Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [20]
“But—but if I’m sent,” the slave moaned. “What then?”
“The slave seed-web is only hooked into your touch-pain nerves. The worst it can do is cause pain,” Jacen said. “The amphistaffs will kill you.”
“But the pain—the pain—”
“I know.”
“You don’t know,” the slave said bitterly. “They never make you do anything.”
“They don’t make you do anything either. They can’t. All they can do is hurt you. It’s not the same thing.”
“Easy for you to say! When was the last time they hurt you?”
Jacen rose, looking away toward Vergere. “You’d better get some sleep. They’ll turn the sun back on soon.”
Muttering, the slave dragged himself away, moving toward the rest of the slaves. He didn’t say thanks.
They rarely did.
Except when the slaves brought their wounds for him to treat, they barely spoke to him at all. They avoided him. He was too strange, too unlike any of the others, and he wasn’t easy to talk to. He walked among them in a permanent bubble of solitude; no one wanted to get too close. They feared him. Sometimes they hated him, too.
Jacen bent down and swept up a handful of the headless beetles. While he watched Vergere approach, he cracked their abdominal shells one by one between his thumb and first knuckle, scooping out the pale purple flesh. Clip beetle flesh was high in protein and fats, and tasted like Mon Cal ice-lobster.
It was the most appetizing thing he ever got to eat.
Vergere picked her way among the sleeping slaves. She looked up and met his eye, smiling, and gave a flickering wave with one hand. Jacen said, “That’s close enough.”
She stopped. “What, no hug? No kiss for your friend Vergere?”
“What do you want?”
She got that wise smile and opened her mouth as if she was about to give one of her cryptic nonanswers, but instead she shrugged, sighed, and the smile faded. “I am curious,” she said plainly. “How is your chest?”
Jacen touched his robeskin over the suppurating hole below his ribs. His robe had healed weeks ago. Even the bloodstain was gone. He suspected that the robeskins lived on the secretions of the creatures who wore them: sweat, blood, sloughed skin cells, and oils. His was large and healthy, even though he continually ripped strips from it for bandages, both for himself and for the wounded slaves he treated; it always grew back to the original length within a day or two.
His chest, though—
Looking at Vergere, he could feel it happen once more: the bone hook slicing in below his ribs, curving up to puncture his diaphragm. Its point had nicked his lung, then scratched against the inside of his sternum: an icy shuddering nonpain that punched a hole through his strength. He had sagged in the warriors’ grips.
Vergere had withdrawn the hook slowly; it skidded through clamped muscle. She examined him at some length, her crest shimmering an iridescent, unreadable rainbow. “Do you feel it yet?”
Jacen had stared down at the sluggish trail of blood that leaked from the hole below his ribs. The hole had been no bigger than the end of his little finger; he’d felt an absurd desire to stick his finger in the hole like the stopper in a bottle of Corellian whiskey.
Only then had Vergere told him what that hook of bone had done: implanted a slave coral seed inside his chest. “Well done,” she had said to the weapon cheerfully. “Go; enjoy yourself.” The hook had relaxed, coiling around her wrist for a moment like a hug from an affectionate snake, then unwrapped itself and dropped to the ground, slithering away into the underbrush.
“I know you’ve been implanted before,” she had told him. “On Belkadan, yes? That seed, though, grew too slowly and was removed too easily. So I’ve made your new, improved one less … mm, less accessible.”
And the agony that had blossomed over his heart—
The slave