Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

against the crumple of stomach-lips, and took her wrist in both hands. He pulled hard, hard as he could, hard enough to make her begging turn to a yelp of pain—

“You’re breaking my ARM please you have to get up, you have to pull me UP—”

Get up? He didn’t have the strength to stand. He didn’t have the strength to save her. He had only strength enough to hurt her even more.

And to torture her final minutes with empty hope.

He could barely imagine what she must have gone through, to miss the evacuation of Coruscant, to survive the bombardment, and the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong. To have lived through the shattering transformation of her world into theirs: the tearing of a whole planet from its orbit. To have hidden in constant terror all these weeks and months in the downlevel shadows, desperately avoiding the conquerors. And when the cavern beast had led her down its throat …

Her heart must have been bursting with relief and joy. She had finally found sanctuary—

Then she had found that the only real sanctuary is death.

And how she would come to that death: eaten alive, digested while still awake and aware.

And when she had looked up to see him on the rim above her, an explosion of sudden hope—

Because she couldn’t know that the man who had come to her rescue was a broken ex-Jedi, tainted with darkness, half mad with suicidal despair.

How had he ended up so useless?

The simple unfairness of it made him angry.

Why should he be the one who has to watch this girl die? He’d never asked to be a hero. He’d never asked for power. From the very day he was born, the whole galaxy had been watching him, waiting for him to do something great, something that would live up to the legend of his illustrious parents, of his legendary uncle.

He couldn’t even live up to his own legend. Such as it was.

And there had been plenty of people who had enjoyed that, hadn’t there? There had been plenty of dirty sniggering people who got plenty of dirty sniggering satisfaction out of calling him a coward behind his back, and not one of those nasty vicious sniggering creeps had even once had to feel what it was like to hang in the Embrace of Pain, or toil hopelessly to save a few lives in the Nursery, or be forced to face the black-hearted indifference that was the real truth of the universe—

Anger blossomed within him, surged and swept him away in the familiar red tide, but this time he didn’t fight it, didn’t struggle and thrash and drown himself in its current. He welcomed it.

In the red rising tide, he found all the power he needed.

TEN

HOME FREE

Home.

The Solo apartments, not far from the ruined hulk of the Imperial Senate, still stood nearly intact.

Home was where Jacen had been heading ever since he’d woken up under the Bridge. Where else did he have to go?

Is anything better than finally finding your way home?

One thing he’d never asked himself: once he got home, what then?

He’d been half expecting, all these weeks, that reaching the place where he’d grown up would mean something: that he’d find some kind of safety there. Some kind of answers. As though if he could only lie down for a nap in his own bed, he’d wake up to find that the nightmare he’d lived—losing his family, his youth, his faith—had been only a hypnoid fantasy sparked by teenage hormones and an undigested dinner.

Is anything worse than finally reaching home, and finding that you’re still lost?

He’d been lost at home for hours by the time Anakin walked in.

Jacen sat in his place, in the chair he’d always used at the dining table on those rare occasions when the whole family had been together: to the left of his mother’s chair, next to Jaina, who’d always sat at his father’s right. Across the table, Anakin always used to sit next to the specially designed Wookiee-sized chair for Chewbacca.

Jacen tried to summon memories of those happy family times—tried to hear Chewbacca’s half-howled laughter, tried to see his mother’s struggle to maintain a disapproving glare at one of his father’s slightly risqué stories, tried to feel Jaina’s elbow in his ribs or a surreptitious glop of orange protato flipped at him by Anakin when their parents weren’t looking—but he couldn’t. He couldn’t fit those images into this dining room.

The dining room was different now.

A slickly glistening blue glob of puffballs—some sort of fungus colony—had enveloped Chewbacca’s chair and a quarter of the dining table; pale yellow tendrils rooted it to the leafy purple underbrush that had sprouted from the floor. The table itself had cracked in the middle, buckling beneath some kind of bloodred taproot the size of a Hutt that had broken through the ceiling and seemed determined to drill its way through the floor as well. The walls were draped with multicolored creepers that served as habitat for a variety of hand-sized creatures resembling scaled, warm-blooded spiders.

Jacen was pretty sure they were warm-blooded; at least, their clawed seven-toed feet felt warm as they ran down his arms, up his chest, and across the back of his shoulders. He’d blink once in a while, when one would scamper over his face, but that was his only motion.

He could have moved, if he wanted. He just couldn’t come up with a reason to.

The arachnoid creatures spat some kind of mucuslike secretion, globs of thick glassy saliva that stuck tenaciously to whatever it touched, with the sole exception of the arachnoids themselves. While it was still wet, their prehensile feet stretched and spun and drew the saliva out into thick glistening ropes that tightened and turned translucent as they dried, filling half the Solo dining room with a frosted fibrous web.

Jacen was pretty sure that this web was intended to bind him to this chair—that these arachnoids had some vague presentient plan to eventually eat him. He could