Star Wars: Red Harvest (26 page)

But a glimpse was enough.

Something was inside there.

And it was green.

The Scabrous-thing made one final effort at speech. At that same moment an abrupt, brilliant javelin of pain sprang across the demolished remnants of its face, like a glint of light from a broken mirror. Then its head—its entire upper body—lurched forward. Its right hand opened, releasing the Sith sword, dropping it, letting it rattle to the stone floor. When the thing slung itself around sideways, Zo saw the thin green tendril sprouting out of its ear, spreading downward to trace the exposed mandible that made up the jawline.

Its mouth fell open. Just beyond its teeth and tongue, she saw another flash of green, darker, thicker, a stalk poking upward in the back of its gullet.

The thing that had once been Darth Scabrous began to convulse, producing not a scream now but a milky gagging cough as if to expel the green, to
get it out
, but the stalk only grew farther, stretching outward over the rag of the corpse’s tongue. A second runner was sprouting up alongside it, twisting down over its chin. As Scabrous’s head went backward, Zo saw the vine reaching down out of its left nostril. The vine began stretching straight out, oddly curious looking, with a single petal from its tip, like a tiny hand reaching for the sky.

An orchid blossom.

The Scabrous-thing fell to its knees in front of her, next to Rojo Trace’s body. No more sound came out, not even a rasping wheeze. Its temples were bulging now, rippling with what looked like veins, except the vein-shadows were moving under whatever remained of the crepe-paper skin, shifting and squirming around its eye sockets.

Hands opening and closing randomly at its sides, Scabrous made a soft, hiccuping whimper. The right half of its skull bulged, the skin splitting open.

Grow
, Zo told the orchid, one last time, no longer an order or even an instruction but just a word.
Grow
.

The Sith Lord stared up at her, its one remaining eye filling with blood. Its lips puckered, twitched, and fell still.

Its skull exploded in a thick nest of vines.

The corpse slumped the rest of the way down, right arm flopping bonelessly to the floor while the left was tucked under it in a mock-protective gesture. The next time Zo looked at the thing, she saw only the severed neck teeming with mad floral life, dozens of small, black blossoms erupting amid the demolished kettle of the thing’s skull.

The vines were already stretching out toward her, screeching and hissing in her mind.

Can’t hold them back
, the Murakami told her.
I can grow them, but I can’t control—

Zo shook her head. “I can.”

And reaching down, she picked up the Sith sword.

The blossoms screamed as she hacked them off at the vine, the arms of the Scabrous-thing still groping blindly for her as she swung the sword, the floor beneath her littered with shrieking black buds and petals. She stepped on them indiscriminately, crushing them under her feet as she forced the Scabrous-thing backward toward the wall, the blade still swinging until every vine had been cut down to the stump of the neck.

This is for Rojo
, she thought, and rammed the Sith sword through the torso of the thing that had once called itself Darth Scabrous, plunging it home as hard as she could with both hands, embedding it in the black wall behind him, pinning him there.

The Sith Lord’s body trembled once.

Zo staggered back, hair dangling in her face, chest on fire, trying to recover her breath. Her arms hung at her sides, limp and exhausted. Heat crackled behind her, orange flames from the toppled brazier spreading along the far side of the wall. Her lungs weren’t the only things that were burning. In her mind, the orchid was making its enervated clicking noises, warning her that she had to get out of here now.

She was starting to turn away from Scabrous’s headless corpse when it sprang at her again, arms outstretched, jerking the Sith sword
halfway out of the wall with the suddenness of its attack. The raw green ends of slashed vines bristled up from the hole in its neck as if it were still, against all odds, trying to scream at her.

As the hilt of the sword struck its breastbone, halting its advance, Zo grabbed her brother’s lightsaber and switched it on, even as the shriek of rage burst up from her lips.

“Enough!”

She slashed the lightsaber across the corpse’s torso, hacking it cleanly in half, so that its lower body dropped to the floor while the chest, arms, and neck remained pinned to the wall. Still shrieking, inarticulate now, she cut through the legs and pelvis, chopping them to pieces, and then turned her attention to what was left on the wall, swinging Rojo’s lightsaber back and forth, reducing the upper torso to chunks of smoking, twitching flesh. Only when she realized that she was literally unable to cut it down anymore did she finally deactivate the lightsaber.

She looked around the temple. The fire had now spread across a full two-thirds of the floor, still rising, the flames reaching shoulder height, heat rippling visibly in the air. It was already starting to creep this way, as if drawn to the chopped-off petals and vine sections scattered over here.

Take them
, she thought.
Burn it all
.

Hestizo
, the orchid’s voice murmured in her mind,
I’m so sorry. I was sick, and I couldn’t…

I just couldn’t…

I know
.

Bending down, she gathered her brother’s body in her arms and lifted him up, pressed his cold cheek next to hers. Pulling his eyelids shut, she looked slowly upward, up the seemingly endless wall toward the faint gray promise of daylight.

I’m sorry
.

She kissed his cheek, crying a little, and released him, laying him slowly back down.

Then she went to the far wall, running her hands over it. Again she saw the lines of inscription that had been carved deep into the sleek
black stone, row after row, going all the way up. Scabrous had told her that Darth Drear had built this temple to achieve immortality, engraving the walls with writings, plans that signaled the end of the Jedi.

Instead, it would be her salvation.

Hooking her fingertips into the chiseled letters, using the carved words for a toehold, she drew herself up and began to climb.

T
WENTY METERS FROM THE TOP, SHE SAW THEM STARING DOWN AT HER
.

They were crouched on all sides of the rectangular opening of the pit, gripping the edge, their faces peering over, eyes shining and hungry in the flickering orange light that shimmered up from the bottom of the pit. Thin pink liquid trickled down from their half-open mouths.

So, so many of them.

For an instant Zo stopped and clung there, shuddering, her fingertips numb and bleeding from the endless trek up the wall. Every centimeter of her body was dripping with sweat. Her hands had cramped so badly now that it felt like someone had hammered nails through the knuckles. The muscles in her calves trembled and twitched, begging for release. If it weren’t for the Force, she knew she never would have made it this far, but now that she saw what was waiting for her up above—

They opened their mouths as one, and screamed.

Zo turned away with a grimace, feeling the ghastly, infected wind of their breath washing down over her as she stared down to the bottom of the pit. Flames had overtaken Drear’s ancient temple now, smoke rising so that she could no longer see her brother’s body or the remains of what had once been Darth Scabrous.

Then she looked up again.

They were starting to crawl down the walls toward her, corpses of the Sith students of the academy on Odacer-Faustin, scurrying down over the walls in her direction with that clutching, fly-like speed. The appetite in their faces was unmistakable now.

Hestizo
, the orchid’s voice murmured,
I’ll try to grow in them, I’ll try, but when the vines come, I don’t think—

Zo nodded once, grimly. There was nothing else to do. She tried to summon the Force, sought out that sense of refuge and peace that had come immediately before she’d slipped free of the straps on the table, and found only a numb, mute absence, like the phantom sensations from an amputated limb. She was too preoccupied, she had let fear invade her too thoroughly and couldn’t concentrate.

The closest of the things was almost on her now, its mouth peeling back in anticipation. It was going to scream again, Zo realized, and then it was going to leap at her. She started to recoil, and her toes slipped from the crack in the rock where they had been planted.

Zo felt a silent gasp escape from her lips. For one dizzying, gut-shrinking second she was dangling by her fingertips, feet kicking out in empty space, unable to find anything to catch on to. The thing crawling down toward her was now nearly close enough to touch, the rabid urgency blazing out from the center of its stupid, dead face.

Hestizo
, the orchid shouted out,
Hestizo, don’t let go—

Can’t hold on, I can’t hold on—

Her fingers slipped, and she felt herself starting to fall.

At that same moment the wall-crawler sprang down at her, gripping the carved inscriptions in the black glossy surface with its left hand while its right swung down to clamp around her throat. Something
popped in Zo’s larynx and she felt the cold, slippery tension of its thumb and forefinger pinch tight over her neck like an iron clamp, hauling her back upward.

It screamed again, so loud that she actually felt it pushing in her eardrums, surging into her skull like warm wax. They were
all
screaming, scampering downward, filling the inside of the long shaft with their bodies as they crawled toward her, so that Zo’s watering eyes could no longer make out the surface itself, nor the words chiseled on it. Now the wall was just a solid layer of rippling flesh.

The thing that had her by the throat swung her upward with impossible strength, hoisting her toward its salivating mouth. Zo flung her hands up, an instinctive defensive gesture, hands slapping off the cold skin of the thing that was crawling over her current attacker, possibly with the intention of getting at her before the other corpse could. It grabbed her right arm; the other seized her left. They began to yank her back and forth, her arms jerking in their sockets—here, clinging hundreds of meters over the burning remains of Scabrous’s temple, she was going to be ripped to pieces.

Grow
 …

Zo wasn’t even sure if it was the orchid, or she herself, who thought the word, but it didn’t matter anymore. Through faint and fading eyes she saw green tendrils spreading out from their ears, pushing out from their nostrils, but it was too late, there were too many of them.

That was when the blaster bolt tore down from above, ripping a hole in the wall.

When Zo looked up again, she saw it plainly. It was brilliant white light so full and intense that it brought tears flooding up into her lids where they welled over and spilled down her cheeks.

What …?

A second blast pounded off the wall, several meters above, shaking the entire passage. She threw one hand up and gripped the craggy edge of the crater it had left in the wall, elbowing her way until she had
something like a solid grasp. Now the light was pulsing down everywhere, filling her vision, flooding it from above.

By the time the third blast struck, she had crawled completely into the rough-hewn hole, tucking her legs up behind her. The great pit reverberated violently around her. Bodies were dropping from above, shaken from their perches and plummeting downward past her, still screaming, shrieking, clutching together as if somehow the infernal bond that death had forged among them might save them.

She watched them tumbling down into the fire.

Turning her head upward, she saw how many were left—dozens, still, but they were slithering back up toward the top of the pit, clambering away so that they wouldn’t fall.

Zo blinked. Something was dangling in front of her face from up above, long and slender.

It’s a vine
, she thought,
another vine, and if I never see one of those again, it will be too soon
.

But it wasn’t a vine.

It was a tow cable.

Z
O LEANED FORWARD OUT OF THE BLAST CRATER AND SEIZED HOLD OF THE CABLE
with both arms, clutching it tight to her chest, then looping it about her waist and tying it clumsily around herself, somehow managing to knot it under her arms. She didn’t trust her mangled fingers to grasp anything for another second, even with her life depending on it. Her hands felt dead and numb, like cold roast nerf that had been grafted to her wrists.

She pushed herself off with her legs, tumbling free.

She dropped and then the cord snapped tight, constricting just above her breasts, her body dangling, swinging from side to side like a pendulum in the middle of the shaft. Then, slowly, she felt herself being lifted up toward the bluish white lights from above. Zo let her head tilt back. Wincing, pupils straining against the brightness, she could just discern vague shapes above her, oblong rectangles and long tubes that she assumed were part of the library’s ceiling.

As she came up out of the pit, her mind registered several things at
once. This portion of the roof had been completely blasted away, exposing the open space and the shaft to the elements. Snow was blowing down through the streams of white light—landing lights, she realized now. What she’d assumed was the high ceiling was really the underbelly of the spacecraft whose hatchway stood open, the towrope pulling her up inside it.

After a moment she recognized it.

It was the
Mirocaw
.

As the cable drew her inside, something reached out of the darkness, and Zo felt cold talon-like claws fasten over her shoulders and hips, dragging her up. Abruptly she realized that she was too weak to fight anymore, too fatigued—whatever had taken the effort to drag her out, she couldn’t resist it anymore.