provide electrical stimulation to the brain of a dead host. So this fellow may
be biologically deceased, but there are artificial signals going out to his
body."
Platt turned around. "Get outta here."
"Do you have a better explanation?"
"Worms operating a complex bioelectrical system? You're making that up."
"All right, so I'm just guessing. But you know," said Tru'eb, studying a
worm perched on the tip of his index finger, "I have actually heard about a
similar incident. Do you remember when I was working on Big Quince's ship?"
Platt rolled her eyes. "You think I could ever forget?"
"This was before I met you. I was not privy to a great deal of
information, of course, but I recall a story that was going around. Apparently
some Imperial friends of
Big Quince's were quite traumatized after seeing a squadron of dead
stormtroopers stagger across a battlefield. At the time I assumed that the
storytellers were spiced. Now I wonder."
Worms inside your armor. Platt felt her entire body start to pucker.
"Supposedly," Tru'eb went on, "each corpse walked around aimlessly for a
while, then went back to the place where it had been killed."
"And this guy here was walking toward the Green Boys over there."
"That does not necessarily mean he died there."
"No, but something's definitely up with those guys," Platt said. "I mean,
look at them. If it weren't for the fog, they'd have the best vantage point in
the whole mountain range. You wanna tell me they're just sitting around
guarding nothing?"
Tru'eb held up his hands. "Furthest thing from my mind."
Platt looked at the Sullustan again. For a moment she thought she was
going to vomit again. But instead, she stopped herself and broke into a slow
grin.
"Hold on just a second," she said. "I have an idea."
When Harkness opened his eyes this time, it was still dark, but his body
felt almost weightless. Not dizzy and thick, not drugged; just light. It was
because there was less pain in his body now.
He didn't feel as though he could sit up yet, but at least the
possibility of moving didn't fill him with trepidation anymore. And the
humming sound lingered at the back of his head in a muted, almost pleasant
way. He entertained the idea that it might be a fraction of a song Chessa used
to sing; she had been on his mind for what seemed like hours now, although he
couldn't remember her ever singing in front of him.
"Hey," he said. His voice was stronger, clearer. "Hey, Sarge."
"What?" said Jai, still across the room.
"How you feeling?"
"Better, I guess," she said.
"Me too. I don't know why."
"How long have we been here?"
"Dunno. A few days. Maybe a week."
"Maybe an hour."
"Maybe."
"Has this... uh... ever happened to you before?" she asked.
"Getting captured? Yes," he said. The memory of it appeared out of
nowhere and surprised him; nothing about his current ordeal had seemed
familiar until now.
"Oh," she said.
He expected her to ask if that was how he had lost his eye, and then
remembered that she still couldn't see his face. In all the time they had been
there, their eyes still had not adjusted to the darkness.
"Did they work you over that time?" she asked.
"Yeah. Worse than this."
"Can't imagine that."
"Well, maybe not by much," he said. "Is that what you were thinking about
over there? My prison record?"
Suddenly he recalled something he had said earlier, regarding the gray
boys in the interrogation room. Living their lifelong dream of making an
Infiltrator scream. Maybe Jai had been done the same way as he had, and then
again-
"Jai?" he said tentatively. "Do you-still have both eyes?"
"Huh?"
"I mean... did they put your eyes out?"
Jai laughed, a surprising, loud, sardonic cackle. It took her a couple of
minutes to rein it in, and then she said, "Hey, Dirk-whicho can tell?"
Harkness felt his lips twitch slightly.
Then he heard more laughter, both of their voices, ringing off the walls,
choking through the pain, and eventually dying down to a few stuttering gasps.
When it was over, his ribs ached and his throat hurt, but he felt an
unfamiliar satisfaction.
"Why'd you ask me that, anyway?" asked Jai around a final chuckle.
"Forget it. Long story."
"Oh, well, you better not get started. I have to be somewhere in ten
minutes."
"Yeah, I have a date myself."
It occurred to Harkness that he did have someplace to be, and people to
be with. But where, and with whom? When the walls stopped ringing, the humming
came back.
"Is that what you've been thinking about?" asked Jai. "My eyes? If it
makes you feel better, Harkness, I'm told they're stunning."
"No," said Harkness, and he sobered. "I was actually thinking about
Chessa."
"Who's that?"
"My girl." Harkness thought about her face the last time he had seen her.
It was a nice, normal day, full of routines, loading the ship, the two of them
flirting over the cargo load. But he had known, somewhere on the odd fringes
of his mind, that she was about to die. He always knew when somebody was about
to die. There was a softness to his or her features on those days. He would
see it all through his stint in the Alliance, and he saw it for the first time
in Chessa, standing there in the docking bay.
"Do you think about her a lot?" Jai asked.
"She's dead," said Harkness in his usual blunt, conversation-ending tone.
Dirk, how's Chessa doing these days? She's dead. Oh. They always changed the
subject after that.
But not Jai. "I know," she said.
"No, you didn't."
"Yes, I did. It's the way you said her name."
Harkness didn't know how to respond to that. Jai had spoken with such
confidence, and he hated it when people thought they could dissect him. Like
all those Alliance counselors he never wanted to go to.
"How did I say her name?"
"Like it was sacred."
"So what? That's how you said your sister's name."
"Yeah, but-was
Jai broke off, so abruptly that Harkness thought she had disappeared alt.
In her place Harkness imagined a deep black hole generating silence,
threatening to suck him through, too. Harkness could actually hear it,
ringing, clouding his ears.
Then his mind cleared out and he realized what he had said. And what it
had meant.
"Sarge?" he said.
"Yeah." Her voice took on a heavy, listless resignation that was very
familiar to Harkness. He wished that she had the energy to crawl across the
floor and smack him across the face. Or that he had the energy to do it for
her.
"When?" he asked.
"Two months ago."
Endor. No wonder the name had sounded familiar. Harkness remembered
briefly meeting a tall, dark-haired officer named Morgan Raventhorn shortly
before the battle. A kid, really. He imagined that girl lying on the floor
across from him, with a slightly older face.
Jai remained quiet, but her breathing hadn't changed. She wasn't crying.
He wondered whether she had cried over her sister at all, and if not, whether
she would anytime soon. That idea puzzled him; up until that moment, he had
guessed that Jai's mind worked much the way his did, and that their
experiences were similar. But he had never been so numb he couldn't mourn.
Harkness's usual course, as a practiced loner, was to give other loners a
fairly wide berth. If they wanted to be left alone, he knew it, and he would
honor it. But Jai was different. Certainly Harkness had lost his faith in the
New Republic, had lost his faith in love, and sometimes had lost faith in
himself and his purpose. But he couldn't imagine what you did when you lost
your faith in everything all at once.
"Chessa was killed by a bunch of stormtroopers," he told her. "All she
was doing was loading crates, but they started a firelight with her. They knew
she was a Rebel sympathizer."
Jai was silent. Harkness went on, "I had been thinking about marriage at
the time. I was an idiot, you know; I was young, I thought I could have
everything."
"I had a fiance myself," she said.
"What was his name?"
"Krul."
She said it the way she had said Morgan's name.
Harkness didn't think he should say anything else after that. He felt
embarrassed at having told Jai so much about himself. Even after four years in
the Alliance, among people he trusted without question, he had not told anyone
about Chessa. To those who had known her, he never talked about what she meant
to him.
The silence seemed to fill up all around him like some invisible snow,
and he thought about the absolute last time he had seen Chessa. Pasty,
bleeding. Not even a person, really. Some dead people looked like they were
sleeping; Chessa's expression was frozen, her eyes staring up at the docking
bay ceiling, surprised and horrified. He shook that image away and pictured
her alive and healthy. Then he pictured her lying in a dark cell with a bloody
nose and nothing to live for.
At that moment, Harkness came across a part of himself that he did not
like to acknowledge, and his stomach tightened. It was the part that had
already begun to dissolve the security of his prison, and his sense of
unparalleled freedom. It was the entire reason the interrogation officers had
seen fit to beat him. He had yet again discovered, to his dismay, the part of
himself that wanted to survive. Whole. Undefeated.
Harkness sighed heavily. Well, it was cozy while it lasted. He shut his
eyes and took a few deep breaths, willing his body to heal itself, willing the
pain to stop. It wasn't that he had any flair for manipulating the Force or
anything like that; he just knew that the reason he had survived all the
injuries and setbacks and impossible missions that had marked his military
career was because he had willed it. And that was why he wasn't going to die
in this cold, rank little cell. Just by wanting to heal, willing himself to
live, he'd find some way to save himself from whatever the Imperials had
planned for him.
Saving Jai, on the other hand-that was the part he feared he couldn't do
anything about.
"Radlin?" said the taller of the guards, thoughtfully giving the E-web a
final wipe and sticking the rag in his back pocket. His voice echoed off the
mountainside. "Radlin, I'm bored."
"I guessed," said Radlin, still sitting and waggling his foot.
"I mean really bored. Really really. What are we even here for? There's
no more Rebels."
Radlin said, "It's procedure. Procedure is this thing you do where you
follow orders so you get that promotion thing we talked about?"
"I'm just saying we should think up something to do."
"You're just all antsy 'cause that mere guy showed up looking for the
Rebels." was You're just all mad 'cause we weren't the ones who caught him.
Look, Rad, let's just go hunting or something. Pick off some more of those
Walking Dead Rebels."
Behind a nearby tree, Tru'eb caught his breath when he heard them mention
the hill toward the guards. She was trying to imitate the Sullustan's jerky
walk and his glazed expression, but her steps were exaggerated and her tongue
was hanging out of her mouth. Tru'eb put a hand to his face and shook his
head.
Nevertheless, Radlin leaped up, knocked over his chair, and stumbled
backwards. When the tall one turned around and saw Platt, he visibly tensed,
but he gave a terse, macho laugh. "Radlin, you want this one?"
Platt stopped when the guards" ledge was at her chest level. "Excuse me,
gentlemen," she said, clasping her hands behind her back. "Is this the way to
the spice mines of Kessel?"
Radlin gave a shriek and opened fire.
"Honestly, Platt," Tru'eb said, as Platt put on Radlin's camouflage
jacket, "I don't know how you talked me into t. You know there's nothing more
dangerous than a blaster being handled by someone in a panic."
"Yeah, but there's nobody more fun to pick off than somebody in a panic,
either." Platt surveyed the area. "You think there's any more patrols roaming
around?"
"Yes. So let's be quick about this."
The dugout was actually situated in front of a deep, man-made fissure
that ran straight through the cliff and out the other side. Tru'eb and Platt
were pleased to discover that this end of the fissure gave way to a relatively
flat area of the forest.
For twenty minutes they made their way over fallen trees and scrub and
large rocks. Platt was becoming increasingly nervous. From what she had seen,
this end of Zeios didn't really have dusk; the sun just seemed to wink out in
the evening. Moreover, the fog was still thick enough that she could see no
more than two meters in front of her at a time.
"What are we going to do," she said, stepping in front of Tru'eb and
walking backwards, "if we don't find the garrison before nightfall? I don't
think that cheap survival shelter has another night's worth of-was
Tru'eb stopped. "Just a moment," he said. "Do you hear that?"
"No. What?"
"Almost a rumbling noise."
"I didn't-was Platt said, and then the ground underneath her disappeared.
She felt herself falling, tried to scream through a dry mouth and
clenched lungs, felt a violent surge of blind panic shooting through her
entire body-and then a yanking sensation through her right arm as she stopped
and dangled where she was. Tru'eb had her by the wrist.
"What... what was... what just happened?" she said when Tru'eb had hauled
her back up and she was on her knees on solid ground. "Did I just fall off
the... how come I didn't see... Tru'eb, what happened?"
Tru'eb didn't answer; he was staring over her shoulder, awed. Platt
turned around just in time to see a black TIE fighter come whooshing up out of
the ground about four meters in front of them.
Both of them fell back in a shower of dirt and leaves, the
deafening
sound of the TIE roaring overhead, and Platt thought the sheer momentum of the
thing might blast her into the mountainside. Then, just as abruptly,
everything went quiet.
They looked up. The TIE fighter sailed just above tree level and then
disappeared.
When the pounding in Platt's head subsided, she looked at what she had
stepped off of. The ground ahead looked like an overgrown clearing. But now
Platt saw that she had walked right off the edge of a sheer rock face that
descended hundreds, perhaps even thousands of meters.
Tru'eb was next to her, staring into the gorge. It was impossible to make
out the bottom of the valley, a dark well with layers of fog drifting above
it. Plunging down into the darkness, the cliff wall was a marbled gray with
steplike ridges naturally chiseled into x. There were also outcroppings along
the way, so heavily overgrown that the plants and trees hung precariously out
over the valley; waterfalls poured out of the rock face in a number of places.