Star Wars, page 28
Phan-tu Zenn was not aware of the way the galaxy perceived him. As he waited in Docking Bay 26 for the Eventide, he only worried the forces trying to break their worlds were stronger than the ones trying to keep them together.
The guard Vigo, standing nearby, noticed his nervousness and cleared his throat.
“When you pulled the princess out of the sea, did you imagine you’d marry her?”
Phan-tu only shook his head, distracted by the Eventide landing in the docking bay. Then he answered earnestly. “No, I didn’t. Why do you ask?”
“Soon, half of you will belong to E’ronoh. How do we know you will love your people as much as you always have?”
Phan-tu turned to him, shocked at such a brash and direct question, but Vigo had already retreated out of speaking distance, staring evenly at the Prince of Eiram. Phan-tu shook it off as the sickle-shaped Republic vessel landed. He nervously waited for the ramp to lower and for Axel Greylark and Gella Nattai. Trailed by QN-1, the pair stomped out of the ship and onto the tarmac.
“You look terrible,” Phan-tu told his friends.
Gella’s onyx hair was loose over her shoulders, and her beige and brown robes stained with—was that blood? Phan-tu always knew she might throttle Greylark one day, as they’d all taken turns feeling during their desert voyage. Axel, on the other hand, looked freshly showered and had changed clothes on the return trip from his asteroid playground.
Axel loosened the collar of his tunic, and hugged Phan-tu. “I expect a personal welcome every time I come to Eiram.”
Phan-tu shook his head, and Gella waited patiently. Was that a third lightsaber she was holding?
“What did you find?” he asked.
“Proof against the viceroy,” Axel explained.
He would find peace in seeing the viceroy pay for what he’d done. In the meantime, he needed Axel’s help.
“I need a favor,” Phan-tu said to Axel. He hoped that his new friend could sense that it was urgent. Then again, the Jedi likely could as well. He decided to add, “Wedding things.”
“I’ll take the datacard to the summit,” Gella said.
For a moment, her worried gaze lingered on Axel, then Phan-tu. When the pair of them waved at her, she shook off whatever was bothering her and hurried to the palace.
When she was out of earshot, Phan-tu asked, “What did you do?”
In his defense, Axel did not deny it. He scratched the side of his head and winced as he said, “I shoved her into a fighting ring and got her trapped. But I did rescue her.”
“Well, yeah, that should do it.”
The ramp of the ship closed behind them. Axel led Phan-tu inside. It smelled like desert rose incense from E’ronoh, and the earthy-scented oils Greylark slathered on himself. He admired the classic details in the ship, the soft brown leather in the lounge and cockpit seats.
Phan-tu strapped in, much to Axel’s confusion.
“I’m sorry, are we going somewhere?” the Coruscant Prince asked.
“I need you to take me two hundred klicks north of here to Arium Island.”
Axel sat back in his pilot’s seat, turning things back on that he’d just turned off. “For wedding things?”
“Yes,” Phan-tu said.
“Krel’s beard,” Axel muttered. “Do you need me to draw you a diagram for your wedding night?”
“Why do I bother with you, honestly?”
Axel shrugged and laughed at his own humor. “Because you want a favor no questions asked, and you know you’ve come to the right person.”
Phan-tu shut his eyes as the Eventide peeled back into the sky. Even though he’d been to E’ronoh and back, the takeoff still made him dizzy.
As Axel navigated to Arium Island, Phan-tu drummed his fingers on the console to the rhythm of the song blaring through the cockpit from his custom transmitter. When his fear of flying vanished, Axel lowered the music, almost as if he knew.
“We got word your mother is on her way,” Phan-tu said.
Axel acknowledged it with a faint nod.
Phan-tu didn’t know much about one of the chancellors of the Republic, but he understood the pressure Axel felt. His own mother was a queen, after all. Sensing that his friend didn’t want to brush upon the subject, he updated Greylark on the nearly finalized treaty, and the distribution he’d done with Xiri on the day Axel and Gella were gone.
Axel tucked a hand under his head and propped up his feet on the console. “If you want honeymoon destinations, I’m happy to suggest.”
“Perhaps. If—” He wanted to say, If there’s still a wedding after today.
“You’re a terrible liar, Phan-tu Zenn,” Axel said, lowering the thrusters as they approached the small island. “So just tell me why we’re here.”
“I know what poison killed the Kage assassin,” Phan-tu said after a moment of silence.
Axel eased the control down. “I take it that’s why we’re at this island?”
“There’s a research facility here,” Phan-tu said. “I thought it’d been shut down when the war first broke out. But when I saw the body, it looked so familiar. The thylefire scorpions on E’ronoh may not be poisonous, but the ones on Eiram are. The death looked like an extreme reaction to something that should be survivable.”
Axel’s wrist comlink beeped. He looked at it and frowned, ignoring it. “My mother.”
“Blame the salt groves,” Phan-tu said. “They grow a lichen that seems to disrupt some comms.”
“Is it like the happy lichen on E’ronoh?” Axel’s eyes glittered with something dark, something Phan-tu had come to realize was self-destructive.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked the Coruscant Prince. There had been a noticeable change in his reluctant friend since he returned from the asteroid. Though, if he really thought about it, he could trace Axel’s erratic mood swings to his arguments with Gella that night in U’ronoh. “Are you perhaps lamenting something you can’t have?”
“Darling, the only thing I can’t have is jogan fruit.” Axel flashed his famous smile as he busied himself with their landing.
They stationed the Eventide in the bay behind the research facility perched on the tallest hill of the dark-green island surrounded by rough waves. Overhead, storm clouds rolled with the promise of rain.
“Before we go inside,” Greylark said, pointing to the viewport that faced the stark gray compound, “I need you to ask yourself two things. What are you going to do if your hunch is right? And are you going to tell Xiri?”
Phan-tu had asked himself those questions since he saw the dead body. “The Jedi Masters said there are too many things obscuring us from the truth. I don’t want to add to that. I don’t want to start this with Xiri with a lie. Even if that means confronting my mother.”
“We could make a run for it,” Axel said. “I have enough fuel to get us a one-way trip to Coruscant.”
He laughed. Axel Greylark had been right. The man had worn him down like sea glass. “If we have a weapon, I want to destroy it. That’s why I didn’t want the Jedi around. We would have been lying to them all, and it could give credence to Viceroy Ferrol’s mad ravings.”
“Though if it turns out that your mother has been secretly manufacturing a poisonous weapon, they wouldn’t be mad ravings anymore.”
Phan-tu got up. What was the galaxy coming to when Axel Greylark started sounding reasonable?
As they stepped off the Eventide’s loading ramp, Phan-tu found himself asking, “Do you ever want to get married?”
Axel looked taken aback. “By the stars, no. Though I have been engaged three times.”
“Three times!” Phan-tu led the way into the facility. He pressed his palm against the lock scanner, and the door hissed open. The moment they strode in, rain began to fall.
Axel shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal. His little droid warbled something Phan-tu could not understand. “Another time, perhaps.”
Someone waited for them in the wide hall of the research center. The woman had long blue braids twisted in two knots at the top of her head. Her pale-green eyes bounced from Axel to Phan-tu and back, then at her datapad.
“My lord, we were not aware of your visit,” she said, bowing to Phan-tu. “You may tell the queen all samples are about to be destroyed as she ordered. That is, of course, except for the ones archived in the palace. The problem is we’ve had to divert power to the weather shield because of the storm and have had to delay the process.”
“Lord Phan-tu would like to oversee the destruction for himself,” Axel said. Though he was no longer dressed as his “attendant,” he seemed to have no trouble slipping back into the role.
Phan-tu had only ever accompanied his mother to the facility once before, when they were working on developing more advanced water purifiers, but then the war started and, to his understanding, everything had been shut down. Even as they took the lift to the labs in the sublevels, the building felt hollow.
“What have you been doing, Mother?” Phan-tu whispered, opening the door to the lab. His breath came away in tiny, cold clouds.
Everything, it seemed, had already been cleared out. Phan-tu went to the holotable but all information had been scrubbed. He had the sudden urge to break something, but there wasn’t much for him to shatter. He had to think clearly. Axel had asked him what he was prepared to do. He’d simply have to face the queen of Eiram.
“Anything?” Phan-tu asked.
Axel tapped open a small refrigerator, his face bathed in the blue light. QN-1 pulsed red, then mimicked the glow of the room.
Phan-tu came up behind him and found the tray of metal tubes full of marbled white-and-turquoise liquid. At least a dozen of them. His mother had lied to him. Kept him in the dark. Now she was hurrying to erase anything that she might have done.
“Well?” Axel asked. “What are you going to do?”
The poison had to be destroyed and he had to be the one to do it because he would not hesitate. He’d have to deal with the “archived” samples later.
Phan-tu went to the corner of the room where he opened the incinerator chute. He could not leave matters to chance. Grabbing the tray away from Axel, he launched it into the fire. He stepped out of the way as the metal doors shut and there came the roar of flame, warped metal and liquid hissing.
His relief was short-lived when he stepped back and noticed an empty cage, the door still open. The rattle of a stinger filled the sterile room.
Axel turned slowly. “What is that?”
“Don’t. Move.” Phan-tu tried to pinpoint the scorpion’s location, but it scurried too quickly, under the table.
Axel drew his blaster and shot, but it only made the thing screech and hide again. Phan-tu shielded his eyes against the next round of shots, until one landed true. Axel bent to pick up the dead, charred scorpion by a twitching pincer, nearly as long as Xiri’s bane blade. Its carapace was a sun-bleached blue and three times as big as any he had ever seen.
“You never said these were enormous. This is the size of my head! You mean to tell me these are just crawling around your planet filled with poison?”
“The shields do keep them out. Besides, I’ve been—”
Phan-tu heard the scuttle of the critter against metal. He turned around and came face-to-face with a second scorpion that had been nesting on a shelf. Its sharp, ridged pincer rattled and hissed as it got ready to sting. Axel fired and missed.
Phan-tu raised his arm to shield his face from the pincer, but Axel stepped right in from of him, taking the full brunt of the sting as the barb drove through the hollow beneath his clavicle. Axel’s blaster clattered to the ground first. Clutching his chest, he scratched at his throat, wheezing for breath.
“Warning,” an automated voice spoke. “Initiating storm lockdown.”
“No, no, no!” Phan-tu shouted, trying to shoulder Axel’s weight as the lab doors shut.
* * *
—
Axel Greylark was on his way. When he’d left Coruscant with a ship full of gifts on behalf of his mother, Chancellor Greylark, Axel had every intention of making the exhausting trip to the Outer Rim without any unscheduled stops. Instead, he’d stopped along the way. That’s when he’d bumped into an old friend.
Binnot found him at a saloon on Lorta. They hadn’t seen each other in some time, but some bonds were deep enough to survive long absence.
“You’re getting predictable,” the Mirialan said. “You always stop here on your way to Dalna.”
Axel smiled into his drink. He had to shout over the caterwauling of the screeching band. “Maybe I want to be found!”
His friend smiled. “She has a job for you.”
“Maybe she’s the one getting predictable,” Axel said, staring into his glass. “Dare I say, careless, even?”
“Don’t.” Binnot glared at him for a long time before continuing. “She misses you. All members of the Path are dear to her—”
Axel interrupted, “I’m not a member of the Path.”
“Of course. But the Mother never forgets her Children,” Binnot said, taking Axel’s drink and knocking it back. “She wants you to come home.”
But Dalna wasn’t his home. When he’d been at his lowest, it might have been, but no more. Axel Greylark was not a member of the Path of the Open Hand. Even the thought that he’d ever uttered the words “the Force will be free” made him grimace. The only freedom he cared about was his own. How could he ever achieve that if his entire life was bound to who he was. His very name. Greylark.
Once, the Mother had taught him to not simply channel his chaos but to embrace it as a good little soldier. She’d seen his potential since the moment Ney Madiine sent him to the Path to deliver ship parts for the skeletal frame of what would be the Gaze Electric.
Back then, on Dalna, it seemed he’d found the one corner of the galaxy that did not worship the Jedi Knights. That’s why he’d first lingered. But the Mother was why he’d stayed. She reminded him that his pain, that bruise in his heart, was the only reminder that he had survived while his father had died. He needed to press down on it, to remember. When he began to forget, to return to the Axel Greylark that Chancellor Kyong wanted him to be. When he closed his eyes, and he couldn’t conjure his father’s face from memory. When he couldn’t breathe, when he began to settle like dust. He pressed down on that bruise, and he learned to need the pain it brought.
When the Mother realized he would be better suited positioned in Coruscant, at the heart of the Senate, she sent him away. When she needed him—the whispers people divulged to him, the threats he could wield with a smile, or even the skill of his blaster—he returned because if she was his moon, then he was the tide.
At least, that’s how it had been.
Then, on Lorta, on his way to join the Paxion, he told Binnot, “Already have a job.”
“Do you want a job? Or do you want purpose?”
Axel shrugged, but grinned. “Let’s hear it.”
Binnot glanced around the room, but in this nook of space, no one cared about the dealings of strangers. “She needs someone to keep track of some Jedi.”
Axel was beginning to think he might never outrun his past. Who was he without it? “Why would the Mother care what a bunch of Jedi are doing on Eiram?”
Axel Greylark hadn’t been prepared for what he’d truly find.
For the last several years, the queen of Eiram had spent her nights in the old study where every royal before her had strategized before a fight. Portraits of her family covered one wall, while a paper map of Eiram, so old it was disintegrating, was framed on another.
After her son had returned with a very sick Axel Greylark, Queen Adrialla hadn’t been able to sleep. She paced her study, robe kissing her bare feet and long curls spilling over her shoulders. The queen turned away from the remains of the map and toward the intricate holo-rendering of Eiram. She had a list of every delegation attending the wedding and considered what alliances could be struck.
When the doors to her study opened, she turned to find her son. Normally, he brought her a gift—a flower from the garden, pearls from his trips into the canals of the city, or simply an embrace.
Now, as he stalked into the room, she realized she hadn’t been prepared for this confrontation.
“Mother,” he said, a tone her sweet, caring Phan-tu Zenn had never taken with her, or anyone for that matter. There was something in his hands she could not make out in the low light. Not until he tossed it on the holotable. The cylinder rolled until she snatched it up. An empty metal vial.
“You were at the research facility,” she said coolly. She’d known it the moment the Greylark boy had been taken to the medic.
Phan-tu struggled, not for words, but for the courage to ask her the things he was afraid to hear. “What did you do?”
“I was protecting us.”
“You lied to the summit!”
“I was protecting us.” She stepped around the table, took his face in her hands. “E’ronoh had its new ships. Don’t you think the Republic has weapons we don’t know about?”
“And who do we have deals with?” He stepped out of her grasp.
“No one,” she said, knowing it was the truth now. “Not anymore.”
“Mother—”
“You’re hurt I did not tell you.” Queen Adrialla moved toward the large arched window. “I could not tell you. What if you’d been taken from me? It was best to keep you in the shadows. That way you would never have to compromise yourself.”
Phan-tu scoffed, hurt lacing his words. “You did more than keep me in the shadows. You lied to me. I defended you when E’ronoh accused us of this very act.”
