Rey caught the edge of an overhang and vaulted herself over the top with a grunt. The Jedi of old could augment their physical abilities through the Force (the mental image of Master Skywalker leaping tens of feet in the air often amused her), but this wasn't all that different from the massive, decaying Star Destroyers she used to salvage on Jakku.
Her thoughts drifted back to the stranger on the cliff watching her and her friends. If there had been one at all. Such strange things had been happening to her since the night of her vision. She was beginning to doubt what was real and what wasn't.
"Can't be thinking that way right now," she said out loud, as if her voice would frighten away the ghosts in the tunnels.
"Need to keep moving."
She was drawn upwards by the distant sound of rushing water. Could there be a waterfall up ahead?
It didn't seem possible, but as Rey entered the next massive gap in the wreckage, she saw that it was true. Somewhere up above the rain must have collected in a great volume (Rey suspected it rained a lot on this planet), and was coursing down through the gap in the ceiling. All around her the wreck was covered in spongey moss and lush greenery. Here and there a small amphibious creature darted through the undergrowth. There was an entire little world inside this splintered section of the space station. Seeing the signs of life sprouting from amidst the cold, brutal facades of the Imperial structure heartened Rey. If these vines and frogs could manage it, so could the rest of the Galaxy.
Seeing no other way out of the chamber, Rey tied back her hair and dove into the pool. Five years ago she never thought she would see this much water, much less learn to swim in it. But she had changed in a lot of ways since Jakku. She found a tunnel in the green fluid and followed it deeper into the station.
Rose threw her weight behind a door, pushing it open.
"So, Jannah. Last night you mentioned 'Chrome Domes,' as in plural. Are there more people like Phasma in the First Order?"
Jannah laughed. "There ain't no one else in the galaxy like Captain Phasma."
"But yeah," Finn explained, "Top brass in the ranks wore chromium plated armor. Silver, gold. Maybe a green? You probably didn't meet any because they usually stayed onboard the Destroyers and conducted remotely."
"Couldn't get their shiny paint jobs dirty," Jannah said bitterly.
"At least one of them is gone now," Poe sighed. "You and Rose took care of Phasma on the Supremacy way back."
"No way," Jannah spun around, accidentally blinding the others with her headlamp.
"Sorry. But no - you guys killed Phasma?"
"Well, we dropped her through the floor of a burning hangar bay," Finn said.
"Oh. So you didn't see the body."
"The whole starship was cut in half and falling apart," Rose said, disbelieving the scavenger.
"You don't know Phasma like we do," Jannah shook her head. "Anyway, we're here."
They walked out of the passage into a high cliff overlooking the old Destroyer. Babu Frik poked his head out of Rose's bag and cooed nervously.
Far below them lines of Sith Eternal Troopers marched like ants into the ship. Still more were overseeing a perimeter of flares around a section of the Death Star's hull.
"There's so many," Connix breathed.
"Were I a betting woman," Jannah said, pointing at the flares, "I'd say that's the surveying team for the next salvage run. You go that way, you'll find your hidey hole."
Scrabbling across the uneven surface of the station proved the most difficult leg of the journey. Fortunately, none of the Troopers ever looked up to see the strange procession above them. R2-D2 decided to stay behind, not trusting his wheels on the perilous hike. He chimed in over the comms every so often to provide C-3PO with updates on the destroyer.
When the massive ship finally did take off, it nearly blew them off the side of the cliff. A bright red beam emerged from the canon on its belly, heaving the wreck up towards it with a deafening sound. At the same time, it began to rise; pulling the chunk upwards like a slice of cake. The Rebels could make out the cross-sections of several decks, and here and there the bright red shapes of the Cult's soldiers overseeing the lift.
"How are they going to get back in the Destroyer before it leaves the atmosphere?" Connix asked.
"I don't think they care," Poe said grimly.
When the piece - not as long as the ship but at least as tall - was secured, the Destroyer fired its thrusters and surged up into the clouds. The force of the liftoff caused several pieces of station to collapse, if the number of birdlike creatures taking off in the distance was any indication.
"That's our clock running," Jannah recaptured their attention. "We should get where we're getting before the next one arrives."
At length, they came upon a sizable outcropping in the hull. Standing guard in front of it was a lone Sith Trooper.
"That looks big enough to fit the Falcon in, wouldn't you say?" Poe asked.
"Yeah," but I feel like that guy wouldn't like us parking here," Rose whispered.
Jannah shook her head.
"Leave that to me."
She stuck her thumb in her mouth to wet it, then held it up to the wind. After a moment, she nocked an arrow from her back quiver into her bow, and let it fly. It struck a soft point in the Trooper's gear, causing him to fall lifeless to the ground.
"You wear that stuff long enough, you know where it hurts most to get shot," she muttered. "He ain't dead - not at this range - but he ain't calling his friends either."
"That's good, actually," Poe said. Because I've been meaning to talk to one of these guys."
A few minutes later, the Resistance and their guide were standing over the Trooper.
"Now let's see what we're working with," Poe said. He pulled off the red helmet, and everyone reacted with shock and revulsion.
There was no face underneath the mask. Not in any logical sense of the word. It resembled a human thumb; featureless save for many hundred tiny and thin wrinkles spiraling out from the center, and coated in a fine oily sheen.
"What is it?" Connix said, her hands covering her mouth aghast.
"This physiology does not appear consistent with any species in my databanks, Threepio reported.
"Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say this being was grown, rather than born through traditional means."
"Cloning?" Poe asked the droid."
"It's possible. I couldn't say for sure."
"But even in the Clone Wars clones looked like, you know, people." Finn said gravely. "This is something else."
"Let's move him out of line of sight," Rose said.
"I have a bad feeling about this."
Rey shivered, wringing her jacket out on the edge of the flooded passageway. She was at a doorway to a turbolift shaft, if she wasn't mistaken. Once she had recovered from the chilly swim, she climbed up the shaft to the next floor, and wedged the door open with her staff. She was surprised to see sunlight stream in.
This room had aged rather poorly. The ceiling was caved in, and most of the support frame had rotted away. This must have been against the exterior of the ship. A rusted and lopsided staircase, its underside clogged by a dense thicket of bushes, lead down to where Rey stood. It seemed like the entire room was pitched upward at an angle, affording Rey a powerful view of a once stately looking circular window, its frame now hanging in a void open to the sky above.
Sitting at the apex of the room was a molding chair with high armrests and a deep set back. When Rey saw it, she was immediately drawn towards it. She could focus only on the sound of her own breathing as she climbed up to the peculiar chair.
She felt this way before, in a closet beneath Maz Kanata's bar on Takodana. The call of the Force, and an inescapable desire to reach out and touch...
As her fingers neared its decaying seat, the wind died off, and the mist in the air disappeared. Even the insects chirping in the undergrowth all paused, throwing the room into a sudden, ravenous silence.
Like that day in the basement of Max's castle, Rey was struck by a jolt of energy as she made contact with the chair. The clouds of Kef Bir lurched upwards, inducing a nauseating sensation of motion as the world around the ruined chamber was wreathed in starless night. The chair began to swivel on its base, as the same horrible, corpselike laughter that Rey heard several nights ago began to play across the still air.
When the chair finished revolving, there was a robes figure sitting in it. They looked up at Rey and sneered with a mouth full of sharp teeth. The young Jedi gasped. It's face was Rey's own. Dark, and distorted, but unmistakable. This other Rey raised her arm and pushed her twin back towards the foot of the stairs. She stood up and pulled a lightsaber from her robes, igniting a red blade, then another, then unfolding the weapon with the flick of her wrist to create a long saber-staff.
Rey vaulted to her feet and drew her own saber. They clashed again and again in the darkened throne room.
"Submit!" The dark Rey hissed, and electricity arced from her fingers, lancing through the destroyed room. Rey screamed as it briefly courses through her body.
"Fall!"
Reaching hold of her foe with the Force, Rey tried to grapple the weapon from her doppelganger's hands. The whole station groaned as the two Reys entered an invisible struggle with each other, until finally the whole room fell, the floor's steep angle partially righting itself with a thunderous crack.
Rey lost her footing, then her grip on her saber, and fell backwards through a gap in the stairs. When she crawled out of the bushes, the grey sunlight had returned to the room, and her twin was gone. She grabbed onto the slats of the stairs and started sobbing.
"Master Skywalker, I can't do it!"
A blue spectral hand fell on her shoulder.
"Talk to me, Rey," Luke said softly. "What has shaken your resolve?"
"All these things are happening to me and it scares me. I feel like I'm losing control of myself! Luke, lightning came out of my hands. How am I supposed to fight the greatest evil in the universe if I can't balance the Force within me?"
"Do you know where we're standing right now?" Luke asked. He waved his hand across the area under the stairs.
"This is where I faced off against Vader. This room - the Emperor's throne room - was the place where I faced my destiny as a Jedi. And I almost couldn't do it. The threat my father posed to my sister, all of my friends? I lost control. I felt the Dark Side surge through me, guide my actions."
"How did you find your way back?"
"There is no 'back,' because there is no 'here.' The Force ebbs and flows, and the Jedi is like a ship on its sea. The struggle between light and dark is the burden of all who walk this path. Ben Solo faces this burden even now. On that day I was able to reject the Dark Side by feeling empathy for my enemy. You will find your own way."
His face fell.
"But you will have to find it on your own. The path ahead of you is clouded by the Dark Side. Even in this room it hangs so thick that I can barely see you. I'm afraid I can't follow you to Palpatine."
"If I were stronger, you would still be alive! And I wouldn't be the last Jedi…"
"You can't think that way, Rey," said Luke with a stern frown. He held out his hand, and Rey's lightsaber floated out of the shrubs and into his hand.
"Every day I was on that island, a part of me wanted to leave. To go out there and be the Jedi people like you wanted me to be. I thought that resisting that urge was strength, but I was wrong. There are people that care about you, and about this fight. They may not be Jedi, but that won't stop them."
"I'm not alone in this," Rey whispered. Rose had told her so just the other day.
"Master Skywalker, I-"
But when she looked up, he was gone.
Rey emerged from the gloom of the wreck's interior with a renewed vigor. People were counting on her, and she couldn't let them down.
Above her, the cloud cover had increased considerably, and the sky grumbled with the promise of an imminent storm...
"Come on, Threepio!" Rose called back.
"Do wait up, Mistress Rose!" The golden droid waved his arms frantically.
Rose and the protocol droid were at the rear of the group as Jannah and Poe led them deeper into the fissure.
"It's quiet in here," Jannah muttered. "I don't want to sound paranoid, but it doesn't seem like it should be this quiet."
"I think we're okay right now," Finn said. "But I don't know how we hide the ship when this place is swarming with Sith Troopers."
Connix thought about it for a moment.
"Swarm is a good word, Finn. The way they move, and the way they see, it's more like an insect hive than an army."
"It's true, they're not very attentive when it comes to their surroundings. A side effect of the 'no eyes' thing, I guess."
"Maybe we can use that to our advantage," Poe said.
"What do you want to do," Finn wrinkled his nose, "stick the Falcon on the ceiling and hope nobody looks up?"
"If they're a hive, all we need to do is convince them that they already have drones in this part of the wreck."
"I am not putting that dead thing's armor on," Finn scoffed.
"You shouldn't have to," Poe shook his head. "They ought to have some sort of transponder they use to coordinate their positions."
"Ooh, and then you can trick them into thinking their man is still alive." said an excited Jannah.
"We'll… probably need more than one."
"Let's take things one step at a time."
Behind them, Rose and C-3PO continued their squabble.
"I was not programmed for such urgency. Why, there's simply no way a droid of my model could-"
"We really need to get you a repulsor pack or something," the mechanic grinned. "My grandmother moved faster than you d-"
She turned around to see not C-3PO shuffling behind her, but the shrouded form of Trudgen Ren.
"Hello, my dear," Trudgen said softly.
A hand cupped her mouth from behind her before she could scream.
"No, no," Vicrul rasped in her ear. "Don't go spoiling the surprise."
The surprise was to come sooner than expected, however. BB-8 happened to turn around and saw Rose surrounded by Trudgen, Vicrul, and Ap'Lek Ren, who now held the deactivated body of C-3PO slung over his shoulder. The astromech beeped, sounding the alarm. Poe and the others ran over.
"Rose?"
The corridor was filled with smoke that obscured their vision. Finn sprinted through it, shouting for his friend.
"Rose!"
Far away from Kef Bir, Lando Calrissian and a team of Resistance foot soldiers emerged into the light. The acrid, dust choked air offered little relief from the stifling crypts below, but Lando took what he could get.
"This place gives me the creeps!" Lando called out to Bek, whose team was waiting for him outside. "Nothing but old bones and echoes."
"Just as well!" An old voice shouted from his pocket. "This place hasn't been inhabited since I was a girl. You'd be in big trouble if you encountered anything stirring in those crypts."
Lando winced and pulled a disc from his pocket. The image of Maz Kanata flickered to life on its surface.
"Ah, Maz. All that rock we were under must have interfered with my communicator."
"Lucky you."
Lando and company were on the old Sith homeworld of Moraband, delving into the tombs of the Dark Lords that had been built here long ago. The old Sith had apparently experimented with finding eternal life; Bek thought that perhaps one of these graves had a clue as to how Palpatine was able to escape his fate. Lando had just finished another expedition into the Tomb of Darth Bane, a giant split open pyramid that dominated the landscape of the valley.
"You're the lucky one, Maz. This is no place for a lady."
"I had my place," the alien sighed. "A nice one. The First Order blew it up."
"Well, maybe after this all blows over you and I can go into business together."
"I know what kind of business you get up to, Lando Calrissian, and I want no part of it! Look at me! I've already allowed Han to drag me into enough of his messes. I'm much too old to get dragged into one of yours."
"Please, Maz, I'm a legitimate businessman," Lando said in mock hurt. "I can promise you, I wouldn't disappoint."
"Be careful not to gamble something you wouldn't be able to pay up on," Maz said mischievously.
Nien Nub said something in his complex linguistic pattern. Bek nodded.
"I agree. I don't believe they're talking about gas mining anymore." Though he said it quiet enough that Maz wouldn't hear him.
"One thing's for sure," Lando frowned. "I wish Han were here with us. This was always his forte more than mine."
"General Calrissian," a transmission came from their ship. "Something is coming out of lightspeed nearby. It's going right over top of you."
Lando and Bek looked up to see first one, then three more Star Destroyers passing over the valley…
Rey saw the Millennium Falcon cruising low over the crooked frame of the station. It landed on the other side of a rise she was climbing. Before too long she was on her way down into the cave where her friends were waiting. None of them looked very happy, though.
"What's wrong?"
Poe held up a dagger, the same dagger she had taken from Trudgen Ren on Kijimi. Tied around the hilt was the teardrop shaped pendant Rose wore around her neck. It then dawned on Rey that the Resistance technician wasn't with them.
"No," Rey shook her head, the blood rushing around her skull. "It can't be true."
"She's gone," Poe choked on the word. "They took her."
The station rumbled as Rey collapsed, and beyond the stillness of the Death Star the Resistance could hear the drumming of rain.