“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.
“But I have. Really, this Force business, you’re better off without it. If you’re a good boy, I’ll give it back when you grow up.”
“But …” How could his universe be so fragile? How could everything he was be so easily broken? “But I’m a Jedi …”
“You were a Jedi,” she corrected him. “Haven’t you been paying attention? What part about being dead do you not understand?”
“I don’t …” Jacen’s eyes drifted closed.
Tears gathered in his eyelashes, and when he opened his eyes the tears dripped straight from his eyeballs to splash on the floor beside Vergere’s feet. One of the room’s prehensile eyestalks twisted itself lower to examine them. “I don’t understand anything … Nothing makes sense to me anymore …”
Vergere straightened her back-bent legs and rose onto her toes, bringing her wide whiskered mouth within a decimeter of Jacen’s ear.
“Jacen Solo. Listen well.” Her voice was warm and kind, and her breath smelled of spices grown in alien soil. “Everything I tell you is a lie. Every question I ask is a trick. You will
