Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

long, smooth tug would lift him to it, and he could reach Ganner’s side, and join in his fight, stand at his shoulder against the Yuuzhan Vong—

“Jacen, wait.”

The words were spoken not loudly, but so perfectly resonant that they chimed in his ear as though the speaker were at his side. And she might as well have been: in the Force he felt an invisible hand take his shoulder.

He nodded to himself. “I should have known, somehow. I should have known you’d be here.”

Vergere stood only a few meters above and to his right, on the coral-draped Senate platform that had once belonged to the delegation from Kashyyyk. “Come, Jacen. Your sojourn in the lands of the dead is at an end. It is time once more to walk the bright fields of day.”

Instead of answering, he turned back toward the bridgeway above—but her Force grip tightened on his shoulder.

“You cannot save him, Jacen. All you can do is die with him. He has chosen this destiny. The only aid you can offer is to honor his choice. You stand at the very gates of death; life lies before you. If you turn back now—even for a single glance over your shoulder—you are lost.”

“What do you want me to do? I won’t leave him! I won’t!” He turned on her. A wave of trembling started at the back of his neck and shivered out through his arms and down his legs. “I can’t let people keep giving their lives for me!”

“He does not give his life for you. He gives your life to you. Will you refuse the gift of a dying man?”

“I can’t—Vergere, I can’t just—”

“In the story of your life, is this your best ending?”

He reached into the Force and gave a wrenching shove that twisted him free of her grip. “I won’t leave him.”

She shrugged. “Then you’ll be wanting this.”

She tossed something down to him. It spun lazily through the air, flashing silver in the slimelight; he caught it instinctively.

It was a lightsaber.

It was his lightsaber.

It felt strange in his hand. Weird. Alien.

He had not seen it since the death of the voxyn queen.

The last time he’d held it, he’d been somebody else. A boy. A sad, conflicted boy, searching desperately for anything he could be sure of, willing to die on a sure nothing rather than live for an uncertain something.

She said, “Choose, and act.”

He looked at the flare of battle above. He ached to go, burned to go, to find in himself the pure release, the cosmic symphony that he could feel echoing through Ganner … but—

He looked back at Vergere. “Every time you say that to me, it’s a trick.”

“As it is now,” she admitted. “But it’s not the same trick. The first time, you were but a boy. You did not truly understand what you were throwing away. The second time you were lost in the dark, and you needed flint and steel to spark a torch. Now, though—now, what are you, Jacen Solo?”

In an instant, it all flashed through him, from Sernpidal and Belkadan through Duro and Myrkyr to the Embrace of Pain, the Nursery, the Jedi Temple, and the cavern beast—

He was no warrior, he was certain of that. Not like Jaina was, or Anakin had been. He was no hero like Uncle Luke or his father, no great statesman like his mother or strategist like Admiral Ackbar or scientist like Danni Quee …

He remembered that he didn’t have to know what he was. All he had to do was decide.

“I—I guess …” he said slowly, frowning down at the weapon in his hand. “I guess—I’m a student.”

“Perhaps you are.” Vergere nodded. “Then you are also a teacher, for the two are one. But to be such, you must learn, and you must teach. You must live.”

She was right. He knew she was right. He could feel it as surely as he’d ever felt anything. But Ganner—

As he looked up, a new sun was born in the Well of the World Brain, somewhere deep in the tunnel above, a rising yellow glare that grew bright, and white, that flared until Jacen had to shield his eyes with his hand and turn away.

The Well shook, and he could feel sudden terror from the World Brain as the cantilevered bridgeway and platform collapsed, plunging a hundred meters to crash into the slime pool, and the world seemed to rock and tremble, and a blast of smoke and dust burst from the tunnel—

“What—” Jacen gasped, coughing in the dust that smelled of burning blood and duracrete, “—what—? Is that Ganner? What’s happening up there?”

“It may be Ganner. It may be a weapon of the Yuuzhan Vong. It makes no difference. Your choice is the same: stay, or go.”

The glare from above died in a long groundquake rumble and new billows of dust, and when Jacen reached out once more through the Force, Ganner was no longer there.

In the hollow of his chest, the warriors who had fought him were similarly absent.

Jacen stared up at the mouth of the tunnel. He could see it now, choked with rubble. Then the platforms around it began to sag, to crumble, and slide down the bowl toward the slime pool. Even the gloom-shrouded ceiling high above seemed to droop, and he felt a warm hand on his shoulder, and heard a warm whisper in his ear: Go.

It sounded like Ganner.

He frowned at Vergere. She returned his gaze blankly.

He would never know what had happened up there.

He would never know if that voice he’d just heard had been Ganner’s, or another of Vergere’s tricks.

He would never really know—could never really know—much of anything. Truth is elusive, and questions are more useful than answers.

But he knew this: life is more a matter of choosing than of knowing. He could never know the eventual destination of his path, but he could always choose in which direction to take each step.

He chose.

“You’re the one who’s supposed to be my guide through the lands of the dead,