“Show me,” she said. “Show me who they are. Please.”
She extended a hand to the dark glass. A fog spread across the surface, dissipating to present one reflection instead of thousands. The hand of Rey’s reflection followed Rey’s physical hand. Their fingers neared yet could never completely touch, stymied by stone.
Rey dropped her hand. The thousand other reflections returned to haunt the obsidian, dropping their hands as she did. The only secret the mirror revealed was that despite her infinite reflections, she was most definitely alone.
She closed her eyes. Though she couldn’t see them, she imagined the other reflections did the same.
At least her tears were real.
AHCH-TO had two suns but one moon. That night it hung giant and full in the sky, its eerie light shimmering in the rain on the temple’s mountain ledge, where Luke stood.
He placed his hands on the meditation stone on which Rey had sat a few hours before. He could still feel her there, specks and motes of her presence drifting in the currents of the past. But he wasn’t concerned with her. He had another in mind.
Luke shut his eyes and breathed. The patter of raindrops and sloshing of the tides soothed him as he let the Force take him where he needed to go.
His mind’s eye opened to see Leia, lying on a bed on a star cruiser, hooked up to medical devices. She was near death, her life clinging to the Force. His touch stirred her awake.
“Luke?”
Her presence in the Force brightened. The medical readouts showed increased signs of activity. Luke strained to hold the connection. He had not communicated with his sister for a long time, and they had grown apart, not only as siblings but also in the Force.
“Leia,” he said, and bestowed to her what strength of his he could before the connection faded for good.
When he opened his eyes, he saw with a new clarity. It wasn’t the galaxy that needed him. It was his sister. She was hurt.
He hurried down into the village, his robes drenched by the storm. “Rey, you were right. I’m coming with you,” he said loudly. “Rey?”
No one answered him. But a light shone in the doorway of her hut. He heard voices.
Luke went up to the door and looked inside. Rey sat on the ground, talking to someone Luke could not see.
“All those years in the desert on Jakku, all that time, I had never felt so alone,” she said.
“You’re not alone.”
Luke braced himself at the second voice. He heard it through the Force. Ben Solo—or Kylo Ren as he now called himself—was communing with Rey.
“Neither are you,” Rey replied. “It isn’t too late.” She extended a hand, then bent her fingers, as if clasping the hand of another.
Luke strode into the hut, intruding on their shared vision. The Force revealed that his disgraced pupil had locked his hand with Rey’s. The two were in league.
“Stop!” Luke gestured at the walls and ceiling of the hut. All the stone blocks shot outward, as if detonated. Ben looked at Luke, then disappeared. Rey gripped air where she had been holding Ben’s hand.
She rose, now wet from the rain since the hut had lost its roof. “Is it true? Did you try to murder him?”
“Leave this island. Now.” Luke began to walk away. He would find another way to help Leia. The girl could not be trusted.
“No—you answer me. Tell me the truth!”
Luke didn’t stop. That this girl had the gall to even suggest—
He fell, the back of his skull ringing in agony. She’d struck him from behind. Rolling in the mud, he looked up, his head throbbing. Rey hovered over him, wielding her staff.
“Did you do it? Did you create Kylo Ren by trying to kill Ben?”
Luke staved off the pounding pain and staggered back to his feet. He started to shuffle away. She swung again.
This time he was ready.
Calling on the Force, he snapped a lightning rod off the roof of a hut and brought it flying into his hand. He used it to parry Rey’s assault, then pushed her off her feet. She bounded up, undeterred, whirling her staff for another blow. Their weapons clanged against each other, battering out a rhythm with every strike. Her aggressiveness surprised him, as did her talent, and she drove him backward. But retreat did not signal defeat.
Blocking her attacks, Luke levered the other end of his rod to swing it back at her like a pendulum. Her staff flew from her grip. She was weaponless.
But not for long.
She summoned his old lightsaber from her satchel, activated it, and slashed. The blue blade sliced through the lightning rod and Luke tumbled to the ground.
She held the lightsaber over him. Rain sizzled against its energy beam. But she didn’t strike. She switched the saber off. “Tell me the truth.”
Luke wheezed from the fight. He knew he couldn’t hold on to the past any longer. And he wasn’t Obi-Wan. He couldn’t tell things from “a certain point of view,” as his first Jedi teacher had excused the half-truths he had told about Luke’s father. Luke couldn’t lie.
“I saw darkness,” Luke said. He fixed his thoughts on the memory that never went away, that fateful moment when he had entered Ben’s quarters.
He remembered holding his hand over his sleeping nephew, then closing his eyes as he searched Ben’s mind.
“I had sensed the darkness building in him. I had seen it in moments during his training. But then I looked inside, and it was beyond what I ever imagined.”
Horrible thoughts that weren’t his own bubbled up like splattering lava. Ben screamed, Ben shrieked, Ben killed, Ben changed. A blue lightsaber replaced by a crackling red one. Still, Luke kept himself rooted in the memory, as much as it caused him pain. “Snoke had already turned his heart. He would bring destruction and pain and death and the end of everything I loved because of what he would become. And for the briefest moment of pure instinct, I thought I could stop it.”
In that memory, he unbuckled his lightsaber from his belt. He activated it and looked at the green beam, but did not raise it to deliver a killing stroke. Nevertheless, for an instant, he considered the possibility. Ben was completely vulnerable on his pallet.
“It passed like a fleeting shadow. And I was left with shame.”
Ben woke to find Luke clutching his lightsaber hilt. Recognition of the deed Luke had contemplated poisoned his stare.
“The last thing I saw were the eyes of a frightened boy whose master had failed him.”
Ben called his own saber to him, igniting it in an attack. Luke raised his in defense, and the two swords crackled and clashed.
“No, Ben!”
But nothing Luke could say or do would ever restore his nephew’s trust in him. The young man lifted a hand and the ceiling collapsed on his uncle in a pile of rubble.
A warm hand on his arm pulled Luke away from the memory. He found himself back on Ahch-To, with Rey kneeling beside him in the mud. “You failed him by thinking his choice was made,” she said. “It wasn’t. There’s still conflict in him. If he were turned from the dark side, that could shift the tide. This could be how we win.”
Luke shook his head. “This is not going to go the way you think.”
“It is. Just now, when we touched hands, I saw his future. I saw it, as solid as I’m seeing you. If I go to him, Ben Solo will turn,” Rey said.
“I killed Ben Solo that night, if not in body, then in spirit. Now there is only Kylo Ren, and he’s stronger than you know, Rey.” He looked up at the girl, beseeching her to listen to him. “Don’t do this.”
Rey rose and held out Luke’s old lightsaber to him, as she had when she’d first approached him on the cliff. He admired her persistence, but he knew that she alone wouldn’t be enough. One person was never enough, it seemed, to dispel the darkness. Luke brought his father back to the light, but Darth Vader’s evil returned to possess Luke’s own nephew. The cycle of light and darkness was inevitable, just as the moon of Ahch-To would overtake the suns.
He refused the
lightsaber.
“Then he’s our last hope,” Rey said. She stalked away from him, heading in the direction of the Falcon.
Luke rose, shaking off the mud and the pain. This time, it was he who followed her, down the mountainside. If she heard him, she didn’t turn in acknowledgment.
Luke halted at the bottom of the staircase. Chewbacca was visible in the Falcon’s cockpit. He saw Luke and waved for him to come aboard. Luke shook his head. He worried that the Wookiee might run out and try to wrangle him inside the ship. But Chewbacca just bared his fangs and looked away from Luke, busying himself with the controls from his co-pilot’s seat.
The Falcon thrummed, preparing for takeoff. Water ran down its sides in rivulets. A curious R2-D2 sheltered underneath the ship, waiting for Rey at the ramp. She ignored his queries and strode up into the freighter without a word. Some wayward porgs toddled after her.
Luke wanted to pull her back, but he knew that was pointless. Had he not done the same as her when he had cut short his Jedi training on Dagobah and gone off to save his friends? Rey would have to learn her own lessons, as he had.
R2-D2 rolled after Rey on his treads. But at the base of the ramp, the droid stopped, swiveled his dome, and focused his radar eye on Luke.
Beep?
Luke mustered a smile. “Thank you for everything, old buddy. You were right to show me that message. Send my best to Threepio.”
The ramp started to lift. R2-D2 whined and rocked from leg to leg. The droid would have dropped off the ramp if Luke hadn’t held up a hand. “You must stay with the girl. Make sure she gets back to safety.”
The ramp continued to rise. R2-D2 kept rocking. Luke struggled to maintain his own composure.
“May the Force be with you, Artoo.”
The last Luke saw of his loyal companion was the indicator light on the astromech’s dome blinking red in the rain. As the hatch closed, a small, sad sound pierced through the rumble of the freighter’s engines.
Meeep.
Luke bowed his head and walked back up the stairs.
From a nearby cliff, he watched the Millennium Falcon vanish into the clouds. Rain trickled from his beard, his brow, and even his eyes.
Though he had escaped the rubble of the temple he had built, its weight remained.
WHEN the Mega-Destroyer obliterated the Anodyne and the Ninka, Poe reached a quick and necessary conclusion.
He had to save the Resistance—from itself.
He stepped up his pace to the cruiser’s secondary bridge. Flares lit the corridor, since most power for unessential systems had been redirected to the engines. The Raddus was burning through its last reserves of fuel, and once the tanks were empty, it would slow down and the First Order armada would destroy the cruiser just as it had the other two ships. Vice Admiral Holdo’s plan, if she even had a plan, wasn’t working.
Commander D’Acy blocked Poe at the doorway. “The admiral has banned you from the bridge. Let’s not have a scene.”
“Let’s.” Poe pushed past her onto the bridge.
Holdo looked up from a monitor. “Flyboy.”
Poe did not salute. “Cut it. We had a fleet, now we’re down to one ship and you’ve told us nothing. Tell us that we have a plan, that we have hope. Please.”
Holdo stood tall. “When I served under Leia, she’d say hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it—”
“You’ll never make it through the night,” Poe finished. General Organa had offered him the same proverb when he had joined the Resistance.
An image of an ovoid loadlifter ship appeared on a screen near him, and Poe realized what she had in mind. “You’re fueling up the transports. All of them.”
Holdo neither confirmed nor denied.
“We’re abandoning ship? That’s what you’ve got?” Poe asked. “That’s what you’ve brought us to? Coward! The transports are unshielded, unarmed. We abandon this cruiser, we don’t stand a chance!”
“Captain—”
Poe didn’t let her talk. “This will destroy the Resistance. You’re not just a coward. You’re a traitor!”
Holdo turned to her security officers. “Get this man off my bridge.”
The officers pulled Poe out the door. He didn’t put up a fight. In the corridor, he held up his hands and told the security officers he would go with them peacefully. Out of respect, they didn’t cuff him, and he walked with them to the hangar. Some transports had a brig for prisoners. He’d probably spend the last minutes of his life in a cell.
As they turned a corner, Lieutenant Connix and a group of six starfighter pilots, one of them Poe’s squadron mate C’ai Threnalli, stepped out before them. “We’ll take Dameron from here,” Connix said.
The security officers backed away. No blasters were pulled. Connix and her contingent directed Poe into a maintenance room, where he was handed a comlink.
“What’s going on?” Poe asked.
A female voice crackled over the comlink. “Captain Dameron, is that you?”
It took Poe a second to identify the speaker. “Rose?”
“Hold on.” The volume of her voice lowered, as if she was turning her head. “Finn, get up here! I got through to the fleet. Poe’s on the line!”
Moments later, Finn spoke over the comm. “Poe, we’re on our way back!”
“Holdo’s loading the crew into shuttles. She’s going to abandon ship,” Poe said. “Where are you?”
“We’re on our way back to the fleet. We’re so close.”
“Did you find the Master Codebreaker?” Poe asked.
“We found…ah…a…codebreaker,” Finn said, without much confidence. “But I promise we can shut the tracker down. Just buy us a little more time!
Poe looked at Threnalli and the others. They were on his side, willing to do whatever was necessary to save the Resistance.
“All right,” Poe said to Finn. “Hurry!”
Rey opened the locker under the medbed in the Millennium Falcon’s lounge. Before they had departed Ahch-To, she had taken a few things from the world she deemed important, and these she stowed inside the locker. She thought they might be of use in the future to her or someone like her in case she didn’t make it back from where she was going. Because the more she thought about where she was going, the more she feared she wouldn’t make it back.
On the journey away from Ahch-To, she had R2-D2 input the coordinates from her binary beacon into the navicomputer. The droid had beeped that it could be dangerous to go there. There were reports of the First Order fleet in that region of space. That only strengthened her resolve. She needed to go wherever Kylo Ren could be.
Maybe she was delusional to be doing this. Maybe the goodness she’d felt when she had touched Ren’s hand was nothing more than wishful thinking.
She tried to hide her apprehension from Chewbacca and R2-D2 as they gathered in the Falcon’s escape pod bay. That proved even harder when she saw the pods resembled funeral caskets. She could be sentencing herself to death.
“As soon as I launch, you jump back out of range and stay there till you get my signal,” she said to Chewie.
The Wookiee yowled, disapproving of her plan. But she was grateful he didn’t try to stop her. He helped her get into the pod. “If you see Finn before I do, tell him…” She faltered, unable to find the words she wanted to say.
Chewbacca nodded and ruffed.
“Yeah, perfect. Tell him that.” She conformed her body to the interior of the pod, then raised a thumb. Chewbacca closed the hatch.
The Wookiee shambled off to the cockpit, but R2-D2 stayed in the bay. Through the pod’s window, she saw his big red photoreceptor focused on her. She grinned a good-bye.
When the Falcon exited hyperspace, Rey’s pod was jettisoned toward the First Order armada and its Mega-Destroyer. The Falcon did not tarry and shot back to lightspeed.
It was now Rey all alone against the mighty First Order.
Seated in the pilot’s chair of the space yacht L
ibertine, Rose pulled the lightspeed lever to exit hyperspace. Huddled around her were Finn, BB-8, and the fast-talking jack-of-all-trades who called himself DJ, after the initials of his cap’s slogan, “Don’t join.” Rose doubted this nickname was anywhere close to his real name, if he still remembered it. But he had rescued them, so she didn’t ask any probing questions.
She did ask about the yacht, however, and BB-8 revealed that DJ had stolen it. The ball droid beeped that he had met the thief while looking for Rose and Finn in the jail. DJ had been so impressed by how BB-8 had stopped the prison guards by shooting credit chips at them that he told the droid he’d been in the same cell as BB-8’s friends. The two then went off to the Canto Bight spaceport to obtain a ship and find Finn and Rose.
Normally, Rose would have ordered that they return the craft, but the Libertine’s database indicated the previous owner had trafficked in weapons to profit off the war, so she didn’t feel guilty about putting the ship to better use.
As the blue streaks of hyperspace resolved into a fleet of First Order Star Destroyers, Rose realized that this probably wasn’t better use.
“Four parsecs to go. This thing really cooks,” Finn said.
Rose centered the ship’s approach trajectory on the Mega-Destroyer. “I just hope we’re in time. You can actually do this, right?” she asked DJ.
“Yeah, about that. Guys, I can do it. But there exists a pre-‘do it’ conversation about price.”
“Once we’re done, the Resistance will give you whatever you want.” Rose wasn’t sure if that would be the case, or if the Resistance had any credits to dole out. But just as Captain Dameron had transmitted them the current coordinates of the Destroyers, she knew he’d make a strong argument to the Resistance leadership to pay the thief—if they all survived.
DJ wasn’t having any of it. “What’cha got deposit-wise?” His gaze strayed to the medallion on her necklace. “Is that Haysian smelt? That’s something.”
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Page 9
