“Had a guest, did we?” Sinjir says.
“Not your business, Imperial.”
“No. It’s not. You’re right.” He’s acting cagey, the senator. Sinjir knows body language, and a lot of that transcends species, sex, age. It’s not just that Wartol is hiding something, it’s that what he’s hiding is up under his skin plates—it’s nesting there like worm hatchlings. He’s bothered by it. He doesn’t want it discovered. So Sinjir decides he’s going to pick this scab, see what bleeds. “Still, though. Why don’t you tell me anyway? We’re friends, aren’t we? I won’t tell anyone.”
Wartol says nothing. He barely even twitches. Sinjir remains where he is, half leaning over the basket of fruit. The silence is a wall between them.
Then the wall shatters. Wartol kicks back, his hand up and out—a blaster is in his clawlike fingers. Sinjir stares down the mouth of that pistol, a fat-barreled snub-chambered Kanji-made blaster—
Like the kind criminals use.
—and the weapon goes off, but Sinjir turns to the side, flattening his profile as the blast pocks the far wall of the cruiser’s sitting room. He has no blaster of his own in kind (Curse you, Sinjir; you should always bring a weapon when tangling with a politician), so he grabs what’s close at hand.
The basket.
He gets his long fingers under the basket’s seat and flips it hard toward the Orishen. Wartol bats it away. Fruit goes everywhere. Through a spray of pta juice, Sinjir rushes the man—the air lights up again and something catches Sinjir hard, and his head snaps back and he smells singed blood and burning hair. Everything goes sideways as the world wheels out from under him. His eyes cross. I’ve been shot. An absurd thought, because he’s fairly certain he has been shot in the head, which is not a good way to live and is in fact a very good way to die.
Wartol lurches over him, a blurry shape as Sinjir’s vision struggles to find clarity. The blaster is up again—
Sinjir’s spidery fingers scrabble over the ground, finding something there, something wet, slimy, seedy—
“It’s too late,” Wartol says. Cryptic. What’s too late?
The blaster goes off. Sinjir rolls aside as a flash of hot energy digs a furrow into the floor right by his head. His ear goes shrill as it rings, and the side of his cheek feels hot, and the other side of his head feels slick—
He whips his hand up, flinging whatever was in it.
A pta fruit spatters uselessly against Wartol’s face. It hits. It drips. It plops back down to the ground. His jaw extends outward and curls into an underbite, and the senator blasts a puff of air upward, unmooring dribbling pta juice from his nose-slits and brow.
“The fruit won’t save you now.”
Sinjir says, “No. But it distracted you, didn’t it?”
Wartol makes a bewildered, animal sound—nngh?—just as a blaster goes off and clips him in the shoulder. He spins like a child’s top and crashes against his own chair. His cup of whatever-it-was splashes down against him and shatters. The snub-barreled blaster drops. Conder steps forward, his own blaster in hand, and steps down on it.
With a quick slide of his foot, he sends the blaster spinning to Sinjir, who snatches it and wearily stands.
“Have I been shot in the head?” he asks Conder.
Conder’s eyes open in shock, and his mouth forms an alarmed O-shape. Well, I suppose that answers that. Sinjir’s hand flies to the side of his head—it comes away wet with his own blood. Some of it has already been cauterized, making it tacky against his fingers. The shot glanced along the side of his head, carving a furrow that starts at his temple.
“Sin, I think you’ll be all right—”
“I’ll be fine. My rather luxurious hair, not so much.” He strides forward and stands atop Wartol. “You. Answer for yourself.”
“Die, Imperial slime.”
Sinjir points the blaster and shoots the man in the knee. He howls.
“Now, I’m of a mind not to actually kill you, because I’m one of the good ones these days and I have appearances to keep up. But I will whittle you down until you’re naught but a talking, jabbering head. Why pull a blaster? What are you hiding?”
“I told you, it’s too late.”
“What is too late?”
“I can’t call him off now.”
Sinjir shoots the other knee. Wartol bellows, sitting suddenly upright like a book slammed shut. He clutches at his knee as purple blood bubbles between his fingers. “Call who off? What are you—”
At first, he thinks it’s thunder, the faraway sound. But thunder is a low rumble, like a sallow belly expressing its hunger. This is duller, deeper, one and done. A hard, shuddering boom. An explosion.
“What did you do, Wartol? What did you do?”
Wartol’s laugh dissolves into a blubbering confession: “Sacrifices are necessary, Imperial. Sometimes a disease is so rampant you must cut off limbs to save the body. Like on Orish. The Empire was a cancer on the galaxy. Just as Mon Mothma was a cancer on the Republic.”
Was a cancer.