Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

seen this male on the worldship at Myrkr. He knew this male’s name, and he tried to say it.

Tried to say—

But before he could even open his mouth—

A hot tidal surge of red billowed through him, and washed away the world.

   Jacen did not swim in the red tide, he floated: drifting, spinning in the eddies, tumbling in the surf. The red tide ebbed, waves washing out, and he bobbed to the surface. The red tide drained from his head, leaving him gasping on the floor.

His hands hurt.

He looked at them, but he couldn’t quite see them, or he couldn’t quite make sense of what he saw; his eyes wouldn’t quite focus. He let his right hand fall to the chilly mosaic tile of the floor, wondering blankly that the outwash of the red tide had left the floor so cold, and so dry. A savor of scorched meat hung in the air, as though his father had jury-rigged the autochef again. But Dad couldn’t have jury-rigged the autochef. There was no autochef. And Dad wasn’t here, couldn’t be here, would never be here—and the smell … Nothing made sense. How had he fallen to this floor? What caused this roil of smoke and dust? A curving wall of rubble choked off three-quarters of the chamber—where had that come from?

Answers were beyond him.

But his hands still hurt. He raised his left hand and frowned his vision clear.

A circle in the middle of his palm—a disk about the size of a power cell—was blackened, cracked, oozing thick dark blood. Wisps of smoke coiled upward from the cracks.

Oh, he thought. I guess that explains the smell.

“How … how does it feel, Jacen Solo—” The voice was thin, ragged and harsh, rasping, broken by coughs. The voice was familiar. The voice was Vergere’s. “—to once more … touch the Force?”

She lay crumpled on the floor a few meters away, just within a ragged archway lipped with jagged stone, as though some incomprehensibly powerful creature had trampled her as it crashed through the wall. Broken stone littered the floor. Her clothing was shredded, smoldering, red embers sliding along torn edges, and burned flesh beneath it still smoked.

“Vergere!” He was at her side without knowing how he got there. “How—what happened?” A sickening conviction clotted in his guts. “Did I—?” His voice trailed off.

He remembered—

Through a fever-dream haze, red-soaked images leaked back into him: the room filled with Yuuzhan Vong warriors, Vergere standing beside Nom Anor as though the two knew each other, as though they were coworkers. Comrades. Friends. Nom Anor had said something to her, and she something to him, but betrayal had hammered any hope of meaning from his brain. He remembered a long gathering breath: inhaling a galaxy of hatred and rage—

And he remembered channeling that whole galaxy of rage down his arms and hurling it at Vergere.

He remembered watching her writhe in the electric arcs of his hatred: remembered the sizzle of his own hands burning as lightning burst through them: remembered how that pain had only fed his anger.

And he remembered how good it had felt.

Clean.

Pure.

No more wrestling with right and wrong, good and evil. Every knotty problem of Jedi ethics had dissolved in one brain-blasting surge; once he had surrendered complexity, he’d found that everything was simple. His hatred became the only law of the universe. Anger alone had meaning, and the only answer to anger was pain. Someone else’s pain.

Anyone else’s pain.

Even now, awake, alert, choking on horror, he could feel the sweet echo of that clean, pure rage. He could hear it calling to him. It coiled inside him: a malignant parasite chewing at the bottom of his mind.

What have I become?

Vergere lay on the floor like a broken doll; her eyes were dull, glazed, empty, and her crest showed only dirty gray.

“Vergere—” he murmured. It had been so easy to hurt her. So simple. Tears spilled onto his cheeks. “I warned you, didn’t I? I warned you. The dark side—”

“Don’t … make excuses …” Her voice was even fainter now, breathier, more ragged.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he whispered. There was no possible excuse. No one knew the dangers of the dark side better than he; those dangers had haunted the depths below his entire life—

Yet he had fallen so easily.

He had fallen so far—

The wall of rubble closed off most of the chamber: tumbled hunks of duracrete, fallen in a steep slope from uncountable floors above. The only light in the much-reduced chamber was leakover from glow globes in the ruined hallway outside. The ceiling had collapsed, he remembered that much, remembered the roar, the pounding, the dust and flying splinters of stone. No, wait, it hadn’t collapsed …

He had pulled it down.

He remembered swirling within the red tide, remembered feeling Vergere lose consciousness, remembered reaching for a new target, a new victim, reaching for Nom Anor with the lightning that had felled Vergere—

And being unable to find him.

He could see the Yuuzhan Vong executor, could hear him shouting orders to the warriors around them all, but he could not touch him with the lightning. There had been a circuit missing: the lightning would ground harmlessly into the floor or the walls or arc back to make Vergere’s unconscious body spasm in convulsions. The lightning of his rage could only span gaps between poles of the Force—neither Nom Anor nor his warriors could conduct that current. Frustration had compounded Jacen’s fury; he had thrown himself outward seeking power to do these creatures harm—

And the storm above the crater had answered.

He remembered the wild joy of release as the power of the storm had roared into him and through him and became a mad vortex within the underground chamber, lifting stone and brick and chunks of duracrete to whirl and batter and slash the Yuuzhan Vong, pounding the warriors with pieces of the planet that had once been Jacen’s home. A shrug of wind had crushed the Yuuzhan Vong into one corner of the chamber, and he remembered bubbling laughter exploding with malice into a shout of