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“Neither are you going to die,” she said cheerfully. “Have you forgotten? You’re dead already. You have been these many months; you have nearly completed your passage through the lands of the dead. Now is time not for death, but for new life. You are healed, Jacen Solo. Arise and walk!”

Jacen sank lower in the chair, staring blindly up through the tangle of arachnoid cables. “Why should I?”

“Because you can, of course. Why else would anyone bother to get up?”

“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes again. “It doesn’t matter whether I get up or sit here until I starve. Nothing matters. Nothing means anything.”

“Not even your brother’s death?”

He shrugged listlessly. Life, death—all was one. One with the Force. He said, “The Force doesn’t care.”

“Don’t you care?”

He opened his eyes. Her gaze had the peculiar, almost humorous intensity he’d seen in the Embrace chamber, in the Nursery, at the crater. But he was too tired, too broken, to puzzle through whatever she might want him to discover. “Whether I care doesn’t matter, either.”

Corners of her mouth tricked up and down. “Does it matter to you?”

He stared at his hands.

After a long, long silence, he sighed. “Yes. Yes, it does.” It never occurred to him to lie to her. “But so what? Sure, I care—but who am I?”

She gave a shrug so subtle it was almost a shiver. “That’s always been the question, yes?”

“But you never have an answer—”

“I do have an answer,” she said kindly. “But it’s my answer, not yours. You will find no truth in me.”

“You keep telling me that.” Bitter ashes rasped in the back of his throat. “Or in anybody else, either, I guess.”

She said, “Exactly.”

A high buzzing whine rose in his ears, skirling around his head like an angry sparkbee trapped inside his skull. “Then where is the truth supposed to be?” he asked blurrily. “Where? Tell me. Please.” He could barely hear his own voice over the buzz in his ears. It grew to a roar.

She leaned forward, smiling, and the roar drowned what she said, but he could read the words from her lips.

Ask yourself where else can one look.

“What?” he gasped faintly. “What?”

As the roar became a storm inside his head, pounding away all words, all hope of sense, she gathered her four opposable fingers into a point and lightly tapped his chest—right on the center, right over the void left by the slave seed, right over the point mass of his own personal event horizon—as though knocking on a door.

Down in that void, there was quiet. There was calm: the eye of the storm inside him. He threw his mind into the calm, quiet void, let the quiet calm swell to envelop everything he was.

The storm blew away.

The black hole swallowed itself.

He was not alone in the quiet calm. Here was the Force: the living connection that bound him to everything that is, that ever has been, that ever will be. Here too was the Vonglife: from the dim satisfaction of the blue puffball basking in the warmth of his and Vergere’s body heat, to the industrious concentration of the arachnoids that skittered through their growing web … to the balanced readiness for instant violence of twelve Yuuzhan Vong warriors who now filed into the room—

And the breathless anticipation of triumph that shone through Nom Anor, as he entered behind them.

Yuuzhan Vong warriors. Twelve of them. Armed.

And Nom Anor.

The warriors spread out in a shallow arc.

Jacen regarded them steadily, without alarm. Here in the quiet calm of his center, there was no such thing as surprise, no such thing as danger. There was only him, and all of them, and the universe, of which each was a small interlocking component.

He looked at Vergere in wonder. He understood now, where he never could have before. She had not said Ask yourself where else can one look.

She had said: Ask yourself. Where else can one look?

Nom Anor paced forward, hands clasped to each other within the voluminous sleeves of a floor-length robeskin so black it gleamed. Jacen could see his own reflection distorted in its glossy surface.

Nom Anor, Jacen thought,