“What?” she whispered.
He jerked her forward so hard that her teeth snapped together and all at once she was moving blindly, half running, half dragged through a black and sightless sea. The bounty hunter’s grip on her arm was like a manacle. Swinging forward, losing her equilibrium and then regaining it, she felt the floor skid out from underneath her feet. She wondered how he could see at all, or if he was navigating by sense of smell, or plain dumb luck.
Then she felt them, coming up from behind.
One or many, she didn’t know, but the presence felt massive, an unwelcome intrusion of breath and motion and stinking flesh that bulked through the dark corridor, filling it.
She heard a scream, a sound like she’d never heard before.
—EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—
It rose, a piercing shriek, pressurized and skating upward into the highest registers of audible sound, thousands of vibrations per second, until she expected it to burst apart, splintering into ragged strands and threads of individual voices. But instead it held together, compressing somehow, overwhelming the cries of the tauntauns and everything else.
—EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—
Zo sensed a probing, almost prehensile quality to that note; it was the echo-locating noise of something—some things—investigating the blackness around them with a desperate, mindless voraciousness.
As quickly as it had started, the scream broke off. The tauntauns’ cries had strangled away as well, leaving a void of utter silence in their wake. Zo drew in a breath, summoning the Force. What came next was a mental image, no longer than a second or two at the most, like a flash grenade exploding in her head. In that moment she glimpsed the perimeter in front of them, the stalls, and the space behind them. She had just enough of a view to sense what she had to do, now.
She swung one leg in front of Tulkh’s ankle, planted her foot, and felt him trip over it, tumbling sideways with a snarled curse into an empty tauntaun stall to their immediate right. Zo collapsed on top of him. The night vision that the Force had given her was already gone. She felt something long and smooth jabbing painfully against her cheek and realized later that it must have been one of the Whiphid’s tusks.
“What—” he snapped, and this time she took hold of him, squeezing hard, digging her fingers as hard as she could into the bounty hunter’s scaly, sweat-slick hide. In surprise, or maybe realization, he went quiet.
The events of the next few moments weren’t simply a matter of sound or smell but some collusion of both sensory and extrasensory perception. With the Force guiding her, Zo realized that she could feel the stalls alongside them, still pitch black, filling with the noxious stirring of many bodies, packed close together, piling past.
Searching.
At one point, Zo sensed them lumbering by so closely that if she’d reached one hand out of the stall, she could have touched them.
And they could have touched her.
They weren’t screaming now, weren’t even breathing. Instead the things, whatever they were, made little incidental grunting noises, the sound of bodies pushing themselves along for the simplest of motives—hunger, hatred, rage.
She held her breath, didn’t move.
After what felt like forever, the grunting noises trailed off, until all that was left was a putrid cloud that made her want to breathe through her mouth.
Beneath her, Tulkh stirred, straightened, and shoved her off him.
“If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you myself.”
Zo glanced off in the direction that the things had gone. “Seems a bit redundant, given the circumstances.”
“I don’t run. And I don’t hide.”
“Listen,” she said. “We saw what those things are. I can’t fight them off, and neither can you. So for the moment that leaves us with running and hiding.”
To her surprise, he didn’t argue. Climbing out of the stall, they made their way forward through the dark, toward the strange pewter-gray light she’d noticed earlier. It grew slightly brighter by degrees until she realized that she could see the exit taking shape in front of them. The air was colder, and she saw the first big flakes of snow drifting in from outside.
Tulkh stopped and tilted his head back, the wind blowing the fur from his face.
“This isn’t where we came in,” he said.
“How do you know?”
He raised one hand. Zo looked where he was pointing. It took her a moment to realize what she was looking at. Once she did, though, she couldn’t look away.
They were back at the tower.
28/What the Sickness Said
IN THE DINING HALL, LUSSK WAS WATCHING THE DEAD AWAKEN.
He saw it with two sets of eyes: the ones he’d had when he’d been alive, and the strange new vision that the Sickness had given him. On some intuitive level he understood that the first set was fading, going blind, and that was fine with him, absolutely fine. The Sickness had given him everything he’d hoped for, everything he wanted, power and strength beyond all imagining. It had altered the midi-chlorians in his bloodstream, telescoping his natural abilities, enhancing them exponentially.
He had been here, of course, when the things burst out of the kitchen, and he’d defended himself adroitly with a series of Force pushes and acrobatic jumps while weaker and less skilled students had fallen and been devoured. Within minutes the things from the kitchen had transformed the dining hall into a charnel house of untrammeled butchery. Now the floors were slick with blood.
The newly dead were rising slowly, shuffling to their feet. Rising up with them, Lussk stared into their faces, faces that he recognized from the academy, now contorted into something utterly new. He felt no fear at the sight of them, no sense of foreboding—only a slick dark fascination.
I’m looking at my future, he thought, and shivered with anticipation. It was a good future, he realized, an endless future, a place of unfathomable possibility.
He saw it all now. The rumor was that Darth Scabrous had been experimenting with an immortality drug, a remedy for death itself, and Lussk saw now that the Sith Lord had been successful beyond his wildest dreams and most deranged nightmares. These things had transcended death. The power they held was beyond anything taught here at the academy. Before it, both Jedi and Sith were nothing, less than nothing, infinitesimal crumbs in the vast expanse of the universe.
Lussk saw the things around him crowding closer.
And that was when he realized it.
It wasn’t enough just to be transformed, to see the world with these new necroscopic eyes. The Sickness had given him its gift, but it wanted something in return, something crippling and enormous, and now, belatedly, Lussk grasped what it was. The Sickness wanted that part of him that made him who he was, that exceptional set of skills and memories and quirks that had made him unique. The Sickness meant to siphon all of that away, so that it could make him part of the greater, swelling organism of the dead.
The Sickness wanted his soul.
No, Lussk told it. It’s too much. Even for what you offer, even for immortality itself, the price is too high.
I will make you the last one, the Sickness promised. Of all the others, you alone shall endure. That is what I have to offer you.
No.
The Sickness paused within him, considering. That is too bad, it said finally, because you no longer have a choice in the matter.
Placing his hand over his chest, Lussk felt his heart stop beating. All around him, the newly dead were screaming, screaming.
He threw back his head and opened his mouth.
And he, too, began to scream.
29/1174-AA
RA’AT FOUND THE WEAPONS CACHE JUST BEFORE THEY REACHED THE BARRIER.
He’d heard that these tunnels were lined with subchambers and cysts, some of them hundreds of years old, as old as the academy itself. According to the rumors, generations of Sith Lords had used them for storage or hiding places for things they never wanted found.
He and K
indra had found the first of the chambers twenty minutes after the group had finished watching the training droid’s hologram. Nobody had spoken much since then; they had moved in silence, listening.
“Look,” Kindra said, pointing at the badly oxidized metal sign bracketed onto the wall. It read:
ARSENAL 1174-AA
“Give me a hand,” Ra’at said, taking hold of the handle. It was a rudimentary side hatch whose stubborn refusal to open was less a matter of security and more a result of the moisture and grit that had accumulated inside its components over the years.
Maggs grabbed one edge and Hartwig and Kindra took the other, and it came open with a metallic clang. They all stood for a moment peering in.
Hartwig whistled.
“That’s the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in a long time,” he said.
Ra’at had to agree with him. The bin in front of them was loaded with gear—some basic melee weapons and body armor for training purposes, headpieces and blast-dampening chest plates, and in the back, in a separate wall mount, three lightsabers.
Kindra reached past him and grabbed one in each hand. As Ra’at took the last one for himself, he wondered why she’d taken two, and guessed she was just optimizing her chances of getting a fully functional weapon. Although the power cells were supposed to hold an almost indefinite charge, there was no telling if any of them still worked, or even how long they’d been stashed down here. As often as he’d trained with them, lightsabers still held an arcane sense of mystery that made them both fascinating and vaguely unsettling, a link to the Sith’s ancient past.
Ra’at thumbed the activation plate, and the scarlet blade sprang to life. He could feel it vibrating up from hand to elbow, the sheer authoritative power of it humming through his entire arm, giving it purpose and strength. He brought the blade up in front of his face, admiring it, feeling the small fine hairs stiffen on the backs of his arms. Next to him, Kindra had switched on both of hers as well. After a moment of comparison, she deactivated both lightsabers.
“Maggs,” she said, and tossed him the one in her left hand. He caught it effortlessly.
“Thanks.”
Hartwig frowned. “Wait a second. Where’s mine?”
“There were only three.”
“So what, I’m out of luck?”
Kindra shrugged, and Ra’at realized the other reason she’d grabbed two instead of one: it had allowed her to decide who carried the third. She had given it to Maggs, who—while not the most proficient duelist—was probably the least likely to snap under pressure and take one of their heads off either by accident or in a fit of poor judgment.
“Flay that noise,” Hartwig said. “We should draw lots to see who gets what. Otherwise …”
“Otherwise what?” Kindra asked. She was still holding her remaining lightsaber in front of her, regarding Hartwig coldly from behind its blade. “You’ll leave? Good riddance. It’s everyone for themselves anyway.”
Hartwig glared at Kindra with a glint of righteous indignation that Ra’at guessed was eventually going to get him killed. Kindra, however, had already seemed to have lost interest in him: she deactivated the lightsaber, clipped it onto her belt, and began eyeing the corridor ahead of them. “Come on, let’s keep going. There might be another weapons dump up this way.”
“Don’t turn your back on me,” Hartwig said.
“Is that a threat?”
“Just a warning.”
She unclipped the lightsaber. “Then I guess I’ll just kill you now, won’t I?”
“You—”
Kindra’s arm whipped upward. The blade was already ignited, sweeping up in a lethal blur, halting centimeters from Hartwig’s throat. Stepping back, Hartwig glanced over at Maggs and saw him waiting to see what would happen. For a long moment, neither of them moved or spoke, and the only sound inside the tunnel was the faint steady hum of the lightsaber itself.
“You won’t do that,” Hartwig said. “You need me too much.” But what he’d obviously intended to be defiance came out as little more than a strangled-sounding squeak. Kindra didn’t answer, just stood riveted to his gaze. The blade stayed where it was. Ra’at saw how its light reflected off the beads of sweat that had begun to accumulate on Hartwig’s upper lip.
“Kindra,” Ra’at started.
“Shut up.”
“He’s right. You saw those things in the holo. We’re outnumbered. We need every—”
“I’ll tell you what I don’t need.” She still hadn’t taken her eyes off Hartwig. “I don’t need to constantly be looking over my shoulder.” She nodded, seeming to decide something in that moment. “No, Hartwig, I think I’m going to have to finish your sorry carcass off right now.”
Hartwig’s lip twitched, trying to make words that wouldn’t come for what seemed like a long time.
“Do it then,” he rasped. “Make your move.”
Ra’at’s hand slipped downward toward the handle of his own lightsaber. Things were deteriorating even faster than he’d anticipated—yet somehow he wasn’t surprised. Perhaps it was better this way anyway.
You really want to take sides now? he thought, and for the moment at least he willed his hand to stay where it was.
“Uh, guys—?” Maggs said from behind them. “You’re going to want to see this. It’s—”
He broke off in a sloppy cough that sounded too loose and wet, as if he were struggling to keep himself from gagging.
Maggs whistled. “Anybody else smell that?”
That was how they found the wall.
30/Taste
SCABROUS ENTERED THE LIBRARY THROUGH THE NORTHWEST SIDE, AS WAS HIS habit. There were five main entrances, but this one led directly to the underground chamber where he’d first found the Holocron, so it held a certain degree of emotional resonance. Also, it was closest, and he had begun deliberately conserving energy. According to the hemodialysis counter on the shoulder pack, his whole-blood reserves were down to two units now. He wasn’t worried about running out, but he wanted to make sure that he was sufficiently able to enjoy everything that would come next.
Stepping out of the storm, he walked beneath the high, icicle-dripping stone archway and strode briskly down the corridor that led to the main stairwell. These walls were thick, but he could still hear the wind whooping and shrieking outside, and after a moment of standing absolutely still, he heard another sound, the low crack of shifting rock and stone. It sounded like something making its way through a pile of brittle old bones.
“Dail’Liss,” Scabrous said. “Come out.”
At first, there was no response. Then a long branch slithered from the crooked crack in the wall above him, sliding sinuously downward, and the Sith Lord looked up to see the face of the Neti, its ancient, wrinkled eyes peering wearily at him.
“My lord,” the librarian said. “What brings you here?”
“I need something from you.”
“Anything, my lord.”
Scabrous started to speak again, and something in the Neti’s voice stopped him. In the past its tone had always been respectful, even reverential, but now it sounded outright frightened. Its fear was the fear of the old and infirm, the apprehension of a thing that couldn’t protect itself properly from some nebulous but very real threat.
“You feel it, too, then?” Scabrous asked.
“What, my lord?”
“Do not play ignorant with me.”
The Neti quavered visibly but did not answer right away. Then it said: “You refer to the Sickness, yes?”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” Scabrous asked. “A sickness?”
“If it pleases my lord … it is a disease, some kind of uncontrollable infection that has been let loose.”
“The academy has been exposed to worse things in the past.”
“I speak not simply of the academy.” Another pause, then one even longer. “I sense it within you, my lord.”
Scabrous stared up at the tree creature’s face, looking deep
into its moist and measuring eyes. As he looked, he felt something stir inside him, a chasm opening, as if some second, chiseled set of jaws were spreading apart in his chest. It wasn’t a painful feeling, not at all—if anything, it was profoundly tactile. For a moment he actually looked down at his body, expecting to see his abdomen stretching beneath the broadcloth of his tunic, the rib cage broadening, gaping open to reveal … what? Something new? Something that transcended even his vast realm of experience?
Scabrous drew a breath, trembling with anticipation, and allowed the feeling to recede.
“Come down here,” he said.
“My lord?”
“Now.”
The crack in the wall widened and the Neti’s thick trunk slithered tentatively downward through it, wood grain creaking in sinuous little crackles as it twisted closer to where the Sith Lord stood waiting. Now there was no mistaking the fear in the librarian’s face; it bordered on panic.
“My lord, please—”
“I want you to send out a message.”
“Yes?”
“There is a Jedi here among us, on this planet.”
The librarian waited.
“The Jedi’s particular talent is botanical telepathy, plant language. Right now she is communicating with the spirit of an orchid, a flower whose presence she trusts implicitly, and …”
Scabrous paused. He could hear the words that he was saying, but his voice sounded different to him. As he spoke, he became aware of that hollow, gaping feeling again, except this time it wasn’t confined to his chest and abdomen—it was radiating through his entire body systemically, enveloping his arms and legs and head.
“My lord?” the Neti prompted.
Scabrous still didn’t respond. For an instant, certainly no longer, he could actually feel the presence of transformation pushing up against the corpuscles of freshly infused blood, fighting against it, invading and overtaking it. And again, as before, there was no pain, only a feverish red aura spilling outward to encompass his vision from within. He was deeply conscious of his own breathing, in and out, a hot coppery taste in his mouth, and a peculiar wave of euphoria rushed over him—a promise of power beyond comprehension. Yet miraculously, he remained lucid, wholly self-aware.
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