Maul sat in his cell, poised on the bench. The hatch stood open in front of him. The rest of genpop was out wandering the gallery, killing time, waiting for the alarms to signal the next fight. But for the moment he preferred solitude, or what passed for it. His recovery was not complete. He needed time and silence to rebuild his strength.
Leaning forward, he placed his right hand between his knees and lifted himself up off the bench with one arm, holding there for a count of fifty before lowering himself and switching to the other arm. He repeated this exercise ten times for each arm, back and forth. Then using both arms he lifted himself straight up into the air, extending his legs, body held erect until every muscle trembled with the strain. There was nothing particularly pleasant about the deep core burn, but it was familiar and provided an outlet for the anger that had continued to grow and fester in him since he’d returned from the warden’s office.
He lowered himself back to the bench and exhaled, shaking off the sweat from his head. Even with the hatchway open, he felt a faint sense of claustrophobia. The cell felt minutely smaller. Perhaps it was. Retractable walls and ceiling panels would certainly be programmed for such subtle adjustments, and at this point, he’d almost expected Sadiki to be tampering with his sense of perception in whatever way she could. He’d frustrated her attempts to interrogate him, but that wasn’t much comfort. What he’d really longed to do was rip her head off with his bare hands, but that wouldn’t solve his problem, either.
I’m going to keep matching you.
He’d expected nothing less. She would keep fighting him until she killed him or he told her why he was seeking Radique. If the wiretap device hidden beneath her desk was any indication, she wasn’t the only one trying to gain that information.
His thoughts migrated to Artagan Truax and his son. Both would be under heavy guard because of their escape attempt, rendering them currently inaccessible. But Maul knew that if he bided his time, the opportunity would present itself. He remembered the old man’s whispered words.
Eogan knows. Everything.
Yes. And if he did—
Something moved outside the cell.
Instantly on his feet, Maul was moving to the open hatchway in less than a second. But what he found waiting for him was not an inmate at all.
The clawbird perched across the concourse gazed down at him with black and lightless eyes—the same bird he’d spotted in the tunnels.
It had something in its mouth.
A scrap of bone.
“What are you doing here?” Maul asked it.
At once, the thing let out a sharp, plaintive caw, then spread its wings and took flight.
Without making any conscious decision to do so, Maul went after it.
Running down the long corridor, bolting past the occasional inmate loitering outside the cells, he cut through great swaths of open space, never letting the bird out of his sight. The walls blurred by. Leaping a waist-level barrier, vaulting over a pile of debris at the far end of the walkway, he knocked two prisoners aside without slowing down.
The clawbird flew faster. It darted upward along the ceiling, cut left, and disappeared through a ventilation shaft.
Propelling his body upward, Maul flung himself after it, plummeting down a ten-meter drop, and hit the ground running, his eyes instantly adjusting to the darkness, chasing it through a half-visible maze of utility droids and subcorridors branching off in a half dozen directions. He couldn’t see the bird any longer, but he could still hear it clearly up ahead, its wings pounding hard through the gray spaces, betraying its position.
Sprinting, jumping across an unfinished platform, he landed on the other side and cut across the catwalk that adjoined it to a web of cables that affixed it to the far wall. Maul grabbed the cables, pulled himself hand over hand to his destination, and swung himself up and through yet another hatchway, into the wide-open space that awaited him there.
The bird had landed on an insulated electrical conduit and was staring down at him from a thick warren of debris—wires, threads, bits of circuitry, and trash—that he realized must be the thing’s nest. For a moment it just stared down at him with what might have been begrudging admiration. The small bit of bone was still clasped in its beak.
Maul glared back at it.
What are you doing here, bird?
He looked around at the space where the chase had led him, a region he’d heard described as the factory floor. According to prison lore, it was another unfinished level somewhere beneath the haunted reaches of the metal shop, and for a moment he simply peered into the arched ribs of the ceiling’s support struts, then down onto the abandoned steel prairie of the durasteel plating.
The word factory seemed to have been applied in its loosest imaginable interpretation. Whatever was supposed to have been manufactured here had gotten no further than the machinery that had been installed to build it. Conveyer belts and pallet racks stood empty around him. Up above, smoked-glass lenses gleamed down. More surveillance. Omnipresent eyes.
Maul moved past all of it with barely a glance. The cold vacuum of space felt very near, pressing against the outer shell of the space station with its own hissing intensity, and he felt artificial gravity intensifying, a by-product of poorly calibrated field generators that nobody had bothered to install properly in the first place. Like much of Cog Hive Seven, this place had a slapdash inconsistency, as if the whole thing had been put together in the dark. Of all the technology, only the cameras, silent and omnipresent, seemed to function according to spec. Guards were watching. Guards were always watching.
He took several more steps and stopped short.
The structure in front of him—he supposed you had to call it a sculpture—was built entirely out of bones. It stood as tall as he was, a gangling conflation of ribs, skulls and phalanges, human and nonhuman alike, all wired together into some utterly new composition.
It wasn’t the only one of its kind. Looking around, he saw that this part of the factory floor was a veritable forest of bone sculptures, some suspended from the ceiling, others perched on the walls. As indifferent as he was to aesthetics, Maul found the assemblages themselves strangely compelling. Whatever else was happening in the bowels of Cog Hive Seven, someone or something was down here creating a new race of horrors that the galaxy itself had never dreamed of in its blackest nightmares. It spoke to some part of him that he’d never known to exist. For an instant he thought of the clawbird with the bone in its beak, and he understood now why he’d followed it here. It had led him to the one who’d made all of these things.
That was when he heard it—the unmistakable servo whir of mechanized belt treads moving up from behind.
He spun around to see a small maintenance droid advancing blithely toward him, carrying more bones with it. When the droid saw Maul, it stopped and squawked at him in some form of machine language.
“What are you doing here?” Maul asked it.
The droid didn’t move. Then, with a panicked chirp, it reversed its treads and tried to get away, but Maul lunged for it and hoisted it up, arresting its escape.
“Easy, Jagannath,” a voice said. “There’s no need to terrorize my droid, now is there?”
Maul set the thing aside and looked around to face the diminutive inmate standing behind him, beaming serenely up at him. It was the Chadra-Fan he’d met in the mess hall, the only one who hadn’t reacted to the explosion in the kitchen.
“Coyle?”
“Lost your way among the great unwashed, did you, brother?” Brushing the droid off, Coyle patted it on its head and sent the thing on its way. “What are you doing all the way down here, we wonder?”
“I followed the clawbird,” Maul said.
“Bird?” Coyle blinked at him. “Now that’s a riddle worth pondering, isn’t it? Why did the prisoner chase the bird?” Then, without waiting for Maul’s answer, he knelt down and began gathering the bones that the droid had dropped, humming quietly to himself as he did so. “Mind giving me a hand with these, brother? Got a work in progress around here somewhere, doesn’t we?”
Maul looked at the bone sculptures. “All these are yours?”
“Hobby of mine, isn’t it?” Coyle gave the armload of bones a fretful glance. “These aren’t going to be enough. I was supposed to meet a couple of the Kings here—they were bringing me another shipment.” He swung one arm, encompassing the sculptures. “I build things, you see. And around a place like this, bones are some of the most common construction materials. Catch my meaning, do you?”
He gestured across the vacant darkness to the other side of the conveyer belt by the opposite wall, and Maul looked up. The Chadra-Fan’s newest sculpture was a towering convocation of femurs, ribs, and vertebrae with sleek, skeletal wings and a face built completely out of skulls. It rose into the uppermost shadows of the factory floor, at least eight meters high.
But there was an aspect of it that Maul hadn’t noticed before. Viewed from a certain angle, the bones crisscrossed to form a pattern. Like a mathematical equation or some foreign alphabet, a code that defied immediate interpretation.
He cocked his head, stepping closer. There was something inside the sculpture, something he couldn’t quite see from here.
“What does it mean?”
“Mean? Mean?” Coyle chuckled again. “It means you still haven’t answered my riddle, brother.”
“What question?”
“Why does the prisoner follow the bird?” The Chadra-Fan peered up at his own sculpture for a moment, then, without waiting for Maul’s answer, tucked a pile of slender bones under one arm and scurried up a ladder to the top of a maintenance gantry alongside the sculpture.
Maul glared up at him. “What else do you build down here?”
“Oh, all sorts of wonderful things.”
“Weapons?”
“Ah, that’s another riddle, isn’t it?” Coyle gazed down at him, and this time his rodent-like face bore no trace of expression. “Anything can be a weapon,” he said quietly, “isn’t that so?” Then another glint of a smile as he ran his fingers along the underside of the gantry arm and held them up for Maul to see the faint reddish-black residue. “ ‘Slimy to touch, greasy to feel, but mix me with blood and I’ll eat through steel.’ ” His eyes twinkled. “Do you take my meaning, brother?”
“Enough riddles.” Maul felt the last of his patience draining away. He grabbed the Chadra-Fan by the shoulder, drawing him close. “I know that I’m getting closer to Iram Radique. I need to talk to him soon. My employer has business to transact.”
“Your employer?” a cool voice spoke up from behind him. “And what employer might that be?”
Maul released Coyle and spun around. The Twi’lek was standing less than a meter away, his gaze fixed on Maul’s. His approach had been absolutely silent, as if he’d been borne forth on a current of dark smoke.
“Zero,” he said.
“Jagannath.” The Twi’lek nodded at him in acknowledgment, then turned his attention to the unfinished bone sculpture next to the maintenance gantry. “Ah.” He touched it with what appeared to be genuine admiration. “This is coming along very well, Coyle. You’ve made great strides.”
“I thank you,” Coyle said. “I’m still not finished, though. I need more bones.”
“No shortage of those. What is it that we say?” The Twi’lek considered. “ ‘The worm turns …’ ”
Coyle smiled, finishing the saying: “ ‘And there are always more bones.’ ”
“Worm?” Maul asked.
“Ah,” Coyle said, turning back to Maul. “That’s the next question, isn’t it?” He smiled, but this time there was very little warmth in it, as he spoke in that same sing-song rhyme: “ ‘The nightmare had a nightmare of its own, deep inside the darkness, fully grown.’ ”
Maul turned to Zero for an explanation. “What is he talking about?”
“My friend here speaks of the Syrox,” Zero said, “the Wolf Worm of Cog Hive Seven. The one that moves in the ductwork of the prison, where it lives and grows fat on the blood from the matches. A nightmare within our nightmare, if you like. You may have already encountered its offspring, Jagannath—and you no doubt will again. But the thing itself, well …” He stopped and shuddered with revulsion. “At night sometimes, in the lowest maintenance shafts, if you put your ear to the wall …”
“Horror stories don’t interest me,” Maul said.
“Being one yourself,” Coyle piped up, “I would think they might, wouldn’t it?”
Ignoring the Chadra-Fan, Maul kept his attention focused on Zero. “I met the man you told me about,” he said. “The one who came here looking for Iram Radique. The one who saved his life. His name is Artagan Truax.”
“Truax …” The Twi’lek’s expression was impossible to read. “Is that right?”
“Radique exists,” Maul said. “And I know he’s in here somewhere. The gangs serve him … or someone who works for him. They smuggle the weapons parts in on the supply shipments. There’s a chain of command, and Radique uses it protect his identity.” He waited for Zero to deny any of this, but the Twi’lek just regarded him thoughtfully. When he spoke again, his voice was low and careful.
“Assuming that you are one step closer to finding the truth,” Zero murmured, “you’ll need to look much harder than that.”
“Who’s above the gangs?” Maul asked. “Who’s the go-between?”
Zero gazed at him. “You know, Coyle is right. Cog Hive Seven is a nightmare. And yet …” The Twi’lek regarded him silently for a moment. “You have already witnessed courage within these walls as well, have you not? And perhaps even selflessness?”
Maul felt his forehead growing hot with anger. “I see only weakness. And weakness is its own punishment, just as strength is its own reward.”
“Is it so simple, then?” the Twi’lek inquired, but the remark didn’t seem to have anything to do with what Maul had said. “And meanwhile, you remain unswerving in your mission.”
“Yes.”
“The search for Iram Radique.”
“Yes,” Maul said again. And in that moment he glimpsed another possibility, one that hadn’t consciously occurred to him before now. What if all of this—even these oblique riddles, this maddening uncertainty, the questions that themselves seemed pointless and incidental—might all be part of some larger test from Sidious, a means of evaluating his capabilities as a Sith Lord before he allowed Maul to participate fully in the Grand Plan?
He narrowed his eyes at the Twi’lek.
“I need to know everything.”
“In that case, Jagannath, I invite you to look upon the answer to your own riddle. Do you remember it?” He gestured up at the bone sculptures.
“Why does the prisoner chase the bird?” And now Maul saw what was moving inside it, flapping its black wings in the shadows. “I don’t—”
“Because it’s a rook,” Zero said.
Maul turned back around to look at him. But the Twi’lek had already turned and started to walk away from Maul, descending into the darkness.