Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (39 page)

He has faced deaths in his family before; more than once, he thought Jaina lost, or his father, or mother or Uncle Luke. He has grieved, mourned them—but it was always a
mistake
, it was a
misunderstanding
, sometimes even a deliberate
trick
 … In the end, they always came back to him.

Until Chewbacca.

When the moon crashed on Sernpidal, it shattered not only Chewbacca’s life but also the magic charm that had always seemed to guard them all. Something in the universe has tilted to one side and opened a gap in reality; through that gap, death has slipped into his family.

Anakin …

Jacen saw him die.
Felt
him die, through the Force. Saw his lifeless body in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. Anakin didn’t even fade.

He only died.

In one impossible instant, Anakin ceased to be the brother Jacen played with, teased, looked after, played tricks on, fought with, cared for, trained with, loved—and became … what? An object. Remains. Not a person, not anymore. Now, the only
person
who is Anakin is the image Jacen carries in his heart.

An image that Jacen cannot even let himself see.

Each flash of Anakin—his reckless grin so like their father’s, his eyes smoldering with fierce will mirroring their mother’s, his effortlessly athletic warrior’s grace, so much like Uncle Luke’s—these are the gamma bursts that burn the marrow of his bones, that cook his brain until its boil threatens to burst his skull.

But when he looks away from Anakin, there is nothing to see but pain.

He cannot remember if he is on a ship, or still planet-bound. He finds a vague memory of capture aboard a Yuuzhan Vong worldship, but he’s not sure if that happened to him, or to someone else. He cannot remember if such distinctions mean anything. All he knows is the white.

He remembers that he’s been captured before. He remembers Belkadan, remembers his vain dream of freeing slaves, remembers the blank terror of discovering that his Force powers meant nothing against the Yuuzhan Vong; he remembers the Embrace of Pain, remembers his rescue by Uncle Luke—

Master
Luke. Master Skywalker.

He remembers Vergere. Remembering Vergere brings him to the voxyn queen, and the voxyn queen sends him slithering back down a despair-greased slope to Anakin’s corpse. Anakin’s corpse floats on a burning lake of torment far deeper than anything that can happen to Jacen’s body.

Jacen knows—intellectually, distantly, abstractly—that once he lived outside the white. He knows that he once felt happiness, pleasure, regret, anger, even love. But these are only ghosts, shadows murmuring beneath the roar of pain that fills everything he is, everything he will ever be; the simple fact that the white had a beginning does not imply that it will have an end. Jacen exists beyond time.

Where Jacen is, there is only the white, and the Force.

The Force is the air that he breathes—a cool whisk of sanity, a gentle breeze from a healthier world—though he can no more grasp its power than he might hold on to the wind. It surrounds him, fills him, accepts his suffering, and sustains his sanity. It whispers a reminder that despair is of the dark side, and that ceaseless murmur gives him the strength to go on living.

Distantly on that cool breeze he feels a knot of anger, of black rage and hurt and despair clenching ever harder, compressing itself to diamond and beyond, crushing itself back into carbon powder—he feels, through the bond they have shared from birth, his twin sister falling into the dark.

Jaina
, he begs in a quiet corner of his heart.
Don’t do it. Jaina, hold on—

But he cannot let himself touch her through the Force; he cannot ask her to share his torment—she is in so much pain already that to suffer his would only drive her darker yet. And so even his twin bond has become a source of anguish.

Jacen has become a prism, reintegrating the glittering spectrum of pain into pure blazing agony.

Agony is white.

Snow-blind in an eternal Hoth ice-noon of suffering, Jacen Solo hangs in the Embrace of Pain.

   The touch of a hand along his jaw leaked time into the white. This was not a human hand, not Wookiee, not family or close friend—four fingers, mutually opposable, hard-fleshed as a raptor’s talons—but the touch was warm, and moist, and somehow not unfriendly. Pain retreated toward the back of his mind until he could think again, though he felt it lurking there, waiting. He knew that it would overtake him again, would break in waves across him, but for now—

The tides of agony rolled slowly out, and Jacen could open his eyes.

The hand that had brought him out of the white belonged to Vergere. She stood below him, looking up with wide alien eyes, her fingers light upon his cheek.

Jacen hung horizontally, suspended facedown two meters above a floor of wet, slick-looking greens and browns—its surface corded, viny, as though with muscle and vein. The walls oozed oily dampness that smelled darkly organic: bantha sweat and hawk-bat droppings. From the darkness above swung tentacles like prehensile eyestalks, ends socketed with glowing orbs that stared at him as the tentacles wove and danced and twisted about each other.

He understood: the enemy was watching.

Something that felt like claws, sharp and unyielding, gripped his skull from behind; he could not turn his head to see what held him. His arms were drawn wide, pulled to full extension and twisted so that his shoulders howled in their sockets. A single strong grip crushed his ankles together, grinding bone on bone—

Yet the greatest pain he now suffered was to look on Vergere and remember that he had trusted her.

She withdrew her hand, clenching and opening it while she stared at it with what, on a human, might have been a smile—as though her hand were an unfamiliar tool that might turn out to be a toy, instead.

“Among our masters,” she said casually, as though continuing a friendly conversation, “it is not considered shameful for a warrior in your position to pray for death. This is occasionally granted, to honor great courage. There are some on this very ship who whisper that your action against the voxyn queen has earned this honor for you. On the other hand, our warmaster claims you for his own, to be a sacrifice to the True Gods. This, too, is a very great honor. Do you understand this?”

Jacen understood nothing except how much he hurt, and how terribly he had been betrayed. “I—” Speaking tore his throat as though he coughed splinters of transparisteel. He winced, squeezing shut his eyes until galaxies flared within them, then gritted his teeth and spoke anyway. “I
trusted
you.”

“Yes, you did.” She opened her hand, turning her quadrifid palm upward as if to catch a falling tear, and smiled up at him. “Why?”

Jacen could not find his breath to give answer; and then he found he had no answer to give.

She was so
alien—

Raised on Coruscant, the nexus of the galaxy, he had no memory of a time when there had not been dozens—hundreds, even thousands—of wildly differing species in sight whenever he so much as peeked out the holographic false window of his bedroom. All space lanes led to Coruscant. Every sentient species of the New Republic had had representatives there. Bigotry was utterly beyond him; Jacen could no more dislike or distrust someone simply because she belonged to an unfamiliar species than he could breathe methane.

But Vergere—

Body compact and lithe, arms long and oddly mobile as though possessed of extra joints, hands from which fingers opened like the gripping spines of Andoan rock polyps, back-bent knees above splay-toed feet—he was acutely, overpoweringly aware that he had never seen any of Vergere’s kind before. Long bright eyes the shape of teardrops, a spray of whiskers curving around a wide, expressive mouth … but expressive of what? How could he know what the arc of her lips truly signified?

It resembled a human smile, but she was nothing resembling human.

Perhaps her species used the crest of iridescent feathers along her cranial ridge for nonverbal signals: right now, as he stared, feathers near the rounded rear of her oblate skull lifted and turned so that their color shifted from starlight silver to red as a blaster bolt. Was that what corresponded to a smile? Or a human’s deadpan shrug? Or a predator’s threat display?

How could he possibly know?

How could he have ever trusted her?

“But you—” he rasped. “You saved Mara—”

“Did I?” she chirped sunnily. “And if I did, what significance do you attach to this?”

“I thought you were on our side—”

One whiskered eyebrow arched. “There is no ‘our side,’ Jacen Solo.”

“You helped me kill the voxyn queen—”

“Helped you? Perhaps. Perhaps I
used
you; perhaps I had my own reasons to desire the death of the voxyn queen, and you were a convenient weapon. Or perhaps
you
are my true interest: perhaps I gave of my tears to Mara—perhaps I helped you survive the encounter with the voxyn queen—perhaps everything I have done was intended to bring you here, and hang you in the Embrace of Pain.”

“Which—” Jacen made himself say “—which was it?”

“Which do you think it was?”

“I—I don’t know … How
can
I know?”

“Why ask me? Should I presume to instruct a Jedi in the mysteries of epistemology?”

Jacen stiffened in the grip of the Embrace of Pain; he was not so broken that he did not know he was being mocked. “What do you want from me? Why have you done this? Why are you here?”

“Deep questions, little Solo.” Her ridge feathers rippled through a shimmering rainbow like a diamond-edged sabacc deck riffled by an expert dealer. “It is near enough to the truth to say that I am a messenger of melancholy—a herald of tragedy, bearing gifts to ease the grieved. A mourner, with grave goods to decorate the tomb. A hierophant, to perform the sacred offices for the dead—”

Jacen’s head swam. “What are you talking about? I don’t—I can’t—” His voice failed, and he sagged exhaustedly.

“Of course you can’t. It’s enough that the dead suffer their demise; would it be fair to ask them to understand it as well?”

“You’re saying …” Jacen licked his lips, his tongue so dry it scraped them raw.
I can face this
, he told himself.
I may not be much of a warrior, but I can die like one
. “You’re saying you’re going to kill me.”

“Oh no, not at all.” From Vergere’s mouth came a musical chiming like a spray of Endorian wind-crystals; he guessed this must serve her for laughter. “I’m saying you’re already dead.”

Jacen stared.

“You are forever lost to the worlds you knew,” she went on with a liquidly alien gesture that might have been a shrug. “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.”

But not everything he knew was gone, not while he lived. He was a Jedi. He reached out with his feelings—

“Oh, the Force,” Vergere chirped dismissively. “The Force is
life;
what has life to do with you?”

Suffering and exhaustion had bled away Jacen’s capacity for astonishment; he did not care how Vergere knew what he was doing. He opened himself to the Force, let its clean cascade wash through him, dissolving his pain and confusion—and found at his side a connection to the Force as profound as his own.

Vergere crackled with power.

Jacen murmured, “You’re a Jedi …”

Vergere laughed. “There are no Jedi here,” she said, and made a gesture, eyeflick-swift.

Inside Jacen’s head, a swirl of interstellar gases fell in upon itself, kindling a protostar behind his eyes. The protostar swelled, gathering power, ramping up intensity until the light inside his skull washed away the woody glow of the chamber in which he hung. In the whited-out blaze, he heard Vergere’s voice, cold and precise as the light of a distant quasar.

“I am your guide through the lands of the dead.”

Beyond that, he heard and saw no more.

A silent supernova erupted within Jacen’s brain, and blasted away the universe.

   Seconds or centuries passed in oblivion.

Consciousness swam back into him, and he opened his eyes to find himself still hanging in the Embrace of Pain, Vergere still standing below him, on her face the same alien facsimile of cheerful mockery.

Nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

The universe was
empty
, now.

“What?…” Jacen croaked, his throat raw as though he’d spent days screaming in his sleep. “
What have you done to me?…
”

“You have no business with the Force, nor it with you. Let
you
have the Force? The idea! It must be some kind of human thing—you mammals are so impulsive, so reckless: infants teething on a blaster. No, no, no, little Solo. The Force is much too dangerous for children. A great deal more dangerous than those ridiculous lightsabers you all seem to like to wave about. So I took it away from you.”

The emptiness of the universe howled inside his head.

There was
nothing out there
.

Only vast interstellar vacuum.

All his training, all his talent, his gift, meant nothing to the limitlessly indifferent cosmos; the Force was only the ghost of a dream from which he had now awakened.

Jaina—
He thrust desperately into the bond that had always been there, seeking his sister, his twin; he poured his terror and loss into the void that yawned where that bond had always been.

Only silence. Only emptiness. Only
lack
.

Oh, Jaina—Jaina, I’m sorry …

With the Force-bond between them shattered, even Jaina would think he was dead.

Would
know
he was dead.

“You—there’s no way—you can’t
possibly—
” He barely recognized this tiny, lost-in-the-dark whisper as his own voice.