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“Vergere—”

“This is not a riddle. What distinguishes a flower from a weed is only—and exactly—this: the choice of the gardener.”

“I’m not a gardener,” Jacen said, biting down on his temper. He leaned toward her, blood surging into his face. “And these are not weeds!”

She shrugged. “Again, our difficulties may be linguistic. To me, a gardener is one who chooses what to cultivate, and what to uproot; who decides which lives must end so that the lives he cherishes may flourish.” She lowered her head as though shy, or embarrassed, sighing; she opened her hand toward the headless shells of the clip beetles. “Is that not what you have done?”

He kept his eyes on her, hanging on to his anger. “Those are bugs, Vergere.”

“So is a shadowmoth.”

“I’m talking about people—”

“Were the beetles less alive than the slave? Is not a life a life, whatever form it takes?”

Jacen lowered his head. “You can’t make me say I was wrong to do it. It wasn’t wrong. He’s a sentient being. Those were insects.”

She gave out a wind-chime spray of laughter. “I did not say it was wrong, Jacen Solo. Am I a moralist? I only point out that you make the gardener’s choice.”

Jacen had always been stubborn; he was far from ready to give up. “You’re the gardener,” he muttered sullenly, staring at his hands. “I’m just one of the weeds.”

She placed her hand on his arm, her long flexible fingers warm and gentle; her touch was so clearly friendly, even affectionate, that Jacen for one moment felt as though his Force empathy had not deserted him. He knew, absolutely and without question, that Vergere meant him no harm. That she cared for him, and regretted his anger, his hostility, and his suffering.

But that doesn’t mean she’s on my side, he reminded himself.

“How is it,” she asked slowly, “that you have come to be the medical droid for your slave gang? Of all the jobs that all the slaves do, how did this one fall to you?”

“There’s no one else who can do it.”

“No one who can set a bone? No one who can wash clean a cut? No one who can twist the head off a clip beetle?”

Jacen shrugged. “No one who can tell the dhuryam to blow itself out an air lock.”

“Ah.” That translucent inner lid slid down her eye. “The dhuryam disapproves?”

“Let’s say it took some convincing.”

“Convincing?”

“Yeah.”

She said nothing for a long time. She might have been waiting for him to elaborate; she might have been trying to guess what he had done. She might have been thinking of something else altogether. “And how did you manage to convince it?”

Jacen stared through her, remembering his savage private struggle against the slave seed and the dhuryam that controlled it, day after day of bitter agony. He wondered how much of that story she might know already; he was certain that she had some way of keeping him under observation.

The dhuryam was an intelligent creature; it had not taken long to discover that Jacen could not be moved by pain. But the dhuryam was itself stubborn by nature, and it had been specifically engineered to command. It was not accustomed to disobedience, nor inclined to tolerate it.

After days of straight, simple pain, the dhuryam had taken advantage of the slave seed’s growth; it had spent more than a week jerking Jacen’s limbs individually by remote control, using the slave seed to give him spasms and cramps that forced him to move, making him twitch and thrash like a holomonster controlled by a half-melted logic board.

The turning point had come when the dhuryam realized that it had been pouring so much energy and attention into its struggle with Jacen that it was neglecting its other slaves. Its domain in the Nursery was falling to ruin, becoming a wasteland among the lush domains of its sibling-rivals. It understood that breaking Jacen was an expensive undertaking: a project whose costs were counted in jobs that did not get done. And it soon began to discover that Jacen could be useful, even unbroken.

Jacen had taken every respite from the pain to minister