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The final ounce of pressure on Jacen’s trigger had come from the girl.

He’s the last, he’s the last! she had shouted. Take him—him! He’s the last!

“She turned on me,” Jacen said quietly.

do you blame her?

He shook his head. “How can I? She’s just a girl. A girl who knows what it feels like to be digested alive. A girl who knew that if it wasn’t me, it’d be her. Again.”

i guess i mean, did you blame her?

“That’s different.” Jacen’s face was bleak as a sandstone cliff on Kirdo III. “I blamed all of them. I hated them. And I set out to hurt them.”

really?

“I knew what I was doing; I knew exactly what it meant. I reached into the dark. I wanted it. I reveled in it. I remember laughing. I remember telling them how much trouble they were in. I remember feeling them through the Force as their fake regret turned to real fear. I remember liking it.”

They had fired on him, blaster bolts streaking scarlet through the greenish acid-fog. Laughing, Jacen had caught their blaster bolts with the palm of his right hand, effortlessly channeling away the destructive energies before they could do him harm. Flicks of his wrist had seized those blasters with the Force and tossed them negligently aside.

how many of them did you kill?

“All of them.” Jacen looked down at his trembling hands. He clenched them until his burns leaked blood onto his palms. “None of them. What’s the difference?”

While the Force had roared through his head, he’d reached down into the hollow center of his chest, into the void where the slave seed had been, and there he had found the dim semiconsciousness of the cavern beast. With the Force for power, he’d created a delusion: a simple conviction so deeply rooted in the cavern beast’s murky mind that no evidence to the contrary could ever shake it.

Humans are poisonous.

So is every other sentient species of the New Republic.

The cavern beast had had no resistance against this kind of trick; it lacked even the rudimentary ability to say to itself, But none of the ones I’ve already eaten have made me sick … All it’d had was a defensive reflex.

It vomited.

A massive surge of reverse peristalsis had swept up the people, the girl, Jacen, and every other foreign object throughout the cavern beast’s immense interior and washed them all out through the luminescent cartilage-lined throat down which Jacen had entered. He remembered their anger, and their growing panic as the pile of people outside the cavern beast’s mouth had disentangled itself into individuals again, and they’d found the teeth of their sanctuary locked against them. No longer could they pay for safety from the Yuuzhan Vong with the lives of others. You’ve killed us, someone had sobbed. You’ve killed us all.

Jacen had stared at them, icy with power. Not yet.

These soft, weak, contemptibly treacherous creatures—he could imagine nothing more loathsome. He’d turned his back on them. Walked away.

He’d left them to the Yuuzhan Vong, and to each other.

but you did help them. better death than life bought with innocent blood.

“Is that supposed to make it all right? I wasn’t trying to help them. I wanted them to suffer. I can’t even blame it on the dark side—I know that now. The dark side didn’t make me do anything.”

i know. that’s not the way it works.

“It was all me, Anakin. I gave in to my own darkness. I let my dark side run wild—”

you could have killed them all. you had the power. and you could have killed the cavern beast. you had power enough for that, too, i bet. just like you could have killed vergere, and nom anor. but you didn’t kill anybody. instead you used the power you’d found to serve life. your dark side ain’t all that dark, big brother.

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t fight the dark with the dark.”

that’s uncle luke talking. fighting the dark was his job. the yuuzhan vong aren’t dark. they’re alien.

“And I can’t seem to make myself fight them.”

who says you have to?

Jacen’s head snapped up. “You do. Everyone does. What other answer is there?”

why are you asking me? Anakin had lost his playful crooked smile, and he’d moved close