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The commander snapped a series of orders, and a squad of heavy infantry lumbered toward the archway, their head-to-toe overlapping plates of vonduun crab armor gleaming in the slimelight. He glanced back at Nom Anor. “We will be in soon enough. Remain calm, Executor.”

“Space your calm, too!”

“You do seem a bit … mm, overwrought,” Ch’Gang Hool murmured. His mouth-tentacles twitched. “One might wonder if you felt, in some way … mmm, responsible for this?”

Nom Anor opened his mouth, took a breath, started to say something, changed his mind, started to say something else—then closed it again. The Shaper Lord’s mouth-tentacles braided themselves into a shape subtly obscene. Nom Anor looked away. He was about one second away from ripping those ridiculous tentacles right off that smug smirking bureaucrat’s face, and eating them—

A few strides down the causeway, among the milling crowd of priests and warriors, he saw Vergere. She met his eye, and with a twitch of her head motioned for him to follow. Oh, he’d follow all right, he thought as he excused himself and paced after her. He had some choice words for that little creature—

She moved well downslope into the blue-white sunlight, and stopped with one hand holding a leafy vertical branch of the road trees. Nom Anor was already snarling by the time he reached her. “Do you know what your ‘student’ has done? That sniveling traitor has betrayed us—and it’s all your fault!”

“Perhaps it is.” Her fluting voice was cheerful as ever. “But let us be clear on the issue of fault, eh, Executor? What is important is not whose fault this truly is; all that matters is whom Tsavong Lah will choose to blame for it, yes?”

Nom Anor pulled fleshless lips back over needle-sharp teeth. He could imagine all too well what Tsavong Lah would do, once word of this disaster reached his fanatic ears. “And why do you come to me now?”

“Because you should take me with you.”

He went absolutely still. “Take you with me?” he asked with studied blankness.

“You’ll need me. I saved the life of Luke Skywalker’s wife. With me at your side, the New Republic might not simply shoot you on sight.”

Nom Anor admitted silently that she might have a point, but his face revealed nothing. “You think I have—some sort of escape plan?”

“Executor, please,” Vergere chided knowingly. “You always have an escape plan. This time, you have something even better: a secret coralcraft, grown below the Well.”

“I—I—I have nothing of the sort!” How could she possibly know? A concealed accessway on the far side of the Well—that would open only to him—led to the coralcraft he’d bribed a shaper to seed months ago, during the earliest stage of the Galactic Senate’s conversion into the Well of the World Brain. “You cannot possibly think—”

“Executor, again: please. Are you the only one who can bribe a shaper? And all the tending and care of your secret coralcraft, while it matured—”

“Hsst! Enough!” He glanced back over his shoulder up the causeway. Though the commander had turned away to observe the battle, Ch’Gang Hool still watched Nom Anor expectantly. To leave now would be too suspicious—he might never make it.

Vergere seemed somehow to read his mind. “Executor, if we do not flee now, there will be no flight at all. There will be no ship.” She stood on tiptoe to lean close to him, and whispered, “Jacen Solo will steal it.”

The surface of the slime pool closes over Jacen Solo like lips, warm as blood.

He does not feel it.

Knotted ropes of tentacles stretch wide his arms, bind close his legs, circle garrote-tight his throat. Their coarsely scaled hide rasps blood through his skin, blood that trails him in a fractal tree-spiral gelled motionless in the slime. Tentacles twist him and turn him and bend him, pulling him deeper through the slime that fluoresces yellow-gold and scarlet around him, blazing colors that shift with his motion and surge from contact with the heat of his body.

He does not see them.

At the deepest depths of the slime pool, the tentacles hold him face-up, his back to a ring of jagged