Traitor - Matthew Stover (iphone ebook reader .txt) 📗

ring spun in their own rotations. It cast a glow over the nightscape brighter, softer, more diffuse, than any conjunction of Coruscant’s moons ever had. This was the most beautiful place Jacen had ever seen.

He hated it.

He hated every bit of it.

Even closing his eyes didn’t help, because just knowing it was out there made him shiver with rage. He wanted to burn the whole planet.

He knew, now, that somewhere deep in his heart, none of the war had ever seemed quite real; none of it since Sernpidal. He’d been nursing a secret certainty, concealed even from himself, that somehow everything would be all right again someday—that everything could be the way it used to be. That Chewbacca’s death had been some kind of mistake. That Jaina could never fall into the dark. That his parents’ marriage was strong and sure. That Uncle Luke would always show up just in time and everyone could have a laugh together at how afraid they’d been …

That the Anakin he’d seen die had been—oh, he didn’t know, a clone, maybe. Or a human-guised droid, and the real Anakin was off on the far side of the galaxy somewhere with Chewbacca, and someday they’d find their way home and the whole family could be together again.

That’s why he hated this world spread before him.

Because it could never be home again.

Even if the New Republic somehow, impossibly, turned the tide. Even if some miracle happened and they retook Coruscant—what they won wouldn’t be the same planet they had lost.

The Yuuzhan Vong had come, and they were never going to go away.

Even if Jacen had found a club big enough to knock the whole species back beyond the galactic horizon, nothing could ever erase the scars they would leave behind.

Nothing could ever heal his broken heart.

Nothing could remake him into the Jacen Solo he remembered: the cheerfully reckless Jacen, chasing Zekk into the downlevels; the exasperated Jacen, trying one more time to make Tenel Ka crack a smile; the Jedi apprentice Jacen, born to the Force, but still awed not only by the legend of Uncle Luke but by the power his uncle’s teaching could draw out of him; the teenage Jacen who could wilt under his mother’s stern glare, but still exchange roguish winks with his father and his sister the instant Mother turned away.

I spent so much time wanting to grow up. Trying to grow up. Trying to act like an adult … Now all I want is to be a kid again. Just for a little while. Just a day.

Just an hour.

Jacen reflected bitterly that a large part of growing up seemed to involve watching everything change, and discovering that all changes are permanent. That nothing ever changes back.

That you can’t go home again.

This was what the alien beauty of Yuuzhan’tar whispered constantly in the back of his head: Nothing lasts forever. The only permanence is death.

Brooding, he sat through the long slow roll of the night.

Some unknown time later—by the wheel of the stars, constellations still mockingly familiar over this bitterly foreign landscape, many hours had passed unmarked—he asked, “What now?”

Vergere answered him from the darkness within the bower of ferns. Though no words had been exchanged between them since twilight, her voice was clear, chiming, fresh as always. “I have been wondering the same.”

Jacen shook his head. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Perhaps I will when you do.”

He nodded. This was as much of an answer as he had learned to expect. He swung his legs back onto the ledge, wrapping his elbows around knees drawn up to his chest. “So, what next?”

“You tell me.”

“No games, Vergere. Not anymore. And no more shadowmoth stories, huh?”

“Is what has happened such a mystery to you?”

“I’m not an idiot. You’re training me.” He made an irritated gesture, a flick of the wrist as though tossing away something nasty. “That’s what you’ve been doing from the beginning. I’m learning more tricks than a monkey-lizard. I just don’t know what you’re training me to do.”

“You are free to do, or not do, what you will. Do you understand the difference between training and teaching? Between learning to do and learning to be?”

“So we’re back to the shadowmoth story after all.”

“Is there another story you like better?”

“I just want to know what you’re after, all right? What you want from me. I want to know what to expect.”

“I want nothing from you. I want only for you. ‘Expecting’ is distraction. Pay attention to now.”

“Why can’t you just explain what you’re trying to teach me?”

“Is it what the teacher teaches—” The darkness itself seemed to smile. “—or what the student learns?”

He remembered the first time she had asked him that. He remembered being broken with pain. He remembered how she had guided him to a state of mind where he could mend himself; like a healed bone, he’d become stronger at the break.

He nodded slowly, more to himself than to her. He rose, and went over to the moss-covered couch at the edge of the black shadows cast by the broken walls and the screen of gently weaving ferns. He picked up the neatly folded robeskin, and looked at it for a long moment, then shrugged and slipped it on over his head. “How long before the Yuuzhan Vong arrive?”

“Look around you. They are already here.”

“I mean, how long before something happens? How long can we stay here?”

“That depends.” A soft chuckle came from the darkness. “How thirsty are you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m told that a human can live three standard days without water—four or five, with careful conservation. Would it be too forward of me to suggest that we might leave in search of some, before you are too weak to move?”

Jacen stared into the darkness. “You’re saying it’s up to me?”

“Here, look at this.”

Out from the shadows flew a pale, irregular object half the size of Jacen’s fist; it curved through a slow arc, gently tossed. Jacen caught it instinctively.

In the clear light reflected by the Bridge, he found the object to