Loyalty/Part 18

Breathing hard, Nawsa gazed down at the body of the Anzat assassin for a long moment. The woman's eyes had closed in her fall; she might have been sleeping but for the still-smoking wounds in her stomach and across her chest. She had tried Nawsa harder than any non-Sith she had ever fought; whence came such a warrior? What had she seen and done in what must have been centuries of life? What drove her to spend her life with such fanatical, single-minded focus, trying to kill Galera even with her last breaths?

But for all her questions doomed to be unanswered, Nawsa did not have to wonder whose hand had manipulated these events. Since the death of Darth Vandak, only one being commanded Sith and Anzati together. She wondered briefly if Darth Alecto herself might be here, veiling her presence with whatever skills and deceptions had carried her to the heart of Anaxes Citadel, but she dismissed the idea at once—not because she thought her perceptions would have pierced Alecto's shadow, but because Alecto would never have stood aside from this fight with so much to be gained or lost.

But even with the Anzat dead, Alecto's Sith were still on the loose. Rising, Nawsa said, "I'm going after the Sith before they reach Satir. Get Galera out of here."

"Master Arodion!" one of the CorSec agents protested.

Nawsa glanced, intending to reassure him, but she felt the blood drain from her face as she saw the two surviving CorSec agents holding Galera between them. Racing to their side even as she swept the area with her mind for threats, she knelt between them and cradled the younger woman's head in one hand. "You're leaking rocket fuel, Galera."

Galera's answering smile wavered on the edge of collapse. "Satir?"

One of the CorSec agents—Tebri, Nawsa remembered—tapped her comlink, while Jeed gave off a spasm of frustration in the Force as he drew a blood-soaked gauze pad off Galera's shoulder and threw it aside. "I can't get this bleeding stopped!"

Nawsa saw it was the third discarded pad, and she waved his hands away. The Anzat's knife had cut and kept going, and the wound it left was only a couple centimeters deep, but it bled copiously; it seemed to have nicked an artery. Though Nawsa was not a healer by training, she set her hand over the wound, but even as blood pumped over her palm, she felt with disquiet the coagulant beads Jeed or Tebri had already poured onto the wound.

"She may have coated it with an anticoagulant," Nawsa warned.

"Can you stop it…I don't know, with the Force?" demanded Jeed.

"If I can, I will."

Nawsa channeled Galera healing energy, vaguely aware of Jeed wandering over to the fallen CorSec agents and rubbing his eyes, still burning from the smoke bombs. Galera, ever the good patient, tried to slow her breathing, but she asked again, "Satir?"

Nawsa's eyes flicked up to Tebri, and she needed neither the tap on the comlink or the following shake of the head to understand—Tebri's anguished eyes said everything. Containing her own sorrow, and the sting of her failure, Nawsa summoned up a stern tone to say, "You first, I think. I didn't think you could make a trade conference this exciting, but I have to admit you've proven me wrong."

As Nawsa put off imagining what she would say to Jedossen, let alone Satir's parents, Galera chuckled, then winced and offered a fogged smile. "Remember when I was…nine? This is…is like when I fell outside the…the…"

"The Green Jedi Enclave," Nawsa supplied. "I remember. You gave me a fright then, too.  Gray hair won't look good on me, Galera…"

Galera laughed again and closed her eyes. "You…you're always there to save me, though…"

"Keep your eyes open, Lady Galera," Tebri said in a thick voice. "Stay with us."

Nawsa bent the hard Force to Galera's aid, slowing the young woman's heart rate as much as she dared as the ruptured blood vessel knit itself back together. Slowly—so slowly that Tebri dug out the emergency transfusion kit from the bloodstained medpac—the flow of blood grew viscous and thin. Galera's eyelids fluttered, and Nawsa frowned; even as the flow slowed, she felt she was pushing a boulder uphill, risking it rolling out of her hands every second.

Then Jeed swore, an Olys Corellisi curse so vulgar that Nawsa turned to stare in spite of herself. He had rolled one of the dead guards onto his back—Nurjiff, the one the Anzat had killed with her throwing knife—and gazed down at Nurjiff with a look of utmost horror. Nawsa held off both pity and self-castigation, lest they sap her focus and endanger Galera, but when Jeed turned that terrified expression on Galera, Nawsa looked again.

And as she did, the Force, in its cruel clarity, made her understand too.

Galera's breaths were still slow, but getting shallower. The Anzat had hit Nurjiff in the gut with her knife not five minutes before; the wound would surely have been painful, but a stomach wound should not have killed so quickly, especially with the knife still in it. Neither should a stomach wound have brought pus-yellow froth to Nurjiff's lips. And only a moment before, when anticoagulants had failed, Nawsa herself had realized the assassin had coated her blade…

Nawsa did not beg, of the Force or of any god, for it not to be so, for she knew it was; deeper than the breaths that had become gasps and the glass stealing over Galera's eyes, she could feel the poison at work. But as she poured out her heart into this woman she had loved for as long as Galera had lived, she begged of the Force, ''Please give me the strength. If ever I have served you, if in all my life I have been an agent of the light, then let me heal her. Take my life for hers if that will save her—take all my power, everything I am, and give it to her to see more days. Please let me save her.''

Please…