and floors were composed of a substance he’d never seen before, light green, semitranslucent. At first he thought it was some form of plastoid, or hued transparisteel, but no, it was a resin of some kind. For the first time, he realized that the floor was not merely vibrating under him, it was warm, like flesh. Faint lines of light glowed deep within it, barely visible, capillaries of luminescence. The arrangement looked ordered, a matrix of some kind, and the pattern of their flashes was not random, though he could not look at it long without its flashes disorienting him.
He tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The architecture, the technology it implied …
Where was he?
A word leapt to the forefront of his mind, a flash that came and went without explanation.
Rakatan.
He leaned forward, trying to remember, feeling as if he were on the verge of some revelation. He tried to pull the word back, to force it to take on meaning and make sense, but it eluded him.
“Rakatan,” he said, and the word sounded strange on his lips. Saying it aloud triggered no more memories.
But more and more memories were clicking into place, connecting names, events, and faces, the backstory of his life being told just below the level of his consciousness. He must have been hit on the head, hit hard. Understanding would come eventually, or so he hoped.
Yet he knew he could not sit still and wait for it. The dark side was all around him. Palpable anger polluted the air, pressed against him. Alarms were wailing. The vibrations in the floor rose and fell like lungs, lurching, not so much like ordinary breathing as a death rale. He had to get away from wherever he was.
An explosion rumbled somewhere in the distance and everything shook.
He was in a ship then, or a station of some kind. He looked for a viewport but saw none.
He crawled over to the wall and used it to help himself stand. The pain in the stumps of his fingers caused him to wince. The smooth surface of the wall pulsed faintly under his touch and he had the sudden, uncomfortable fear that he had awakened in the belly of some nameless pseudomechanical beast, that he’d been swallowed and was now being slowly digested.
Licking his lips, he stood away from the wall. His wounded fingers had left bloody smears on the smooth green surface.
The comforting weight of his lightsaber hung from his belt and he put his hand on its cool hilt. He had made it.…
Where had he made it?
On a ship. On Junker. He’d made it on Junker.
He remembered giving his other blade, the one he’d made as a boy on Coruscant, to Marr.
To Marr.
A face flashed in his memory: tan, weathered, a ruff of hair haloing a towering forehead. The face of a Cerean. Marr.
“Marr?” he called over the sirens, his raw voice bouncing down the corridor. In his mind’s eye he saw a lazy eye, a malformed asymmetrical face, and a ready smile, and a name accompanied the image. “Khedryn?”
No response.
He was alone.
He took a moment to evaluate his physical condition, examining his limbs, chest, abdomen. Other than the reopened wounds on his hand and the small hole in his head, he’d suffered no serious visible harm. He had been in a fight, though. His cheek felt sore to the touch; his ribs and his arms had several bruises, as if from blocking blows.
He took inventory of his gear, sifting through pockets, the cases on his belt—nutrition bars, extra power packs for his blaster, liquid rope, a glow lamp. No medpack, though.
He took the glow lamp in his wounded hand and activated it. Its beam put a path of luminescence on the semitranslucent floor, down the corridor. The hair-thin filaments in the floor seemed to glow in response, the photons communicating in a tongue he could not comprehend. He fell in behind the beam of his glow lamp and tried to find a way out.
He felt more himself as he moved. The corridor split repeatedly. Vertical seams in the walls opened wetly at his approach to reveal corridors and rooms beyond. Once more, he marveled at the technology.
The smoke made his eyes leak, turned his throat raw. The blinking patterns of light in the walls and floor drew him on, will-o’-the-wisps tempting him to some fate he did not understand. Distant explosions continued to rock the vessel and he staggered under their onslaught, his legs still weak.