Read Star Wars: Red Harvest for Free Online

That’s the question, isn’t it? How about when you can’t see?
    Picking up a pair of thermal lenses from the counter beside him, Hracken adjusted them over his eyes, then reached over and switched off the lights. Darkness swallowed the room, vast and total. Hracken flicked on the goggles. His vision helioscoped into a hundred brilliant variations of fluorescent green before resolving itself into focus, and he leaned forward with keen interest.
    Down below, the now-blind Ra’at stopped in his tracks, processing what had just happened, and in that second the wall behind him burst open in a whistling array of heavy rubber whips, slashing into the air. Ra’at jerked forward, but it was too late—the whips drove him to his knees. Hracken saw the apprentice’s face clench, his lips drawn back in pain.
    It’s over
, he thought, and reached to switch the lights back on.
    But it wasn’t.
    Ra’at was on his feet again instantly, jumping clear of the whips. Hracken immediately realized that the apprentice was no longer hampered by vision, or lack thereof: now he was relying entirely upon the Force. When the swing-arm came down again, Ra’at reached up, grabbed it, and actually held on—a move that the Sith Master hadn’t seen before, even from Lussk—riding it all the way up to the ceiling. Atthe apex of its arc, he let go, twisting and launching himself headlong through open space to catch hold of the spring-loaded rod as it came spiking out of the wall.
    It was a move of unprecedented grace and absolute precision. Ra’at spun himself around the rod once, twice, three times, building speed, and fired himself directly at the window of the control booth.
    Master Hracken jerked backward. Ra’at slammed into the transparisteel with both hands, actually clinging there for a split second, long enough for Hracken to see the student’s face staring straight in at him.
    Then he dropped.
    Hracken whipped off the goggles and turned on the lights. Light roared across the room, filling every corner. He saw Ra’at standing down below, his face flushed, shining with sweat, shoulders rising and falling with the effort of catching his breath. Despite his obvious exhaustion, the apprentice’s face was almost incandescent with leftover adrenaline. When he saw Hracken coming down the stairs, his eyes filled with expectation, awaiting the Sith Master’s judgment.
    “Interesting,” Hracken said. “Tomorrow we’ll see if you can do it again.”
    Ra’at blinked at him. “Master?”
    Hracken looked around. “What is it?”
    “Lussk … in combat simulation, has
he
ever …?”
    The Sith Master waited for Ra’at to finish the sentence, but in the end the apprentice simply nodded and looked away.
    “Tomorrow,” he said.
    Walking back to the dorm with his cloak drawn up over his shoulders and his wounds throbbing in the frigid night air, Ra’at stopped and glanced back at the simulation bunker. He was aware of what the other students and Masters said about him—how he was too small, too weak, in thrall to his own paranoid delusions—and he didn’t care. Tonight he’d shown Hracken what he was capable of. Soon the rest would see.
    He stepped over a high snowdrift that had formed outside the library, making his way around the eastern wall of the building until he found himself in the shadow of the tower. It was snowing steadily, but Ra’at could still make out the tracks leading up to the tower’s main entryway, two sets of prints along with the familiar tracks of the HK droid.
    Ra’at felt the requisite twinge of jealousy. The tracks in the snow meant that Lord Scabrous had brought visitors here, very recently. The Sith Lord had invited them into his sanctum, and they had stepped inside. Ra’at, who had never been inside the tower and could only imagine its secrets, wondered who the visitors had been. Lussk? Nickter? One of the Masters?
    Slipping off his glove, Ra’at placed one bare hand directly on the closed hatchway,