Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

“What I have done? Oh, no no no, little Solo child. This is about what you have done.”

“I haven’t done anything!”

Vergere settled back against the chamber’s wall a meter away. Slowly, she folded her back-bent knees beneath her, then laced her fingers together in front of her delicately whiskered mouth and stared at him over her knuckles.

After a long, long silence, during which I haven’t done anything! echoed in his mind until Jacen’s face burned, Vergere said, “Exactly.”

She leaned close, as though to share an embarrassing secret. “Is that not the infant’s tactic? To wail, and wail, and wail, to wriggle its fingers and kick its heels … hoping an adult will notice, and care for it?”

Jacen lowered his head, struggling against sudden hot tears. “What can I do?”

She sat back again and made more of that snuffling noise. “Certainly, among your options is continuing to hang in this room and suffer. And so long as you do that, do you know what will happen?”

Jacen gave her a bruised look. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said cheerfully. She spread her hands. “Oh, eventually, you’ll go mad, I suppose. If you’re lucky. Someday you may even die.” Her crest flattened back and became blasterbore gray. “Of old age.”

Jacen stared, openmouthed. He couldn’t face another hour in the Embrace of Pain—she was talking about years. About decades.

About the rest of his life.

He hugged his knees and buried his face against them, grinding his eye sockets against his kneecaps as though he could squeeze the horror out of his head. He remembered Uncle Luke in the doorway of the shed on Belkadan, remembered the sadness on his face as he cut through the Yuuzhan Vong warriors who had captured Jacen, remembered the swift sure pressure as Luke gouged the slave seed out of Jacen’s face with his cybernetic thumb.

He remembered that Uncle Luke wouldn’t be coming for him this time. Nobody would.

Because Jacen was dead.

“Is that why you keep coming here?” he muttered into his folded arms. “To gloat? To humiliate a defeated enemy?”

“Am I gloating? Are we enemies?” Vergere asked, sounding honestly puzzled. “Are you defeated?”

Her suddenly sincere tone caught him; he raised his head, and could find no mockery now in her eyes. “I don’t understand.”

“That, at least, is very clear,” she sighed. “I give you a gift, Jacen Solo. I free you from hope of rescue. Can you not see how I am trying to help you?”

“Help?” Jacen coughed a bitter chuckle. “You need to brush up on your Basic, Vergere. In Basic, when we talk about the kind of things you’ve done to me, help isn’t the word we use.”

“No? Then perhaps you are correct: our difficulties may be linguistic.” Vergere sighed again, and settled even lower, folding her arms on the floor in front of her and arranging herself on top of them in a way more feline than avian. Secondary inner lids shrouded her eyes.

“When I was very young—younger than you, little Solo—I came upon a ringed moon shadowmoth at the end of its metamorphosis, still within its cocoon,” she said distantly, a little sadly. “I had already some touch with the Force; I could feel the shadowmoth’s pain, its panic, its claustrophobia, its hopelessly desperate struggle to free itself. It was as though this particular shadowmoth knew I was beside it, and screamed out to me for help. How could I refuse? Shadowmoth cocoons are polychained silicates—very, very tough—and shadowmoths are so delicate, so beautiful: gentle creatures whose only purpose is to sing to the night sky. So I gave it what I think you mean by help: I used a small utility cutter to slice the cocoon, to help the shadowmoth get out.”

“Oh, you didn’t, did you? Please say you didn’t.” Jacen let his eyes drift closed, sorry already, for how he knew this story would end.

He’d had a shadowmoth in his collection for a short time; he remembered watching the larva grow, feeling its happy satisfaction through his empathic talent as it fed on stripped insulation and crumbled duracrete; he remembered the young shadowmoth that had emerged, spreading its dusky, beautifully striated wings against the crystalline polymer of its viewcage; he remembered the shadowmoth’s thrilling whistle of moonsong, when he had released it from its viewcage and it had soared away under the mingled glows of Coruscant’s four moons.

He remembered the desperate panic that had beat in waves against him through the Force, the night the shadowmoth had fought free of its cocoon. He remembered his ache to help the helpless creature—and he remembered why he hadn’t.

“You can’t help a shadowmoth by cutting its cocoon,” he said. “It needs the effort; the struggle to break the cocoon forces ichor into its wing veins. If you cut the cocoon—”

“The shadowmoth will be crippled,” Vergere finished for him solemnly. “Yes. It was a tragic creature—never to fly, never to join its fellows in their nightdance under the moons. Even its wingflutes were stunted, and so it was as mute as it was planetbound. During that long summer, we sometimes heard moonsong through the window of my bedchamber, and from my shadowmoth I would feel always only sadness and bitter envy, that it could never soar beneath the stars, that its voice could never rise in song. I cared for it as best I could—but the life of a shadowmoth is short, you know; they spend years and years as larvae, storing strength for one single summer of dance and song. I robbed that shadowmoth; I stole its destiny—because I helped it.”

“That wasn’t helping,” Jacen said. “That’s not what help means, either.”

“No? I saw a creature in agony, crying out its terror, and I undertook to ease its pain, and assuage its fear. If that is not what you mean by help, then my command of Basic is worse than I believed.”

“You didn’t understand what was happening.”

Vergere shrugged. “Neither did the shadowmoth. But tell me this, Jacen Solo: if I had understood what was happening—if I had known what the larva was,