Star Wars - Gathering Shadows - The Origin of the Black Curs - Unpublished Read Free

you yell real loud like that.”
    “What were you thinking about?” Harkness asked.
    “Just stuff,” said Jai. “Did it get warmer in here?”
    “No,” he said. “Listen—mind if I ask you something?”
    “Yeah?”
    “You don’t care about your team. You don’t seem to care about the Rebellion anymore.”
    “I do care about the Rebellion. It’s the New Republic I hate.”
    “And you say you can’t remember if you have any family.”
    “Are you taking notes or something?”
    “I’m just curious as to what made you resist interrogation.”
    “Look, just because I don’t like what happened to the Alliance doesn’t mean I’m willing to turn on it.”
    “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “What did you focus on?”
    “I focused on not telling anybody anything.”
    Harkness gave a terse sigh. “Sarge—”
    “What is your problem?”
    “You are not listening to me.” Harkness slowed his voice down. “In that moment… in the interrogation room… when the drugs had worn off… and you tried to feel sorry for your interrogators… and you tried to hyperventilate yourself into a trance… and you realized that it didn’t matter what you did, because those Imperials were living out their lifelong dream of making an Infiltrator scream, and they were having so much fun they might never stop…”
    Jai stared at where she thought Dirk’s face probably was.
    “Yeah,” she said.
    “What was it that you focused on? What image came to your mind?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Then think! Come on! Was it a person?”
    “Yeah, it…” Jai stopped herself. “Yeah!” she said. “It was my little sister.”
    Harkness shifted around. “You’re somebody’s older sister?”
    “You sound like you think that’s funny.”
    “No, no. I can just imagine you ordering some six-year-old around.”
    “Well, she’s a little older than that. She’s a major in Special Ops.”
    “So she gets to order you around.”
    “She wouldn’t dare.”
    “Major Raventhorn,” said Harkness. “That name sounds familiar.”
    “’Course it does,” she said.
    “When’s the last time you saw her?”
    “I don’t know.” Jai’s brain clouded up as easily as it had cleared, and she felt a throbbing tightness all the way from her shoulders up into the back of her head. “I thought I hadn’t seen her since she was about twelve. But I can see her with an adult’s face… l thought I just talked to her a few months ago… or last week…”
    “Keep thinking,” said Harkness.
    “What about you?”
    “Me?”
    “No, the other beat-up merc across the room. How come you didn’t talk?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Keep thinking,” Jai said, with more than a trace of sarcasm.
    “No, really, I can’t… but I feel like I knew a minute ago…”
    “I’d love to know what they did with our heads,” Jai said irritably. She found that she could lift her arms now, and kept trying to massage the tension out of her shoulders with one hand. After a while she began to notice that the pain wasn’t just in the muscles but in the skin, and her hand came away wet. She forgot all about the tension and felt the burning all across her shoulders and her back.
    Suddenly Harkness yelled, “Dirk!”
    Jai felt her whole body tighten. If she could have sprung to her feet, she would have. “Who? What? Who?”
    “Dirk! That’s my first name!”
    Jai’s body relaxed, and her limbs shook from the tension release. “Will you quit screaming out like that?”
    “Dirk Harkness,” he said. “I’m Dirk Harkness.”
    “Dirk Harkness?” Jai finally said, primarily to get him to stop chanting it. “What kind of name is that? You don’t sound like a Dirk.”
    “So don’t call me Dirk.” He made some shuffling noises again; Jai imagined that he was lying on his side now.
    “Fine, Harkness,” she said. “If you remember your first name, then tell me what kept you from talking.”
    Dirk was silent.
    “Well?”
    “I think,” he