Rey woke the next morning brimming with excitement, then reconsidered and tried to take a more mature approach. No one should be excited at the thought of going into battle, she might kill someone, or someone might kill her, and unnecessary violence was to be avoided at all costs. Only a homicidal megalomaniac would be excited.

But it was the most interesting thing that had happened to her in weeks, she was getting off the ship, and she could enjoy it as a nice moonlit walk with her lightsaber, if nothing else.

She had a meeting first.

Captain Nenya Matandari had taken over the recently vacated post of Head of Personnel, responsible for recruitment and training, and really wished she hadn't.

'Their demands are ridiculous, Rey.' She took another drag on her First Order branded addictive substance stick and flicked the residue off the end. 'It takes time to select and indoctrinate a stormtrooper, I can't just churn them out in a couple of months. The proper inculcation process takes years. But the staffing demands have doubled every year for the past five years and my team can't keep up. We're having to force people into the army and some of them already have names – imagine that. They're too old to voluntarily give up their identity and accept their role in the Order, they fight it. Our rate of recidivism is one fifth. It's embarrassing.'

'Recidivism?' Rey asked weakly, making a mental note to ask Janeek to clean up the splatter marks on the floor.

'One fifth of stormtroopers have broken their training in some way over the last year. I've got so many in reconditioning they're queueing out of the door. I think a lot of it is boredom.'

She lit another stick from the remains of the first, pursed her lips as the hit reached her veins, then bent forward. 'Did you know we have troops guarding factories now? I had a transfer request in last week for one unit who was being asked to stand at the end of a bench all day watching some old lady make pants. That's not what life in the First Order is supposed to be about.'

'And what is it supposed to be about?'

'Haven't you read the objectives – everyone's supposed to have a copy in their room. The purpose of the First Order is to eliminate disorder from the galaxy. We take young people, train them, give them useful skills and transferable experience in a command and control environment and then we take them out and show them the universe. It does not involve pants.'

'I see your point. I assume you're not on the military council?'

She snorted, hocked back a wad of phlegm and spat it on the floor. 'That's what I think of them.'

Janeek was going to have something to say about that.

Rey was dressed hours before the scheduled time. Haight had done a better job of replicating her old clothes this time, maybe because he was more familiar with the fabric. She'd gone for the short-sleeved tunic and tight trousers again, but tucked them into leather knee high boots and strapped on what she now thought of as her sword belt. She examined herself critically in the mirror, unsure whether or not this was a step too far. She was going on a raiding party in the dark and almost everyone on both sides would want to kill her. Wearing white was tantamount to painting a target on her back, so instead, she was head to toe in black.

She didn't really recognise herself in it, the contrast making her face pale and her eyes glitter in a way that was almost menacing. She swished the lightsaber a few times. In this outfit she looked…frightening and she felt… free. Like this was a costume she could pull on and take off and pretend to be someone else in-between. It wasn't really her.

She opened the door, knowing he was waiting but she was thumbing the lift before he'd caught up.

'What?'

He gave her a look out of the corner of his eye that ran from head to toe and everywhere in between. 'Nothing. The Axazi are slavers, and they specialise in selling children into the sex market so I wouldn't worry too much about the ethics of what we're about to do.'

'Do you think I would have agreed to come if I was worried about ethics?'

'They will be heavily armed, blasters mostly, but expect some rapid fire, heavy calibre weapons and ion cannons. This is a small outpost, fighters only, no women or children. The camp's perimeter isn't fortified but it's on an open plain, so they'll see us coming. I'm not taking armoured vehicles because this is a training exercise and there's no point in beating them too quickly.'

The lift had reached the hangar bay and he paused to put his mask on. 'Here we go.'

'Why have you started wearing that again?'

'It's new. And I need their fear, remember? Not loyalty and devotion.'

Side by side, they swept out across the floor. There was an honour guard again, despite Rey knowing for a certain fact that all these people had better things to do than stand around waiting for her to board a shuttle and she was conscious that behind their helmets, each of these soldiers was watching her dramatic entrance.

She attempted to keep her face entirely still, as humourless as his. Her boots clicked across the expanse of sparkling metal. Beside her loomed the imposing figure of Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order, his black robes swishing as he strode across the hall. If she was really going to pull off this dark side thing she decided, she was going to need a cloak, as a bare minimum.

'You're enjoying this, aren't you?' Ben said in her head, and she was mildly surprised to realise she was thinking of him as Ben again.

'Tell me something sad, I think I'm going to laugh.'

'Black suits you.'

'Flattery?'

'Sincerity.'

'Well, it suits you, too.'

He took the mask off as soon as they were on board the ship, and he settled into the pilot's chair while she strapped herself in beside him.

'We have support troops, but you and I are the vanguard and we'll lead the attack. You can use the drills we practised but improvise, this is about strengthening the way we work together.'

He laid in the co-ordinates. 'Stay close to me and if we get separated, meet me back at the shuttle.'

The ship cleared the Star Destroyer and headed out into space, flanked by a couple of transports and some short-range fighters.

'Keep your weight forward, you tend to be flat footed on the turn.'

'Noted.'

'Don't get tempted into chasing your opponent, let him come to you, it's safer.'

'I will.'

'If you get tired, take a break or switch to a blaster.'

'Understood. And Ben? You don't need to worry about me so much. I've done this before.'

But when the ship landed, disgorging them onto a grey, featureless desert with the searchlights of the Azaxi settlement already illuminating the sky, and she realised she hadn't done this before. She'd never planned and executed a clandestine attack, never followed orders, never killed a man without having been attacked first – she was just a little girl in silly clothes a long way from home.

Then someone from the darkness fired at her and her instincts overrode her doubts. She came up out of hiding with Ben at her side, ignited her weapon and the two beams of light flashed through the darkness in a tandem dance of destruction.

From what she saw of various Axazi warriors, rushing towards her with pistols blazing, they had the strength and aggression of warthogs and all of the looks. She cut them down one after the other, not really seeing or caring whether they were dead or mortally injured, concentrating exclusively on the next opponent to come her way.

'If you're quite finished playing,' Ben said from somewhere over on her right and she fought her way back across to him feeling sheepish, taking up a position at his back and allowing the Axazi to surround them. She let her awareness of him in her head rise, and then the battle really started.

It was like having an extra pair of arms and legs, she decided after a while, like a single brain controlled them both. If she dodged left, he was there too, supporting the move, he ducked, and she leapt over him, smashing his opponent out of the way. She flung out an arm in an ambitious swipe and he was under it already, chopping the legs from another. She couldn't possibly be enjoying it, not death and blood and chaos, no one who had ever wanted to be a Jedi could possibly be actually enjoying this, but the exhilaration that filled her was unlike anything she had ever known.

With him at her side she felt like she could do anything, because they were superb together. Powerful. Deadly. She was a single part of a greater whole and in that moment, in the white-hot focus of the middle of the fight, she trusted him implicitly.

The last Azaxi fighter on the field fell to a well-aimed lightsaber throw, she whirled, and because it was an extension of the connection she felt, she seized a handful of his tunic, pulled him down and kissed him on the mouth, hard.

Then she snatched her weapon and ran in the direction of the camp, yelling. His voice echoed in her mind. 'I'm not complaining, but I think you might be getting carried away.'

They wiped out the slave traders, dropping one and spinning on to the next as she tried more and more extreme feats, knowing he'd support her in whatever she did. It was faultless. Or almost faultless, if you didn't count the storage container she tried to remotely pull down on to someone's head which stubbornly refused to move, or the time she tried to run up a wall, emulating his aerial manoeuvres and fell flat on her face.

At one point, while they were standing in a darkened hut, back to back, waiting to crash out and surprise the last few slavers she found herself with a tight grip on his hand, and it felt so natural she didn't consider letting go.

She made a mistake near the end though, running so fast after a particularly slippery assailant that she blundered out into the middle of a landing bay completely on her own. A discarded blaster, pulled by the Force into service caught him in the back halfway up the ramp of the waiting Azaxi shuttle. She nudged the pigman with her foot, checking he was dead, and then stopped, the adrenalin pumping through her body falling away in an instant and leaving her sick and exhausted.

She was alone, and she had found a ship. Weeks of waiting had finally gifted her the opportunity to escape and there was no time to be lost, she could power up the engines, blast away to the nearest friendly star system, and never have to see the First Order again.

And yet…

She turned, obeying the nagging question in her mind and found him standing there in the shadows, just staring at her. He said nothing, either out loud or in her mind, simply switched off his lightsaber and waited.

It was a few short steps to freedom. She hesitated.

Behind him, something moved. She sensed rather than saw it, the raising of a wrist, the squeezing of a trigger, a blaster, aimed at his back, which he wasn't going to notice because his whole attention had been given to her.

The reaction was quicker than thought. She paused the blaster bolt in mid-air and she came back down the ramp at a run, her jaw set, sprinting past him with anger propelling her legs and a black vengeance in her heart.

There were men in the shadows, tall, well fed, well-built men, indistinguishable in their matching cloaks, hoods up, faced covered. They were not Azaxi, and they bore no insignia, although the weapons they were pointing at her were supposed to be in short supply.

The joy she had experienced was gone, hardened into a blunt resolution and she no longer worried about dark side or light side. She was a killer, and she brought death. The first man went down to a top lunge, elbows low as she'd been taught, his neck fountaining blood. The next managed to fire a shot, and she ripped out his throat with the tip of her sword. Behind her, Ben dispatched two more, and she fought beside him not for amusement but for survival.

It was a short, bitter fight, over quickly but it left a scar. Tears sprang hot and thick down her cheeks and the off switch eluded her until the lightsaber dropped from her hands.

Then strong, reassuring arms wrapped around her, pulling her in and she sobbed, held tight against his chest.