Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [19]
Leia had thought at the time, Like seeing your world destroyed, and the deaths of everyone you know? She’d dealt with that one by helping Luke and Han escape with the Death Star plans, by setting in motion the events that had blasted Grand Moff Tarkin and the Emperor’s cherished superweapon into stellar dust.
She’d changed the subject, and a few weeks later, Greglik had been killed. She hadn’t thought of him, or that conversation, in years.
But his words came back to her as she heard the soft snick of the door lock unbolting and the rustle of clothing just beyond the line of her sight. She tried in panic to turn her head and couldn’t.
She couldn’t move at all.
Blossom, she thought.
Panic flooded her.
Someone was definitely approaching the divan on which she lay. The heavy velvet robe of state she’d worn to her meeting with Ashgad still wrapped her like a shroud of molded lead. There was a doorway or a long transparisteel panel in the wall opposite her feet, and the end of the trapezoid of blanched sunlight that fell through it touched her knees, heating them uncomfortably under the velvet’s folds. The wall around the doorway was poured permacrete, lead colored and unplastered; beyond she could see a paved terrace and a low permacrete wall and a hugeness of air imbued with hard-edged, sugary light.
Clothing rustled again. She felt the vibration of someone grasping the carved headboard of the divan.
Its legs scraped softly on the permacrete floor as the divan was drawn backward, away from the rectangle of sunlight, into the deeper shadows of the room.
Every atom of Leia’s body screamed and thrashed and struggled to rise, to fight—at least to turn her head. And every atom of the sweetblossom in her system laughed at her and held her still.
The dragging stopped.
Get up, get up, get up!
Dzym came around the head of the divan. He stood gazing down at Leia with his large, utterly colorless eyes—(They were brown on the ship. I know they were brown on the ship.)—and Leia saw that the skin of his throat, where it was revealed by the open neck of his loose gray robe, was purplish brown, shiny, and ever so slightly articulated. Chitenous, not like human skin at all. When he sat on the divan beside her and took her hands in his, she saw between the cuffs of his gloves and those of his robe that his wrists were the same.
He saw she was looking at him and smiled, running a very long, very pointed tongue over sharp brown teeth. While his eyes held hers he turned his shoulder to her, so that she could not see his hands, and drew off his gloves. She felt him lay them over her arm. Then he took her left hand between both of his.
The terrible sinking, the slow ache in her chest were as they had been in her stateroom on the Borealis. A growing, spreading coldness. The seeping away of her breath.
I’m dying, thought Leia, as she had then. She saw the secretary’s thin, dark lips part in what might have been a smile or only a satiated sigh. Ecstatic, as he had been on the ship.
He stood and walked around behind her. Lifting aside her hair, he put his hands to the sides of her neck. Something sliced her that wasn’t pain and wasn’t cold, more terrifying than either.
She thought, Please, no more.
She thought, Han …
She thought, You’d better finish me off, you squalid parasite, because if you don’t, by my father’s hand I swear I’ll break your stinking neck.
She sank into drowning darkness.
Voices cried out through the Force.
Hundreds of them—Luke felt their terror and despair. Dying, he thought.… He thought also, in that first cold lance of panic, that Leia’s was one of them, terrified and alone. But in the clamor he couldn’t be sure.
His hand flashed to the comm panel, calling up the far-off