Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

would have swept aside the curtain with a flourish and posed, dramatically backlit, in the doorway. He would have coolly announced himself and asked his questions, counting on his imposing height and intimidating glare, his reputation, and his sheer gutsy dash to bully out the answers he needed.

Now, instead, he leaned back against the pebbly wall beside the door and let himself slide down. He settled in, sitting, as though he were just another refugee, taking a nap at the side of a corridor.

He let his head drift forward and his eyes fall closed while he reached into the Force, seeking feelings from the chamber beyond. This could be a trap, and he was done with taking foolish chances. Caution was his byword, now, and unobtrusiveness his best defense.

He felt humans inside the chamber, with enough Force presence that there might have been five of them—as he’d been told there would be, by the harried data clerk who’d accessed their file on the temporary, obsolete, and overloaded central server that held the sketchy records compiled by this camp ship’s volunteer administrators—but Ganner couldn’t quite resolve the Force sensation into distinct individuals.

He frowned, squeezing his eyes more tightly shut, concentrating.

It was almost as though inside this chamber there was one person with five different personalities … or that all five of them participated in some kind of group consciousness. That would be rare in humanity, but hardly impossible. The galaxy had spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of minor variations on the human theme; Ganner knew he hadn’t seen them all.

And the unknown, he had learned through bitter experience, was always dangerous. Often deadly. His little half joke about this chamber being on the dark side didn’t seem funny anymore.

He had a feeling he was about to get himself killed.

He sighed, and got up.

From the moment he had begun chasing this rumor, he had sort of, somehow, half known he would end up like this: alone, no backup, no one even knowing enough about where he was to mount a search for him when he did not return. It’d taken him two days just to walk this deeply into the camp ship.

No one would ever know what had happened to him.

Well, one person would be able to guess … but he didn’t think she’d care.

He remembered the dark flame in Jaina’s eyes when he’d told her of the rumor.

“Another stupid lie,” she’d said. “And you’re an idiot for believing it.”

He’d tried to explain that he didn’t actually believe the tale; he just thought it should be checked out. He’d tried to tell her how important this could be to the morale of the whole New Republic. “Don’t you get it? He’s a hero. It’d be like—like he rose from the dead, Jaina! It’d be magical—it’d be a miracle! It’d give us hope again.”

“We don’t need hope,” Jaina had told him. A grim set had hardened the once soft curve of her jaw ever since Myrkr. “We need more ships. We need better weapons. And we need Jedi. We need to keep on fighting. We don’t need you wasting everybody’s time on fantasies.”

Ganner had persisted. “But what if it’s not a fantasy? Your mother still claims he’s alive—”

“My mother,” Jaina had said, a slow, ancient weight on her words, a weight too vast, too old for a teenage girl, “lost both her sons on the same day. She hasn’t gotten over it. She probably never will.”

“She has a right to know—”

“I’m not arguing with you, Ganner. I’m telling you. Keep your fat yap shut. I don’t want anything about this getting back to Mom. To raise her hopes and then crush them again would break her. If you do, I’ll break you.”

“But, but Jaina—”

She had leaned close to him then, and that dark flame in her eyes had burned so hot that Ganner took a step back. “Don’t think I won’t, Ganner. And don’t think I can’t.”

He didn’t answer. He believed her.

She said, “The Vong kept Jacen alive after they captured him. For a long time. They kept him alive so they could hurt him. I could feel it. I never even told Mom and Dad what they put him through. What happened to Anakin … that was better. That was clean.”

Tears had sparked in her eyes, but her voice was hard enough to cut transparisteel. “I felt Jacen die. In one instant, he was—he was just gone. Blasted out of existence like he’d never existed at all. I felt it. If he were alive, I wouldn’t need you to come and tell me about it! I’d know!”

Her hands had clenched to fists, white-knuckled, pressed against her sides, and her lips drew back over her teeth. “Don’t talk to me about this—this garbage ever again. And don’t talk to anyone else, either. Anyone. If I find out you’ve so much as looked in a mirror and told yourself, I will hurt you. I will teach you things about pain that no one should ever have to learn.”

Ganner had stood and stared, gaping, dumbstruck at the hurt and the pure black rage that beat against him through the Force. What had happened to her? There had been some rumors—

“Hey, Jaina, it’s okay,” he’d said. “I won’t tell anybody, I promise. Don’t get mad—”

“I’m not mad. You haven’t seen mad. You better hope you never do.” She had folded her arms and turned her back to him. “Get out of my sight.”

Ganner had walked unsteadily away, shaken. Jaina had always held herself so together, had always been so competent, so in control, that it had been easy to forget that she’d lost both her brothers that day, too.

Had lost her twin: the brother who’d been half of all she was.

Later—much later—he reflected: Well, y’know, I only promised I wouldn’t talk about it. I never promised I wouldn’t look into it.

That was when he had set out. Alone.

The old Ganner might have done the same, he occasionally thought with a certain melancholy resignation. It would have made a great story, a story