Corso ignored the fact that his face throbbed, he could only see out of one eye, and blood still trickled from his nose. All he knew was the grief that spilled hot down his cheeks and onto her hand, a small broken thing that lay dormant in his. "Oh, Ky. What did you do? What have I done?"
Scourge had warned the boy not to touch her, but the fool had slid his palm under her hand anyway. He'd stepped forward to push Corso aside, but Sayonar had caught his arm and shook her head. He'd long ago forgotten the power of touch, Sayonar reminded him with her reproachful glance.
Skavak stood off to the side, his hands clenched into fists, his heart a tight knot in his chest, itching to touch something of her—anything of her. A fingernail, an eyelash, the moist exhale of her breath. Always the outsider, barred from being part of the show unfolding before him. He should just leave now and save himself the embarrassment of losing a race he'd never had a chance of winning anyway. He'd done his bit, she'd been found; yeah, he should just leave, but he couldn't. Not now. Not yet.
"Come back to me, tough girl," he muttered under his breath then turned and made his way to the lift to join Bowdaar and Akaavi who'd remained on the second floor to guard the few assailants who'd survived.
He almost ran into Doc and the Mon Calamari, Gus, when he stepped off the lift. Seph was having a conversation with Akaavi and the Wookie and, Rusk, the Chagrian appeared through a door from one of the side rooms, a sour look on his face. Likely unhappy he'd missed all the action, his fingers drummed along the top of a satchel he carried, his assault cannon hung from his shoulder.
"Dammit, I'm the one with the expertise," grumbled Doc. "You stay here and tend to the others while I go below. We both have a job to do, and Sayonar specifically requested me. Don't worry, my friend, Ole Doc's on the case."
Skavak knew the type; too slick, too well groomed and too full of ego. Scourge didn't like the man, that was evident by the surly scowl during Sayonar's conversation over the commlink, but they both had faith in his abilities. Skavak stepped aside and let him pass, but if Ky died, he'd show the man just how deadly the sin of pride could be.
Medkit slung over his shoulder, Doc rounded the wall of the cell and stopped short. "Force help us," he whispered as his gaze fell on the pitiful creature lying before him.
He squeezed past Sayonar and Scourge and laid his hand on Corso's shoulder. "Ease your hand from under hers, son, and step back. Let ole Doc do his work."
Doc had seen the evil that men can do, but nothing like this. His scanner made one pass over Ky's body, he frowned, made adjustments and scanned her again, his mouth a grim line, he made a third pass.
He lifted the blanket, and the collective gasp sucked all the air from the room. Every inch of skin on the woman's body had some kind of scar, burn mark, abrasion, puncture wound or bruise in varying shades of nearly black to sickly green. Her fingers had been broken and not set, her left foot had been flayed, with bones pushing up against the scar tissue in peaks that threatened to tear through again.
A feeding tube had been forced through a nose already broken, the dark shadows of trauma framed her closed eyes. The hinge of her jaw jutted out just below her ear and her misaligned teeth clenched behind dry, cracked lips.
"Well?" Corso's voice pierced through the stifling silence like a slug thrower shot. "Will she live? She has to live. Please."
Doc turned to them, his complexion ashen, his lips pulled tight, his eyes without promise. "You can all see the external damage, and how malnourished she is, how she's alive I can't even begin to guess. Only the massive amounts of kolto in her system have prevented rampant infection, and she is severely dehydrated. She also suffers from a non-genetic form of Osteogenesis Imperfecta or brittle bone disease. She has micro fractures everywhere, but the ones in her spine are the most worrisome. We have to find a way to remove her from here and get her to a decent medical facility where I can begin analysis and treatment."
Doc checked his scanner again. "There are chemicals in her blood I can't identify and things traveling through her veins, possibly parasitic in nature, possibly keeping her alive. I just don't know without the proper equipment. Her systems are so compromised, she's so weak, I don't know if she'll survive being transported to the ship."
"What of her mind?" asked Scourge.
"All her autonomic functions are working, or she'd already be dead, and there are blips of higher brain function that register on the scans, but not with any regularity. She has all the appearances of a coma patient, but there is something else there as well. More study is required. The main concern is keeping her alive and getting her off this force-forsaken moon."
Corso shuffled back and forth, scrubbing his hand across the back of his neck, trying to rub some feeling back into his shoulder, needing to hold her, comfort her as he'd always done. He hurt when he looked at her. From toes to balls and balls to brains, he ached, a mordant clawing misery that shredded his heart and laid it bare.
From far away he heard Scourge ask, "what about the probes?"
Doc fiddled with his mustache and checked the scanner again. "They're embedded deep. We must find some sort of release mechanism to remove them. Perhaps the room that remains locked? A lab perhaps?"
"T7, have you been able to unlock the room marked as the lab yet?" A series of whistles and beeps came through the commlink. "He says he is close."
"The question still remains; how do we move her?" said Doc. "What can you force users do to help? Surely you can restore some vitality to her body, enough to stabilize her at least?"
"I know little of the healing arts since my talents lie elsewhere," said Scourge. "Dark healing is painful at best and could throw her into convulsions at worst."
"Kira and I are much the same, both of us warriors not adept in healing practices. Scourge has also said that his darkness sensed her, an influx of light could cause more harm than good and what was done to her has nothing to do with the light."
"Then we are at an impasse and time whittles away at her life."
"Perhaps if we combined our power," said Scourge. "Tempered the force somehow between dark and light."
"And likely blow up this room and everyone in it," said Kira.
"No, there may be a way." Sayonar removed the medallion she'd taken from Tajno's body from the folds of her tunic. "Do you feel it Scourge? Kira? The item has power."
"And you know what it is?"
"Yes. It's the pendant of Kaelin Mon, a Jedi exiled for his beliefs centuries ago. One of my ancestors who believed in the Gray. Look at the motif, read the inscriptions. Dark and light, gray in the middle, 'We Stand.'"
"A conduit, but who would channel such power?"
"I will," said Kira. "Though I've chosen to serve the light, a grain of darkness will always be with me. Subdued, yes, but I fight it every day and will for the rest of my life."
"My darkness may consume you," said Scourge.
Kira touched the medallion, light and dark in perfect balance, no conflict, passion and peace in harmony, calm purpose written in achromatic lines. "It is important that we save her?" she asked Scourge.
"Yes. Her gifts cannot be wasted, and she still has a part to play."
"Then let's do this."
Kneeling with the pendant held between them, Scourge grasped the engraved lightning, and Sayonar grasped the sword, Kira gripped the base of the mountain. The rising sun on the bas-relief flared and the three fell into deep meditation. A bubble of energy formed around the trio, light flashed brilliant white, a miasma of black laced through with red and purple lunged against the light. Both caught in a vortex, funneled together, squeezed into a single thread of opalescence and channeled toward Kira's fingers.
A silvery mist formed over Ky, lowering gauzy tendrils that stroked and wound around her battered body and pulsed with power. The energy of dark and light, yoked together, pouring life into the dying and shoring up cells that had gone awry. Kira's hand trembled with the strain, beads of sweat broke out on her forehead, and even the giant red Sith wavered under the stress.
Ky's breathing deepened and steadied, a watery pink flush spread across her cheeks. The mist dispersed into translucent droplets and shattered. Kira and Sayonar sagged, Scourge caught them both and hugged them to his chest, fighting to stay upright himself. The medallion clattered to the floor, spinning on its edge before falling flat and face up. Doc breathed a sigh of relief, Corso stumbled back into the wall, hand across his mouth, afraid to ask, afraid to hope.
Doc ran another scan, a frown scrunching his brows together. "We need to move her soon. Whatever strength you gave her will not last, and we still have the probes to remove."
T7's binary erupted from Scourge's commlink in a series of chirps and beeps. The lab door was unlocked.
Scourge hoisted himself to his feet, pulling Sayonar and Kira with him. "We need a hover-stretcher and answers. I'll be back."
An hour later, they all stood in Tajno's lab. Seven technicians and the doctor lined up in front of the row of interrogation chairs, Tajno's surviving children on their knees against the wall, guarded by Akaavi and Bowdaar.
A keening wail had exploded from Bowdaar when he first saw Ky as if his world had crumbled and only his cries of grief could make it right again. A string of Mando'a curses flew from Akaavi's lips, so much rage with too many places to lay the blame. Gus made an odd sound somewhere between a gurgle and a gulp, anger and shock stuck in his throat with nowhere to spit it out.
The Chagrian moved around the lab, Seph's mien turned into sharp angles around the ruin of his face.
Skavak didn't give two shits about any of them. He'd come for her, and his eyes were hard as sapphires under a cold winter moon. He leaned against a table and watched and waited.
Corso had expected the doctor to be alien, Anomid or Neimoidian, but he was human. Short, bald and well fed. Corso brushed past Scourge, closed his fist around the front of the doctor's jacket and slammed him into the metal table. "Seems you didn't miss any meals. Is this where you tortured her? Look at her, you sonuvabitch. I will kill you for what you've done."
"Let him go, Corso," said Scourge. "We need him to remove the probes. She will surely die if not done properly and we don't have time for Doc to figure it out."
Corso rammed the man's shoulders into the metal, grinning at the loud thud of his head and grimace of pain that played across the doctor's face. He released his hold and turned away.
Pasty-faced, hands folded in supplication, the doctor fell to his knees. "Please. I was just following orders. You have no idea what that madman would have done to me, to us."
"If I had a credit..." Scourge stepped forward. "Get up and stop whining. You have no idea what I will do to you if you don't remove the probes from her head without further injury. Do it now if you want to live."
"Move her there." The doctor pointed to the bank of monitors that blinked to life with images of Ky's brain as soon as the stretcher was within proximity.
"Doc?" said Scourge, both doctor's heads turned toward him. "Our Doc, not you," Scourge clarified. "Supervise if you please."
"She has a most magnificent brain," Taj-doc prattled on as he set about turning knobs, flipping switches and removing the probes one by one. "She's hiding, you know. We tried to ferret her out, but she's burrowed too deep. I tried to get him to stop the torture, but he was obsessed with her. What he did went beyond the interests of science. Ah, the last one." He placed the final wriggling filament in a beaker on the table.
"And the injections?" asked Doc.
"Everything is here." Taj-doc walked to a row of computers. "You can copy all the data and take it with you although there were things he did that had no logic to a scientific mind. Those things are best explained by someone with knowledge of the force. Your Sith or Jedi friends perhaps."
Taj-doc pointed to a small metal box on the table. "He used that on her also. Some ancient amulet intended to break down the minds' defenses. Please take it."
Scourge nodded to Seph who palmed the box and tucked it into his rucksack.
"Scourge? Come here please," said Sayonar from across the room surrounded by rows of stasis tubes with adult bodies suspended in a viscous medium.
The Sith joined her where she stood gazing on a male child frozen in a stasis tube set aside from the others. "Who is this boy?" Scourge addressed Taj-doc.
"Lord Tajno's son. A tissue donor that decelerated the advance of Lord Tajno's illness."
Sayonar's face flushed with anger. "He used his own son as a lab animal?"
Scourge leaned closer to the glass, invading the child's mind, searching for any sign of consciousness. No walls, no barriers, just a flat wasteland, with no prints of a single thoughts passage. "The boy is hollow, Nulis. Not force-sensitive and nothing remains of who he was. He is blank like an unused sheet of flimsi. He will feel nothing."
"I won't leave this child," Sayonar's jaw set hard and stubborn as granite.
"You know the outcome of this. Mercy has no place in what we must do."
"He is an innocent. Please do not fight me. I will remove and carry him myself if I have to."
"Remove the boy from the tank," Scourge said to Taj-doc. "I will carry him from this place."
Ten minutes later, Scourge stood with the blanket wrapped boy in his arms. Doc and the others had left with the hover-stretcher, only he, Sayonar, Corso and Rusk remained though he detected Skavak's presence just outside the door.
"I've done everything you asked. You promised to let me live." Taj-doc squirmed like a worm on a hook.
The jittering vibrations of fear rattled against Scourge's darkness, and, oh how he wished he could smell the rank odor. He'd breathe it in like a heady perfume. His eyes settled on the quavering doctor with no more concern than the sole of his boot observing an insect. "I never promised you could live and I never said you could leave."
Scourge pivoted on his heel, Sayonar tugged on Corso's sleeve to follow. Scourge turned just once before exiting through the door. "Rusk, you know what to do. Finish this."