Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

have broken free without much effort, earlier, before the web had grown strong. He hadn’t. Even now, a shrug of his anger could scatter the arachnoids and flashburn their web into nonexistence.

But he couldn’t think of a reason why he should bother.

Anakin walked through the web strands as though they didn’t exist. He wore a dark vest over a loose tunic, and close-fitting breeches in the Corellian style. He hooked his thumbs behind a wide leather belt, his right near an empty clip where his lightsaber should have been, and gave Jacen a crooked smile so much like Han’s it brought tears to his eyes.

whatcha doin’, big brother?

One of the arachnoids scampered along a strand that passed through Anakin’s chest at an angle from shoulder to floating rib. Neither paid the slightest attention to the other.

Jacen looked at Anakin for a long time, then sighed. “What are you this time?”

this time?

Jacen closed his eyes. “You remember Uncle Luke talking about his Master? About how he could feel Master Obi-Wan in the Force sometimes, even after he’d seen Darth Vader … seen our grandfather—kill him on the first Death Star? How he could hear Master Obi-Wan’s voice giving him advice, and a couple of times even see him?”

sure. everybody knows those stories.

“I guess I kept expecting you to help me like that. I mean, I know: you’re not my Master. And I saw your body. I saw—what they did to you. But still … I guess I kept hoping, you know? I just—I just wanted to hear your voice again. One more time. See you grin. Smack you one on the top of the head for doing something as stupid as get yourself killed.”

not that you ever needed all that much of a reason, huh?

Jacen’s closed eyes filled with tears. “Yeah. One last time, you know?”

sure.

“That’s why I fell for it. Both times.”

both times?

Jacen tilted his head in a sketch of a shrug. “Back in the Nursery, when Vergere stopped me from killing the last dhuryam. She used the Force to fake your voice, and I—”

how do you know?

Jacen opened his eyes, frowning. “What?”

you sure it was a fake? Anakin’s grin was as playfully lopsided as it had ever been. she was using the force, right? how do you know the force wasn’t using her?

“I guess I don’t,” Jacen admitted slowly. “But it doesn’t really make any difference.”

if you say so.

“The last time, you had nothing to do with the Force. You were telepathic bait.”

maybe i was. are you sure that’s all i was?

Jacen frowned without answering.

what would have happened if you hadn’t seen me there on the balcony?

He lowered his head. “I—I don’t know. I might have let myself—” fall, he finished silently. He couldn’t say it.

He had let himself fall. He had fallen faster and farther than any mere drop to his death.

so seeing me there saved your life, huh?

“Yeah. I guess. But what you led me to—I mean, what it, the telepathic projection, what it led me to—”

it, me, whatever. Anakin waved a dismissive hand. don’t get hung up on meaningless distinctions.

“But down there—down inside the cavern beast—” Bitter acid slid up the back of Jacen’s throat. He couldn’t go on.

you saved the girl, didn’t you?

“Oh, sure. Saved her. I sure did.” Jacen coughed, gagging on the memory. “But the others—”

There had been other people in the belly of the beast: a lot of people, fifty or more, nearly all human. They had come crowding to the mouths of the stomach chamber gullet-tunnels only a moment after Jacen had freed the girl.

None of them was happy.

With raw Force rolling through him in dark waves, he had been able to seize his own hands telekinetically, using them like tools to peel back the clamped-shut lips of the stomach-mouth. He could feel every centimeter of the girl in the Force, could feel her terror and hope and the agony of her acid-scorched skin, and with the Force he’d lifted her effortlessly, setting her safely on the bowl rim above. A Force-assisted leap had carried him neatly to her side, then he’d lifted her in his physical arms and leapt to the gullet-tunnel down which he’d come. Her clothing had hung in tatters, her skin reddened, peeling, seeping fluid, cooking in the slow heat of the acids that still coated her; Jacen had swiftly stripped off the remnants of her clothing, replacing them with his own robeskin.

It’s all right. You’ll be all right, he had told her. The robeskin will take care of you. It would not only absorb and eliminate the leftover acids, but also eat necrotic skin on her burns and probably save her from serious infection, even gangrene.

He hadn’t told her that, of course; despite the darkening thunder of the Force rolling through him, he hadn’t been thoughtlessly cruel enough to tell her—after what she’d been through—that the clothing he had given her was already eating parts of her flesh.

And then, clad only in his breechclout, he had looked up and seen the others. The cavern-beast people, fifty-odd of them. Some of them had blasters.

Some of the blasters had been pointed at him.

“It was so—so sick. I couldn’t believe it.” Jacen shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

Anakin stared at him patiently.

“Worse than Peace Brigaders. Worse than anything I can think of.” Jacen shut his eyes against the memory. “They were living in there.”

The cavern beast was a conservative predator: if its telepathic bait captured more animals than it needed for food, captured survivors could live for a considerable while inside. The moisture that had dripped continuously from the “stalactites” was actually an internal food reserve, analogous to a human’s stored fats and glycogen, that could both hydrate and nourish creatures in the cavern beast’s multiple crops. The cavern beast processed waste matter ultra-efficiently, extracting nutrition from its captives’ feces and water from its captives’ urine, and the body heat given off by captives helped the cavern beast regulate its internal temperature. When it needed the extra nutrition of a