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Tahiri came up on her feet within reach of an inmate, one who’d been at the rear of Furan’s pack a moment earlier, a Bothan whose white fur was dyed blood red in spatter patterns. She gave him no time to react either with fight or flight instincts. She hit him, open-palmed, in the jaw and felt it break under the impact. Unconscious where he stood, he stumbled a step and crashed to the floor.

It ran counter to her instincts to attack someone who had not overtly demonstrated hostile intent. But if Tahiri were to survive, she had to win this fight both by force and intimidation. If she managed to put the Wookiee down, there was the rest of the room to consider. If they were too intimidated to attack, she would survive … and fewer of them would be hurt.

Gaharrag turned, roaring, and came after her. That roar, sounding like an entire jungle’s worth of rage, was supposed to freeze enemies with dread for a critical second. Tahiri grinned. She’d trained so often against Lowbacca, the Wookiee Jedi, that the roar seemed almost welcome.

Training against Lowbacca had other advantages. She knew where a Wookiee’s vulnerable points were. There weren’t many. But with older Wookiees—and Gaharrag was no youngster—the knees were the first to go.

As Gaharrag came within reach of her—his reach, not hers—Tahiri ducked under his grasp and rolled to her left. She slapped out with her arms, anchoring herself in place on her side, and, as Gaharrag’s weight came down on his right leg, she lashed out at it. The kick took him in the side of the knee.

With a gruesome crack, his leg folded sideways. Roaring in pain, Gaharrag toppled toward Tahiri. She rolled out of the way and came up to her feet as he crashed to the flextiles. Then he folded up around his injury, howling.

Tahiri took a couple more steps back, to be out of his reach in case he decided to renew hostilities, and turned to look around. Though some of the other inmates had been in mid-stride forward a moment before, they were all now frozen in place, looking at her.

She pointed at the nearest one, a Sullustan. “You want to play? Come here.” He shook his head.

She gestured toward a far corner of the room. “Get out of my sight.” She turned to the next nearest one, a heavily scarred human who massed roughly three times what she did, almost none of it fat. “You?”

He shook his head, his expression stony.

She gestured. He withdrew.

The others began sidling away without further invitation.

She looked back at her downed opponents. The Bothan was facedown, blood pooling on the floor under his mouth. Furan, the Mon Cal, was clearly unconscious, his eyes closed, his body unmoving; the two inmates who had broken his fall were in slow retreat. Leurm and Gaharrag lay where they’d fallen, both conscious and in pain, the one issuing burbling whimpers, the other offering up little growling moans and curses in the Wookiee tongue.

There was another noise, too, a faint mechanical whine. Tahiri looked up toward the ceiling, seeking its source.

A metal cylinder half as long and wide as a human male had extruded itself from the ceiling. At its bottom end was a blaster barrel—aimed at her.

She jerked into motion but heard the weapon fire before she’d moved a handspan. Then everything was blackness.

Her wrists and ankles encased in bulbous durasteel shackles, with metal cables running from wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle, Tahiri was led by a guard-droid into the office. She had to shuffle; the cable between her ankles was too short to allow her to walk normally. Not that she would have been very energetic in any case. The stun bolt she’d sustained, scaled to bring down Wookiees and Hutts, was still affecting her, leaving her pained and listless even hours later.

The office was large but sparsely furnished. There was a desk with a black nerf-leather office chair on the far side and two visitors’ chairs on the near. The entire left wall was a square viewport looking down on a real exercise yard,