EIGHT

INTO THE DARK

Lightning blazed overhead, and thunder slammed the crater floor hard enough to shake the ground. Shivering, Jacen pressed himself into a broken corner that had once been the interior of a fashionable refresher. Icy rain streamed down his spine, and pellets of hail stung his skin. He clenched his jaw so that his teeth wouldn’t chatter.

The Yuuzhan Vong were coming.

Whole squads of warriors had come bounding over the crater’s rim before Jacen and Vergere had made it even halfway down the inner slope. The warriors had leapt recklessly from slab to rock to rubble, gaining rapidly. Jacen could not possibly have matched their speed; in the service of the True Gods, injury or maiming—even death—is a warrior’s fondest hope.

He didn’t know how long he’d been waiting here, shivering in the icy rain. Vergere had told him to wait, had told him she could find an escape route, but she had to hunt for it and she could move faster alone. Though she had not said the words, had not asked him to, Jacen trusted her.

What choice did he have?

Oh yeah, sure, I’m free, he thought sourly. Some freedom.

The rain, the hail, the bitter wind, they were bad. The waiting was worse.

Worst of all was that he could feel the Yuuzhan Vong closing in.

The center of his chest was hollow: an empty space where the slave seed once had been. If he changed his breathing, if he closed his eyes, if he thought about that hollow—directed his attention into the emptiness at his center—somehow that brought another sense to life. He couldn’t have described the feeling; there were no words, exactly, for how it felt. The slave seed had sent fibers throughout his body, had woven itself into his nervous system until those fibers were an inextricable part of who he was—but those fibers vibrated to a life foreign to this galaxy.

He just knew …

He could feel the Yuuzhan Vong swarming down the crater’s slopes, could feel them slogging through the thunderstorm in the crater’s center. He felt the sizzle of alien stress hormones coursing alien veins. He felt one’s shortness of breath as a warrior slipped around a blind corner that might hide a fugitive Jedi; he felt one’s black rage at the death of comrades in the Nursery, and his heart echoed with another’s savage lust for vengeance. He felt the shocking, nauseating nonpain that slammed up a leg from an ankle broken by an unlucky shift of rubble, and he felt the frustration of a warrior ordered to remain behind to tend some clumsy brenzlit’s broken ankle while he burned to leap forward, to hunt and find and slay. He felt them all.

Like he was all of them, and all of them were him. At the same time.

And more: he felt the crush of tender fronds under hard hot boot heels. He felt the primitive distress of moss when half a struggling colony was scraped off a broken door by the stumble of a warrior against it. He felt the blank terror of a small family of burrowing, roughly mammalian creatures, cringing at the groundborne impact vibrations of so many running feet.

Accepting the warriors’ feelings, opening himself to their emotions, their sensations, he no longer felt the cold: Yuuzhan Vong metabolism, faster and hotter than human, turned the icy rain into a refreshingly astringent shower. The sting of hail became harshly intoxicating, like scratching an inflamed rash. And he was no longer afraid—

Not that he was afraid to die. He’d left fear of death behind on the worldship at Myrkr—but in the blasting thunderstorm, his body had cringed and shook, twisting away from imagined slashes of amphistaffs, bracing against impacts of imagined thud bugs, a biological reflex that took no account of his courage. But now—

Now, all he felt was a fierce rise of predatory joy as a warrior raised his amphistaff and crept toward a small white-robed human shivering in a corner at the meeting of two broken walls, and only when a tall shadow loomed through the curtain of rain right in front of him did Jacen realize that the small white-robed human who was about to die was himself.

Lightning blasted overhead as he twisted, and the amphistaff blade only scored his ribs before stabbing deep into the duracrete of the wall at his back. In the ringing darkness that followed the flash he let the knapsack drop off his shoulders, catching one strap as it fell; while the warrior yanked his amphistaff free, Jacen swung the knapsack two-handed and slammed fifteen kilos of cans and equipment into the warrior’s face. The warrior staggered backward and Jacen pounced, swinging again, landing solidly, buckling the warrior’s knees.

Jacen spun the knapsack overhand to smash the warrior straight down to the ground, but the warrior lifted his blade to parry, slashing the knapsack in half, scattering protein bars and canned synthmilk, shearing the electrobinoculars neatly in half and stabbing into the electronic guts of the datapad—which exploded into blue-white sparks that lit up the rain and scaled the length of the amphistaff to scorch the warrior’s hands.

The warrior hacked a glottal curse as his hands spasmed involuntarily. Smoking, the amphistaff fell limp to the ground between them. Jacen grimaced as pain bit his own hands, chewing its way up his arms—but it wasn’t his pain.

This was pain from the warrior’s burns.

When the warrior leapt to attack unarmed, Jacen met his attack effortlessly, pivoting slightly so that the warrior’s spiked boot missed him by a centimeter. The warrior skidded, caught himself, then twisted and fired a lightning punch overhand toward Jacen’s temple. Jacen tilted his head a fraction, and the punch only ruffled his hair.

“If you don’t stop,” Jacen said, “I’ll have to hurt us.”

The warrior snarled and swung his knotted fists. Jacen flicked the first punch aside; the second, he parried with an open palm as he stepped forward, swinging his own doubled arm, so that the warrior’s knuckles slammed into the point of Jacen’s oncoming elbow. The warrior howled as his knuckles shattered, and a blaze of alien pain ignited in Jacen’s arm: splintered bones stabbing through third-degree electrical burns.

“I can do this all day.” He could: the warrior might as well have been a part of Jacen’s own body. He could no more fail to meet an attack than one of his hands would miss the other in the dark. He would feel every scrap of whatever pain he inflicted, but so what? It was only pain.

And the rest—

He let himself go, moving light and easy, counters to every attack as clear and obvious and predictable as a form he’d done a thousand times: like training with Jaina, when their Force talents and their twin bond had made them practically one person. More warriors sighted the fight—the dance—and thud bugs snapped through the air, and Jacen actually felt he should apologize as he gracefully faked the warrior off balance and then took his outstretched arm and spun him into their path. The thud bugs hit him like hammers. Vonduun crab armor saved his life, but transferred enough hydrostatic shock to snuff his consciousness like a switched-off glow rod.

Jacen felt that, too: an eyeflash of blackout that staggered him.

When his eyes cleared, three warriors had him boxed.

Knowing how they would attack wouldn’t help; no one alive could move fast enough to dodge. The warriors slashed at him, amphistaffs lengthening with whipcrack speed. None of the blades even grazed him.

He had not moved.

To the nerve nodes that served as all three amphistaffs’ primitive brains, Jacen suddenly appeared to be a—small, disturbingly misshapen, but still unmistakable—amphistaff polyp; uncounted millennia of natural selection had hardwired amphistaffs against cutting polyps.

Well, that worked okay, Jacen thought. But once they drop them and come after me barehanded, I’m cooked.

So he attacked.

He took three running steps for momentum toward the one on the left and sprang into the air. The warrior’s instinctive reaction—to lift his amphistaff and spear Jacen through the guts—did him no good at all, because the amphistaff dropped limp between his hands and the warrior could only gape in astonishment as Jacen slammed both feet into his chest and flattened him as if he’d been hit by a speeder.

Jacen hit the ground running, and never looked back.

They came after him like hungry gundarks, snarling fury. He dashed blind through the storm, slipping, skidding, head down, navigating by the feeling in the middle of his chest: toward where the Yuuzhan Vong weren’t. He could feel them spot him, could feel surges of rage and feral blood lust from all directions as hunters glimpsed him, vaguely, wraithlike through the rain and hail, and felt every flash of stark joy when they spotted him in the stuttering blue-white strobe of lightning. Thud bugs tracked him, blasting splinters off walls, scattering chunks of sodden moss. Shouts from all sides: harsh coughs with too many consonants, half smothered in rain, half buried in thunder. He didn’t speak the language, but he could feel the meaning.

They had him surrounded, and were closing in.

This, he said to himself, would be a really good time for Vergere to show up.

As if summoned by his thought, an invisible hand shoved his shoulder, knocking his headlong dash into a diagonal stagger. Before he could recover his balance, an invisible rope hobbled his ankles and brought him crashing to the ground—

Which collapsed under him with the dull rip of rotten fibertile, and dumped him headfirst four meters down to a damp stone floor that he hit like a cargo sack. He lay there, half stunned, gasping, wind knocked completely out of him, staring at the sudden constellations that wheeled around his head but shed no light into the surrounding gloom.

A section of wall slid aside, revealing another room beyond, dimly lit by glow globes in conservation mode. The light from the far room haloed a small, slim avian silhouette in the doorway. “Jacen Solo. It is time to come in from the storm.”

He looked up at the Jacen-sized hole in this room’s ceiling, and let the icy rain that poured in on him wash the stars out of his head. “Vergere?…”

“Yes.”

He felt the confusion of the hunters above: as far as they could tell, he had simply vanished. “Uh, thanks, I guess—”

“You’re welcome.”

“But—”

“Yes?”

Slowly, he pulled himself up. No bones seemed to be broken, but his whole body ached. “You couldn’t have just, maybe, said ‘Hey, Jacen! Run this way!’?”

Her head canted a centimeter, and her crest seemed to glow a deep burnt orange. She extended a hand toward him.

“Hey, Jacen,” she said. “Run this way.”

After one last glance through the hole above at the black, lightning-lashed clouds, he did.

   Deep into the planet, deep into the darkness—

Running.

Glow globes dead, or pulsing feebly; flashes of rooms, bare and sterile, the only life flattened cartoons of foliage spidering across walls in mosaic tiles; hard clap of boots on stone, harsh breath rasping through dust-filled throat, over lips and teeth coated with sand—

Running.

Sweat burned in Jacen’s eyes, blurring Vergere’s back; she streaked ahead, turning corners, ducking through doorways, diving down stairwells, leaping into abandoned turbolifts to slide the guardrails, and he followed desperately—

Deeper into the planet. Deeper into the darkness.

Running.

That calm open hollow at his center evaporated somewhere along the way; he didn’t feel the Yuuzhan Vong anymore. Gasping, losing Vergere and catching sight of her again, his sprint dipping into a stagger, he couldn’t know if the Yuuzhan Vong were gaining, falling behind, circling ahead. His imagination crowded the corridors at his back with fierce sprinting warriors, but to look behind risked losing Vergere forever.

Daggers of fire stabbed into his lungs with every step. Ragged black blots danced in his vision, growing, blending, twisting until they suddenly billowed and swallowed him whole.

Deep in the darkness …

   He awoke on the floor. Warm rain trickled down his cheeks as he sat up. The palm of one hand was skinned raw. A drop of that warm rain touched his lips, and he tasted blood.

Vergere crouched nearby, half shadowed in the weak amber light from a single glow globe well down the corridor. She watched him with feline patience.

“Until your head becomes as hard as these flagstones, I’d suggest you avoid knocking it into them,” she said.

“I …” Jacen’s eyes drifted closed, and opening them again cost him tremendous effort. His head thundered like the storm above. The corridor swirled around him, and darkness pressed in on his brain. “I can’t … get my breath …”

“No?”

“I—can’t keep up, Vergere. I can’t—draw on the Force like you do, I can’t get … strength …”

“Why not?”

“You know why not!” Black fury ignited his heart, blood steaming in his head, spinning him to his feet. Two strides put him above her. “You did it to me! I am sick of your questions—sick of your training—”

He pulled her to her feet, then off her feet, holding her dangling above the floor so close that his teeth might as well have been clenched in her flesh. “And most of all,” he growled, low, murderous, “I am sick of you.”

“Jacen—” Her voice sounded oddly thick, oddly tight, and her arms fell limp to her sides—

And Jacen discovered that his hands were locked around her throat.

Her voice trailed to a fading hiss. “That … twisssst—”

My species has a particularly vulnerable neck—

His hands sprang open, and he took a step back, and another, and another until his back came hard against the sweating stone of the wall. He covered his face with his hands, blood from his palms painting his face, blood and sweat from his face stinging his skinned palm. His chest heaved but he couldn’t quite breathe; he never had managed a really good breath; his strength fled along with his rage and his knees turned to cloth, and he sank down to huddle against the wall, eyes squeezed shut behind his fingers.

“What?…” he murmured, but he couldn’t finish. What is happening to me?

Vergere’s voice was warm as a kiss. “I told you: here, the dark side is very, very strong.”

“The dark side?” Jacen lifted his head. His hands shook, so he clasped them together and pinned them between his knees. “I, ah—Vergere, I’m sorry—”

“For what?”

“I wanted to kill you. I almost did.”

“But you didn’t.”

Waves of trembling rippled through him. He ventured a shaky laugh. “You should have left me behind. I probably have less to fear from the Yuuzhan Vong than I do from the dark side.”

“Oh?”

“All the Yuuzhan Vong can do is kill me. But the dark side …”

“Why is it so to be feared?”

He turned his face away. “My grandfather was a Lord of the Sith.”

“What? Of the Sith?”

He turned back to find Vergere staring at him in blank astonishment. She tilted her head one way, then another, as though she suspected he might change appearance when viewed from a different angle. “I had thought,” she said carefully, “that you were of Skywalker blood.”

“I am.” He hugged himself against the shaking. Why couldn’t he breathe? “My grandfather was Anakin Skywalker. He became Darth Vader, the last Sith Lord—”

“Anakin?” She settled back into herself, openly stunned—and clearly, astonishingly, saddened. “Little Anakin? A Lord of the Sith? Oh … oh, could it not have been otherwise? What a tragedy … What a waste.”

Jacen stared at her in turn, his mouth hanging open. “You say that like you knew him …”

She shook her head. “Knew of him, more. Such promise … Do you know, I met him once, not five hundred meters above where we now sit? He couldn’t have been more than twelve, perhaps thirteen standard years old. He was—so alive. He burned …”

“What—what would Darth Va—I mean, my grandfather—what was he doing on Coruscant? What were you doing on Coruscant? Five hundred meters above us? What was this place?”

“Do you not know? Has this been lost, as well?” She rose, and extended a hand to help him to his feet. She touched the wall nearby, her fingers skittering through a complex pattern on a sweating rectangular slab, which slowly swung wide, opening a doorway into a gloom-filled chamber beyond.

“This way.” The chamber threw back a dark resonance, as though she spoke beside a drum. Her gaze was steady once more, and expressionless as the stone of the walls. Lost in wonder, Jacen stepped past her into the darkness.

“This was our tower of guard: our fortress watch upon the dark,” she said. The doorway narrowed into a dim yellow stripe of globe-glow, then vanished. “This was the Jedi Temple.”

“This—?” Awe squeezed his chest, and he floundered in the dark; he had to gasp harshly in order to speak. “You—you are a Jedi!”

“No, I am not. Nor am I Sith.”

“What are you, then?”

“I am Vergere. What are you?”

In the darkness her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. He turned, seeking her blindly. “No more games, Vergere.”

“This has never been a game, Jacen Solo.”

“Tell me the truth—”

“I tell you nothing but truth.”

She sounded so close by that Jacen reached for her in the dark. “I thought everything you tell me is a lie—”

“Yes. And the truth.”

“What kind of truth is that?”

“Is there more than one? Why even ask? You will find no truth in me.”

This time her voice came from behind him; he whirled, extending his hands, but found nothing he could grasp. “No games,” he insisted.

“There is nothing that is not a game. A serious game, to be sure: a permanent game. A lethal game. A game so grave that it can be well played only with joyous abandon.”

“But you said—”

“Yes. It has never been a game. And it always has. Either way, or both: you had better play to win.”

“How can I play if you won’t even tell me the rules—?”

“There are no rules.”

A scamper of footsteps to his right; Jacen moved toward them silently.

“But the game does have a name,” she said from the opposite side of the room. “We are playing the same game we have been playing ever since Myrkr: we are playing ‘Who is Jacen Solo?’ ”

He thought with longing of the glow rod, lost with his sliced-open knapsack in the crater above. Thinking of the glow rod, of bright golden light springing from his fist, made him suddenly ache for his lightsaber: he thought of that clean green glow filling the room, cutting through all shadows, making everything clear again. His hands burned to hold it one more time. In building that lightsaber, he had built himself an identity. He had built himself a destiny.

He had built himself.

“If that’s the game,” he said, “I can end it right now. I know who I am, Vergere. No matter what you do to me. No matter what new torture you put me through. If I never touch the Force again. It doesn’t matter. I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he said solidly into the darkness. “I’m a Jedi.”

A long, long silence, in which he seemed to hear the entire room drawing a slow, slow breath.

“Indeed?” She sounded sad. Disappointed. Resigned to a melancholy fate. “Then the game is over.”

“Really?” he said warily. “It is?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “And you lose.”

The room burst to light; after so long in the dark, Jacen felt like he was being jabbed in the eye with a piece of the sun. He flinched, shading his eyes with an upraised arm. Slowly his eyes cleared; the room was larger than he had thought—a ten-meter ceiling, walls decorated with the same floral mosaics, lit by blazing glow globes the size of the Falcon’s cockpit, hanging suspended by tripled chains of verdigris-caked bronze that swung gently above its tiled floor—

And it was full of Yuuzhan Vong.

He turned to Vergere. Beyond a ring of warriors, she stood companionably beside a medium-sized male who wore a long, loose-fitting robeskin of black.

They spoke, but Jacen could not hear them. His ears roared like a forest fire. The Yuuzhan Vong male spoke again, more sharply, but Jacen did not understand. Could not understand. Had no need to understand.

Jacen had seen this male before.

He had seen this male on Duro, with Leia’s lightsaber behind his belt. He had seen this male on the worldship at Myrkr. He knew this male’s name, and he tried to say it.

Tried to say—

But before he could even open his mouth—

A hot tidal surge of red billowed through him, and washed away the world.

   Jacen did not swim in the red tide, he floated: drifting, spinning in the eddies, tumbling in the surf. The red tide ebbed, waves washing out, and he bobbed to the surface. The red tide drained from his head, leaving him gasping on the floor.

His hands hurt.

He looked at them, but he couldn’t quite see them, or he couldn’t quite make sense of what he saw; his eyes wouldn’t quite focus. He let his right hand fall to the chilly mosaic tile of the floor, wondering blankly that the outwash of the red tide had left the floor so cold, and so dry. A savor of scorched meat hung in the air, as though his father had jury-rigged the autochef again. But Dad couldn’t have jury-rigged the autochef. There was no autochef. And Dad wasn’t here, couldn’t be here, would never be here—and the smell … Nothing made sense. How had he fallen to this floor? What caused this roil of smoke and dust? A curving wall of rubble choked off three-quarters of the chamber—where had that come from?

Answers were beyond him.

But his hands still hurt. He raised his left hand and frowned his vision clear.

A circle in the middle of his palm—a disk about the size of a power cell—was blackened, cracked, oozing thick dark blood. Wisps of smoke coiled upward from the cracks.

Oh, he thought. I guess that explains the smell.

“How … how does it feel, Jacen Solo—” The voice was thin, ragged and harsh, rasping, broken by coughs. The voice was familiar. The voice was Vergere’s. “—to once more … touch the Force?”

She lay crumpled on the floor a few meters away, just within a ragged archway lipped with jagged stone, as though some incomprehensibly powerful creature had trampled her as it crashed through the wall. Broken stone littered the floor. Her clothing was shredded, smoldering, red embers sliding along torn edges, and burned flesh beneath it still smoked.

“Vergere!” He was at her side without knowing how he got there. “How—what happened?” A sickening conviction clotted in his guts. “Did I—?” His voice trailed off.

He remembered—

Through a fever-dream haze, red-soaked images leaked back into him: the room filled with Yuuzhan Vong warriors, Vergere standing beside Nom Anor as though the two knew each other, as though they were coworkers. Comrades. Friends. Nom Anor had said something to her, and she something to him, but betrayal had hammered any hope of meaning from his brain. He remembered a long gathering breath: inhaling a galaxy of hatred and rage—

And he remembered channeling that whole galaxy of rage down his arms and hurling it at Vergere.

He remembered watching her writhe in the electric arcs of his hatred: remembered the sizzle of his own hands burning as lightning burst through them: remembered how that pain had only fed his anger.

And he remembered how good it had felt.

Clean.

Pure.

No more wrestling with right and wrong, good and evil. Every knotty problem of Jedi ethics had dissolved in one brain-blasting surge; once he had surrendered complexity, he’d found that everything was simple. His hatred became the only law of the universe. Anger alone had meaning, and the only answer to anger was pain. Someone else’s pain.

Anyone else’s pain.

Even now, awake, alert, choking on horror, he could feel the sweet echo of that clean, pure rage. He could hear it calling to him. It coiled inside him: a malignant parasite chewing at the bottom of his mind.

What have I become?

Vergere lay on the floor like a broken doll; her eyes were dull, glazed, empty, and her crest showed only dirty gray.

“Vergere—” he murmured. It had been so easy to hurt her. So simple. Tears spilled onto his cheeks. “I warned you, didn’t I? I warned you. The dark side—”

“Don’t … make excuses …” Her voice was even fainter now, breathier, more ragged.

“I wouldn’t dare,” he whispered. There was no possible excuse. No one knew the dangers of the dark side better than he; those dangers had haunted the depths below his entire life—

Yet he had fallen so easily.

He had fallen so far—

The wall of rubble closed off most of the chamber: tumbled hunks of duracrete, fallen in a steep slope from uncountable floors above. The only light in the much-reduced chamber was leakover from glow globes in the ruined hallway outside. The ceiling had collapsed, he remembered that much, remembered the roar, the pounding, the dust and flying splinters of stone. No, wait, it hadn’t collapsed …

He had pulled it down.

He remembered swirling within the red tide, remembered feeling Vergere lose consciousness, remembered reaching for a new target, a new victim, reaching for Nom Anor with the lightning that had felled Vergere—

And being unable to find him.

He could see the Yuuzhan Vong executor, could hear him shouting orders to the warriors around them all, but he could not touch him with the lightning. There had been a circuit missing: the lightning would ground harmlessly into the floor or the walls or arc back to make Vergere’s unconscious body spasm in convulsions. The lightning of his rage could only span gaps between poles of the Force—neither Nom Anor nor his warriors could conduct that current. Frustration had compounded Jacen’s fury; he had thrown himself outward seeking power to do these creatures harm—

And the storm above the crater had answered.

He remembered the wild joy of release as the power of the storm had roared into him and through him and became a mad vortex within the underground chamber, lifting stone and brick and chunks of duracrete to whirl and batter and slash the Yuuzhan Vong, pounding the warriors with pieces of the planet that had once been Jacen’s home. A shrug of wind had crushed the Yuuzhan Vong into one corner of the chamber, and he remembered bubbling laughter exploding with malice into a shout of victory as he had reached up his hand and brought down the building around them.

He rocked back on his ankles, hands going to his face. Was it possible? He had buried them alive. All of them. And he didn’t care.

No: he did care. That’s what made it even worse.

He had buried them alive, and he was happy about it.

The dark side called to him: a shadow worm whispering promises of ecstasy as it ate into his heart. It murmured infinite release, humming a song of the eternity that lies beyond all shadows of doubt and remorse.

He shook himself violently and lurched to his feet. “I have to get out of here.”

“Jacen …” She lifted a hand as though to stay him, as though to ask for his help.

“No, Vergere. No. I have to go—I have to go right now. I’m sorry I hurt you, I’m so sorry, I am—” Liar, the shadow worm snickered inside him. Just wait, and watch, and she’ll give us an excuse to do it again.

Vergere’s eyes seemed to clear then, and a hint of a smile curved her lips. “The dark side?…”

“It’s—it’s too strong for me here. I warned you. I warned you what could happen—”

She raised her hand once more, reaching for his leg; he took a hasty step back to avoid her touch, and she let her arm fall limp to the floor. “You see …” she whispered, “…  but you do not see. Jacen … why would the Jedi Council … build its Temple upon … a nexus of the dark side?”

“Vergere, I—” He shook his head helplessly. “I have to go. I have to go before—before I …” hurt you again, he finished silently. He couldn’t say it out loud. Not here. “I don’t have time for guessing games.”

“No guessing …” she said. “The answer is … simple. They wouldn’t.”

He went very, very still. “What do you mean? I can feel the dark side here. I touched the dark side, and it, and it, it touched me—”

“No. What you feel is the Force.” Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. “This is the shameful secret of the Jedi: There is no dark side.”

How could she lie here with smoke still rising from the shreds of her clothing, and expect him to believe this? “Vergere, I know better. What do you think just happened here?”

“The Force is one, Jacen Solo. The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. I’ve told you already: the Force does not take sides. The Force does not even have sides.”

“That’s not true! It isn’t—” The red tide surged into his chest, reaching for his heart. Everything I tell you is a lie. This was only another of her lies. It had to be. If it wasn’t—

He couldn’t let himself think it. He shook his head hard enough to make his ears ring. “It’s a lie—”

“No. Search your feelings. You know this to be true. The Force is one.”

But he could feel the dark side: he was drowning in it.

“Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand.” She seemed to draw strength from his weakness, slowly managing to sit up. “What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion … but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness—true greatness of any kind—requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind.”

“But—but the dark side—”

She rose, her smoldering garments wreathing her in coils of smoke. “If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do.”

“Me?” The red tide turned black, poisonous, strangling, burning through his ribs from the inside. “No—no, you don’t understand—the dark side is, it’s, it’s, don’t you see it? It’s the dark side,” he insisted desperately, hopelessly. There were no words for the truth inside him; nor were there words for the horror that rolled into him, because he could feel the Force again.

He could feel that she was right.

But that would make me—does make me … His knees buckled, and he staggered to maintain his balance, stumbling, reaching for the wall, something stone, anything solid, anything certain, anything that he could lean on that wouldn’t become smoke and mist and let him fall forever. He whispered, “The dark side …”

She paced toward him, relentless, inexorable. “The only dark side you need fear, Jacen Solo, is the one in your own heart.”

And in her eyes, he found that certainty, that solidity: the permanent, immutable truth he hoped would keep him upright—

His reflection.

Distorted. Leering. Misshapen. An illusion of light, floating on a glossy curve of surface … above depths of infinite black.

They say the truth hurts. A gasp of lunatic laughter bubbled wildly through his lips. They have no idea … The Embrace of Pain had been nothing but a scratch, the slave seed only a toothache—

His laughter choked itself to a smothered sob. He threw himself past Vergere into the hallway, and fled.

Running.

   Every time Nom Anor glanced back toward the wall of rubble that so easily could have become his tomb, a spectral hand reached into his chest to twist his heart apart. “You assured me there would be no danger!” he said for the fourth time.

He spoke Basic—it would not do for the warriors to hear him complain—and he gritted his teeth, clenching arms and legs, because the warriors must not see him tremble.

“Nom Anor,” Vergere said with the patience that grows of wounds and exhaustion, “you are alive, and uninjured save for bumps and bruises.” She wept a continuous rain, mopping away her burns with tears. “What have you to complain of?”

Nom Anor looked once more at the wall of rubble; he could still feel the strangling panic of being so easily, casually, almost negligently shoved aside—and then the rumble of the ceiling’s collapse, and the howl of the maelstrom within the chamber, and the boil of dust, and the absolute night that had swallowed him … “You should have warned me how dangerous and erratic this ‘Dark Jedi’ power can be,” he insisted.

“Look around you. A dozen warriors, and you. And me. All living. If, instead of wielding this ‘dangerous power’ about which you whine, Jacen Solo had been calm, centered, and armed with his lightsaber …” One arm rippled in a shrug more eloquent than any words. “You saw what he did in the Nursery. There might have been survivors, but you and I would not be among them.”

Nom Anor only grunted. “I do not understand the purpose of this Jedi babble of the ‘dark side,’ either. What was the use of sparking this crisis? Here I am, at your insistence, lying to the Shaper Lord, manipulating his troops, lurking in this hideous place—not to mention placing my life at considerable risk—to trigger this … what? What has any of this to do with converting Jacen Solo to the True Way?”

Vergere looked up from tending her wounds. “Before one can learn truth, one must unlearn lies.”

“You mean, our truth. The True Way.” Nom Anor squinted at her. “Don’t you?”

“Our truth, Executor?” Her eyes seemed to expand into vast pools of unreadable darkness; in them he could see only his reflection. “Is there any other?”