forward with blades low. Soldier bounded back, slapped both blades aside with his own lightsaber, and raised his blade for a killing strike. Before he did, Two-Blade’s roar of rage turned to a groan of pain and he fell to the floor, grasping his head, writhing, screaming. His blades deactivated and his flesh crawled, bulged, rippled.
Soldier stood over him, blade in hand, violence still fresh in his mind. It would be so easy to cut Two-Blade down, so easy. He raised his lightsaber.…
Scar’s screams of pain reached a crescendo, popped the balloon of his rage, and brought him back to himself. He recalled his purpose. With difficulty, he lowered his blade and deactivated it. He was sweating. The anger boiled in him, simmering—It always had to end this way—but he controlled it.
He took a deep, calming breath and spared a glance back at Scar. He was too late. Open sores on her face and arms leaked fluid, ragged craters erupting pus.
“Soldier,” she mouthed, and raised one of her hands for a moment before it fell slack to her side. Her body twitched once, twice, then lay still. Her vacant, dead eyes, turned bloodred by burst capillaries, stared accusations at Soldier.
Soldier cursed and kicked Two-Blade in the ribs. Soldier did not know why he cared. Except for the children, the rest of the clones cared little for him. But he could not deny that he did have feelings for them.
And so he would do what he always did—take care of them.
He knelt before the case that contained the hypos. Thirty doses of the meds remained. They had expected the doses to last them weeks, maybe longer, but whatever they’d flown through had exacted a price for their increased connection to the Force—it had accelerated their illness. Presumably it would also speed the onset of the madness that inevitably came with the sickness. As bodies failed, so too would minds. Two-Blade was already almost gone. Hunter, too. A Jedi had come to the moon, killed one of the clones, but the rest had escaped to … To what?
While the screams and groans of the sick resounded off the walls, Soldier measured out doses with steady hands. He watched his skin as he worked, afraid that he would see the same crawling mounds he had seen on Scar, but to his relief, he saw nothing. The doctors at the facility had made him well, it seemed.
When he’d prepared enough injections, he turned and threw himself back into the storm of their agony, moving from one to another, injecting each with the medicine the doctors had created to keep them alive and sane. He started with the children, then Two-Blade, then Hunter. Each calmed moments after the injection, eyelids heavy, breathing slow and regular. He put a hand on Grace’s head, smoothed her red hair, did the same with Hunter. Hunter was soaked with sweat. She shivered at his touch, but her skin, at least, no longer crawled.
“Where is Alpha?” Hunter asked, her eyes lucid for at least the moment. She held Grace and Blessing—both fathered by Alpha—in her arms. The girls had closed their eyes. They appeared to be sleeping, but their pinched faces and tiny whimpers bespoke continuing pain. The children always suffered the most from the illness. Most of the clones’ offspring had died young over the years.
“Alpha is dead,” Soldier said. “The Jedi killed him. You know that, Hunter.”
She stared at him a long moment, as if not comprehending.
“It should have been you,” she said at last, her speech slurred, and closed her eyes.
The words ablated harmlessly on the emotional armor in which Soldier usually sheathed himself. He’d heard them or something similar often enough over the years. He was different from the others. They knew it and he knew it. He was the best of them, the final specimen created by the doctors, and he showed no signs of the illness that afflicted the rest. Only the children treated him as one of them.
“Do you need water?” Soldier asked her.
“No,” she said, her voice soft, as if she had forgotten her harsh words from a moment before.
“Rest, then. I will get you blankets for the children.”
He started to stand but her hand closed on his forearm, her grip a fevered vise. “Why is this happening, Soldier?”
He did not trust himself to answer, but he didn’t have to. She answered for him.
“Mother is testing her faithful,” she said. She smiled and nodded distantly. “We will pass this test, as we