Scopique took another step, leaning forward, reaching down to turn the head over.
The corpse swung itself up and lunged at him.
It was Jura Ostrogoth.
Scopique sprang back, instincts taking over as the thing charged at him in a ragged, flopping blur. He flew across the dorm floor, then Force-leapt straight up, grabbing the ventilation fixture that hung five meters above the beds, legs dangling, using the vent’s beveled surface for purchase while he scanned the room below for any kind of weapon.
Below, the corpse snarled and lunged at him, every leap taking it closer to where Scopique hung on. Thick ropy spit swung from the half-pulverized jaw. From above, the Zabrak thought he could actually see colonies of maggots squirming in the thing’s lacerated scalp. No doubt about it: death had come for Jura Ostrogoth, but it hadn’t finished the job.
The Zabrak stared down at the corpse, heart pounding, killing instincts fully engaged. On some level, from that first moment when he’d made the tape of Jura on his bunk, he’d known there would be an hour of reckoning between them. Now that the moment had arrived, couched in terms that he never could have expected, Scopique was filled with a wild, adrenalized bloodlust and he felt himself grinning a crazy grin. Was he actually enjoying this?
Yeah, he thought. Yeah, I guess I am.
Drawing on the Force, gathering it inside as he’d been taught during hundreds of hours of training, he jerked the vent fixture from its housing. It came loose with a hollow metallic pop, bolts rattling free, opening a rectangle of cold space that fed into an open air shaft above. Still dangling from the open shaft, Scopique turned the vent fixture over in his free hand, evaluating its immediate utility as a weapon. It was thin and aerodynamic, with sharp edges—it would serve the purpose well enough.
He looked down at the thing that had been Jura.
“Whatever you are,” Scopique muttered, “say good-bye to your head.”
Swinging himself around, he flung the vent housing as hard as he could at Jura’s corpse.
The makeshift discus whistled down through the air and found its target perfectly, shearing Jura’s head from its shoulders and sending it tumbling forward across the floor. Thick, half-clotted blood spurted from the stump of the corpse’s neck. The decapitated body took another shambling step, tilted sideways, and fell to its knees, then down on its belly.
Still dangling from the open vent—he was taking no chances—Scopique stared down at the thing in frank fascination. Nothing he’d learned at the academy even came close to what he was looking at right now. When he told the others—
Thumping noises from below: the headless monstrosity was still moving. In fact, it was leaning forward, groping around the floor until it found its severed head, sitting back up again and holding the head face-forward in front of its chest, tilting it up in Scopique’s direction, so that those runny black eyes were staring straight up at Scopique, mouth working up and down as if it were chewing on something.
The mouth opened, and it screamed.
Scopique saw the decapitated corpse of Jura Ostrogoth haul back and fling its own head straight at him, its mouth still wide open. Without thinking, the Zabrak swung his free hand in front of his face and felt teeth clamp into the tender flesh of his forearm, ripping through the skin and muscle, right down to the bone. The pain was unbelievable, chemical somehow, as if the incisors were coated in some kind of fast-acting acid. Agony shot up through Scopique’s arm to his clavicle, and he let go of the vent and fell, the head still affixed to his arm, and hit the floor hard. Blurrily, he looked down at the head. It was making little gurgling sounds now, its jaw tightening and releasing, the eyes still gleaming.
“Get off me!” Scopique shouted, trying to shake his arm free but unable to muster much strength. Was the arm broken? “Get off!” He grabbed a hank of the thing’s hair and pulled as hard as he could, but it still wouldn’t release. “Get off my arm!”
For several horrible seconds, he tried slamming it against the floor, pounding it as hard as he could, but nothing seemed to affect it. It was locked on tight, the burning liquid pain continuing to drip through the wound in his forearm.
Scopique stood up. The floor felt crooked under his feet. Staggering toward the bed, he underestimated the distance and crashed to the floor a second time, this time landing on his face. Blackness was crowding up through his vision, eclipsing the light, and he realized now that the pain in his arm had basically stopped, overwhelmed by a cool numbness that had begun spreading through his entire body.
Scopique fell utterly still.
All sound faded.
The numb feeling deepened, bringing with it a kind of near euphoria that swept through his consciousness in one solid black wave.
This isn’t so bad was his final, fleeting thought. This isn’t so bad at all.
* * *
Sometime in the next thirty minutes, a group of students came back to the dorms to find the room in disarray. They didn’t see what was left of Scopique—he had crawled under the bed—but they did find Jura Ostrogoth’s severed head.
And by the time they heard the noises coming from behind them, under the bunk, it was far too late.
20/Lockdown
IN THE DINING HALL AN HOUR LATER, 120 OF THE ACADEMY’S ACOLYTES—MORE than half of the student body—were finishing their evening meal when the mag-bolts in the doors clanked shut behind them, sealing them in.
Whether it was one of the Masters who initiated this sequence or some other factor was never made clear. A fifth-year apprentice named Rucker was the first to discover that they’d actually been locked in. Preoccupied by thoughts of the next day’s early combat training, he’d just shoved harder on the hatchway, assuming it was stuck or broken again, but it still didn’t give. Rucker cast a furtive glance over his shoulder to see if he was being messed with, but that did not appear to be the case. None of the others was even looking at him.
By the time he’d started trying to use the Force to get it open, several of the other students were standing behind him, growing audibly impatient with Rucker, waiting to get out. Even those who hadn’t left the tables were watching, waiting to see how this mini drama would resolve itself.
None of them was looking back in the direction of the kitchen—until the screaming started.
When he heard it, Rucker stopped fighting the blocked hatch and turned to see what appeared to be a group of six or seven Sith students swarming out of the food preparation area, launching themselves at the apprentices still seated over their meals. There was something seriously wrong with the tilt of their faces—he saw that right away—that made them look almost as if their features had been ripped off and stitched sideways on their heads. Their eyes were black and dead, their oily skin putty-colored and lifeless, except for their mouths, which were twisted back in grinning scimitars of unmistakable hunger.
And they were screaming together, as one.
At this point, Rucker—who had approximately thirty seconds left of life as he knew it—saw the things overtaking the room completely in a series of brief, high-contrast impressions. It was like watching some kind of parasite latch onto its prey. Their already-wide mouths somehow spread out even wider still, clamping down on the faces and necks and chests of the first rows of victims, taking them down with phenomenal strength and speed. Trays flew. Bright helices of blood spurted and looped in the air. A great bundle of steaming intestine splattered on the floor to Rucker’s right with the ripe coppery smell of meat fresher than anything that had ever been served here before.
All around him, Rucker saw the other apprentices fighting back. They were using Force techniques, chokes and pushes and jumps, but the corpses tore through them indiscriminately. The only thing that seemed to have any effect was crushing the creatures, or pinning them under something so heavy that they couldn’t get free. When one of the things seized him around the throat, Rucker raised one hand and tried to lift the table in front of him, flipping it over, but the thing o
n his neck was too strong, too hungry. Rucker’s knees buckled, his legs caved in, and he dropped to the floor, smelling the fetor of the thing’s breath even as its teeth gouged through his flesh.
His vision flickered and grew intensely sharp, as if, in the final seconds, his senses had grown more acute, desperate to take in all that they could before oblivion descended. Across the dining hall, he caught a glimpse of one of the apprentices standing on a table with both arms outstretched. Two of the living corpses went flailing backward, slamming into the opposite wall thirty meters away. The attacking apprentice—he had long, flaming red hair and penetrating green eyes—stood perfectly still, waiting for the things to come back. Nothing about what was happening seemed to perturb him in the least. In fact, Rucker realized, he could actually catch a hint of what the other student was thinking as he looked at the bodies, and—
The power, the power—
—and the other student wanted to be like them.
Rucker let out a silent groan. Blood was trickling down into his vision now, blackness closing in fast, but just before it covered him up completely, he could finally make out the identity of the redheaded apprentice standing on the table.
It was Lussk.
Rucker saw now that he was about to get his wish.
“Come on then!” Lussk was laughing, jeering as the things charged at him. He’d stopped fighting them off and instead had allowed them full access to his wrists, which Rucker saw he’d slashed open with a dinner knife. Blood poured from his arms. “Come on and take me!”
His voice became a scream.
21/Headstone City
TRACE LANDED AT NIGHTFALL.
The main hangar of the academy was empty.
Disengaging the ship’s main hatch, he jumped down from the cockpit and forced himself to stop and wait on the landing pad, his senses—both physical and telemetric—tuned for any immediate threat. The challenge, of course, was that this entire planet was a threat. Besides the blizzard raging overhead, the Sith academy was a black hive of dark side energy; Trace could feel it buzzing around him like a huge swarm of venomous insects. The psychic contamination was so thick, so total, that for a moment he felt a blur of vertigo attacking his balance, tilting it dangerously off kilter.
She’s here.
He knew it, even though he hadn’t received any further bursts of distress from her along the way. Zo’s kidnapper had brought her here; Trace felt her presence, recognized it somewhere amid the snowy ruin of the academy itself.
He moved quickly across the hangar, measuring every ambient sound as a possible threat. Since there had been no way of disguising his arrival—his ship wasn’t equipped with a cloaking device—he’d decided to head straight into the thick of things, anticipating a hostile reception that he’d likely have to fight his way out of.
He ran past a control booth and stopped there—the hatchway hung open, dangling sideways, as if it had been partially ripped off its housing. The chair lay on its side in front of the main flight-control console, a datapad, and a pile of old holomags with titles like Hot Ships and Kuat Classics. Reaching inside, Trace rested two fingertips on the chair.
A vivid splash of violence erupted in his mind’s eye—a man screaming, jerking backward, while a pair of pale hands groped through, clutching his shirt and trying to pull him out. Trace felt the man’s trapped panic, his horror, as he tried to keep whatever it was away from him … that part of the image was just a crazed, blood-soaked blur, defined more by its frantic strength than any kind of shape or form. An instant later the image faded.
What else had happened here?
He left the control area and strode the rest of the way through the hangar. It was becoming fully dark as he stepped outside and stared at the ruins stretched out around him, fading into a horizon. He’d glimpsed the academy during his descent, but it looked bigger from the ground, kilometers across, all of it, he thought, honeycombed with subterranean passageways and countless hiding places. Lights flickered, dotting the twilight with motion, or the illusion of motion. People were moving out there, he sensed them—Sith students and Masters.
That didn’t matter. He would find her.
A sudden gust of wind slammed him in the face, carrying with it a rich and fetid stench of decay. Trace narrowed his eyes, assaying the winding networks of broken walkways that led among buildings and temples and piles of old stone. Given the smell, they reminded him of capillaries on the face of a cadaver.
His eyes settled on a tall black structure jutting upward, far above the other, lowlier structures, its top swathed in snow—a tower, like a headstone amid a city of the dead.
It was a start.
He began walking.
22/Practicum
WHEN ZO SAW WHAT TULKH WAS POINTING AT, SHE FELT SICK.
He had led her up to the top of a flat, ice-slick slab of rock that might once have been the roof of some unused building. It was dark, but the Whiphid had a phosphorescent glow rod that lit up the night like a thick slice of midday, and in the end she saw much more than she wanted to.
After a long moment of forcing herself to stare at the pulpy thing that squirmed in front of her, Zo realized she was looking at the student from Scabrous’s laboratory—the one that had crawled out of the cage. Tulkh must have recognized it; that was why he’d brought her up here to look at it.
The thing’s leg was pinned under a pile of rocks, and its head swung at an impossible angle from its upper torso, as though the neck was broken in several places. Yet even so, it writhed and shrieked and snapped at them, thrusting itself forward as if it could somehow break itself in half and attack with whatever portion of its body it could pull off.
The Whiphid poked at it with the spear.
The thing in front of them screamed again, its head twisting snake-like, all the way around. As horrible as it was, Zo thought the final remaining vestiges of humanity on its face were far worse. If she looked hard enough, she thought she could still see a dead teenager in there, fallen into a prison of its own decaying flesh.
“Explain that,” Tulkh said.
“Me?” she asked. “You’re the one that brought us here. Now we’re both stuck in the middle of it.”
One finger tapped her firmly in the middle of her chest. “You’re stuck.”
“What about you?”
“I’m already gone.”
Tulkh turned away, took three steps, and stopped, looking down off the edge of the overhang. The long, oscillating scream that rose up around them now did not come from the thing smashed under the rock pile. It came, instead, from down below, and when Zo joined Tulkh at the edge of the overhang she could see where he had shone the glow rod.
The others.
Six of them.
Sith students, she saw, the fronts of their uniforms caked in gore, clustered together, their gray faces upturned to show eyes that glittered with that same shared intensity of appetite. When they screamed, they screamed together. One of them was a Zabrak. The others were—had been—human.
Zo snapped a glance back at the corpse whose leg was trapped under the rock.
It’s calling them—the orchid’s voice broke through in her mind—summoning them up here, Hestizo—
When the scream ended, she heard an eager scratching noise. The other students had already shoved forward, grabbing the ragged surface in front of them, clawing at it.
They began to climb.
23/Lowboy
WHERE IS EVERYBODY?
That was what Kindra had asked Ra’at when they were outside, and he’d blown it off, or pretended to, because he didn’t have an answer—or because the answer he had was too deeply disturbing to vocalize. But the question returned to him now, down in the dorms, as they went through room after room, finding nothing but empty, silent bunks and vacant corridors.
They had been running for some time, but Kindra didn’t even sound as if she was out of breath, and Ra’at realized that he was starting to feel better, too—moving aroun
d had helped clear his head, steadying him. Even his arm didn’t hurt as much anymore. Being young had its advantages.
Going low had been Kindra’s idea, a means of buying time until they figured out what they were up against, and despite Ra’at’s avowed intention to go to the infirmary and get checked out, he’d followed her—for now, anyway. They’d run inside a long utility corridor to a place where it branched off in a three-pronged intersection. The permasteel ceiling oozed condensation just above him, and the long tube-lamps embedded in the walls let off a pale, achromatic glow in the hanging clouds of moisture. The opposite end of the corridor intersected another group of dorms, and that was where they’d run into two other students—Hartwig and Maggs.
“What are you two doing down here?” Hartwig asked. He frowned at Ra’at. “Dag, man, what happened to your arm?”
“Training accident,” Ra’at said evenly.
Hartwig smirked. “Fail.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that”—Hartwig pointed at the wound—“doesn’t look like any training accident I ever saw. What did you do, fall on a vibroblade or something?”
“I was in the pain pipe.” Ra’at held Maggs and Hartwig in the same regard that he did the rest of his classmates, with a kind of suspicious indifference. Their motives were purely selfish, as were his; he had no intention of sharing information that didn’t somehow improve his own situation. At this point they all knew something had gone very wrong, contaminating the academy or the entire planet; for the moment they were allies of opportunity. “Have you guys seen anything else down here?”
“What do you mean, anything?” Hartwig asked.
“Or anybody.”
“No.” Maggs cracked his knuckles nervously. “Not yet. Weird, huh? It’s pretty early for it to be so quiet. I heard there was some kind of assembly earlier, but Wig and I missed it.”
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