Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber

Tulkh’s identity with a retinal scan that left the Whiphid blinking and wiping his eyes in annoyance, and escorted them through. The turbolift had sucked them upward and dispensed them here.
    Into this room.
    For a moment Zo could only stare at it. A laboratory like nothing she’d ever encountered in years of research sprawled out to fill the space in front of her. She could hear small things shifting and moving in the corners. It seemed, in some horrible way, to be an insidious darkanalogue of the plant lab on Marfa, its instruments designed not to foster life but to inflict and sustain dosages of pain on whatever might still be alive here. There was something rustling in a cage in the shadows, making little smacking noises with its mouth.
    “Do you have it?”
    With an involuntary breath of surprise, Zo turned and looked back. In the center of the lab, a tall man in a dark robe stood watching them, his face a chiseled amalgam of shadow and bone, the cheek structure cruelly sharp, the hollows of his eyes like the sockets of a skull. Zo felt a thin wire of fear probe downward through her chest and into the pit of her stomach, where it dangled, twitching in the darkness. She thought of the name that Tulkh had mentioned on their way here:
Darth Scabrous
.
    The Sith Lord was staring at her, his expression inscrutable, although the raw intensity in his stare was unmistakable. It was as if he was looking at something that he wanted simultaneously to possess and to destroy.
    Without a word, the Whiphid took the orchid from Zo’s hand. He walked over to where the Sith Lord stood and held the flower out to him.
    “This is it.”
    Darth Scabrous took the flower, giving it only the most cursory of glances before returning his attention to Zo. There was a glimmer in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
    Tulkh stood waiting. “My money,” he said.
    If the Sith Lord heard him, he showed no sign. He was still staring at Zo.
    “Her name’s Hestizo Trace,” the Whiphid said. “She’s the orchid’s keeper. It needs her to—”
    “Survive,” Scabrous said. “I know. That’s how I knew you were bringing me the genuine article.” He reached up and touched her face, his gloved hand cold against her cheek, like leather wrapped around an iron rod. “It was the one piece of information that I withheld about the orchid.”
    “Then our business here is finished,” Tulkh said.
    The Sith Lord nodded. “My droid will pay you on the way out.”
    The Whiphid nodded and walked away.
    “No,” Zo called out after him, watching him go,
“wait!”
She felt a steel band of panic tighten around her chest, pressing painfully inward, crowding out her breath. She heard his footfalls growing quieter down the long stone corridor, then the faint hydraulic
whoosh
as the lift doors opened and shut again.
    Then he was gone.
    The Sith Lord was still looking at her. A new silence spread out, seeming to fill the lab with a stinging mist of cold, dry air. Zo was aware of the orchid making anxious noises inside her mind, a soft, irregular click of nervous energy awakening to what might happen next. Although she knew she was the only one who could hear the sounds, she still felt an irrational impulse to hush it.
    “You are a Jedi,” Scabrous said.
    “I am.” She braced herself for his contempt, even rage, but the Sith Lord simply nodded as if he’d expected nothing less than her appearance here—had, in fact, anticipated it. He reached out with one hand, not quite touching her, and she felt a certain heaviness underneath her left breast, as if his palm were pushing directly against the muscle of her heart.
    Then he lowered his hand, and the pressure disappeared. He picked up the flower and carried it across the laboratory to the place where Zo had heard the soft lip-smacking noises.
    What she saw inside made her stomach do a slow, nauseated barrel roll. The teenage boy in the cage was staring up at her with bright, unblinking shoe-button