Free Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber

make sure—”
    The spear tip pushed harder.
    Insisting.
    Hurting now.
    Zo started down the landing ramp.
    Fresh kills or not, she was immediately grateful for the boots and skins, the heavy fur pelt piled around her shoulders and around her neck. The snow wasn’t deep—in many places its crust was firm enough that they actually walked on top of it—but the wind was surgical, a precision instrument with needles for teeth, and it found even the tiniest exposed places on her skin, attacking them. In minutes her face was a numb mask, her cheeks heavy and lifeless.
    She fixed her stare on the black crooked spine of peaks on the horizon. They were closer now, and any initial resemblance to mountains had long since vanished. The ruins and escarpments had a crudely mechanized appearance, and the resulting sprawl looked as if the massive skeleton of some ancient machine—city-sized, planet-sized—had been half buried here, abandoned while it was still alive enough to dig itself out.
    In the midst of it, like some pivot upon which it all turned: a great black tower.
    It rose up crookedly, a sloping monolithic pile constructed of sleek black rock, the grave marker of some long-dead deity. Even from here, its height dwarfed the half-ruined complex below: a good pilot could have parked a long-range freighter atop its flat roof. Red lights swarmed and shimmered inside its upper levels, their erratic patterns flooding the cloud of snowfall in a deep arterial glow. It was like watching a digitized readout of a brain going insane and dying.
    The crunch of Tulkh’s footsteps faltered and slowed to a halt, and Zo lowered her gaze to what lay immediately before them. Twenty meters ahead, the ground dipped and a kind of crude gateway rose up,webbed with clots of ice. She was aware of a silence here, the wind shearing abruptly away, leaving them in a pocket of utter quiet. Zo took a breath and held it, then finally spoke aloud the words that had been haunting her since she’d first emerged from the bounty hunter’s ship.
    “This is a Sith academy.”
    The Whiphid marched on, the unspoken silence of his confirmation hitting her even harder than she had anticipated.
    “What planet is this?”
    He ignored her.
    “Why are we here?”
    He skulked past her to the gate. Despite his size and imposing stature, there was a hesitation to his approach, as if he didn’t know quite what to expect beyond this point.
    “It’s the orchid, isn’t it?”
    Tulkh turned back to her, spear in hand. She saw knots of ice dangling from his hair. His eyes were lost in shadow.
    “You were right to be afraid,” she said. “Whatever’s inside there is worse than you can possibly imagine. I’m only trying to warn you,” she went on. “You know I’m a Jedi. I can feel—”
    Something happened then, some truncation of motion, as if time itself had been tricked, cheated out of its rightful due. Before she knew it, an icicle of pain, a single radial spike, jagged upward into the underside of her chin, and when Zo opened her eyes she saw Tulkh standing directly in front of her, the sharp part of the spear thrust upward into her flesh, biting in, drawing blood. He had moved faster than she’d ever imagined, faster even than her enhanced powers of perception could quite register.
    Zo pulled back, freeing herself. “What do the Sith want with the Murakami orchid?”
    Tulkh blinked at her once, slowly, the blink of a creature that preferred to spend its time alone.
    “You can tell me now,” she said, “or you can kill me. But I’m letting you know, I’m not going another step without knowing what’swaiting for me in there.” She thought about everything she’d heard of the academies, hives of darkness so black and toxic that they blazed with their own special kind of evil, unimaginable to those who’d never witnessed it firsthand. Even those darkest of places seemed clean compared with the rancid feeling of contamination wafting out from in front of