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“And, perhaps,” Vergere offered gently, “also to protect it from other well-intentioned folk—who might wish, in their ignorance, to ‘help’ it with their own utility cutters.”

“Yes …” Jacen said, then he caught his breath, staring at Vergere as though she had suddenly grown an extra head. “Hey …” Comprehension began to dawn.

“Hey—”

“And also, perhaps,” Vergere went on, “you might stop by from time to time, to let the struggling, desperate, suffering creature know that it is not alone. That someone cares. That its pain is in the service of its destiny.”

Jacen could barely breathe, but somehow he forced out a whisper. “Yes …”

Vergere said gravely, “Then, Jacen Solo, our definitions of help are identical.”

Jacen shifted forward, coming up onto his knees. “We’re not really talking about shadowmoth larvae, are we?” he said, his heart suddenly pounding. “You’re talking about me.”

She rose, legs unfolding like gantry cranes beneath her. “About you?”

“About us.” His throat clenched with impossible hope. “You and me.”

“I must go, now; the Embrace has become impatient for your return.”

“Vergere, wait—!” he said, struggling to his feet, the Embrace’s branch-grips dangling from his wrists. “Wait, Vergere, come on, talk to me—and, and, and shadowmoths—” he stammered. “Shadowmoths are indigenous! They’re not a transported species—they’re native to Coruscant! How could you have found a shadowmoth larva? Unless, unless you—I mean, did you—are you—”

She put her hand between the lips of the mouthlike sensor receptacle beside the hatch sphincter, and the warted pucker of the hatch gaped wide.

“Everything I tell you is a lie,” she said, and stepped through.

The Embrace of Pain gathered him once more into the white.

Jacen Solo hangs in the white, thinking.

For an infinite instant, he is merely amazed that he can think; the white has scoured his consciousness for days, or weeks, or centuries, and he is astonished now to discover that he can not only think, but think clearly.

He spends a white eon marveling.

Then he goes to work on the lesson of pain.

This is it, he thinks. This is what Vergere was talking about. This is the help she gave me, that I didn’t know how to accept.

She has freed him from his own trap: the trap of childhood. The trap of waiting for someone else. Waiting for Dad, or Mother, Uncle Luke, Jaina, Zekk or Lowie or Tenel Ka or any of the others whom he could always count on to fly to his rescue.

He is not helpless. He is only alone.

It’s not the same thing.

He doesn’t have to simply hang here and suffer. He can do something.

Her shadowmoth tale may have been a lie, but within the lie was a truth he could not have comprehended without it. Was that what she had meant when she said, Everything I tell you is a lie?

Did it matter?

Pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. To live is to be a slave to pain.

He knows the truth of this, not only from his own life but from watching Dad and Anakin, after Chewie’s death. He watched pain crack its whip over his father, and watched Han run from that pain halfway across the galaxy. He watched Anakin turn hard, watched him drive himself like a loadlifter, always pushing himself to be stronger, faster, more effective, to do more—this was the only answer he had to the pain of having survived to watch his rescuer die.

Jacen always thought of Anakin as being a lot like Uncle Luke: his mechanical aptitude, his piloting and fighting skills, his stark warrior’s courage. He can see now that in one important way, Anakin was more like his father. His only answer to pain was to keep too busy to notice it.

Running from the taskmaster.

To live is to be a slave to pain.

But that is only half true; pain can also be a teacher. Jacen can remember hour after hour of dragging his aching muscles through one more repetition of his lightsaber training routines. He remembers practicing the more advanced stances, how much it hurt to work his body in ways he’d never worked it before, to lower his