Rey does no more than blink. It is not shock that seals her lips, but relief, massive overwhelming relief burning a path through the stasis that has locked her heart since she left Exegol. She doesn't really pay attention to what Poe says because there he is in front of her, as large as life, Ben Solo made mortal again. He is filthy, dirt smearing his face and neck, his hair sweaty and hardened into strands and he shifts awkwardly where he sits, running a hand over his forehead and flicking the matted locks away from his eyes. The fingers of his free hand spider across the table as if searching for something and he keeps his face bent low, studying the blank surface in front of him so that she cannot read his expression. His shoulders hunch at some external stimulus too quiet for the recording and he hunkers down into the chair.

He is worried. He must be worried given that the last time his eyes were open she was with him and now he is locked in a cell somewhere, alone. It is obvious that he is a prisoner. It doesn't look like he is injured, but putting together the overheard conversations of earlier Rey divines that Ben has been captured, although not without a fight, and is being held at Poe's discretion.

She must go to him. The thought flashes through her mind and it is accompanied by an ache of longing. The strength of the emotion surprises her. They have been living in the same galaxy for twenty years and she has never felt the urge to be with him that she feels now. It is the same urge that drove her lips to seek his when she woke from the darkness and realised who it was that held her. Seeing that he had changed, that he had renounced the dark side smashed aside all the restrictions she had put in place between the attraction she felt towards him and the decision to do anything about it. With the blockage removed, with Kylo Ren dead, she was finally free to follow her heart.

She closes her eyes and opens the bond. She hasn't touched it since she passed him Luke's lightsaber, too afraid to use it after he died for fear of where it might lead but she reaches for it now with joy and anticipation. How will he react when he sees her again? How quickly will she be able to find a place where they can be alone?

Ben's side of the connection responds to her power and she jumps to embrace it. It is like ice within her. The emptiness of it knifes her guts, ripping her open with a bitter slash. There is no answering mind on the other end, no rush of sudden, tumultuous emotion with which she must deal, no one to read her thoughts and respond with a wordless understanding, no one even to argue with her or taunt her; there is no one there. She feels a yawning pit open in her heart, the sorrow she has been trying to avoid all day beckoning her to fall in but she pops her eyes open instead and studies the projection.

Ben is still sitting in his cell staring at the table, giving no sign that he has felt anything at all. His shoulders do not move, his posture does not alter, he gives no indication that he senses her touch. Even though he is practised in self control, even though he must know he is incarcerated and in danger and must be vigilant, she cannot believe that if he felt the bond open he would not react. He was dead, they had lost each other – he wouldn't let the moment of finding her again pass without so much as a blink.

She shuts down the link inside her with a snap but the sadness remains, too strong now to ignore. It is possible that the bond has ceased to function, or that he has experienced some kind of injury that is preventing it from working – it is also possible that he has simply closed himself off from the Force. She doesn't know, but she has to find out.

She turns to Poe. 'What do you mean you don't know who he is?' she asks.

Poe shrugs and fiddles with some commands on his commlink while the projection shifts to show another picture. This time it is a corridor, poorly lit by a solitary blinking panel in the ceiling, with a thick sea of roiling black smoke lapping halfway up the walls. Rey hears muffled voices and the perspective shifts as the Resistance clearance crew she is shadowing approach, the mist swirling angrily around their thighs. There is a call from somewhere off to the left, the words indistinct but the warning clear and then from out of the darkness emerges a man, tall and broad shouldered, the skin of his torso turned a sick blue colour in the intermittent flashing of the light. His hands are open and his face bears a confused look, the brows drawn over the narrow plane of his nose. The smoke leaves nothing to the imagination, and Rey sees parts of him she has never seen, and never thought to imagine before this moment but the man seems unselfconscious and he limps slightly as he moves towards the camera.

There is a shout as he is recognised, a couple of words which are probably his name called out by one of the rebels, a warning bellowed by another. The man does not react, but his mouth moves as if he is searching for something to say. Then the firing starts.

Rey shoots a look of disgust at Poe. 'You ordered them to kill an unarmed man?' She is conscious of the hypocrisy but chooses to ignore it.

'He's Kylo Ren,' Poe shrugs. 'What else did you expect them to do?'

The blaster bolts do not hit their target. The flashes of imminent death streak towards the man in the corridor but they are deflected away, rebounding on the weapons that have fired them and the rebels are forced to dodge as their own shots chase them down. The man's abilities do not surprise Rey, but his reaction does. His eyes widen in surprise and his jaw goes slack. It is quite clear from the recording that he did not expect what has just occurred. But the Resistance are regrouping and without any further discussion they are firing again.

And the man flinches under the assault, in fact, more than that, he cowers before it, bringing his arms up into a defensive pose which speaks more of fear than it does of attack. The blasters are repulsed once again and this time some of the Resistance fighters yell as they go down but the man does not press his advantage, he does not levitate his enemies into walls, choke them with the Force or push them away. Instead, he turns and runs, lumbering back into the smoke which closes over his backside.

Rey finds her gaze drifting to Poe's to see what he makes of this behaviour. She has never seen Ben run from a fight before and even naked and unarmed he has the capacity to dispose of all his opponents and more.

'Strange, right?' Poe mutters and then forwards the recording on.

The remaining members of the rebel crew pursue their target into the mist but the corridor swiftly branches into two, with three doorways opening on either side. The commander, whose bodycam this is, waves a camouflaged arm and the team split up to search the rooms they have found. Rey's perspective follows the leader as she passes over the first threshold and enters what is clearly a massive space, since the sound of her boots begins to echo across the metal floor. This room has been partially destroyed, rubble is strewn across it and a feeble yellow glow from a far corner illuminates a cascade of rock where the roof has collapsed and the contents of the room above have spilled in.

The commander switches on her headtorch and, with hesitant footsteps, turns immediately right and begins to explore. A structure looms out of the shadows, square, a tank with a metal base wreathed in hoses and wires and made of transparisteel plates which house nothing but a dull green sludge. There is a plaque fixed to the side of the tank which shines dimly in the gloom and when the focus shifts, it reveals the number one. The camera moves to the next tank, which is of exactly the same construction, although there seems to be more of the green ooze in this one - the legend on it is the number two. The camerawoman fiddles with the angle of her torch and in the gloom Rey can see a row of similar tanks stretching off towards the back of the room, the numbers dimly visible through the darkness. A fall of stone has obliterated everything from fourteen upwards but Rey catches the blink of a tiny red bulb over the opposite side of the room just before her host sees it too, and follows the trail of light across the treacherous carpet of rock which litters the floor.

Slipping and sliding on the stone the woman approaches a tank, identical to the others she has already passed, all smooth sides and indecipherable equipment but when she gets up close it is easy to see the difference. This tank is empty. The apparatus around its base is still active, and the hum of machinery is a low buzz through the speakers as the power source operating it staggers on. Rey watches as a gloved hand reaches out and a finger is poked into a puddle of a thick, gelatinous goo covering the ground and spilling down the sides of the tank. From this perspective it is apparent that one of the sides of the tank has been retracted and whatever was originally inside is no longer there. The number on the side of the tank reads thirty four.

The camera begins to move back towards the door, but something in the next pod along catches the camerawoman's eye and she bends in closer. Rey feels the pit of her stomach fall away as the lens catches what floats inside. At the back of this receptacle, entirely encased in protective ooze, hangs a human body, large, naked, and in an early state of putrefaction. The skin feathers off into delicate streamers, blurring the outline of the shape and the dark hair forms a nimbus around the head where it has begun to drift away. As the woman turns to pace around the far side Rey gets a sideways view of the profile of the face and bile rises to the back of her throat, confirming her gut reaction. She knows that face. No one else has that profile, no one else has that nose, that combination of features in that exact proportion. The number on this tank reads thirty five.

Rey looks at Poe, but he is busy flicking the screen back to its original view, where the person in the white boiler suit sits on his chair in his cell and stares at the table. Poe watches the picture for a minute before speaking.

'I was contacted for orders not long after that recording was taken. There's more, but I'll spare you the gory details. It's a cloning facility. Looks like Palpatine has been trying to clone Ren for years. In the next room along there were clones of Snoke and in the other rooms…other people.'

Poe gives Rey a look that suggests he is about to vomit and Rey decides right then that she does not want to pursue whatever that look means.

'Palpatine asked me to kill him so he could take my body. Maybe if I'd refused, or died or if I hadn't gone to find him in the first place he'd have got a clone of Ben to do it instead,' she muses. 'The existence of the Final Order suggests he was very good at contingency plans.'

'Then why not clone himself?'

'Maybe they tried. Maybe his DNA was too degraded when they dug him out of the Death Star. He looked half dead.' The figure in the cell catches her attention. 'Do you think he's a clone?'

'I don't know and it doesn't really matter. You said Ren died on Exegol completely naked, and believe me, I want to ask about that but I'm too polite. Then this guy turns up a couple of rooms away, also completely naked, which feels like a bit of a co-incidence. But then, there's a room full of tanks with little Kylo clones that I'm going to have nightmares about for days down there and only one of them is empty. Like I said, it doesn't matter. If that's the real Ren, then he's a war criminal who deserves to die, and if that's a clone, then it isn't a real person anyway and it also deserves to die.'

Rey remembers the conversation she overheard earlier. 'You tried to execute him on Exegol. That was the situation you were talking about. But something went wrong and he fought back.'

'He didn't really fight, didn't really need to – everything just bounces off him, he's untouchable. When the team tracked him down he just stood in a corner with his hands over his eyes and waited for the firing to stop. We lost a couple of men to injury before I called a halt to it and then someone gave him some clothes and asked him nicely to get on a transport.'

'You said you needed my help?'

'Yeah.' For the first time Poe doesn't appear able to meet her gaze. 'He's got powers, so do you. I want to find out who he is and then I want you to help me with him.'

'I thought you said it doesn't matter who he is?'

Poe is looking increasingly shifty. 'I wanted to handle this on Exegol, quietly and discreetly, but he wouldn't let that happen. So now I have a team of soldiers who think they've captured the Supreme Leader of the First Order and a transport crew who are probably sending pictures of him back to their buddies right now. It's not going to be possible to keep this a secret. More people are going to know that we've got Ren in custody, whether he's the real one or not, and they're going to want me to take action.'

'What sort of action do you think people will want you to take?' Something is brewing inside Rey. She can't put a name to it, but it sends little ripples through her composure, like the first drops of a rainstorm.

'A trial,' stammers Poe, flicking her a glance that is cut short as soon as it meets her face. 'I'll have to put him on trial for war crimes and he's bound to be found guilty. People want justice, and as soon as the news spreads that Ren's alive they'll be calling out for his head. I need to know who he is first though. A live broadcast trial with a clone isn't going to be very convincing. If he's not the real Supreme Leader it would be better if we just said he was killed trying to escape prison or something. It would be better if we got rid of him right now without any more fuss.'

'You want my help to execute him, don't you?' she asks silkily, as if this suggestion is something she might consider. The storm comes closer, and her fingers begin to shake as she feels the force of it growing inside her.

Poe chooses to stand his ground. 'He probably isn't even a 'he'. 'He' is probably just an 'it'.' He nods at the screen. 'You said Kylo Ren was dead. The thing in that cell is probably just a clone, a failed science experiment that needs terminating. Or worse, it's a genetically altered clone even more dangerous than the original. I can't think why you'd have a problem getting rid of it.'

Rey takes a step forward and there is a wind blowing so loudly in her ears it is hard to concentrate. Her fingers tremble with its power. 'The man in that cell is either a clone, and is therefore innocent of any crime, or is Ben Solo, who sacrificed his life for mine.' She slides even closer and Poe's face, although so familiar, is something she barely recognises. The tornado inside reaches peak velocity and at last she can put a name to it. It is fury. She has skipped anger and jumped straight to terrible, blinding fury, a rage so vast she can't control it and her fingers whip out as the Force takes a crushing hold of Poe's throat.

'I would rather execute you,' she says.