Slowly, Zak reached for the bars and gave them a hard shake.
“It won’t do any good.”
The voice was low and rough, and came from the shadows of the cage next to Zak’s.
“Who’s there?” Zak asked. The voice wasn’t Hoole’s, nor did it belong to Platt, Tru’eb, or any of the other smugglers. But it was familiar somehow. He could see someone crouching in the back of the cage, mostly covered by shadows. “Who’s there?” he asked again.
No response.
Zak leaned closer, but he still couldn’t make out the prisoner’s face. He looked around, and spotted something tucked in a far corner of the hut. It was a gray helmet, battered and worn. Zak had seen that helmet several times before. Only one person in the galaxy wore a helmet like that.
“Boba Fett,” he whispered.
The prisoner did not respond.
Zak shook his head in disbelief. He tried to see through the gloom to look at Boba Fett’s face, but the shadows were too thick. “I can’t believe they caught you.”
The shadowy prisoner spoke. “Who are they?”
Zak said told Fett what he knew-about the original survey team, and the crashed rescuers, and the children they had tried to raise on the swamp planet.
“How did they catch you?” he asked the bounty hunter, still barely believing he was actually speaking to Boba Fett.
A grunt came from the shadows. “I arrived on Dagobah. I was tracking you. A dragonsnake was tracking me. Difficult to kill.”
Zak didn’t know if the bounty hunter meant himself or the dragonsnake.
Fett continued. “Lost consciousness. Woke up in here.”
“The Children must have found you in the swamp and brought you here. You know they’re cannibals, right?”
Fett shrugged.
“You don’t look too concerned,” Zak said. “They’ll eat you, too.”
Fett shook his head.
Zak snorted. “Why not? You’re the one in the cage.”
Fett’s voice was hard as durasteel. “Before they eat me, they have to come in here and get me.”
As if answering his challenge, Galt and the cook returned. “Your friends are still gone,” Galt said happily.
“Galt, let me out of here,” Zak said, rattling his cage again. “You can’t do this.”
“Why not?” Galt’s face looked completely innocent.
“You can’t just eat other human beings. That’s cannibalism!”
“It is food,” Galt said simply. “And we are hungry.”
“There’s other food! We’ll help you catch it.”
Beside Galt, the cook patted his stomach. “Not food like this. Food that saved our lives. Food like the parents gave us.”
“What?”
Galt nodded. “We were all very young. For a long time, we ate the food saved from the crashed ship. But the parents were dying from the swamp fever. The machines that kept the food fresh lost power, and the food spoiled. Then it was gone. We were hungry.”
“Very hungry,” the cook said.
“I remember crying for food. Any food. We cried for days. The parents cried, too. Then they found food for us.”
Zak shuddered. He knew what Galt would say next.
“They fed us flesh from the parents who were dying from the swamp fever.”
Zak felt his stomach turn over again. He recalled the holographic video they’d seen. He remembered the sick, dying woman, crying as she said, “We’ve gotten so hungry…”
The Children were eating the same flesh they’d eaten when they were young, when their parents had last fed them.
“You can’t do this,” he repeated. “Cannibalism is-“
“I don’t know that word,” Galt said. “The words I know best are ‘hunger’ and ‘food.’ I am hungry,” he said as he opened the door to Zak’s cage, “and you are food.”
CHAPTER 16
Galt and the cook grabbed Zak by the shoulders and dragged him from the cage. The meat flower, disturbed by the jerky movement, lashed out again, and Zak winced, doubling over in pain.
The Children, thinking he was trying to resist, hauled him to his feet again.
“Remove his head,” Galt said. “Then we can drain the blood before cutting the slices.”
The cook let go of Zak to reach for the sharp piece of ship’s hull they used as a knife. As she did, Zak pulled his hand free and jammed it into his pocket. The meat flower bit into his hand, but Zak was counting on that. He ripped his hand back out of his pocket with the meat flower still attached, and flung it toward Galt.
As he snapped his hand, the meat flower came loose and slapped into Galt’s face-flower, roots, and mudpack all at once. The meat-eating plant sank its teeth into the man’s cheek.