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Moving briskly and in anger, Subaltern S’yito approached the bower and snapped his fists to the opposite shoulders in salute. “Commander, the prisoners are awakening.”

Carr looked over to the center of the yard, where Major Cracken, Captain Page, and some fifty other officers sat on their haunches, their hands secured behind them to wooden stakes that had been driven into the soft ground. Indeed, eyelids were fluttering; heads were nodding and swaying; lips were smacking in thirst. Selvaris’s suns were almost directly overhead, and heat rose from the glaring sand in shimmering waves. Sweat had plastered the prisoners’ soiled clothing to their scrawny bodies. It fell in fat drops from unshaved faces and matted fur.

Carr pushed himself upright and stepped into the unforgiving light, S’yito and a dozen warriors flanking him as he crossed the yard and stood with his hands on his hips in front of Cracken and Page. A priest joined him there, black head to toe with dried blood. Carr refrained from speaking until he was satisfied that the two prisoners were attentive and aware of their circumstance.

“I trust you enjoyed your naps,” he began. “But look how long you’ve slept.” He raised his face to the sky, pressing the inner edge of his right hand to his sloping forehead. “It is already midday.”

He clasped his hands behind him and paced in front of the prisoners. “As soon as our sentinel beetles alerted us to the fact that some of you were outside the walls, I ordered that sensislugs be placed in all dormitories. It is never an agreeable experience to awaken from their sleep-inducing exhalations. The headaches, the nausea, the irritated nasal membranes … But I take some comfort in assuming that each of you luxuriated in pleasant dreams.”

Stopping in front of bearded Page, he allowed some of his anger to show. “There will come a time when even your dreams won’t provide you with escape, and you will look back on your days here as blissful.”

On first learning of the predawn escape, Carr had nearly hung a tkun around his neck and prodded the living garrote to choke off his life. It was because of his failure at Fondor, more than three years earlier, that he had been demoted to the rank of commander and placed in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp at the remote edge of the invasion corridor. Worse, on distant Yuuzhan’tar, his former peers—Nas Choka, Eminence Harrar, Nom Anor—had been escalated and made members of Supreme Overlord Shimrra’s court.

The prospect of further indignity had filled Carr with such self-loathing that he wasn’t sure he could go on. Ultimately, however, he decided that if he was careful—and if he could keep Warmaster Nas Choka from hearing of the escape, or at the very least maintain that it was part of his plan to obtain information on local resistance groups—he might yet be released from the prison fate had fashioned for him.

Toward that end, he had been relieved to learn that the search parties he had dispatched had been partially successful. Two escapees had been killed, and a third had been captured. But a fourth had been whisked offworld by an enemy gunship.

Carr turned to S’yito. “Fetch the prisoner.”

S’yito and two other warriors saluted and rushed off to the front gate. When they returned a moment later, they were dragging behind them a near-naked Bith, who, from the look of him, had fallen victim to a lav peq web. It pleased Carr no end to see expressions of surprised dismay flare on the faces of Page, Cracken, and the rest—even when those expressions were quickly transformed to scowls of hatred for the warriors who dropped the captive unceremoniously onto his face in the sand.

Carr stood over the Bith, whose hairless cranium was scratched and bleeding, and whose arms and legs were shackled.

“This one,” Carr began, “along with three others who failed to survive …” Deliberately, he let his words trail off, if only to observe the effect of the lie on the assembled prisoners. “Well,” he started again,