"I am all right," he said to Khedryn. "Thank you."
Khedryn smiled. "That is a thank-you I'll accept."
Wincing, Jaden jerked the feeders out of his nose and dropped them on the Anzat's body. Nausea seized him and he vomited onto the floor. Khedryn put a hand on his shoulder and nodded at the Anzat's corpse.
"That thing got to me before it got you. What is it?"
Jaden wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and straightened on shaky legs.
"An Anzat. I think he followed us from Fhost, but I'm not sure."
"You sure you're all right?"
Jaden took in the ruin of Khedryn's face.
"I should be asking that of you."
Khedryn took Jaden's arm and helped support him. "I've been beaten worse than this, Jedi." He looked down into Mother, at the slain clone and the grizzly contents of her gullet.
"What happened here? Are those the doctors and stormies? Stang."
"Yes," Jaden said, and deliberately did not look into Mother. "I'll explain the rest on the way out. We must hurry. There are more surviving clones, Khedryn. They want a ship and we cannot allow that. We need to get back to Flotsam. Now."
Khedryn cleared his throat, spit blood and phlegm onto the floor. "If they take my ship anywhere, I will hunt them across the 'verse."
"Yes," Jaden said, and activated his purple-bladed saber. He could barely hold it in his wounded hand. "We will."
"Where did you get that lightsaber?" Khedryn asked.
"Long story."
Together they hurried back through the facility, both holding weapons built decades earlier-Khedryn a stormtrooper-issued blaster, Jaden a lightsaber he'd built as a boy. They retraced their steps past one scene of slaughter to another. The facility seemed less ominous to Jaden now, but it still felt haunted by ghosts.
Jaden told Khedryn what he'd learned from the clone: that other clones had survived on the moon for decades, that they wanted desperately to get off, that they were mad and dangerous.
"Did they have any children?"
Khedryn's question slowed Jaden's steps. He had not considered that. "I… don't know."
By the time they neared the West Entry, Jaden had recovered some of his strength. He did not have the time or capacity to interpret all he'd learned-about the facility and himself-but he would, later.
"Did you get the answer you wanted?" Khedryn asked as he pulled up his helmet and sealed the neck ring.
"I don't know," Jaden admitted. He deactivated his lightsaber and started to pull up his helmet, realized that his suit was so damaged from combat with the clone that sealing it was pointless.
Seeing that, Khedryn said, "You will be cold."
"I'll abide," Jaden said.
Relin was going to die, was going to add another failure to the long line of failures that composed his life as a Jedi. The rage went out of him as if drained through a hole in his heel. Despair replaced it, black and empty.
Saes held out a hand, and his lightsaber flew from the deck to his palm. He ignited it. In its hum, Relin heard his death pronounced.
"You understand now, at the end," Saes said. He removed the remains of his mask and regarded Relin with yellow eyes that looked almost sympathetic. "That pleases me."
Relin dwelled in the bottomless void of his despondence. And in the void, in its endlessness, he saw his purpose fulfilled.
He drew on the Lignan, fed its power into the hole at his core. The emptiness in him was insatiable, drinking the power as fast as he could pull it in, yet never getting filled.
His body and mind swelled with the influx. The ore dotting the deck flared in answer to his desires. Sneering, Saes drew on the Lignan himself.
Relin gripped Saes's throat in his mental grasp. Saes tried to swat away the Force choke with his own power. His eyes widened when he realized he could not. He gasped, staggered. Relin sat up, thought of Drev, and squeezed.
Saes stumbled forward, lightsaber held high. Filled with power, Relin used the Force to pull Saes's lightsaber from his fist. It leapt through the air and landed in Relin's hand. He rose to his knees and Saes fell to his before Relin, still clutching his throat.
Relin had nothing more to say to his former Padawan. He drove Saes's own lightsaber into and through his chest. Saes fell face-first to the deck without a sound.
Relin stared at the red lightsaber blade in his hand. He had resolved that he would not fight with a Jedi weapon and he had not. He had fought with a Sith weapon and it had been appropriate.
His body felt charged, so filled with the dark side of the Force that he no longer felt human. He had transcended. He sagged to the floor among the flaring ore. The metal of the deck felt cold under him. Blood poured out of his face, his nose. Chunks of Lignan dug into his flesh. With Saes dead, he suddenly felt his injuries, and agony accompanied each breath.
But the pain of his body paled in comparison with the pain of his spirit.
He shouted, trying to purge the pain and despair in a wail that shook the crossbeams of the cargo bay. But both were infinite. He could have shouted for eternity and found no relief.
Still, he refused to fail again.
Saes had called his rage days old, but it was more than that. It was a conflagration, the sum total of all the repressed emotion of Relin's life compressed into a tiny singularity of self-consuming anger and despair from which nothing could escape, not even him.
And that, he realized, was the unspoken, unacknowledged pith of the dark side-it consumed all who turned to it. Yet he did not turn away. He wanted nothing more than to be consumed, to be reduced to oblivion, annihilated. He welcomed it.
But he would not go alone.
He continued to draw in the power of the Lignan, to feed it into the hole he had become, to let it amplify his hate and despair even as he died. Power burned in him. He was vaguely conscious of the remaining crystals around him flaring, a brief flash of life before he consumed their power and turned them dull and dead.
Unbound by concern for his continuing survival, he took in as much energy as he could control. Spirals of energy formed around his body. He felt his torso growing lighter, the flesh becoming diaphanous, transformed by power to become one with the energy.
Barely able to feel his own flesh, he nevertheless reached out for his dead Padawan. His fingers closed over Saes's forearm and slid along until he held his former Padawan's hand.
Tears flowed as energy gathered, turned on itself, grew stronger. Coils of blue power, like long lines of Force lightning, shot out from his flesh, roiled in the air above him, striking the ceiling and the storage containers, penetrating the ship.
He drew in more power, more, until the entire cargo bay was lit with a network of twisting, jagged lines of energy, a circulatory system through which flowed his rage. The lines spread from the cargo bay and through the ship like veins, like an enormous garrote that would strangle Harbinger to death. Relin's mind became one with them. Power and hate pulsed along them with each beat of his heart. They were an extension of him and he felt them as they squirmed through the ship, wrapping it in their net, from the rear section, along the spin, to the forward section with the black scar of Drev's grave gouged into its face.
He was ready, then.
He knew he was lost, and yet he was found.
"Laugh even when you die," he whispered.
He squeezed Saes's cold, scaled hand, imagined Drev's face, and laughed for joy as the power crescendoed and began to consume Harbinger in fire.
Marr perceived a light through his eyelids. He struggled to open them but they felt as if they weighed a kilo. Finally able to pry them open, he winced against the glare blazing through Junker's cockpit viewport.