Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

puncture his diaphragm. Its point had nicked his lung, then scratched against the inside of his sternum: an icy shuddering nonpain that punched a hole through his strength. He had sagged in the warriors’ grips.

Vergere had withdrawn the hook slowly; it skidded through clamped muscle. She examined him at some length, her crest shimmering an iridescent, unreadable rainbow. “Do you feel it yet?”

Jacen had stared down at the sluggish trail of blood that leaked from the hole below his ribs. The hole had been no bigger than the end of his little finger; he’d felt an absurd desire to stick his finger in the hole like the stopper in a bottle of Corellian whiskey.

Only then had Vergere told him what that hook of bone had done: implanted a slave coral seed inside his chest. “Well done,” she had said to the weapon cheerfully. “Go; enjoy yourself.” The hook had relaxed, coiling around her wrist for a moment like a hug from an affectionate snake, then unwrapped itself and dropped to the ground, slithering away into the underbrush.

“I know you’ve been implanted before,” she had told him. “On Belkadan, yes? That seed, though, grew too slowly and was removed too easily. So I’ve made your new, improved one less … mm, less accessible.”

And the agony that had blossomed over his heart—

The slave seed had sprouted in seconds, filaments wriggling like screwworms into his celiac plexus. It said hello by secreting algesic enzymes, triggering a star flare in his chest that slapped him off his feet like a blow from a club. He lay on the knotted hump of vein flesh, curled around his pain.

Vergere and the warriors had left him there. No instructions or orders were necessary; the slave seed—with an efficiency Jacen had come to think of as typically Yuuzhan Vong—had let him know what was required of him, simply and directly.

It had hurt him.

The slave seed was linked telepathically to one of the dhuryams. Whenever Jacen wasn’t doing what the dhuryam wanted, the slave seed set his nerves on fire. The only way to escape pain was to discover the dhuryam’s desire: he’d try one thing after another until he found an activity that did not hurt.

Often it took a while to figure out. Sometimes a long while.

Here in the Nursery, the sun was extinguished for about a third of each day; instead of moons for light during the artificial night, the Nursery had an abundance of phosphorescent mosses and algae. He could count days now, if he wished, but he didn’t bother. He could chart the passage of time by the spread of slave seed filaments webbing his nerves.

He could feel it growing.

As it grew, its control refined; through the increasingly sophisticated slave seed-web, the dhuryam could tell him to go forward by hurting his back. It could tell him to pick something up by hurting his empty hand. At need, it could spike his nerves so sharply that involuntary spasms would jerk an arm or a leg in the appropriate direction.

The injection wound left by Vergere’s weapon had gone bad: red and inflamed and crusted with yellow ooze. Jacen pressed his palm against the stiff robeskinbandage over it. He stared expressionlessly at the alien avianoid creature who had inflicted this on him. “My chest?” he said. “It’s all right.”

“Let me see.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Have we not yet discussed, Jacen Solo, the futility of acting like a child?” She hopped nimbly toward him.

“Stay away from me, Vergere. I mean it.”

“I believe you,” she said. She reached solid ground and stalked up to him. “But what matters your meaning? How will you prevent me? Will you slay?”

Jacen clenched his fists and did not answer.

“Will you maim? Cripple your friend Vergere? No?” She gave him her arm as though inviting him to dance. “Break a bone, then—above the wrist, if you don’t mind. It should heal cleanly enough to be a merely temporary inconvenience.”

“Vergere—”

“Inflict pain,” she offered. “Twist my elbow. Pluck feathers from my crest. Otherwise, sit down and show me your ribs. Orders not backed by force are only suggestions, Jacen Solo.”

And her orders are orders, Jacen thought. She could have a squad of warriors here in minutes; she could probably Force-hold him in midair and do whatever she wanted. But still he did not move.

She cocked her head quizzically, smiling sideways up at him. She gathered her four opposable fingers into a point and jabbed firmly, accurately, through the robeskin onto his infected wound.

Pain blazed in his side. Jacen didn’t even blink.

“I told you,” he said evenly. “It’s all right.”

She pointed to the ground, to the crushed layers of moss where the slave had lain while Jacen had beetled his wound. “Lie down.”

Jacen didn’t move.

“Jacen Solo,” she said patiently, “you know the Force is with me. Do you think I cannot feel your infection? Am I so blind that I cannot see fever boiling in your eyes? Am I so weak that I cannot knock you down?”

There may come a time, Jacen thought, when we will answer that last one. But he sighed and lowered himself to the moss.

Vergere seized his robeskin with both hands, then lowered her face to nip a hole in it with her small sharp dental ridges. She tore the hole wide, then stripped off the bandage beneath. Folding the bandage upon itself, she roughly scrubbed away the infected crust over the wound. Jacen watched her expressionlessly, not reacting to the coarse scrape across his inflamed ribs.

She noted his regard, and winked at him. “Pain means little to you now, yes?”

“Since the Embrace?” Jacen shrugged. “I don’t ignore it, if that’s what you mean.”

“But it does not rule you,” she said approvingly. “There are some who say that humans are incapable of overcoming their fear of pain.”

“Maybe the people who say that don’t know very many humans.”

“And maybe they do. Maybe they simply know none like you.”

She lowered her head and closed her eyes, cupping the folded bandage in the palm of one hand. Jacen stared, astonished,