TWENTY-THREE

A similar thing had happened to Jacen on Duro, three years back.

At the time, he had been helping a group of Ryn refugees fit a synthplas dome over the prefabricated building that was to be their shelter. This time he was off on his own in the Middle Distance, picking his way downhill to a still pool on the floor of a narrow valley.

Jaina?

On Duro, he had passed out and fallen, knocking himself unconscious. This time a forest creeper swept his feet out from under him, and he pitched forward, sliding face-first on muddy ground and sodden deflated leaves until he managed to somersault himself onto his back and extend his hands to the sides. He was still meters from the valley floor when he arrested his descent, but his lightsaber fell prey to momentum and soared free of the cloth belt that cinched his robe. Tumbling end over end through the air, it arced into the depths of the ice-fringed pool below.

Jacen leapt to his feet and vaulted to the water’s edge. Focusing on the center of the concentric waves that were spreading across the pool, he immersed himself in the Force and stretched out his right hand.

The tubular alloy handgrip emerged vertically from the water, but not alone.

It was held in the upraised four-fingered hand of Vergere.

Sekot’s thought projection of the diminutive Fosh, at any rate, looking much younger than the piebald, short-feathered Vergere Jacen had come to know on Coruscant. Her willowy ears and pair of corkscrewing antennae appeared smaller, and her slanted eyes were radiant with wonder. The splayed feet of her reverse-articulated legs rested just on the surface of the agitated pool.

“Lose something, Jacen?” Sekot asked through Vergere’s wide mouth.

“Not for the first time.” His exhalations formed clouds in the chill air.

“It’s not like you to stumble.”

“My sister Jaina is in danger. I forgot to look where I was going.”

“How often will you allow yourself to be distracted by the dangers she faces?”

This was Vergere as remembered by Sekot, Jacen thought, in contrast to the Vergere who had sacrificed her life at Ebaq 9 to save him and Jaina. “As often as necessary,” he said. “We’re twins, and strongly bonded.”

“What if you were faced with the choice of saving your twin or your uncle? Which do you serve?”

“I serve the Force.”

“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 have corrupted the light with my darkness, stained it forever. Self-awareness tricks us into believing that there is us, and that there is the other. But in serving the Force we recognize that we are all the same thing; that when we act in accordance with the Force we act in accordance with the wish of all life to enlarge itself, to rise out of physicality and become something greater.

“In that sense, all living beings are seed-partners, Jacen, passionate to unite with all life, and to help give birth to grand enterprises—whether a starship, a work of art, or a deed that will echo through history as a noble action. I am no different than you in wanting to play a part in the evolution of the spirit. My consciousness yearns for this.”

“Easier said than done,” Jacen said.

“Yes, it is a matter of balance. But we are balancing the universe constantly with every action we take, some tipping it one way, some another. To triumph over the Yuuzhan Vong we must simply go where we wish to go. That is also what I must do to return us to known space. But the task entails far more than simply focusing on a set of hyperspace coordinates. Unless the destination is a place I wish to go, nothing will work out. Even if I execute the jump flawlessly, my actions will come to nothing.

“For your interest, Jacen, that is something that Vergere taught me.”

Jacen was listening too intently to respond. Vergere had set him on the path to remaking himself. But unless he could complete the process, he would be ensnared by the very self-conscious uncertainties Sekot professed to have grown past, and prevented from merging fully with the Force.

“We must approach the turning points in our lives with purity of heart,” Sekot was saying. “We must look beyond ourselves, and when we see danger approaching or a difficult choice ahead, we must calm ourselves well in advance, so that we can navigate with a clear mind. Once we have mastered the technique, we can learn to trust that we’re doing the right thing, without thinking about it.”

“Do you know where you want to go?” Jacen asked when he realized that Sekot was waiting for him to say something.

“By analyzing Yuuzhan Vong biotech—by what I intuited from Nen Yim—I have learned much about augmenting Zonama’s hyperspace cores with energy derived from the planet itself. And the success of the trial jumps has encouraged me that I can safely return Zonama to known space. I begin to understand how the Yuuzhan Vong created what they call dovin basals, villips, yammosks, and other biots. Or perhaps I begin to remember.

“But I am worried about the potentially calamitous or destabilizing effects Zonama’s sudden appearance could have on any planet in close proximity to our emergence.”

From records stored in the Chiss library, Jacen and Saba had learned of the widespread seismic devastation Zonama Sekot had caused on Munlali Mafir, standard decades earlier, not only to the planet but to the indigenous Jostrans and Krizlaws, as well.

“My uncle thought you might be worried about that,” Jacen said. “He was going to tell you himself that you shouldn’t be.”

Vergere glided toward him across the water and ice. “Tell me what Master Skywalker has in mind.”