by Jason Fry
Luke waited, utterly still, until some signal told him to plunge the pole into the water. When he pulled it up, a meter-long fish was flapping on the end, stuck through.
“How’d you do that?” Rey asked. “The Force?”
“No.”
It was raining hard when they returned to the saddle at the top of the island, the great fish strapped to Luke’s back. Rey trudged along a few steps behind him, peering at his back through the rising wind and the slashing rain and making sure she stayed close enough to hear him if he spoke to her.
He didn’t.
A cold rain continued for most of the night. When Luke’s door opened in the morning, Rey was there—chilled and weary, but there. He hesitated for a moment, but then walked past her, heading up the worn stairs, wreathed in mist.
Rey followed, fingers white around her staff. She began to talk, at first just to keep herself warm, then so that there was some sound besides the murmur of the sea and the cries of the birds. So she let the story of her life unspool: all those years scavenging on Jakku, BB-8’s arrival, flying the Falcon, seeing the miraculous green of Takodana, finding herself on Starkiller Base, departing D’Qar with a Wookiee for a copilot and an ancient map for a guide.
She addressed the story to Luke’s back. Perhaps telling it properly would make him realize the importance of her quest, and he’d stop treating her like an intruder. And if not, well, by now annoying him was its own reward.
Then, in midsentence, she stopped.
Something was calling her—a sweet sound, whispering to her through the mist. She turned away from Luke and walked silently off in the opposite direction, eyes fixed ahead.
Luke stopped and turned. He watched her go, head cocked, curious.
* * *
—
The uneti tree had been massive once, but all that remained of it now was an ancient, mossy husk. In one end an opening gaped, carved by weather and time.
It was warm and dry inside. Light from a crack in the ancient trunk fell on a nook in the wood—one that held a row of ten or so very old books. Rey approached slowly, gazing at them. As she neared the books, they began to glow faintly, and she felt like the air was thrumming with energy.
She felt almost hypnotized. The books seemed to call her. But unlike the lightsaber on Takodana, that call didn’t feel like a threat. Rather, it felt like a promise, one made long ago and now ready to be fulfilled.
She reached out her hand toward the books, to touch them.
“Who are you?” Luke asked. He had followed her, and now stood looking at her as if for the first time.
Rey was so entranced by the books that she barely noticed that Luke had finally acknowledged her.
“I know this place,” she said. “This is a library.”
Luke stepped in front of her and took one of the books off its shelf. She couldn’t read the ancient runes inside, but she could feel their power.
“Built a thousand generations ago to keep these—the original Jedi texts,” Luke said. “The Aionomica, the Rammahgon, a dozen other mystic-sounding made-up names—the foundation of the ancient faith. They were the first and now, just like me, they are the last of the Jedi religion.”
He looked up from the book, his eyes searching Rey’s face. After the days she’d spent trying to get his attention, his sudden regard was a little unsettling.
“You know this place,” Luke said. “You’ve seen these books. You’ve seen this island.”
“Only in dreams,” Rey said.
He looked at her again, and repeated his earlier question: “Who are you?”
“Weren’t you listening? I told you the whole story.”
“I went in and out.”
It seemed wrong to roll one’s eyes in the presence of the founding Jedi texts. She managed not to.
“The Resistance sent me,” Rey said.
“They sent you? What’s special about you? Jedi lineage? Royalty?”
Rey was none of those things, and after a moment’s consideration Luke seemed to sense that.
“An orphan,” he said wearily. “This is my nightmare. A thousand wannabe younglings showing up on my doorstep, hoping they’re the Chosen Whoevers, wanting to know how to lift rocks.”
“Where are you from?” Luke asked.
“Nowhere,” Rey said, recalling endless days of heat and sand.
“No one’s from nowhere.”
“Jakku.”
Luke raised an eyebrow. “All right, that is pretty much nowhere. Why are you here, Rey from Nowhere?”
“The Resistance sent me. We need your help. The First Order—”
But Luke’s eyes had turned flinty again.
“You’ve got your youth, you’ve got a battle to fight, a whole universe out there to explore,” he said. “Why come dig me up? Dry bones, tired old legends. Let them lie, Rey from Nowhere. Find your own path.”
“That’s not it…this is my path.”
“Is it? Why are you here?”
There was nowhere to hide from his eyes. She took a breath, and then looked up pleadingly.
“Something inside me has always been there, but now it’s…awake. And I’m afraid. I don’t know what it is or what to do with it. And I need help.”
“You want a teacher. I can’t teach you.”
“Why not? I’ve seen your daily routine—you’re not busy.”
“I’ll never teach another generation of Jedi,” Luke said. “You asked why I came here? I came to this island to die—and to burn the library so the Jedi Order dies with me. I know only one truth: It’s time for all of this to end.”
The words seemed to reverberate inside her head, terrible and final.
“Why?” Rey asked.
“You can’t understand,” Luke said, dismissively but also a little sadly.
“So make me,” Rey said. “Leia sent me here with hope. If she was wrong, she deserves to know why. We all do.”
It was all too much, suddenly. He had seen the connection between her and the books and stopped ignoring her, only to reject her again. To reject her, his sister, and all those who were depending on him so desperately.
She silently pleaded for Luke to say something. But he just stared at her for a moment before turning and striding out of the library, reclaiming the solitude he had guarded so jealously.
In a corridor in the depths of the Raddus, Finn sat by himself on an equipment crate, looking down at the glowing beacon in his hand.
General Organa had been clutching it when the hatch to the bridge air lock opened. As crewers and medics frantically worked on the badly injured Resistance leader, the beacon had rolled across the deck, unnoticed, and come to a halt at Finn’s feet. He’d picked it up and then stood back, allowing the medical droids to attend to the general and bear her away on a stretcher.
He rolled the device back and forth in his hands. Rey was out there somewhere—and when she returned, it would be to the beacon’s location.
Finn got to his feet. He knew what he had to do, even though Poe and his other friends in the Resistance would never understand.
He just hoped he wouldn’t regret it for the rest of his life.
* * *
—
Rose Tico was also sitting by herself in one of the Raddus’s corridors, tears rolling down her cheeks and falling into her lap. Occasionally her hand crept up to the collar of her jumpsuit, feeling for the teardrop-shaped Otomok medallion around her neck.
She had spent the journey to D’Qar showing the Ninka’s techs the jury-rigged system she’d developed to cloak the energy signatures of bombers’ ion engines. Once that work was complete, she’d transferred to the Raddus. After that, she and Paige had little time together—Rose had watched from a ready room aboard the Ninka as Cobalt Hammer released its payload above the First Order’s Si
ege Dreadnought and then vanished into the mighty ship’s funeral pyre.
Paige had told Rose that they were connected to each other, and to home—and that they didn’t have to be in the same place for that to be true. But now Rose’s connection with her sister had been brutally severed. After rarely spending more than a couple of days away from Paige, Rose was looking at the endless, yawning expanse of a lifetime without her.
She had no idea how she was going to survive that—or if she even wanted to.
The technicians aboard the Raddus hadn’t known what to do with her, and they were too busy keeping the cruiser running to figure it out. They’d handed her a spare jumpsuit from the Ground Logistics Division and sent her out doing droidwork—checking bulkhead doors and data conduits down on the lower levels.
Rose supposed she should have been insulted—she’d been a flight engineer aboard a bomber, after all. Paige, she knew, would have pitched a fit on her behalf—when they’d joined the Resistance, she’d refused to fly without Rose as part of her bomber crew.
But the Resistance had no more bombers, and Paige was dead.
The droidwork had turned out to be a blessing in disguise, allowing her to be mostly alone down here in the guts of the Raddus. She had been briefly reunited with Fossil, who was also left adrift as surplus personnel, the commander of a squadron that no longer existed. Fossil had given her a ring engraved with the logo of the old Rebel Alliance—in memory, she said, of Paige’s sacrifice for the Resistance.
The hulking Martigrade’s sorrow had only deepened Rose’s misery; it was better to sleepwalk through her duty shifts with no company except the thrum of the Raddus’s air exchangers.
Then the heavy cruiser had been attacked—Rose had felt the torpedo impact on the bridge as a shudder and shimmy, followed by a deep, eerie moan that seemed to ripple through the hull. Rumors had begun flying, reaching her when she stopped in the mess or returned to the barracks. That General Organa was dead. That the Resistance and the First Order were negotiating a surrender. That the First Order had another superweapon, and more leading New Republic worlds had been targeted.
And then, for her morning shift, Rose had been handed an electro-stun prod and grim orders: Stun anyone accessing the Raddus’s escape pods.
She’d agreed without hesitation. Her sister had died to save this ship—to save the entire Resistance fleet—and deserters were dishonoring that sacrifice.
Rose heard something moving down the corridor and looked up from her gloomy appraisal of the ring Fossil had given her. A man was creeping down the corridor, with a canvas bag on his shoulder. He was so intent on his objective that he didn’t see her.
Curious, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and followed him. He was tall and dark-skinned—handsome, she thought idly. He was wearing a Resistance jacket with a rip in the back. The damage had been repaired by a malfunctioning droid or someone whose understanding of a needle and thread would be best described as theoretical.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
She was only a couple of meters away, and the sound of her voice startled the man, who bumped his head on the hatch of an escape pod.
“Hi!” he said, then began stammering. Rose couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell her.
Then she realized it was him.
“You’re Finn! The Finn!” she said.
He looked perplexed. “The Finn?”
This wasn’t going well. She forced herself to stop.
“Sorry, I work behind pipes all day,” she said, trying to get her bearings. But somehow that just made her feel more discombobulated.
“Doing talking with Resistance heroes is not my forte,” she said, then cringed at how that had come out. “Doing talking. I’m Rose.”
“Breathe,” Finn told her, and she did. It helped, a little.
“I’m not a Resistance hero,” Finn said. “But it was nice talking to you, Rose. May the Force be with you.”
“Wow,” Rose managed. “You, too.”
She understood—he had things to do. Everyone aboard the Raddus had things to do except her, it seemed. What were they not telling her now that was so important? Was there a radiation leak? Saboteurs aboard?
Rose had gone several paces down the corridor when she decided she couldn’t leave it like that. She didn’t know Finn, but whatever was wrong, maybe she could help. And Finn seemed like he could use a little help.
“Okay, but you are a hero,” she said, finding him back at the open hatch of the escape pod where she had left him. “You left the First Order, and what you did on the Starkiller Base—”
“Listen—” Finn tried to say, but Rose kept on talking, hoping to make him understand.
“When we heard about it, Paige—my sister—said, ‘Rose, that’s a real hero. Knows right from wrong and don’t run away when it gets hard,’ she said.”
“Sure.”
“You know, just this morning I’ve had to stun three people trying to jump ship in these escape pods,” Rose said. “Running away.”
Thinking about it made her angry all over again.
“That’s disgraceful,” Finn said.
“I know. Anyway.”
“Well, I should get back to what I was doing,” Finn said, smiling broadly.
“What were you doing?” asked Rose.
“Checking. Just checking the…uh, doing a check.”
Rose’s eyes jumped from his face to the bag on the deck to the open escape pod.
I am the biggest idiot in the history of big idiots.
“Checking the escape pods,” she said quietly.
“Routine check,” Finn said.
“By boarding one. With a packed bag.”
“Okay, listen—” Finn began, but she had heard enough. She reached down, the motion practiced by now, unclipped the prod from her belt, raised it, and stunned him.
* * *
—
The summons came as Poe was arguing with Vober Dand about how to best reshuffle the fleet’s remaining starfighters to protect the Raddus. Poe knew the disagreement would have been minor if both their nerves weren’t so badly frayed, but he and Vober still wound up profoundly irritated with each other. They rode the turbolift in fuming silence, ignoring BB-8’s querulous beeps, and found positions at different places in the crowd of officers that had gathered in the briefing room on the Raddus’s emergency bridge.
Taking the seat next to C’ai Threnalli, Poe spotted D’Acy and Connix—two of the few officers who hadn’t been on the main bridge during the First Order attack.
D’Acy stepped forward, and the hubbub of conversation ebbed.
“General Organa—Leia—is unconscious but recovering,” she said. “That’s the only good news I have. Admiral Ackbar, all our leadership—they’re gone. Leia was the sole survivor on the bridge.”
Poe knew that, but it still felt like a punch in the gut.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” said C-3PO.
D’Acy continued: “If she were here she’d say, Save your sorrow for after the fight. To that end, she left clear instructions as to who should take her place. Someone she’s always trusted, and who has her full confidence.”
Poe considered the likely line of succession. Undoubtedly Ackbar would have been next in line, but the old Alliance veteran was dead.
So who…
No, it couldn’t be.
But he thought it could. A promotion from the starfighter corps was unconventional, but hadn’t Leia always valued personalities over military hierarchies?
For a moment Poe was certain that D’Acy was looking at him. But it was Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo who stepped forward to stand next to D’Acy, leaving Poe unsure if what he was feeling was relief or disappointment.
If Holdo was aware of the scrutiny, she didn’t show it.
&n
bsp; “Thank you, Commander,” she said, a mercurial half smile on her face. Her hair was washed in purple, and she wore a dress of the same color. “Look around you. Four hundred of us on three ships. We are the last of the Resistance, but we’re not alone. In every corner of the galaxy, the downtrodden and oppressed know our symbol and they put their hope in it.”
As she spoke, Poe studied the other officers. They looked skeptical, he thought. Or perhaps they were all just in shock.
“We are the spark that will light the fire that will restore the Republic,” Holdo said. “That spark—this Resistance—must survive. That is our mission. Now to your stations, and may the Force be with us.”
“That’s Admiral Holdo?” Poe asked C’ai. “Battle of Chyron Belt Admiral Holdo?”
The Abednedo pilot shrugged and muttered something in his own language.
“Not what I expected,” Poe said.
As the crowd broke up, Poe approached Holdo. Her speech had been long on rhetoric but short on specifics. And she had a reputation for being unconventional—eccentric, some would say. But he also knew she was one of Leia’s oldest confidantes—and one of the closest things the general had to a friend. That alone was enough for Poe to offer whatever her help he could.
“Vice Admiral?” he asked, trying to remember if they’d been formally introduced. “Commander Dameron.”
Holdo studied him. Her eyes struck him as shrewd.
“Admiral, with our current fuel consumption there’s a very limited amount of time we can stay out of range of those Star Destroyers,” Poe said.
“Very kind of you to make me aware,” Holdo said.
“And we need to shake them before we find another base. What’s our plan?”
“Our plan…Captain? Not Commander, yes? Wasn’t it Leia’s last official act to demote you? For your Dreadnought plan? Where we lost our entire bomber fleet?”