Ty leapt, higher than it should have been possible for her or any Tholothian to jump. She didn’t make it to the canopy of karenga trees, but managed to grab a low-lying bough that stretched from one tree to another. The branch bowed, dropping her perilously close to the Drengir, the creature bellowing in hunger.

“The harvest is ours. The harvest is ours.”

Not today.

Hooking her boots around the branch, Ty clambered directly above the creature. Her body ached, and the silver tendrils that hung from her scalp itched, even the phantom one. Especially the phantom one, sliced off all those years ago by a Weequay knife. If the missing tip was itching, she really was in trouble.

The branch dropped.

Ty whipped her head around to see that the Drengir had managed to snare the end of the bough and was pulling down sharply. She was caught in the middle, too far from the vine to try to kick it free and not close enough to the trunk to climb higher. The branch groaned, its wet bark starting to splinter. If it broke, there would be nothing to stop her tumbling down into the Drengir’s embrace.

Food. Meat. Sustenance. Survival.

She had one chance. Looping both her knees over the branch, she hung facedown toward the monster. It snarled and frothed, grasping back up toward her. Ty closed her eyes and reached down, not with her hands, but with her feelings, with her very spirit. She reached beyond the creature that longed to consume her and beyond the water that pooled beneath its ravenous bulk. She searched through silt and roots, looking for the one thing that could save her, the weapon she had dropped when the Drengir first attacked.

There. There it was, caught beneath a root, right beneath the Drengir’s weight. Damn and blast.

A barbed vine looped around her left wrist.

Ty reached out again, this time not searching, but calling.

Beneath the Drengir something shifted, something Ty had owned for a long, long time. From long before Galidraan. Before even Caratoo. She increased the pressure, the muscles in her arms taut. Still it wouldn’t come, twitching in the muck, unable to break free.

Another creeper found her right wrist. The Drengir pulled her closer.

Ty visualized her weapon in her mind; its long grip, the vicious spikes that would have so disappointed the old Azumel who taught her to build it. The focusing lens, the emitter, the activation switch.

Purple light flared beneath the Drengir, and Ty pulled up with all her might.

The blade sliced through the root. It was free. Next it sliced through the Drengir itself, splitting that hideous beaklike mouth in two. The Drengir wailed as the two halves of its body came apart like rotten fruit, splashing into the marsh.

Ty’s lightsaber found her hand, and the branch broke.