Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber Page B

screaming.
    Jura stopped again, narrowed his eyes, looked more closely.
    The caged animal was Nickter.
    Nickter was thrashing in his little prison, shrieking and writhing and blubbering out noises that sounded only slightly like words. There was blood running down his face, sticking and clinging to his cheeks, as if he’d been sitting under a melting red candle. He was half naked, his exposed torso gleaming with sweat.
    But the worst were the tubes.
    They ran directly out of his back, long, pipe-like conduits from his spine, leading to a machine with a large transparent cylinder mounted on top. Scabrous was doing something to the machine, holding up some object that Jura couldn’t identify, putting it inside the cylinder. The fluid inside it began roiling, changed color, became suddenly, remarkably incandescent, pulsing through the tubes into Nickter’s vertebrae.
    The screaming stopped.
    Jura watched Nickter collapse to the floor of the cage, motionless and silent, mouth half open, eyelids sagging. Now the only sound was the high, steady drone of a heart monitor in flat line. Jura let out the breath that he’d been holding in his lungs for the last ten seconds.
    He didn’t need to get any closer to see that Wim Nickter was dead.
    Zo stared at the dead Sith student in the cage. His eyes were still open, glassy and lifeless. His mouth sagged, a bloody spit bubble clinging to the corner. A waxy pallor had already begun to spread over his cheeks, turning his skin a pale shade of gray.
    In her mind, the orchid was still screaming.
    She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Nothing in her experience at the Marfa facility or before had prepared her for this. In the past forty-eight standard hours, the routines of her daily existence had become a blood-soaked travesty of reality.
    Her eyes flashed up to the glass cylinder where Scabrous had dropped the flower. It wasn’t there anymore—the fluid seemed to have absorbed it, dissolving it in chunks—but she could still hear it, wherever it had gone, whatever had happened to it, crying out, begging her to do something, to help it, to stop the pain.
    Burning, Zo, it’s burning, it’s BURNING—
    Scabrous was watching the cylinder.
    In the cage, the dead boy sat up.

13/Dragon Teeth
    J URA NEVER SAW THE DOOR BLOW OFF THE CAGE .
    It happened so quickly that the only thing his mind registered was the wire mesh flying across the lab, slamming into a vented power-cell housing that protruded down from the ceiling. Metal struck metal with a flat, declarative clang that reminded him somehow of the sound of training blades clashing at the top of the temple. It was a noise that said:
Things have been put into motion, and whatever happens next, there will be no going back
.
    From his hiding place, Jura stared, crouched in the shadows as if welded to the spot. He saw Scabrous and the girl staring at the cage, neither one of them moving.
    The thing that crawled out of the cage wasn’t Wim Nickter.
    It was draped in Nickter’s skin, yes, and it wore some version of Nickter’s face, but the eyes were ovals of smeared glass behind which pupils darted back and forth in the torchlight, like tiny black insectstrapped inside a dirty bottle. It cranked its head to the right, and the yellow grin that wrinkled its lips back was unlike anything Jura had ever seen. Watching it, he felt himself melting inside, a breathless terror invading him, stripping away strength, reducing him to a shuddering pool of nerves. The intuitive voice of the Force was shouting at him now,
Wrong, wrong, wrong
, but he couldn’t seem to move.
    The Sith Lord gazed upon his creation. A terrible, prescient smile crept across his face.
    “Nickter,” he said. “Come to me.”
    The thing shuffled another step forward, and Scabrous held out one hand, beckoning it forth like an animal.
    “Yes. That’s right.”
    All at once Nickter sprang forward with an entirely different kind of urgency, the tubes ripping out of its back,