Star Wars_ Darth Maul 02_ Shadow Hunter - Michael Reaves [97]
Shock sent waves of jangling sensations up his body, and he had to still himself, force his mind to unclench and accept what he was seeing.
He used the Force to grasp the shiny bit of metal, pulling it out of the rubble, bringing it to his hand.
It was the twisted, melted hilt of a lightsaber, its body scorched almost beyond recognition.
Almost.
In practice duels at the Temple, two Padawans traditionally exchanged salutes prior to their match, raising their lightsaber hilts to their foreheads before igniting the energy coils. Obi-Wan had noted more than once the carefully wound wire grip on Darsha’s weapon, a unique design.
The same design he was looking at now.
The Force confirmed it, as if there were any doubt. Darsha Assant was dead.
Obi-Wan Kenobi stood quietly, looking at the hilt in his hand.
There is no emotion; there is peace.
How he wished it were so.
Lorn stared up at the brightest light he had ever seen.
He felt … brittle, as though he might crack into countless pieces if he tried to move. There was a strange ringing in his ears, an odd smell in his nostrils. His eyes refused to focus. Everything seemed dreamlike. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.
Abruptly the light—which he now realized was the sun—was blotted out by a familiar face.
“Good—you’re awake. How do you feel?”
Lorn moved his jaw experimentally, found that he could speak without too much difficulty. “Like a battle dog’s chew-toy.” He sat up, his vision still blurred, a multitude of aches trying to drag him down. “What happened?”
I-Five didn’t reply for a moment. “You don’t remember our recent … situation?”
Lorn looked around him. He and the droid were on a small setback roof about halfway up the side of a building. The last thing he remembered …
He turned and looked in another direction. Perhaps fifty meters away was the building they had been trapped in by the Sith. He remembered Darsha opening the door, remembered seeing the Sith framed in the doorway—but nothing more than that. He said as much to I-Five.
The droid nodded. “Loss of short-term memory. Not surprising, given the trauma of recent events and the carbon-freezing.” He helped Lorn to his feet. “Can you walk?”
Lorn tested his balance. “I think so.”
“Good. The authorities will no doubt be here soon, but with any luck Tuden Sal will arrive before they do.”
Tuden Sal. For some reason the name triggered more flashes of memory. “You froze us in carbonite.”
I-Five nodded. “The waste-treatment chamber we were in was set up to contain volatile materials for transport. It was simply a matter of readjusting the parameters for—”
It hit him then, like a stun grenade at close range. “Darsha!”
The sunlight, so much brighter than he was accustomed to, faded momentarily back to the grayness of downlevels. I-Five’s mechanical hand gripped his upper arm, steadying him.
Darsha, the Jedi Padawan, the woman with whom he’d shared the last tumultuous forty-eight hours—the woman who’d come to mean, in that short and intense time, more to him than anyone except Jax and I-Five—Darsha was dead.
No. It couldn’t be. The droid and he had managed to cheat certain death; surely there had been some way that she, too, might have.
He looked desperately at I-Five. Saw that the droid knew what was going through his head. And read, somehow, in the other’s metallic, expressionless face, the truth.
They had escaped because she had bought them time—had bought it with her own heart’s blood.
That part came back, too. She was … gone.
“What happened?” he asked dully.
“She managed to stack some of the flammable containers together during her battle and ignited them as she was struck down.”
Struck down.
Lorn was quiet as they made their way to the roof