The medical droid was nowhere to be found.
“Wait,” Eogan was saying. He’d put down his end of the crate and was now pacing quickly through the medbay, searching for the GH-7, as if the droid might have gone into hiding somewhere. “You said that it could deactivate the charges. Where did it go?”
Maul said nothing. He’d assumed that Radique would meet them up here to use whatever inside influence he had to disarm the explosives in his chest—he knew from Radique’s expression that he wanted Maul’s insight on the lightsabers. Which meant the arms dealer needed to keep him alive, at least long enough to—
KRRRAACCK!
The walls shook hard enough that Maul had to steady himself against the hatchway. By now the entire prison was rocking steadily around them, the tremors coming with such violence and frequency that they never really seemed to stop. Gaps were opening in the joinery overhead, where exposed wires spat and fumed with sparks.
“Jagannath …”
Maul turned and looked over to where the boy had already stopped in his tracks, staring down at the scorched pile of processors and components scattered haphazardly across the floor. What was left looked so little like a droid that they’d stepped right over it before. The GH-7’s head and manipulator arms had been blasted off completely, and the rest of its circuitry seemed to have caught fire and melted into slag.
“What happened to it?” Eogan asked, his tone splintering with near-panic. “We have to fix it!”
“That’s impossible,” the low voice said behind them.
Maul and Eogan turned to look at the hatchway through which they’d entered. Radique was standing there, blue skin gleaming, staring at them coldly. Maul watched as Radique spread his arms wide, allowing his clawbirds to land on him, a dozen or more perched from shoulder to wrist on either side. The feathered black bodies and piercing soulless eyes were a visual echo of his own. They made low, restless, hungry sounds.
“What happened to the surgical droid?” Eogan asked him.
“Blasted to pieces by hostile inmates would be my guess,” Radique said. “Not that it matters now. You’re Inmate 10009, aren’t you?” Raising his face back up to meet Eogan’s desperate expression, Radique shook his head. “I think your number is up.”
“No!” the boy yelled, and swung out his fist at the weapons dealer, but the punch was wild, and Radique saw it coming with plenty of time to duck. The clawbirds on his arms took immediate flight, cawing and shrieking as they swept down on Eogan, going for his eyes. The boy swung his arms furiously, trying to ward them off, but there were too many of them. Over his shoulder Maul could hear the hungry, greedy noises they made as they pecked at the boy’s face and hands. All around them the medbay shook harder, as if stirred to life by the attack.
Maul’s arm shot out, grabbing Radique by his black tunic and jerking him close. “Call them off.”
Then he felt it—the lightsaber activating in Radique’s hand. Radique raised it up in front of him and swung it at Maul. Maul ducked, the blade humming over his head.
“One final match,” Radique said, stepping forward. “I think Warden Blirr would have approved, don’t you?” He paused to admire the blade in his hands. “You do amazing work, Jagannath, you know that? You must tell me your secret.”
“Come closer,” Maul said, “and I will.”
Radique’s lips quirked into a slight smile. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Maul just looked at him, into the red eyes, measuring the distance between them.
“When it comes to weapons,” Radique continued, “I am a proud man. But …” He turned the blade from right to left, inspecting it more closely from all angles. “I have no problem acknowledging the work of a fellow master’s hand when I see it. Surely it’s not just a matter of the geological compressor. So tell me, Jagannath. How is that you knew exactly what my synth-crystals required in order to become fully functional?”
Maul moved all at once. Gripping the bank of diagnostic equipment behind him, he leaned back and swung his right foot up, driving it hard into Radique’s chest.
With a sudden grunt, Radique flew backward, crashing into the far wall, the lightsaber spinning out of his hand. Maul caught it in the air and swung it around just as the clawbirds came at him from all sides, dive-bombing his face and throat, their talons and beaks assaulting him.
He whirled, the red blade becoming a blur, cutting the birds down around him as they screamed and cawed and swooped. Within seconds the air was full of black feathers drifting downward. Maul kicked their bodies aside and brought the tip of the blade down to where Radique was sprawled on the floor, head to the side, exposing the throbbing vein in his neck.
“Jagannath,” another voice managed, and from somewhere behind him, Maul heard a soft thud.
Keeping his blade close to Radique’s throat, Maul glanced around where Eogan had fallen. The boy’s once-smooth face was a crosshatched nightmare of cuts and scratches from the birds’ attack, but that wasn’t what had killed him. He lay motionless on the floor, not far from the disassembled droid that could have saved him.
It was over for the boy, Maul saw. Eogan’s eyes were still open, but their whites were already beginning to glaze. His lips were slightly parted, as if he’d still been trying to say something, make some final pronouncement or plea, when the charges had finally gone off in his heart.
“Too bad.” Radique shook his head. “Not that he didn’t deserve it. His father was a worthless waste of skin, and so was he.” His raised his head back up to Maul. “Shall we continue our fight?”
Maul looked down at Eogan’s body one last time. In the end, he felt no obligation to the boy himself; compassion and pity were as alien to him as they’d ever been. Yet Eogan had stood with him to the end, and something about his death needed to be set to rights.
He brought the lightsaber closer to Radique’s throat. “This match is over.”
Radique grinned. “Not yet.”
Maul didn’t see the blaster until it went off in Radique’s hand. It was a pocket model, small enough that Radique must have been able to hide it in his sleeve. The shot caught Maul point-blank in the meat of his right shoulder, ripping through the muscle and knocking him backward into a wild sunburst pattern of his own blood.
“The lightsaber,” Radique said. “Give it back to me. Now.”
Maul tried to move his right arm, flexing his fingers. With the tissue and nerve damage in his shoulder, he was not at all sure that he could get the lightsaber out and cut Radique down before he fired again. At this distance, one shot was all he’d need.
“Suit yourself.” Radique leveled the blaster at his face. “Then I’ll take it off your corpse.”
Maul saw his grip tighten on the weapon, the knuckle constricting visibly behind the trigger guard, and heard a sudden grunt as the boy sprang up from the floor and threw himself at Radique. The arms dealer hadn’t seen him coming from that angle, and Eogan was fast enough to knock him flat, holding him to the floor while he groped for the blaster, twisting it around in his hand.
“No!” Radique snarled, trying to elbow him off and push him away without releasing the blaster. “No! No!”
The boy didn’t bother wasting his breath, nor did he try to take the weapon from Radique. Jaw set, lips clamped tight, his bloody eyes fixed on the task at hand, Eogan simply kept twisting the blaster until Maul heard the bones in Radique’s wrists crack, until the barrel was pointed straight back up at his face—
—and it went off in a single blinding flash.
Radique’s head jerked sideways and disappeared in a cloud of blood and cranial matter that evacuated itself across the wall behind him. His corpse slumped sideways into a sagging pile, the boy pulling himself away from it, then drawing himself upward into a standing position, wiping his hands on his pants. He drew in a low, shuddering breath.
“So now …” He turned to Maul. “I guess we’re even.”
Maul glanced at the boy’s chest, and Eogan shrugged. “In the medbay the first time, when my father and I tried to escape, the droid put a needle in my chest. It must have been enough to deactivate the charges.”
“You knew?” Maul asked.
“I wanted to be sure.” Eogan reached down and picked up the blaster from Radique’s broken and stiffening fingers. “How’s your shoulder?”
Maul said nothing, and the boy tilted his chin upward, glancing abruptly behind him. That was when Maul became aware, suddenly, of another presence standing in the door of the medbay, watching them. Her arrival had eluded him until this very second, but now he recognized it fully.
“Komari Vosa.” The name twisted from his lips like a curse. “You have come.”