Jacen rose gently from the embrace of the Force like a man rising slowly and reluctantly from the warmth and buoyancy of a mineral spring. He paused before rising fully to the mundane world and basked for a moment in the luxurious, shining unity of all living things, and then, like a garment, he donned his ego—put himself into himself, as it were—and he opened his eyes.
“You were successful?” Vergere asked.
The strange being’s feathery whiskers floated in an alien breeze, a wind heavy with warmth and the thick spoor of organics. They had escaped Coruscant in a Yuuzhan Vong coral craft, a vessel with a resinous interior that looked like half-melted ice cream and ventilation that smelled like old socks.
“I think I found them,” Jacen said. “I touched my mother, and I know she recognized me. But we were cut off suddenly—I don’t know why. And I think I may have reached my uncle—my Master—Luke. And I touched my sister, briefly.” He frowned as the harmonious sensation brought by his connection with the Force was disturbed by the unsettling memory. “But she was involved in a confrontation—a battle, I think, with the Yuuzhan Vong. I broke the connection before I could turn into a fatal distraction for her.”
Anxiety for Jaina gnawed at his mind. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have stayed with her, tried to send her calm and strength.”
“You made the choice, and it was uncoerced,” Vergere said. “For you to question such a choice is not simply useless, but harmful. Such doubts will chain the mind to an endless circle of pointless speculation and self-recrimination. You should prepare yourself to live with the consequences of your decisions, whatever they may be.”
“It’s different when the consequences are going to happen to your sister,” Jacen said.
The diminutive Vergere hunkered down, the knobs of her reverse-articulated knees rising strangely behind her. “The rise or fall of a civilization can depend on the decision made in a fragment of a second. There are many seconds in a day. How many seconds can you regret? How many choices?”
“Only the bad ones,” Jacen said.
“And if you don’t know immediately whether the decision was good or bad? What if you don’t find out the answer for fifty years?”
Jacen looked at her. “Fifty years,” he said. “I’m not even twenty. I can’t imagine fifty years.”
Her tilted eyes shimmered like waves over cold, deep water. There was unconquerable sadness in her voice. “Fifty years ago, young Jedi, I made a decision,” she said. “The consequences of that decision echo down the years until today. And I still do not know whether the decision I made was the right one.”
“What decision was that?” Jacen asked.
“The decision that brought about this war.” Vergere’s feathers rippled. “I am responsible, you see, for all the fighting, all the suffering, all the death. All because of a decision I made fifty years ago, on Zonama Sekot.”