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Jacen said, fainter now, “Oh. Oh, no.”

The designs were viewports. The mountains were buildings. This place was a nightmare image of Yavin 4: the valleys and ridges were patterns of rubble carpeted by alien life. Far more than just an ancient temple complex like one on the gas giant’s moon—what Jacen looked upon here was the shape of a single planetwide city, shattered into ruins, buried beneath a jungle.

And all he could say was, “Oh.”

Long after Yuuzhan’tar had turned this face away from its sun, Jacen still sat on the mossy ledge above the jungle, now shrouded in night. Flashes of bioluminescence chased each other through the shadowed canopy in jagged streaks of blue-green and vivid yellow. The Bridge was impossibly bright, impossibly close, as though he could reach up, grab on, and swing from one of its braided cascades of color. The colors themselves shimmered and shifted as individual fragments in the orbital ring spun in their own rotations. It cast a glow over the nightscape brighter, softer, more diffuse, than any conjunction of Coruscant’s moons ever had. This was the most beautiful place Jacen had ever seen.

He hated it.

He hated every bit of it.

Even closing his eyes didn’t help, because just knowing it was out there made him shiver with rage. He wanted to burn the whole planet.

He knew, now, that somewhere deep in his heart, none of the war had ever seemed quite real; none of it since Sernpidal. He’d been nursing a secret certainty, concealed even from himself, that somehow everything would be all right again someday—that everything could be the way it used to be. That Chewbacca’s death had been some kind of mistake. That Jaina could never fall into the dark. That his parents’ marriage was strong and sure. That Uncle Luke would always show up just in time and everyone could have a laugh together at how afraid they’d been …

That the Anakin he’d seen die had been—oh, he didn’t know, a clone, maybe. Or a human-guised droid, and the real Anakin was off on the far side of the galaxy somewhere with Chewbacca, and someday they’d find their way home and the whole family could be together again.

That’s why he hated this world spread before him.

Because it could never be home again.

Even if the New Republic somehow, impossibly, turned the tide. Even if some miracle happened and they retook Coruscant—what they won wouldn’t be the same planet they had lost.

The Yuuzhan Vong had come, and they were never going to go away.

Even if Jacen had found a club big enough to knock the whole species back beyond the galactic horizon, nothing could ever erase the scars they would leave behind.

Nothing could ever heal his broken heart.

Nothing could remake him into the Jacen Solo he remembered: the cheerfully reckless Jacen, chasing Zekk into the downlevels; the exasperated Jacen, trying one more time to make Tenel Ka crack a smile; the Jedi apprentice Jacen, born to the Force, but still awed not only by the legend of Uncle Luke but by the power his uncle’s teaching could draw out of him; the teenage Jacen who could wilt under his mother’s stern glare, but still exchange roguish winks with his father and his sister the instant Mother turned away.

I spent so much time wanting to grow up. Trying to grow up. Trying to act like an adult … Now all I want is to be a kid again. Just for a little while. Just a day.

Just an hour.

Jacen reflected bitterly that a large part of growing up seemed to involve watching everything change, and discovering that all changes are permanent. That nothing ever changes back.

That you can’t go home again.

This was what the alien beauty of Yuuzhan’tar whispered constantly in the back of his head: Nothing lasts forever. The only permanence is death.

Brooding, he sat through the long slow roll of the night.

Some unknown time later—by the wheel of the stars, constellations still mockingly familiar over this bitterly foreign landscape, many hours had passed unmarked—he asked, “What now?”

Vergere answered