A grudge is a powerful thing. Once a man is possessed by it, he will never be free of it. Though it may fade from his mind, it will never leave. I cannot, not until balance is achieved. He will not die peacefully until he has his revenge. To allow a scorned man to live is to invite death.

~ Tutor annals

***

To say it was through a series of unfortunate events that had brought the girl named Vega to Coruscant would be a gross understatement. Her whole life had been a series of unfortunate of events. However, looking at the last year, things had been decidedly more unfortunate than ever before. As she lay, feeling her consciousness slowly slipping away from her, she recalled the months gone by. Captured by Hutt drug lords, she had become a slave to their every whim, only to be cast out into some godless desert for her errant behaviour.

After stumbling through the wastelands and finally finding an inhabited town, she had been strung up, accused of murders she did not commit. It was with an acute awareness of the irony of her actions that she had laid waste to the town of Ben’ma, before returning to the desert from whence she had came, once more in search of civilization. Fortune shone brightly upon her, as she managed to stow away on board a ship, escaping the harsh wind and sand – only to find herself leaping right into the fire.

Collapsed from exhaustion, she awoke to find the ship in flames. The two man crew was now fifty percent smaller, and the entire vessel was filled with the intoxicating smoke of the drugs that it had been carrying. With the ships controls no longer functioning, the pair were plucked from their doom by the staff of the Astral Astoria. However, at first welcomed, the girl and her co-passenger, known only as Joe, were quickly marked as criminals, a logical assumption to make given their ships cargo.

In spite of her protests, the girl was deported from the ship to Coruscant, where she would be sentenced for her crimes – while Joe, on the other hand, managed to escape into the vast halls of the Astoria and remains there to this day. It was there, on Coruscant, that she found herself dredging through these memories.

At first she had been confused as to why the prison staff had drugged and bound her in her cell, but after pouring over her thoughts for almost a week she had come to realize the truth. Although she had arrived here only on charges of drug running, she would leave with many more convictions. Years ago, she had been associated with hit men and mercenaries. While she did not make herself a particularly well known name as an assassin, she had killed enough people to cause a blip on the radar of the local law enforcement. To say the least, her criminal record was substantial and warranted more than just a smack on the wrist.

And so she lay. Occasionally a guard would walk past her cell and peer through the small, barred window in the door, commenting on how they found it baffling to think that she was a mass-murdering, drug-dealing sociopath. One thing they didn’t even entertain a thought of, however, was that fact that this sociopath had, over her years as a mass-murdering drug-dealer, acquired a good many friends.

She was, as much them, entirely unaware of the events that would soon transpire. Events outside of all of their control. Events which, in actual fact, would only worsen the situation at hand, thus adding to the already monstrous list of exceedingly unfortunate events surrounding the life of the girl named Vega.

The cleaning staff of the Coruscant City Prison had a twisted kind of logic. It went something like this. The people who ended up locked in the cells within the prison itself were some how lower than human, sub-human if you will. As such, they did not possess the same basic human rights as those of a normal human level. This was the rationale behind the staffs lack of work ethic. They did not think that that inmates were deserving of a clean environment to live in, or at least that’s what they’d have the rest of the world think, so long as they could shirk off their responsibilities.

The consequence of all of this means that instead of looking like an upstanding hall of law enforcement, the lobby of the prison was as grimy and unsanitary as a slum. The fluorescent tube lights over head flickered on and off constantly, causing a great deal of confusion for the myriad number of insects that was inexorably drawn to their harsh glow. The two tone buzz, of both the insects and the bulbs to which they were drawn, would have been enough to drive a man mad.

There were certain sacrifices however, they said (whomever the mysterious they were, in this instance), that must be made. The prison could have had a floor so clean you could see your reflection in it, but the supervisors argued that there were better things money could be spent on than pine air fresheners, and rightly so. The money that wasn’t poured into the decorum of the prison made sure that the prison proper functioned like an extremely well-oiled machine. So well-oiled, in fact, that there hadn’t been a riot or an escape in over two hundred years.

Stopping just inside of the main doorway, the thin man considered this fact and, if only for a split-second, felt guilty.



“Still awake?” he inquired, gently kindling the fire, eyes never leaving the entrancing flames. Somewhere to his right, beyond the reach of the glow, someone or something made a small sound. An affirmative. The man by the fire nodded and, laying the kindle stick down by his side, carefully withdrew a packet of death sticks. The pack looked old and dog-eared. Half a dozen little white sticks sat inside. The man plucked out two, and looked halfway over his shoulder.

“Do you smoke?” he asked idly, not really listening for an answer. He lit both sticks on the fire, the flames licking his skin as he withdrew his hand. Holding one death stick between his fore and middle finger, he twisted his hand over to look at the underside, where the fire had met his flesh. It looked a little red, but he felt nothing of the pain. He smiled sadly.

“You want me to light it as well?” he shook his head and sighed the kind patronizing sigh that women sigh when they want to get their own way. Again dipping into the fire he ignited the tip of the second stick. Sitting back into a crouch, he got slowly to his feet and took the time to brush the grit from his starch-pressed trousers before approaching his silent companion.

The light from the two smokes wasn’t much, but it was enough. It lit the smoke as it rolled from between the mans lips. It lit his pale face and set his eyes on fire. Lines at their edges spoke of times when it would have been common to see happiness in those eyes. Perhaps that time hadn’t been so long ago, but there was none of that now. Not as he looked down into the bloodied face before him.

Taking a long drag of his death stick, he pressed the tip of the second between the lips of the girl. For a fleeting moment he wondered if she was old enough to smoke, and then realized the idiocy of such a thought. Such legislations and laws didn’t apply to their type. Perhaps that had once been someone who would have cared enough to chide her for throwing her life away to death sticks, but that someone had long since gone. At least, as far as he could see. Perhaps he should have been that someone.

A sense of self-revulsion and guilt threatened to push to the forefront of his mind but he denied it the pleasure of gaining control of him, drawing the second stick away in side of himself and casting it into the fire. It went up in a puff of gases that disappearance on the breeze as quickly as they had come.

“Still with me?” he asked, to which she nodded in reply.. It’s a small wonder. Then again, she had been with him before, had she not? When he had lay at the gates life, teetering on the brink, she had seized his hand and drawn him back. Hadn’t she? Yes. There had been a time when he had questioned whether it was true, or whether he had simply imagined it, but he now knew the truth. For a time, his life had been in her hands and she had held as if it were the most delicate thing in the world. Yes, she had been his someone, and now it was his turn to be hers.

“You were good back there, kid,” he continued, not entirely sure he she was still listening. “I owe you one. More than one even,” he laughed, though it was far from a cheerful sound. He removed the cloth on the girl’s brow and his face twisted, involuntarily, in distaste. Not at the blood that stained it, but at what had been beneath it. While she had still had the strength, the girl had told him that she had taken a blade to the face. He was no doctor, by any means, but he doubted if she would ever be able to see well from that eye again. Yet, he thought, she was lucky to have that.

The fight which they had found themselves a part of had left men with far worse. No less than ten lay dead, and many more injured. It had been one of those fights that, although beginning with a handful of people, had escalated in a matter of minutes to full brawl. How it was that the girl had come to be a part of it, he did not know. She was not a part of the gang that had jumped him, demanding payment for his trespassing on their land. Thinking back, he tried to place the first time when he had laid eyes on her, and drew a blank. As ludicrous as it sounded, it was as though she had appeared out of thin air.

“We’ll get that patched up in the morning,” he murmured, dabbing gently at the now congealed blood around her eye. “Best we stay put here, where its nice and quiet, just incase those boys’ daddies come looking for ‘em.” Boys, he thought, and almost laughed. They had been boys once, but not anymore. All of them, he wagered, had been old enough to be the girls father. This thought in mind, he found himself unable to deny the guilt in his mind. There would have been no way he could have helped her, not admist that flurry of fists, blades and gunfire, but somehow he felt responsible. That was why he had brought her there, to an old warehouse of all places. No one else would have, so the duty fell to him, and he accepted it with pride.



“Pride,” the thin man said. The desk clerk, only now pulled from the day-dream he had lapsed into, looked up with a look of confusion. “I said it must filled you with pride,” he repeated.

Still, the man said nothing. The thin man wondered, idly, if he was mute.

“To be a part of this team.” The clerk made a sort of mmm noise and then looked away, as though hoping that his lack of interest would stave the man in gray from asking any further questions – and such inane questions at that.

“I was once a law man myself,” the thin man continued, in a voice that the clerk recognized from many a family reunion. It was the voice that elderly men and women alone could speak in. The voice that told you that within a matter of moments you would be treated to a long and rambling recollection of some kind. It was the kind of voice that you wanted to ignore, to escape somehow, but yet found yourself unable to move, somehow transfixed by the monotone drone.

With a dejected sigh, the clerk raised his eyes again and, regret already on his mind, asked: “Oh really?”

As with much of her life, the girl viewed what happened mostly in retrospect. There was always some difficulty to comprehending it all as it rushed right before your eyes, so it was best to sit back and just wait until the wheels stopped turning. The more you fought it, she had decided, the more you were unable to resist it. It was like the ebb and flow of the tide, water dragging you out to see. Whether or not you drowned was always up in the air.

The first sign that something was not right was the absence of the patrol guard. Though her time spent in the cell had been short thus far, she had grown to expect his arrival. They worked to a rigid routine, that allowed the superior officers to pinpoint the location of any guard at any given time. It also gave them a good coverage across the entire prison, ensuring that if something did – in the unlikely event happen – then there was bound to be at least one man (or creature) nearby to handle it.

In the quiet she strained to hear approaching footsteps. Although she was vaguely suspicious, she was also aware of her lack of time keeping. Reliant entirely upon the amount of light filtering through the barred window, she would have wagered it was late in the evening but couldn’t pin point the hour, let alone the minute. Still, it felt like the right time, and so she felt justified in thinking something was wrong.



“Oh yes,” the thin man had replied. “I was a sheriff, you see, for around ten years. You wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you? Ten years! But that was many years ago, and I see that things are much different now.”

Already the mind of the clerk had begun to wander. It strayed back and forth between trivial problems, when his shift ended, what he would eat for dinner, whether or not he’d get lucky in the inebriated haze of Coruscant’s underworld. The thin man had seen all of this. Not exactly, of course, but he had witnessed the vacancy in the mans eyes, as if his mind had turned the sign from open to closed and stepped out for a smoke, without reading the packet- smoking kills.

His head hit the desk and his brains, the wall. Briefly revolted, the thin man found consolation in the fact that the bloody splatter made the foyer no less repulsing than it had already been. He edged around the back of the desk and saw, quite unfortunately, that the clerk had exacted one last act of justice, whether intentional or not. His lifeless hand had hammered down onto the energy alarm button, a big bright red thing that the thin man wagered he had been waiting to push for years.

He spat, and punched the clerk in the face, sending his five-legged chair spinning across the grimy floor. Flecks of something fleshy had sprayed onto his cuff. “Krasst.”



They say you can tell a lot about a man by the way he dresses, or the company he keeps. The girl thought you could say the same of the gun he carried. Even as she lay in a drug induced half-coma, the sound of gunfire carried to her ears. It was unmistakable, and whoever had fired off the round wanted it to be as such. There was something defiant about the sound. No silencer had been used, and it was almost as if the culprit were inviting all and sundry to come to it, heed the call of the smoking siren. Thoughts of an inmates revolt blurred across her mind, seemingly transferring to those around her, who began to bark and bray for flood.



The alarm was silent. The thin man did not know whom it had alerted or how quickly they would arrive, only that he needed to move quickly. The clerk had been armed with what may as well have been a toy pistol, but he took it regardless, stuffing it down the front of his belt. On second thoughts, he pilfered his badge too and grabbed a handful of throwaway pens and a pearl paperweight from the desktop, reasoning that you never knew when something might come in lucky.

The temptation to stumble from hallway to hallway until he found the girl was strong. He envisioned himself burst through each door with his gun in one hand and that pea-shooter in another, mowing down every guard who came in his way, armor be damned. It would have been suicide, he knew that, but something in him still seriously considered the thought. His plan had ended the moment he had painted the walls with the clerk, and he found himself now in the precarious situation of having to draft a concluding strategy on the fly.



The shouting continued. On any other occasion she would have protested, but no- the sound was drawing her out of her lethargy. It felt like her head was going to split, and she was almost thankful. For the first time in days, she acknowledged emotion beyond dull apathy. If only for a fleeting second she thought she might have the strength to move, to stand perhaps, but for what? The clamor outside would spread to her cell soon enough, and the other prisoners would break down her door on principle. Thug mentality would consume them and they’d exact their beastly temper on any inanimate object they could find.



And so it was, with a swig of the courage tucked into his breast pocket, the thin man devised his master plan. Once more into the breach. Chest all puffed out, he burst through the first door he could find. Hot-headed bravery filled his mind, and his eyes shone with a manic light. A thin film of sweat covered his brow. His hands swept back and forth as though conducting some unseen orchestra, the nose of his pistol the baton. But there was no sound. No strings, no percussion. Only the buzz-flicker of the lights behind him. He paused. This was not as he had expected.

The thin man exited the janitor’s closet, and turned to door number two.