KotOR: Grey - Chapter 7

Breathing in the red dust of the settlement's streets, Atton wondered if his old friend would warn his mark

Doubted it. Didn't matter anyway. They would both die.

She's one of us.

He pondered that thought from a distance. If V'loren Coltro was one of Revan's elite assassins, she'd be … difficult. If she and Tremen joined forces they might actually be dangerous.

His pulse accelerated with anticipation.

She would know poisons. She would most certainly know pain. Her mind would be a tangled mess of emotion, distraction and lies.

Had he been capable of it, Atton might have actually enjoyed the prospect.

As it was, he merely flipped one of the local coins to the ragged child who was selling skewers of unidentifiable meat. Too distracted to wait for his change, he chewed the stringy mess as he walked, grease dripping unheeded onto his chest.

He paid no attention to the child's gasp of joy, but only allowed the exhausted masses to swirl past him, jostling him, directing his footsteps as he sorted through his plans.

The urge to simply charge in and take down as many of the vipers as he could before being cut down was nearly overwhelming. But he had a job to do. He had a purpose. At least until it was over.

None of it would mean anything unless the heart was cut out of the place, unless they were made to bleed until the sands of Ulicia were wet, packed hard and red.

He wanted to kill tonight, though.

His skin was beginning to itch with memory. It was unacceptable.

Atton lifted his eyes at last to survey where the ebb and flow of the crowd had taken him. He registered the hopeless, dull stares of women and children who stood listlessly in the shadows of makeshift shelters, the soft melody of weeping that wove its way through the air. A man's drunken growl, followed by the skin-on-skin crack of violence, raised a single sharp cry that echoed between rows of tumbledown shanties. He turned toward it.

It would be easy to forget, tonight. For a while.

He settled into a low, relaxed stance, centring his weight over his hips and the balls of his feet. He pushed out with a predator's senses, taking in the swell of humanity around him, the dry smoke-filled air. Garbage piled high against tin and ferrocrete walls, the smell making his eyes water.

"Ah, the beautiful stench of decay and desperate living."

He spun and stumbled, nearly fell. He knew that voice. Barely recognized it as his own.

A slow chill crept up his spine, but he shook it off with a curse, clamping down on his mind, on his memory.

"That's a lesson I refuse to learn! If I can help them, I will."

It could all be washed way in blood.

It had to be.

He scanned the dirty roadways, the alleys, for any sign of someone who could die for him today. He was starting to feel frantic, hunted. He was starting to feel. It had to stop.

It had to.

There. Huddled between to ramshackle shelters, a bundle of rotting cloth and torn flesh. A woman. Old? Ill. The bundle shuddered with each wracking cough. She would do. Pale hands twisted around themselves in the cooling night air, scarred with red scabs and dark lesions that criss-crossed her skin. She was the lucky one, to die today.

Atton moved closer, light on the balls of his feet.

The woman didn't even sense him as he got closer. Didn't sense death at all.

He studied her in her suffering.

"If someone suffers, then they are worth our time!"

Atton's breath caught in his throat. No.

The old woman turned at the sound, and he saw that she wasn't so old after all. Sick, but not so bad. Just hungry. And weak. And cold.

She had looked up at him with those dark eyes, the familiar half-grin that made him feel she was sharing a joke with him. Only him.

"Oh, you don't look so bad," she'd said, turning back to the man who believed he was breathing his last in the squalor of Nar Shaddaa. "Here, why don't you let me take a look? Maybe I can help."

The pain that lanced through his chest drove him to his knees, eyes wide, seeing nothing but a soft, sensual smile that lit up the night sky. He reached for the woman, who screamed and shrank away from him, trapped in her alley.

If he could just reach her. If he could just …

"There's a lot of people in the galaxy who need help, Bish. Maybe we should just focus on what we're here to do, huh?"

She'd laid a hand on his arm as he moved to walk away, to turn his back on the things she was doing.

"Anyone in trouble deserves our help, if we are capable of it."

He watched her hand on his jacket, willing himself not to tremble at the touch. He met her eyes.

The woman was weeping now, scrabbling backwards across piles of garbage, stagnant water and rot. The man who crawled towards her snarled and spat, pounded the ground until the skin on his knuckles split and bled into the filth.

Even on his knees he was faster than she. He reached for her. Touched her. Sobbed as white heat burned through his core, scalding his veins.

Nononono! Not this! I can't …

The woman closed her eyes and waited for the pain, for death. Waited to die, cowering in the garbage of Ulicia.

By the time her breath settled into steady, high-pitched gasps, the air around her was silent. Shaking and gagging on her own fear, she managed to open her eyes, even if she preferred not to see the face of death before it took her down.

But he was gone.

She lowered her face into her perfect, unblemished hands and sobbed.