Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

living body, it could squeeze one of its inhabited crops, forcing captives down the gullet to the stomach chamber.

“They were mostly downlevel refugees who’d missed the evacuation—but some of them were escaped slaves, from the seedship. The Yuuzhan Vong are familiar with cavern beasts, and they avoid them; it wouldn’t surprise me if these were the original unshaped baseline from which they bred their worldships, like the one where you … the one at Myrkr.” He coughed, obscurely embarrassed. “Sorry.”

it’s okay, jace. Anakin’s grin was easy, friendly. don’t worry about me. i’m not sensitive.

Jacen nodded. “I guess I am, though.”

you always were. go on.

Jacen sighed sadly, but anger began to trickle through his guts again. “So it makes a perfect hiding place from the Yuuzhan Vong patrols. The cavern beast hides them, gives them shelter, water, food—sometimes it lures in animals that can be killed and eaten, or traps a refugee who’s carrying a stash of protein squares or whatever. There’s only one problem. Every once in a while it gets hungry. Sometimes there’s an animal or two that can be thrown to the stomachs.”

Jacen swallowed and looked at the ceiling. Brilliant green fingers of moss had crept in through the crack forced open by the immense taproot. “And sometimes—” His voice came out thick, hoarse with remembered fury. “—sometimes there isn’t.”

Anakin nodded gravely. the girl.

“Yeah, the girl. They had a rule: last to arrive is first to go. First to go … in. The girl had gotten there only a few hours before me. But some of them—the ones who did that to her—” His breath went hot, and his vision began to haze subtly red. “Some of them had been in there for weeks. Weeks, do you understand? Do you understand what they were doing? How many—how many people—” He had to stop, panting, until he could force the rage back down below his throat.

Anakin watched him expressionlessly.

Finally, he could go on. “They didn’t even kill her, just knocked her on the head and threw her in.” Muscle bulged at the corners of his jaw. His voice dripped loathing. “I guess they didn’t kill her because they didn’t want her murder on their consciences.”

Anakin shrugged. people are capable of rationalizing just about anything.

“But she woke up before the stomach closed over her, and almost got out. Made it halfway. Far enough to scream.” Jacen’s voice dropped to just above a whisper. “That’s where I came in.”

so what happened?

“I sure wasn’t about to let them put her back in. I wasn’t about to let them put anyone in—but all the stomachs were opening, and the crops were forcing everyone down the gullets. The cavern beast wanted to be fed, and if they didn’t take care of it, it’d just take care of itself.”

and the last one in—

“Was me. Right.”

they tried to feed you to the cavern beast?

Jacen said, “It never got that far.”

no?

“I’ve changed, Anakin. I’ve … I can’t excuse it. I can’t even explain it. But you—you should know—”

it’s okay, jace. no matter what happened—no matter what you’ve done, or what’s been done to you—you’re still my big brother, y’know? you always will be.

“Big brother,” Jacen echoed tonelessly. His eyes ached. He leaned his elbows to his knees, and rested his face in his burned hands. “Funny—these past couple of years, I felt like you’re the big brother.”

that’s kinda silly.

“Is it? You—Anakin, you were so sure of yourself. So sure of everything. So strong. I really—I looked up to you, Anakin. You always seemed to know what to do next. Things were so easy for you.”

everything’s easy when you have no doubts.

“But that’s what I wanted. To be sure. That’s what I thought being a Jedi was.” He lifted his face, and his eyes were wet. He laughed bitterly through his tears. “Don’t you get it? You’re exactly what I want to be when I grow up.”

what, dead?

“You know what I mean.”

i didn’t question things because i was never the questioning kind of guy. i was never thoughtful, like you. i was more like uncle luke: a human weapon. point me at the bad guys and turn me loose, i knock ‘em down and everybody cheers.

but things are different now. doing things the old way—my way, uncle luke’s way—that’s just getting people killed. look at what happened to me. what’s happening to all of us.

“Better that than what’s happening to me,” Jacen whispered. “Better off dead.”

you think so?

Regret welled up inside him, building a pressure of guilt and self-loathing that he could no longer lock away. He looked at his hands: at the burn-cracked flesh in the middle of his palms, roasted in the lightning of his rage. “Anakin, I went dark.”

did you?

“Under the old Jedi Temple, when Vergere handed me over to Nom Anor—what I did was bad, but it wasn’t evil. It was panic, and exhaustion, and suddenly finding the Force again when I thought it had been taken from me forever. Saving the girl … I’m not sorry for that. Anger was all I had left. And I didn’t hurt anybody.”

except yourself.

“But that’s okay, isn’t it? Isn’t that part of being a Jedi, to sacrifice your own welfare to save others?”

Anakin turned one palm upward. you tell me.

Jacen looked away. Remembering hurt. Talking hurt even more. But not talking about it—not admitting what he’d done, rationalizing it, justifying it—that he would not do.

I haven’t fallen that far, he thought.

Yet.

He had used the darkness for strength, letting it course through his veins like blood to keep him upright and functioning while the cavern-beast people appeared, while he learned who they were and what they had done to survive. He might have been able to hold on to his temper, if it had only been that. What they had done—what they had become—sickened him, but he was not a judge. He was a Jedi. He might still have found some way to help them. Even as the stomach-mouths gaped around them, fogging the chamber with their acidic gases, and the cavern-beast people had closed in