She lies in supine surrender. There is an odalisque's coyness to the tilt of her chin, the parted lips and heavy-lidded gaze. From the low sweep of her jaw to her right temple her skin is flayed open and pinned to either side, like wings.
The holo was a still, a snippet of medical record that somehow found its way into the free-access Republic archives along with other once-confidential details of the Exile's decade of wandering. Sion often lingered over that single frozen moment, contemplating the clouded mismatched eyes, the gleaming furrows of exposed muscle and bone. He did not know why, and the mystery of his own motivations annoyed him.
In a span of days his hounds would run her down. Starved and eager for blood, the assassins would nevertheless adhere to his command: the Jedi's last breath was to be wrung from her body by Sion's hands alone.
Then she would die, and this strange and unwelcome curiosity would die with her.
One breath of recycled air thick with the scent of living bodies and already the itch was back, the need to be lost again.
Del froze on the transport shuttle's lowermost step, grasping at last minute reasons to cancel this foray into the land of the living: she should lay low a while longer, search out medications somewhere with fewer people . . . but the pulsing heat of sickness behind her right eye argued otherwise.
The eye was fake, a clever ball of microcircuitry and photoreceptive fibers. Her immune system was up to its old tricks, attempting to rid her body of the intruding technology by sabotaging the flesh around it. This tactic hadn't worked with numerous skin grafts, implants, and augmentations, but this time she'd allowed the sepsis to seethe and spread.
As usual, a member of the Exchange had footed the medical bills. In return, she'd been given the names of half a dozen sentients, every one of whom she'd tracked down and killed. She'd poisoned the last of them, a human man holed up in a flophouse on the edge of nowhere. As she sat smoking a cigarra and watching the light fade from his eyes, his twelve-year-old daughter had broken from her hiding place, a blaster in her hands.
Del left the girl's body next to her father's. For days after her medication ran out she did nothing but lay still in the dark and wait for the infection to eat her alive. The desire to die eventually passed, as it always did, but the fever remained.
Her boot heels clicked metronome-steady across the permacrete station flooring. Del told herself that the situation was in hand, that she was cool as carbonite. Then came her first glimpse of sentient station dwellers, and her guts seized up in the push-pull of loneliness and fear. One of them, an adolescent girl, looked up as she passed. Del's breathing hastened to panting.
She ducked into the first empty alcove she found, considered the steroid nebulizer strapped to her wrist and lit a cigarra instead. The first deep drag of smoke choked her, the second numbed her lungs into submission. Puff by puff her breathing slowed, her heart quit its trapped-bird hammering against her ribs. She leaned her head against the wall and daubed sweat from the patches of her skin that weren't synthetic.
Stop acting the cowardly schoolgirl, she told herself.She pressed a palm against her eye, a disconcertingly cool weight in its warm, swollen orbit. You've killed an entire planet. What's one more ghost in your shadow?
Del ground the cigarra into a faded 'no smoking' placard and resumed her trek. At last she came upon a long numbered row of metal bins, each equipped with a keyreader slot–not as convenient as a permanent postal address, but a good option for someone allergic to permanence in general. She swiped her keycard and the bin clicked open. Inside were the expected packages of medications, bandages, and the like. She stuffed them into her haversack, then paused. Wedged in the very back of the bin was one more parcel, small and boxy, lacking any indication of what it was or who had sent it.
There were hours to kill before the transport would be ready to leave again, and her stomach was so empty it was eating itself. Del managed to stave off her curiosity long enough to find a seat in a near-empty cantina and order a meal. That accomplished, she took the boxy package and scrabbled it free of its protective casing.
The box was plain and beat up at the corners. There were no security measures to bypass, just a simple metal latch. No one with a hair of sense would risk something like that to the vagaries of the Republic postal system. She frowned at it, testing its weight in her hand. A gentle shaking of the box brought to her ear the tinkling, delicate slither of a metal chain.
Fingers at the back of her neck . . . bands of bold blue ink sweeping back across a pale brow . . . eyes dark with the confusion of envy and love . . .
Del's scalp prickled as the ghost of memory drifted across her skin, conjured by sound alone. With the clumsy hands of a sleepwalker she released the latch, drew back the lid, and looked inside.
From a layer of dusty padding grew an orchid cleverly worked in metal and enamel, its slender chain coiled about it like a silvery vine. Some petals were perfect, others ran together in a twisted, bubbled mess.
It was physical incapability, not discipline, that kept Del's eyes dry at the sight of it. The electrical fire that had resculpted the pendant so many years ago had also worked its savage artistry on her face, robbing her of one eye and nearly blinding the other. She sat still as stone with nothing but a frustrated burn in the scalded remnants of her tear ducts.
A hand touched her shoulder. Lifting her gaze, she realized that the twi'lek waitress had been trying to get her attention for some time. The waitress eyed her suspiciously and plunked down a cheap plastic goblet.
"Courtesy of the hume in the jacket at the end of the bar," the twi'lek said, and sashayed out of earshot before Del could form a reply.
She shut the box and tucked it into her haversack. Once out of sight the pendent immediately seemed less real, and her focus returned. She stole a look at the man the waitress had mentioned, easy to find since he was the only other human in the cantina. He was staring in the opposite direction and nursing a glass of juma. She watched him for a while, but the back of his jacket held no clues as to why he might have seen the need to purchase alcohol on her behalf.
Lucky me, she thought. Another mystery.
Whatever was in the cup smelled highly flammable. She swirled it once and drained it. As she set the cup back on the table, the paper ring around its base came loose in her hand. Written upon it was a staccato warning:
Being watched. 2 bugs 1 devil. All armed.
She put the paper face down on the table. Bending as though to retrieve a dropped bit of cutlery, she glanced around the cantina and found it was no longer so empty. A pair of rodians were at a table behind her, cradling stunners in their laps. A tall devaronian was only a few strides away, openly staring. Del felt like kicking herself. Instead, she quietly withdrew her own weapon from the holster at her thigh.
At some wordless cue the devaronian stood and wove between the tables and chairs to stand in front of her.
"Katya Deleón," he said, and bowed.
First her missing pendent, now her discarded name. The past was in a biting mood.
"I haven't heard that name in a while," she said mildly, while under the table her fingers traced the comforting curves and angles of her blaster. "Is there something I can do for you gentleman?"
"There is indeed. Join me at my ship civilly, and spare me the need to convey you by force." The devaronian smiled. He was quite handsome, all gleaming horns and flashing teeth. What a shame she'd probably be shooting him soon.
"You're not even going to pay for my dinner first?" She leaned into the light, giving him a good look at her scar-webbed, mottled flesh. "How disappointing."
Revulsion flickered briefly across his features. Seeing it made her feel like either laughing or blasting a hole right in the center of his smooth, sculpted brow–maybe both.
"A very powerful man has taken an interest in you," he continued. "He wants you unharmed, and if at all possible I wish to oblige him." He put his hands on the table palm up and empty. The gesture might have been reassuring if it didn't reveal the heavily modified blaster strapped under his arm.
"The Exchange sent you to fetch me." The corner of her lip drew back in disgust. "You reek of dirty money."
The devaronian's smile widened. "The same money that paid for many of your surgeries, including that eye with which you are currently giving me such a vile glare."
Her trigger finger itched to give him something worse than a glare to be concerned about. "And I did everything they asked in return." Her voice was low, dangerous. "I'm through with the Exchange."
He made a subtle gesture with his hand, and Del heard the scrape of synthwood on tile as the rodians behind her stood. "Unfortunately, that is not your decision to make." He paused theatrically, allowing his cohorts time to get into position and Del to activate the implants plugged into the nerves running down each arm. When the handsome devaronian finally spoke again, it was in a near-whisper. "You're outnumbered, Jedi."
Del hooked her forearms under the table, upended it, and heaved it backwards over her head. The rodians dove out of the way with comical screeches of surprise. While they scrambled she fired and winged the devaronian. The impact sent him spinning to the floor. His blaster flipped from his hand; she kicked it across the room.
Hot energy blistered her cheek as it shot past. She grabbed an abandoned drink and flung it into the rodian's face. Her return fire followed the arc of liquid and ignited it, for a single second obscuring the insectoid features behind a veil of blue flame. His partner shot, missed, and got a blast in the guts for his trouble.
"What's going on?"
The kitchen doors swung open. The twi'lek waitress took two steps, caught sight of the smoldering rodian, and froze in terror.
"Run, you idiot," Del shouted. When her words prompted no reaction, she fired at the floor in front of the girl's feet. "Back in the kitchen, now!"
The devaronian had recovered his blaster while she was distracted. Del discovered this when a ball of fiery agony erupted against her sternum, hurling her into a table. Her jacket absorbed most of the hit, but what got past hurt so badly she could do nothing but lay back, stunned, as the devaronian lined up a second shot.
Throughout the conflict the man at the bar had sat calmly, paying attention only to his drink. Now he turned, leisurely drew a pistol from his belt, and shot the devaronian in the back. The horned man crumpled into a pained heap on the floor.
Del forced herself to stand, face contorted with pain-fueled rage. She fired shot after shot at the rodians until they stopped twitching, then advanced on the moaning devaronian. Her hand closed around his florid throat and clamped down, hard.
"Exchange money also paid for these strength enhancers of mine . . . or didn't they tell you about those?" She squeezed harder, enjoying the feeble crunch of his windpipe.
"Stop . . . please."
The waitress had never made it back to the kitchen. Her thin voice pierced Del's fever like a splinter of ice. The rage drained away and left her weak, unsteady. She loosened her fingers, drew back her hand, but the devaronian was already dead.
If he rejoined the Force, she couldn't feel it.
"Didn't expect to watch someone die today." The mystery man from the bar stood at her side, staring impassively at the corpse's face. "What are you going to do now? Station security is slow, but they're the type to shoot a suspect just to cut down on paperwork." His tone was lighthearted, faintly amused, but his dark eyes were intense and unreadable.
Del's chest was a mess. Blood was seeping into her undershirt where the blast had torn the fragile regrown skin. If she didn't make her escape now, she'd have plenty of time to watch the new scars form while behind the glowing bars of a force cage.
She looked up at the man, considering. The roughest sketch of a plan flashed through her mind.
"Do you have a ship?" she asked.
"Not sure I'm ready for the fugitive life . . . But yeah, I've got a ship." He offered his hand.
A subtle shift of the wrist brought the needle to her fingertips. A moment of pressure as he helped her to her feet slipped it under the skin of his wrist. If he felt it, he forgot all about it when she brought the barrel of her blaster up under his ribs.
"I'm going to need its access codes," she said.
Time to be lost again.
Note: This story came about after listening to the song "Tarantula," by Faithless, on the heels of beating the game and hearing Sion's warped declaration of love. Part of the summary was also inspired by the lyrics, which you can look up if you're interested.