Reath ignored the implied threat of interrogation. He realized who the other human who’d gone there had to be. “Bring him here,” he said, calling on the Force to shape their wills. “Bring Dez Rydan to me.”

The last cogent, coherent thought in Dez Rydan’s brain had been: That hatch is going to hit me square in the face.

Pain had smashed into his forehead, jolting through his entire body like electricity, the agony of it reaching his gut, his fingers, his feet. Everything after that had been dark for a long while, and silent, but not painless. The agony was the only sensation left to him, and his only desire was for it to stop. If it stopped because he died, that seemed fair. As long as it stopped.

There came a time when he was turned over and forced to see sunlight; his head throbbed so badly at the sensory input that he’d vomited. Something had lashed him cruelly across the back as punishment. A whip? A vine? Dez didn’t know and didn’t care. He only wanted his head to stop hurting.

As the days went on, he should’ve either felt better or died. Instead, although he could feel the swelling in his face and neck going down, Dez remained in a terrible kind of stasis. Was he being poisoned? They pricked him with thorns, after which he would feel sleepy and nauseated. His eyes refused to focus, but whether that was because of his injury or what was being done to him, he couldn’t tell. The Drengir kept asking him questions, but he couldn’t understand exactly what they wanted to know. He wasn’t even sure Drengir was the right name. If he could’ve explained things to them, he would have. But the world swirled around him, sickening and blurry, beyond his comprehension.

Dez suspected they had caged him, as unnecessary as that was. Branches encased him on every side. He couldn’t have stood up if he wanted to. He didn’t want to.

One of the Drengir approached; by then he knew the scent of them and associated it with pain. But even as he braced himself, the Drengir whispered, “There is more meat here.”

Maybe. Dez wasn’t totally sure what he’d said. It didn’t make any sense, but nothing else did, either.

“We wish to see what your people think you can do with these.” Between the branches, Dez could see the Drengir dangling what they’d taken from him when he first arrived unconscious: his lightsaber. “Kill him, and we will let you go free.”