21/Headstone City
TRACE LANDED AT NIGHTFALL.
The main hangar of the academy was empty.
Disengaging the ship’s main hatch, he jumped down from the cockpit and forced himself to stop and wait on the landing pad, his senses—both physical and telemetric—tuned for any immediate threat. The challenge, of course, was that this entire planet was a threat. Besides the blizzard raging overhead, the Sith academy was a black hive of dark side energy; Trace could feel it buzzing around him like a huge swarm of venomous insects. The psychic contamination was so thick, so total, that for a moment he felt a blur of vertigo attacking his balance, tilting it dangerously off kilter.
She’s here.
He knew it, even though he hadn’t received any further bursts of distress from her along the way. Zo’s kidnapper had brought her here; Trace felt her presence, recognized it somewhere amid the snowy ruin of the academy itself.
He moved quickly across the hangar, measuring every ambient sound as a possible threat. Since there had been no way of disguising his arrival—his ship wasn’t equipped with a cloaking device—he’d decided to head straight into the thick of things, anticipating a hostile reception that he’d likely have to fight his way out of.
He ran past a control booth and stopped there—the hatchway hung open, dangling sideways, as if it had been partially ripped off its housing. The chair lay on its side in front of the main flight-control console, a datapad, and a pile of old holomags with titles like Hot Ships and Kuat Classics. Reaching inside, Trace rested two fingertips on the chair.
A vivid splash of violence erupted in his mind’s eye—a man screaming, jerking backward, while a pair of pale hands groped through, clutching his shirt and trying to pull him out. Trace felt the man’s trapped panic, his horror, as he tried to keep whatever it was away from him … that part of the image was just a crazed, blood-soaked blur, defined more by its frantic strength than any kind of shape or form. An instant later the image faded.
What else had happened here?
He left the control area and strode the rest of the way through the hangar. It was becoming fully dark as he stepped outside and stared at the ruins stretched out around him, fading into a horizon. He’d glimpsed the academy during his descent, but it looked bigger from the ground, kilometers across, all of it, he thought, honeycombed with subterranean passageways and countless hiding places. Lights flickered, dotting the twilight with motion, or the illusion of motion. People were moving out there, he sensed them—Sith students and Masters.
That didn’t matter. He would find her.
A sudden gust of wind slammed him in the face, carrying with it a rich and fetid stench of decay. Trace narrowed his eyes, assaying the winding networks of broken walkways that led among buildings and temples and piles of old stone. Given the smell, they reminded him of capillaries on the face of a cadaver.
His eyes settled on a tall black structure jutting upward, far above the other, lowlier structures, its top swathed in snow—a tower, like a headstone amid a city of the dead.
It was a start.
He began walking.