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“The Force would guide you to the correct decision?”

“Why else would I serve it?”

Insubstantial Vergere extended the lightsaber to him. “Reclaim your weapon.”

He called the lightsaber to him and wedged it into the belt of his now muddy robe. The handle was wet and cold, as were his hands, which he rubbed briskly together.

Zonama Sekot had completed a second trial jump without sustaining severe damage. R2-D2 had calculated that the planet was on the galactic ecliptic, close to the Reecee system in the Inner Rim, were the frontier of that arbitrary zone to be extended into the Unknown Regions. One more jump through hyperspace and Zonama Sekot could be back in known space.

Vergere seemed to be watching him. “Do you use your lightsaber to slash or to heal?”

“That’s always been the dilemma.”

Jacen lowered himself to the ground. Broad shafts of sunlight flooded through the giant boras, dappling the leaf duff and dazzling the surface of the pool. Insects skimmed the water and bombinated around him.

“Were you searching for something here?”

“Only answers.”

“As to how best to end the pain, suffering, and death that war has brought to the galaxy. You must trust in the Force, Jacen, if you are to serve it fully.”

“Being a Jedi isn’t just about serving the Force,” he said. “It’s a commitment to valuing all life.”

Sekot brought a smile to Vergere’s whiskered face. “You learned that from your mentor, Vergere.”

“My guide,” Jacen amended.

My guide through the lands of the dead. My herald of tragedy …

“Vergere learned it from me,” Sekot said. “For that is how I felt on being brought to awareness by Leor Hal, the first Magister. You wish to reiterate that the Yuuzhan Vong are part of life, part of the Force, and therefore must be dealt with accordingly.”

“More to be pitied if stripped of the Force, as you contend,” Jacen said.

Vergere’s narrow shoulders sagged. “I, too, am searching for answers, Jacen. But I do not sympathize with the enemy as you appear to.”

Jacen compressed his lips. “Because of what Vergere guided me through, I’ve developed a kind of … sense for them—a Vongsense. I feel it more strongly here, not only when I speak with Harrar, but wherever I go.”

He touched the hollow space in his chest that had once housed the slave seed Vergere had implanted, and he recalled how it felt to have been racked on the Embrace of Pain; stripped of the Force.

You are forever lost to the worlds you knew, Vergere had told him at the beginning of his process of being remade. Your friends mourn, your father rages, your mother weeps. Your life has been terminated: a line of division has been drawn between you and everything you have ever known. You have seen the terminator that sweeps across the face of a planet, the twilit division between day and night. You have crossed that line, Jacen Solo. The bright fields of day are forever past.

“By growing to understand you better, I grow to understand our enemy better,” Sekot said. “Do you see a contradiction there, Jedi?”

“That depends on whom Sekot serves.”

“I, too, serve the Force—but as defined by the Potentium, which does not recognize evil, except as a label. Magister Leor and the Ferroans were my guides to consciousness. But it was the Far Outsiders—the Yuuzhan Vong—who taught me that while evil does not exist, evil actions do exist, and it is to those that we must direct ourselves. I had the power to halt the Yuuzhan Vong when they approached me fifty years ago, and I have the power to halt them now. My instincts, such as they are, tell me that I have always had power over them.”

Jacen thought about the Force punch Sekot had delivered to those aboard Jade Shadow when the ship had first appeared in the Klasse Ephemora system—Sanctuary.

“And you’ll exercise that power to defeat them?” he asked carefully.

“If necessary—but without contempt. If I defeat them aggressively, if I hate them for who they have become, then I will have separated myself from the Force, and permitted my ego to triumph over my desire to merge and expand my consciousness. I will