Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [66]
He had swallowed himself.
—please oh PLEASE why why WHYYYY please I don’t want to die like this you have to help me HELP me you have to HELP MEEEEEE—
The voice sounded human. Female. Raw, ragged, sobbing with exhausted terror. It sounded absolutely real.
As real as Anakin had looked.
He wouldn’t fall for it again.
Many kinds of Vonglife used forms of telepathy, from yammosks to villips—even coralskippers reportedly had a mental bond with their pilots. It was obvious to Jacen now: this great cavern beast was a sessile Vonglife predator that had developed a specialized variety of telepathy to lure victims into its mouth. The hallucination of Anakin was only a side effect: any victim would see someone or something they’d instinctively trust to lead them to safety. They would follow blindly, trusting, and be consumed.
The irony was bitter: the shadow worm that coiled through his chest had defended him from that false trust, while the rage that fed the worm had sent him headlong into the cavern beast’s mouth anyway.
This, Jacen reflected in his first clear thought since falling into the dark, is going to be an ugly way to die.
But that was okay. Dying was okay; he didn’t mind. Better to die than to live with the darkness inside him. At least it would be over. He could just kneel here and wait to die—
If only it were quiet.
—please help me please aaaaAAAAAA—
The phase transition of terror into raw agony jolted Jacen’s eyes open, and he lurched to his feet. He couldn’t listen to this, trick or not. He knew too much about pain.
“Shut up,” he growled, low in the back of his throat. “Shut up shut up shut up.”
The screams echoed through a puckered gallery mouth that yawned a few meters to his left: a tunnel beyond led down, dropping away into the yellow-green gloom. Jacen stumbled drunkenly on the slope. The screams continued: wordless now, bleak, animal, edged with despair.
The tunnel led deeper and deeper, turning upon itself in a long loose spiral, opening at last into another cavern vastly larger than the first, a cavern dank, dim, the bio-glow that had lit the throat and the chamber above only shimmering faintly through the mouths of other tunnels that opened around the walls. White swirls of mist curled through the air—no, not mist, Jacen discovered as he entered the cavern, but smoke: eye-burning, chokingly harsh, tasting of acid. The floor of this cavern was ruggedly uneven, dimpled as though it were only a thin skin over bowls big enough to swim in; the bowls tapered steeply downward, bottoming in upcrumpled hummocks of stony flesh like lips of refresher-sized mouths.
He coughed, batting smoke away from his face, and staggered toward the screams, following a winding course balanced on the thin curving rims where the bowls met edge to edge.
Deep in the cavern, one of those mouths had pursed around a girl.
Jacen paused above her, balanced on the warm stone bowl rim. She looked as real as Anakin had: real from her tangled, matted hair to the tear-streaked dirt that smeared her face. Only her head and one arm protruded from the tight-sealed lips that held her, and when she saw him above she reached for him, fingers straining helplessly, eyes white with pain and fear.
“Please whoever you are PLEASE you have to HELP ME please it’s EATING me, it’s, it’s, it’s eating me ALIVE—”
He knew what those puckered lips were, now. The cavern above was actually only a crop, or a gizzard; the real stomachs were behind those mouths at the bottoms of the bowls below. That’s why the cavern beast was showing him a girl down there.
She was bait.
“Shut up,” Jacen whispered. “You’re not real. Shut up.”
All he wanted was a quiet place to die. Was that too much to ask? Hadn’t he earned that? Why did everything have to be so hideous, so gruesome, so just plain rotten all the