35/The Anatomy Lesson

“IT’S COLD,” MAGGS SAID, SHIVERING AND LOOKING AROUND AS IF FOR VERIFICATION from the others. “Feels good though, doesn’t it? After all that?”

Kindra didn’t say anything. They had just stepped out of the tunnel, she and Maggs and Hartwig with Master Hracken silently bringing up the rear. Hartwig had taken Ra’at’s lightsaber, scrubbing the handle with the first handful of snow he could scoop up, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the stain to go away.

“Are we gonna talk about what happened back there?” Maggs asked.

“What,” Kindra said. “You have something you need to say?”

They all turned around to look at Hartwig, standing several meters behind them, still inside the tunnel so that half his face remained in darkness.

“With Ra’at,” Maggs said. “He—”

“Ra’at got turned,” Hartwig said, emerging into the vague gray glow of the twilight air, breath pluming from his lips. It was the first time he’d spoken since they’d chopped their way through the barrier, and his voice sounded different, thick and strange. “He changed into one of them, and Master Hracken boxed him. And I got his lightsaber. End of story.”

“What about us?” Maggs asked.

“None of us was bitten, as far as I can tell.” Hartwig looked around as if waiting to see if the others would contradict him. “You okay?” Maggs nodded. “Kindra? You have something you need to come clean about?”

She didn’t look around.

“Kindra?”

Silence.

“Hey.” Hartwig walked over, pushing past Maggs, and grabbed her shoulder, swinging her hard toward him. “I’m talking to y—”

Kindra snapped around on him, her eyes brittle pellets.

“I’m clean.”

“You sure?” Hartwig hadn’t lowered his hands. “What’s that on your neck?”

“Very funny.”

“You think I’m joking?” He waited while Kindra reached up and touched her throat, perhaps a centimeter lateral to the jugular. She winced at the open wound, drew back her hand, and looked at the scarlet stain on her index finger.

Standing apart from them, a little distance away, Master Hracken watched without saying anything.

“Just a cut,” she said. “A piece of the electrical fixture—”

“You don’t know that,” Hartwig said.

“You don’t think I’d remember being bitten?”

“I think”—he held her gaze—“that there was a lot of infected blood flying around. And if some of it splashed in there—”

“Then I’d already be screaming and ripping your guts out,” Kindra snapped, “which I’m not … no matter how much I’d like to. So if you’re done casting baseless aspersions—”

“You were ready to kill me back there over a lightsaber,” Hartwig said. “Seems to me that it’s in the group’s best interest if we took you out of the equation now.” He glanced at the Sith Master. “Right, Master Hracken?”

Hracken didn’t have a chance to reply before Kindra cut in again.

“Is this really what you want?” she asked Hartwig, blade ready. “We’ve sparred enough times in the training arena. You know how it’s going to go down.”

Hartwig didn’t answer, just stared at her, shoulders rising and falling with every breath, his face betraying no trace of emotion. The wind flung another thin gust of snow between them, and Kindra felt the cut beginning to ache on her throat.

“Make a move,” she said.

“You first.”

“Wait,” Maggs said. “Nobody knows what the incubation period for this thing is, right?”

Hartwig didn’t take his eyes off Kindra. “Seemed pretty fast with Ra’at.”

“Yeah, but Ra’at got tagged firsthand. Maybe accidental exposure takes longer.” Kindra could hear Maggs’s voice growing more confident as he spoke, warming to his own argument. “Point is, we don’t know. So before somebody does something stupid, how about we all take a step back, strip down, and make sure nobody’s got any open cuts that could have gotten contaminated blood in them.” He looked back at Combat Master Hracken, who still had not spoken. “What do you think?”

Hracken nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“Strip down?” Kindra’s expression had already gone from bellicose to incredulous. “You’re asking me to take my clothes off?”

“It’s the only way to be sure.” He glanced at Hartwig. “You agree to that?”

“Why not?” Hartwig shrugged. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” He yanked off his tunic and the uniform shirt beneath it, then shoved his pants down to his ankles. In front of him, Kindra had already slipped out of her coat, keeping her bare arms crossed over her chest, gazing back defiantly at the others.

“That’s as far as I’m going.”

Hartwig rolled his eyes and turned back to Maggs, who stood shivering in his shorts and boots, clutching a wad of balled-up clothes against him like a small child that had gone to sleep. Behind him, bare-chested, stood Master Hracken. The Combat Master had also stripped to the waist, without being asked, revealing a broad, well-muscled physique hardened by scar tissue, strange tattoos, and decades of intense physical conditioning. His head was bowed, as if he was inspecting something in the snow.

“Looks like we’re all clean,” Hartwig said. “So I guess that means we—”

Master Hracken raised his head. The crooked slash of his grin on his face seemed to cut almost diagonally across the entire width of his head. Blood had already started streaming down on either side of his mouth where he’d gnawed his own lips open.

There was nothing human in his eyes.

With a shapeless noise that was half shout, half gasp, Hartwig fumbled for his lightsaber and dropped it in the snow. He bent down, scrambling to pick it up, but succeeded only in pushing it deeper.

In less than a second Hracken was on him. He grabbed Hartwig’s head and buried his teeth in the student’s throat, ripping out a mouthful of tissue and cartilage. Kindra watched wild, looping parabolas of blood spurting high in the air around him like a miniature fountain that had been turned on directly beneath Hartwig’s chin.

Hartwig staggered backward, hands up, blinking at the Sith Master as he whipped around to face him. His nerves were gone. Hracken’s hands flew up, preparing to fire off a burst of Force lightning, when its head toppled sideways off its shoulders and rolled, still spurting, into the dark snowdrifts.

Hracken’s decapitated body collapsed, seizing and twitching, and Maggs saw Kindra standing behind it. She gripped the lightsaber in both hands with absolute steadiness.

“Thanks,” Maggs breathed.

“Forget it.” She walked over to Hracken’s still-snarling head and chopped it straight down the middle. “That one’s all yours.”

Maggs looked back around at Hartwig’s corpse, its ripped-open throat spilled out sloppily across the snow like a losing hand of pazaak. The thing was already starting to come back. It was squirming in place, shifting its arms and legs, preparing to sit up again. Listless bubbling and gurgling sounds issued from the hole in its neck.

“You going to take care of that?” Kindra asked.

Maggs took a breath and swung his own lightsaber down on Hartwig’s corpse, carving its torso open from throat to groin. Gazing down at him, Kindra realized she could see the black, still-pulsing gristle of the thing’s dead heart laboring stupidly onward, grasping for one more beat. What she felt more than anything at that moment was revulsion at the human machine’s mindless commitment to endure and endure and endure.

“Is it down?” she asked.

Maggs didn’t answer.

“Is it down?”

Maggs went to work with the lightsaber again, and this time it took the Hartwig-thing’s head off at the shoulders. The head dangled for a moment on one remaining ribbon of flesh, then dropped away. A few listless dribbles of boiled blood leaked like tears from the sheared-off arteries, black as used oil, before they cauterized completely.

“Now it’s down,” he said.

Kindra nodded but kept her own lightsaber drawn.

“What now?” Maggs asked.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “You’re staying here.”

Maggs blinked. “What?”

Kindra’s lightsaber slashed out from the back, catching him across the hamstrings, shearing through tendons just above the ankle. Maggs shrieked and slipped, arms pinwheeling, all balance gone. He was screaming at her, asking her why she did it, what did she think she was doing, but by that time Kindra had already turned and started running—not walking, but running—as fast as she could in the opposite direction.

“Wait!” Maggs sat up and tried to stand, but his lower legs refused the job, the severed Achilles tendons dumping him forward again into the snow.

When he lifted his head up, he heard the noises coming up from behind him.

No, Maggs thought, no, this was all a mistake, just a big mistake—

He looked back, and they fell on him.