Now, as he dances backward, Norra can see Jas—
Jas has her own enemy to deal with. The bounty hunter is still standing—and lashing out with a high kick. Her foe is bigger, heavier, with an upper torso like a handful of grain sacks strung together with heavy-gauge chain. She connects with the kick but it doesn’t seem to faze him. The big monster bellows an incomprehensible cry, then catches Jas in a hard swing of his meaty fist. The bounty hunter topples, limp and lifeless.
No. Norra gets her legs under her and springs forward. She connects with his middle, tackling him, expecting her weight and momentum to knock him off balance. But the thug isn’t going anywhere—he’s like a pylon driven deep into the mantle. He doesn’t budge.
Worse, he laughs.
A gross, mechanized chuckle erupts from his own ventilator, and both of his hands marry together into one hellacious mega-fist. He slams his hands down into the center of Norra’s back. She hits ground once more. Air gone. Pain radiating. Blood in her mouth as her jaw snaps shut, teeth around the tip of her tongue. In the dark behind her eyes she sees streaks of white.
Someone grabs her ankle. Turns her over.
Her attacker is back. He adjusts something along the side of his head, and the jets of steam suddenly cease.
The thick sack-chested monster joins the other one. The two of them stand tall over her, talking, pointing.
“Va-wey ko-yah,” the littler one says.
“Yash,” the sack-chested monster says, agreeing, chuckling.
Then the little one shakes and shudders. His chin lifts and his head does this…wobble on his neck. Norra’s face is suddenly wet, as if misted.
He hits the ground like a felled tree.
Sack-Chest grunts in confusion. Then his head tilts hard to his shoulder—this time, Norra sees a faint red flash along with it—and the monstrous thug pivots on one heel and lands hard atop the other.
We’re saved, Norra thinks. Or, rather, Norra hopes.
She stays still, though, just in case.
“Jas,” she says in a loud whisper. Nearby, Jas groans.
Lights fill the air. Bright and bold. Not from one direction, either, but from three—all on at the same time, and Norra has to cover her eyes lest she go blind from it. Shadows emerge, light framing dark armor.
The crackle of static as a voice broadcasts:
“Don’t move.” As the shadows close in, Norra hears the faint jostling of jointed armor and blaster rifles in gloved hands. It’s a familiar sound that means one thing: stormtroopers. The voice is quieter when it says: “We found them. We found the rebels.”
From nearby, Jas curses under her breath.
Norra, though, smiles around her bloodied mouth. Because stormtroopers means Empire, and Empire means Sloane.
Sloane kneels, blind and bound.
The ratty ribbon across her eyes is filthy and rough; it feels like it’s abrading the skin off her face. This whole planet is like that, though: Everything is coarse-grained sandpaper wearing her down first to muscle, then to bone, then to the marrow beneath, and soon only to whatever passes for a soul or a spirit. A ghost left to wander these dust-choked deadlands.
Her wrists chafe, too: The rope binding them is raw and fibrous.
At least they haven’t sealed her mouth or her ears.
What she hears: the pad-pad-pad of feet on stone. Not hers, but those who pull the cart in which she waits, drawing it deeper and deeper through the winding red cavern. The cart itself is old—stone-fiber boards lashed together with braids of tendon and not buoyed by hoverplanks or grav-plates but rather kept rolling by a pair of proper wheels. Wheels that clank and rattle as the cart is drawn over the hard rust-stone.
What she says: “We’re almost there. The air is colder down here.”
What he says: “I hope so. Everything of mine is…cramping up.”
Those are the words of her traveling companion—a man named Brentin Wexley. She found him stowing away in her ship when she barely managed to escape Chandrila. Sloane was injured and drifting toward death, but he saved her life. Sometimes she’s surprised he’s still with her. But his purpose is her purpose, too: find Gallius Rax and end him.
Rax, who stole her Empire from her. Rax, who stuck a chip in this man’s head and turned him into a killer. Vengeance drives the pair of them. It marries them, too, in a way. The oddest of couples, aren’t they? She, the onetime grand admiral of the Empire (a title she cannot imagine matters anymore), and he, a former rebel spy turned programmed Imperial assassin. Neither of them wants to be here. But this is where they are.