still, mouths partway open, eyes glassy. To Soldier they looked like corpses who did not yet realize they were dead.
The possibility of the children dying made his legs go weak.
“Grace,” he called. “Blessing.”
Neither moved. Neither seemed to hear him.
What had happened? He’d been gone only minutes.
Maker sat cross-legged on the floor, rocking, his mouth open and uttering guttural howls at intervals. His fingernails had scratched bloody grooves down the length of his forearm and he continued to worry at them even as his blood puddled on the floor. Repulsed, Soldier went to him and grabbed his hands.
“Stop it,” Soldier said to him, but Maker seemed not to hear, and his hands continued to try for his wounds.
Scar’s high-pitched screams pulled Soldier around. She lay on the ground near one of the overturned stasis chambers, writhing, the exposed areas of her blotchy skin visibly pulsing, as if thousands of insects crawled beneath her epidermis and sought exit through her pores.
“Help me!” she cried in a spray of spit, her face distorted by the crawling. “Help me!”
But no one moved to help her. Seer was too lost in her trance, still praising Mother, and the others were too lost in their pain. Soldier recovered himself, ran to Scar, crouched beside her, and pulled her to him. She was thin, her long dark hair lank on her drawn face. He tried to keep the revulsion from his face as her skin shifted and bulged under his touch.
“Help me, Soldier!”
“It’s the sickness,” Soldier said, feeling helpless. “It has to be. The sickness.”
The sickness afflicted all of them—all of them but him—but he’d never seen the symptoms so bad, never seen them come on so quickly. The doctors at the facility had altered the midi-chlorians in their blood, and it seemed their altered blood was responding to the same phenomenon that had given them a surge in power. The sickness was surging, too. Soldier had to get the medicine.
“I’ll be right back,” he said to Scar, and she answered him with a scream. The bulges in her face grew larger, darkened, formed pustules, distorting her expression, then burst in a spray of pink fluid that spattered Soldier’s face and clothes.
“What is happening to me?” she screamed.
His mind turned to the children. They were sick, too. He looked over at Grace, Blessing, and Gift, but they looked all right.
Soldier stood, his legs weak under him. He saw the chest they’d used to bring the remaining medicine from the moon. It was near the far wall and Two-Blade stood near it, his eyes feral, his hands on his lightsaber hilts. Two-Blade did not seem to be in pain, at least not yet. He murmured something incomprehensible over the screams and shifted on his feet, as though preparing for a fight.
Soldier headed for the chest of meds, slowly, hands held up to show harmlessness. Two-Blade’s eyes hardened, his muscles a coiled spring. Sweat beaded his brow. His mouth was a hard line in the nest of his beard. His green eyes fixed on Soldier, but he blinked often and seemed not to see clearly. His pupils were fully dilated, black holes that saw something other than the real world. As Soldier watched, slight palpitations under the skin of Two-Blade’s face foretold a fate like Scar’s.
“I need the meds,” Soldier said, nodding at the chest behind Two-Blade.
“Soldier,” Two-Blade hissed.
Soldier tried to step around him but Two-Blade blocked his way. His chest rose and fell like a bellows. Soldier swallowed a flash of irritation. The screams and moans of the surviving clones put him on edge. Seer’s imprecations to Mother were a pebble in the boot of his mind.
“Get out of my way,” Soldier said. He pushed past Two-Blade and knelt before the chest.
The sizzle of igniting lightsabers sounded from behind him and instinct took over. He rolled to his left, bounded to his feet, took his own blade in hand, and ignited it. The red line sparked and hissed, a mirror of his mood. Anger kindled in him and the surge of power affecting them all lit it into a bonfire. Force lightning shot from his fingers, coiled around his hilt, his blade. He reveled in the newfound intensity of his power.
Two-Blade, his reddish-orange blades jutting from the hilts he held in both fists, snarled.
“It always had to end this way, Soldier. You aren’t one of us.”
“You’re not thinking clearly,” Soldier said, but his heart wasn’t in the protest. He wanted to fight, wanted to kill.
Two-Blade snarled and lunged