels that covered the entire planet.

  “Anyone following?” he said.

  Aryn did not answer. She sat in the passenger seat and stared at her Master’s lightsaber hilt as if she’d never seen it before.

  “Aryn! Is anyone following?”

  “No,” she said, but did not look back.

  Zeerid shot a glance behind them, above them, and saw no one. He let himself breathe easier.

  “Blast, Aryn, what were you doing?”

  She answered in a tone as mechanical as a protocol droid’s. “What I came here to do, Zeerid. Facing Malgus. What were you doing?”

  “Helping you.”

  “I didn’t need help.”

  “No?” He stared at her across the speeder’s compartment.

  “No.”

  Zeerid thought otherwise. “Why’d you get in the speeder, Aryn?”

  “I didn’t want you to get hurt. And I said I would help you get offplanet.”

  “A lie,” Zeerid said. “Why not just stay there and finish it?”

  She looked away from him as she answered. “Because …”

  “Because?”

  “Because killing him is not enough,” she blurted. “I want to hurt him.”

  She hooked her Master’s lightsaber hilt to her belt and looked over at Zeerid. “I want to hurt him like he hurt me, like he hurt Master Zallow before he died.”

  “Aryn, I don’t have to be an empath to feel your ambivalence. Revenge—”

  She raised a hand to cut him off. “I do not want to hear it, Zeerid.”

  He said it anyway. He owed her as much. “This doesn’t sound much like you.”

  “We haven’t seen each other in years,” she snapped. “What do you know about me?”

  The sharp tone cut him. “Not as much as I thought, it seems.”

  For a time, silence sat between them like a wall.

  “I hired on with The Exchange for a good reason, I thought. To provide a good life for my daughter.”

  “Zeerid—”

  “Just listen, Aryn!” He took a breath to calm himself. “And that one decision, that seemed so right, led to me running weapons, and then to running spice. One decision, Aryn. One act.”

  She shook her head. “This isn’t like that, Zeerid. I know what I’m doing.”

  He wasn’t so sure but decided not to press further. He changed the subject. “I think I can get us into the spaceport. There are ships there, from Valor, and Imperial troopers, but I have a plan.”

  Without looking at him, she reached across the seat and touched his hand, just for a moment. “I’m sorry for the way I spoke, Zeerid. I�
�m not …”

  He shook his head. “No apologies, Aryn. I know you’re hurting. I just … don’t want you to make it worse for yourself. I know how that can happen. Are you … seeing clearly?”

  He felt ridiculous trying to provide an empath, of all people, with insight into her emotional state.

  “I am,” she said, but he heard uncertainty in her tone.

  “In the end, you have to live with yourself.”

  He knew well how difficult that could get.

  “I know,” she said. “I know. Now, what’s your plan?”

  He told her.

  She listened attentively, nodded when he was done. “That should work.”

  “Tee-seven can do it?”

  Aryn nodded, and T7 beeped agreement.

  “I will help you get in and get a ship,” Aryn said. “But … I’m not leaving Coruscant.”

  “I figured you’d say that,” he said, but in his own mind he had not yet conceded the point. He wrestled with whether to tell her about the Twi’lek.

  “You are holding something back,” she said.

  He rubbed the back of his neck, torn.

  In the end, he decided he owed her honesty, and he knew he could not make decisions for her.

  “The Twi’lek we saw in the vid at the Temple …”

  He trailed off. Aryn grabbed his forearm, squeezed.

  “Tell me, Zeerid.”

  He swallowed, feeling complicit in a crime. It wasn’t so much harm to the Twi’lek that concerned him, as it was harm to Aryn.

  “I saw her at the Liston Spaceport. She was there.”

  Aryn’s fingernails sank into his skin, but she seemed not to notice. He welcomed the pain. She stared off through the windscreen. He fancied he could see her weighing options in the scale of her mind. He held out hope she would choose the right one.

  “I want to see her,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  That was not the answer Zeerid had been hoping to hear.

  MALGUS SAT AMONG THE RUINS, the fallen statues of his ancient foes, and pondered. The night breeze blew cool over his face. He replayed his confrontation with Aryn Leneer. Her power had surprised him. So, too, the anger that underlay it.

  The anger he understood, even respected, but he didn’t understand how she’d come by it. She had known that he’d killed Master Zallow when they had fought on the ruins. But she had not known when they had first seen each other on the ship-to-ship holo over Coruscant, when Valor had shot down the freighter. He was certain of that. He would have felt the knife point of her rage if she had known then.

  So she must have learned in the interim that he had killed Master Zallow.

  Either she’d seen it somehow—a surveillance recording pulled from the rubble, maybe—or she’d interrogated a witness, a survivor who had escaped, or maybe a droid who had crawled out of the destruction.

  Either way, she now knew the details of the attack.

  It pleased him that she knew. The destruction of the Jedi Temple was the greatest achievement of his life. He wanted the Jedi—wanted Aryn Leneer—to know it was he who had done it, he who had left the corpses of so many Jedi buried in the rubbled tomb of their onetime Temple.

  But something worried at the edge of his mind. She had not fled on the speeder out of fear. He would have felt that, too.

  I am going to hurt you, she’d said.

  How could she hurt him?

  And all at once he knew. She knew the details of his attack on the Temple, so she knew Eleena had accompanied him. She might even have seen in Malgus’s behavior what Lord Adraas had seen—his feelings for Eleena. She would hurt him the same way Adraas and Angral would try to manipulate him.

  The realization sent a rush of emotion through him, a rush it took him a moment to recognize as fear. He activated his comlink and tried to raise his lover on their normal frequency.

  No response.

  A flutter formed in his stomach. He raised Jard.

  “Jard, has Eleena returned to Valor?”

  “She has not, my lord,” returned Jard. “One of her shuttles has returned, but she was not aboard.”

  A fishhook of fear lodged in Malgus’s gut and pulled him to his feet.

  “When is the last time she checked in?” he asked.

  “She has not checked in, my lord. Is there cause for concern? Should I send a team to retrieve her?”

  “No,” Malgus said. “I will find her myself.”

  There could be any number of reasons for Eleena to be out of contact. She could have simply turned off her comm.

  But Malgus could not shake the unease he felt. He hailed his personal pilot and summoned the shuttle back to the Temple. He knew where Eleena and her team had set down—the Liston Spaceport. He would look for her there first.

  THE SKY LIGHTENED to the east. Zeerid checked his chrono. Almost dawn. The night had disappeared on him. He was too wired to feel fatigue. He worked up the nerve to ask his question of Aryn.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  She did not look at him, and he took that as a bad sign. “I’m going to get you into the spaceport and you’re going to fly back to your daughter.”

  Assuming he could dodge Imperial cruisers on the way out, which would be no mean feat.

  “That isn’t what I mean, Aryn, and you know it. What are you going to do with her?”

  Aryn did not answer, but the set of her jaw told Zeerid all he needed to know. He regretted mentioning the Twi’lek to Aryn. His honesty would cost Aryn her soul. Hunting the Sith who had murdered her Master was one thing. Killing the Twi’lek simply to hurt Malgus was something else. As he drove, he found himself hoping that the Twi’lek had left the spaceport.

  Ahead, the port came into view. He scanned the sky, saw nothing. The control tower was still dark. The Empire had done a poor job of securing the port—they had far too few men guarding a location with many potential entry points—but Zeerid supposed they had limited troops and an entire planet to police. He was glad of it. Otherwise, his plan would have had no chance to succeed.

  “I’ll circle wide and we’ll go up top. The key to this is speed.”

  “Won’t they spot us on scanners?”

  “The tower’s dark and I don’t see any hardware around. If they have orbiting surveillance on the port, well …”

  He shrugged. If the Empire had orbiting surveillance or high-altitude surveillance droids watching the spaceport, he and Aryn would have problems.

  “Speed is still the key,” he said. “Even if they see us, if we can get in and out fast enough, we can still pull it off.”

  Aryn brushed her hair from her face. “Where did you see her? The Twi’lek?”

  “There,” he said, pointing at the large transparisteel windows that opened onto the small-craft landing pad where he had spotted the shuttles, the drop ship, and the Twi’lek. Without bringing his macrobinoculars to bear, all he could see through the windows were indiscriminate gray shapes, presumably the shuttles. Aryn stared at the windows for a moment, then nodded to herself.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  He killed the running lights on the speeder and took it up to five hundred meters, just above the top of the main center structure in the spaceport. Pushing the thrusters as hard as he could, he accelerated toward it.

  His heart raced, not out of fear that they would be caught, but out of concern that Aryn would find the Twi’lek.

  He swerved around one of the large-craft landing arms that reached up and over them. He hunched behind the controls, anticipating fire at any moment. But none came.

  Below them perhaps a hundred meters, he could see the roof doors of the various small-craft landing pads. Aryn unstrapped herself, turned, and unlatched T7. The droid beeped.

  Zeerid slowed the speeder but did not stop. If anyone had seen them approach, he wanted them to think that the speeder just kept on going.

  “Ready?” he asked, and set the speeder’s unsophisticated autopilot to fly on anoth
er ten klicks before setting down.

  “Ready.”

  He released the stick, and he and Aryn quickly maneuvered onto the back of the speeder near T7. The wind pulled at them. He had trouble balancing but Aryn took him by the arm and steadied him. They sandwiched the droid between them, shared a look.

  “Go,” he said.

  She nodded and they stepped off the back of the speeder.

  T7 whooped as they fell. The droid’s bulk did not allow them to control their descent; they were flipping end over end immediately. Zeerid’s field of vision veered rapidly, wildly, between the starry sky and the top of the spaceport below. His stomach crawled up his throat and he gritted his teeth to keep down the protein bar he’d eaten.

  End over end they spun, T7 whistling with alarm, until Aryn seized them in her power, ended the spinning, and slowed their descent. The metal and duracrete of the spaceport’s roof rushed up to meet them. They had only a second, two. Aryn grunted, slowed them still further, further, until they touched down gently on the roof.

  “Much better than last time,” Zeerid said, grinning, heart racing. “I could go my whole life without another fall and feel I’d missed nothing.”

  Aryn did not so much as smile.

  Zeerid gathered himself, took a blaster in each hand, and scanned the rooftop. He spotted a conduit access panel. “There.”

  They ran over to it and he shot off the metal cover with his blaster, exposing a viper’s nest of wires. Ordinarily, a breached cover would have set off an alarm in the control tower, but the control tower was dark, unoccupied.

  “Do it, Tee-seven.”

  A panel in the droid’s abdomen opened and several thin, mechanical arms reached out. All ended in one kind of tool or another. T7 stuck the arms into the wires and began to work. Zeerid, still concerned that they may have been spotted, scanned the sky. He saw nothing.

  T7 hummed while he worked.

  “Come on, come on,” Zeerid said to the droid. To Aryn, he said, “You all right?”

  She seemed oddly calm, or preoccupied.

  “I’m fine,” she said.