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Instead, a bubble of air had formed around him, and tentacles had cradled him like a sleeping child, and lips had closed over sword-edged teeth to touch him with a kiss.

Because he was the World Brain, and the World Brain was him, and each was everything else, and Jacen had learned that one can meet the Universe and all its irrational pain—which means meeting oneself—with fear, or with hatred, or with despair.

Or one can choose to meet it with love.

Jacen had chosen.

But still, he was astonished to discover that the Universe could love him back.

At the far end of an infinite distance—which was the same as right here—he felt an oceanic roll of the Force gathering an interstellar fortissimo of symphonic joy; at the same time, within the hollow at his center, he felt rage and pain and fierce hot combat, and he understood another reason why he was still alive.

Ganner—

He reached out with his feelings and gathered power from across the Universe.

Tentacles fell away from his arms and legs, and the air bubble around him collapsed. He brushed the World Brain lightly with his fingertips: a good-bye to a friend. Then Jacen Solo shot from the slime pool as though fired from a torpedo launcher.

He burst into the brimstone smoke, his robe blazing with slime that trailed from him in shining ropes and dripped like falling stars; he sailed over the slime pool to alight at the bowl rim, where the coral met the bare durasteel of a Senate platform. He lifted his head, fixing his gaze upon the cantilevered bridgeway that stuck out into the Well like a tongue, a tongue from a mouth that belched smoke and scarlet flame and the amethyst lightning of a lightsaber biting flesh.

And he could hear a human voice up there. He could not make out words, but the tone was unmistakable.

Ganner was laughing.

Deep in the Force, Jacen seized that bridgeway with the hands of his mind. One 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