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Days passed, each much the same as the last.

Jacen had plenty of time to think.

He thought about being a student. About being a teacher.

Being a Jedi.

Being a traitor.

Being a shadowmoth.

Once he brought it up to Vergere. “Can you tell me, now, what you’ve been after all this time? What it was you wanted me to be?”

“Of course,” she said easily. “I wanted you to be exactly what you are.”

“That’s not a very helpful answer.”

“It’s the only answer there is.”

“But what am I—? No, don’t say it, I already know: ‘That’s always been the question, hasn’t it?’ If you only knew how aggravating that gets after a while—”

“Forgive my curiosity,” she interrupted with an air of changing the subject, “but I have been wondering: just what, exactly, did you do in the Well of the World Brain?”

Jacen settled into himself then, and moved around on the couch beast into a more comfortable position. “What were you expecting me to do?”

Her crest flared green. “We know each other too well, you and I. Very well, I confess it: I did not know what to expect. I guessed you would either kill the World Brain, or yourself. The third possibility—that you would go ahead and sacrifice Ganner—I didn’t think likely.”

“But not impossible.”

“No,” she said. “Not impossible.”

“I chose a different option,” Jacen said. “I seduced it.”

Vergere’s crest flickered to orange. “Indeed?”

“I’m using the dhuryam to teach the Yuuzhan Vong a lesson. A real lesson. Kind of like the ones you taught me.” Jacen smiled, but it was a hard smile, a cold one, that glinted like pack ice in his eyes. “The World Brain’s on our side, now.”

“It’s going to fight the Yuuzhan Vong? Work for the New Republic?” Vergere asked skeptically. “A genengineered double agent?”

“No. Not the New Republic’s side. Our side. Yours and mine.”

“Oh.” Now she settled into her feline repose, and her black eyes gleamed. “We have a side of our own, do we?”

“I think we do,” Jacen said. “The dhuryam isn’t going to fight them. The Yuuzhan Vong are fanatics. For them, everything is Right or Wrong, Honorable or Evil, Truth or Blasphemy. When you fight fanatics, all you do is make them even more fanatic than they were when they started. Instead, my friend the World Brain is going to teach them something.”

He sat upright. “They are about to discover that the Vongforming of Yuuzhan’tar is not going exactly to plan. In fact, everything is going to go just a little bit wrong for them from now on. No matter how hard they try, nothing will happen quite the way they want it to.”

Vergere’s crest flickered quizzically. “And this teaches them what?”

“It’s that fanatic thing,” Jacen said. “That’s most of what’s wrong with the Yuuzhan Vong. Instead of working with what is, they keep trying to force everything to be what they think it should be. That’s not going to work on Yuuzhan’tar. They’ll either have to murder the dhuryam and start over from scratch—which they have neither the time nor the resources for—or they’re going to have to learn to compromise. Get it?”

“I do,” Vergere said appreciatively. “This is the most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic: that fanaticism is self-defeating.”

“Yeah.” Jacen looked back out the corneal port into the infinite nothing of hyperspace. “I can think of a few Jedi who could stand to learn that one, too.”

Suddenly Vergere was on her feet, and her arms encircled Jacen’s shoulders in a surprisingly warm hug. When she drew back, her eyes glistened—not with their customary mockery, but with tears.

“Jacen, I am so proud of you,” she whispered. “This is the greatest moment of a teacher’s life: when she is surpassed by her student.”

Jacen found himself blinking back tears of his own. “So is that what you are, finally? My teacher?”

“And your student, for the two are one.”

He lowered his head. His chest ached with a hard, cold solidity that wouldn’t let him meet her eyes. “Hard lessons.”

“It is a hard universe,” she said from beside him. “No lesson is truly learned until it has been purchased with pain.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Jacen