Клаудия Грэй - Into the Dark

Nobody was talking to Reath, but he thought he should weigh in, if only to get past being called meat. Could they not hear him? Or understand him? Their accents were strong, more like the way people had talked centuries before. Still, he’d try. “Probably those other people didn’t mean to come here any more than I did,” he guessed. “We thought that was Amaxine technology—”

“The Amaxines!” All the Drengir made a snap-rustling sound that must have been their version of laughter. So , Reath thought, they can hear me. They just think I’m not worth talking to.

The Drengir leader continued, “One of our first great conquests. They built this relay to make war on us, attempting to take our planet as they had many others. Instead, we defeated and devoured them.” Even this comment was more of a pep talk to his fellow Drengir than a statement directed at Reath. “We made their station our own. From there we planned to wreak havoc on many worlds. But then our people fell silent. None of them returned in either glory or defeat.”

We haven’t seen your people on the station , Reath wanted to say—but was stopped by two realizations.

First, they had seen Drengir on the station. Now that he looked at them, he recognized the curl of their thorns, the particular dark yellowish-green of some stems. The Drengir had been there the whole time, silent and still. Were they the darkness that had been held in check by the ancient idols?

Second, only a few moments before, the Drengir leader had said another person had recently come through in a hyperspace pod. How recently?

“Who else has come to your planet via the pods?” Reath asked, tightening his grip on his saber.

“This one is fresh,” said one of the Drengir, still ignoring Reath. “Not like the wilted one with sap running from his head. Maybe it can answer more questions.”

Reath ignored the implied threat of interrogation. He realized who the other human who’d gone there had to be. “Bring him here,” he said, calling on the Force to shape their wills. “ Bring Dez Rydan to me. ”

The last cogent, coherent thought in Dez Rydan’s brain had been: That hatch is going to hit me square in the face.

Pain had smashed into his forehead, jolting through his entire body like electricity, the agony of it reaching his gut, his fingers, his feet. Everything after that had been dark for a long while, and silent, but not painless. The agony was the only sensation left to him, and his only desire was for it to stop. If it stopped because he died, that seemed fair. As long as it stopped.

There came a time when he was turned over and forced to see sunlight; his head throbbed so badly at the sensory input that he’d vomited. Something had lashed him cruelly across the back as punishment. A whip? A vine? Dez didn’t know and didn’t care. He only wanted his head to stop hurting.

As the days went on, he should’ve either felt better or died. Instead, although he could feel the swelling in his face and neck going down, Dez remained in a terrible kind of stasis. Was he being poisoned? They pricked him with thorns, after which he would feel sleepy and nauseated. His eyes refused to focus, but whether that was because of his injury or what was being done to him, he couldn’t tell. The Drengir kept asking him questions, but he couldn’t understand exactly what they wanted to know. He wasn’t even sure Drengir was the right name. If he could’ve explained things to them, he would have. But the world swirled around him, sickening and blurry, beyond his comprehension.

Dez suspected they had caged him, as unnecessary as that was. Branches encased him on every side. He couldn’t have stood up if he wanted to. He didn’t want to.

One of the Drengir approached; by then he knew the scent of them and associated it with pain. But even as he braced himself, the Drengir whispered, “There is more meat here.”

Maybe. Dez wasn’t totally sure what he’d said. It didn’t make any sense, but nothing else did, either.

“We wish to see what your people think you can do with these.” Between the branches, Dez could see the Drengir dangling what they’d taken from him when he first arrived unconscious: his lightsaber. “Kill him, and we will let you go free.”

“The lightsaber is not—is not the tool of a murderer.” Dez coughed. He couldn’t even stand up; how could they expect him to fight? He had no idea who or what was here—a pirate? A smuggler? Leox Gyasi? It didn’t matter. He refused to slay another sentient being for the Drengir’s amusement. “Let him go free instead. Kill me .” Then, at last, it would be over.

“That tells us nothing,” the Drengir said. He was speaking to himself as much as to Dez. “We wish to see more than that.”

Another thorn pierced Dez’s flesh, and he cried out in pain—but in the very next heartbeat, the pain vanished. He sensed that it wasn’t gone, only masked, but that alone felt like reason to live.

Whatever had been injected into him had other effects, too. His heart beat too fast, and his muscles began to tighten and shake. Adrenaline , whispered some part of his brain that was still functioning but was all too far away.

“Fight and the pain stops,” the Drengir said. Through his blurry vision, Dez saw the door of the cage swing open. “Fight and be free.”

His mind no longer mattered. Dez was nothing but his body, nothing but anger and desperation and a wild chemical frenzy. He clutched for his lightsaber, and the Drengir let him take it. Instantly Dez swung the lightsaber in a long, low arc, slicing straight through the Drengir, which fell in two pieces to the ground.

Was that what he was supposed to do? He’d killed something; would they set him free now?

Each part of the Drengir twitched. Then twitched again. Then began to grow tendrils. Dez’s vision doubled, trebled, then doubled again as the tendrils reached toward each other. They grew fast and thick, splicing the Drengir back together until he stood intact.

“Very good,” said the Drengir. “Now we will take you to the new intruder, and you will do that again.”

Using the Force to shape another’s will came instinctively to some Jedi. The teachers even had problems, occasionally, with younglings who’d gotten the hang of it but didn’t yet understand not to play with others’ minds. For other Jedi, however, it was a trick that could take years or even decades to master.

Reath was in the latter category. So when one of the Drengir returned to the clearing, dragging a human figure behind it, Reath was at first even more astonished than pleased. I actually did it?

Any thoughts of his own accomplishment vanished the second he recognized the man being pulled forward. Reath had known who it had to be, but his face split in a smile as he yelled, “ Dez! ”

Dez didn’t call back. His gaze was unfocused, his breaths came too quickly, and his face was flushed. Reath’s grin faded as he saw the purple swelling around one of Dez’s eyes, and that his black hair was matted with blood. Worse than Dez’s appearance was that of the Drengir, whose flytrap mouths were smiling.

At least they’d let go of Dez, who stood there staring dully at the transport pods. He didn’t seem capable of understanding that they meant escape, freedom, home. Either because of his head injury or what the Drengir had done to him—maybe both—he was in a deeply altered state of consciousness.

But Reath had to get through to Dez somehow. He tried, “Dez? Come on. Let’s go.”

No response. The Drengir had begun laughing, an eerie rustling sound.

Maybe my mind trick didn’t work after all , Reath thought. Or maybe it only worked because they already intended to bring Dez to me. Because they wanted me to see him. But why?