Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [39]
There was a crack, a sound like stone shattering.
The eyes of Thei’s mother opened. Sparkle sprang to its feet, making a startled noise, then seemingly collapsed again, though there was no sign, in the blurred and confused image, that the cu-pa’s legs had folded.
Sparkle wailed, then sank instantly out of sight.
Thei’s mother rolled away from Thei as if helpless to prevent the motion, toward where Sparkle had lain. She shoved Thei, and the girl’s point of view tumbled, became incoherent.
It steadied again as the child Thei rose. The smell of soup was gone, replaced by another odor—
Luke felt his stomach lurch. It was the moist, enzymatic, decaying smell of a droch nest, a big one. He winced, knowing what had to come next.
The girl’s point of view moved forward. Where the cu-pa and her mother had been, there was now a hole in the cave floor, sign of a collapse. A chittering, skittering noise emerged from the hole, punctuated by shrill screams from the cu-pa, wails of fear from the woman.
IN THE IMAGE, WHICH WAS INCREASINGLY CLEAR, INCREASINGLY REAL, the shrieks of both human and cu-pa grew in volume.
The little Thei’s small hand reached down to pick up the glow rod, to activate it, to shine its light down into the hole.
The portion of the cave floor where Thei’s mother and Sparkle had lain, weak for who knew how many centuries, overburdened by the cupa’s weight, had collapsed into a lower cave. Its floor was some ten meters down.
And it crawled with drochs, a carpet of the tiniest ones, moving lumps the size of fingernails.
Sparkle struggled frantically, its legs clearly broken, and atop its flank was a droch the size of a Wookiee’s spread-fingered hand: a huge one. It turned to look at Thei, its multifaceted eyes evaluative, intelligent.
Thei’s mother stood at the edge of the cave, scrabbling against the wall, trying to climb it. But the stone there was too smooth, and she could get no purchase. Drochs had swarmed up her legs and back. They had already drawn so much strength from her that it was clear her legs were failing, trembling, barely able to support her.
Her eyes connected with Thei’s, and she managed two words: “Run, baby.” Then she toppled over backward and the drochs swarmed over her.
A sharp, high-pitched peal rose from the image, a child’s scream, and drochs by the hundreds or thousands began to climb the wall toward Thei.
Then the image jolted, blurred. Suddenly it was outside, under the stars, with dawn gleaming violet in the east. And the child’s scream continued as the little Thei ran …
“Come back to us. Come back to the present, where you’re safe. Don’t think about the cave. Think about your husband. Think about your baby to come.” Rubbing his chin, Taru sat back on his stool, leaning away from Thei and the geode.
The image in the geode faded, though the golden outline around its circumference lingered.
Ben whistled. He had paled.
Luke knew what he was thinking, what he was feeling. He’d lost his own mother only a few years before. It had been very hard to deal with. What it must be like to be five and go through that … Luke reached out, gave Ben a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.
Then he turned to Taru. “What next?”
“First, I need to confirm something.” From a side table, Taru retrieved a datapad, an older model with a scratched, scuffed case. He brought up a viewer and began scrolling through a set of holocam images. He angled the device so Luke could see its screen, but it showed only ordinary domestic scenes: Thei and the happy dark-skinned man who was clearly her new husband, the husband laboring away beneath an airspeeder, a living room, a kitchen—
“There.” Taru froze the sequence on one of the kitchen images. It showed the husband standing beside a