His left leg was terribly injured. Corrsk looked down at his mangled scales and crushed muscles with anger. Still, he felt no pain. He let out a snarl as he saw that the Rock Dragon had escaped through the closing blast doors. The ineffective guards shot their clumsy weapons again, but to no avail.
Corrsk clenched his clawed hands. He desperately needed to kill something, someone, and he wanted it to be one of the Wookiees.
The smell of Lowbacca’s blood was in his nostrils now. The Wookiees had injured him.
Corrsk would not stop until he was able to crush Lowbacca with his bare hands.
19
Punishing hot light poured like a river of fire down from the sky, and Ryloth’s surface radiated it upward again in shimmering waves.
The sweltering day-heat was intense, rolling off the dark rocks and the half-melted sands. Every breath was like gulping a mouthful of fire.
Ryloth’s unmoving sun burned a bright hole in the sky and reflected from every object on the surface.
Far from the sheer cliffs, chasms split open like old scabs to reveal running streams of molten lava that burned orange, yellow, and white.
Raynar did his best to keep up with Jaina as they trudged between cracks, leapt across open spaces like ovens, and hid from the fire in any shadows they could find. “Now I know—what a nerf sausage—on a hot plate—feels like,” he panted.
Jaina couldn’t answer. Her skin was already red and raw, her hands and feet blistered. The temperate zone seemed impossibly far away across the broiling landscape. Jaina didn’t know how they would ever get there, or if Lowie had even made it safely to the Rock Dragon.
With sunken cheeks, red-rimmed eyes, and dry, salt-encrusted skin, Raynar looked completely desiccated. His hair and his jumpsuit would have been drenched with sweat, had the searing heat not evaporated all perspiration the I moment it appeared.
“Remember how comfortable the tunnels were?” Raynar said as they worked their way along the mountainside, trying to climb higher to safety, to the temperate zone. “The shade, the walls that were cool to the touch … the shadows, the air you could breathe.”
Jaina trudged ahead. “Sure. And Diversity Alliance soldiers hungry for our blood…”
“Well, that was one drawback,” Raynar admitted.
Jaina climbed up a rockface, along a cleft in the stones that provided some shade. She slipped briefly and, reaching out to steady herself, touched an outcropping exposed to the direct sunlight.
Jaina hissed in pain and snatched her fingers away. Red burn-welts sprouted on her skin.
“Working the mines is starting to sound like a vacation to me,” she admitted. “We don’t have any water out here, no food or protection….”
Raynar spoke in a whisper so he wouldn’t have to inhale much of the hot air. “Maybe Lowie can still find us. You think he made it out in the Rock Dragon? You think Jacen is safe? And Tenel Ka?”
Jaina continued climbing upward, grimly seeking a cave or cleft that would offer them temporary shelter from the unending day’s fire.
“We’ve had other plans that were a bit more successful,” she said.
“I need to rest … just cool off for a little while,” Raynar said.
Spying a crevice, Jaina ignited her lightsaber and hacked away at it, chopping out huge glassy lumps of stone. Raynar pulled the rocks aside to deepen the small alcove, to deepen the shadows.
Jaina’s lips were chapped and dry. Her tongue felt thick and her throat was like sandpaper.
She was desperate for a drink, any kind of drink.
Dazzled by the brilliant sunlight, she fixed her eyes on the rock, daring to hope that she might accidentally break through to a natural spring in the mountainside.
The lightsaber sizzled as Jaina worked, shedding its eerie violet light into the alcove. Raynar helped until Jaina finally gave up, panting and shuddering with exhaustion. “Rest here—in shade—for a while,” she gasped. Together, they crawled into their tiny shelter.
Raynar sighed. “It’ll never get dark on this side of the planet. It always stays hot. Are you sure we can’t just go back and surrender?”
“Absolutely not.” Jaina fixed him with the most valiant stare she could muster. “We’re Jedi Knights, Raynar. We’ll think of something.” She hunkered down against the rock wall of the new alcove. Even here in the shade, deeper in the rock, fingers of the throbbing heat reached toward them … but at least it was a few degrees cooler. “We’ll wait here until we can figure out what to do.”
Raynar sat next to her in silence.
Where the Diversity Alliance tunnels opened to the glaring sun of Ryloth, Hovrak stopped and paced. Many Twi’lek prisoners and defeated clan leaders had gone out this doorway, exiled to die in the Bright Lands.
But no one ever went out there voluntarily.
He had followed the stench of humans all the way here from where he had picked it up in the lower tunnels.
One of his lieutenants spoke. “Are you certain the humans came here, Adjutant Advisor?”
“Of course,” Hovrak growled. “Can’t you smell them?”
The scent of prey filled his nostrils, though blood still clogged his nose from where Tenel Ka had punched him the day before. Even injured, the wolfman could easily detect the stink of humans. They had fled out into the heat. They were fools to think they could survive in that environment.
One of the Talz guards spoke up next, his voice squeaking through the tiny mouth at the end of his proboscis. “They must have burned to death by now.”
Hovrak bared his fangs and shook his furred head. “Others have made such erroneous assumptions but I will not be one of them. I won’t be satisfied until I see their charred and dehydrated corpses frying in the sun.”
The Adjutant Advisor gave an order and turned to stare out into the oppressive sunlight as his assistants scurried to follow his instructions.
Before long, several Diversity Alliance workers rushed to the end of the tunnel, carrying bulky, heat-reflective suits. The silver polymer material was shiny, like a mirror, to deflect the blazing sunlight.
Hovrak grabbed a suit and studied its configuration to make sure it would fit his body type.
Taking care not to knock loose any of his precious medals, he tugged the suit on over his formal uniform and directed four of his guards to do the same.
Hovrak sealed his transparisteel helmet and stared through its mirrorized coating. Now he could walk and see comfortably, even out in the harshest glare. The suit’s recirculating climate-control systems kept him cool, and he listened to the hiss of cool air as he breathed.
The four guards, now suited up, gathered beside him, anxious to begin stalking. They wanted to kill the escaped humans before the searing heat did the job for them.
The landscape out there was hellish: fire and lava, rock and desert.
The silvery suits would protect them against far greater extremes than the weakling humans would be able to endure.
“Let’s go,” Hovrak said through the comm unit in his helmet. “No one rests until our task is finished.” The Adjutant Advisor stepped out into the sizzling daylight, looking for any shadowed path that Jaina and Raynar might have chosen to walk. The two humans could not have moved very fast across the treacherous landscape, picking their way upward; they could not have gone far.
Hovrak shouldered his weapon, hoping that its circuits wouldn’t be scrambled by the unaccustomed inhospitable temperatures. Of course, if the blaster refused to fire, he could simply attack the young humans with his hands. The rocks felt soft and plastic under his heavy-booted feet. He grasped outcroppings with his gloves to help himself along, and easily picked up the trail. The humans hadn’t had many options.
A couple of the Diversity Alliance guards appeared uneasy, less confident than he was in the protective abilities of their suits.