Attempting to draw in some air, Khedryn instead aspirated some of the blood and snot and began to cough. When he finished, he looked up into Kell's face. The human's eyes watered; a network of popped blood vessels made a circuit board of his eyes; blood and mucus slathered his mustache and beard.

"What are you?" he asked, his voice as coarse as a rasp.

Kell almost answered by reflex, I am a ghost, but stopped himself.

"I am a pilgrim," he said instead.

Khedryn's face screwed into a question and Kell, distracted, drove his fist into the center of it. Khedryn did not make a sound. His nose shattered, blood sprayed, and Kell let him fall on his back to the floor unconscious. He gathered up Khedryn's blaster, searched him for other weapons, found none, stripped him of his comlink, and left him on the floor.

He considered slitting Khedryn's throat with his vibroblade, but realized that he was indifferent to Khedryn Faal. And he would no longer murder with indifference. Perhaps his apathetic butchery had been the reason revelation so long eluded him. He must kill only with his spirit on fire.

And he was burning for Jaden Korr.

And Jaden had headed down.

Kell left Khedryn behind and followed after Jaden. His pilgrimage was nearing its end.

Khedryn swam in pain, drowning, flailing, seeking release…

He awoke on the cold floor of the recreation room, coughing blood. Each cough drove a spike of pain through his nose and nasal cavity. The metallic taste of blood clung to the roof of his mouth, near the back of his throat. He winced with remembered pain and terror, recalling the pointed appendages that had squirmed from his attacker's cheeks and wormed up his nose. He'd been unable to breathe, unable to think, violated.

Nausea seized him. He sat up, vomited blood, snot, and his last meal onto the deck, where it steamed in the cold. Forgetting the details of his injuries, he steadied himself with a hand on the floor and his broken wrist screamed in protest. The pain from bone grinding against bone almost caused him to pass out. He held on to consciousness through sheer force of will.

After the room stopped spinning, after the pain in his wrist grew bearable, he used a chair from the sabacc table to help him to his feet. His shattered nose did not allow air to pass, so his breath wheezed through his mouth, left hanging open like a cargo bay door.

As he rose, he fixed his eyes on a sabacc card that had fallen from the table, staring at the image on it-a grinning clown face in an absurd hat. The Idiot. He almost laughed.

His body ached from the beating. The adrenaline dump and the after-effects of the terror he'd felt left him weak, shaking, barely able to stand. He tried to collect his wits, gather his thoughts, endure the pain in his wrist.

Had the creature been one of the clones? It had seemed a Force-user. He'd felt it slip into his thoughts and command him to be still. The greasy feeling of being mentally violated had been reminiscent of Jaden's use of the mind trick.

Why had it left him alive?

He did not know and did not care. It was enough that he was alive.

He reached for his comlink, thinking to warn Jaden, and found it gone. The creature had taken it. He looked around the room for his blaster, saw that it, too, was missing.

The creature seemed concerned only that Khedryn be unarmed and unable to warn Jaden. He had no particular interest in Khedryn, apparently. Khedryn understood the message-Leave and it's all over. He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It had seemed exactly so since he had first met Jaden Korr.

"One problem after another," he murmured.

Dizziness overcame him. His legs gave way and he sagged gingerly into a chair at the sabacc table, struck with the fact that the last people to sit there were all dead.

He daubed his nose, wincing at the pain, and slowly drummed his fingers on the table. He thought of Marr, of Relin, of Jaden. All were putting their lives in danger for… what?

For something bigger than themselves, he decided. For something they believed in.

What did Khedryn believe in?

His drumming fingers waited for an answer. He decided they could wait a long time.

He flashed on his last conversation with Marr. His friend had said that helping the Jedi was the right thing. He'd been certain of it.

Khedryn stopped drumming his fingers.

He could not always run.

"Kriffin' son of a murglak broke my kriffin' nose."

He stood, fought down the dizziness, and headed back the way he had come. His wrist throbbed with agony. His nose leaked blood and felt as if it had been smashed with a hammer. But he was through running.

He remembered the way to the lift, but he had a stop to make on the way.

Jaden felt light-headed as the lift sank into the moon. He grounded himself in the Force while the hum of the lift's motors proclaimed its rapid descent. By the time it slowed, he figured he had descended a hundred meters or more.

The doors parted, the aged mechanism squeaking loud enough to make him wince. Air ten degrees warmer than that in the surface installation flowed into the lift compartment. It bore the whiff of things dead a long while.

He stepped out and into a circular room with an overturned desk and chair near the single door that provided egress. Dried blood, brown and crusted, stained the walls.

It was not a spray pattern, Jaden realized. Someone had slathered it on the walls as if it were paint. The shapes and patterns made no sense to him, their meaning plain only to the mad.

The lift doors closed behind him. He activated the comlink.

"Khedryn, do you read?"

In the silence, his voice sounded as if he were speaking through a voice amplifier. Water dripped somewhere behind the walls, the rhythm that of the distress beacon.

The comlink exploded in static.

"Khedryn, do you read?"

More static. He was too far underground. He muted the comlink and walked into the room. He realized with horror that he was walking on clumps of hair, lots of it. Human hair. Brown, black, blond, gray. It was scattered all over the room, like fallen snow.

He knelt down and took some in his palm. Ragged pieces of the root clung to the clumps, little brown bits of dried scalp that made Jaden's mouth go dry. The hair had been ripped out in handfuls.

Dread settled on Jaden like a funeral shroud. The ceiling suddenly seemed too low, the light too dim, the whole of the complex as oppressive as a tomb. Whatever had happened in the facility had been not merely violent, but macabre.

A large brown stain covered the floor near the desk, as if someone had bled out there. Other than the unsettling scattering of hair, he saw no sign of any bodies.

Licking his lips, he put his hand on the door control-not a hatch but an ordinary door-and it slid open. The stink of old death-a stale, sickly sweet stench-wafted through, stronger than before. He wondered when he would encounter the bodies. He knew it was only a matter of time.

A wide, curving corridor stretched in either direction. From the angle of the arc, he surmised that the corridor formed a circle and came back on itself.

Putting his free hand on his blaster, as tense as a coiled spring, he went left. Blaster marks scored the white duracrete walls here and there. Blood spattered the walls. Together, the scorches and blood looked like some ancient, indecipherable script, pictographs of violence. Again, he found stray pieces of stormtrooper armor, souvenirs of the slaughter that had occurred. Again he found no bodies.

At intervals he encountered double doors along the inner wall. All were closed and would have required a card reader to pass, but the readers had been destroyed by either blasterfire or lightsaber.