At first the girl seemed to be paralyzed, as well she ought to have been in the presence of a lord such as Thoriel Silbus. Her subsequent demonstration that she was not proved as startling as it was potentially fatal. Without preamble she gestured at him, and there was a twist of energy as some previously innocuous segment of machinery—Silbus had no idea what it was—wrenched itself loose from a nearby wall and came barreling at his head.
Somewhat disturbed, he held up a hand and caught it with his will just before it would have smashed his head like a pulp melon. After his brief duel with Atton Rand, he was a bit concerned about overexerting himself too quickly, so he unpretentiously floated the debris a few feet to the side and dropped it with a crash. Flexing his fingers, he turned back to the girl—the Jedi, he realized—except that she was nowhere in sight. However, one of the doors on the right wall of the corridor was open.
An aggravated growl scraped its way up his throat. "Are you really going to force me to chase you down, you pusillanimous pest?!" he demanded as he made for the opening. He was given pause, though, by a series of laser bolts that flashed out from it when he was less than a meter away. He waited and watched as they savaged the opposite wall, his outrage quickly mounting to the heights of amazement. Was the Jedi not alone? Had she roped some hapless Republic soldier into accompanying her? And was the Headmaster of Trayus Academy now being subjected to the indignity of being shot at—again?
There was a pause, then two more blasts, one scorching the side of the doorframe itself. Silbus noticed his hand drifting toward the lightsaber at his waist, and he restrained it with a sneer. At the dark side's signal he marched around the corner, both arms outstretched, and a Force storm ripped into the room beyond. Display screens and light fixtures exploded, power cables melted, chairs and cabinets were overturned, and fire belched from ruined computers and other machinery as wrathful lightning vented itself on everything in sight.
And the Jedi and her apparent accomplice were both gone; they had fled through a door on the other end of the wrecked control room. Flapping his cape from side to side before him in an attempt to dispel the smoke, Silbus gave chase. As he crossed the room, there was a brief moment of weakness in which he bemoaned his lot in life; at times like these it seemed to be little more than a long series of humiliations and degradations.
The dark side did not fail him, notwithstanding his heightened fatigue after the lightning burst. As he emerged into another hallway much like the last, he instantly perceived where his quarry was and sent a wave of power down the hall. As the Jedi girl reeled back, the Headmaster sensed a weapon in her hand and tore it away with a thought. As he levitated it over to himself, it turned out that the Jedi had no accomplice with her after all; she was the one who had shot at him. He clenched his fist, and the blaster pistol crumpled like a sheet of flimsi and fell to the floor. How far the Jedi have fallen, he thought scornfully. And here I thought lightsabers were for boors.
The girl backed away, moving into the inner concourse of MSG Control and launching Force blows back down the corridor. Striding in pursuit, Silbus wrapped himself in the dark side and let her feeble attacks burst against him; the walls on either side shuddered slightly and his cloak billowed behind him, but he went on effortlessly. In the meantime, he extended his perception toward the Jedi herself, searching and probing. The Human's mind was pliant and easy to penetrate, her consciousness buffeted by a whirlwind of untapped, uncontrolled emotions and desperations. Despite himself, Silbus was surprised by her vulnerability; even Padawans were supposed to have achieved some rudimentary state of mental discipline. He could sense, however, that there was something out of the ordinary going on with her…
Setting that aside for the moment, he stabbed at the Jedi's mind as he had tried to do with Rand before. The pain slid its way in with no resistance, and she fell to her knees with a shriek.
She slowly looked up as Silbus drew near, her eyes glassy and unfocused. Then a spark of cunning flickered through them and she reached with the Force; but Silbus had seen her intention even as it formed in her thoughts and countered. The lightsaber stayed on his belt, and a Force wave flipped the girl out onto the catwalk behind her, where she landed harshly on her back.
With the histrionics apparently concluded at last, the Headmaster went and stood over her. Elsewhere on another platform, Rand was continuing his pointless fight with Marr… and where was Yaiban? Hiding?
No matter; Silbus gave them only a glance. They were too far away to interrupt.
Nothing ruined a murderous rage—or the Force power it could generate—like having your attack foiled by a blind woman. Even as Atton fell back, parrying and counter-slashing, he occasionally spared a brief look over Visas' shoulder at the Nautolan, who fixed his ridiculous robe and toddled off with hardly a scratch on him. It had been years since the last time Atton had felt so cheated. But he could save that frustration, recycle and refine it into anger that he could use.
He slapped Visas' blade aside and kicked her just below the knee. It didn't land as hard as he'd have liked, but she still grunted and slowed down a bit, giving him some breathing room. His Force sense warned him of someone coming up behind him—the Twi'lek. That guy wouldn't be much of a problem.
As he prepared himself, Atton glanced past the Miraluka again, looking for Silbus. Then he glanced past Silbus and found something to really piss him off, though pissing him off wasn't the exact same thing as making him angry.
It was Kaevee. By herself. She had made it all the way here, through the entire base, and was alive for now. However, given that she was apparently about to be squaring off with a Sith Lord, "for now" didn't look like it was going to be a very long period of time.
Disbelief relaxed Atton's jaw, and then resentment clenched it tight. You poor, dumb kid, he thought. You damn stupid deluded little schutta, what are you doing here?
Then Visas and the Twi'lek both moved, trying to hem him in, and plasma met plasma. He played momong in the middle for a bit, sidestepping and spinning back and forth to keep them at bay. The Miraluka's moves were potent and unpredictable, alternating between the pretentious jabs and light slashes of Makashi and more conventional, powerful attacks. Atton gave slightly less attention to fending off the Twi'lek, who was a bit slower and, like Atton himself, solidly a Niman stylist.
Kaevee and Silbus disappeared into one of the control room blocks, but lingered in the back of Atton's mind, which proved helpful. Even as he juggled the whirling lightsabers around him, he partway retreated into his own mind, letting instinct and precognition take over the fight, stoking the emotional embers that could ignite his rage again.
There was no shortage of things to use as fuel. For instance, the narrow escape of the windbag Headmaster, and Meetra's lapdog saving him at the last second… But Kaevee's brief appearance turned out to be even more aggravating. Just taken on her own, there were a lot of things about the girl that Atton found easy to hate. Now, though, he could also hate what Silbus was about to do to her—and what the Jedi had done to her so many years before they had ever met.
There was an itch of distraction somewhere in that thought process as well. What was it, worry? Concern? No, not good enough, he decided, setting it aside. What I need is hate.
He feinted at the Twi'lek's left side, then slid past him on his right, putting both Sith in front of him. They stayed on him, attacking together, but the narrowness of the catwalk limited their fields of attack. The Twi'lek in particular seemed afraid of getting in his new partner's way and tried to keep a little buffer zone between them. As he hacked away at Atton's defenses, his angry red blade repeatedly went through the railing beside him, spattering his black outfit with sparks and sending pieces tumbling down into the concourse.
Atton gave ground for a little while, then hopped backward with a sudden burst of speed, letting the Force carry him a couple extra meters out of reach. As the two Sith started to catch up, he fell into a classic ready stance: blade up to parry, dominant foot back. Snarling fiercely for good measure—at least, he thought it looked fierce—he crouched slightly, gathering energy for a split second.
His stance was the basic guard of Ataru, the acrobat's form, of which a favorite move was to flip over an opponent and slash at them from above. Recognizing it immediately, the Twi'lek interrupted his own assault, winding up for a counter-slash designed to bisect Atton while he sailed overhead—copycat. Atton, however, was not an Ataru stylist at all, despite the fact that he knew how to Force-jump. So as the Twi'lek's guard drifted just a little too high, Atton called on the Force again, but instead of springing up he sprang forward at a physics-taunting speed, thrusting his saber straight ahead of him. Its unstable blade bit deep, leaving a thick, burning line from one lung to the other.
Atton didn't have time to pull it out before he had a feeling that he should duck. As he took the feeling on good faith, Visas' spinning slash, meant for his back, hummed overhead. It didn't spare her already-doomed comrade, however, blazing through lightsaber hilt, lekku, and shoulders in what was not exactly the cleanest mercy-kill Atton had ever seen. The pieces fell, and as he caught the Miraluka's next blow in a lock, he smelled freshly-burned meat. His lips parted in a bloodthirsty grin as he felt the high coming back, the pure, simplifying red haze over everything, and he gave himself over to the fight completely.
Kaevee lay splayed on the catwalk, gazing at the scaffolded ceiling of the facility and trying to make it stop spinning. She felt distant from herself, every feeling and faculty numbed by the variety of pains racking her body. She waited on the Force, but it didn't seem close to her, and the remote, elusive light of Atris' presence had grown even more ethereal. Perhaps it was only a mental afterimage of the old woman's presence. Either way, it seemed Kaevee was very much on her own now.
The Nautolan Sith Lord came into her shifting view and gazed odiously down at her as though she was something filthy he had unexpectedly stepped in. Occasionally a spasm passed over his face or through his head-tentacles, like some hidden pain was irritating him. He cleared his throat before he spoke. "I doubt you can comprehend the trouble you and your scheming Republic friends have caused me. I've lost many colleagues and many more students—students I've spent years teaching."
Kaevee slightly lifted her head. Though the motion set off firecrackers behind her watering eyes, she wanted to look at him, and for him to know how much she hated him at that moment. It brought her a drop of happiness to imagine he had been hurt somehow; it was only unfortunate that any of the Sith had escaped their academy.
He went on musingly. "On the plus side, my classes now have some open slots. Perhaps you would be interested in…" He trailed off, shaking his head. "Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Where is your friend, the other Jedi? I know there is another—someone far more powerful than you…"
The Padawan stirred, bones aching and muscles burning. A memory from Daluuj echoed through her thoughts: No matter what happens, don't tell them anything. You got that? Atris was certainly too far away for anyone to hurt her, but whether or not Kaevee had any information that the Sith could actually use, she felt more was at stake here—principles.
And her life.
Get away, she thought. She had to get away.
Stifling a pained sob, she rolled herself over. Facing the other way, her eyes were drawn out the huge window down at the end of the concourse, across a perverse, nightmarish technological parody of a forested valley—nothing but steel in measured angles, straight lines, and precisely-forged shapes and proportions. And somehow, looking at the silver-green energy that flared around those giant metal teeth was almost nauseating; it didn't belong. It shouldn't have been.
Looking skyward, Kaevee spied a drexl here and there circling the valley. If she could manage to reach one of them with the Force… But no, she had tried already, back at the landing zone. Someone else had bound them—perhaps the Sith Lord right behind her.
"This does not need to be difficult, little Jedi. I am trying to be patient with you." The Nautolan's voice was gently stern, like Master Zhar's had been whenever he'd had to chastise some stubborn youngling, and the similarity was terrifying.
As Kaevee started to crawl, the Sith Lord appeared in the corner of her eye, one hand raised. "Oh, very well," he complained. "I should have known; I have to do everything myself."
The Padawan stopped as a very deep shadow, one that her eyes couldn't see, fell over her. She felt something in the back of her head—it was not really pain, not actual physical pressure, but somehow it was still as acute and palpable as a metal hook digging into her skull. Her back arched, her fingernails scraped against the catwalk, and her flesh crawled. Her thoughts went back to the day of her arrival at Belsavis, when she had watched in excitement as the frozen planet grew in the Ebon Hawk's viewport.
There was a split second in which she wondered why in the galaxy she had started thinking about that; given her circumstances, it was so inappropriate as to be alienating. But the memory continued to play out in her mind's eye, and her stomach turned as she realized that the Sith Lord was somehow in her head, making her think about it. He was looking for the "other Jedi," looking for Atris.
The memory accelerated, and soon it was of Kaevee's descent through the abandoned monastery with Atton and the laigrek, toward the chamber with the cistern—and Kaevee's intuition told her that when the memory reached Atris herself, the Sith Lord would then discover her.
Her entire being revolted. No matter what happens, don't give them anything. She couldn't just let him take what he wanted. She had to be brave this time and do something…
She doubted that attacking the Sith Lord directly again would do any good. At a loss as to her other options, she instead tried to will the memory away by conjuring up something else to put in its stead; she imagined the Janta plains back on Dantooine, thought of the tall grass rustling as a breeze swept over it and kath hounds prowled within. But the plains wavered and swam like a heat mirage, and her mind split between the two images, oscillating between them as her will warred with the intruder's.
The shadow around Kaevee deepened toward pitch. The imaginary hook went deeper into her head and then started to yank, harder and harder, and with each yank she felt herself being pulled further and further away from the world until the universe itself was somehow turned inside out. Her body now seemed to be a vaporous, accessory thing, hardly even a part of her at all except for the dulled pain that still reached her from her limbs and head; now it was thought that was solid, real, and immediate.
Kaevee told her body to move, to leap to its feet and run; it only sank flat against the catwalk, and even this barely registered to her. There was no way to concentrate in this nightmarish state of being, and her diversionary thought of Dantooine crumbled in the Sith Lord's grip like a dried leaf. As the episode of Belsavis continued, Kaevee panicked and panicked, scarcely able to feel her own heart pounding, and all the while there was the Nautolan's presence somewhere in her, following her hijacked train of thought toward its end…
Not thinking, not really able to think while enveloped in the shadow, Kaevee's fear ignited to an almost preternatural fury, and she tried to fight back—but in this inverted, sundered state, she could not gather whatever was left of her kinetic power to break his limbs with a Force blow, as she so desperately wanted to. Nothing in the material world still lay within her reach, and as her soul thrashed and writhed, all she had was her other memories, the other things in her mind, and she seized on them as though they could be used to form a barrier between the Nautolan and herself, or as psychic missiles to strike him with.
Time seemed to explode or to collapse in on itself; the images shot past their mind's eyes like the inscrutable ripples of a hyperspace tunnel, yet at the same time there was a searing, painstaking clarity to them, whether the memories were things Kaevee recalled often, or buried so deep that she hadn't even realized she'd forgotten them. She didn't select them; once she had made the decision to fight back, they simply came tumbling out.
She saw Shen burning.
She was sitting in the library in the Enclave on Dantooine, buoyed up by Emon's expectant gaze, and she was saying, "There is no passion; there is serenity…"
A frigid, blinding-cold wind buffeted her away from the door, and her laigrek squawked in outrage.
"I am not scared," she protested as a brith circled somewhere high overhead.
She followed Atton down and down and down, toward the bottom of the hollow hill.
There was no sound in the room except for the otherworldly song of the lightsaber—her lightsaber, at last—as she slowly, experimentally weaved it through the air, mesmerized by its emerald blade.
"—DON'T HAVE ANYTHING, THANKS TO YOU PEOPLE!" Cole screamed at her. "Now GET THE HELL OFF ME!"
At the center of the room stood a waist-high cistern filled nearly to the brim with what could have been ice or water; it was too still to tell which…
"—right to listen to the Council, Kaevee, and to your Master," Bastila said. "We have to trust the Force more than ever, in times as dark as these—"
The Nautolan's mental brute force was undeterred, shunting the would-be obstacles aside with more and more disdain each time. If Kaevee had felt any tenuous sense of control, it was gone now; she had triggered an avalanche and it was burying her, and lightyears away she distantly felt her throat burning itself raw with screaming.
"Thanks, Atris," Atton called up the steps. "I found her."
Kaevee fell across the universe in an instant and landed back in her body, drenched in sweat that felt like it had frozen on her. Brittle-feeling twines of hair fell over her eyes as she peeled her face away from the floor, which seemed to be rumbling louder, harder than it had before.
"That was much more than I needed to know," the Sith Lord muttered drily as he hovered somewhere nearby. "But one of your Council survived—and it was the librarian! Very interesting. Perhaps the two of us will meet some other time. That would be stimulating… though I can't say much for her as a Master, sending you into danger unattended. And on Malachor, of all places, when this planet has already devoured so many Jedi…"
Surprising herself that she was able to move at all, Kaevee propped herself up on an elbow, clawed the hair away from her eyes, and peered up at the alien. He was gesturing absently as he rambled, his black eyes hard to read but seemingly fixed on the floor beside his captive, as though he was speaking to himself as much as to her. Kaevee was almost beneath his notice; she hadn't been strong enough to stop him, she realized, just like she hadn't been strong enough to stop Mira when she'd been about to hurt Cole. That thought lingered, dense and smoldering inside, and another shadow in the Force seemed to coalesce around her—but it was a very different shadow this time. It seemed… comforting, like a parent offering an embrace. It promised there was a way out.
Kaevee hesitated before the shadow. There was a part of her that feared it and wanted to draw away; it told her that it was not of the Jedi, told her to say her mantra again, or to remember Emon's teaching, or to hold onto the enigmatic truth she had just recalled, which said that there was no passion, only serenity. But the greater part of her did not want to die, and moreover it wanted the Nautolan to die instead. In the face of that, Jedi words and Jedi ideas all seemed less real than they had before—and she could not bear to listen to them now, so soon after failing them again.
She clutched the shadow to herself and found that the Force was very much with her.
Blue-white plasma slammed against red, launching shards of light through the sterile air as Atton drove Visas back and back. He put all his weight into the blows, all the wrath he could dredge up from the ruins of the past six years, and kept them coming so fast that his former companion had hardly a millisecond free to counter-attack.
But it wasn't enough. Somehow, for some reason, it just wasn't enough. Even as Visas parried madly, not even trying to counter his enhanced strength directly, she seemed never to tire, never to exert herself a speck more than necessary. And all the while her face was tranquil, bored even, showing no sign of strain. Atton was stronger on Malachor, but so was she. The fun that he'd had back in the security zone and with the Headmaster's two flunkies was over, and he saw the same thing he'd been forced to see after the scuffle on Daluuj: he had lost something when he'd run from Meetra. But why, exactly? Why should that have made him weaker?
Damn cosmic energy rules. How was he supposed to keep track of it all?
Their duel was fast approaching the end of the catwalk, where it joined the ring that ran along the window showing the inside of the valley. As they neared it, Atton suddenly stopped his assault, knowing better than to waste more energy on venting his anger. Visas wheeled back, then rudely flicked her blade at his throat, playing the elegant fencer again. Atton brought his guard up by reflex in an awkward, last-second parry that twisted his wrist and loosened his grip.
Scowling, he did some backpedaling of his own, pawing at his bandolier, and pulled his last grenade from it. He knew bringing explosives into the fight would turn it into a very hair-raising and very short game of telekinetics, but if he could get it over to Visas before she was ready—
But no. The schutta's hand cut through the air, and the grenade jumped out of Atton's fingers, over the nearby railing, and into the depths before he could even get his thumb through the pinhole. She was on him again in a second, and their sabers met again in a flashing pinwheel of azure and crimson. Behind her, the pylons in the valley had all unfolded and were extended toward the sky, and a few in the two outer rings of them were starting to spark online. Atton began to suspect that, rather than not dying, the best he might get out of this day was seeing the look on Visas' face when they finally all lit up.
Their lightsabers crossed again at chest-level and ground together, the energy beams whining and straining in protest as they pressed against each other. They were there a long time—or it seemed so—and at some point Atton realized that he seemed to have run out of sweat. He still felt fine, sort of, strained and aching and cracking, but still perfectly willing to keep fighting for another day and a half, whether or not he'd just fall to pieces when it was over be damned. Underlying all that, though, was a subtler sensation which he recognized as the icy, hope-you-enjoyed-your-last-meal feeling he'd had on the dropship.
A horrible sound reached his ears from some distance away, a rattling, anguished scream that overrode the electric shriek of the lightsabers and knifed its way through his focus. His dazzled eyes flicked to the side. Kaevee…
Past the crackling X of dicolored light, Visas Marr raised four fingers from the hilt of her lightsaber, and then the X was gone, because Atton was flying back over the catwalk. He had a great time landing, opting to just let go of his lightsaber rather than dismember himself as he bounced and rolled over the unforgiving durasteel.
Patches of the void and clumps of stars floated before his eyes. Untangling his arms and legs, he got up on one knee to find himself halfway back up the walkway. His lightsaber lay several meters ahead, still active, its fractious blade chewing a charred line in the floor. A ways past, he saw the burning brand of Visas' own weapon and was distantly puzzled at how she wasn't charging at him.
The pilot stretched out his left hand and groaned as he saw a shallow scorch line running diagonally along its back and over the wrist. His own flesh didn't smell as good as other people's. Grinding his teeth, he forcibly locked eyes on his fallen weapon, which rattled for a second before starting to roll toward him, dragging a wide, molten scar across the metal.
Come on, come on, COME ON, he thought furiously, and the lightsaber finally flew toward him. He caught it with both hands, hissing with pain as his new wound reminded him of its existence. But the Force was still with him—lucky him—and it guided him, tightening his hold and tipping the blade horizontally to hold it just under his chin. Without warning, its light went supernova and filled his murky vision. He stared in something approaching terror, thinking the already less-than-expertly-reassembled emitter matrix was now failing completely—meaning the containment field would rupture, allowing the pent-up energy to escape in a manner similar to how energy "escaped" when a thermal detonator went off.
As his sight cleared, he realized that the saber wasn't spazzing out on its own—it was the quivering, staggered strand of Sith lightning flowing into it that was causing that. That was a microscopic relief, but Atton still had room to be dismayed as his eyes followed the bolt up to Visas' extended hand. He'd never seen her use that power before.
The two energy sources trembled and fluctuated, seeming almost to merge into each other at the point of contact, and Atton had no choice but to bet on his saber having more energy to dump than Visas did. One of them had to run out, and he knew that hardly anyone but a Sith Master was strong enough to throw those bolts around willy-nilly. Hopefully it meant she was getting desperate or cocky.
Atton slumped forward as the lightning stream died, seemingly taking his blade with it. Standing up, he thumbed the saber's activation switch, but the weapon only made a strange sort of electrical gargling sound and stayed off. Rather than try again, he stuffed it into a pocket and drew the vibroblade he had found in the security zone. Pitifully short though it was, it at least had a cortosis weave, and rather than feel stupid for his own deficiency in armament, he consoled himself that Visas was too arrogant to just carry a blaster and shoot him the second his lightsaber failed.
Atton's shorter weapon forced him to maintain a tight circle of defense. Visas closed in, probing with careful jabs toward his midsection that kept leaving singes on his jacket as he parried. The Sith's movements were just a little slower, more conservative, than before—she had indeed strained herself with the lightning blast. But with the shape Atton was in, he didn't think that would do him much good. His wounds, slight though they were, continually ate away at his focus. If she got one good hit in, that would be it for him.
He danced with Visas a while longer, letting her push him away from the center of MSG Control. The fact that the curtain was about to drop meant getting closer to an exit was now a priority, but leaving would be somewhat thorny with the Miraluka breathing down his neck.
He realized then that Kaevee's voice had stopped, and the unwelcome sense of worry began to build up in the back of his mind again. If only he'd had just a few more seconds to hack away at Silbus… but he hadn't, so he reflexively tossed that thought aside and hoped, for the kid's sake, that she was already dead. But what if she wasn't? He'd need to find her, rescue her from the consequences of her heroism, and get her back to that hangar—after dealing with Silbus. And Visas.
Speaking of whom, she Force-leaped over Atton's head. Knowing his blade wasn't long enough to reach her, the pilot simply kept her in his sights as she landed in a crouch, blocking his prospective escape route. He wound up to slam a boot into the middle of her face, but her blade whipped diagonally upward where his leg would have been, and he fell back a stride instead.
The Miraluka slowly rose, turning to reduce her profile, her saber angled down—the Makashi ready stance—and, for a change, waited. Useless though it was to try to stare down a species without eyes, Atton locked onto the golden veil where hers would have been and took the opportunity to calculate.
He had no weapons left but the midget-sized vibroblade. The very fact Visas had paused implied that she was winded, but even if Atton whipped himself back into a frenzy for another offensive, his inferior reach would leave him vulnerable. In the end he opted for the one tactic he hadn't tried on Visas before: talking.
"Tired… yet?" His voice sounded strange—a little high-pitched, crazily mirthful, separated by gasps. "What say we… call it a draw?"
She came toward him—walking, not charging—and he backed away at the same speed. There was no time to finesse his words, to figure out what might get into her head. All Atton could do was talk and hope that something would draw blood, would chip away at her resolve, her dedication to the fight, or whatever kept her anchored in the Force.
"Y'know, you're gonna… hafta leave real soon." He jerked his head back, toward the window. "That thing's on… already going." The red blade snapped at his face, and he parried. "Really, I wouldn't lie to you…"
Then it happened.
The green flicker cast by the pylons turned into a flare that lit the whole concourse, casting black shadows and glittering fiercely off of the Miraluka's veil. An ensemble of alarms began to blare in tandem with the high-pitched wails and cries of machinery, as if the facility was a living titan of steel in the midst of some cataclysmic labor. Visas froze, her chin tilted upward, as if she was watching the magnified ripples that had at last begun to pass through the planet's mass shadow. Atton got his payoff—even with no eyes to widen, the face of the Sith was finally seized with the startled dread he had wanted to find there.
He couldn't help but gloat. "I know what you're thinking—how'd he do it? Got my goons spread around, they'd know if the other Jedi had broken in… Too bad it's not so easy…"
He very nearly had to shout to be heard over the suicide-pangs of the Mass Shadow Generator. His sentence would have ended with, to sense a droid, but he trailed off as his ears sifted out a properly hellish but entirely un-mechanistic noise from the rest. His eyes, too, were drawn away from his opponent and off to the side as, somewhere in the indoor technoscape of silvery green-tinted gray, there was a brilliant orange-white glow as something caught fire.
The Nautolan's prattling continued another moment or two before his eyes finally found their way back to Kaevee. He cleared his throat again. "But what am I going to do with you, Human? You have the Force, and yes, plenty of hate. Hate that you could learn to use…" He inclined his head for a moment, hesitating, then laughed cruelly. "Oh, please—just look at you squirming there like a jellyfish. You wouldn't last a month with my other students. It takes some gumption to become a true Sith—"
Kaevee's free hand sprang toward him, fingers bent, and the alien's head snapped back as though jerked by an invisible noose, his sentence terminating in a prolonged, insensate gurgle. His cranial tendrils squirmed like caught serpents and his bony hands shot to his collar. Kaevee forgot her misgivings, feeding them all to the shadow that had found her, and felt herself strengthened. She poured every last spark of that new strength into her throttling grip until she thought her soul might go with it and disintegrate into the Force.
But even as he choked and his spindly body trembled, the Sith Lord resisted. Seconds passed. A tortured breath whistled down his throat, and though Kaevee felt the Force was still with her, she was now squeezing less and less on the alien's neck, and more and more an expanding barrier of Force energy around his neck.
As she saw this she wavered, realizing that she had only taken him by surprise. She still was not strong enough, even with the shadow—and as soon as she realized this, the shadow left her and she crumpled on her side, limp and exhausted.
Released at last, the Sith Lord doubled over in a coughing fit. Even in her forsaken state, Kaevee dared to probe him with the Force for just an instant, hoping against hope to find some tiny vulnerability, but the barrier he had summoned was now a hardened, solid shell; even if she had the strength to try, she wouldn't be able to touch him. He stood then, hunched over, and she saw murder in his eyes. "Case… in point," he said, his voice low and quivering, keeping a tenuous grasp on his veneer of restraint. "One does not play games with the dark, little Jedi."
Then he raised a half-closed hand and wrenched Kaevee into the air. The Padawan tried to struggle, but found that she could not even flail her limbs; completely encased in his Force grip, she hung splayed in midair like an insect pressed between two panes of glass, her head tilted back—and the pressure was building, pushing in from every direction. Her bones would crack and splinter, her organs would liquefy, and the Jedi Order would finally die with her.
Help, she thought blankly. Help, help, help… She could just barely see flashes from the far-off duel out the corner of her eye. Atton was too far away to help her, of course. Not only was Kaevee going to die, she would never know if her blind, ignorant impulse to save his life had meant anything to him at all—or if her death would mean only the passing of a nuisance from his life. Stupid kid, he'd think as he found her mangled body. Worse yet, maybe he'd be right.
Help…
Again without warning, a far-reaching luminescent channel cut through the dark of Malachor and flowed into Kaevee, imparting strength yet again. But as soon as her spirit began to soar, it floundered—how could she use that strength? Spend it in another useless assault?
There was a critical pause as the Sith Lord regarded the Padawan with a contemptuous sneer that spoke of finality. Kaevee did not deliberate, did not wonder what Atris was expecting her to do, or what her dead Master would have expected. Her only thought at all was to survive just a little bit longer, to hold on as tight as she could to the bleeding edge of whatever small moment of life she still had. Above all, she was not ready to die because she wanted to die as a Jedi, and at some point since entering Singularity Base, in the pit of her heart, she had begun to understand that she was not a Jedi and hadn't been one for a very long time.
At the same moment that the Nautolan clenched his fist, Kaevee willed a barrier around herself, like the one protecting him. Her chin hit her chest, her knees bent, her ankles locked together, and her arms folded over her torso as the dark side's crushing power bore in on her, but the strength Atris was giving her could keep it at bay—for now. The Sith Lord raised a brow, but kept up the pressure. He was the one who could draw on the awful strength of Malachor, not Kaevee, and it was plain that Atris had only bought her a few seconds.
Forcing agonized, rattling breaths through a half-closed windpipe, the Padawan flicked her eyes upward to meet the alien's. The energy pylons outside continued their rhythmic flares, adding a ghostly quality to his already sickly countenance, and deepening the long shadow that he cast back toward the outer section of MSG Control.
Something in his shadow caught her eye—a spot of thicker, almost solid darkness—but as soon as it did, the silver-green flashes that played across the concourse doubled their intensity. The Nautolan hissed, at first shielding his eyes with his free hand, but then stared past her and out the giant window, his intense expression melting to a look of stupefied horror. As his mouth dropped open, he dropped Kaevee, who fell back to the catwalk, gasping like a fish.
"No, no, no, no, no," he murmured. "He couldn't have— How…?"
Lifting her pounding head, Kaevee looked forward. Behind the Sith, a faint, blurry red light glimmered close to the floor. It seemed that someone besides Atris had heard her mental call for help.
There was a whisper of danger in the Force, and Kaevee feebly scooted herself backward, but the effort dragged blades through her insides, and she cried out. Her voice snapped the Sith Lord out of his preoccupation, and he looked down at her—but the Force must have been trying to whisper to him as well, because then he spun around to face whatever had come up behind him, his dark energy quickly rejuvenating itself and preparing to strike. But while he was still turning, the laigrek craned its neck back and spewed its molten breath on him.
The Sith Lord screamed like no one Kaevee had ever heard in her life; it was a sound of such shrill and otherworldly agony that it seemed as though a fissure had opened between two layers of reality, allowing the everlasting death-rattle of Malachor itself to begin to spill through into the sensible world. The alien jumped and thrashed about like a madman, futilely trying to rip off his heavy robes as flames swept across them, reaching up to gnaw at his face; his eyes sizzled and his head-tendrils ignited. Kaevee watched, petrified, until he tumbled to the catwalk, flopping and squirming about. Then she jammed her fingers into her ears, pulled her knees up to her chest, and buried her face in her cloak.
At some point the hellish sound retreated—gradually, perhaps, as though disappearing into the depths of some fathomless pit. When it seemed to be gone at last, the Padawan looked about and found herself alone. Seeing the rails about the edge of the catwalk beside her, she took hold of them and climbed to her feet. It was a labor that stole whimpers from her mouth and tears from her bloodshot eyes. Her bones felt like twigs. It took three or four tries to get her legs underneath her, and even when she succeeded, she ended up not leaning against the rail so much as hanging from it like a corpse that had fallen there.
The Sith Lord lay two meters from her, a curled, shriveled, twisted black muddle that reeked of burning. Spidered out on top of him was the laigrek, the one front scythe-leg that had dragged it from the control room sunk deep into his belly. The faintest glow still remained in its compound eye, but it was as still as the corpse beneath it.
Kaevee stared dumbfounded for a moment, but the sight could not hold her attention for long, soon giving way to the noise of mechanical commotion about her: the multitudinous screeches of alarms, the grinds and roars of titanic engines, and piercing electric whines and buzzes. The facility itself seemed to be moving beneath her.
She looked the other way, toward the massive window. The steel valley was ablaze with silver-green light, sparking with the glows that sheathed the giant metal teeth—sheathed all of them now, she realized. The drexls, which had previously been gliding repetitively over the area, seemed to have turned shy and were gradually distancing themselves in ever-widening circles of flight. Meanwhile, the central pit disgorged needle-thin, spiraling arcs of energy into the clouds, which now seemed filled with a ghostly light. Atton had done it, Kaevee realized. Somehow. Malachor would be destroyed…
Some platforms over, the pilot was still locked in his duel with the Sith: Visas Marr, the same one as on Dantooine. But instead of a lightsaber, Atton had only a short sword, and it was clear he was losing, entirely on defensive. Buying himself a few seconds of breathing room with a sudden backpedal, he turned his head toward Kaevee. Though their stares seemed to meet, she struggled to read his face, what with the distance and the glaring light outside. But the pilot's voice came bounding across the concourse, even managing to carry over the thunder of the machine. "KAEVEE, GET OUTTA HERE!"
I can't move, she tried to say, but her lips didn't really work. Looking down, she found her hands and arms entwined about the railing as though welded to it. She had no legs. Her body was shutting down. Her thoughts, too, seemed to be disintegrating. She was terrified to blink; if she closed her eyes she would let go of the rail and fall into the abyss without so much as a scream.
But for all that, she still had the Force—just a little bit left. She clung to that fact even as everything else turned fuzzy and faint. She had to use the Force. She had to save Atton. It was the whole reason she had plunged herself into this nightmare. Save Atton.
Throwing whatever remained of herself into the Force, Kaevee left her senses as far behind as she dared and reached out over the valley, looking for something in the fractured skies.
Damn stupid kid, totals are nineteen-nine, play the minus ten card, come on you schutta, is that all you've got, totals are nine to nine—
Atton was running on fumes as he continued his retreat down the catwalk toward the center of the base, toward the eye of the brewing storm, his face screwed up in a murderous, maniacal scowl as he blocked the lightsaber again and again. He could barely feel his fingers. Concern for Kaevee had seized at him again, but his mind quickly sank into a vortex of blackening, contradictory half-thoughts as the duel resumed, and it was far too late in the game to convert any of his emotions into anything useful.
The exhaustion that blanketed him now felt one and the same as the chilling finality that he'd had since the beginning of his return to Malachor, and part of him embraced it as something comforting. He hadn't exactly planned on dying here, as far as he knew, but something felt right about it. It had something to do with all the bodies he'd left behind in the security zone, with the sight of the Headmaster's pride fleeing from his face under Atton's onslaught, with the two dead Marauders, and with how it had taken all that before Visas would finally manage to finish him off. And with how his death would do nothing at all to stop the Mass Shadow Generator, and Visas had to know it even as she continued their dance of death, stubborn to the end as all Forcefuls were.
Bao-Dur's plan would be carried out, though he hadn't lived to see it. Malachor's destruction would throw the Sith Remnant into confusion and give the Republic a shot in the arm to resist the impending invasion. And the Force would carry the echoes of what Atton had done up the Nagian Corridor and all the way back to the ancient empire, back to Meetra. And maybe, if against the odds there was justice in the Force after all, he'd somehow get to be there in the echoes when they reached her so he could laugh in her face.
He fell back and back, his weapon guided by what little remained of his reflexes. The only thing that cut through the starflares of the Mass Shadow Generator was the red blade of Visas' lightsaber, repeatedly searing and sparking against Atton's sword, close to where the blade began. The vibroblade felt like a club in his hands; one well-timed cut would go through the hilt and right into him, and then he would join the rest of Malachor. Again, it wasn't ideal, but it felt right in a way.
They had reached the catwalk's end when something strange happened.
Visas stopped cold, seeming once again to peer up into the bedeviled skyline. Also coming to a halt some paces away, Atton watched as the Miraluka extinguished her blade, turned tail, and sprinted back the way they had come. Before he could get his wits back enough to be confused, he had yet another feeling that he should duck. As if he needed more encouragement, there was also a skull-shaking crash as something broke through the transparisteel window some twenty feet above him.
He hit the floor, pulling his jacket up over his head as gleaming shards rained down around him, and the catwalk buckled as something very heavy landed not too far ahead. Not particularly interested in finding out what it was, Atton scrambled away from the now-suspect bridge and onto the ringed walkway behind him.
What he saw as he got to his feet was somewhat puzzling. A small mountain of muscle was crawling—or slithering, whatever—after Visas, its weight causing the catwalk to squeal and sag. When its supports gave way and it fell crashing into the depths of the concourse, the creature spread monstrous wings and took to the air, its pale hide lit up almost white by the flashing pylons outside. Staring in astonishment, Atton wondered since when in the hell they had drexls here.
A figure moving along another walkway some distance down and to the left caught his eye—Visas. As soon as Atton recognized her, the drexl seemed to do the same and swooped down toward her, reaching with clawed mandibles that could slash her in two. The Miraluka leaped aside, but the beast's huge tail smashed through the catwalk as it passed, and its imminent collapse forced her to leap to another one.
Atton would have been content to watch the spectacle, but he was startled by an amplified series of beeps in his ear. He spun around, his vibroblade half-raised, but found only the Remote floating before him. Relaxing a bit, he struggled to decipher the machine's chatter from the noise around them. "Yeah, I noticed," he said with a lazy gesture at the valley. "Mission accomplished, good job."
The droid spasmodically talked over him, though, and as he listened harder he realized the annoying thing wanted to lead him somewhere. He sheathed his vibroblade and followed the Remote some distance down the walkway and out onto one of the bridging catwalks, where he found Kaevee clinging to the safety rail. Nearby, there lay a blackened husk that had once been Silbus, decorated by the corpse of a giant bug, but they didn't hold Atton's attention for long. The girl's head was turned toward him as though she had expected his approach, but even before closing the distance, he could make out her ashen face and thousand-kilometer stare.
"Kid? Kid, you with me? Kaevee?" He prodded her shoulder, snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, and felt her pulse, and all the while his throat tightened as what remained of the haze of battle evaporated from his mind, leaving more than enough room for his emotions to crash into one another.
Was she going to die on him now, right after he'd finally reached her, and after whatever Silbus had put her through? Did she literally need to die before she finally learned what it cost to play hero all the time? She wouldn't have been the first Jedi to. Damn the Jedi, he thought. Damn Atris, stupid old hag. Why'd she send me to Dantooine? Why couldn't we just leave this kid alone?
He swallowed the maelstrom of frustrations whole. Once again he was annoyed by Kaevee's strange knack for getting under his skin without even trying to. As he set about prying her off of the rail, her gaze refocused a bit. "I saved you, Atton," she murmured as he half-laid, half-dropped her on her back. She was like a talking corpse.
Atton paused. Looking back on what had happened moments before with the drexl, it was too convenient—how it had completely ignored him and seemed intent only on having a Sith for dinner. With that and Kaevee's knack for Beast Control, He was able to put two and two together. So she had saved him in a way. And she'd apparently managed to kill Silbus with the help of her bug.
Atton was begrudgingly a little impressed, but he was not about to feed her ego by sharing that. "You and me are gonna talk later," he said gruffly before slinging her up onto his shoulders. He was surprised at how light she was. They'd need to fatten her up, add nerf steaks to her diet or something.
With the Remote close behind, he shambled his way down the catwalk and toward one of the exits. Using the last speck of his power, he tried to keep his Force sense active, in case there were any incoming last-minute dangers aside from the planet being about to implode… There had been troopers, assassins, a Sith Lord, and Marauders. Who did that leave? "All I need now is that damn Wookiee to show up," he muttered.
"What's… a Wookiee?" asked Kaevee dreamily.
"Forget it."
At the mouth of the hallway leading back to Security Zone C, they met an out-of-breath squad of Republic troopers. Their leader explained, "Ship's ready to go—we're here to evacuate your dumb asses! Major says you're too important to lose!"
Atton, who had forgotten how fun it was to get yelled at by COs, just told him, "Fine by me," and followed as they charged back up the darkened corridor.
If nothing else, Malachor was a place where people lost themselves, and in that respect Kaevee was just one of many.
She was aware when Atton reached her at last. She recognized his face and was struck by how different it looked, as though his aloof countenance had finally cracked. But as while he was carrying her, and she was starting to puzzle out how this could have happened, he disappeared—and so did everything else. Singularity Base left her, with all its towering and burrowing ferrocrete and steel, and its shifting, bellowing machinery, and Malachor V, and the two fleets warring above it. Even the stars hid themselves. Everything was gone except Kaevee and the void.
And her Master.
She was back in that rare nightmare again, marooned in a perfect black expanse with nothing—not even her own body—and no one else but Emon suspended before her, frozen in some kind of painful slumber by an awful white glow that enveloped him.
Kaevee wanted to wake him. Something awful had happened to her. She had been dying or almost dying, and killing, and then she had run away into this place—maybe. She wasn't sure why she was here, but knew that she needed Emon's help. She willed herself closer to him, wishing that she had a hand in this void to bring up to touch his cheek…
The white glow that enclosed her Master flashed, then surged crimson. A shudder passed through Emon's body and his head jerked up. His eyes snapped open, looking ahead, looking at Kaevee, with something approaching horror.
Kaevee heard screams, one of them perhaps her own, but in a second they were gone and she found herself in a cramped, noisy room. There were voices and moving shapes that she took to be people, but the details were fuzzy and indistinct. Though she was aware enough of her body to realize that she was lying down, she couldn't seem to move herself, as though she was still in the void somehow. Even so, she tried to be as still and silent as possible. She didn't want to see Emon again, didn't want to see him looking at her like that…
A few moments passed, and Kaevee realized that she was awake; Emon was long dead, it had only been a bad dream, and she was… where?
As her senses sharpened again, she realized that she was chilly—someone had taken her cloak, leaving just the tunic. A sharp little pain on one arm, fresher than and distinct from her many bruises, led her to roll up the sleeve there; underneath she found the neat prick left by a needle. Cautiously she lifted her head, which pounded, but not excruciatingly so.
The room whirled with activity and thrummed with unpleasant sounds—people groaning, shouting, and conversing. She was in a bed, one of several dozen set in rows, each of them occupied. As Kaevee looked from one to the next, she recognized men with missing arms or legs, or other terrible wounds—the same ones from Singularity Base. Off in a corner, several soldiers were rifling through cabinets of medical supplies and passing them off to others who meandered among the beds, tending to their occupants as well as they could.
Feeling obscurely embarrassed, Kaevee sat up and started to shift her legs toward the edge of the bed, only for one of the medics to appear in front of her, hefting a case of stimpacks under one arm. "Hey, take it easy, kid," he said sternly, putting his free hand on her shoulder. "You were in shock."
"What's… going on?" Kaevee fumbled, not looking at his eyes.
"We're getting the hell outta here. Just take it easy." With that, he firmly—though not roughly—pushed her back down onto the bed and went off.
Kaevee stared at the ceiling, her resentment somewhat diluted by perplexity. Getting the hell out of where? she thought, immediately before it hit her. Behind all the noise, there was a steady, omnipresent rumble which faded as the transport broke atmosphere. The transport! She remembered now.
A feverish, irrational sort of urgency took hold of her. She had to get out of that room; she didn't belong there. "I'm not a kid," she grumbled, looking around again and spying a door. When none of the medics were close by, she slid from the bed. Though her legs were a little unsteady, she made it through the door, braced herself against a wall, and inelegantly ambled down the corridor toward a door leading… somewhere or other.
The room beyond resembled the main cabin of the dropship she had ridden down to Malachor, except that it was somehow even more cramped despite the plethora of empty jumpseats, its ceilings lower and its aisles narrower. She glanced about anxiously, her eyes passing over the grubby, exhausted Republic soldiers scattered about. Whatever she was looking for seemed beyond her conscious desires, and it pulled her across two aisles.
Looking down the length of the second gave her pause. Cole was sitting near a far corner, strapped in like the soldiers. The spacer didn't see her. His eyes were closed, his face screwed up; maybe he was in the middle of his own nightmare. Kaevee watched him pityingly, but a bitter pain welled up inside her as she remembered the last words they had traded. Yet it felt dulled somehow, as though it had happened a very, very long time ago.
When she turned around, she forgot about Cole. On the nearby wall was a small window affording a view of the back of the transport, which sloped down slightly, and a few Republic corvettes and fighters flying escort, presumably bringing up the withdrawing fleet's rear. Beyond them, shrunk enough by distance that it seemed the size of Kaevee's palm, hung what had to be Malachor V. The strange rings and drifts of silver-green energy she had seen on her way in were gone; in their place was a shimmering, undulating wave that encircled the ruined world and its orbiting debris like a planetary shield on the verge of collapsing. Outside the field there was a handful of Sith cruisers, barely visible except for the winks of light as they fled from realspace.
Kaevee stared, squinting against the awful gleam, and her flesh crawled as the Force within her awakened to a sound. It came as though from a tremendous distance, but was horribly familiar—screams.
At that point time seemed to freeze, like a glitch in a holorecording, as Malachor's orbit was eclipsed by a perfect sphere of solid, actinic white, so startlingly pure that it could have been a hole ripped in space itself. But in the blink of an eye the orb was gone, collapsing into its center and disappearing like a ship entering hyperspace.
Murmurs spread through the transport's cabin—the men must have seen it. Kaevee was left staring at a now completely unremarkable and empty patch of space where a dead world, and before that a whole one, had once been. If she looked away, she would not be able to find the spot again.
Her breath caught as she realized that the screams in the Force were gone. Now it was silence that was hitting her; it was the silence of a dreamless sleep, infinitely exhausted and infinitely satisfying. Mystified, tantalized, and drained, she sank into the nearest jumpseat and put her head in her hands.
She had never missed Dantooine so much before.