Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [130]
Jacen understood nothing except how much he hurt, and how terribly he had been betrayed. “I—” Speaking tore his throat as though he coughed splinters of transparisteel. He winced, squeezing shut his eyes until galaxies flared within them, then gritted his teeth and spoke anyway. “I trusted you.”
“Yes, you did.” She opened her hand, turning her quadrifid palm upward as if to catch a falling tear, and smiled up at him. “Why?”
Jacen could not find his breath to give answer; and then he found he had no answer to give.
She was so alien—
Raised on Coruscant, the nexus of the galaxy, he had no memory of a time when there had not been dozens—hundreds, even thousands—of wildly differing species in sight whenever he so much as peeked out the holographic false window of his bedroom. All space lanes led to Coruscant. Every sentient species of the New Republic had had representatives there. Bigotry was utterly beyond him; Jacen could no more dislike or distrust someone simply because she belonged to an unfamiliar species than he could breathe methane.
But Vergere—
Body compact and lithe, arms long and oddly mobile as though possessed of extra joints, hands from which fingers opened like the gripping spines of Andoan rock polyps, back-bent knees above splay-toed feet—he was acutely, overpoweringly aware that he had never seen any of Vergere’s kind before. Long bright eyes the shape of teardrops, a spray of whiskers curving around a wide, expressive mouth … but expressive of what? How could he know what the arc of her lips truly signified?
It resembled a human smile, but she was nothing resembling human.
Perhaps her species used the crest of iridescent feathers along her cranial ridge for nonverbal signals: right now, as he stared, feathers near the rounded rear of her oblate skull lifted and turned so that their color shifted from starlight silver to red as a blaster bolt. Was that what corresponded to a smile? Or a human’s deadpan shrug? Or a predator’s threat display?
How could he possibly know?
How could he have ever trusted her?
“But you—” he rasped. “You saved Mara—”
“Did I?” she chirped sunnily. “And if I did, what significance do you attach to this?”
“I thought you were on our side—”
One whiskered eyebrow arched. “There is no ‘our side,’ Jacen Solo.”
“You helped me kill the voxyn queen—”
“Helped you? Perhaps. Perhaps I used you; perhaps I had my own reasons to desire the death of the voxyn queen, and you were a convenient weapon. Or perhaps you are my true interest: perhaps I gave of my tears to Mara—perhaps I helped you survive the encounter with the voxyn queen—perhaps everything I have done was intended to bring you here, and hang you in the Embrace of Pain.”
“Which—” Jacen made himself say “—which was it?”
“Which do you think it was?”
“I—I don’t know … How can I know?”
“Why ask me? Should I presume to instruct a Jedi in the mysteries of epistemology?”
Jacen stiffened in the grip of the Embrace of Pain; he was not so broken that he did not know he was being mocked. “What do you want from me? Why have you done this? Why are you here?”
“Deep questions, little Solo.” Her ridge feathers rippled through a shimmering rainbow like a diamond-edged sabacc deck riffled by an expert dealer. “It is near enough to the truth to say that I am a messenger of melancholy—a herald of tragedy, bearing gifts to ease the grieved. A mourner, with grave goods to decorate the tomb. A hierophant, to perform the sacred offices for the dead—”
Jacen’s head swam. “What are you talking about? I don’t—I can’t—” His voice failed, and he sagged exhaustedly.
“Of course you can’t. It’s enough that the dead suffer their demise; would it be fair to ask them to understand it as well?”
“You’re saying …” Jacen licked his lips, his tongue so dry it scraped them raw. I can face