by Jason Fry
“We’re really nowhere—deep space,” he said. “How’s Rey going to find us now?”
The fleet had emerged from hyperspace at an old Alliance rendezvous point that was nothing more than arbitrarily chosen coordinates, and Finn was staring at a holographic chart of their position, seemingly in dismay.
Something about the plaintive need in Finn’s question touched Leia. The former stormtrooper was brave and capable, but there was a childlike quality about him—unguarded and almost innocent. In a galaxy riven by war, she thought, that was something to be cherished instead of punished.
Leia smiled and lifted her sleeve to reveal a faintly glowing bauble strapped to her wrist, ready to explain what it was to Finn.
She didn’t need to—he recognized it.
“A cloaked binary beacon.”
Leia nodded. “To light her way home.”
“All right,” Finn said. “So until she gets back, what’s the plan?”
“We need to find a new base,” Leia said.
Commander D’Acy nodded. “One with enough power to get a signal to our allies scattered in the Outer Rim.”
“And most important, we need to get there undetected,” Leia added.
As if in answer, a klaxon began blaring on the bridge.
“A proximity alert!” said a startled Ackbar.
“That can’t be,” Poe said.
But a glance at the Raddus’s holographic displays showed that it was. A massive warship had emerged from hyperspace, accompanied by more than two dozen Star Destroyers.
Poe was one of the few Resistance officers who recognized the huge ship. Its existence had been revealed by intelligence brought to D’Qar just before the evacuation. He’d hoped that intelligence was somehow mistaken, but what he was seeing proved rather definitively otherwise.
“That’s Snoke’s ship,” he said. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Can we jump to lightspeed?”
“We have just enough fuel for one jump,” Connix said gravely, her face pale.
“Do it fast—we have to get out of here!”
But Leia held up her hand.
“Wait,” she said, a grim realization dawning on her. “They tracked us through hyperspace.”
“That’s impossible,” Poe replied.
“Yes, it is. And they’ve done it.”
Once again, it was Finn who broke the stunned silence on the bridge.
“So if we jump to lightspeed, they’ll just find us again and we’ll be out of fuel,” he said. “We’re trapped. They’ve got us.”
That shook Poe out of his trance.
“Not yet they don’t,” he insisted, then turned to Leia, risking a cocked eyebrow. “Permission to jump in an X-wing and blow something up?”
“Granted.”
Poe hurried off the bridge, finding himself oddly relieved to be returning to battle. Leia had been genuinely angry with him, and he promised himself he’d find time to think about what she’d said and why she’d said it.
But she’d also remembered something more important: She really did need him to be reckless sometimes.
Like now, for instance.
* * *
—
The wail of the klaxon jerked Tallie out of her nap in the ready room just off the Raddus’s main starfighter hangar.
Fighter pilots learned the necessity of being able to nap anytime, anyplace, for as long as they were allowed, but Tallie’s sleep had been fitful and uneasy. She’d kept dropping back into the same dream, one in which she had to protect Resistance bombers that didn’t appear on her scopes; she’d only located them by the screams of their pilots as they died.
She looked around in befuddlement and found Starck sitting up on a cot nearby, looking equally confused.
The ready room’s holotank lit up and both pilots peered at it, then at each other.
“That’s practically an entire starfleet,” Tallie said.
“And two of those ships are the same ones that were chasing us at D’Qar,” Starck said. “Can’t be right. It’s gotta be a glitch.”
Red dots began flashing in the emptiness ahead of the enemy flagship.
“Your glitch just launched a squadron of TIEs,” Tallie said.
She pulled on her boots and her flight vest, practiced hands automatically adjusting the straps to fit snugly, then scooped up her helmet. Starck was hopping on one foot, trying to get his other boot on.
“Practice your dance moves later—we gotta fly,” she called over her shoulder, activating her comlink and selecting the squadron channel.
“Boss, you seeing this?” Tallie yelled into it as she sprinted across the hangar deck, dodging squalling BB units and harried technicians who’d been working on routine maintenance a moment before.
“I know—on my way,” Poe said breathlessly.
The Raddus shook beneath Tallie as she reached her A-wing, waving off a Sullustan tech fumbling with a ladder and scrambling onto the fighter’s fuselage, then dropping into the cockpit. Starck was yelling for his astromech to load in and for the ground crew to get his fuel hoses disengaged. She made a note to remind him not to do that. The techs knew their jobs and were working as quickly as possible—yelling at them didn’t help anything.
The Raddus trembled again. Tallie cold-started the engines and the little fighter growled a brief protest, then began to thrum around her, as if eager to get into space and confront the fleet’s tormentors. Black One was still empty, but the ground crew was detaching hoses from the X-wing and closing access panels with frantic speed.
As the pilots began their roll call, Tallie spotted Poe’s orange-accented astromech rolling into the hangar from the main corridor. The squadron leader sprinted right behind the droid, eyes fixed on his X-wing.
Then the sensors in Tallie’s A-wing flashed red, keening an urgent warning.
Missile lock? We’re still in the hangar. That one really is a glitch.
Tallie’s fingers reached for the interrupt. Before she could silence the alert, everything around her became heat and light.
* * *
—
A cannonade from the First Order task force ripped into the Vigil, breaking the cargo frigate’s back. A moment later the warship exploded into a cloud of glittering fragments as a flight of First Order TIEs swept past. The starfighters skimmed the Raddus’s hull, laser fire arcing from their weapons, and the cruiser groaned and shuddered.
“Torpedo!” cried out a sensor officer. “Direct hit on the starfighter hangar!”
Leia had no time to think of the losses they’d sustained on an already unbearable day, or to wonder if Poe had reached the hangar before impact.
“Full engines ahead,” she ordered, her voice cutting through the hubbub on the bridge. “Get out of range of the Star Destroyers and the fighters will fall back.”
“All craft, full engines,” Ackbar said. “Concentrate rear shields.”
Leia nodded. The Raddus was at the tail of the Resistance column, its shields between their First Order pursuers and the other three ships.
And then she went rigid. Staring, she fumbled for a chair and half fell into it, the Resistance officers’ worried faces turning in her direction.
Her mind had brushed a familiar presence in the Force—one she knew intimately. A presence that had once been bright but had turned black as space, becoming a soundless scream of rage and need.
She knew instantly that it was Ben Solo, her son.
Leia tried to stop herself from being drawn into her memories, even as she knew she wouldn’t be able to resist.
Ben in her womb, turning and tumbling in search of comfort, an ever-expanding radiance in the Force, but one shot through with veins of shadow. Luke had reassured her that was normal—the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. She’d desperately hoped that w
as true.
Ben as a baby, red-faced and round. His hair had been black from birth, impossibly fine and delicate—the softest thing Leia had ever imagined.
Ben as a toddler, forever following Han. Carrying the dice from the Millennium Falcon—the ones his father had used to win the beloved, battered freighter—and promising anyone who’d listen that one day he would be a pilot, too, like his daddy.
Ben in adolescence, his face grown lean above a strong jaw. A boy who always seemed alone, a churning storm in the Force. And whose anger had begun to manifest in malfunctions and breakdowns and objects that fell off shelves and shattered with no one near.
Ben, her son. Who’d been stolen from her and Han, stolen by Snoke’s wiles and Luke’s mistakes and his own furies. Who’d become Kylo Ren, the champion of the First Order—and his father’s murderer.
Ben was leading that TIE squadron. He had fired the torpedo that had killed her pilots, and now he was coming to kill her and everyone else.
* * *
—
Kylo banked his fighter—a prototype TIE Silencer with a night-black hull—away from the ruin of the starfighter hangar, his wingmates matching the maneuver.
The Resistance fleet was barely worthy of the name—his fighters’ initial attack run had reduced it to a Mon Calamari heavy cruiser and two smaller craft. The smaller ships were of little consequence. The heavy cruiser had rebalanced its shield envelope to protect it against the turbolasers of the First Order vessels harrying its stern. That was a sound strategy, but it left the cruiser vulnerable to the prowling TIEs—and Kylo had just ensured it wouldn’t be launching starfighters anytime soon.
“Target the main bridge,” he said.
His mother would be there, he knew. It wasn’t Leia Organa’s style to lead from the rear, or to put her own concerns above whatever cause she held dear at a given moment.
For a moment Kylo let himself recall his parents’ worried conversations behind closed doors, the ones they’d deluded themselves into thinking he wouldn’t know about. Conversations about the anger and resentment that had boiled over once again in their son. Conversations in which they talked about him like he wasn’t their son, but some kind of monster.
They were frightened of him, he realized. And so they got rid of him, sending him away to his uncle Luke—whose betrayal would prove far worse.
But Ben Solo was no more—Kylo had shed his childhood identity and the pathetic weakness it represented. Han Solo’s days of cheating and disappointing people were over. The New Republic was destroyed. And now the Resistance—the last of his mother’s causes—would follow it into extinction.
The heavy cruiser’s bridge was bracketed in Kylo’s sights. He glanced at his instruments, verifying that his torpedoes were loaded and armed.
His mother was indeed there. He could feel her familiar presence in the Force, and he could sense her determination and focus—along with a deep weariness. And sorrow. And worry.
It’s too late to be sorry, Mother. Though you’re right to worry.
His thumb hovered over the trigger, even as his senses drank in impressions from the Force. The panic on the bridge ebbed and flowed around the calm focus that was his mother. Her anxiety pulsed in the Force, in this last moment before her death…but she wasn’t afraid.
She was worried for him, he realized. And she wasn’t angry. She ached for him to come back to her.
Kylo depressed the trigger slightly, not quite enough to fire.
And then he lifted his thumb.
He couldn’t do it.
A moment later, Kylo’s wingmate fired.
* * *
—
The torpedo sheared through the bridge of the Raddus and exploded. In a nanosecond it became the center of an expanding envelope of overpressurization that hurled crew members and equipment in all directions, shattered the viewports, and buckled the bulkheads separating the bridge from the rest of the ship. Then the torpedo’s payload of superheated plasma vaporized everything that the blast wave hadn’t flung into space, leaving behind a ruin of twisted, blackened metal, already cooling in the vacuum.
The explosion buffeted Kylo in his cockpit. If he had known, he could have stopped the torpedo—freezing it in space with a thought. But he had been surprised. Now he couldn’t sense his mother—the shock had shattered his focus, leaving him breathing hard behind his fighter’s control yoke.
“The Resistance ships have pulled out of range,” Hux said over his comlink. “We can’t cover you at this distance. Return to the fleet.”
“No!”
Kylo turned back toward the Raddus, determined to erase the cruiser and the rest of the Resistance fleet from existence. The Mon Calamari ship’s point-defense cannons spat energy at the TIEs, and the fighter to port vanished in a ball of fire.
“Snoke’s command,” Hux told him. “They won’t last long, burning fuel like this. It’s just a matter of time.”
Hux sounded patient, as if he were addressing a child. Kylo would show the arrogant general that was a fatal mistake.
The Raddus’s guns incinerated another TIE.
Teeth gritted, Kylo broke off the attack, streaking for the distant line of First Order warships.
* * *
—
Leia Organa flew through the void, arms raised as if in supplication.
She could feel the moisture in her eyes and mouth evaporating and her lungs struggling for air that wasn’t there. All around her she saw debris—and members of the bridge crew. Those who weren’t dead would be soon.
She could see the First Order TIE fighters, shrinking in the distance. Her son—lost to her, flying back to his master. Who was aboard one of the bright dots of light arranged in a line beyond those fighters. Those lights were Star Destroyers, relentlessly hunting her battered and beleaguered little fleet.
She could surrender, and it would all be over in a moment. She would be at peace.
Then she noticed another light nearby, drifting through space amid the wreckage. It was Rey’s beacon, she realized—the one she would need to find her way back. It had come loose from Leia’s wrist.
Her hand closed around its soft glow. She couldn’t give up, not yet. She had to go on—for Rey and everyone else on the Raddus. And all those the First Order would consign to misery and despair.
Leia’s eyes closed and she lowered her head, her outstretched hands tensing as she concentrated.
Feel the Force around you. Life creates it, makes it grow.
Leia reached out with her senses. She was surrounded by the remains of battle—but thin traceries of life remained around her, generated by the tiny microorganisms that lived, undetected, on and in bodies and even in the air. Their Force energy was ebbing, dying out or growing dormant, but she could sense that it formed a tenuous ladder back to the warship behind her.
Leia asked the Force to help her ascend that ladder and return to the broken bridge. Where, faintly, she could see Resistance crewers gathered at an air lock.
Even as her senses dimmed, her body rose toward the gaping maw of the shattered bridge. It slid through the wreckage and into the lock. Leia’s fingers brushed the viewport, and the outer hatch closed.
Then the inner door opened, flooding the narrow space with light and air and life. Faintly, as if from a great distance, she heard contradictory commands and agonized questions surrounding her. The Force was bright and spiky with fear.
Leia wanted to tell her rescuers that it would be all right, that they should see to the fleet. But even imagining the effort necessary to do so was impossible. And so, belatedly, she did surrender, letting go and allowing herself to slide into darkness.
The Jedi Master emerged from his hut at dawn. Autumn had come to the island and the morning was gray, hinting at worse weather to come.
He found Rey standing outside th
e repaired door, leaning on her quarterstaff.
“Morning,” she said.
Luke didn’t acknowledge her, shouldering his pack and walking up the stairs.
Rey hadn’t expected him to yield that easily, and so she followed him. And she kept following him, as he ascended the island to its jagged crest to watch Ahch-To’s second sun clear the horizon.
“So this is where they built the original Jedi temple?” she asked. “How long ago?”
“Go away,” Luke replied.
He’d spoken! She decided to count that as progress, and smiled as she followed him back down the well-worn path, trailing him until they reached the tumbled rocks and narrow beaches that fringed the shoreline. Seabirds called overhead and the salt air was sharp in Rey’s nose. On the beach, sea sows lounged torpidly in tide pools, waiting for the suns to warm them.
Luke unfastened a bottle from his pack and bent over a sow’s belly, squeezing green milk from her swollen udder. He looked up from his work, a green streak on his upper lip. Rey kept watching, though that last moment had left her a little ill. The sow regarded her lazily.
“Is this like a thing where you’re pretending to ignore me but secretly teaching me lessons?” Rey asked.
“It is not,” Luke replied.
She was there the next morning when his door opened.
“I’ve never seen so much water in my life,” she said.
“Don’t care,” Luke muttered, and began his rounds.
She suppressed a slight smile. Today he’d spoken to her immediately. At this rate they might have an actual conversation within a few months.
On the south side of the island, a narrow inlet pierced the land, its cliffs plunging down into a foamy slot of a bay. A pole leaned against the edge of the cliff, its end planted in the shallows far below. Luke grabbed the pole and used it as a lever to swing himself over the gap.
“Whoa—careful!” Rey called.
Luke landed lightly on the other side, standing on an impossibly narrow ledge, and aimed a withering look her way. He braced himself above the long drop and lifted the pole, staring down at the water. Rey edged over to the gap and peered down to where the pole’s pointed, barbed end hung over the churning water.
