following on his heels. A smell hung in the air, thick and familiar but as yet indefinable—chemicals? No, it was sweeter than that, almost cloying, like a cooking smell.
He walked over to the window and glanced down through the falling snow at the academy below. From here it looked like a ruin, abandoned and forgotten. The occasional faint glimmers of light that burned in the windows of one of the buildings—some kind of dorm, he assumed—only made it look more hollow somehow, a place that had fallen into the possession of ghosts.
You’re getting jumpy
, he scolded himself.
Cut it out
.
He turned and walked back toward a stack of machinery half buried in shadow. Something crunched under his boot, and he paused to look at it.
Flowers.
Squatting, the bounty hunter set the metal case aside—it was still cuffed to his wrist—and reached into his pocket for a glow rod. He switched it on, shining it down in front of him. The crunching had come from broken glass, test tubes or vessels that Dranok guessed had held the different species, before they’d all been dumped or thrown unceremoniously across the floor.
He opened the metal case and looked at his own flower, the alleged Murakami orchid itself, comparing it with all of those scattered overthe cobblestones. The black-market spice dealer who’d sold it to him had guaranteed that it was a genuine article, the rarest in the galaxy, stolen from a secret Republic bio-lab on Endor. The dealer had even provided him documented proof, complex chemical and gas spectroscopy equations that Dranok had pretended to understand.
But now, looking at these other flowers on the floor—rejects all—Dranok found at least two that looked exactly like it.
His breath caught in his throat.
He’d been duped, and now—
“Dranok.”
The bounty hunter froze at the sound of his own name, the voice turning his breath to dry ice in his lungs. Up ahead, standing between him and the exit, a tall, dark-cloaked figure gazed back at him from the other side of a long stone table. Dranok realized that he was looking into the face of a man with long, refined features, the aquiline nose, raked brow, and prominent cheekbones stretched out until they were almost a caricature of arrogance. Thick gray hair, a strange silvery blue color, swept back away from his forehead. The figure extended one long-fingered hand, gesturing him forward, and at the same moment Dranok saw the man’s eyes flicker and pulse as if reflecting the burst of some far-off explosion.
“Lord Scabrous.”
“Did you bring the orchid?”
“I—”
“Where is it?”
A bluff, then—the bounty hunter realized that it was his only way out. He had bluffed his way out of tight spots before. This would be no different.
“This is it,” he said with manufactured brusqueness, holding up the open case to show its contents. “The Murakami orchid, as you requested.”
When Darth Scabrous didn’t move to take it—in fact, he didn’t seem to move at all—Dranok unlocked the chain from his wrist, set the case down in front of the Sith Lord, and stepped back. Still, Scabrousmade no indication of coming around to examine the flower. His eyes remained locked on Dranok.
“Did you come alone?”
“My associate is waiting outside,” Dranok said. “Just in case.”
“Your associate.”
“That’s right.”
“And you have brought no one else with you?”
Dranok scowled a little. “Who else would I have brought?”
Scabrous apparently didn’t judge the question worthy of reply. The bounty hunter frowned, genuinely flummoxed now, his confusion only tightening the clenched fist of anxiety in his guts. “Enough questions,” he shot back, hoping the tone of impatience might help mask the fear. “I delivered the orchid as we agreed. Now where’s my money?”
Scabrous still didn’t make any move to respond. The moment stretched, and in the pursuant silence Dranok realized that he smelled something else gathering around
Janwillem van de Wetering