Chapter Thirty-Three The Monster
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The Monster
“I know where the lightsaber is,” I said. Cold sweat slid down my back. I tried to look calm, but I was staring down death and I knew it.
But what would happen if this strange fringe group got their way? Solidified their lie about Luke Skywalker and how he’d abandoned the galaxy—and how everyone else would abandon them, too? Because stories, who told them, and who heard them mattered, woven together in a tapestry called history.
Maybe Luke Skywalker had abandoned the galaxy, but it didn’t mean everyone would.
Good wasn’t always easy. It wasn’t always safe. It meant that sometimes the people you loved died in terrible, awful ways.
Good, as it turned out, was the hard choice.
Good was the long way around.
Tears burned at the edges of my eyes.
It wasn’t fair—it wasn’t fair.
But I knew that. Good wasn’t fair. Good did not grow from nothing, just as evil did not bloom unattended. But even as I repeated that—It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair—I knew what I had to do.
I just hoped I had the courage to do it.
“The lightsaber’s not here,” I said, my voice strangely calm to my ears. Was this how I sounded before I died? Unafraid of death?
The general narrowed his eyes.
Val spun to me as if I’d just betrayed him. Well, probably so. “What?”
“The saber. It’s not here with me. How did you think I got the droids back, Brother?” I asked him sarcastically. “That I stole them? That I killed the Jawas for them?” I met his gaze in a challenge. “I didn’t know how important it was. I’m just a poor naive girl on a ship, after all.”
He turned back to his superiors. This time he looked panicked. “She’s lying about something, sir. She has to be.”
The lander was getting closer, moving faster and faster, but they’d notice it soon if I didn’t do something.
I wished I could tell Dad how much I loved him.
I took a deep breath and faced the terrible tall man in black armor. He really did look like a nightmare—some warped version of pictures I’d seen of Darth Vader. “And I’m sorry to tell you this, sir,” I said to him, “but that mask is ugly, and probably so are y—”
The warlord snapped out his hand, fingers splayed.
I felt an invisible force grab me by the throat. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t—I couldn’t—
His power was so overwhelming, it was crushing.
It hurt. Everything hurt. He dragged me closer, my feet brushing the ground.
The planet around me grew faint—like a holo playing in another room.
All I could do was stare into that terrible mask.
Beneath his helmet was nothing but seething hatred.
I could feel it—thorns spiking off of him like lacerations in the galaxy.
“Then I’ll just look in your mind to see where it went,” he said—
Or I thought he said. I wasn’t sure. His voice was everywhere; it was in my ears, in my head, in my bones. A sharp stab of pain cut through my thoughts, a dull knife splitting apart flesh as it burrowed through my head. It hurt—it hurt so much I forgot to breathe.
He pulled away memories of Mom. Memories of sitting with Dad in the cockpit. Memories of playing pretend with Val. Fixing up Veebee. Laughing around the table in the mess hall with the crew. Guests—countless guests, so many guests, faces that bobbed in and out of the darkness, half remembered.
How unremarkable, I heard.
My life. He was referring to my life.
Itineraries and places and star charts and finding Mom’s copies of Under the Tan-Tan Sun in a crate in the storage room, kicking my feet as I read them secretly late at night, finding the last installment in a shop on Coruscant—
No, I thought, trying to shove him away, but I was helpless. Powerless.
He really was a monster.
He saw the firefight. He saw Sian and me hiding in the alley. The lightsaber. Sian stowing away. The night we talked on the flight deck. Personal things—private things. Tatooine. Bartering with the lightsaber. Keeping it.
There was a thread of satisfaction when he saw that.
Geonosis. Alakor. Kissing. He lingered on that.
Strange. Revolting. Then Sian taking the lander to leave.
The Starfarer arriving. Val killing Veebee.
The agony in that moment. He paused there.
Relished it. Then he inspected my memory of seeing him for the first time, this awful monster, this warlord of nightmares, this—
Kylo Ren, he said.
I would remember that.
And then he saw the glint of metal in my memory. The lander—
Suddenly, there was a noise, so loud it made my head ring. He wrenched out of my thoughts, dropped me to the ground. I puddled there. If I had bones and skin and blood, I didn’t know it anymore. He turned, raising both hands—
The lander, meters away, came to a dead halt.
I gasped for air, curling into myself on the ground, the feeling coming back like a needle of pain in my spine. My eyes were blurry. My throat burned.
With a cry, Kylo Ren threw the lander away like it was a children’s toy. The ship flipped over and rolled to a stop against the facility. Smoke sighed from the engines. No—Sian. Sian! I clawed at the ground. It was spinning too much.
“Bold,” remarked Kylo Ren.
I heard the lander door open. Through my blurry vision I watched someone stumble out.
The warlord took something from his belt. His own lightsaber. He activated it. The blade was as red as blood, a shorter blade on either side hissing, seething. I felt the heat burning my skin. He held it so close to my neck, I began to blister. I smelled my hair singeing.
He was going to kill me. There was no reason for him not to—
“Stop. Let her go,” said Sian, stumbling toward us. The troopers raised their blasters at him, but the warlord motioned for them to stand down. “I have it—I have it here. Just let her go.”
“You are bartering with me?” This Kylo Ren sounded angry now.
Sian took the saber out of his pocket. He held it up. “I’m pleading—”
The lightsaber was snatched from Sian’s hand like it was on an invisible string. It flew into the warlord’s grip. His shoulders hitched up in elation—
A moment passed in silence.
And then he yelled in anger—loud, frustrated, raw. He crushed the hilt in his hand like it was made of tin.
“This isn’t the one!” he roared.
The pieces of the saber clattered to the ground, the strange yellow crystal inside cracked in two.
He turned his attention back to me, raising his red saber. Sian shouted. My family pleaded. I squeezed my eyes closed, until suddenly, I heard a familiar sound.
I knew that sound. I knew it well. It was the sound of a ship approaching in the atmosphere. The sky filled with the scream of ships. I glanced up. Three sleek, elegant fighters with chrome finishes soared toward us, firing bolts at the stormtroopers. The men scattered like herd creatures.
Kylo Ren deflected a blast. It careened into the research facility, where it met the fuel there and exploded, knocking everyone off their feet.
Everyone except him.
“Kill them,” the warlord spat as he spun on his heel and returned to the shuttle. “You’ve wasted enough of my time.”
When Val tried to follow, the general aimed his blaster at him. “No, you stay here with your mess.”
My brother gave a start, his eyes wide. “But I found the lightsaber for you!”
“I’m glad you understand,” the redhead spat, and turned his blaster on me.
Sian positioned himself between me and the general. Though I couldn’t see what was happening, I imagined that the general had looked into Sian’s eyes.
General Hux snarled, “A Lucem?”
“In the flesh,” Sian replied, opening his arms wide with a mock bow. “I wonder, what do your dull eyes see?”
Then General Hux vomited. Two of his men grabbed him and ushered him quickly away toward the shuttle. Halfway there, he recovered enough to snarl into his communicator in a hoarse, cracked voice, “Fire on the ship when we’ve evacuated!”
The three fighter ships were coming back for a second round. They fired on the command shuttle, distracting the bigger ship in the sky, too.
For a moment, the planet was quiet.
For a moment, I sat on the ground, clutching my neck, gasping for breath, Sian picking up the shattered pieces of the saber, while Telly and Maz stole out of the ship to undo the cuffs on the other crew members.
For a moment, everything stilled as my father slowly got to his feet.
For a moment, we were alive.
But not for long.
The command shuttle took to the sky.
From the communicator tucked into my jacket, I heard Lady Sosha yell, “We’ll hold them off while you go! Go!”
Val wordlessly turned back to face us. There was a terrible dark shadow across his face. His hand still gripped the blaster, finger on the trigger. “You ruin everything,” he snarled, storming toward me, stepping over the corpse of my friend. “You—”
Suddenly, he was pulled to the ground. He whirled back to see what it was—
Veebee’s hand gripped his ankle. Half her face was melted, and her remaining eye flickered with life, but as she silently turned her gaze to me, I knew she wouldn’t let him go. What had that Rodian said an eternity ago? Always check for a pulse.
We were still alive. Our deaths weren’t foregone conclusions—not until we stopped fighting.
The hyperdrive engines weren’t primed. The navicomputer wasn’t programmed. It would take too long for Dad to get the Starfarer into hyperspace before that terrible big ship above us shot us down.
But I wasn’t Dad.
And this wasn’t a normal ship.
This was my ship.
“Get on the ship!” I shouted, shoving myself to my feet.
My stomach heaved. My entire body hurt. I couldn’t think about that.
“Hurry—Sian! Hurry!” I cried, sprinting up the ramp and through the cargo hold, glancing back to make sure everyone was making their way inside.
They just had to get to the ramp. That was it.
Val struggled to get to his feet, having dropped his blaster, but Veebee kept her hold.
She was giving us a gift. I better not squander it.
I raced onto the bridge and fell into the pilot’s seat, firing up the hyperspace engines. They yelled in warning, but I ignored them. The light for the airlock turned off a moment later and then—
“Everyone’s inside,” Dad reported from a comm station by the door. “Except…”
“I know, Dad. But he’s…”
“I know, love. We have a responsibility.”
We did.
I didn’t have time to boot up the navicomputer.
I didn’t have time to run any preflight checks.
I hoped everything worked. The ship had never failed me yet.
Warning lights flashed as the First Order’s capital ship locked on to its target, but Sian dismissed them as he sat down beside me in the copilot’s chair.
I didn’t know where to go, where we would be safe—
The three fighters banked toward the First Order’s capital ship, swirling around it like gnats.
I flipped on the thrusters and pulled the ship off the ground. I had to at least get to the atmosphere before we jumped. I had to find a lane. I had to figure out where to go—
Through the communicator, Lady Sosha said, “We’ll meet you back at Endor, Starfarer.”
Endor it was.
Sian took my hand and squeezed it tightly. “Trust yourself, Starlight.”
Glaring red lights lit up the console, alarms whirred, and then—
Trust yourself, I thought, and squeezed my eyes tightly closed.
I slammed down the hyperspace lever. The stars blurred.
The thrusters glowed white. And suddenly I found myself in the space between spaces, where time swirled around us instead of sitting still.
My wrists tilted the controls—nudged them, ever so slightly—left and then right and then left again.
I couldn’t see the celestial bodies we passed, the ships in the lanes around us, but I could feel them.
I understood them. Where they were going. Where they’d been.
Mom was right: Wayfinding was as easy as breathing.
The universe unfurled in front of me like a tapestry of lanes not yet taken, impossibly wide and beautiful, and I understood now—
I understood why my Mom had loved this so much.
The stars stretched onward. For one breathless second. Two. Three.
Ten minutes. Thirty. An hour—I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. This was why Mom had liked to have someone she trusted in the cockpit while she astrogated. Because while I did, I wasn’t in the cockpit. I wasn’t in my body.
I was the product of time and motion.
All I knew was when it was time to disembark. It felt like delicately extracting myself from a tapestry, knitting myself back into my body. I pushed the hyperspace lever back up.
The Starfarer came out of lightspeed with a pop.
Through the viewport, Endor’s forest moon sat peacefully in a pocket of safe space. No ships were waiting for us. No firefight. A few moments later, the three chrome ships that had helped us left hyperspace at our side. We had made it. We had escaped—somehow.
And the First Order didn’t follow.