He entered the lift, turned his back to Dr. Gray, and watched the doors close. He tapped the button on the control panel for the lower level. The lift began to sink, and Jaden with it.
By the time Khedryn reached the recreation room and its sabacc table, he had resolved to stop.
"I'm coming back," he said to Jaden, but feared the static in the connection had disrupted the transmission. On impulse and without looking at them, he took the cards from the single sabacc hand he had left unturned on the table and stuffed them in his pocket. He decided they totaled twenty-three, no matter what they showed. Someone in the facility must have been lucky.
His comlink coughed more static but he caught the tail end of whatever Jaden said.
"… down."
"Say again, Jaden?"
A voice spoke in his ear, and breath that smelled of rotting meat warmed his neck.
"He said he was heading down."
Khedryn whirled, bringing up his blaster. Kell seized the human's right wrist and held the arm out wide while the blaster discharged, putting a smoking hole in the sabacc table. Cards fluttered into the air like freed birds.
Kell's and Khedryn's daen nosi whirled around them, the arms of their personal spiral galaxy. Staring into Khedryn's misaligned eyes, Kell projected, Be still.
The human showed surprising resistance, swinging an overhand left that caught Kell on the temple. The punch might have knocked a human unconscious, but it only surprised Kell.
Frowning, he squeezed Khedryn's wrist hard, felt the bones start to crack.
Khedryn winced with pain, grunting through the wall of his clenched teeth. He tried to twist his cracking wrist free from the vise of Kell's grip but did not have the strength. The human punched Kell in the face once, twice, again, again. Kell absorbed the blows, his nose trickling blood, and squeezed as hard as he could.
The bones of Khedryn's wrist snapped at last and the human shrieked with agony, spraying saliva. Kell did not release his grip, but instead ground the bone shards against one another, the coarse friction a music of pain under the human's flesh.
Khedryn's scream went on and on, ending only when Kell took him by the throat with his free hand and lifted him from his feet. The human hung in his arms, clawing with his one good hand at Kell's grip, trying to draw breath, his legs spasming with the effort.
Kell watched his daen nosi twist around the human's and overwhelm them, strangling Khedryn's possible futures just as Kell strangled his body. He looked into Khedryn's pain-dazed eyes.
Be still, Kell projected, more forcefully, and Khedryn at last went limp. One of the human's eyes focused on Kell, the other off to the left, perhaps seeing the end approach.
Out of habit, Kell opened the slits in his cheeks and his feeders slipped free. The human, lost in his pain and the maze of Kell's mental command, did not appear to notice them until they began to slide up his nostrils.
He kicked feebly and shook his head, fighting against Kell's mental hold. But his struggles proved futile. Kell's feeders knifed their way through the nasal tissue. Khedryn's eyes watered. Blood leaked around the feeders, out the human's nostrils, and into his beard and mouth.
Only then did Ken realize what he was doing, that he felt nothing, that he was risking revelation by surrendering to his appetite prematurely.
The possibility of feeding on the human's soup elicited no longing, no yearning expectation of revelation. He looked at Khedryn's daen nosi, found them uncomplicated entirely, lines of fate that did nothing more than curl back on themselves forever, leading nowhere, offering nothing.
Khedryn Faal did not offer revelation. No one did.
Except Jaden Korr.
Their lines were connected, Kell's and Jaden's. Only Jaden's lines, once enwrapped by Kell's, would map out the road to understanding, would scribe characters of revelation for Ken to read. Only then would Ken have what he had sought for centuries.
Disgusted with himself-and with Khedryn-he pulled back his feeders. They came clear of Khedryn's face with a wet, slurping sound. A flood of blood and snot poured from Khedryn's nose. Kell lowered Khedryn to the floor, loosening his grip on the human's throat.
Attempting to draw in some air, Khedryn instead aspirated some of the blood and snot and began to cough. When he finished, he looked up into Kell's face. The human's eyes watered; a network of popped blood vessels made a circuit board of his eyes; blood and mucus slathered his mustache and beard.
"What are you?" he asked, his voice as coarse as a rasp.
Kell almost answered by reflex, I am a ghost, but stopped himself.
"I am a pilgrim," he said instead.
Khedryn's face screwed into a question and Kell, distracted, drove his fist into the center of it. Khedryn did not make a sound. His nose shattered, blood sprayed, and Kell let him fall on his back to the floor unconscious. He gathered up Khedryn's blaster, searched him for other weapons, found none, stripped him of his comlink, and left him on the floor.
He considered slitting Khedryn's throat with his vibroblade, but realized that he was indifferent to Khedryn Faal. And he would no longer murder with indifference. Perhaps his apathetic butchery had been the reason revelation so long eluded him. He must kill only with his spirit on fire.
And he was burning for Jaden Korr.
And Jaden had headed down.
Kell left Khedryn behind and followed after Jaden. His pilgrimage was nearing its end.
Khedryn swam in pain, drowning, flailing, seeking release…
He awoke on the cold floor of the recreation room, coughing blood. Each cough drove a spike of pain through his nose and nasal cavity. The metallic taste of blood clung to the roof of his mouth, near the back of his throat. He winced with remembered pain and terror, recalling the pointed appendages that had squirmed from his attacker's cheeks and wormed up his nose. He'd been unable to breathe, unable to think, violated.
Nausea seized him. He sat up, vomited blood, snot, and his last meal onto the deck, where it steamed in the cold. Forgetting the details of his injuries, he steadied himself with a hand on the floor and his broken wrist screamed in protest. The pain from bone grinding against bone almost caused him to pass out. He held on to consciousness through sheer force of will.
After the room stopped spinning, after the pain in his wrist grew bearable, he used a chair from the sabacc table to help him to his feet. His shattered nose did not allow air to pass, so his breath wheezed through his mouth, left hanging open like a cargo bay door.
As he rose, he fixed his eyes on a sabacc card that had fallen from the table, staring at the image on it-a grinning clown face in an absurd hat. The Idiot. He almost laughed.
His body ached from the beating. The adrenaline dump and the after-effects of the terror he'd felt left him weak, shaking, barely able to stand. He tried to collect his wits, gather his thoughts, endure the pain in his wrist.
Had the creature been one of the clones? It had seemed a Force-user. He'd felt it slip into his thoughts and command him to be still. The greasy feeling of being mentally violated had been reminiscent of Jaden's use of the mind trick.
Why had it left him alive?
He did not know and did not care. It was enough that he was alive.
He reached for his comlink, thinking to warn Jaden, and found it gone. The creature had taken it. He looked around the room for his blaster, saw that it, too, was missing.
The creature seemed concerned only that Khedryn be unarmed and unable to warn Jaden. He had no particular interest in Khedryn, apparently. Khedryn understood the message-Leave and it's all over. He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It had seemed exactly so since he had first met Jaden Korr.
"One problem after another," he murmured.