Aftermath: Empire's End (Star Wars: Aftermath #3)(120)

Blast it all to hell.

She turns away from the computer and raises the pistol. Brentin asks: “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” she responds. It’s an honest answer.

“You’re helping Sloane.”

“Maybe. No. I don’t know. You stay here.”

“I’m getting somewhere—I’ve closed one of the baffles, I just need to slice through the defenses to get the others.”

“Hurry.”

Norra marches off toward the sound of Sloane’s cries.

Ahead is a long hallway. It descends at an easy angle. Red lights around black metal cast everything in a diabolical glow. Pillars line the side like dark, gleaming guards. Beyond, in the walls, she spies the empty, implacable faces of droids sealed into the walls. It reminds her of the prison ship on Kashyyyk, and she fails to repress a shudder.

Where does this passage go? What awaits at the end? No sign of anything or anyone here. It’s eerily quiet. She’s about to yell for Sloane—

But then she sees her. The woman is alone on the floor, unconscious, her hair splayed out around her like a spreading puddle. Behind her is a massive pit from which emits a hellish glow. The borehole, she thinks.

Sloane lifts her head, casting a bleary eye to her.

“Run,” Sloane says, her voice mushy.

The warning comes a moment too late.

Someone steps out from behind one of the pillars. Norra cries out, raising her blaster—but the heel of the man’s hand catches her right under the chin, driving up under Norra’s jaw so hard her whole head rattles. The dark behind her eyes explodes with light and the man’s other hand catches her blaster, twisting it out of her grip handily, so handily in fact that she’s shamed by how easily she lost her one and only weapon. She cries out and tries to flee, but—

The blaster cracks her in the head and as she staggers forward onto her hands and knees, she looks over her shoulder to see him raise the weapon. This man in naval whites. This man in his red cape. Gallius Rax. The architect behind everything, if Sloane is to be believed.

Then his gaze flits beyond her—

The sound of running footsteps echoes.

Brentin.

Her husband leaps, slamming into Rax hard. The blaster goes off, but the shot goes wide, smacking into the ceiling above her head. Brentin gets underneath the blaster, wrenching it upward. The two men struggle. It all seems to happen in slow motion. Norra works to stand, dizzied by the blow—but she moves, has to move, even though it feels like her brain isn’t connected to anything, like her feet are stuck in mud. She throws her body against the wall behind Rax, and she reaches for him—

Even as he kicks out with a boot, knocking Brentin back—

Even as Rax raises the blaster—

Even as she hears herself screaming—

Even as her hands close on his throat from behind, as the blaster goes off, as Brentin staggers back, as a black burning hole blooms in the center of her husband’s chest like a dark flower opening to the sun—

Brentin falls backward, clutching at his breastbone.

Rax spins around to meet Norra face-to-face. His visage is a rictus of raw, blistering rage—it is the fury of a fiend trapped in the corner and desperate to claw its way free. He pumps a knee into her stomach. She doubles over but urges herself forward, slamming him into the wall. The pistol swings and cracks her across the cheek and she feels something there give way—a disk in her neck slipping as misery radiates in every direction across her body. She wants to stop. She wants to roll over and give up and plead—Let me have a moment with my husband, just one, before you kill me. But that mote of desperation is swallowed in a wave of rage all her own. Norra roars as she grabs the man behind the leg and yanks out—he slams backward and the two of them fall.

The blaster is between them. All hands on it. They struggle. He wrenches her sideways. Her head crashes into the wall, concussed. Her vision starts to slip like a broken gear. In her blurred vision, she sees Brentin there by the wall, holding his chest, staring up at her. His mouth forms words that she can’t hear, but she can see.

I love you.

“I love you too,” she says, the words garbled and messy.

She cries out as she summons every molecule of strength she can muster, turning the blaster centimeter by dreadful centimeter toward Rax’s chest.

Her finger finds the trigger—

His head slams hard into hers. The blaster goes off. Rax cries out and throws her off him. He pulls himself up as the whole place shakes and shudders and bangs. The man clutches at his shoulder, blood staining his whites. “You shot me,” he says, incredulous.

Norra, whimpering, pulls herself toward her husband. His name slips from her lips in a babbled mantra, Brentin, Brentin, Brentin, and she crawls over to him and cradles his head, telling him that he’ll be okay, that she’ll get him help, that she’s survived death so many times she knows he can survive, too. But his eyes are dead as coins and his mouth is slack. Norra cries out. She cradles him. She crumples against him.

I just want to sleep. I just want to be with him again. I’m so sorry, Brentin. So sorry I didn’t believe you. So sorry I…

Rax stumbles away from her, down the hall, holding his injured shoulder. Norra watches him escape through blurry vision.

No. Come back. I’m not done with you yet…