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“That’s not it at all—”

“No? Then tell me, Jacen Solo, if you had pursued the noble goal of saving those thousands of slaves in the manner of a true Jedi, what would you have done differently? Anything? Or would you only feel differently about what you have done?”

Jacen frowned. “I—that’s not what I mean—”

“Does killing a dhuryam for a noble goal make it any less dead? Do you think it matters to these dead dhuryams whether you killed them in a frenzy of rage or with calm, cool Jedi detachment?”

“It matters to me,” Jacen said solidly.

“Ah, I see. You can do whatever you want, so long as you maintain your Jedi calm? So long as you can tell yourself you’re valuing life? You can kill and kill and kill and kill, so long as you don’t lose your temper?” She shook her head, blinking astonishment. “Isn’t that a little sick?”

“None of those questions are new, Vergere. Jedi have asked themselves all of them ever since the fall of the Empire.”

“Longer than that. Believe me.”

“We don’t have a very good answer—”

“You’ll never have an answer, Jacen Solo.” She leaned toward him, her hand on his shoulder. Though her touch was warm and friendly, her eyes might have been viewports into infinite space. “But you can be an answer.”

He frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

She turned her palms upward in a gesture of helpless surrender. “What does?”

“Oh, well, yeah,” he sighed. “I’ve wondered that myself.”

“Look around you,” she said. “Look at this world: at the patterns of the fern forest, at the rugged curves of terrain, the braided colors of the rings overhead. It is very beautiful, yes?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jacen said truthfully.

“That is ‘sense’ of a kind, yes?”

“Yes. Yes, it is. Sometimes when I look out at the stars, or across a wild landscape, I get the feeling that it does make sense—no, more like what you said: that it is sense. Like it is its own reason.”

“Do you know what I see, when I look at this world? I see you.”

Jacen stiffened. “Me?”

“What you see around you is the fruit of your rage, Jacen Solo. You made this happen.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You stole the decision of the tizo’pil Yun’tchilat from the shapers on the seedship. You chose the dhuryam that has become the pazhkic Yuuzhan’tar al’tirrna: the World Brain. You destroyed its rivals. You gave it the over-lordship of this planet. This planet takes its shape from your dhuryam friend’s intention, its personality—and its personality has been shaped by your friendship. All this beauty exists, in this form, because of you.”

He shook his head. “That wasn’t what I planned—”

“But it is what you did. I thought we had agreed that why you did it is of concern only to Jedi.”

“I—you always twist everything around,” he said. “You make it way more complicated than it really is.”

“On the contrary: I make it simpler. What you see around you, Jacen Solo, is a reflection of yourself: an artificial construct of the New Republic, remade by the Yuuzhan Vong into something new—something more beautiful than has existed in the galaxy before.”

“What do you mean, an artificial construct?” The sick dread that had curdled in his stomach when he found duracrete beneath the moss slammed back into him. “Where are we?”

“Yuuzhan’tar,” she said. “Did you not understand this?”

“No, I mean: what world was this before?”

She sighed. “You see, but you do not see. You know, but you do not let yourself know. Look, and your question is answered.”

He frowned at the fern forest below, where mountain shadows stretched away from the setting sun. Those flying creatures were out in greater force now, in the twilight, and they circled higher and higher through the shadows as though in pursuit of nocturnal insects. Their wings were broad, leathery, their bodies long and tapered, ending in a sinuous reptilian tail—

Then one swooped straight up in front of Jacen and soared above into the darkening sky, and he could no longer ignore what they were.

Hawk-bats.

He said, “Oh.”

Those strange metric designs on the distant mountains—he knew what