Fi took the end of the ladder and began to move it carefully to avoid loud scraping sounds. Sev took the other end and they balanced it lengthways on the parapet.
“No, I'm going to run.”
“Fi, they say someone spiked my vat. But I reckon someone really spiked yours.”
“Lost your nerve?”
“Di'kut.”
“If I plummet heroically to my doom, then you can crawl across. Deal?”
“I hate it when you try to provoke me into showing you how it's done.”
“Like this?”
Fi had seconds. They needed to be across the gap and gone before anyone spotted them. He leaned down hard on one end of the ladder, lifting it enough to swing it out horizontally and drop the other end on the facing parapet.
Thirty meters below, death waited. And if it wasn't death, it was paralysis.
He stepped up on the parapet, tested the first rung with his boot, and then focused straight ahead on the other side.
Then he sprinted.
He still had no idea how his body calculated the gaps but he hit every rung and landed on the far side, dropping flat. When he knelt upright, Sev was staring at him.
Fi beckoned. Come on.
Sev ran for it. Fi broke his landing as he jumped off the parapet. He noted Sev's clenched jaw with satisfaction.
“Easy,” Fi mouthed.
Sev gave him a hand signal, one of his especially eloquent gestures of disapproval.
The roof had a few steps down to doors that the holoplans showed as access to the top floor of the living area and the turbolift shaft. They didn't look that substantial in the flesh, but the plans appeared to be accurate: they didn't always get updated after renovations. A quick application of thermal tape on the doors and it would be easy to lob a few grenades down the hole to soften up the residents before going in. Fi gave Sev a thumbs-up and took a magnetic det out of his belt. It slid into place in the speeder's air intake with a faint thack.
Back, Fi gestured.
He teetered on the parapet and then ran across the durasteel rungs again, feeling them flex and spring back under his boots. When he looked back, Sev was lining up for the sprint, too. Fi beckoned encouragingly. Sev went for it.
He was two-thirds of the way across when he slipped. He grabbed for a rung and hung motionless from his right hand. Fi's gut somersaulted.
If anyone looks up here now—
Most people screamed when they fell. Sev, to his credit, was utterly silent. But his eyes were wide and scared. He tried to reach up with his left arm but for some reason didn't seem able to do it. Fi scrambled across the ladder on his belly and reached down to grab Sev's arm and haul him up. It was a potentially lethal maneuver on a narrow ladder, but Fi managed to get a grip on Sev's belt and pull him across the ladder crosswise.
Sev was using his right arm. It was only when Fi gripped his left shoulder to pull him in line with the ladder that he heard his sharp gasp and understood why he wasn't using that arm, and why he hadn't been able to lunge up to get a grip with his other hand. He'd hurt himself badly.
“Udesii ... ,” Fi whispered. “Take it easy.”
There was pain, and there was whatever had happened to Sev. Fi dragged him back across the ladder a few centimeters at a time and rolled him onto the safety of the roof before hauling the ladder back in. When he dropped flat again, Sev was kneeling in a ball, clutching his left shoulder.
Fierfek, this is my fault for goading him. “Can you walk?” Fi whispered.
“ 'Course I can walk, you di'kut. It's my arm.”
“I'll let you drop next time, you ungrateful chakaar” Fi hauled him upright and decided to risk taking the service turbolift down to the ground level. By the time they reached the end of the walkway it was clear that Sev had dislocated his shoulder and had to hold the arm against his chest to tolerate the pain at all. He said nothing but it had made his eyes water. Fi had long used that phrase to indicate extreme pain but it was the first time he'd seen it up close, and it wasn't funny.
“If I miss this mission, I'm going to show you a really interesting trick with a vibroblade.”
“Sev, take it easy.” Fi always kept his medpac on his belt. He fumbled for the single-use sharp of painkiller and stabbed it into Sev's triceps. “We'll slap some bacta on it back at base.”
“Yeah, and maybe that'll work when I rip your head off, too.”
“It was an accident.”
“It was a stupid stunt. I never had accidents with Delta.”
“Well, you're just Vau's perfect little soldier boys, then, aren't you? We screw up. And then we get up and go on.”
“I have to complete this mission?”
“Not if you're a liability you don't. Look, injuries happen. Stay at base and monitor the comlinks.”
“You don't understand.”
“Really?” Fi racked his brains for first-aid training. “Funny, I thought we did the same job. Look, get in here and let me have a look.”
They slipped into the sheltered lobby of an office block and hid behind a pillar. Fi detached Sev's bodysuit sleeve from the shoulder seam and took a look in the dim security lights.
The line of the shoulder looked unnaturally square where the ball of the humerus had shifted out of the socket and was pushing the deltoid muscle up and out of shape. This was going to hurt.
“Okay, on the count of four,” Fi said. He took Sev's wrist in his right hand, stretching out the arm, and braced his left hand against the man's chest. Then he paused and looked him in the eye in his most reassuring I-know-what-I'm-doing way. “See, when you get a dislocation like this, you have to do what they call reducing it by—four'
Sev yelped. The joint made a wet shhhlick sound as it slipped back into the socket.
“Sorry, ner vod.” Fi folded Sev's arm back against his chest and held it there while he struggled to get the sleeve section reattached. He could almost feel the torn ligaments and muscle fibers screaming. Sev's face was white, his lips compressed. “Nothing worse than bracing for it, though.”
“For a moron, you're not a bad medic!”
“Kal said that if we could take a body apart, we ought to learn a bit more about putting it back together again if we needed to.”
“Fi, I have to be fit to fight.”
“Okay, okay. Bacta and ice packs. Right as rain in no time.”
“Vau'll kill me.”
“Look, what is this thing with Vau?” Fi pulled Sev out into the walkway again, and they jogged back to the speeder they'd left a block away. “I know he had a reputation for beating the stuffing out of trainees, but why are you ready to gut Atin?”
“Atin's sworn he'll kill Vau.”
Fi almost stopped dead. “Atin? Old don't-interrupt-me-I'm-working-on-a-really-interesting-circuit? Our At'ika?”
“Seriously?” Sev asked.
“Yeah, sometimes I get serious. It happens?”
“Okay. Atin's pod was the only one that ever lost men!”
“Geonosis. Ruined Vau's clean record?”
“It's not that simple. Atin was doing that survivor guilt thing when he got back, and Vau just focused him a bit.”
Odd: Skirata hadn't been around when Fi returned from Geonosis. But he'd worry about that later. “That explains the scar on his face.”
“You got it.”
“Doesn't explain the rest of the scars he was showing you.”
“You ask him about that.”
Sev was as near to scared as Fi had seen him. He couldn't imagine being afraid of Skirata. The man might have sworn himself to a standstill when he was angry, but nobody in Skirata's company ever felt they had to fear him. He was Kal'buir: he lavished ferocious care on his commandos to the exclusion of all else.
But Sev didn't want Vau to know that he'd injured himself doing something reckless. Whatever the reason, Fi owed his brother some support.