by Rae Carson
“General Calrissian, we’re looking for Exegol,” Poe said.
Lando froze for a split second, but then he softened with resignation. “Of course you are.”
* * *
—
“You’re certain?” General Pryde asked.
“It was her,” Kylo insisted. Strange how anyone could doubt the power of the Force, after everything that had happened. Or maybe it was him they doubted.
“In that case, once the necklace is analyzed, we’ll know exactly where she is,” Pryde said.
Tishra Kandia hurried toward them, Rey’s necklace dangling from her hand. Kandia was a top intelligence officer, and one of the few who never balked at his orders to expend First Order resources to find the girl.
“Sir,” said Officer Kandia. “Microanalysis says this comes from the Middian system, Pasaana, Forbidden Valley.”
Kylo felt a surge of hope. He’d have to move fast. Their Force connection had alerted Rey to his intentions, and she’d flee Pasaana as soon as she’d gotten what she’d come for—whatever that was.
“Prepare my ship and alert the local troops,” he ordered General Pryde. “Send a division.”
Kylo Ren turned and strode toward the TIE hangar.
“Yes, Supreme Leader,” Pryde said to his back.
* * *
—
Lando Calrissian leaned forward so they could all hear him over the rumble of the treadable. “Luke and I were chasing down a real scoundrel,” he said. “His name was Ochi of Bestoon.”
The name gave Rey a start, though she wasn’t sure why. Ochi of Bestoon.
“A Jedi killer since the Clone Wars. He was searching for Sith relics,” Lando continued. “Evil, old things.”
He activated his wristlink, showing a holo of the Jedi assassin. Ochi of Bestoon seemed not-quite human, with large black eyes, soft features, and some kind of cybernetic headgear. He didn’t look dangerous at all.
“Like the Emperor’s wayfinder,” Poe said.
“That’s it,” Lando confirmed, switching the holo display to a pyramidal object. “Ochi bragged at a cantina that he had a clue to the wayfinder’s location. That he had its coordinates inscribed.”
“Inscribed where?” Rey asked.
“That’s the question, kiddo,” Lando said. “We chased Ochi halfway across the galaxy.”
“Here to Pasaana,” Finn said.
Lando nodded. “Where the trail went cold. Ochi disappeared into the desert. Luke sensed he was still here. We found his ship—abandoned—but no Ochi. No clue. No wayfinder.”
Something about the way he said it…“So you stayed here?” she asked.
“Here and there. The desert helps you forget,” Lando said, and sadness tinged his voice. The cabin jerked as the treadable lurched over a boulder. C-3PO grabbed a hanging net to steady himself. Lando went on: “First Order went after us—the leaders from the old wars. They took our kids.” His gaze grew distant. “My girl wasn’t even old enough to walk. Far as I know, she’s a stormtrooper now.”
Finn’s face turned grim. Rey resisted the urge to put a hand on his shoulder; sometimes, sympathy was hard to bear.
“They turned our kids into our enemies,” Lando said in a defeated voice. “My girl. Han and Leia’s son, Ben. To kill the spirit of the Rebellion for good.”
Rey and Finn locked eyes, and she knew he was thinking along the same lines she was. Ripping children away from their homes and pressing them into service wasn’t only about filling ranks. It was about crushing the opposition’s spirit. Because wars weren’t fought with just ships and weapons, but with grit and resolve. That’s why Leia was always talking about hope. It was as essential to victory as good supply lines or reliable intel.
“We need to get to that ship,” Rey said. “Search it again.”
The treadable lurched to a halt. A familiar screaming sound pierced the air. TIE fighters. They peeked out from the entrance portal and spotted them gliding along the horizon.
The First Order’s reach now extended throughout the galaxy, which was why they’d run into a stormtrooper even here. That meant Ren could have backup troops on the ground in the space of an hour. Maybe less. Those TIEs could be an advance unit, scouting on the Supreme Leader’s behalf. Come to think of it, Ren had certainly deployed scouts and probe droids everywhere already. She’d sensed how desperate he was to find her.
They would have to be very fast, and very careful.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Lando said. “Ochi’s ship is growing rust out past Lurch Canyon. It’s the only clue I’ve got. Go.”
They tumbled out of the treadable, all except Chewie who moaned mournfully at Lando. Lando reached for Chewie’s arm and squeezed, as though saying goodbye.
Rey said, “Leia needs pilots, General.”
“My flying days are long gone,” Lando said. “But give Leia my love.”
Rey thought of how she’d almost missed an opportunity to say goodbye to Leia, and she tried one last time: “You should give it to her yourself. Thank you.”
Though Lando was practically a stranger to her, she could read the yearning in his face plain as a desert day. Maybe she’d gotten through.
Lando’s treadable had taken them across the valley to the other end of the festival grounds, far away from the tent where they’d encountered the stormtrooper. Now they just had to find transportation to the canyon Lando had mentioned.
“There!” Poe said, pointing. “Those speeders!” They all sprinted toward a group of parked skimmers. C-3PO struggled to keep up.
Some of the skimmers were empty—probably for rent to festivalgoers—and several others were loaded with goods. Rey had no idea how they’d pay; they knew better than to walk these crowds carrying hard, untraceable currency, and had left most of it on the Falcon.
Poe rolled beneath one of the skimmers, ripped open a panel, and quickly set about rewiring.
“How do you know how to do that?” Finn asked.
“No need to worry,” C-3PO said, finally catching up. “I made it.”
An older Aki-Aki with a missing trunk began running toward them, yelling and waving his huge calloused hands. Undaunted, Poe did the same thing to a second speeder.
“We gotta go!” he said, hopping into it. Finn gaped at Poe, and Rey shared his astonishment. The pilot had somehow overridden the ident locks in the space of mere moments. They’d have to get Poe to teach them that one.
But as Rey grabbed the tiller of the first skimmer, a weight settled in her stomach. She hated stealing, even when it was absolutely necessary. Chewie and BB-8 climbed in behind her, and she gunned the engine. The old Aki-Aki screamed insults at their backs as they raced away.
The desert flew by around them, a sea of wind-rippled sand interspersed with islands of layered buttes that scraped the sky. It was beautiful, in its way.
BB-8 warbled at her.
“It doesn’t go any faster, Beebee-Ate!”
Back on Jakku, Rey had loved climbing onto her speeder after a hard day’s work and whipping across the dunes. It cooled the sweat from her skin, made her feel a little bit free.
As the speeder skimmed the sand, peppering her face with grit, she decided that she’d try to enjoy the ride. She just hoped they were going in the right direction.
CHAPTER 6
Wind and sand stung Finn’s cheeks, and without protective goggles he could hardly keep his eyes open. He had no idea how Poe was piloting this thing—it was like no speeder he’d encountered before. Come to think of it, he had no idea how Poe did a lot of things.
“Ripping speeders, lightspeed skipping,” he yelled to Poe. “How do you know how to do shifty stuff like that?”
“Just stuff I picked up,” Poe said.
“Where?” Finn pressed. Not in the Resistance, surely. Leia and Poe
tried to keep their operations above board as much as possible. Poe had been Finn’s very first friend outside the First Order. But it turned out there was plenty he still didn’t know about the pilot.
Before Poe could respond, the skimmer jerked sideways with an impact. Finn smelled blaster scorching as more laser bolts missed, sailing past them.
The First Order had found them. Stealing the speeders had probably triggered alarms and informant networks all across the valley—which was still better than getting caught and arrested at the festival. But now two treadspeeders pursued them, each one carrying two troopers. Their treads kicked up sand in their wakes as they closed fast.
Finn and C-3PO clung to the steering vane as Poe began evasive maneuvers, swerving back and forth to make them as difficult a target as possible. Off to their right, running parallel, Rey was doing the same. Netted bundles of goods swung around in the cargo basket, threatening to spill. Finn yanked out his blaster and started firing, but Poe’s veering made his shots go wide.
Behind Rey, Chewie’s luck with his bowcaster was just as terrible. Still, their shots were making it dangerous for the First Order speeders to close the distance, so Finn kept at it. Gradually, he sensed a rhythm to Poe’s maneuvering, and he timed his shots accordingly, getting closer and closer to his target.
Almost there…just a little to the left. He lined up the shot, anticipated Poe’s swerve…
Right before he pulled the trigger, the rear passengers of each treadspeeder, launched into the air with jetpacks.
“They fly now!” C-3PO said.
“They fly now?!” Finn yelled.
Poe gripped the tiller. “They fly now,” he echoed, because of course they did.
Finn got off a few experimental shots with his blaster, but hitting a flying object from the back of a swerving skimmer was harder than impossible.
“Rey!” Poe yelled. “We should split—”
“Split up,” she yelled back.
“Yeah!”
They peeled off, Rey angling right with Chewie and BB-8 toward a dust grain farm. Poe steered Finn and C-3PO leftward into a narrow rocky canyon.
Their pursuing treadspeeders split up just as Finn had hoped. But his breath caught when he realized both of the flying jet troopers had disappeared, as though Rey were their true quarry.
The canyon closed in around them. Poe’s driving took them so close to the walls that Finn could have reached out and scraped them with the tip of his blaster.
The treadspeeder was gaining on them. “Hold on!” Poe yelled, aiming directly for the canyon’s wall.
“Oh, my!” said C-3PO as Poe lifted the skimmer’s nose, and suddenly they were racing up the cliff’s edge. Goods shifted to the back of the speeder. C-3PO’s golden grip on the steering vane slipped, filling the air with a horrible metal-on-metal screeching.
Finn had completed minimum stormtrooper training with speeders, but even he knew that repulsorlift technology wasn’t robust enough for them to continue skimming a cliff wall for long. And in an outdated junker like this, things were probably even worse than he knew.
“Did we lose them?” Poe hollered, bumping the speeder back down to the canyon floor.
Finn searched their surroundings. Just sand and outcroppings and walls as far as the eye could see. “Looks like it.”
“Excellent job, sir!” C-3PO shouted. But he spoke too soon because the prow of a treadspeeder cornered a butte and came screaming toward them. “Nope, still there!” Finn said.
“Terrible job, sir,” said the droid.
Poe laid into the throttle, but the skimmer didn’t have any more to give. Finn resumed firing with his blaster—calmer now, letting his instincts guide him—a shot landed! The treadspeeder jerked sideways but resumed the chase in the blink of an eye. Finn hadn’t damaged it at all.
The treadspeeder had shields.
Emboldened, the trooper lifted his blaster and fired. Finn hit the deck just in time as the trooper’s shot impacted a bundle of dried goods, which blackened to smoke.
He was about to jump to his feet and fire back, but right at his nose was a long coiled rope with large metal hooks on each end. They stuck to the magnetized floor—a nice feature for holding down cargo, but not exactly helpful now. He muscled one away from the floor, lifted it, threw it toward the speeder.
The hook landed on the ground. Just as he’d hoped, the speeder drove right over it. The hook punctured the rubberized tread, caught, and held. The rope at Finn’s feet uncoiled at an alarming rate as it wound around the trooper’s tread.
Maybe he should have thought this through better…Their skimmer was slower than the treadspeeder, but it was also heavier. That gave him an idea.
The vane C-3PO clung to was solid metal, sturdy enough to provide additional steering and stability, just like a mast. Finn grabbed the second hook and secured it to the pole, making sure it held tight.
“Poe,” he warned.
The pilot turned, saw the hook wrapped around the vane. “I gotcha!”
The treadspeeder was eating up their rope. It went taut; the skimmer jerked, and Finn nearly lost his footing. Poe angled the rudder sharply left, pushing them into an impossible right turn. They cornered so hard it felt as though Finn’s cheeks were struggling to stay on his face.
The rope remained taut between them. The treadspeeder skidded in an arc around the fulcrum of Poe’s hairpin turn, skidded, skidded, sand flying everywhere…and finally slammed into the side of the canyon, where it exploded into a ball of fire and dust.
“Wooo!” Finn yelled. He couldn’t believe that had worked.
* * *
—
Even though they’d split up, Rey was left to deal with three pursuers. At least Poe and Finn would have a chance.
Chewbacca fired doggedly at the treadspeeder with his bowcaster, but he paused when the jet troopers suddenly hit the throttle and pulled even with them—and then confusingly moved ahead. Their strategy quickly became clear when they started firing charges to the ground in front of their skimmer.
Rey yanked the tiller, turning the skimmer at the last moment, barely dodging an explosion. She ducked away from the ensuing debris cloud even as she dodged again, turning away from the treadspeeder. Good thing the controls on this skimmer were sensitive, but she still found it necessary to anticipate, reacting a split second sooner than should be humanly possible. It was taking all her concentration.
The speeder and jet troopers were still in pursuit. Rey knew she couldn’t keep this up forever. She’d eventually make a mistake.
“Get them!” she yelled to Chewie. “I’ll go for the speeder.”
It was possible to dodge obstacles ahead of them while shooting at something behind them, right? Well, she was about to find out.
Chewie kept the jet troopers busy with his bowcaster, but Rey found herself slaloming through grain-processing pipes that jutted from the ground, like an orchard of metal. She yanked up the blaster Han had given her, let the Force fill her, fired several times in quick succession at the treadspeeder.
Her shots hit, but they did no damage.
“The front shields are up,” Rey said.
BB-8 began to beep excitedly about something he’d found.
“Not now, Beebee-Ate!” Rey hollered.
Chewie yelled, pointing.
Rey saw a lump in the distance. No, a ship. Ochi’s freighter?! It hunkered atop a sandstone bluff, overlooking a vast, windswept valley interspersed with dark sand like blots of spilled ink. The ship’s hull was blasted by sand and wind, its landing struts drowning in small dunes. “I see it!”
She ducked instinctively as a laser blast heated the air by her ear. One of Chewie’s shots landed square on a jet trooper, who bulleted to the ground. The Wookiee roared.
Two to go.
The treadspeeder c
ontinued to fire at them, and the remaining jet trooper seemed inspired by the death of his comrade to double his efforts, lobbing charge after charge. Between evasions, Rey managed to get a few shots off with her blaster. Many of them hit the treadspeeder. None did any damage.
“Their shields are too strong,” she yelled, ducking another cloud of stinging grit.
BB-8 had lodged himself behind Rey’s tiller, taking advantage of the mag plates to keep himself from rolling off the skiff. One of his compartments opened, and his welding arm shot out toward one of the many containers in the cargo area. Rey didn’t bother to ask or admonish; she focused on dodging charges and grain pipes, letting the little droid do whatever he was going to do.
BB-8 reached toward a metal canister with his welding arm and pecked at it, opening up a dark hole. Before anything could escape the now-compromised canister, BB-8 body-bumped it, hard enough to disengage the maglocks and send it flying into the air behind them.
It released a cloud of smoke as it fell—bright, sunshiny yellow, just like the colored smoke at the festival. Opaque as a wall.
The stormtrooper driving the speeder couldn’t react fast enough to avoid it. The cloud blinded him, and he panicked, swerving left and launching up the slope of a rock. The speeder shot high, exposing a fuel tank that was unprotected by its forward shields. Rey aimed her blaster and pulled the trigger. The treadspeeder exploded.
BB-8 beeped smugly.
“Never underestimate a droid!” Rey said.
One to go. But neither Rey nor Chewie could spot him anywhere. The remaining jet trooper had disappeared.
Rey’s senses were on high alert as she steered the skiff toward the abandoned freighter. As they approached, the lines of the hull manifested into something recognizable. Familiar. Her palms grew damp, and her breath became shallow and fast. “Ochi’s ship…” she murmured. “I’ve seen that ship before.”
Poe’s skimmer appeared over the rise. Everyone seemed haggard and windblown, but were otherwise fine.
“You get them all?” Finn called.
