Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [115]
“Then I’m dead. Just like your father.” A wet cough wracked Thyne. “You want to know if I had him killed, yes?”
Corran shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t believe whatever you told me and it wouldn’t bring him back.” And since you really want to torture me with it, I won’t give you the satisfaction of thinking I do want to know.
Thyne grimaced against the pain that contracted his muscles. “Let me tell you this. Loor knows about you. He knew about you before he forced me to betray you. I sold you out this time, but someone else sold you out before me.”
Corran’s jaw dropped open. Tycho! But Wedge said he’d died on Noquivzor so I couldn’t have seen him here. Someone else? Who?
Thyne forced a laugh. “There, I will haunt you.”
“No, you’ll just be dead and you’ll die knowing you’ve warned me about an enemy I didn’t know I had.” Corran patted the man on the shoulder, pulling his hand back before Thyne could bite weakly at it. “You’ve just saved my life, Zekka Thyne, and that’s something we’ll both remember until death takes us.”
Thyne’s head lolled to the left and his body slackened. Corran stood and saw Mirax comforting Inyri. He started to open his mouth to say something, but Mirax caught his eye and shook her head to forestall his comment. He closed his mouth again realizing that the question he would have asked, though simple, probably would not have a simple answer. Nor an answer I really have a chance of understanding.
He didn’t even know if he should thank Inyri for saving his life by shooting her lover. Corran admitted to himself that he’d not have thought she’d do that for all the stars in the galaxy. Her reaction toward him had been hostile from the moment they’d met on Kessel. Corran clearly remembered Inyri dispassionately handing Thyne a blaster so Thyne could kill him at the Headquarters. Later she had seemed to resent his helping her escape from the Imperials after her speeder bike had been shot down.
Every clue she’d given him suggested that if Thyne had been slow in shooting him, she’d have gladly done the job rather speedily.
Inyri eased herself free of Mirax’s embrace and sat back against the airspeeder’s hull. The front end of the vehicle hid Thyne’s body from her view though a thin rivulet of blood was meandering toward a drain in the center of the hangar floor. She hid her face in her hands, sobbed silently a bit, then wiped away her tears.
When she looked over at him, despite the red rimming her eyes, she looked eerily like her sister, Lujayne. “You want to know why.”
Corran nodded. He’d heard enough preambles to confessions to know that she needed to talk more than he wanted to have her actions explained. “If you want to tell me.”
“Coming from Kessel, it marks you. No one respects you because they assume you’re a criminal. When you tell them you aren’t they just assume you’re a liar. Even the prisoners don’t respect you—they all come from worlds that have more going for them than spice mines and a prison. If you’re born there you can never escape Kessel.”
Corran felt a tight knot forming in his stomach. When he’d first met Lujayne Forge he’d prejudged her because of where she had come from. Everything Inyri said was true, but her sister hadn’t let that stop her. Lujayne had confronted Corran with his bias and made him see what he was doing. That experience with Lujayne had changed him. It had made him ready to look beyond where Inyri came from, but she’d prejudged and rejected him.
“Thyne helped me escape Kessel. He respected me. He made others respect me. He made me respect me. Yet in all the time I was with him I knew that he was not the sort of person I had been raised to respect. He was the antithesis of everything my parents had taught me was good and right in the galaxy.”
Mirax nodded. “But he respected you and valued you in a way you never thought you’d find.”
“Exactly.