"With a scar." The taller droid shone the beam of its handlight lower, down to where the wound, the physical memory of a Gamorrean pikestaff, ended below her throat.
"We could do something about that. To make it better."
"Why bother?" Other memories, nearly as unpleasant as those from the pit, flooded her thoughts. Whatever her life might have been before, the time in Jabba's palace had been enough to convince her that beauty was a dangerous thing to possess. It'd been just enough to entice Jabba's sticky hands-and the hands of those underlings who had been his current favorites-but not enough to protect her when the Hutt grew bored with her charms. "I can do without it," she said bitterly.
"Anger," noted the other medical droid. Need lessly-the scent of negative emotion was almost palpable in the warren hole's entrance. "Treatment inadvisability."
"I remember seeing you." The taller droid's low, soothing voice continued. "At Jabba's palace." The handlight beam moved across her face. "You were part of the entertainment."
"I was-" She glanced over her shoulder toward the warren's darkening entrance, to make sure no one was approaching, then turned back toward the droids. "But not now."
"Oh?" An inquiring gaze seemed to move behind the droid's optic receptors. "Then what are you?"
"I ... I don't know... ."
"Name," spoke the shorter of the two droids.
"Designation."
"They called me ... Jabba called me Neelah." She frowned. Something-the absence of memory, rather than anything she could actually recall-told her that wasn't right. That name's a lie, she thought. "But ... that's what they called me... ."
"There's worse names." Voice brightening, the taller droid tried to comfort her. "Consider my own subidentity coding-" Its complicated hand pointed to a data readout on the front of its dark metallic body. "SHS1-B. Most sentient creatures can't even pronounce it. This one's luckier."
"1e-XE." The shorter droid extruded a pill-dispensing module and gently tapped the back of her hand with it.
"Acquaintance; pleasure."
They're working on me, thought Neelah. She knew enough about medical droids-from where?- to be aware of the soothing effects they were designed to provoke in their patients. Anesthetic radiation; she could feel a low-level electromagnetic field locking into sync with the neurons inside her head, drawing out the lulling endorphins... .
"Knock it off," she growled. She shook her head, snapping herself free of the droids' influence. "I don't need that, either. Not now." Neelah drew one hand back in a small but effective fist. "If I have to whack you again, I will."
Like extinguishing a torch, the field abruptly cut out. "As you wish," said SHS1-B. "We're only trying to help."
"You can do that by telling me where he is." The wound across her face stung once more, but she ignored it.
"Who?"
She nodded toward the security hatch. "The bounty hunter. The one whose hiding place this is."
"Dengar?" One of SHS1-B's metallic hands pointed toward the warren opening behind her. "He's back at Jabba's palace."
"Supplies," noted le-XE. "Various."
"That's right." SHS1-B opened a small cargo pod bolted to the side of its body. "He sent us back here with what we required. As you see-antibiotics, metabolic accelerators, sterile gel dressings-"
"Fine." Neelah interrupted the droid's inventory of its contents. "But Dengar-he's still back at the palace?"
SHS1-B's head unit gave a nod. "He said he wanted to find one of Jabba's caches of off-planet edibles. That might take some time, though-the palace has been very badly looted by the Hutt's former employees."
"Mess." le-XE rotated the top dome of its cylinder back and forth. "Disgust."
There wasn't time to consider her decision. "Open the hatch," said Neelah, pointing to the magnetically sealed disk, the coded digits still blinking in its readout panel. "I want to go inside."
"Dengar told us not to let-" The taller of the two droids caught the look in Neelah's eyes. "All right, all right; I'm opening it."
The tunnel on the other side of the hatch descended at close to a forty-five-degree angle. Heading down it, with the droids clunking behind her, Neelah felt a claustrophobic panic crawling along her spine. The darkness and the close, scarcely ventilated air felt like the tunnel through which she'd crawled to escape from Jabba's palace. After what had happened to her poor friend Oola, any risk had seemed preferable to winding up as rancor food.
Though her own death had almost found her, before she had gotten away. The scything blade of a Gamorrean perimeter guard's pikestaff had slashed the raw-edged wound on her face. She'd left the blade buried halfway through the guard's throat; Jabba had always made the mistake of hiring thugs who were bigger than they were fast. She'd only felt fear afterward, as she'd stepped over the widening pool of blood, then ran into the desert.
In this dimly lit space, she was finally able to stand upright in a central chamber. "Where's the other one?" She glanced over her shoulder at the two medical droids as they emerged from the tunnel and clicked back into their normal positions. "The one you're taking care of?"
"Dengar told us-" SHS1-B's voice snapped silent.
"Over here," it said grudgingly. The taller droid led Neelah past disorganized stacks of weapons and ammunition modules, mixed with the discarded wrappings of autothermal field-ration containers. "It's not really suitable-this patient should've been medevac'd to a hospital immediately-but we've done the best we can...
."
Neelah tuned out the droid's words. At the low, rounded entrance to the side chamber, she halted and peered inside. "Is he ... is he awake?" A dim glow filled the space; a black cable ran from a shielded worklight to a fuel-cell power generator in the middle of the main chamber's clutter. "Can he see me?"
"Not with what we gave him." SHSl-B stood just behind her. "I prescribed a five-percent obliviane solution from le-XE's anesthetic stocks. On a constant basis, too; the patient's injuries are unusually severe. That was one of the reasons we had to go back to the palace, to try and find more. But if we didn't, the pain from this kind of trauma could go into a feedback loop and completely burn out th e patient's central nervous system."
She stepped into the chamber, ducking under the doorway. An improvised bed, polyfoam stuffed inside flexible freight sheathing, left only a small space between the unconscious man and the medical droids'
intravenous units and monitoring equipment. She squeezed past the humming machines, dials, and tiny screens ticking with slow pulses of light, and stood looking down at someone whose face she had never seen before.
One of her hands reached to touch him, but stopped a few centimeters away from his brow. He looks worse than I do, thought Neelah. The man's flesh looked as raw as it had when she'd found him the first time, out in the desert; the skin that he had lost in the Sarlacc's digestive tract was replaced now with a transparent membrane, linked to tubes trickling fluids from the wall of machines alongside the bed. "What's this?" She touched the clear substance; it felt cold and slick.
"Sterile nutrient casing." SHS1-B reached out and made a slight adjustment to one of the equipment controls. "It's what we normally use on severe burn victims, when there has been major epidermal loss. When we were in the service of the late Jabba the Hutt, we saw and treated a lot of burns."
"Explosions," said le-XE.
"Just so." SHSl-B lifted part of its carapace in an approximation of a humanoid shrug. "The kind of persons who worked for Jabba-the rougher sort of his employees-they were always blowing themselves up, one way or another."