Maul made it back just seconds before the reconfiguration began. He’d just stepped through the hatchway when it sealed shut behind him, the floor and walls already starting to shift. As the now-familiar clamor of gears and clockwork filled the air, he turned his gaze upward to where he knew the warden and the rest of the galactic gambling community would be watching. His involvement in the next bout seemed to be a foregone conclusion.
What would it be this time? Fire? Ice? The sarlacc from the Great Pit of Carkoon?
The cell reeled and swung as the architecture of the prison fell into its newest alignment. Maul held fast to the handgrips of the bench, riding it out. At this point it really didn’t matter what they pitted him against. Now that he’d seen Radique face-to-face—
The cell came to a halt.
Maul cocked his head, listening for whatever opponent the algorithm had selected for him. Whatever it was, he would kill it as quickly as possible and get on with his business at hand.
The wall of the cell came open.
Maul looked into it, muscles tensing for the attack—
And felt all his resolve go swirling away in a sudden rush of bewilderment.
The Weequay stepped out to face him.
* * *
For a moment he couldn’t speak. The Weequay was walking toward him with the clawbird resting on his shoulder. Maul stared, his senses heightened by the intensity of his shock, as the bird lifted one of its talons, shifting its position, to reveal the knots of khipus tied around its feet.
“You were supposed to die already, Jagannath,” the Weequay said. “Torn to pieces on the factory floor. I should have finished you myself.”
He was still coming. Maul was struck again by the ineluctable suspicion that everything that had happened to him since the moment of his arrival here—from the ongoing matches to the riddles to the machines that had nearly ripped him to pieces—had all been part of some larger trial or examination overseen by Sidious, and that perhaps now he had arrived at the greatest test of all.
“Wait,” Maul said. “I won’t kill you.”
“You’re right about that.”
Maul reached up and yanked open his collar to reveal the bundles of credits that he’d stuffed inside his uniform before leaving Nightside. He held them up. “Three hundred thousand credits. They’re yours.”
The Weequay didn’t answer. Instead, he raised his arm, and the bird took flight, arrowing across the cell like a shadow cut loose from the object that cast it, streaking straight for Maul’s face, talons extended. Ducking, Maul swung one fist to knock it aside, but the bird dove down under his arm at the last second and came up screaming, claws fastened to his face, pecking furiously at his eyes.
Maul grabbed the bird blindly, ripped it from where it had fastened itself to his face, and tried to fling it to the floor, where he could stomp it to death, but it squirmed free and took flight, still cawing and shrieking across the cell in a trail of feathers. He raised his head and wiped his eyes. His vision was a curtain of blood beyond which the Weequay arose, the vaguest of shapes, though nearer than ever.
“I know exactly what you are,” Radique’s voice said, very close. “And I know who sent you here.” He was raising something over his head—some kind of melee weapon, some dagger or pike whose specifics Maul couldn’t immediately discern—already intent on delivering the deathblow. “Now I will give you what you deserve.”
A supernova of pain exploded through Maul’s right flank, and his right arm went numb even as he lifted it in an attempt at self-defense.
But the paralysis went far deeper than that. For the first time since he’d arrived at Cog Hive Seven, Maul had no idea how to proceed. Killing Radique now would mean the end of his mission—total failure in the eyes of his Master and the Sith.
Yet anything less would cost him his life.
“You serve the Bando Gora,” the Weequay’s voice was saying, from somewhere behind the scarlet veil.
“No,” Maul said. “That’s not—”
From behind him, the pounding of wings.
Maul reacted on instinct, swinging his left arm back to pluck the clawbird out of the air. His right arm remained useless—whatever the Weequay had done to him with the melee weapon seemed to have severed his control of it, at least temporarily. Gripping one of the bird’s wings with his left hand, Maul bit down on the other wing and clamped it between his teeth, spreading them apart to their fullest span.
Keep it disoriented. Work it into a frenzy until it cannot tell friend from enemy. It’s the only way.
The bird fought him with everything it had, twisting and writhing, pecking frantically, screaming in his grasp. Its talons raked his face, carving deep furrows across his cheekbones. But Maul did not let it go.
He swung it through the air, slashing it across the Weequay’s face in a definitive stroke, simultaneously breaking its back while raking the thing’s claws over the Weequay’s eyes. The bird fell to the floor, a broken thing, its wings protruding at awkward, irrational angles.
Maul wiped the blood from his face. At last his vision had begun to clear. Stepping back, he raised his left hand in one final attempt to communicate with the Weequay.
“Hear me,” he said. “I’m not here representing the Bando Gora. I need to buy a weapon from you. I need—”
Radique attacked him again, a quick, brutal series of blows to neck and face. They came almost too fast to register, a fierce storm of blows, and Maul was aware of the floor shifting beneath him, dropping him to his knees. When the Weequay’s pike smashed into his skull again, Maul realized that right here and now, in the midst of his crisis, Radique was going to beat him to death.
It was going to end here.
Master. The uncertainty of it loomed over him, clouding his thoughts. What should I do? How can I—?
Wham! Another blow, the most vicious one yet, split the thought in half, and Maul dropped to his stomach. He knew that failure would cost him everything, that he would never be able to return to Sidious and the Grand Plan, and yet—
Maul’s thoughts cycled back to his early childhood, further back than he’d ever dared reflect, to his earliest training, the endless, hostile torture that he’d endured on Mygeeto. As painful as it had been, there was knowledge there, a realization that in the end, the galaxy was a cold and uncaring place that would never protect him. And if he was going to survive, it would only be because he would never give up.
Never.
Give.
Up.
Not then.
Not now.
Never.
Something broke open inside him, a vein of pure instinct that ran even deeper than his commitment to the mission. On his feet at once, he grabbed the Weequay by his seclusion braids, jerked the other’s head back, and thrust his own head forward, driving the horns of his skull against the inmate’s throat.
Radique’s windpipe burst open, splintering beneath the attack. His body fell limp, and Maul released the braids, letting him drop to the floor.
Maul stepped back from the corpse.
He stood there for what felt like a long time.
It was over.
Master, I had no choice.
But there was only silence.