The Last Jedi

by Jason Fry

  The fingertip traced Kylo’s eyelid, leaving a streak of moisture behind.

  “Yes,” Snoke said. “There it is. You have too much of your father’s heart in you. Young Solo.”

  Kylo’s eyes snapped to Snoke’s, burning with rage. “I killed Han Solo. I killed my…when the moment came I put my blade through him. I didn’t hesitate.”

  “Petulance, not strength,” sneered Snoke. “And look at you. The deed split your spirit to the bone. You were unbalanced, bested by a girl who had never held a lightsaber. You failed.”

  Kylo felt rage ignite deep inside of him—ignite and become an inferno demanding release.

  But Snoke had anticipated that, too. Kylo had only taken the slightest step toward his master when lightning erupted from Snoke’s fingers, blasting Kylo backward and leaving him reeling in pain. The Praetorian Guards snapped into combat stances, faceless visors fixed on Kylo.

  A dismissive wave of Snoke’s hand and the guards straightened again, though they still regarded the black-clad figure on the floor with wary suspicion.

  “Skywalker lives!” Snoke howled at Ren. “The seed of the Jedi Order lives! As long as it does, hope lives in the galaxy!”

  The Supreme Leader fixed Kylo with a contemptuous look. “I thought you would be the one to snuff it out. Alas. You’re no Vader, you’re just a child with a mask.”

  Kylo turned his back on Snoke, fighting to keep the fires of his anger banked—and so missed the cruel smile that twisted the Supreme Leader’s face.

  In the turbolift, doors shut, he stared down at the helmet cradled in his hands. This time the rage came without warning, a live thing that felt like it would burn and blister his very flesh. Kylo smashed the mask into the wall. The Force was howling inside him, giving him the strength to hammer his mask against the metal until it had been reduced to a twisted hunk of black and silver.

  The turbolift doors opened and two frightened officers took an instinctive step backward from the seething man in black.

  “Get my ship ready,” Kylo snapped.

  The late-afternoon suns hung low over the islands of Ahch-To, lengthening the shadows of the old stone huts. Below, the surf sighed, a rhythmic sound like static. Luke Skywalker sat on a bench outside his simple dwelling, next to a morose Chewbacca. Rey hovered nearby, reluctant to interrupt the two old friends in their mourning.

  But it couldn’t be put off any longer.

  “Han Solo was my friend,” she said. “There’s no light left in Kylo Ren, and he’s only getting stronger.”

  The mere mention of that name seemed to pierce Luke where he sat slumped beside Chewie. For a moment he struck Rey as old and broken, drained of whatever power he had once possessed, and she felt like an intruder on his grief.

  But the galaxy needed this man—needed him to rise above whatever misfortune and misery had driven him into his self-imposed exile. Rey had been sent to find him, and she had. Now she had to reach him, and make him understand the knife-edge on which everything stood.

  “Leia showed me estimates of the First Order’s military stock,” Rey said. “It’s massive. And now that the Republic is destroyed there’s nothing to stop them. They will control all the major systems within weeks. They’ll destroy the Resistance, Finn, everyone I care about. Now will you help us? You have to help us. We need the Jedi Order back. We need Luke Skywalker.”

  Luke’s eyes were cold and flinty.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t need Luke Skywalker.”

  “Did you hear a word I just said? We really, really do.”

  Luke scowled.

  “You think…what? That I’m going to walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole First Order? The Jedi—if you had them back, a few dozen Jedi Knights in robes, what do you think they would actually do?”

  Rey looked at him in disbelief. Was he really trying to engage her in some kind of strategic debate? Did he really not understand what the Jedi meant to a galaxy in peril?

  “Restore the…balance of…”

  There was mild pity in Luke’s glance as she fumbled to answer—but there was anger, too.

  “What did you think was going happen here?” he asked. “Do you think I don’t know my friends are suffering? Or that I came to the most unfindable place in the galaxy for no reason at all?”

  Now Rey was angry. The problem wasn’t that he didn’t understand—it was that he didn’t care.

  “Then why did you come here?” she demanded.

  Rather than answer, Luke got to his feet, gazing sorrowfully at Chewbacca.

  “I’m sorry, old friend,” he said. “I’m not coming back.”

  Chewbacca didn’t respond—his fury at Luke was spent—but Rey sprang off her bench.

  “I’m not leaving without you,” she warned.

  “Get comfortable, then,” Luke replied as he retreated into his hut, stopping to pick up the broken door and lean it up against the stone.

  Rey stepped in front of the doorway, hands on her hips, and stared defiantly at him through the gap. Let him think she’d given up—he’d soon discover otherwise. Jakku had trained her to do two things better than anyone else could.

  The first was to salvage broken things.

  The second was to wait.

  * * *

  —

  Leia sat alone in her stateroom aboard the Raddus, staring out into the blue-white tunnel of hyperspace.

  The Resistance fleet was dangerously low on fuel—there hadn’t been time to transfer more than a fraction of the reserve stored on D’Qar to the ships in orbit. Ackbar wasn’t overly concerned—not with the fleet having escaped into hyperspace. His plan was to make a short jump away to a deep-space rendezvous point once used by the Alliance, then assess their situation.

  Leia automatically began reviewing the list of things that had to be done. Their first task was to let the people of the galaxy know that the Resistance had survived and would oppose Snoke and his First Order. They had to reach out through coded channels to Snap Wexley, Jess Pava, and the other pilots Leia had sent to gather the New Republic’s surviving commanders. They needed to recruit allies from the Outer Rim, contact senators and planetary leaders seeking protection from the First Order, corral military forces left leaderless by the strike at Hosnian Prime, and reactivate C-3PO’s network of droid spies.

  It was a daunting list, but Leia found herself relieved that there was nothing she could do at the moment. For at least a little while, Ackbar and his bridge crew could handle everything.

  But having finally secured a bit of solitude, Leia found no comfort in it, nor in the amplified light of countless stars churning around her. The galaxy was at war again, and every star lighting her way was a potential battlefield, a bitter harvest of misery and loss waiting to be reaped.

  She had seen too many losses on too many worlds—family, friends, comrades-in-arms, allies, and innocents—and the thought of how many more losses were yet to come was a monstrous weight. There was no place in the galaxy she could go where she wouldn’t be surrounded by ghosts.

  Hope is a light brighter than the deepest darkness—but only we can keep it lit.

  Her mother had said that—Breha Organa, the queen of Alderaan.

  Breha who had been murdered by the Empire—along with every one of the people she had vowed to protect.

  And is that how she’d want me to remember her? To remember them? As mere victims of the Empire?

  After Endor, Leia had learned to open herself to the Force, to feel the mysterious energy field that underpinned the cosmos. Luke had told her that she’d drawn on the Force all her life without being aware of it—not just when she had heard his desperate call for help above Cloud City but in Senate sessions and Alliance strategy meetings. The Force had helped her read rooms and sense the political winds
. It had lent authority to her calls for action. It had buoyed her when the burdens of office threatened to become crushing. He wanted to teach her how to access the Force consciously; after that, it would be up to her.

  Aboard the Raddus, Leia closed her eyes and remembered.

  Stretch out with your feelings, Luke had told her.

  He’d explained that life created the Force and made it grow. The lessons of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda had helped him understand the Force as a luminous tide, one that overflowed the boundaries of the bodies that generated it, connecting and binding all life in a web of energy that spanned the galaxy.

  By learning to be calm and at peace, he said, a Jedi could feel this energy around her, tracing the ever-changing currents and ripples made by life. By opening herself to the Force, she could then guide its possibilities and do extraordinary things. But all of those feats depended on this bedrock understanding of the Force as a creation of life—and of the Jedi as merely temporary vessels for its will. Living things created the Force, but they didn’t contain it—its energy spilled out of them until it imbued everything, making the very idea of individual presences border on meaninglessness.

  Leia reminded herself to breathe in, then out. She visualized herself releasing her fears and anxieties, one by one.

  Her breathing slowed and she let her senses drift, as if untethered from her body. She reached out beyond the confines of her stateroom, her awareness expanding to encompass the entirety of the Raddus as it hurtled through hyperspace.

  She could feel the Force around her now, and the beings creating it, along with the wild cacophony of their emotions.

  There was joy at their escape, and a jagged excitement at the prospect of battle. But there was also fear of the precariousness of their situation, and anxiety at the possibility that they might fail. The Force was bright with rage and a need for revenge, and roiled by the agony of having to go on without friends and loved ones.

  Leia let it all wash over her, allowing its tides to carry her this way and that. Then she reached out for those individuals with whom she had an emotional connection.

  On this point, Luke had explained, he had rejected the teachings of the Jedi. The Order had forbidden emotional attachments, warning that they left a Jedi vulnerable to the lures of the dark side. And indeed, it was a love curdled into jealousy and possessiveness that had led their father, Anakin Skywalker, into darkness and despair.

  But Luke had disagreed with Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi that Anakin was lost to the light. He had insisted that the very emotional entanglements that had led Anakin to become Darth Vader might also draw him back—entanglements such as the stubborn love between a father and son, each of whom had thought the other lost.

  Luke had been right—and ignoring his teachers had saved him, the Alliance, and the galaxy.

  Leia reached out and found Ackbar—weary yet stolid, his mind sifting through worries in his usual orderly fashion. She sensed Connix was exhausted and uncertain, doubting. And Fossil’s grief for her lost bomber pilots was so raw and open that Leia instinctively retreated from it.

  She was surprised to sense the presence of Finn, the First Order deserter who’d been placed in a coma to heal. He was awake, and a tangle of anxiety and confusion. Twinned with him in Leia’s awareness was Poe Dameron, his emotions oscillating between pride and doubt.

  Way too much pride, not nearly enough doubt, she thought, then let that go. She’d deal with Poe soon enough.

  Leia let her mind drift farther, away from the Raddus, until she felt the brush of other minds, beings on worlds hurtling by in hyperspace—a constant hum of emotions and hopes and dreams and fears. She reached still farther, searching for one particular signature, one she knew would burn brilliantly in the Force.

  But it wasn’t there.

  Once, she had been able to sense Luke’s mind halfway across the galaxy, if only as a faint stirring in the Force. But it had been years since she had felt that presence.

  When her family had been broken by betrayal, Luke’s agony and guilt had whipped the Force until it felt like a storm-wracked sea. She had been able to feel the churn of her brother’s emotions even as he had retreated, abandoning her in her most desperate hour. Overcome by her own anger and sorrow, she had let him go, and for a time she had wanted him far away.

  And that’s what happened. Her sense of her brother had dwindled to an echo, then a whisper, and finally to nothing at all.

  She didn’t know why, or what it meant. Perhaps Rey had discovered that—and was on her way back to her with the answer. And maybe Luke was with her.

  Leia felt for the device she kept wrapped around her wrist, then stopped herself, lowering her hands and relying on her senses instead. Perhaps if she reached out again…

  A moment later her eyes opened and she felt dizzy. The Force was suddenly jagged with danger. Coming for her—her and the entire Resistance.

  Outside Leia’s stateroom viewport, the tumble of hyperspace vanished, replaced by the blackness of space. She rose and hurried for the bridge.

  * * *

  —

  Poe had brought Finn to his quarters so he could wipe away the slimy remnants of the bacta, don one of Poe’s spare Resistance uniforms—and get an answer to his question.

  But Poe’s answer had left him even more uneasy.

  “So you blew up the Starkiller Base, Rey beat Kylo, the Resistance got the map,” Finn said to Poe. “You won, right? Why does this not feel like winning?”

  Rolling down the corridor beside them, BB-8 blooped mournfully—apparently the astromech agreed with Finn.

  “We came out of hiding to attack Starkiller,” Poe said, adjusting a bundle under his arm that he’d removed from a locker in his quarters. “It didn’t take the First Order long to find our base.”

  Finn could see his friend’s attention was far away. He paused, trying to figure out how to phrase what he knew he had to say.

  “Look, Poe,” he said. “I believe in what you guys are doing. But I didn’t join this army—I followed Rey here. I just don’t want you thinking I’m something I’m not.”

  “It’s going to be all right, don’t worry,” Poe said. “You’re with us, where you belong.”

  His friend’s reaction only made Finn feel more guilty. Poe didn’t understand that Finn hadn’t joined the attack on Starkiller Base to help the Resistance but to rescue Rey. Finn had dreamed of convincing her to join him somewhere in the wilds of the Outer Rim, where the First Order could never find them. It had been a sensible plan then and remained so now. The First Order would never stop hunting the Resistance until it was destroyed, but two fugitives might have a chance to escape its notice and create a life for themselves on some quiet backwater world.

  Finn scratched at his side—it was a relief to be free of the bacta, but it still itched abominably—and so missed that Poe was offering him whatever it was he’d taken from his quarters.

  It was the pilot’s old jacket, he saw now—the one Finn had salvaged from a wrecked TIE on Jakku, when he’d thought Poe was dead, and that Kylo Ren had sliced through in their confrontation on Starkiller Base. The rent in the back had been mended by a decidedly inexpert hand.

  “I’m not much of a sewer,” Poe said apologetically. “Plus I was, you know, saving the fleet.”

  Finn’s face fell. It was a kind gesture, which was no surprise—Poe had never been anything but kind to him. Heck, hadn’t the pilot been the one to give Finn a name? But that only meant Poe would be even more disappointed when he found out how thoroughly he’d misjudged Finn.

  Finn looked uneasily at his friend, trying to work up the courage to explain. But before he could speak, a golden protocol droid rushed around the corner, startling BB-8 and nearly plowing into them.

  “Commander Dameron, Princess Leia requests your presence on the bridge at once,” said C-3PO. “I t
ried to make that sound as pleasant as I could.”

  Poe couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t known Leia Organa. She’d been a mentor to his parents, Kes Dameron and Shara Bey, both of whom had served alongside her in the Alliance. She’d kept tabs on him as he grew up, learning to push starfighters to their limits—and sometimes beyond those limits. And she’d convinced him to leave the New Republic for the Resistance.

  He knew her well enough to recognize the cold fury on her face as he entered the bridge of the Raddus, with Finn and BB-8 trailing behind him.

  An angry General Organa was a force to be reckoned with—and one for which Poe had a healthy respect. But he felt certain he could talk her down. He always had before, after all. They understood each other. She knew he could be rash and foolish, but he knew she wouldn’t have him any other way. When she’d recruited him, in fact, she’d said the Resistance could use some rashness—and added that foolishness and passion were often confused.

  Poe had never forgotten those words, and he knew Leia hadn’t forgotten them, either.

  So it was a shock when she slapped him across the face.

  “You’re demoted,” she said, ignoring the stunned faces around them on the bridge.

  “For what?” he protested, his cheek stinging. “A successful run? We took out a Dreadnought!”

  “At what cost? Pull your head out of your cockpit!”

  “You start an attack, you follow it through!” Poe said.

  “There are things you can’t solve by jumping in an X-wing and blowing something up. I need you to learn that.”

  “There were heroes on that mission,” Poe said, unwilling to concede the point.

  “Dead heroes,” Leia snapped. “No leaders.”

  The silence that followed was uncomfortable and seemingly endless. It was Finn who broke it.

  “We’re really nowhere—deep space,” he said. “How’s Rey going to find us now?”