Maul awoke to blinding lights, a blazing firestorm of incandescence that seared his eyes, obscuring whatever stood just behind them. He tried to move and discovered that he couldn’t. His arms and legs were lashed and stretched spread-eagle, and he hung suspended in midair, above … what? It was impossible to say.
What had they shot him with? Some kind of stun weapon, powerful enough to knock him completely unconscious. Whoever was responsible was clearly prepared to evade the surveillance cameras as well—it would explain the painfully intense lights, bright enough to mask whatever they were planning on doing to him.
At length he heard a sound coming from off to his left, someone laboring to breathe. Incoherent words. Croaking noises. The rasping harshness of respiratory distress. Maul was still listening to it, trying to process the details of his circumstances, when he picked up the creak of approaching footsteps.
“Where’s the old man?” a voice asked.
“In the corner,” a second, more familiar voice answered. “Next to the baler.”
“Has he said anything significant?”
“He’s delirious.” The familiar voice was calm but not dispassionate, colored with an overtone of what might actually have been sympathy. “He contracted blood poisoning after he lost his leg. The infection’s already spreading to his brain.” From directly in front of him, the one who had spoken most recently leaned in close enough that Maul could make out his features. “Hello, Jagannath.”
Maul squinted up at the face of the Twi’lek above him. “Zero?”
Zero gazed at him. “You’ve caused quite a stir around here,” he said. “You really shouldn’t have killed Rook. Mr. Radique was paying handsomely to keep him safe from being matched.”
“So you do know him.”
“Sending the Nelvaanian to hack into the algorithm was your first mistake.” The Twi’lek’s expression was slightly puzzled now, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what had driven Maul to such a grave misstep. “There have already been repercussions, you realize. Severe repercussions.”
Reaching down, he hoisted a limp corpse and lifted it close enough that Maul could see it.
It was Izhsmash. The Nelvaanian’s broken jaw hung slack on its hinges. His mouth and eye sockets were stuffed with scraps of broken circuit board and twisted wire—a message for whoever found the body.
There was a faint, throat-clearing noise somewhere off to the left. Maul jerked his head up, struggling to pull himself free from the thick web of cables that lashed his arms and legs to walls that he couldn’t see.
“Is he here with you?” Maul asked. “Is Radique here?”
Zero ignored the question. “The guards and inmates will find your body next to the Nelvaanian’s,” he said with that same puzzled empathy. “They’ll know what happened. Such warnings must be sent from time to time. It is his will.” Leaning in close enough that he could lower his voice, he spoke almost apologetically: “No one threatens Mr. Radique, Jagannath. You understand, don’t you? It’s just business.”
“I have business with him,” Maul said. “Tell Radique—”
“Good-bye, Jagannath,” the other voice said. It was the first time that Maul had heard it. “It’s a pity you have to end your time in Cog Hive Seven as a cautionary tale. You were an intriguing specimen while you lasted.”
“Wait.” Maul lifted his head again and caught sight of the figure next to Zero—it was a Weequay, one he’d never seen before. Or had he? The craggy, sun-baked face was raked back in a speculative frown, his high forehead crowned with a topknot, and Maul remembered the inmate that he’d seen on his first day here.
The clawbird was perched on his shoulder.
“Repercussions, Jagannath.”
Without another word, the Weequay glanced at Zero, and the two of them turned and left the room.
There was a jolting, mechanized clamor of heavy machinery being throttled reluctantly to life. Force-feedback servos chugged and became a steady pulsating drone. Maul thought of the factory floor.
Before he could comprehend what that meant exactly, he felt the cables around his wrists and ankles beginning to draw tight, pulling him in four different directions.
As suddenly as they’d appeared, the blinding lights went out, burying him in utter darkness.
Maul jerked and yanked at his restraints, but the cables around his arms and legs only pulled tighter, stretching the sockets of his shoulders, cranking tension into hips and knees. He fought to pull himself free, but the restraints held fast. Something popped in his right wrist. Every joint began to burn. They were going to rip him to pieces.
From above him, above the hum of the machinery, he heard a brisk flapping of wings.
In the darkness, the wheezing noises began again. Labored words.
“Going … to kill us both,” a voice rasped.
Now Maul recognized the voice. The old man was in here with him, Eogan’s father—the one who’d lost his leg to Voystock’s blaster. He searched his memory for the old man’s name, and it came to him almost at once.
“Artagan?”
“Never should have … saved his life,” the old man’s voice said. “Should have stayed with the Bando Gora. Too late now, I suppose.”
Twisting his entire body as far as the cables would allow, Maul turned his head in the direction of the old man’s voice. By now the tension in his extremities had transcended pain, catapulting him into an entirely new realm of consciousness. Again he thought, almost instinctively, of using the Force, of calling upon strength and ability whose magnitude could almost certainly save him from death. Surely such things had been placed at his disposal for a reason, a larger purpose, hadn’t they?
From the hinterlands of conscious thought, he heard his Master’s voice ringing out in his mind.
There are aspects of who we are, Sidious had once told him, that can only be revealed to us in the deepest pit of intolerable suffering, in those moments when all else is torn away—when we stand at the very brink of eternity itself and stare death in the face.
Maul didn’t breathe. Sweat poured from his face. Still facing Artagan, he managed to catch the old man’s eye. “What did you say?”
“Bando Gora,” Artagan muttered. “All hail the skull …”
“You were in the Bando Gora?”
“… were going to kill Radique.” Somewhere in the darkness, the old man mumbled something else, an incoherent slur of consonants, then he became lucid again. “I betrayed them, saved Radique from them. They’ve been hunting me down … ever since.”
For a moment Maul didn’t speak. Beneath the pain and the rattling of the machine that was about to rip him to pieces, a new revelation had already begun taking shape in his mind. “That’s why you brought your son here to Cog Hive Seven.”
The old man grunted in assent. “Radique swore … he’d protect me …”
Maul felt himself measuring what the old man said against whatever he knew to be true. The realization—a piece of the puzzle abruptly snapping into place—brought a sudden upsurge of determination.
Summoning up all that remained of his strength, he wrenched his right arm as hard as he could away from the cable, dislocating his shoulder from its socket with an audible pop. A loopy, over-elasticized numbness spilled through the joint on a wave of pins and needles, threatening to render his entire arm useless, but the move brought just enough slack to the cable so that the binding slipped free around his right wrist.
Jerking his arm loose, he reached across with a hand that was already rapidly going numb, fumbling with his left wrist. It seemed to take forever, but at last the left hand came free as well. Only after he’d gotten his ankles loose did he slam his upper torso against the floor, knocking the right shoulder back into place.
There.
He rose and crossed the room, his eyes fully acclimated to the darkness now. This was the factory floor, as he’d expected—the bulky machinery, Coyle’s bone sculptures hulking in the background like an inevitable reminder of where they were all destined to end up. If Zero had brought him here, along with the Weequay—
“The Weequay,” he said aloud. A half dozen steps later, he’d reached the spot where the old man lay on the floor, hideously diminished by his wounds, burning with fever. Maul could feel the heat radiating up from him like a blast furnace, could smell the sickness on him. “The one that was here with Zero. That’s him, isn’t it? That’s Iram Radique.”
A foggy groan that might have been acknowledgment came from the old man. “Radique …,” he managed.
“I need to find him. What was his connection to the Gora?”
“Can’t … tell … you.”
“Why not?”
“… only tell Eogan …”
Maul reached down and lifted Artagan Truax up, hoisting him over his shoulder.
“… you doing?” the old man asked. “Where you taking me …?”
“Out of here,” Maul said. “We’ve got things to discuss.”