If Finn was going to die now, at least he could rest well knowing he had tried to help his friends make a difference in the galaxy.
He had only one regret.
He wished he could have convinced other troopers to do the same.
PHYSICALLY, Rey was not in fighting condition after Snoke hurled her across his throne room. Mentally, her mind throbbed like an open wound as it pieced itself back together from his invasive probe.
But in the Force, Rey had never felt stronger.
She had been right about what she’d seen. Luke had been wrong. Kylo Ren wasn’t lost to them. Under his dark shell flickered a spark of light. He could be redeemed.
She joined him in combat against the guards, and they made a most formidable pair. In a blur of laser blades, one red guard fell, then another, then two more, and then a second pair. The Praetorians’ weapons clattered to the ground next to their bodies while slashed curtains fluttered down like funeral shrouds.
When Rey’s fourth opponent tried to decapitate her, she pirouetted and swung, cutting through his armor and knocking him down. Kylo Ren had more difficulty with the final guard. The Praetorian thrust his pole-arm at Ren from behind and pinned down Ren’s lightsaber, forcing him to drop it.
“Ben!” Rey locked the activation matrix on her hilt and tossed him the blue blade. Plucking it out of the air, Ren quickly parried what would have been a mortal blow, rolling his wrist, turning the blade into the guard’s helmet.
The last of the First Order’s most elite warriors crumpled to lie with his comrades and Supreme Leader on the scuffed and smoking floor.
Ren caught his breath. Rey did the same. Their eyes met, and Rey saw in Kylo Ren the good person he wanted to be.
But beyond him, she also saw the massacre that was being waged in space.
She rushed to the wall where the curtains had hung. An enormous window Showed the Destroyers converging on the Resistance cruiser while the Supremacy continued its assault on the transports. From what she could make out, only ten remained.
She turned to Ren. “Order them to stop firing. There’s still time to save the fleet!”
Ren loomed over Snoke’s body with Luke’s lightsaber still drawn, as if he wanted to stab his master again.
“Ben!” Rey said again.
Ren looked up from the corpse. “That’s my old name.”
“What?”
“It’s time to let the old things die, Rey. I want you to join me.” He seemed to grow in stature. “Snoke, Skywalker, the Sith, the Jedi, the rebels—let it all die. We can rule together and bring a new order to the galaxy.”
Her chest tightened. The throbbing returned to her head. The hope that had sustained her started to wither and die. This couldn’t be happening. She had felt the good in him. She had seen the real Ben—Ben Solo.
“No, Ben, don’t do this! Don’t go this way, please!”
Ren chuckled at her plea. “Do you want to know the truth?” he asked. “About your parents?” His eyes twinkled, cruel and sinister. “Or have you always known, and have just hidden it away, hidden it from yourself?”
She didn’t want to listen to him. She wanted him to stop the charade and return to Leia. But she also wanted to know.
“Let it go,” he said. “You know the truth. Say it.”
She knew only what she feared. And what she feared was the truth of the voice from her dreams—the dreams that had haunted her since the day her parents abandoned her on Jakku.
Stay here. I’ll come back for you, sweetheart. I promise.
That was not the voice of her mother or her father, as she had long convinced herself.
The voice was her own.
She had imagined that voice and repeated those words over and over as a child until they became part of her reality, even her dreams. They had helped her fall asleep on a hungry stomach and pushed her to persevere when the future seemed bleak. When the years went by and her parents never returned to take her back, she never gave up the hope that someday soon they would and the nightmare of her youth would be over.
It was a false hope.
Was that what Luke had tried to prompt her to confess in the library? The truth she had locked in her heart and had never let herself admit? The truth that her parents were not hardworking space merchants trying to scrape enough together to make a better life for their family?
“They were nobody,” Rey said at last.
“They were filthy junk traders who sold you off for drinking money,” Kylo Ren said, spitting out the words. “They’re dead in a pauper’s grave on Jakku, like all the other junk buried there.”
Rey hadn’t known those details, but she had no doubt what Kylo Ren said was true. Her whole life had been one giant lie of her own making, a castle of dreams and echoes that had no foundation.
She shook all over. She might have survived Snoke’s mental thrashing, but this self-admission could break her for good.
Ren stepped toward her. “You have no place in the story. You come from nothing. You are nothing.” His tone became tender. “But not to me.”
He deactivated the blade. “Join me. Please.” He held out his hand to her.
She looked at him, pale and ghostly in the starlight of the window. His request was sincere. He wanted to teach her. She could learn great power from him. He could help her attain her true potential in the Force. Her past didn’t matter. All that mattered was her place in the future.
Rey reached out to Ren. He smiled.
Their hands never met.
Rey could never join with him. Not as he stood before her now. For he, too, had tried to erase his past, reinventing himself in the mold of his grandfather. The difference was that he had lost hope in his parents, while she had kept hope in hers, however false, alive.
Perhaps that was the very meaning of hope. It seemed false until it happened.
And if she wanted to save Ben, she would have to stop Kylo Ren.
With a tug of the Force, she summoned Luke’s lightsaber from Ren’s grasp. It shot toward her, then stopped. Ren raised a hand and the lightsaber froze in midair.
Rey pulled at the lightsaber with the Force, wiggling it closer to her, until Kylo Ren yanked it back toward him. Brows sweat and veins bulged as both tried to pry the lightsaber away. What Rey possessed in will, Ren matched in anger. Neither could overpower the other and lay claim to the sword.
Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father, had built this lightsaber to last. And last it had, withstanding the battles of the Clone Wars, the sands of Tatooine, the ice storms of Hoth, and the gas clouds of Bespin. Yet under the duress of the twin forces of Rey and Ren who wrenched at it like gravitational giants, the saber could not hold.
It was, after all, an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
Under this most uncivilized pressure, the lightsaber split in two, exploding in a blaze of blinding white.
Poe hurried back into the hold. The viewport showed a handful of transports left, yet it was unlikely any would make it to the planet before the Mega-Destroyer had obliterated them all.
He thought they’d been hit when the transport rattled violently. He grabbed a handle to steady himself. Pieces of fuselage whipped past the viewport. The megalaser cannons hadn’t struck them, but their neighbor, and they flew through the wreckage.
From Poe’s calculations, the Resistance was down to six transports. Even if they locked themselves in the rebel base on Crait, it was not a force adequate to repel the First Order.
Lieutenant Connix stood across from him, peering out a porthole facing starboard. “Our cruiser’s priming her hyperspace engines! She’s running away!”
Poe stumbled over to the window. The cruiser’s engines flared a hot blue-white, as they did before a leap. But he also noticed the Raddus’s forward bow was pointed in a direction that did not suggest retreat.
“No, she isn’t,” Poe said.
The Raddus jumped to hyperspace, but it was a short jump. A very short jump.
; The cruiser emerged to slice through the Mega-Destroyer.
Like a star turning in on itself, the colossal warship buckled and burned, igniting a wave of devastation that enveloped anything near it. The Raddus was devoured, as were half the Destroyers in the First Order armada.
Vice Admiral Holdo had just sacrificed herself to save the Resistance.
The crew in the transport’s hold cheered. But General Organa remained solemn, as did Poe.
Finn and Rose were on that Mega-Destroyer.
“KILL them both.”
Finn felt the whoosh of the axe stroke after Phasma uttered her command. But the vibrating blade never cut into his neck. A shockwave pitched him off his knees.
He must have lost consciousness, because the next thing he knew, Rose was pulling him by his leg as she had on the Raddus. He shook himself free. “I’m okay,” he said, getting up.
Smoke stung his eyes. Alarms blared at ear-piercing decibels. The hangar around him was in shambles. Docking rigs had caved in on TIE fighters. Stormtroopers were strewn about, their armor charred and broken. Slag marked where a gunship had sat. Walkers lay toppled, their legs smashed. Fires raged everywhere.
The Mega-Destroyer had been hit hard. And from the looks of what was happening in the hangar, it was in its death throes.
Finn stumbled after Rose toward a shuttle that hadn’t sustained much damage. BB-8 rolled ahead of them, having cast off the waste bin cover. Finn didn’t know how the droid had gotten there exactly, but it was just like him to join them at the last moment.
DJ was also nearby, on the verge of departure. The thief stood on the ramp of the stolen yacht, waving farewell as the ramp retracted. Finn snatched a blaster rifle from a fallen trooper and fired at the traitor. But the hatch had already closed so that the bolt glanced harmlessly off the Libertine’s hull.
Secondary explosions ripped through fuel lines, and dark clouds billowed across the hangar. Rose grabbed Finn’s arm and he dumped the heavy rifle as they ran toward the shuttle.
Captain Phasma and a squad of stormtroopers stepped out of the smoke in front of them. Finn paled as the troopers raised their blasters.
A salvo of laser fire beat the troopers to their triggers, causing them to scatter for cover. Cannons ablaze, the head shell of a two-legged walker came off its body, showing BB-8 in the cockpit. The droid must have circumvented the walker’s programming and taken control. Finn would have to thank the pesky unit if they all made it out alive.
Rose retrieved a blaster and ducked behind a melted beam, returning fire. Phasma, however, charged at Finn.
From the floor, Finn picked up a discarded riot baton and swung at Phasma, chopping off the barrel of her rifle. Dropping the gun, she slid a quicksilver rod from her belt and pushed a button. Its ends extended into a slim baton with two needle-sharp points.
“You were never anything more than a bug in the system,” she said.
Finn gripped his baton with both hands. “Let’s go, chrome dome.”
It wasn’t a fair fight. Not only was Phasma suited in armor, but she was a master with the baton. Her strikes thundered against Finn’s baton, rattling his arms and bones. All Finn could manage was to block and parry her attacks as she drove him under the walker’s leg and through the smoke to a cleft in the floor. “You were always disobedient, disrespectful,” she said, whirling her baton. “Your emotions make you weak!”
She hammered at his baton, and Finn could keep his balance no more. He tumbled backward into the hole. Fires crackled beneath him, but he didn’t fall far. He landed on the platform of a cargo lift. The platform’s repulsors still functioned and he dialed them to take himself back up to the hangar.
Phasma hadn’t expected him to reemerge, and that mistake cost her. Finn clocked his baton at her helmet, sending her sprawling to the hangar floor.
When she lifted her head, he saw her helmet had been cracked. A blue eye looked back at him. He had never thought of Captain Phasma without her helmet, and seeing that she was actually human made him shudder.
“You were always scum,” Phasma said.
Finn nodded. “Rebel scum.”
The floor beneath Phasma gave way and she plunged into the shaft. The flames in the pit roared as they took her.
More explosions ruptured the deck. Finn was still standing, but his seconds were numbered. There was no route for escape. Fire and falling beams blocked his path to the shuttle.
“Finn!” Rose yelled.
She sat with BB-8 in the cockpit head of the bipedal walker, working its controls. It lumbered through the ruined hangar and took a wide step over the pit. Finn scrambled up a leg.
He held on tight as the walker hotfooted it to the shuttle.
After the light, there was darkness. Kylo Ren sank deeper and deeper into it until a sound roused him out of the void. A footstep, followed by a feeling.
He was about to die.
Kylo Ren woke to find General Hux standing over him. Hux’s hand swayed from the blaster he was about to pull. His face knitted in false concern. “What happened?”
Ren staggered to his feet. He was still in the throne room, with his slain master and the Praetorians rotting on the floor. Smoke drifted from where Luke’s lightsaber had exploded. Rey, however, was nowhere to be seen.
“The girl murdered Snoke,” he said.
Bodies slid as the floor suddenly tipped. Hux grabbed the shreds of a hanging curtain while Ren rooted his feet to the floor. A fiery light poured through the viewport behind the throne.
Ren beheld a cataclysm out in space.
The Supremacy had been shorn in two, the innards of its bisected other half visible as explosions tore it further apart. Smaller Destroyers burned around it, their spearheaded bows colliding into each other to feed an expanding chaos.
It was Ren’s turn to ask the question. “What happened?”
Hux didn’t answer. The room’s grav-units reestablished themselves and he rushed to the airlock, accessing its console. He frowned. “Snoke’s escape shuttle is gone.”
Ren stared into the inferno. Rey was somewhere out there, fleeing in the shuttle. “We know where she’s going. Get our forces down to that Resistance base. Let’s finish this.”
Hux turned from the airlock. “Finish this? You presume to command my army?” He challenged Ren with a look of pure disdain. “We have no ruler. The Supreme Leader is dead!”
Ren stepped over the corpse of his master and pinched his fingers, picturing them on Hux’s windpipe. The general began to choke.
“The Supreme Leader,” Kylo Ren said, “is dead.”
Hux sagged before Ren, tugging at his collar as if that could stop the strangulation. “Long…live…” he rasped, looking up at Ren, “the…Supreme Leader.”
All glints of challenge vanished from Hux’s eyes. Kylo Ren released him to gasp for breath on his knees.
As it had so often in her life, history was repeating itself.
Bundled in a high-collared coat, Leia stared out at the surface of Crait from the entrance of the old rebel fort. Around her loomed a ridge of coal-dark mountains. Behind her, the last soldiers of the Resistance carried out Captain Dameron’s orders to arm themselves. And before her stretched a plain as desolate as Hoth’s icy wastes, with salt in place of snow. Soon the walkers and war machines of the First Order would trample that ground and wage an assault on the base, just as the Empire had forty years before on the planet Hoth.
The Rebel Alliance had survived that siege, managing to evacuate in time. The Resistance had no such option. All of the six transports that had landed on Crait were damaged and in need of repair. Even if they launched, they would never get far without an ion cannon to neutralize the Destroyers in orbit. Unlike Hoth, the base on Crait wasn’t much more than a warren of abandoned mineral mines with a deflector shield and armor-shelled outer door. Leia would transmit a distress call for reinforcements, but if none came by the time the First Order broke through the door, it would all be over.
&n
bsp; Perhaps history wasn’t repeating itself. Perhaps this was the end.
She reproached herself for having such thoughts. She’d been in similar dead-end situations in the past, and she wasn’t dead, not yet. She had to hold on to hope. As she told her troops, if you only believed in the sun when you saw it, you’d never make it through the night.
She touched the beacon on her wrist. Rey was still out there, somewhere, as was Luke. The stimshots and medical droids had bolstered her recovery, but it was her brother who had boosted her strength and saved her from the brink of death.
She looked up at the sky and thought of him.
Six TIE fighters and a First Order assault shuttle broke through the clouds and descended toward the base. It seemed rather small for an advance attack group. The First Order’s armada had only been crippled, not destroyed. Nonetheless, she was well aware of the size of the force that would follow.
“They’re coming. Shut the door.”
She retreated into the base. The shield door, a reinforced block a hundred meters tall, began to drop, its rusty gears whining from years of nonuse. When they had arrived, Leia was grateful that her old rebel codes had opened the door. Now she prayed she wasn’t sealing them all in a tomb.
As the Resistance soldiers went farther back into the mines, so did the mountain’s native inhabitants, a four-legged species the rebels had called crystal foxes because of the crystalline spines bristling from their vulpine bodies. Whenever the foxes moved, the spines clinked like a symphony of chimes. How and why the foxes had evolved in that way, no one knew. War always put the natural sciences on the backburner.
The First Order shuttle sped ahead of the TIEs and arrowed toward the base’s entrance. “Take cover!” Poe yelled.
He ran toward the entrance, firing at the shuttle with a heavy rifle. The shuttle dipped low, beneath the door, losing its upper fin in a close shave. It bounced on the ground, slid, and came to a halt. The shield door boomed shut behind it.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Page 12