Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [7]
“Not for me,” Jacen answered dully, once his throat opened enough that he could speak. “No matter how dead you say I am, it still hurts.”
“Oh, well, yes. That the dead are beyond pain is only an article of faith, isn’t it? We should say, we hope that the dead are beyond pain—but there’s only one way to find out for sure.” She winked at him, smiling. “Do you think that pain might be the ruling principle of death, as well?”
“I don’t think anything. I just want it to stop.”
She turned away, making an odd snuffling sound; for half a moment Jacen wondered if his suffering might have finally touched her somehow—wondered if she might take pity on him …
But when she turned back, her eyes were alight with mockery, not compassion. “I am such a fool,” she chimed. “All this time, I had thought I was speaking to an adult. Ah, self-deception is the cruelest trick of all, isn’t it? I let myself believe that you had once been a true Jedi, when in truth you are only a hatchling, shivering in the nest, squalling because your mother hasn’t fluttered up to feed you.”
“You—you—” Jacen stammered. “How can you—after what you’ve done—”
“What I have done? Oh, no no no, little Solo child. This is about what you have done.”
“I haven’t done anything!”
Vergere settled back against the chamber’s wall a meter away. Slowly, she folded her back-bent knees beneath her, then laced her fingers together in front of her delicately whiskered mouth and stared at him over her knuckles.
After a long, long silence, during which I haven’t done anything! echoed in his mind until Jacen’s face burned, Vergere said, “Exactly.”
She leaned close, as though to share an embarrassing secret. “Is that not the infant’s tactic? To wail, and wail, and wail, to wriggle its fingers and kick its heels … hoping an adult will notice, and care for it?”
Jacen lowered his head, struggling against sudden hot tears. “What can I do?”
She sat back again and made more of that snuffling noise. “Certainly, among your options is continuing to hang in this room and suffer. And so long as you do that, do you know what will happen?”
Jacen gave her a bruised look. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said cheerfully. She spread her hands. “Oh, eventually, you’ll go mad, I suppose. If you’re lucky. Someday you may even die.” Her crest flattened back and became blasterbore gray. “Of old age.”
Jacen stared, openmouthed. He couldn’t face another hour in the Embrace of Pain—she was talking about years. About decades.
About the rest of his life.
He hugged his knees and buried his face against them, grinding his eye sockets against his kneecaps as though he could squeeze the horror out of his head. He remembered Uncle Luke in the doorway of the shed on Belkadan, remembered the sadness on his face as he cut through the Yuuzhan Vong warriors who had captured Jacen, remembered the swift sure pressure as Luke gouged the slave seed out of Jacen’s face with his cybernetic thumb.
He remembered that Uncle Luke wouldn’t be coming for him this time. Nobody would.
Because Jacen was dead.
“Is that why you keep coming here?” he muttered into his folded arms. “To gloat? To humiliate a defeated enemy?”
“Am I gloating? Are we enemies?” Vergere asked, sounding honestly puzzled. “Are you defeated?”
Her suddenly sincere tone caught him; he raised his head, and could find no mockery now in her eyes. “I don’t understand.”
“That, at least, is very clear,” she sighed. “I give you a gift, Jacen Solo. I free you from hope of rescue. Can you not see how I am trying to help you?”
“Help?” Jacen coughed a bitter chuckle. “You need to brush up on your Basic, Vergere. In Basic, when we talk about the kind of things you’ve done to me, help isn’t the word we use.”
“No? Then perhaps you are correct: