by Jason Fry
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
HARDBACK ISBN 9781524797119
EBOOK ISBN 9781524797126
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook
v5.2
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Del Rey Star Wars Timeline
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part II
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part III
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part IV
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part V
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Part VI
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Photo Insert
Acknowledgments
By Jason Fry
About the Author
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….
The FIRST ORDER reigns.
Having decimated the peaceful
Republic, Supreme Leader Snoke
now deploys his merciless
legions to seize military
control of the galaxy.
Only General Leia Organa’s
small band of RESISTANCE fighters
stand against the rising
tyranny, certain that Jedi
Master Luke Skywalker will
return and restore a spark of
hope to the fight.
But the Resistance has been
exposed. As the First Order
speeds toward the rebel base,
the brave heroes mount a
desperate escape….
Luke Skywalker stood in the cooling sands of Tatooine, his wife by his side.
The strip of sky at the horizon was still painted with the last orange of sunset, but the first stars had emerged. Luke peered at them, searching for something he knew was already gone.
“What did you think you saw?” Camie asked.
He could hear the affection in her voice—but if he listened harder, he could hear the weariness as well.
“Star Destroyer,” he said. “At least I thought so.”
“Then I believe you,” she said, one hand on his shoulder. “You could always recognize one—even at high noon.”
Luke smiled, thinking back to the long-ago day at Tosche Station when he’d burst in to tell his friends about the two ships sitting in orbit right above their heads. Camie hadn’t believed him—she’d peered through his old macrobinoculars before dismissively tossing them back to him and seeking refuge from the relentless twin suns. Fixer hadn’t believed him, either. Nor had Biggs.
But he’d been right.
His smile faded at the thought of Biggs Darklighter, who’d left Tatooine and died somewhere unimaginably far away. Biggs, who’d been his first friend. His only friend, he supposed.
His mind retreated from the thought, as quickly as if his bare hand had strayed to a vaporator casing at midday.
“I wonder what the Empire wanted out here,” he said, searching the sky again. Resupplying the garrison at Mos Eisley hardly required a warship the size of a Star Destroyer. These days, with the galaxy at peace, it hardly required a warship at all.
“Whatever it is, it’s got nothing to do with us,” Camie said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is,” Luke said, his eyes reflexively scanning the lights that marked the homestead’s perimeter. Such caution wasn’t necessary—no Tusken Raider had been seen this side of Anchorhead in two decades—but old habits died hard.
The Tuskens are gone—nothing left of them but bones in the sand.
For some reason that made him sad.
“We’ve hit our Imperial quota for five years running,” Camie said. “And we’ve paid our water tax to Jabba. We don’t owe anybody anything. We haven’t done anything.”
“We haven’t done anything,” Luke agreed, though he knew that was no guarantee of safety. Plenty of things happened to people who hadn’t done anything—things that were never discussed again, or at least not by anyone with any sense.
His mind went back to the long-ago days he kept telling himself not to think about. The droids, and the message—a holographic fragment in which a regal young woman pleaded for Obi-Wan Kenobi to help her.
Let the past go. That’s what Camie always told him. But staring into the darkness, Luke found that once again, he couldn’t take her advice.
The astromech droid had fled into the night while Luke was at dinner with his aunt and uncle. Fearing Uncle Owen’s fury, Luke had taken a risk, slipping away from the farm despite the threat of Tuskens.
But no Sand People had been on the prowl that night. Luke had found the runaway astromech and brought it back to the farm, pushing the landspeeder the last twenty meters to avoid waking Owen and Beru.
Luke smiled ruefully, thinking—as he so often did—about everything that could have gone wrong. He could easily have died, becoming one more foolhardy moisture farmer claimed by the Tatooine night and what lurked in it.
But he’d been lucky—and then lucky again the next day.
The stormtroopers had arrived just after Luke returned from working on the south ridge’s balky condensers—Owen and Beru’s source of aggravation then, his and Camie’s now. The sergeant was making demands even before he swung down from his dewback.
A band of scavengers sold two droids to you. Bring them. Now.
Luke had almost needed to drag the droids out of the garage. The astromech hooted wildly, while the protocol droid kept babbling that he was surrendering. They’d stood in the relentless heat for more than an hour while the Imperials picked through the droids’ memory banks, with the stormtroopers curtly refusing Owen’s request to at least let Beru sit i
n the shade.
That was when old Ben Kenobi had appeared, shuffling out of the desert in his dusty brown robes. He’d spoken to the stormtroopers with a smile, like they were old friends running into each other at the Anchorhead swap meet. He’d told them, with a slight wave of one hand, that Luke’s identification was wrong—the boy’s last name wasn’t Skywalker, but Lars.
“That’s right,” Owen had said, his eyes jumping to Beru. “Luke Lars.”
Ben had lingered, telling the stormtroopers that there was no need to take Owen in for questioning. But they’d refused that request, and forced Luke’s uncle into the belly of a troop transport alongside the droids, with the astromech letting out a last, desperate screech before the hatch slammed.
They released Owen three days later, and he’d remained pale and silent during the long ride back from Mos Eisley. It was weeks before Luke got up his courage to ask if the Empire would compensate them. Owen snarled at him to forget it, then tucked his hands under his elbows—but not before Luke saw that they were trembling.
A meteor burned up overhead, shaking Luke out of his reverie.
“What are you thinking about now?” Camie asked, and her voice was wary.
“That somehow I got old,” he said, tugging at his beard. “Old and gray.”
“You’re not the only one,” she said, hand going to her own hair. He offered her a smile, but she was looking off into the night.
No one had ever seen old Ben again. But there’d been rumors—whispers about a gunship flying low over the Jundland Wastes, and fire in the night. In Anchorhead they dismissed that as cantina talk, but Luke wondered. The troops at the farm had been real. So were the ones who’d come to the Darklighter farm and taken Biggs’s family away. The Darklighters had never returned—the farm had been stripped by Jawas and Sand People, then left for the sand to bury.
Weeks had turned into months, months into years, years into decades. Luke turned out to have a knack for machinery, a feel for the maddening complexity of Tatooine growing conditions, and a talent for good outcomes, whether it was bargaining with Jawas or choosing sites for new vaporators. In Anchorhead, the boy once teased as Wormie was more often called Lucky Luke.
Camie had seen that, too—just as she’d noticed that Fixer talked a lot while doing little. She’d married Luke and they’d become partners with Owen and Beru before inheriting the farm. There’d never been children—a pain that had dulled to an ache they no longer admitted feeling—but they’d worked hard and done well, building as comfortable a life as one could on Tatooine.
But Luke had never stopped dreaming about the girl who’d called out for Obi-Wan. Just last week he’d woken with a start, certain that the astromech was waiting for him in the garage, finally willing to play the full message for him. It was important that Luke hear it—there was something he needed to do. Something he was meant to do.
After the stormtroopers took the droids, Luke assumed he’d never learn the mysterious young woman’s identity. But he’d been wrong. It had been blasted out over the HoloNet for weeks, ending with a final report that before her execution, Princess Leia Organa had apologized for her treasonous past and called for galactic unity.
Curiously, the Empire had never shared footage of those remarks, leaving Luke to remember his brief glimpse of the princess—and to wonder what desperate mission had caused her to seek out an old hermit on Tatooine.
Whatever it was, it had failed. Alderaan was a debris field now, along with Mon Cala and Chandrila—all destroyed by the battle station that had burned out the infections of Separatism and rebellion, leaving the galaxy at peace.
Or at least free of conflict. That was the same thing, or near enough.
He realized Camie was saying his name, and not for the first time.
“I hate it when you look like that,” she said.
“Look like what?”
“You know what I mean. Like you think something went wrong. Like you got cheated, and this is all a big mistake. Like you should have followed Tank and Biggs, and gone to the Academy like you wanted to. Like you were meant to be far away from here.”
“Camie—”
“Far away from me,” she said in a smaller voice, turning away with her arms across her chest.
“You know I don’t feel that way,” he said, placing his hands on his wife’s shoulders and trying to ignore the way she stiffened at his touch. “We’ve made a good life, and this is where I was meant to be. Now come on—let’s go inside. It’s getting cold.”
Camie said nothing, but she let Luke lead her back toward the dome that marked the entrance to the homestead. Standing on the threshold, Luke lingered for a last look up into the night. But the Star Destroyer—if that was indeed what it had been—hadn’t returned.
After a moment, he turned away from the empty sky.
* * *
—
Luke woke with a start, instinctively scooting up to a seated position. His mechanical hand whirred in protest, echoing the thrum of the insects that lived in the hardy grasses of Ahch-To.
He tried to shake away the dream as he dressed, donning his woolens and waterproof jacket. He opened the metal door of his hut, then shut it quietly behind him. It was nearly dawn, with the pale coming day a glimmer like a pearl on the horizon, above the black void of the sea.
The oceans of Ahch-To still astonished him—an infinity of water that could transform from blank and placid to roiling chaos. All that water still seemed impossible—at least in that way, he supposed, he was still a child of the Tatooine deserts.
Farther down the slopes, he knew, the Caretakers would soon rise to begin another day, as they had for eons. They had work to do, and so did he—they because of their ancient bargain, and he because of his own choice.
He’d spent his youth resenting chores on Tatooine; now they gave structure to his days on Ahch-To. There was milk to harvest, fish to catch, and a loose stone step to be put right.
But not quite yet.
Luke walked slowly up the steps until he reached the meadow overlooking the sea. He shivered—the summer was almost gone, and the dream still had him in its grip.
That was no ordinary dream, and you know it.
Luke raised the hood of his jacket with his mechanical hand, stroking his beard with the flesh-and-blood one. He wanted to argue with himself, but he knew better. The Force was at work here—it had cloaked itself in a dream, to slip through the defenses he’d thrown up against it.
But was the dream a promise? A warning? Or both?
Things are about to change. Something’s coming.
Leia Organa, once princess of Alderaan and now general of the Resistance, stood in a jungle clearing on D’Qar, a throng of officers and crewers on either side.
Their heads were down and their hands clasped. But Leia could see them stealing looks at her, and one another. Just as she could see the way they shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
War was coming, and they knew it. And they were worried that in her grief she’d forgotten.
The idea offended her. Leia knew all too much about war and grief—she’d lived with both for longer than some of these fretful officers had been alive. Over the five decades of her life, in fact, war and grief had been her only truly faithful companions. But she had never let either stop her from doing what had to be done.
The anger felt hot and sharp, and came as a relief after the hours of rudderless sorrow that had left her feeling empty, like she’d been hollowed out.
She didn’t want to be standing here in the steaming jungle—she hadn’t wanted to hold this ceremony at all. She’d stared balefully at Admiral Ackbar when the veteran Mon Calamari officer had taken her aside in D’Qar’s war room to deliver his message.
Han is dead, at the hands of our son—and you want me to give a speech?
But Ackbar had faced
down even worse things than an angry Leia Organa. Her old friend had held his ground, apologetic but insistent, and she’d understood what he was thinking. The Resistance had so little in terms of resources, whether one was talking about soldiers, ships, or credits. It had just won an enormous victory at Starkiller Base by destroying the First Order’s superweapon. But the euphoria had been short-lived. The New Republic was all but destroyed, and the First Order was now free to unleash its fury on the Resistance.
Whether Leia liked it or not, the Resistance’s greatest strength—its one indispensable asset—was her. Her leadership, her legacy of sacrifice, her legend were what held this fragile movement together. Without them, the Resistance would disintegrate before the First Order’s guns.
Her people—and they were her people—were facing the greatest test in their history. To stand firm, they needed to see her and hear from her. And they needed her to look and sound strong and determined. They couldn’t suspect that she felt broken and alone. If they did, they would break, too.
If that struck her as cruel, well, the galaxy was often cruel. Leia didn’t need anyone to explain that to her.
So she had returned to the landing field where she’d said farewell to the Millennium Falcon—and what was the battered, saucer-shaped freighter but another piercing reminder of what she’d lost? Slowly and somberly, she’d read the names of the pilots who’d never returned from Starkiller Base. And then, trailed by her entourage, she’d walked slowly to the edge of the jungle for the second part of the ceremony Ackbar had insisted on.
