Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 14_ Traitor - Matthew Woodring Stover [79]
Ganner had stood and stared, gaping, dumbstruck at the hurt and the pure black rage that beat against him through the Force. What had happened to her? There had been some rumors—
“Hey, Jaina, it’s okay,” he’d said. “I won’t tell anybody, I promise. Don’t get mad—”
“I’m not mad. You haven’t seen mad. You better hope you never do.” She had folded her arms and turned her back to him. “Get out of my sight.”
Ganner had walked unsteadily away, shaken. Jaina had always held herself so together, had always been so competent, so in control, that it had been easy to forget that she’d lost both her brothers that day, too.
Had lost her twin: the brother who’d been half of all she was.
Later—much later—he reflected: Well, y’know, I only promised I wouldn’t talk about it. I never promised I wouldn’t look into it.
That was when he had set out. Alone.
The old Ganner might have done the same, he occasionally thought with a certain melancholy resignation. It would have made a great story, a story about the kind of Jedi Ganner had always wanted to be: the lone hero, searching the vast reaches of the galaxy on a quest he cannot share, braving unimaginable dangers and facing incalculable odds.
That had been Ganner’s fantasy self: the cool, calm, dangerous hero, the kind people trade stories about in voices hushed with awe, and all that adolescent crap.
Vanity, that’s what it was: pure vanity. Vanity had always been Ganner’s fatal weakness. Nothing wrong with being a hero—look at Han Solo, or Corran Horn. Nothing wrong with wanting to be a hero: Luke Skywalker often talked about his youthful dreams of adventure, and look how he turned out.
But when you start trying to be a hero, you’re in a whole galaxy of trouble. Lust for glory can become a sickness: a disease that bacta cannot cure. In its final stages, it’s all you can think about. At the end, you don’t even care about actually being a hero.
You just want people to think you are.
The old Ganner Rhysode had suffered from that style-over-substance disease. He’d had as bad a case as any he’d ever seen. It had nearly killed him.
Worse: it had nearly driven him dark.
In unguarded moments he still found himself drifting back to those dangerous dreams. Just thinking about it could give him the shudders. He had worked very hard to squeeze his lust for the admiration of others into a small, quiet voice, and he hoped one day to silence it forever.
So he had set about his quest quietly. Inconspicuously. Anonymously. Making sure the tale did not spread. He had to be sure he was doing this for the right reasons. He had to be sure he wasn’t suffering a relapse into the glory sickness. He had to be sure he chased this rumor only because it was the right thing to do. Because the New Republic desperately needed any glimmer of hope.
Because Jaina did.
Every time he remembered that dark flame in what had once been soft brown eyes, he felt another blow on a spike driving into his chest. Flirting with the dark—sure, lots of the Jedi had, since the war’s beginning. Some had even claimed it was the galaxy’s only hope. At the Myrkr worldship, the strike team had discussed it seriously, as an option.
But it was one thing for, say, a Kyp Durron to talk about the dark: he was a creature of tangled hostility and self-loathing, always had been—the incredible brutality of his childhood, and the unimaginable crimes it had driven him to commit, had twisted him to where holding on to the light was a struggle for him every single day. It was another thing for young Jedi, in a desperate situation, to debate using dark side power.
For Jaina Solo to look in his eye and threaten his life was something entirely different.
It hurt him. Hurt him worse than he would have ever guessed it could.
The Solo kids were supposed to be invulnerable. They were the galaxy