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“While you slept. You were unconscious for quite a while.” Vergere moved slowly out of the shadows, and crouched at his side. “Are you all right?”

“I—I’m—” Jacen shook his head blankly. “I mean, thank you. I guess.”

“Did you not want it removed?”

“Of course I … I mean, I did. I just—I don’t know.” He held it up into the softly shifting light. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”

Vergere nodded solemnly. “Once a slave seed has extended its tendrils throughout a host’s nervous system, it is no longer an independent organism. This one died within a minute of its removal.”

“Yeah.” Jacen’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “I just feel—I don’t know. I hated it. I wanted it out of me. I wanted it dead—but, you know, while it was in me … it made me part of something. Like in the Nursery. During the fight, it was almost like having the Force again. Now—”

“You feel empty,” Vergere supplied. “You feel alone. Lonely. Almost frightened, but also strong, yes?”

He stared at her. “How?…”

“The name for what you are feeling,” Vergere said through a slow, gentle smile, “is freedom.”

Jacen snorted. “Some freedom.”

“How did you expect it to feel? You are free, Jacen Solo, and that can be lonely, and empty, and frightening. But it is also powerful.”

“You call this freedom? Sure, I’m free—on a ruined planet occupied by the enemy. No friends, no ship, no weapons. Without even the Force.” He couldn’t help thinking, Without even the slave seed. He glowered out into the gaudy shimmer of the Bridge. “What good does freedom do me?”

Vergere settled into feline repose, arms and legs folded beneath her. “Well,” she said at length. “That’s a question worth considering, yes?”

“Oh …” Jacen’s breath caught in his throat. “That’s what you meant just now? When I asked you what next?”

“You are free,” she repeated. “Go where you will. Do what you will. Be what you will.”

“And what are you going to do?”

Her smile shifted infinitesimally. “What I will.”

“So I can go? Just go? Walk off? Do whatever I want—and nobody will stop me?”

“I make no promises.”

“How am I supposed to know what to do?”

“Ah—” Her smile expanded, and her eyes drifted closed. “—now we return to epistomology.”

Jacen lowered his head. He’d lost what taste he’d ever had for playful banter.

He realized, sitting there with Vergere reclining by his side, that this ledge, high up the side of a ruined building, was in its own way kind of like the Embrace of Pain. He could sit here until he rotted, wallowing in misery—or he could do something.

But what?

Nothing seemed to matter. On this shattered planet, each direction was as good as any other. There was nothing useful he could do—nothing within his reach that would make a difference to anyone but himself.

On the other hand, who says I have to be useful?

And, sitting on that ledge, he discovered that there was one direction that still meant something to him.

He got up.

Vergere opened her eyes.

He parted the ferns, moving back into the night shadow beneath them, and found his way to the moss-covered wall. Starting at one rear corner, he walked the wall’s length, scraping a long strip of the moss aside with his hand. It came off easily, revealing blank duracrete beneath. He glanced over his shoulder at Vergere, who watched him silently through the screen of ferns.

Shrugging, he went back to the corner and started along the adjoining wall.

Three paces from the corner, his scraping fingers revealed a vertical crack, straight as a laser, bordered with metal strips; beyond the crack, the wall became durasteel, instead. Jacen felt around on the wall at about waist height until his fingers closed on a manual release. He turned it, pushed, and the durasteel door slid aside with an exhausted groan.

“What are you doing?”

Jacen didn’t answer.

Beyond lay a hallway that smelled of mildew, dimly lit by bulbous growths of phosphorescent lichen, its floor patched with ratty, insect-eaten carpeting. It had been years since he had prowled the lower levels with