Platt drew her blaster. “If that’s true, this will be a lousy secret base. Let’s have a look.”
Boldly, she jumped out to the first steppingstone. It sank a little under her weight, but held. Tru’eb went next, with Hoole and the Arrandas behind. The others brought up the rear.
The steppingstones led straight through a dark, fetid swamp. As they walked, Tash pointed out various plants and small animals she had read about in the records.
Why does she always seem to know everything? Zak said to himself.
He thought back to Nar Shaddaa, when Tash had helped Hoole defeat the bounty hunter while he had done nothing. And then, later, when he had been stunned by Boba Fett, Tash had tried to fight the killer off.
Now she was flaunting how smart she was.
It wasn’t fair. He didn’t have the Force. How could he hope to match his sister?
Now and then a stone was missing and they each had to make a long jump to the next step. At one particularly long gap, Platt had to shift herself to the back edge of her steppingstone and use a running start to reach the next one. Tru’eb made the jump, and Hoole hopped across easily on his long legs. Tash gathered herself and leaped. Her feet just reached the edge of the next steppingstone. She slipped on the mossy surface, but Hoole grabbed her and pulled her up.
“Can you make it, Zak?” the Shi’ido asked.
If Tash can make it, I can make it, he thought. “Sure!” he said aloud.
Zak backed up to the edge of his steppingstone, took two small steps, and launched himself into the air.
The instant his feet left the ground he knew he wasn’t going to make it.
He came down a half meter short, falling chest-deep into the cold, murky swamp water. He felt his feet stick in the ooze at the bottom. But he didn’t care about the cold or the slimy water. His cheeks flushed red with embarrassment as the others started to laugh.
But the next moment, all the color drained from Zak’s face.
Two figures were rising up out of the water beside him. Zak saw two human heads covered with stringy hair, two sets of pale eyes, two gaping mouths missing several teeth, and two sets of bony arms. The skin hanging from those arms looked old and dead.
They were corpses. Human corpses.
And they were reaching out to grab him.
CHAPTER 6
Shouting in fright, Zak tried to scramble up onto the steppingstone, but he slipped on the moss.
He felt a cold, wet hand close around his arm.
Before he could cry out again, Platt was kneeling beside him. She jabbed her blaster over Zak’s shoulder and fired. The corpse screamed and let go, falling into the water with a splash.
As friendly hands pulled Zak up to safety, Platt swiveled her blaster to fire at the other corpse. But this one threw its hands up in front of its face and wailed, “No, please!”
Platt’s finger eased off the trigger. The corpse continued to back away through the waist-deep water. Its pale, frightened eyes looked from the newcomers to the body of its companion, now floating on the surface, and back again. “Don’t hurt me.”
“Why not?” Platt said in a hard voice. “You were going to hurt one of us.”
“Wait,” Hoole said firmly, putting one hand on top of the smuggler’s weapon.
From the safety of the raised steppingstone, Zak took a second look at his attacker. It obviously wasn’t a corpse-it was a young human male. But his skin was so pale that Zak was sure the man had never spent any time in the sun. And he was incredibly thin, like a living skeleton. His sunken cheeks and eyes gave his head the look of a skull.
“Why did you attack us?” Hoole asked.
The pale man shook his head, his stringy hair flopping around his neck and face. “Did not attack. Tried to help. Boy fell into water. Tried to help.”
“That’s not what it looked like from here,” Platt muttered.
“Tried to help,” the skeletal man insisted. He glanced again at his dead companion.
“Who are you?” Tash asked.
The man’s eyes narrowed. “I live here. Who are you? You are not from Dagobah.”
“No,” Hoole answered before anyone else could. “We’re here to explore this planet.”
The skeleton’s eyes lit up. “Explorers? The parents were explorers!”
“What in space does that mean?” Zak asked.
“Platt, let’s help him up out of the water.” Hoole gestured at the corpselike man. “He is undoubtedly freezing.”
Reluctantly, the smuggler reached out a hand and hauled the soaked man up to one of the steppingstones as the others moved farther down the path to make room. The pale man was dressed in slime-coated rags, and stood only a little taller than Zak and Tash.
“Now,” Hoole asked, his dark eyes staring into the man, “if you were not attacking us, why were you hiding under the water?”