Han grunted as the lift reached the infirmary level and stopped. Zahara remembered the corridor vividly, how it had been littered with bloated corpses of guards and stormtroopers who had died waiting to get into medbay-dozens of them, sometimes stuck to one another with the fluid they'd been heaving up when they finally collapsed. The smell would have intensified, too, she knew. She expected Han would say something, maybe cover his mouth and stand there a moment taking it all in, the way that she had when she'd first laid eyes on it.
The turbolift stopped and the doors slid open on the hallway. Zahara braced herself for the shock-and looking out, felt a different kind of shock go through her, quick and jolting, making her legs feel heavy and weak at the same time.
All the bodies were gone.
Chapter 21
They Woke Up
Han and Chewie followed Zahara down the corridor without talking. Han in particular didn't like it, nor was he crazy about the way the doctor kept glancing back over her shoulder. She was easy on the eyes, he had to admit, but fear didn't do much for her face. And she was keeping something from him. In his experience women and secrets mixed together to form something only slightly less volatile than an unstable fusion reactor.
"How much farther is it?" he asked.
She didn't answer or even look at him, just held up her hand, meaning either shut up, stop walking, or both. Han turned to glance at Chewie, wondering aloud how much longer they were supposed to put up with this.
It had been a while since they'd been free-weeks, he guessed, since the Imperials had boarded the Millennium Falcon and impounded the ship and her cargo. The shuttle had ferried them here to this barge, just another pair of anonymous smugglers whom the galaxy couldn't care less about.
And that would've been the end of it, if Han hadn't gotten impatient and tried to escape a number of days earlier during a well-choreographed mess hall riot. He'd clocked a prison guard, Chewie had thrown a stormtrooper across the table, and the next thing they knew everything went dark.
Very dark.
Down in the hole, he'd spent most of his time speculating about what was going to happen next-who, if anyone, he and Chewie could rely on for a rescue. A smuggler's friends were few, and those who would actually stick their necks out for the likes of Han were effectively nonexistent. For the first time he had begun to wonder if he and Chewie were destined to spend whatever remained of their lives in some cramped and poorly lit Corrections dungeon.
In front of him, the doctor stopped walking again, turned, and looked through an open hatchway. Though he'd never been up here before, Han figured it was the medbay. He came up alongside her and peered inside, then back at the doctor. From the expression on Zahara's face, Han guessed this wasn't how it had looked when she'd left it.
Every bed was empty.
All the medical equipment, monitors, and medication pumps were active, blinking and twittering to themselves, but the IV lines, tubes, and cords dangled loose, some of them dripping liquid medication in puddles the size of small lakes. Bedsheets and blankets hung in twisted disarray, stained with sweat and blood, dragged across the floor and left there. Han realized the silence was making his shoulders tighten up and his right hand feel particularly lonely where his blaster ought to have been. He made a quick but conscious decision to calm down.
"Busy place," he remarked.
She shook her head. "It was full when I left."
"No offense, Doc, but maybe this sickness is affecting you, too."
"You don't understand," she said, "they were all dead-twenty or thirty of them, guards, inmates, plus the ones lying on the floor, I wouldn't have left them here if there was something I could still do to help."
"Where's your droid?"
"I don't know." She raised her voice. "Waste?"
The 2-1B didn't answer. Han and Chewie walked around her on either side, looking at the rows of empty beds. Chewie growled, and Han murmured, "Yeah, me either." He stepped over a bloody hospital gown that looked as though it had been ripped in half, then looked back up at Zahara. "Say you're right and there's nobody else left alive. How are we going to get out of here?"
"There's the Star Destroyer."
Han was sure that he'd misheard her. "Excuse me?"
"Up above us. Apparently it's a derelict. The barge docked on it to scavenge for parts for the thrusters-that's when everything really started going wrong. I have no idea whether the engines were repaired before the maintenance team died. Otherwise.»
"So this contagious disease came from the Destroyer?"
She nodded.
"Sounds like a good place to keep clear of."
Zahara didn't answer him. She had bent down to study a patchy streak of bloodstains from under one of the beds. Reaching under, she touched something-Han couldn't tell what it was-and dragged it slowly into view.
"What is that?" Han asked, and then he saw.
The hand was human, and had been ripped free by sheer force, the bones of the forearm cracked and severed by some blunt object. Two of the fingers were missing, plucked from the knuckle. Zahara looked at it with no particular emotion evident on her face.
"It belonged to a guard," Zahara said.
"How do you know?"
She pointed out the signet ring. "ICO academy." She dropped it, and it landed with a soft thud.
Behind her, on the other side of that row, Han heard Chewbacca growl.
"Uh, Doc?" Han said. "I think we found your droid."
Zahara looked, and as soon as she did, she realized that some small, dismal part of her had been expecting exactly this outcome, from the moment she'd arrived in solitary and Waste had not been there.
The 2-1B lay in pieces across the floor behind the last of the beds. Its arms, legs, and head had all been systematically dismantled and crushed, its torso beaten so the instrumentation panel flickered listlessly, erratically, beneath the cowl. It was still trying to talk, making garbled noises through its vocabulator.
"Dr. Cody?" it said.
"Waste, what happened?"
"I'm sorry. That test pattern wrote on the owl wall. It was marvelous. Would you like to taste it again?"
"Waste, listen to me," she said, crouching down next to it. "The patients, the bodies, where did they go?"
"Look, Doc," Han said behind her. "Let's get out of here, huh? This whole place…"
"Shh," Zahara said, not looking back, keeping her attention on the droid. "The corpses, Waste," she prompted. "Did someone take them?"
"I'm sorry. There isn't any left. It doesn't walk without three and the two places. I'm sorry. Every reasonable attempt was made." The 2-1B clicked and something sparked and clanked deep inside its lower processors. "We must uphold the sacred oath of. " It stopped, hiccupped, and seemed to regain some sense of what she'd asked it. "An amazing thing. They're miracles, really. Marvelous." And then, with terrible brightness: "They woke up!" There was one last small internal click, although this one sounded more jarring, broken, and when it spoke again its voice sounded thick and sluggish. "They just. eat."
"What?"
The components in the droid's torso flickered again, but it didn't say anything else. "Hey," Zahara said, turning around to Han and Chewbacca, "do either one of you know anything about droids?"
But Han and Chewie were gone.
Chapter 22
Bulkhead
The graffiti scrawled on the inner bulkhead was written in Delphanian, but Trig could guess what it meant. Face Gang. Keep out. Blood toll.
"Will you relax?" Kale said. "Myss is dead. They all are."
It didn't make Trig feel any better. At first all the corpses had frightened him, but there was something worse about not seeing them. They hadn't seen any more dead people since Sartoris had chased them away from the escape pod. Now they were traveling crosswise through the admin level, in accordance with Kale's plan. Trig had initially thought that it was because of the hidden route they were using, down these tight passageways, alongside conduits within the walls, but now he wondered why they hadn't seen a single body.