She wakes in his arms again, because she doesn't appear to be able to avoid it. This time, she is still curled up in the corner of the bed and he is spooned around her back, his arm thrown possessively over her waist. He may be doing this on purpose, or it may be that he is drawn to her unconsciously in his sleep, but either way she has had enough. She slips off the edge of the mattress, exchanges her nightwear for a blue boiler suit and boots and leaves him sleeping.

At the end of the corridor there is a lift, and she has to walk past an entire floor of empty crew quarters to get to it, the door seals all showing a steady green to indicate that they are not in use. A map of the ship has been bolted to the wall, and like the ship itself, it has seen better days, as much of the script is blurred or covered in grease and it is with difficulty that she works out that the communal areas are located on the deck above, and consist of a canteen, recreation space, exercise facilities and a couple of other rooms of indeterminate purpose. The massive decks are below, and house the engines and mechanical storage and maintenance areas as well as the ventral repulsorlift suspension system which allows the cargo to be moved around easily.

The repulsorlift stinks of burnt bread, but it works and she follows the smell into the canteen. A blue suited woman stands with her back to Rey, fiddling with a bit of apparatus which appears to be malfunctioning, as gouts of black smoke are pouring out of it and rising towards the ceiling. She stops as soon as she hears the clang of footsteps and turns so quickly she nearly falls.

The woman is also sporting a blue boiler suit, but it is much more flattering than Rey's is on her. She is tiny, with a waist so small Rey's hands would probably meet around it, and hips that flare out dramatically into a sweeping curve. The fastenings of the suit are struggling to contain the woman's ample chest, which appears so top heavy given the rest of her slight frame Rey is nearly sure it is artificially enhanced. Long blonde hair is scraped back in an unflattering ponytail, but it cannot disguise the arresting beauty of her faintly pink face, all high cheekbones and pouting, full lips.

As soon as Rey catches her eye she looks down, and steps hesitantly across the room. 'Hi, I'm Candice.'

The handshake is brief, and Rey has the distinct impression that the other woman does not enjoy physical contact. 'I'm Rey. I'm new here.'

'Oh, I know, you joined up last night. I had a message from First Officer Dann to say that he'd taken on two new crewmates to help out, which is great, because we're really short handed.' She gestures at the smoking machine behind her. 'Would you like breakfast? The food synthesiser's been broken for ages but we stocked up on Ajan Kloss and there's plenty of fresh stuff available. That is, if you can work the toaster.'

'I'm not hungry.' Rey's stomach growls at her and she attempts to remember the last time she had a hot meal that wasn't either a ration pack or jungle forage. She smiles at Candice. 'I'm starving. Show me what you've got.'

There are eggs, smoked and preserved meats, beans and pulses, condiments by the dozen, as well as a range of baked goods and Rey decides she is going to cook all of it. She finds the necessary implements and gets to work while Candice brews caf and looks on longingly.

'Do you want some?' she asks, piling half on a plate and offering the rest to her co-worker.

Candice shakes her head. 'I can only digest polystarch and blended nutrients.'

'How come?' The food is delicious. Rey thinks she may be eating some kind of bacon and she wonders why she has spent so long existing on plants when there is such a wonderful alternative in the universe.

'I'm a – well, you must know what I am. No? Really?'

Rey continues to shake her head. 'I've led a sheltered life.'

'It's how I was bred. Eating isn't attractive so I was genetically altered to make having proper meals impossible. I'm a Zeltron carfarel, or mostly Zeltron anyway, I'm not sure what the other part is, but it's why I'm not fully red. I was bred in Hutt space and I served them and their allies for years before I ran away. Everyone on this ship is running away from something.'

Rey looks closely at the woman across the table, at the way her boiler suit is fastened up to the neck, the enormous, unflattering goggles she has perched on her head, the lack of makeup or any kind of ornamentation, the way she rarely makes eye contact. 'Running away sounds like a very brave thing to do,' she says.

The woman brightens slightly and pulls out a pad. 'I have your rosters here. You've been put on droid maintenance, and it's a double shift, I'm afraid. Dann says you have to start earning your signing on bonus, whatever that is. I'm a cargo handler so I'll be down in the hangars all day, and you probably won't see D'Workan either, because he's busy cataloguing the new stock at the moment. Your husband is on engine repair. Have you been married long?'

Rey shakes her head. 'This is our first trip together.'

Candice bends closer. 'Are you running away?'

'No. But my friends don't exactly approve of him. We're keeping a low profile.'

'Oh.' Candice's eyes jump to something over Rey's shoulder, but from the familiar sound of heavy boots Rey can already tell who it is. She swings round to make an introduction, but Candice is already on her feet, her hand on her hip, her chest thrust out and she seems to be chewing something. 'Hi,' she starts. 'My name's Candy, what's yours, sugar?' She catches herself then and drops into her chair opposite Rey, her face a flame red. 'Sorry,' she whispers. 'It's genetic.'

Ben clumps forward, and Rey shifts seats so he won't take the one next to her, plonking herself next to Candice instead. 'Hello Candy,' he says, but he gives the woman no more than a cursory look, and his attention fixes on Rey.

'Candice,' she corrects. 'This is my husband.'

Candice squints at him and Rey sees that Ben's face is rippling around the edges again as he projects the image he has chosen into the other woman's mind. She leans over towards Rey. 'I see why your friends don't approve. I've never met anyone before who's married a Crolute.'

Rey freezes and attempts to see what is sitting in front of her, but he still looks like Ben, albeit a Ben in a blue boiler suit with too much chest on show. 'Looks like I did,' she grates, and then leans back behind Candice's back and mouths one word at him silently – 'Idiot.'

She understands exactly what he's done. Knowing the false name she has given and knowing her homeworld he has conducted some research and come up with a disguise as authentic as possible, but she isn't sure if he's ever seen a Crolute in the flesh before. Candice probably sees a walking ball of fat, which is what the species looks like when they are out their natural habitat, to say nothing of the voice, or the unpleasant way the skin smells, especially when they are hot.

'This is my husband,' she repeats. 'Lunkas Plutt. He's quite handsome, but only underwater.'

Ben frowns at her.

Candice is still looking dubious. 'I've met Crolutes before. They need a certain sort of attention. All Crolutes are male and they can only mate with Gilliands from Crul, no one else.' She turns to Rey. 'How does it work between you? When you're in private?' She catches Rey's expression and flushes again. 'Sorry, force of habit.'

'That's alright,' Rey gives a reassuring nod, but she turns a laser sharp stare on Ben. 'We're still working out that part ourselves.'

He pushes away from the table and goes to explore the rest of the kitchen, ending up in front of the still smoking toaster. 'What did you do to this?'

'I made breakfast already.' Rey goes back to her meal and ignores him. 'You can have what's left.'

The sounds of cupboards opening and closing continues for a while, followed by the sound of a fingernail tapping on a datapad and then some banging and a bit of low muttering before he finishes whatever he's doing. 'Fixed it. You had the settings turned up too high and someone had reinstalled the crumb tray incorrectly. It should be fine now.'

Candice rises and sways towards him. 'You're a marvel, Lunk. Can I call you Lunk? Or would you prefer Ass?'

Rey clears her throat and Candice throws her a mortified glance. 'Zeltrons are extremely sensitive to pheromones, and he's giving off a lot of pheromones, for a Crolute,' she gabbles, before running from the room.

'What was that about?'

'She's a Zeltron carfarel. Don't tell me what it is, just look it up in your head, I can work it out for myself. She serviced the Hutts until she ran away. I don't think she can help how she behaves. I suggest you leave her alone.'

'I have no intention of doing anything else.' He pulls the plate of extra food towards him. 'Are we going to train this morning?'

She pushes the datapad across the table. 'No. I'm on droid maintenance and you're scheduled for engine repair. It's a double shift. You'll probably be asleep by the time I get home.'

He shakes his head. 'I'll wait up. I missed you this morning.'

She snorts in a manner that is designed to be unattractive, and storms out of the canteen, heading for droid maintenance two decks below. The simmering anger has resurfaced and this time, it doesn't seem to want to go away. Her heels pound the corridors, her fingers punch buttons and she is unnecessarily rough with the equipment she is cannibalising, dismantling broken BB units for parts and remaking others until she has workable droids. The task is easy, and familiar, and it should be soothing but Ben haunts the boundaries of her thoughts and she finds it hard to let him go.

She has completed seventeen units and sent them to patrol the ship in search of maintenance tasks before a shipwide alert whines through the disused speakers, garbled and indistinct.

'All crew report to the bridge.' She thinks the voice may be that of First Officer Dann, but the quality of the sound is too poor to be certain.

The bridge is on the top deck, and Rey is the last to arrive. There are three other blue garbed crew members, of whom only one is unfamiliar, a non-descript humanoid male who has no distinguishing features to signal his homeworld, who is hanging around at the back of the group, shifting from foot to foot and giving every indication of wanting to be somewhere else. This must be D'Workan. Rey's instinct tells her not to trust this man, before he has even opened his mouth.

The first officer is familiar to her from their interaction the previous night, his grey uniform even more rumpled in daylight and the bags under his eyes enormous. Looking at him in the artificial light of the ship it is clear to Rey that he has some kind of addiction, because he looks permanently sweaty and there is a jittery quality to the way he moves his hands that doesn't seem healthy. She is not surprised that Ben managed to prevail upon him to employ them so easily – his brain was probably already mush before the mind trick.

The captain of the Long Goodnight is an older man who appears completely out of place amongst the crew, all of whom appear to have problems in one way or another. His bearing is upright, poised and he stands with his hands clasped behind his back; she suspects he has had at least some involvement with the military. He has iron-grey hair, swept back from his forehead over a face which is conventionally handsome, if crinkled around the edges. Candice suggested that everyone on board was running from something, but Rey cannot divine what might have caused the captain to flee.

'Welcome to the team, Mrs Plutt,' the captain booms, having noticed her entrance and he makes a beckoning motion for her to join them. 'I was just congratulating your husband on his excellent progress with the engines. Would you like to explain to everyone what you have accomplished, Lunkas?'

Rey catches the tiny wince as the captain says Ben's new name and she is tempted to smile before he eyeballs her. 'I simply improved the efficiency of the engines by thirty percent. It was nothing really.'

The captain claps him on the back. 'What Lunkas here is too humble to say, is that he has repaired the malfunctioning sub-light drive, which, as my regular crew will know, has been preventing us from attaining maximum speed for at least a year. This means that our trip can be completed much more quickly than expected, and we will all receive an extra bonus from the Nixata Shipping Line. Well done, that man.'

There is some very muted clapping from the three established members of the team, and such is their lack of interest that Rey suspects this kind of employee recognition is quite common on board.

'I expect great things of you, Mr Plutt. Now – on to the hyperdrive.'

The crew begins to disperse but Ben catches Rey's eye. 'Actually, Captain, I was wondering if I could talk to you about the shift rosters? I appear to have been put on a double rotation, and, given the success I've already had with the engines this morning, I was wondering if I might spend the afternoon helping my wife in droid maintenance?'

'Of course, of course. Duty should never come between a man and his wife,' the older man is clearly uninterested in the inner workings of shift rotations and waves a hand, as his attention turns back to the bridge controls.

Rey moves away, but Ben is trotting after her. 'It was a simple misfire in the priming circuit,' he confides. 'Quite apparent from the wiring diagram I found in the manual.'

'And you also fixed the toaster. Well done.'

His voice drops. 'I fetched the lightsabers from the cabin. I thought we could spend the rest of the day training.'

'I don't want to see you at the moment,' she whispers back. 'Don't you know when you're being ignored?'

'I know I'm being ignored,' he says. 'But I'm ignoring it.'

He clears a space in the midst of the hangar of droid parts, switches on his saber and approximates the third form so badly it looks like he has never held a lightsaber before. Rey flicks on her own blade and attempts to correct his errors but after ten minutes of trying he is still making the same mistakes and her patience, already thin, has snapped.

'Are you even trying? You don't look like you're trying.'

'I'm trying, but you don't know what you're doing.'

'I'm a Jedi,' she snaps. 'And you did better with the stick.'

He takes a breath, shoots her an assessing glance. 'If you were a better Jedi, maybe your Ben wouldn't be dead.'

His words are unforgiveable and her reaction instantaneous. She leaps to the attack and he is forced to fight for his life, because she isn't stopping until she has revenge. She chases him up and down the hangar, whirling off walls, leaping across piles of parts, duelling hand to hand on the floor. The rage blows a whirlwind inside her, a turning circle of anger that won't let go until she is sweaty and gasping, and he has sustained a number of minor injuries which are beginning to slow him down.

He puts up a hand and she pulls to a halt, wiping her forehead on her arm. 'Feeling better?' he asks. 'We can carry on if not.'

Her stance sags as she understands. 'You were trying to provoke me.'

'You were angry,' he nods. 'Your shoulders tighten up and you walk with this sort of hunch when you're annoyed with me. I thought it would be a good idea to let it out. Anger like that will eat you up if you let it. Are we done?'

'We're done,' she agrees, too exhausted to argue, but before she can switch off her saber there is another call over the shipwide tannoy.

'All crew report to the bridge.'

Rey turns, and out of the corner of her eye she sees a figure in a blue boiler suit whisk through the doorway and into the corridor, a figure with no distinguishing features who has been watching them fight for an indeterminate length of time. By the time she makes it into the hallway he is gone.

For the second time Rey assembles with the rest of the crew on the bridge, but this time the atmosphere is less celebratory.

The captain's face is dark and he spits out his words with disgust. 'I have been forced to ask you all to present yourselves here by this rabble –' he points at a ship on the viewscreen behind him. 'Who have the audacity to tell me what to do.'

Ben says, 'A YT-1300 light freighter? Who's on board?'

Rey surges towards the screen, her reservoir of fury seemingly not exhausted by the hours she has spent pouring it out on Ben. The world around her is red and jagged, and the fire in her heart rages like a furnace; her fingers itch with the urge to violence. She doesn't really see the ship through the viewscreen, she doesn't care who might be on board, she sees a threat, and her reaction is immediate and all-encompassing.

'Blow that piece of junk out of the sky,' she yells.