• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“What are you—what’s going on? Jacen—”

“We can talk now, but not for long. I persuaded all the creatures monitoring us to take a nap.”

“Creatures? Monitoring? I don’t—”

“They were watching us. That was the point of that silly nerf-and-Wookiee show just now. The Yuuzhan Vong have decided I’m the avatar of one of their Twin Gods.”

Ganner stared. His life had become a succession of inexplicable strangenesses.

“I had a dream—a dream about a sacrifice—you were going to kill me, then find Jaina and kill her, too … That was just a dream, wasn’t it?” He swallowed. “Wasn’t it?”

Jacen reached into one sleeve and pulled out a pouch similar to the one in which he’d carried that poison pad back on the camp ship; this pouch contained a similar wad of damp fabric, which Jacen began to apply directly to the blood-welling punctures where the tube-vines had withdrawn through Ganner’s skin.

“They can’t see us or hear us right now. Pretty soon somebody’s going to come around to find out why. We have to be ready to go when they get here.”

“Go? Go where? Where are we, Jacen? What—hey, what are you doing to me? What is that stuff?” Everywhere the moisture of the pad touched, Ganner stopped bleeding. Strength flowed back into his drugged muscles.

“We’re on Yuuzhan’tar.” Jacen kept wiping him down with the pad. “The Yuuzhan Vong homeworld.”

Ganner had heard the name from refugees on the camp ships. “You mean Coruscant.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Just changing a name doesn’t make it—”

“The Yuuzhan Vong remake everything they touch.” Jacen’s hand fell to his side, and a dark distance stretched his gaze far beyond the walls of this small chamber. “It’s not about names. My name is still Jacen Solo.”

Ganner frowned.

An instant later, Jacen seemed to remember where he was. He dropped the pad on the floor and shook out a long, flowing robe of white. “Here, sit up. Put this on.”

Ganner discovered, to his astonishment, that he could now move without discomfort. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the hammock. The Yuuzhan Vong had left him his boots and leggings, but he was obscurely grateful to Jacen for providing the robe; being bare-chested here made him feel oddly uncomfortable. Vulnerable. He stood and shrugged into the robe, marveling at how good he felt. Being dressed. Being able to stand. He never could have guessed what profound joy might spring from such simple pleasures.

A shimmer of motion caught his eye, and he looked down. The robe he wore bore glowing designs like Jacen’s, colors pulsing along arterial networks down the sleeves and front, except the designs on Ganner’s robe were in black and green upon the white.

He frowned. “What’s this?”

“It’s your sacrificial robe. For the processional to the Well of the World Brain.”

Ganner stared. His dream flooded back to him.

On that day, Ganner Rhysode will walk proudly at my heel, as I lead him into the Well of the World Brain, where we will together offer up his death to the glory of the True Gods.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he said. He started pulling the robe off over his head.

“Oh, yes I do.”

“This is some kind of trick.” Wasn’t one of the Yuuzhan Vong Twin Gods supposed to be some kind of trickster or something? How much truth was Jacen telling? “This is all some kind of trick. You’re lying to me.”

“Well, actually, yeah. I am.”

Ganner stopped, staring at Jacen out through the neck hole of the robe, which was now halfway over his head. Jacen’s lips twitched in that unmistakable Solo half smile. “Everything I tell you is a lie.”

“What?”

“See, the thing is, everything everyone tells you is a lie. The truth is always bigger than the words we use to describe it.”

“I knew it! This is some kind of trick!”

“Yeah. But not on you.”

Ganner shook his head wordlessly. He couldn’t connect this Jacen to the cheerful dark-haired kid he used to know. He suffered an instant of wild hope: maybe Jacen wasn’t Jacen—maybe this traitor who had promised to murder him was some kind of impostor,