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The cell had no business being called a room. It was a hole with walls.
Stone sweated with old damp, though no rain had touched this place in years. Mud lay thick across the floor, black and foul, churned by boots and bodies and the slow drag of chains. Somewhere beyond the bars, metal groaned against metal. A man screamed once, sharp and ragged, and was answered by laughter that rolled down the corridor like loose gravel. The air reeked of rust, mildew, blood, and the sour remains of beings who had long ago stopped expecting mercy.
This was not a place where innocence survived. It was not even a place where lesser sins endured. Murderers rotted here. Thieves with blasters tucked under their pillows. Slavers. Butchers. Beings who had carved names for themselves in blood and fear and found, in the end, that there was always somewhere lower to fall. The kind of forgotten world that drifted at the edge of civilized charts, where no Republic patrol came willingly and no Imperial officer stayed unless ordered at gunpoint. A dead place. An unforgiving place. The sort of place built to break whatever was thrown into it.
Cassian Abrantes woke face down in the mud.
Consciousness returned to him by degrees, each one crueler than the last. First came pain, deep and pounding, spreading through his skull like a hammer striking from the inside. Then the ache in his ribs. Then the taste of iron in his mouth. His hands twitched weakly beneath him, fingers sinking into wet filth as he dragged in a shallow breath and immediately regretted it. Even breathing hurt.
For a long moment, he did not move. He simply lay there, cheek pressed into the cold muck, listening to the distant clatter of chains and the muted hum of some dying power conduit hidden in the walls. His dark hair was matted with mud. Blood, some dried and some fresh, traced one side of his face. Every inch of him felt heavy, as though his body no longer quite belonged to him.
Then memory flashed, not cleanly, but in fragments. His speeder, the violent lurch of impact. Voices he did not know. Hands hauling him back before darkness swallowed the rest.
Cassian forced one eye open. The world blurred, then sharpened just enough to make out the crooked lines of durasteel bars in front of him and the dim amber glow of a failing light overhead. No furnishings. No blanket. No cot. Just stone, mud, and confinement. The eldest son of House Abrantes had been thrown into the dirt like carrion.
Slowly, with visible effort, he pushed one palm against the ground and tried to rise. His arms trembled under the strain. Pain tore through his side so sharply that black spots burst across his vision, and he nearly collapsed again. A bitter breath left him through clenched teeth. He stayed on one knee, shoulders heaving, mud dripping from his hands.
Outside the cell, footsteps approached at an unhurried pace. Cassian lifted his head.
A shadow stretched long across the corridor before its owner came into view, distorted by the crooked bars and the poor light. Somewhere farther down, another prisoner muttered to himself in a language broken by missing teeth. A chain rattled once more and the whole miserable place seemed to hold its breath.
Cassian wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and looked toward the sound, battered and filthy, but with something in his eyes that had not yet been beaten out of him.
Whatever this place was, whatever pit of the galaxy they had buried him in, it had not taken that.
Not yet.
No, not yet.