Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [48]
Jacen shook his head. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Perhaps I will when you do.”
He nodded. This was as much of an answer as he had learned to expect. He swung his legs back onto the ledge, wrapping his elbows around knees drawn up to his chest. “So, what next?”
“You tell me.”
“No games, Vergere. Not anymore. And no more shadowmoth stories, huh?”
“Is what has happened such a mystery to you?”
“I’m not an idiot. You’re training me.” He made an irritated gesture, a flick of the wrist as though tossing away something nasty. “That’s what you’ve been doing from the beginning. I’m learning more tricks than a monkey-lizard. I just don’t know what you’re training me to do.”
“You are free to do, or not do, what you will. Do you understand the difference between training and teaching? Between learning to do and learning to be?”
“So we’re back to the shadowmoth story after all.”
“Is there another story you like better?”
“I just want to know what you’re after, all right? What you want from me. I want to know what to expect.”
“I want nothing from you. I want only for you. ‘Expecting’ is distraction. Pay attention to now.”
“Why can’t you just explain what you’re trying to teach me?”
“Is it what the teacher teaches—” The darkness itself seemed to smile. “—or what the student learns?”
He remembered the first time she had asked him that. He remembered being broken with pain. He remembered how she had guided him to a state of mind where he could mend himself; like a healed bone, he’d become stronger at the break.
He nodded slowly, more to himself than to her. He rose, and went over to the moss-covered couch at the edge of the black shadows cast by the broken walls and the screen of gently weaving ferns. He picked up the neatly folded robeskin, and looked at it for a long moment, then shrugged and slipped it on over his head. “How long before the Yuuzhan Vong arrive?”
“Look around you. They are already here.”
“I mean, how long before something happens? How long can we stay here?”
“That depends.” A soft chuckle came from the darkness. “How thirsty are you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m told that a human can live three standard days without water—four or five, with careful conservation. Would it be too forward of me to suggest that we might leave in search of some, before you are too weak to move?”
Jacen stared into the darkness. “You’re saying it’s up to me?”
“Here, look at this.”
Out from the shadows flew a pale, irregular object half the size of Jacen’s fist; it curved through a slow arc, gently tossed. Jacen caught it instinctively.
In the clear light reflected by the Bridge, he found the object to be rough-textured and lumpy, like a rounded hunk of limestone. It had several flattened nubs, sticky with a black, puttylike secretion, that might have been stumps where pieces had been broken off. The object as a whole seemed to be the yellowish white color of bleached bone, but all its cracks and crevices were crusted with something flaky, dark, brownish—
Blood. Dried blood.
“What is this thing?” A hard fist clenched the bottom of his throat, because he already knew.
It was a slave seed. A mature slave seed.
His slave seed.
This was why he hadn’t been in pain.
He should throw it off the precipice: hurl it into the jungle of ferns a kilometer below. He should set it on the floor beside him and smash it flat with a hunk of duracrete: crush it into paste. He should hate it.
But he didn’t.
He stared at it, aching, astonished at the empty whistling loss that suddenly gaped inside him.
Without thinking, he hiked up his robeskin and peeled back the strips that bound his chest, peering beneath them. On the spot where she had stabbed him so many weeks ago, he now bore a wider scar, as long as his finger, a scar the bright pink of newly healed flesh; she must have healed him with her tears, almost like bacta.
He found he had to sit down.