Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [4]
The emptiness of the universe howled inside his head.
There was nothing out there.
Only vast interstellar vacuum.
All his training, all his talent, his gift, meant nothing to the limitlessly indifferent cosmos; the Force was only the ghost of a dream from which he had now awakened.
Jaina—He thrust desperately into the bond that had always been there, seeking his sister, his twin; he poured his terror and loss into the void that yawned where that bond had always been.
Only silence. Only emptiness. Only lack.
Oh, Jaina—Jaina, I’m sorry …
With the Force-bond between them shattered, even Jaina would think he was dead.
Would know he was dead.
“You—there’s no way—you can’t possibly—” He barely recognized this tiny, lost-in-the-dark whisper as his own voice.
“But I have. Really, this Force business, you’re better off without it. If you’re a good boy, I’ll give it back when you grow up.”
“But …” How could his universe be so fragile? How could everything he was be so easily broken? “But I’m a Jedi …”
“You were a Jedi,” she corrected him. “Haven’t you been paying attention? What part about being dead do you not understand?”
“I don’t …” Jacen’s eyes drifted closed.
Tears gathered in his eyelashes, and when he opened his eyes the tears dripped straight from his eyeballs to splash on the floor beside Vergere’s feet. One of the room’s prehensile eyestalks twisted itself lower to examine them. “I don’t understand anything … Nothing makes sense to me anymore …”
Vergere straightened her back-bent legs and rose onto her toes, bringing her wide whiskered mouth within a decimeter of Jacen’s ear.
“Jacen Solo. Listen well.” Her voice was warm and kind, and her breath smelled of spices grown in alien soil. “Everything I tell you is a lie. Every question I ask is a trick. You will find no truth in me.” She came close enough that her whiskers tickled his ear, and whispered, “Though you believe nothing else, you may rest your faith on this.”
Jacen stared into eyes as blackly encompassing as interstellar space. He whispered, “What are you?”
“I am Vergere,” she said simply. “What are you?”
She waited, motionlessly patient, as though to confirm that he had no answer, then she turned away. A hatch sphincter dilated in the wall—a wet sound like lips opening for a kiss—and Vergere left without a backward glance.
The walls and ceiling creaked like an old man’s joints as the grip of the Embrace of Pain tightened again. Jacen Solo was once more swallowed by agony.
Now there is no more Force for Jacen—no more cool breath of life and sanity, no more Jaina, no more life.
Where Jacen is, there is only the white.
PART ONE
DESCENT
ONE
COCOON
In the dust-swept reaches of interstellar space, where the density of matter is measured in atoms per cubic meter, a small vessel of yorik coral blinked into existence, slewed through a radical curve that altered both its vector and its velocity, then streaked away, trailing a laser-straight line of ionizing radiation, to vanish again in the gamma burst of hyperjump.
Some unknown time later, an unguessable distance away, in a region indistinguishable from the first save by the altered parallax of certain stellar groups, the same vessel performed a similar manuver.
On its long journey, the vessel might fall into the galaxy any number of times, and each time be swallowed once more by the nothing beyond.
Jacen Solo hangs in the white, thinking.
He has begun to riddle out the lesson of pain.
The white drops him once in a while, as though the Embrace of Pain understands him somehow: as though it can read the limit of his strength. When another minute in the white might kill him, the Embrace of Pain eases enough to slide him back into the reality of the room, of