Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

was only a side effect: any victim would see someone or something they’d instinctively trust to lead them to safety. They would follow blindly, trusting, and be consumed.

The irony was bitter: the shadow worm that coiled through his chest had defended him from that false trust, while the rage that fed the worm had sent him headlong into the cavern beast’s mouth anyway.

This, Jacen reflected in his first clear thought since falling into the dark, is going to be an ugly way to die.

But that was okay. Dying was okay; he didn’t mind. Better to die than to live with the darkness inside him. At least it would be over. He could just kneel here and wait to die—

If only it were quiet.

—please help me please aaaaAAAAAA—

The phase transition of terror into raw agony jolted Jacen’s eyes open, and he lurched to his feet. He couldn’t listen to this, trick or not. He knew too much about pain.

“Shut up,” he growled, low in the back of his throat. “Shut up shut up shut up.”

The screams echoed through a puckered gallery mouth that yawned a few meters to his left: a tunnel beyond led down, dropping away into the yellow-green gloom. Jacen stumbled drunkenly on the slope. The screams continued: wordless now, bleak, animal, edged with despair.

The tunnel led deeper and deeper, turning upon itself in a long loose spiral, opening at last into another cavern vastly larger than the first, a cavern dank, dim, the bio-glow that had lit the throat and the chamber above only shimmering faintly through the mouths of other tunnels that opened around the walls. White swirls of mist curled through the air—no, not mist, Jacen discovered as he entered the cavern, but smoke: eye-burning, chokingly harsh, tasting of acid. The floor of this cavern was ruggedly uneven, dimpled as though it were only a thin skin over bowls big enough to swim in; the bowls tapered steeply downward, bottoming in upcrumpled hummocks of stony flesh like lips of refresher-sized mouths.

He coughed, batting smoke away from his face, and staggered toward the screams, following a winding course balanced on the thin curving rims where the bowls met edge to edge.

Deep in the cavern, one of those mouths had pursed around a girl.

Jacen paused above her, balanced on the warm stone bowl rim. She looked as real as Anakin had: real from her tangled, matted hair to the tear-streaked dirt that smeared her face. Only her head and one arm protruded from the tight-sealed lips that held her, and when she saw him above she reached for him, fingers straining helplessly, eyes white with pain and fear.

“Please whoever you are PLEASE you have to HELP ME please it’s EATING me, it’s, it’s, it’s eating me ALIVE—”

He knew what those puckered lips were, now. The cavern above was actually only a crop, or a gizzard; the real stomachs were behind those mouths at the bottoms of the bowls below. That’s why the cavern beast was showing him a girl down there.

She was bait.

“Shut up,” Jacen whispered. “You’re not real. Shut up.”

All he wanted was a quiet place to die. Was that too much to ask? Hadn’t he earned that? Why did everything have to be so hideous, so gruesome, so just plain rotten all the time? Couldn’t he even die in peace?

Did the whole universe hate him?

There’s only one answer when the universe hates you, whispered the shadow worm from the base of his skull. Hate it back.

So he did.

It was easy.

He hated the universe. Hated everything about it: all the pointless suffering and empty death and all the stupid mindless mechanical useless laws and all the squirming blood-smeared ignorant life, hated the stony flesh under his feet and the air that he breathed, hated himself, hated even the hate he felt and suddenly he wasn’t tired anymore, he wasn’t confused anymore, everything was simple, everything was easy, everything made sense because hate was everything and everything was hate, and he didn’t want to die anymore.

All he wanted was to hurt someone.

He looked down at the screaming girl. He hated her.

She wasn’t even real. Like a dream. He could do whatever he wanted. Anything. His heart thundered, and his breath came short and hot.

Anything.

Power raged through him as though a dam had burst in his chest. He smiled, and stretched forth his hand, and made a fist.

The Force stifled her screams to a shocked choke. Through the Force he could feel her terror, feel the savage burning of digestive acids slowly dissolving her skin; in the Force he could feel power, real power, power enough to crack her skull like a pterosaur egg, power enough to—

Wait, begged his last shred of sanity. Wait—

He could feel her—in the Force?

“Oh—” he whispered. His knees buckled. “Oh, oh no, oh please no—”

His hatred and his strength failed together. He pitched forward, his boots losing purchase on the rim, and he tumbled down the inner curve of the bowl to splay bonelessly beside the stomach-mouth. He might have just lain there, just let himself pass out, let himself sleep until the mouth beside opened again to close around him, instead, but a hand, a girl’s hand, a real hand belonging to a real girl, clutched desperately at his robeskin, yanking him awake, and her shriek scorched his ears. “HELP me you have to HELP ME you have to help me—”

“Sorry,” Jacen mumbled, blinking rapidly, trying to make his eyes focus, struggling weakly to rise. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—”

His vision cleared, and he saw her, really saw her, for the first time. He saw that her hair had once been long and flowing and golden blond under its coating of greasy dirt; he saw that her eyes were blue, and her face a delicate oval; he saw that—

She’s barely even my age.

And if I don’t do something RIGHT NOW, she won’t get any older.

He couldn’t trust his legs to support him; he swung himself around to brace his feet