Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

gods’ existence with the highway from their deific home to the world hanging forever overhead—so obviously magical, as well, that a creature could follow its curve all the way around the world and never reach either end. It would be only too easy to imagine gods patrolling their Bridge, looking down upon their creation.

With the gods so close at hand …

If the world is full of violence, savagery, and torture, this must be how they want it.

Lots of things about the Yuuzhan Vong made sense to him now.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?”

Vergere’s voice came from just behind his shoulder; though he hadn’t heard her approach, he was too lost in wonder and new comprehension to be startled. And he had known somehow already that she would be here. He had felt her shadow upon his thousand-year dream.

He had known, somehow, that she was still part of his life.

“You know,” Jacen murmured, still gazing up into the sky, “that’s exactly what you said when you brought me into the Nursery. Those same words. Just like that.”

“Truly?” Her wind-chime laughter tinkled around him. “You recall all that I say to you?”

“Every word,” Jacen answered grimly.

“Such a clever child. Is it any wonder that I love you so?”

Slowly, painfully, Jacen lowered himself to sit with his legs over the edge, his feet dangling free a kilometer above the rugged jungle canopy. “I guess I was pretty messed up. Pretty battered,” he said, laying one hand along the bandages that bound his sprung ribs in place. “You patched me up. You and those tears of yours.”

“Yes.”

He nodded: not thanks, just acknowledgment. “I didn’t expect to live through it.”

“Of course not. How could you, and achieve what you did?” she said kindly. “You found the power that arises of acting without hope … and also without fear. I was—I am—very proud of you.”

Jacen met her eyes. He could see his own reflection, dark and distorted, in their glossy black surface. “Proud? All the people up there who died because of me—”

“All the people down here who live because of you,” she countered, interrupting. She briefly told him how the shapers had been forced to give the dhuryam immediate control of the seedship, and how it had begun the breakup into individual shipseeds so quickly that there had been no time to round up the rampaging slaves. The dhuryam itself had used their slave seeds to herd them to safety, fulfilling its side of the bargain it had made with Jacen. “Yes, hundreds died in the battle—but thousands of slaves were able to ride the shipseeds to the surface: slaves who were to have been executed at the climax of the tizo’pil Yun’tchilat. You were magnificent, Jacen Solo. A true hero.”

“I don’t feel much like a hero.”

“No?” Her crest splayed orange. “How does a hero feel?”

Jacen looked away, shaking his head silently. She settled in beside him, swinging her legs over the void below them, kicking her heels aimlessly like a little girl in a chair too high for her.

After a moment, Jacen sighed, and shook his head again, and shrugged. “I guess heroes feel like they’ve accomplished something.”

“And you haven’t? Several thousand slaves might disagree.”

“You don’t understand.” In his mind, he saw again the body on the hive-island’s beach: the one who might have been a slave, who might have been a warrior, who had bled out his life next to the corpse of a shaper who’d had no clue in combat: a shaper who’d only thought to put his own body between the infant dhuryams and the killing machine Jacen had become. “In the Nursery—once I started killing,” he said softly, “I didn’t want to stop. That must be—I can only think that’s how the dark side must feel. I didn’t ever want to stop.”

“But you did.”

“Only because you stopped me.”

“Who’s stopping you now?”

He stared at her.

She turned her quadrifid palm upward as though offering him a sweet. “You want to kill? There is nothing around you but life, Jacen Solo. Take it as you please. Even mine. My species has a particularly vulnerable neck; merely take my head in your hands, and with one quick twist, thus—” She jerked her head up and back as though an invisible fist had punched her in the mouth. “—you can satisfy this dark desire.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Vergere.” He hunched into himself, resting his elbows on his thighs as though huddled against a chill. “I don’t want to kill anybody. Just the opposite. I’m grateful. You saved me. I was out of control—”

“You were not,” she said sharply. “Don’t make excuses.” “What?”

“Out of control is just code for ‘I don’t want to admit I’m the kind of person who would do such things.’ It’s a lie.”

He offered her half a smile. “Everything I tell you is a lie.”

She accepted his mockery with an expressionless nod.

“But everything you tell yourself should be the truth—or as close to it as you can come. You did what you did because you are who you are. Self-control, or its lack, had nothing to do with it.”

“Self-control has everything to do with it—that’s what being a Jedi is.”

“You,” she said, “are not a Jedi.”

He looked away. Remembering what she had done to him kindled a spark within his chest that grew into a scorching flame around his heart. His fingers dug into the lush moss that carpeted the ledge, and he made fists, tearing up a double handful, and a large part of him wanted that moss to be her neck. But years of Jedi training had armored him against rage. When he opened his fists and let those shreds fall into the wind, he let his anger fall with them.

“Being a Jedi isn’t just about using the Force.” His voice was stronger now; he was on sure ground. “It’s a commitment to a certain way of doing things—a certain way of looking at things. It’s about valuing life, not destroying it.”

“So is gardening.”

He hung his head, numb with memory. “But I wasn’t trying