By the time Maul had made his way back from the factory floor to the main gallery, the rest of the prison population was already on their way to lockdown. Alarms howled louder here, the clock ticking down. Holding his side where the varactyl had slashed him, he shoved his way through the foul-smelling herds of inmates, cutting a path down the corridor that led to his own cell. Stepping inside, he found a guard standing there.
“Hey, Tooth,” the guard said. “Welcome back.”
It was Smight, the young CO who had kept jamming the barrel of his blaster against Maul’s spine on the way up to the warden’s office.
But he looked different now—there was something twitchy going on in the corners of his mouth, some twisted species of chemically enhanced depravity that Maul had not seen on the young CO’s face before now. His eyes gleamed dully in the recessed lights. Maul wondered if the guard was on something, if he’d speed-jacked some glitterstim before coming here, to nerve himself up for whatever his purpose was.
“They’re matching you again, you know,” Smight was saying, cracking his knuckles as he spoke. He shot a glance at the chrono on his wrist. “In about two minutes.”
“Then you better get out of my cell,” Maul said.
“In a rush, huh? Got someplace you need to be?” The guard sniggered and cast his eyes at the open wound on Maul’s flank. “Maybe you shouldn’t have been tussling with that varactyl, huh? Match hasn’t even started and you’re already bleeding.”
Maul said nothing.
“Which reminds me,” Smight added. “Warden sent me up here with something special, just for you.” Reaching to his belt, he withdrew a pair of zip-tie restraints, Nylasteel, like the ones they’d used on the wampa. “Take a seat.”
Maul sat on the bench and Smight slapped the zip-ties around his ankles, jerking them tight to the steel posts that anchored it to the floor. When he finished, he gave Maul one last, wild look.
“What’s the matter? You got nothing to crack wise about?”
“You should be more careful what you put in your body,” Maul said.
“What?”
“Spice. It will kill you. If I don’t do it first.”
Smight’s face seemed to narrow with hostility. “Have a good fight,” he said, and stepped out, as the hatch sealed behind him.
Maul didn’t move. The alarms outside had stopped. There was a long, anticipatory silence, and then a sudden metallic creaking sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once as the prison itself began the process of reconfiguration.
Now he would find out if Izhsmash had been able to accomplish what he’d asked. The zip-ties would make it more difficult, but not impossible. There was nothing to do but wait.
The cell lurched into motion. It turned and swung around to the right, jerked upward once again, and tumbled head to foot 180 degrees, leaving him dangling upside down by the handgrips and the zip-ties on his ankles. Other cells were moving around his; he could hear the noise of their passing. At length, his rotated back down to its original position and stopped, the wall and ceiling panels adjusting themselves, tightening around him.
Maul listened for sounds on the other side of the wall. The list of inmates had not told him what type of species Rook was. What would it be this time? A growl? A snarl? A human voice?
He heard nothing. He looked at the walls around him. The cell didn’t feel any smaller. But something had changed, the entire room tightening around him in some almost imperceptible way.
Seconds later, the cell began to fill with water.
It came spraying down from a pipe in the ceiling, an ice-cold gush of stinking gray liquid that drenched him instantly as it clattered across the metal floor and began pooling around his feet and ankles. From where he sat, Maul looked up at the pipe with annoyance but no real sense of surprise.
Rising to his full height, he jerked on the zip-ties that fastened him to the bench, already knowing that they wouldn’t yield. He grabbed the bench and yanked. The steel posts weren’t going anywhere, either, nor had he expected them to. For the moment, this seemed to be where he was fighting from.
The water had risen past his knees and was coming up to his waist. The entire ceiling seemed to be pouring down on him, and the acoustics of the room had begun to change, obliterating the echoes and leaving only a steady, discordant roar. It was happening so fast that it felt less like the water was coming down and more like he was sinking into it.
He could feel the sheer weight of liquid tonnage itself pressing in around him, rising to engulf his chest and shoulders, and then creeping up higher around his neck. Tipping back his head, he exhaled and watched his breath plume out in a visible cloud. The temperature in the cell had dropped twenty degrees in two minutes. He felt both his hearts quickening, pumping blood to his extremities, readying himself for whatever came next.
Where was Rook? Was he coming? Or had Izhsmash failed to hack the algorithm as he’d requested?
He gave another glance at what remained of his surroundings. The cell had grown darker, as if the lights themselves had been swallowed up by the flood.
Drawing in deep breaths, saturating his lungs with as much oxygen as he could, Maul plunged his head under the surface, acclimating his vision to the turbid murkiness below. At first he saw nothing. Lights shone faintly from the submerged walls, hazy in the depths. He could see nothing else down there.
Not yet.
He burst to the surface again, as high as the restraints would allow him to rise. The water was almost above his head, leaving only a narrow, cramped layer of stale oxygen above the surface. He went down again, and when he lifted his head, the water level had risen to the ceiling. There was a centimeter or two of air at the very top.
Maul sucked at it, feeling it disappear against his lips.
Across the cell, he felt the low, grinding reverberation of a hatch sliding open underwater. He pulled himself down but saw nothing.
An instant later, below the surface, something brushed against his leg. Squinting into the depths, Maul made out a pair of bulbous, glassy black eyes staring back at him.
An instant later, it struck.