The Last Jedi

by Jason Fry

  She stared into the inky darkness of the hole. Bright as the moon was, it revealed nothing about what was below. The hole burbled and hissed, as if it were speaking to her.

  Rey stopped at the edge, stooping to examine the moss, and slipped. Slipped, or was dragged inside. She didn’t know if she cried out, or if it made a sound.

  She fell into water, the cold like a knife in her lungs. She struggled, surfaced, and gasped, eyes stinging from the salt, then hauled herself out onto the slick, flat stone.

  She was in a cave, she saw now—a long, narrow space that the sea had carved away beneath the lip of the cliff, creating a hidden place beneath the island, its existence revealed only by a blowhole where a vertical shaft had intersected the surface. The hole spat gouts of water at high tide but seemed to breathe when the tide was low, as it was now.

  Before her, the sea had ground and polished the walls of the cave until the stone was like a dark mirror, cracked but glossy. Rey could see her reflection in it—a reflection repeated a thousand times in the stone’s labyrinthine facets, so they created a line of Reys retreating from her gaze.

  Rey gazed into the mirror—and realized it was gazing back. The Force was quavering in response to the approach of something.

  She could hear herself breathing—slowly and raggedly. Then her breathing quickened as she realized she was inside the stone, within the mirror world, with several Reys between her and the soaked, shivering girl standing on the ledge in the cave.

  Then that Rey was gone and a hundred Reys stood between her and the slim figure on the ledge. She turned her head and all those Reys obediently did the same, each one’s turn coming a moment after the one before it, until all were staring along with her deeper into the dark stone.

  Rey knew she had to go deeper—that the world inside the stone only seemed to go on forever. It was leading somewhere, and if she only had the courage to follow, that secret place would show her what she had come to see—and what she was most afraid to know.

  There were Reys deeper in the stone, part of the line yet ahead of her. She told herself to follow them, to become them, to ignore the voice in her head that kept babbling that she would be trapped forever, down here in the darkness at the secret heart of the island.

  She followed the line of Reys, willing the surreal succession to end, until finally it did. Until at last there was one final Rey, breathing hard and staring at a large, round, clouded mirror of polished stone like the one that had called to the girl in the cave.

  This last Rey stood in front of the stone, gazing into its depths.

  “Let me see my parents,” she begged. “Please.”

  She stretched out her hand and the clouded surface of the mirror seemed to ripple, its darkness melting away. She saw two dark figures beneath its surface. As her heartbeat hammered in her ears, the two became one. Her fingers touched the stone and met the fingertips of another.

  It was the girl from the sea cave, staring back at her. It was herself.

  Rey lowered her hand and her reflection did the same.

  Then she began to weep.

  She’d spent so many nights in the deserts of Jakku, an orphan in the half-buried wreckage of a forgotten war. Marking each night with a new scratch in the metal, until she was surrounded by thousands of gouges. There had been too many to sensibly mark time, but that had long ago ceased to be the point. The rows upon rows of slashes had become something else, but she didn’t know what. A testament to her insistence that this vigil had a purpose, maybe. Or perhaps a ritual to hold back the solitude that was always at work on her, eroding her hope and whispering that she would wind up like everything else abandoned on Jakku—a shell, empty and purposeless.

  She had felt so alone, all those nights. But never as alone as she did staring at her own reflection, beneath the island in the cold and the dark.

  When her tears finally ebbed, Rey lifted her head. She knew who she had to talk to about the cave, about what she had sought and what it had shown her—someone who would understand how solitude and loss could eat away at you until there was nothing left.

  * * *

  —

  Luke was afraid Rey had gone—that his awakened sense of the Force had blinded him to the more mundane world around him, and he would discover the Falcon had departed, taking her away with it.

  “Rey, you were right,” he called as he crossed the meadow in the driving rain, lightning flashing overhead. “I’m coming with you. Rey?”

  Luke had shut himself off for so long, and now the Force was roaring around him. Rey was right. She needed him. As did Leia, and the Resistance, and all those desperate for hope. His grief and guilt had left him unable to see that, unable to see anything but darkness and despair. In trying to shield the galaxy from his failure, he had walled himself off from everything—including the prospect of hope.

  The Force had sent Rey, of that Luke was now certain. She had arrived bearing the message he had refused to hear. But she was not just the Force’s vessel. To think of her that way was to diminish her. She was also a young woman, powerful with the Force, who needed his help—and who had believed in him even when he gave her no reason to.

  He reached the huts, and saw to his relief that Han Solo’s freighter was still sitting at the bottom of the long, winding stair. And light was leaking out of the door and the narrow window of the hut Rey had claimed for her own.

  Relieved, Luke quickened his steps, eager to make up for lost time.

  * * *

  —

  The moment Rey reached her hut she had felt him near her, in the Force. The connection between them was so raw and powerful that it reminded her of touching a live wire in the wreckage of a starship. She had closed her eyes, opened them, and found Kylo Ren there—right next to her where she sat on the stone bench. As if she could actually reach out and touch his hand, his face, his hair.

  At the sight of him she’d felt relief surge through her.

  Kylo listened intently, his long face impassive, as she told him about being drawn into the cave and into the stone, and how the journey had led to nothing, no revelation except how alone she was.

  “You’re not alone,” he insisted, and she believed him.

  “Neither are you. It isn’t too late.”

  Rey tentatively raised her hand toward his, expecting to see their hands go through each other and wondering if she would feel it in the Force somehow.

  But their fingers actually touched. She grasped his hand, jolted by the contact, and saw that the same shock had gone through him.

  Luke Skywalker walked into the hut—to find Rey and Kylo with their hands clasped, staring into each other’s eyes.

  “Stop!” he yelled, and flung out his hand. A burst of power hurled every stone of the hut outward from its center, scattering them around the bench where Rey and Kylo sat in astonishment.

  Rey’s hand closed on nothing and she stared at Luke as rain pelted them.

  She got to her feet and stared at the Jedi Master.

  “Is it true?” she demanded. “Did you try to murder him?”

  “Leave this island,” Luke said through gritted teeth. “Now.”

  Then he turned and walked away—just as he’d done the day she arrived, bearing the lightsaber that had called to her.

  That day she had just watched, bewildered and hurt. But that had somehow become a long time ago.

  “No,” Rey said. “You answer me. You tell me the truth. Stop!”

  Luke kept walking—and so Rey snatched up her staff, took three long strides, and swung it flat and hard, cracking him across the back of the head and knocking him to the ground.

  He stared up into the rain, surprised, at the young woman standing over him with her teeth bared.

  “Did you do it?” Rey asked. “Did you create Kylo Ren?”

  Luke got to his fe
et and Rey saw immediately that nothing had changed—he was still going to walk away from her, retreating to brood in silence. Furious, she swung her staff at him again—but Luke reached out, the motion a blur, and a length of lightning rod flew off the roof of one of the huts. Before Rey could blink he had intercepted the strike of her staff, the impact sending a jolt up her forearms, and knocked her backward.

  Rey sprang back at him, her staff and his improvised weapon spinning and colliding as the rain poured down. She pressed the attack. The staff had never felt more comfortable in her hands, so much like a part of her. Her confidence grew and she smiled wolfishly as she saw the surprise on his face.

  But it was a fleeting thing. Quicker than she could follow, he parried her thrust and continued the motion, flipping the staff out of her hands to clatter on the stones, leaving her defenseless.

  Rey reached out, feeling the Force alive and hungry around her, and found the weight of the lightsaber in her hands. She ignited it and Luke gave ground, looking up at her as she held the blade high, rain hissing and sparking off its length.

  They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Rey turned the lightsaber off, leaving them in the rain.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Luke Skywalker looks down at his nephew Ben Solo—no longer a boy but not yet a man. He has come into his chambers, at night, and now stands over him. The Jedi Master’s eyes are closed. The Force is aboil with danger. Worry shadows Luke’s face as he extends his hand, reaching out with the Force—reaching into the sleeping Ben’s mind.

  The boy remains still, his face untroubled. And Luke’s eyes remain shut. But he can see: fire, and ruin, and the sightless eyes of the dead. And he can hear: screams, and the howl of lightsabers, and the roar of explosions.

  Darkness—expanding from this slim, dark-haired boy to shroud everything—and the cacophony of terror that will accompany it. Luke draws his hand back, as if burned. The Force around Ben has always been shot through with veins of darkness, but what he’s seen is beyond anything he’d feared to find.

  Luke removes his lightsaber from his belt and ignites the blade, his eyes grave. But then he looks at Ben and the brief, almost unwilling thought is gone. He cannot bring his lightsaber down on his sister’s son while he sleeps.

  And immediately Luke knows it is too late—he has already failed his student. Because Ben’s eyes are open—frightened but aware. The boy’s powers with the Force are already immense, and still growing. And he is a Skywalker.

  He knows what Luke thought.

  He knows what Luke saw.

  He knows what will be.

  Desperate, Ben’s hand reaches out, not toward Luke but beyond him, to the lightsaber he has constructed. Willing it into his hand, its blue blade a killing blow aimed at his Master. Luke’s own blade meets Ben’s and the locked lightsabers buzz and spark. Then Ben reaches up toward the ceiling with his free hand, compelling the stones to come crashing down on Luke’s head.

  * * *

  —

  Rey touched Luke’s arm.

  “You failed him by thinking his choice was made,” she said, her voice equal parts gentle and insistent. “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 turned his eyes to her. His gaze was bleak, and for the first time in Rey’s memory he struck her as old—a broken man dragged back into a storm he’d thought he’d escaped. But his voice was strong, insistent.

  “This is not going to go the way you think,” he warned her.

  “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, don’t do this,” Luke said.

  Rey’s answer was to hold the unlit lightsaber out to him once again—a last invitation.

  She knew immediately that he would not accept it.

  “Then he’s our last hope,” she said.

  She turned and simply walked away from him.

  When the time came to evacuate the last personnel off the fuel-starved Ninka, some glitch had kept Poe off the duty roster. The deck officer had shrugged helplessly, then let Poe look at the datapad for himself. His name was there, and next to it the word INELIGIBLE.

  Fuming, Poe had been forced to remain aboard the Raddus as C’ai Threnalli fired up the transport and eased it out of the hangar—a lone ship would be sufficient to evacuate the Ninka’s skeleton crew. He watched on the control room’s monitors as the transport left the little bunkerbuster, leaving her empty in space, then looked on in agony as the Ninka lost headway, her bow riding up, and was cut to pieces by turbolaser fire from the First Order fleet.

  The Resistance fleet had never been large enough to justify that grand-sounding term, but now it no longer existed. Only the Raddus remained. A single First Order Star Destroyer would have been a tough fight for the Mon Calamari cruiser, and there were thirty of them back there.

  Not to mention Snoke’s monstrous flagship.

  And whatever else the First Order had spent all those years building in secret, while the New Republic’s senators argued about nonsense.

  Poe left the control room as C’ai’s transport returned, figuring the least he could do was welcome the Ninkas to the Raddus. But his words sounded unconvincing in his own ears as he greeted the techs and soldiers, and few of them even looked up. They simply trudged across the hangar with their shoulders slumped and faces drawn.

  They looked beaten.

  Poe stalked angrily through the corridors of the Raddus, passing nervous-looking soldiers and crewers. The heavy cruiser was dim, lit in many places only by emergency lighting. That was to conserve fuel—a measure he might have agreed with, if only he knew what that fuel was being conserved for.

  He reached the temporary bridge and found Commander D’Acy waiting for him, outside the doors.

  “The admiral’s banned you from the bridge,” she said. “Let’s not have a scene.”

  So it hadn’t been a glitch.

  “Let’s,” Poe said, shouldering D’Acy aside and storming onto the bridge. D’Acy hurried to catch up with him, but he’d target-locked Holdo and arrowed straight for her. None of the officers in his path dared to stop him.

  Holdo just regarded him evenly.

  “Flyboy,” she said.

  “Cut it,” Poe spat, nose-to-nose with her. “We’re running on fumes and your crew knows it and you’ve told them nothing. You’ve got something up your sleeve, now’s when you put it on the table. Right now. Tell me we’re not just running away until we die—that we have a plan. That we have hope. Please.”

  Poe wondered if she’d slap him, or order the soldiers to drag him off to the brig, or simply ignore him. But she surprised him with words that he knew by heart.

  “When I served under Leia she’d say hope is like the sun,” Holdo said. “If you only believe in it when you can see it—”

  “—you’ll never make it through the night,” Poe finished.

  They looked at each other in silence—united, if only for that moment, by their shared regard for the woman they’d lost.

  “Captain, you’re mistaking rashness for bravery,” Holdo said. “Follow my orders.”

  Poe started to say something, then stopped—one of the officers’ monitors had a readout of a transport on it, like the one C’ai had just piloted back from the Ninka. Poe looked over the man’s shoulder, trying to process what he was seeing and not wanting to believe it. Then he whirled to face Holdo, incredulous.

  “You’re fueling up the transports—all of them,” he said, his anger building. “We’re abandoning ship! That’s what you’ve got? The transports are unshielded—unarmed. If we abandon our cruiser we don’t stand a chance!”


  “Captain,” Holdo said, but he plowed on ahead.

  “This will destroy the Resistance! You’re not just a coward—you’re a traitor!”

  Holdo turned away in disgust. “Get this man off my bridge,” she ordered, and the soldiers stepped forward to obey her order.

  * * *

  —

  Rose had to give DJ this much: He’d stolen a good ship.

  The yacht’s nameplate identified it as the Libertine, a name that had made Rose wrinkle her nose and wish there was time to make some alterations with a blaster. It was nearly sixty meters from the repulsorlift vanes jutting from its prow to the rakish fin at the stern, sheathed in hull plating that had been milled, polished, and buffed to a glossy white sheen. There was an elegant lounge with the latest model of pedestal holoprojector in the center of the flight deck; trim, tastefully appointed cabins belowdecks; and an honest-to-goodness staircase leading up to the cockpit.

  Someone’s gonna rattle every cage on Cantonica when they find out this ride is gone.

  Before leaving Canto Bight’s jail, BB-8 had retrieved Rose and Finn’s personal effects from the impound lot. The droid had then accompanied DJ to the city’s spaceport to obtain transportation.

  BB-8 had given Rose the details of the theft in a flurry of droidspeak as the Libertine slipped away from the desert world, the transition from atmospheric flight to space travel barely noticeable thanks to the yacht’s top-line acceleration dampeners and antishock fields. There’d been a note of admiration in BB-8’s beeps and whistles as he gleefully recounted how DJ had slipped past the spaceport guards and needed less than two minutes with a computer spike and a key-bypass hub to get aboard the yacht and fire up its engines.

  Rose made a mental note—make that another mental note—to take Poe aside, should they manage to actually rescue the Resistance fleet without dying in any of a dozen ways she decided it would be too depressing to catalog. Having already proven amenable to disobeying orders, assuming false identities, and committing simple assault, the pilot’s astromech was now developing a taste for larceny.