Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [45]
“I don’t feel much like a hero.”
“No?” Her crest splayed orange. “How does a hero feel?”
Jacen looked away, shaking his head silently. She settled in beside him, swinging her legs over the void below them, kicking her heels aimlessly like a little girl in a chair too high for her.
After a moment, Jacen sighed, and shook his head again, and shrugged. “I guess heroes feel like they’ve accomplished something.”
“And you haven’t? Several thousand slaves might disagree.”
“You don’t understand.” In his mind, he saw again the body on the hive-island’s beach: the one who might have been a slave, who might have been a warrior, who had bled out his life next to the corpse of a shaper who’d had no clue in combat: a shaper who’d only thought to put his own body between the infant dhuryams and the killing machine Jacen had become. “In the Nursery—once I started killing,” he said softly, “I didn’t want to stop. That must be—I can only think that’s how the dark side must feel. I didn’t ever want to stop.”
“But you did.”
“Only because you stopped me.”
“Who’s stopping you now?”
He stared at her.
She turned her quadrifid palm upward as though offering him a sweet. “You want to kill? There is nothing around you but life, Jacen Solo. Take it as you please. Even mine. My species has a particularly vulnerable neck; merely take my head in your hands, and with one quick twist, thus—” She jerked her head up and back as though an invisible fist had punched her in the mouth. “—you can satisfy this dark desire.”
“I don’t want to kill you, Vergere.” He hunched into himself, resting his elbows on his thighs as though huddled against a chill. “I don’t want to kill anybody. Just the opposite. I’m grateful. You saved me. I was out of control—”
“You were not,” she said sharply. “Don’t make excuses.” “What?”
“Out of control is just code for ‘I don’t want to admit I’m the kind of person who would do such things.’ It’s a lie.”
He offered her half a smile. “Everything I tell you is a lie.”
She accepted his mockery with an expressionless nod.
“But everything you tell yourself should be the truth—or as close to it as you can come. You did what you did because you are who you are. Self-control, or its lack, had nothing to do with it.”
“Self-control has everything to do with it—that’s what being a Jedi is.”
“You,” she said, “are not a Jedi.”
He looked away. Remembering what she had done to him kindled a spark within his chest that grew into a scorching flame around his heart. His fingers dug into the lush moss that carpeted the ledge, and he made fists, tearing up a double handful, and a large part of him wanted that moss to be her neck. But years of Jedi training had armored him against rage. When he opened his fists and let those shreds fall into the wind, he let his anger fall with them.
“Being a Jedi isn’t just about using the Force.” His voice was stronger now; he was on sure ground. “It’s a commitment to a certain way of doing things—a certain way of looking at things. It’s about valuing life, not destroying it.”
“So is gardening.”
He hung his head, numb with memory. “But I wasn’t trying to save anybody. Sure, it started out that way—that’s what I planned for—but by the time you caught up with me on the hive-island, saving lives was the farthest thing from my mind. All I wanted was a club big enough to smack the Yuuzhan Vong all the way out of the galaxy. All I wanted was to hurt them.”
She blinked. “And this is wrong?”
“It is for me. That’s the dark side. It’s the definition of the dark side. That’s what you saved me from.”
“I saved your life, Jacen Solo. That’s all. Your ethics are your own affair.”
Jacen just shook his head. His family history was itself the ultimate argument that the dark side is everybody’s affair, but he wasn’t about to get into that. “You don’t understand.”
“Perhaps I don’t,” she agreed cheerfully. “You seem to be telling me that what you do is irrelevant;