SIX

HOME

Thousands of years passed before Jacen opened his eyes.

He spent those thousands of years in one endless claustrophobic nightmare: of being held, bound, cocooned, unable to move, to speak. He couldn’t see, because his eyes would not open. He couldn’t swallow. He could not breathe.

For a millennium he smothered, helpless.

Then he felt a muscle twitch in the middle of his back. It took a century, but he found that muscle, and he found he could make it contract, and he could make it relax again. As decades grew into another century, he found he could work surrounding muscles in his back as well. Then he could clench his thighs, and bunch the muscles in his upper arm—and his nightmare had become a dream, filled with possibility rather than dread.

And throughout the dream he kept expecting, somehow, that his chrysalis would crack, and he would at last be able to spread his new wings, and hear his wingflutes piping in harmony as he soared into the four-mooned sky …

When he finally opened his eyes and realized that this had been only a dream, a tremendous wash of relief flooded through him: he thought, for a moment, that it had all been a dream, the Nursery, the Embrace of Pain, the voxyn queen, Anakin …

Duro. Belkadan. All the way back to Sernpidal.

Either that had been all a dream, or he was still dreaming, because he didn’t hurt anymore.

He lay on something soft, rounded, insanely comfortable, like an acceleration couch upholstered in living scarlet moss that smelled of flowers and ripe fruit. Insects buzzed nearby, invisible, screened by gently waving ferns twice Jacen’s height; through these ferns wove vines like garlands of flowers, blooming with brilliant yellow and blue and vivid orange in fantastic and delicate array. The far distance echoed with a long, mournful pack hunter’s howl. Somewhere above, an unseen creature lifted its voice in a song as thrillingly lovely as that of a manullian bird calling its mate in the Mother Jungle of Ithor.

Ithor, he thought, dully bitter. He remembered what the Yuuzhan Vong had done to Ithor.

Where in all nine Corellian hells am I?

The sunlight that trickled through the ferns around him had a familiar color: the way the shadows’ penumbrae were rimmed in faded red … mmm, that was it. This sunlight was exactly the same color as the fusion spark that had lit the Nursery.

“Oh,” he murmured numbly. “Oh, I get it, now.”

It only made sense: the Yuuzhan Vong would of course have tuned their artificial sun to the same spectrum as the natural one that would light the world where they wanted the seedship’s life-forms to grow.

He was on Yuuzhan’tar.

Still, there was something about the color of this light that twisted his stomach. The light in the Nursery hadn’t affected him the same way, perhaps because of the thick mists that had always swirled through the interior—or maybe it was the deep purple-blue of this sky …

No two planets have skies exactly the same color; sky color is a function of complex interactions between the solar spectrum and a world’s atmospheric composition, and he couldn’t help feeling that he’d seen this one before. Or one very like it. The color was close enough to spark his memory, but not so exact that he could recall which planet it reminded him of.

He sat up, and had to stifle a groan; he was sore, bruised from head to foot, and though his ribs had been expertly bound, moving gave him a stabbing pain in his side that slowly—agonizingly slowly—faded to a dull ache that throbbed all the way up into his neck.

Okay. This isn’t a dream.

Slowly, more cautiously now, he swung his legs off his moss couch; it hurt, but he didn’t feel dizzy or nauseated. After a couple of seconds, he stood up. A robeskin lay nearby, neatly folded. Whoever had bound his ribs had also fashioned him a sort of breechclout, sufficient to protect his modesty. He left the robeskin where it lay.

Beyond the ferns that had screened his bower he found a short cliff stretching up two or three times his height, thickly carpeted with variegated mosses. Some kind of epiphyte clung to the cliff with knurled woody fingerclaws, draping long sprays of roots so fine they looked like wigs hung from hooks. Jacen dug his hands into the mosses and tugged, to see if they might support his weight so he could climb up and get a look around, but the moss pulled free almost without resistance, leaking purplish sap that smelled like tea and stained his fingers.

And the surface it had clung to—

Even cracked and stained with juices of unfamiliar plants, he could not mistake this stuff: this was what his whole world had been built from.

Duracrete.

This wasn’t a cliff. It was a wall.

“Oh …” He stepped back, hands dropping nervelessly to his sides. As though his dream closed in on him again, he couldn’t seem to breathe. “Oh, no, not really …”

He followed the wall a few meters to his left, where he saw clear sky through another screen of ferns. He parted the ferns, stepped through—

And found an alien world spread beneath him.

He stood on a ledge, one stride from a sheer drop that plunged more than a kilometer to a dazzlingly multicolored jungle of ferns similar to the ones that screened his bower. Patches of brilliant scarlet darkened to crimson, joined other patches of shimmering black or gap-spark blue, all shot through with curving streaks of shimmer like rivers of precious metals, and it all moved: shifting, rippling, rolling through a rainbow spectrum and back again as leaves and fronds and branches and vines all twisted in some wind he could not feel. Flying creatures flitted from point to point far below him, hunting just above the forest canopy, too distant for his eyes—unaccustomed to such vast spaces—to make out their details.

This jungle curved away over a topography too random, too jagged, too young to be real; valleys were bottomless chasms, shrouded in mist, joined by razorback ridges that intersected and parted again and doubled upon each other with no pattern any known geology could produce. Immense mountains rose in the distance: sharp spires, flat-sided and needle-topped, as though there had never come wind or rain to erode them. Some of these mountains had sides too steep even for this tenacious jungle of mosses and ferns. Where their bones were exposed, Jacen could pick out oddly regular patterns: squares, rectangles, all arranged rank upon rank, metric arrays in lines both horizontal and vertical. He squinted, frowning: those patterns were far too regular to be natural; they were mathematically precise. He had seen something like this before—

Thinking, he happened to glance upward … and forgot everything else, because that was his first sight of the Bridge.

From a razor-sharp, needle-pointed arc above the distant horizon, a mind-bending river of color swelled overhead. Following it, Jacen craned his neck back, and back, and back: a titanic spectrum, cascades of azure and incarnadine, of argent and viridian braided into an impossibly complex, impossibly vivid rainbow that filled a third of the sky before narrowing again to another knifeedged curve that vanished into the purple sky above the opposite horizon.

Jacen knew what it was; more than a few worlds in the New Republic sported planetary rings. And he also knew that none of those worlds had rings like this one. This would have been famous, legendary; for this view alone, such a world would have been renowned throughout the galaxy as a tourist destination. And if it was this vivid—this huge—even now, when its color must be washed out by the light of day and the purple of the sky, what must it look like after dark? He could barely imagine.

Looking upon it, he felt he understood something about the Yuuzhan Vong that had always puzzled him before. It was not uncommon for primitive species on ringed worlds to mistake the rings in their sky for magical bridges built by gods; even for Jacen, who was well aware of the physics behind what he saw, the sight produced a faint shudder of sympathetic awe. He could imagine all too clearly being one of a species that had evolved under such a sight: to them, such a Bridge could only be the work of gods. It would be impossible to doubt the gods’ existence with the highway from their deific home to the world hanging forever overhead—so obviously magical, as well, that a creature could follow its curve all the way around the world and never reach either end. It would be only too easy to imagine gods patrolling their Bridge, looking down upon their creation.

With the gods so close at hand …

If the world is full of violence, savagery, and torture, this must be how they want it.

Lots of things about the Yuuzhan Vong made sense to him now.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?”

Vergere’s voice came from just behind his shoulder; though he hadn’t heard her approach, he was too lost in wonder and new comprehension to be startled. And he had known somehow already that she would be here. He had felt her shadow upon his thousand-year dream.

He had known, somehow, that she was still part of his life.

“You know,” Jacen murmured, still gazing up into the sky, “that’s exactly what you said when you brought me into the Nursery. Those same words. Just like that.”

“Truly?” Her wind-chime laughter tinkled around him. “You recall all that I say to you?”

“Every word,” Jacen answered grimly.

“Such a clever child. Is it any wonder that I love you so?”

Slowly, painfully, Jacen lowered himself to sit with his legs over the edge, his feet dangling free a kilometer above the rugged jungle canopy. “I guess I was pretty messed up. Pretty battered,” he said, laying one hand along the bandages that bound his sprung ribs in place. “You patched me up. You and those tears of yours.”

“Yes.”

He nodded: not thanks, just acknowledgment. “I didn’t expect to live through it.”

“Of course not. How could you, and achieve what you did?” she said kindly. “You found the power that arises of acting without hope … and also without fear. I was—I am—very proud of you.”

Jacen met her eyes. He could see his own reflection, dark and distorted, in their glossy black surface. “Proud? All the people up there who died because of me—”

“All the people down here who live because of you,” she countered, interrupting. She briefly told him how the shapers had been forced to give the dhuryam immediate control of the seedship, and how it had begun the breakup into individual shipseeds so quickly that there had been no time to round up the rampaging slaves. The dhuryam itself had used their slave seeds to herd them to safety, fulfilling its side of the bargain it had made with Jacen. “Yes, hundreds died in the battle—but thousands of slaves were able to ride the shipseeds to the surface: slaves who were to have been executed at the climax of the tizo’pil Yun’tchilat. You were magnificent, Jacen Solo. A true hero.”

“I don’t feel much like a hero.”

“No?” Her crest splayed orange. “How does a hero feel?”

Jacen looked away, shaking his head silently. She settled in beside him, swinging her legs over the void below them, kicking her heels aimlessly like a little girl in a chair too high for her.

After a moment, Jacen sighed, and shook his head again, and shrugged. “I guess heroes feel like they’ve accomplished something.”

“And you haven’t? Several thousand slaves might disagree.”

“You don’t understand.” In his mind, he saw again the body on the hive-island’s beach: the one who might have been a slave, who might have been a warrior, who had bled out his life next to the corpse of a shaper who’d had no clue in combat: a shaper who’d only thought to put his own body between the infant dhuryams and the killing machine Jacen had become. “In the Nursery—once I started killing,” he said softly, “I didn’t want to stop. That must be—I can only think that’s how the dark side must feel. I didn’t ever want to stop.”

“But you did.”

“Only because you stopped me.”

“Who’s stopping you now?”

He stared at her.

She turned her quadrifid palm upward as though offering him a sweet. “You want to kill? There is nothing around you but life, Jacen Solo. Take it as you please. Even mine. My species has a particularly vulnerable neck; merely take my head in your hands, and with one quick twist, thus—” She jerked her head up and back as though an invisible fist had punched her in the mouth. “—you can satisfy this dark desire.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Vergere.” He hunched into himself, resting his elbows on his thighs as though huddled against a chill. “I don’t want to kill anybody. Just the opposite. I’m grateful. You saved me. I was out of control—”

“You were not,” she said sharply. “Don’t make excuses.” “What?”

“Out of control is just code for ‘I don’t want to admit I’m the kind of person who would do such things.’ It’s a lie.”

He offered her half a smile. “Everything I tell you is a lie.”

She accepted his mockery with an expressionless nod.

“But everything you tell yourself should be the truth—or as close to it as you can come. You did what you did because you are who you are. Self-control, or its lack, had nothing to do with it.”

“Self-control has everything to do with it—that’s what being a Jedi is.”

“You,” she said, “are not a Jedi.”

He looked away. Remembering what she had done to him kindled a spark within his chest that grew into a scorching flame around his heart. His fingers dug into the lush moss that carpeted the ledge, and he made fists, tearing up a double handful, and a large part of him wanted that moss to be her neck. But years of Jedi training had armored him against rage. When he opened his fists and let those shreds fall into the wind, he let his anger fall with them.

“Being a Jedi isn’t just about using the Force.” His voice was stronger now; he was on sure ground. “It’s a commitment to a certain way of doing things—a certain way of looking at things. It’s about valuing life, not destroying it.”

“So is gardening.”

He hung his head, numb with memory. “But I wasn’t trying to save anybody. Sure, it started out that way—that’s what I planned for—but by the time you caught up with me on the hive-island, saving lives was the farthest thing from my mind. All I wanted was a club big enough to smack the Yuuzhan Vong all the way out of the galaxy. All I wanted was to hurt them.”

She blinked. “And this is wrong?”

“It is for me. That’s the dark side. It’s the definition of the dark side. That’s what you saved me from.”

“I saved your life, Jacen Solo. That’s all. Your ethics are your own affair.”

Jacen just shook his head. His family history was itself the ultimate argument that the dark side is everybody’s affair, but he wasn’t about to get into that. “You don’t understand.”

“Perhaps I don’t,” she agreed cheerfully. “You seem to be telling me that what you do is irrelevant; all that matters is why you do it.”

“That’s not it at all—”

“No? Then tell me, Jacen Solo, if you had pursued the noble goal of saving those thousands of slaves in the manner of a true Jedi, what would you have done differently? Anything? Or would you only feel differently about what you have done?”

Jacen frowned. “I—that’s not what I mean—”

“Does killing a dhuryam for a noble goal make it any less dead? Do you think it matters to these dead dhuryams whether you killed them in a frenzy of rage or with calm, cool Jedi detachment?”

“It matters to me,” Jacen said solidly.

“Ah, I see. You can do whatever you want, so long as you maintain your Jedi calm? So long as you can tell yourself you’re valuing life? You can kill and kill and kill and kill, so long as you don’t lose your temper?” She shook her head, blinking astonishment. “Isn’t that a little sick?”

“None of those questions are new, Vergere. Jedi have asked themselves all of them ever since the fall of the Empire.”

“Longer than that. Believe me.”

“We don’t have a very good answer—”

“You’ll never have an answer, Jacen Solo.” She leaned toward him, her hand on his shoulder. Though her touch was warm and friendly, her eyes might have been viewports into infinite space. “But you can be an answer.”

He frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

She turned her palms upward in a gesture of helpless surrender. “What does?”

“Oh, well, yeah,” he sighed. “I’ve wondered that myself.”

“Look around you,” she said. “Look at this world: at the patterns of the fern forest, at the rugged curves of terrain, the braided colors of the rings overhead. It is very beautiful, yes?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Jacen said truthfully.

“That is ‘sense’ of a kind, yes?”

“Yes. Yes, it is. Sometimes when I look out at the stars, or across a wild landscape, I get the feeling that it does make sense—no, more like what you said: that it is sense. Like it is its own reason.”

“Do you know what I see, when I look at this world? I see you.”

Jacen stiffened. “Me?”

“What you see around you is the fruit of your rage, Jacen Solo. You made this happen.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You stole the decision of the tizo’pil Yun’tchilat from the shapers on the seedship. You chose the dhuryam that has become the pazhkic Yuuzhan’tar al’tirrna: the World Brain. You destroyed its rivals. You gave it the over-lordship of this planet. This planet takes its shape from your dhuryam friend’s intention, its personality—and its personality has been shaped by your friendship. All this beauty exists, in this form, because of you.”

He shook his head. “That wasn’t what I planned—”

“But it is what you did. I thought we had agreed that why you did it is of concern only to Jedi.”

“I—you always twist everything around,” he said. “You make it way more complicated than it really is.”

“On the contrary: I make it simpler. What you see around you, Jacen Solo, is a reflection of yourself: an artificial construct of the New Republic, remade by the Yuuzhan Vong into something new—something more beautiful than has existed in the galaxy before.”

“What do you mean, an artificial construct?” The sick dread that had curdled in his stomach when he found duracrete beneath the moss slammed back into him. “Where are we?”

“Yuuzhan’tar,” she said. “Did you not understand this?”

“No, I mean: what world was this before?”

She sighed. “You see, but you do not see. You know, but you do not let yourself know. Look, and your question is answered.”

He frowned at the fern forest below, where mountain shadows stretched away from the setting sun. Those flying creatures were out in greater force now, in the twilight, and they circled higher and higher through the shadows as though in pursuit of nocturnal insects. Their wings were broad, leathery, their bodies long and tapered, ending in a sinuous reptilian tail—

Then one swooped straight up in front of Jacen and soared above into the darkening sky, and he could no longer ignore what they were.

Hawk-bats.

He said, “Oh.”

Those strange metric designs on the distant mountains—he knew what they were, now. And the impossibly complex topography of the jungle, that made sense, too.

Jacen said, fainter now, “Oh. Oh, no.”

The designs were viewports. The mountains were buildings. This place was a nightmare image of Yavin 4: the valleys and ridges were patterns of rubble carpeted by alien life. Far more than just an ancient temple complex like one on the gas giant’s moon—what Jacen looked upon here was the shape of a single planetwide city, shattered into ruins, buried beneath a jungle.

And all he could say was, “Oh.”

   Long after Yuuzhan’tar had turned this face away from its sun, Jacen still sat on the mossy ledge above the jungle, now shrouded in night. Flashes of bioluminescence chased each other through the shadowed canopy in jagged streaks of blue-green and vivid yellow. The Bridge was impossibly bright, impossibly close, as though he could reach up, grab on, and swing from one of its braided cascades of color. The colors themselves shimmered and shifted as individual fragments in the orbital ring spun in their own rotations. It cast a glow over the nightscape brighter, softer, more diffuse, than any conjunction of Coruscant’s moons ever had. This was the most beautiful place Jacen had ever seen.

He hated it.

He hated every bit of it.

Even closing his eyes didn’t help, because just knowing it was out there made him shiver with rage. He wanted to burn the whole planet.

He knew, now, that somewhere deep in his heart, none of the war had ever seemed quite real; none of it since Sernpidal. He’d been nursing a secret certainty, concealed even from himself, that somehow everything would be all right again someday—that everything could be the way it used to be. That Chewbacca’s death had been some kind of mistake. That Jaina could never fall into the dark. That his parents’ marriage was strong and sure. That Uncle Luke would always show up just in time and everyone could have a laugh together at how afraid they’d been …

That the Anakin he’d seen die had been—oh, he didn’t know, a clone, maybe. Or a human-guised droid, and the real Anakin was off on the far side of the galaxy somewhere with Chewbacca, and someday they’d find their way home and the whole family could be together again.

That’s why he hated this world spread before him.

Because it could never be home again.

Even if the New Republic somehow, impossibly, turned the tide. Even if some miracle happened and they retook Coruscant—what they won wouldn’t be the same planet they had lost.

The Yuuzhan Vong had come, and they were never going to go away.

Even if Jacen had found a club big enough to knock the whole species back beyond the galactic horizon, nothing could ever erase the scars they would leave behind.

Nothing could ever heal his broken heart.

Nothing could remake him into the Jacen Solo he remembered: the cheerfully reckless Jacen, chasing Zekk into the downlevels; the exasperated Jacen, trying one more time to make Tenel Ka crack a smile; the Jedi apprentice Jacen, born to the Force, but still awed not only by the legend of Uncle Luke but by the power his uncle’s teaching could draw out of him; the teenage Jacen who could wilt under his mother’s stern glare, but still exchange roguish winks with his father and his sister the instant Mother turned away.

I spent so much time wanting to grow up. Trying to grow up. Trying to act like an adult … Now all I want is to be a kid again. Just for a little while. Just a day.

Just an hour.

Jacen reflected bitterly that a large part of growing up seemed to involve watching everything change, and discovering that all changes are permanent. That nothing ever changes back.

That you can’t go home again.

This was what the alien beauty of Yuuzhan’tar whispered constantly in the back of his head: Nothing lasts forever. The only permanence is death.

Brooding, he sat through the long slow roll of the night.

Some unknown time later—by the wheel of the stars, constellations still mockingly familiar over this bitterly foreign landscape, many hours had passed unmarked—he asked, “What now?”

Vergere answered him from the darkness within the bower of ferns. Though no words had been exchanged between them since twilight, her voice was clear, chiming, fresh as always. “I have been wondering the same.”

Jacen shook his head. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Perhaps I will when you do.”

He nodded. This was as much of an answer as he had learned to expect. He swung his legs back onto the ledge, wrapping his elbows around knees drawn up to his chest. “So, what next?”

“You tell me.”

“No games, Vergere. Not anymore. And no more shadowmoth stories, huh?”

“Is what has happened such a mystery to you?”

“I’m not an idiot. You’re training me.” He made an irritated gesture, a flick of the wrist as though tossing away something nasty. “That’s what you’ve been doing from the beginning. I’m learning more tricks than a monkey-lizard. I just don’t know what you’re training me to do.”

“You are free to do, or not do, what you will. Do you understand the difference between training and teaching? Between learning to do and learning to be?”

“So we’re back to the shadowmoth story after all.”

“Is there another story you like better?”

“I just want to know what you’re after, all right? What you want from me. I want to know what to expect.”

“I want nothing from you. I want only for you. ‘Expecting’ is distraction. Pay attention to now.”

“Why can’t you just explain what you’re trying to teach me?”

“Is it what the teacher teaches—” The darkness itself seemed to smile. “—or what the student learns?”

He remembered the first time she had asked him that. He remembered being broken with pain. He remembered how she had guided him to a state of mind where he could mend himself; like a healed bone, he’d become stronger at the break.

He nodded slowly, more to himself than to her. He rose, and went over to the moss-covered couch at the edge of the black shadows cast by the broken walls and the screen of gently weaving ferns. He picked up the neatly folded robeskin, and looked at it for a long moment, then shrugged and slipped it on over his head. “How long before the Yuuzhan Vong arrive?”

“Look around you. They are already here.”

“I mean, how long before something happens? How long can we stay here?”

“That depends.” A soft chuckle came from the darkness. “How thirsty are you?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m told that a human can live three standard days without water—four or five, with careful conservation. Would it be too forward of me to suggest that we might leave in search of some, before you are too weak to move?”

Jacen stared into the darkness. “You’re saying it’s up to me?”

“Here, look at this.”

Out from the shadows flew a pale, irregular object half the size of Jacen’s fist; it curved through a slow arc, gently tossed. Jacen caught it instinctively.

In the clear light reflected by the Bridge, he found the object to be rough-textured and lumpy, like a rounded hunk of limestone. It had several flattened nubs, sticky with a black, puttylike secretion, that might have been stumps where pieces had been broken off. The object as a whole seemed to be the yellowish white color of bleached bone, but all its cracks and crevices were crusted with something flaky, dark, brownish—

Blood. Dried blood.

“What is this thing?” A hard fist clenched the bottom of his throat, because he already knew.

It was a slave seed. A mature slave seed.

His slave seed.

This was why he hadn’t been in pain.

He should throw it off the precipice: hurl it into the jungle of ferns a kilometer below. He should set it on the floor beside him and smash it flat with a hunk of duracrete: crush it into paste. He should hate it.

But he didn’t.

He stared at it, aching, astonished at the empty whistling loss that suddenly gaped inside him.

Without thinking, he hiked up his robeskin and peeled back the strips that bound his chest, peering beneath them. On the spot where she had stabbed him so many weeks ago, he now bore a wider scar, as long as his finger, a scar the bright pink of newly healed flesh; she must have healed him with her tears, almost like bacta.

He found he had to sit down. He sank in place with a sigh like an overloaded landing strut. “You cut it out of me …”

“While you slept. You were unconscious for quite a while.” Vergere moved slowly out of the shadows, and crouched at his side. “Are you all right?”

“I—I’m—” Jacen shook his head blankly. “I mean, thank you. I guess.”

“Did you not want it removed?”

“Of course I … I mean, I did. I just—I don’t know.” He held it up into the softly shifting light. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”

Vergere nodded solemnly. “Once a slave seed has extended its tendrils throughout a host’s nervous system, it is no longer an independent organism. This one died within a minute of its removal.”

“Yeah.” Jacen’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “I just feel—I don’t know. I hated it. I wanted it out of me. I wanted it dead—but, you know, while it was in me … it made me part of something. Like in the Nursery. During the fight, it was almost like having the Force again. Now—”

“You feel empty,” Vergere supplied. “You feel alone. Lonely. Almost frightened, but also strong, yes?”

He stared at her. “How?…”

“The name for what you are feeling,” Vergere said through a slow, gentle smile, “is freedom.”

Jacen snorted. “Some freedom.”

“How did you expect it to feel? You are free, Jacen Solo, and that can be lonely, and empty, and frightening. But it is also powerful.”

“You call this freedom? Sure, I’m free—on a ruined planet occupied by the enemy. No friends, no ship, no weapons. Without even the Force.” He couldn’t help thinking, Without even the slave seed. He glowered out into the gaudy shimmer of the Bridge. “What good does freedom do me?”

Vergere settled into feline repose, arms and legs folded beneath her. “Well,” she said at length. “That’s a question worth considering, yes?”

“Oh …” Jacen’s breath caught in his throat. “That’s what you meant just now? When I asked you what next?”

“You are free,” she repeated. “Go where you will. Do what you will. Be what you will.”

“And what are you going to do?”

Her smile shifted infinitesimally. “What I will.”

“So I can go? Just go? Walk off? Do whatever I want—and nobody will stop me?”

“I make no promises.”

“How am I supposed to know what to do?”

“Ah—” Her smile expanded, and her eyes drifted closed. “—now we return to epistomology.”

Jacen lowered his head. He’d lost what taste he’d ever had for playful banter.

He realized, sitting there with Vergere reclining by his side, that this ledge, high up the side of a ruined building, was in its own way kind of like the Embrace of Pain. He could sit here until he rotted, wallowing in misery—or he could do something.

But what?

Nothing seemed to matter. On this shattered planet, each direction was as good as any other. There was nothing useful he could do—nothing within his reach that would make a difference to anyone but himself.

On the other hand, who says I have to be useful?

And, sitting on that ledge, he discovered that there was one direction that still meant something to him.

He got up.

Vergere opened her eyes.

He parted the ferns, moving back into the night shadow beneath them, and found his way to the moss-covered wall. Starting at one rear corner, he walked the wall’s length, scraping a long strip of the moss aside with his hand. It came off easily, revealing blank duracrete beneath. He glanced over his shoulder at Vergere, who watched him silently through the screen of ferns.

Shrugging, he went back to the corner and started along the adjoining wall.

Three paces from the corner, his scraping fingers revealed a vertical crack, straight as a laser, bordered with metal strips; beyond the crack, the wall became durasteel, instead. Jacen felt around on the wall at about waist height until his fingers closed on a manual release. He turned it, pushed, and the durasteel door slid aside with an exhausted groan.

“What are you doing?”

Jacen didn’t answer.

Beyond lay a hallway that smelled of mildew, dimly lit by bulbous growths of phosphorescent lichen, its floor patched with ratty, insect-eaten carpeting. It had been years since he had prowled the lower levels with Jaina and Lowie, Tenel Ka and Zekk, but the smell was unmistakable. The hallway was lined with numbered doors: this had been one of the old midlevel apartment blocks. At the far end of the hall, an open arch led to emergency stairs.

Jacen nodded to himself, and headed for the stairs without so much as a glance at Vergere.

Her voice echoed along the hall. “Where are you going?”

He didn’t owe her any answers. Silently, he started down the stairs. The stairwell was walled with age-clouded transparent fiberplast, netted with reinforcing wire. Dimly through the webs of scratches, cracks, and wire, he could see a walkway, far below, leading into the blank black-stained wall of a neighboring building.

Halfway down the first flight, he paused, sighing.

“You coming, or what?”

“Of course.” Vergere appeared at the stairtop behind him, smiling broadly in the Bridgelight. “I was only waiting for you to ask.”