Fruuna raised her nose to the air, sniffing, whiskers quivering. Nillan was about to ask when she lowered her golden eyes to him and rasped, "They're close."
"How many?"
Fruuna bared her teeth. "It's a nose, not a sensor."
Wiping his brow as much to conceal his rolled eyes as to get rid of his endless sweat, Nillan said, "All right, let's keep moving."
"Let's deal with them here!" Fruuna retorted. "We have the full code now."
Retrieve the code, and kill no one until you have. Darth Alecto's command had seemed simple a week before, when Nillan and Fruuna had entered the swamps at the height of their strength. But neither of them had been prepared for code segments etched in tiny font on the side of logs, the underside of rocks, and even burned into the scaly hide of a monitor lizard. That alone would have taxed any being, but Darth Alecto had also neglected to mention the assassins stalking them through the swamp, firing on them with blaster rifles and flechette launchers.
Even that Nillan might have handled but for his master's command not to kill…and the fact that she had confiscated all their weapons before they began.
"Let's just get out of here!"
Fruuna growled. "They've hunted us for days! We don't leave enemies like that at our backs!"
The hairs on the back of Nillan's neck were standing up; he might not have Fruuna's predator senses, but he had the Force. "All right, but not here."
"Why not?"
"Look at this!" Nillan swept an arm over the surrounding bog; in his mind, he heard Colonel Barjed berating him in his Small Unit Tactics class. "The trees are too spread out; the fern clumps aren't thick enough to conceal me, let alone you; and there's line of sight for fifty meters! This is one of the worst ambush sites I've ever seen, and Jaguada's a desert!"
Fruuna snarled in the back of her throat, but after a second she snapped him a nod. "Lead, then."
They had spent so much of their time in the swamps seeking the code fragments and evading assassins that Nillan doubted he could lead Fruuna to a databook ambush site; as he jogged away from the feeling of danger, fatigued from lack of sleep, his thought process only got about as far as away. He could have put together quite an ambush if he'd had a few thermal detonators, some monofilament wire, or even just a blaster rifle of his own. As it was, after a week in the swamp, all they had between them was a full code, Fruuna's teeth and claws, and a chunk of wood Nillan had scraped into a shiv.
After a kilometer of muck, snapping reptiles, biting insects, and tangling vines, though, two things happened. First, it began to dawn on Nillan that the danger was closing in again; either they weren't moving nearly as fast as he thought, or the enemy was hemming them in. It was probably a bit of both; he was parched, and Fruuna's tongue hung over her teeth as she panted, but both of them had ruled out drinking the swamp water. Second, even through his fogged brain, he began to recognize some of the terrain. Trying to focus, channeling his fear at the danger of failing and his anger at the hunters who had pursued him and robbed of sleep and sanity, Nillan found himself recognizing a boulder, a clump of trees, a zig-zagging stream bed.
"This way," he told Fruuna even as the Force told him.
They slipped under a pair of trees that had grown into one another like an arch, into a narrow, twisted clearing; Nillan could just barely see the other side over a clump of ferns, some fifteen meters away. The ground was solid, spongy moss, and vines hung like lengths of rope from the trees—the swamp was giving way to the bog that bordered the forest farther still, and the trees clustered closer together. The dark side gave Nillan a little shiver despite the heat and humidity that stuck his clothing to his skin, and he told Fruuna, "Here."
She sniffed and nodded. "Draw them."
Without another word, she leapt onto a branch above. It creaked under her weight, but she crawled higher among the vines; she wore only a belt, and her dull fur blended into the canopy. Nillan plodded on into the clearing; the moment he had stopped moving, his legs had started turning to jelly. By the time he reached the far end, he barely had to feign sinking to his knees and clutching what felt less like a stitch and more like a still-open surgical wound in his side.
Wheezing, he felt his tormentors closing in; he could no more separate out their minds than Fruuna could their scents, though he knew there was more than one. He palmed his shiv, waiting.
He did not have long to wait before he saw a faint glint of metal through the fronds, dulled from days in the bog—a blaster rifle barrel. Once he knew where to look, he saw the outline of the Human holding it—or perhaps the Force saw it for him and traced it into the air before the man came in sight. Another appeared a few meters away in support position, then a third behind the first. Nillan felt a mix of conflict and cooperation in their minds; they were unused to working together, nor was it their first choice, but they knew it was necessary if they were to have any chance of success.
The mental aspects of the Force had never been Nillan's strength to begin with, and that cocktail would've been far too nuanced for him to glean under most circumstances, except that he knew it well—it echoed through every team exercise among Darth Alecto's disciples.
Nillan felt the alert when he was spotted; pressing a shaking hand to his head to camouflage his eyes, he saw the first hunter raise a hand. The third opened his mouth, and Nillan sensed his triumph, but the first shushed him. Pointing, the first man aimed his rifle, and the others followed suit. They worked well together, he thought, and they were able to avoid gloating before a kill; Darth Alecto would've loved them.
C'mon, Fruuna. He felt rifle sights coming to rest on him. Any time now…
Nillan felt the Force thrust him into a forward roll, but even as he dodged the first blaster shots, Fruuna dropped from her tree. Nillan heard cries of alarm and came up in time to see the first hunter scrambling for space as the third died; Fruuna had his neck clamped in her jaws, and with one wrench, she turned his spasming body into a rag doll. The first hunter tried to aim, but Fruuna closed the distance in time and opened his throat with her claws.
The surviving hunter fired and missed, but he had range and good shooting position. For half a second Nillan was tempted to let him shoot her; had she just miscalculated the drop, or had she intended to let them shoot him? But he found himself running anyway. For as often as she pitted them against one another in training, Darth Alecto had at least as many partner and team exercises; between that and Jaguada's military, "there-is-no-I-in-team" unit philosophy, Nillan just wasn't built to let his teammate get shot to death.
He thrust out a hand and unsteadied the hunter with the Force; running on so little sleep, plagued by dehydration and muscle fatigue, he didn't have enough focus to flatten the Human into a tree, but the shot missed Fruuna. She tensed to spring, but by the time the Human got balanced again, Nillan had closed the distance. Barreling into the man so hard they both almost fell, he caught the rifle and they grappled over it. The Human was taller and thicker, tattooed at the neck and on one wrist, obviously a grown man—Darth Alecto's training regimen had built on the foundation of muscle Jaguada had given Nillan, but a fourteen-year-old body could only support so much muscle mass. Nillan's foot ripped up a clump of moss and slid on the mud below, and the Human levered him down.
Knowing that he was about to die cleared the fog out of his brain in a hurry, and while his body had long since exhausted its adrenaline supply, he had the Force in spades. Fear and anger took one of his hands off the rifle and drove that fist into the Human's ribs before even he realized what he was doing; bone splintered under his clenched knuckles, and the Human howled. Nillan's following knee strike to the thigh didn't have enough power to break the Human's femur, but the muscle pulped, and he drove the hunter to the ground. The man grabbed him by the throat, but Nillan stabbed his shiv through the thick wrist; the hunter's screams faded into background noise as he plunged the shiv into the man's face again, and again, and again, and…
"I think he's dead enough," said Fruuna.
Nillan blinked; gore coated his arm to the elbow, and flecks of it dripped down his cheeks. Leaving the shiv embedded in what remained of the Human's head, Nillan struggled to his feet; he stumbled, but Fruuna caught and steadied him, then slapped a blaster rifle into his chest. "Let's go."
One successful ambush didn't give either of them enough confidence to sleep, but no one else challenged their escape from the bog, and, hours later, they stumbled out of the forest into the shadow of Darth Alecto's encampment. Nillan felt only slightly better; they had come upon a cleaner river in the woods and drunk their fill, but Fruuna had had to pull him ashore when he started to pass out, lest he drown him in his sleep. Still, the camp atop the bluffs was a more welcome sight than Jaguada's high-walled academy and drill field had ever been.
Not as welcome was the Anzat waiting at the base of the cliff. As Darth Alecto had promised, the Anzati came and went from Lisal, and though he had sparred with several of them, Nillan could not keep them straight. Except Lady Khiyali, of course; between her blood-red clothes and the way she lurked in Darth Alecto's shadow, she was hard to forget. The female Anzat staring at them was not Nevya Khiyali; she had the same chalky gray complexion and raven-dark hair, but she looked…
Younger was always a dicey word to use with Anzati; though she looked like a Human in her early twenties, Nillan guessed the assassin was older than whoever his grandparents were. But she had neither Lady Khiyali's self-possession nor her aura of authority; this Anzat seemed at once hungrier, more aggressive, and less sure of herself. Nillan thought the Force had to be feeding him most of those observations; he was so exhausted and disoriented that he was just glad his eyes could tell the Anzat apart from the cliff.
Fruuna's ears backed and her tail lashed the air behind her. Since nobody but Megaera was younger than him, Nillan sometimes forgot that, apart from Lukurt Kreen, the other dark side adepts were just older, not actually old. But Fruuna seemed no more comfortable with the Anzat than Nillan was with any of their kind. Lady Khiyali had once shared that any of the adepts (or Zeff Rogu; over a month after their arrival, he remained the only Acolyte) might make a tempting meal for the Anzati under any other circumstances; nothing but their loyalty to Darth Alecto kept them in check, and though that loyalty seemed unwavering, the hungry glares didn't do his nerves any favors.
The Anzat drifted toward them, and Nillan checked an instinct to point his stolen rifle at her; he really hoped it was only his fatigue-addled brain that made her steps inaudible. She wore a pair of swords at one hip and a half-dozen knives at the other. Clamping one hand around the hilt of a sword, she asked, "Code?"
Nillan had gotten used to Lady Khiyali's somewhat more polished Basic; he had forgotten how threatening the rest of the Anzati sounded even when not speaking their own language. His mind got hung up on that, but after a second Fruuna rattled off the code they had pieced together.
The Anzat woman released her sword. "Correct. Sleep."
She pivoted ninety degrees back as if clearing a doorway. Nillan chuckled—there was ample space on either side of her—but it was born from fatigue and died quickly under the assassin's glower. His and Fruuna's rifles wouldn't be much use at melee range; even together, possessing the Force where the Anzat didn't, he thought they might have a tough time getting past her if she wanted to stop them. He tried not to run up the little path up the cliff.
The mesa atop the bluff had continued to evolve in just the week they'd been gone. Construction droids fifty meters tall laid huge segments of the structure rising from the grass; it was still too early for Nillan to guess what it would someday look like, but the droids had laid down enough foundation for him to see where the walls would go. Between the hulking construction droids and the smaller laborers spread out in every direction, it seemed Darth Alecto was going for width rather than height; she hadn't told her disciples what to expect.
Other droids hauled new-mined rocks from a hole in the ground or transported durasteel beams in; the only thing Darth Alecto had told them about the underlevels of the fortress was to stop asking about them.
Fruuna shambled off across the plateau without another word; they hadn't had much conversation over the past week, and with food and sleep in sight at last, Nillan couldn't blame her. He saw some of the other Sith amidst the construction equipment and prefabricated buildings. Zurgharjhen, the hulking Irrukiine brute, was bench-pressing durasteel bars with each of his pairs of hands; losing a finger to Darth Alecto's blade had cowed his rebelliousness, but it didn't seem to have diminished much of his fighting skill, as he had been more than happy to demonstrate to Nillan whenever they'd sparred. Crile Craetor was sparring hand-to-hand against Dolre Thyle, who wore his usual Near-Human guise rather than his true Clawdite form. Little, reptilian Rewz had gotten drafted into the construction process—something about her species's natural bent toward engineering—but Nillan gathered she was on break, because she lay atop an unmoving piece of machinery, sunning herself.
Nillan's stomach twisted, but he knew he could sleep through even hunger pangs, so he plodded toward the row of identical, modular boxes that served the Sith disciples as cells until their master's fortress was completed. Zeff Rogu had his own, somewhat larger box a short distance away, while Darth Alecto most often slept aboard her Scourge. The sharp-edged freighter sat in its usual spot toward one end of the plateau, and even through his haze of exhaustion, Nillan managed to find it odd that she hadn't met her students…
"She's not here."
Nillan couldn't muster much more than a grumble. "I've told you not to do that, right?"
He shuffled on the spot to face Megaera, who crossed her slender green arms. "And I've told you, it's always on—it's just part of me."
"Like flowers."
She rolled her eyes and tossed her head, and the flowery tendrils that served her in place of hair blasted him with a wave of fragrant aromas. "Besides, you're leaking your thoughts."
"I'll be better once I finally get some sleep."
She didn't challenge the statement; maybe the lie was too obvious to bother. In the month and change since their arrival on Lisal, he had never yet managed to wall her out of his mind. He knew she had gotten only the odd burst of annoyance or amusement out of Darth Alecto, and Zeff had some way of blocking her out too, but neither of them had seemed inclined to teach Nillan. It might have comforted him that only the Sith Lord and the Sith Acolyte could keep Megaera out…except that Megaera didn't have much luck with Lady Khiyali, either.
"I'd teach you if I knew how," she said.
He tried to glower at her, but he was too tired; he thought he just looked grumpy, and Megaera pressed her green lips together in a failed attempt not to smirk. She fell in step with him as he continued toward his cell and asked, "So where's Darth Alecto?"
"She went into Cundassa. She took Shrizzzqadl and Rosyit with her."
Nillan didn't know if she was any better with Anzat names, or if she just picked them out of people's heads. "One of the Anzati was waiting for me and Fruuna when we got out of the woods—"
"Rhyna."
"…sure. Not saying I missed him, but where's Zeff?"
"He's here somewhere."
"Huh. And Lady Khiyali's offworld?"
"Actually, she just got in last night." Megaera pointed, and Nillan saw a sleek Anzat ship in the shadow of Darth Alecto's larger Scourge. "I don't know what they're doing, though."