—Chapter 27: Rematch—
Poe could feel her trembling as they watched him leave. His mind selfishly wandered to the what-ifs of Ben not returning to them, but a wave of guilt passed over him, and he pushed those thoughts back down. He gave Rey's shoulders a squeeze. "Come on. He's the toughest guy I've ever met, he'll be back. He's made it back from worse than this."
Rey nodded solemnly, taking a long, uneven breath before wiping the tears from her cheeks. "I know," she said, turning her body toward the halls that would get them to the children. She closed her eyes, and reached inside, steadying herself with a centering focus. After a moment, she was set and firm. "The Corellian children are down that way. We need to free them."
"Yes," replied Simeon. "Expect them to be heavily guarded. Are you ready?" he asked, setting his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber.
"I am," answered Rey, igniting her saberstaff and giving it a twirl, reacquainting herself with its weight in her hands.
Finn studied the two Force users before him. He didn't entirely know how to feel about what they were setting out to do. It was just the four of them: Two lightsaber-wielding badasses and two gruff Resistance fighters armed with blasters and misplaced bravado. They were about to face off against an army—Finn couldn't help feeling like the odds were more than a little bit stacked against them, in spite of how formidable his friends might be.
Poe, it seemed, was having similar thoughts. "So, uh… how do we expect to do this? You two look pretty confident. Don't take this the wrong way, but… are we marching to our deaths here? How many stormtroopers do you suppose they've got?"
Rey didn't answer, or even look in Poe's direction. She just advanced resolutely toward the hallway that would take her to the children, her saberstaff humming solidly in her hands.
Simeon, for his part, took some small measure of pity on the two Resistance fighters who were pinning their survival on the hope that he and Rey would perform some marvel and save the day. "All will transpire as the Force wills it to," he said. Finn and Poe both looked at him blankly. Simeon, taking this to mean that his words hadn't had the desired effect, smiled a smile they couldn't see, and tried again. "It will come together, don't worry."
Finn and Poe continued to stare placidly at their new comrade, but didn't hesitate to follow him once he stepped forward, following after Rey. By the time they had made it through the main hall and reached the opening where it emptied into the grand incubation chamber, the veteran fighters had grounded themselves, and their misgivings were forgotten.
The doors had been sealed and were guarded by a squad of eight stormtroopers, armed with heavy blasters and a mounted chaingun, set up behind an impromptu barricade. The stormtroopers hesitated as the quartet approached, unsure what the presence of Simeon Ren foretold about what was to come.
"Halt!" called the captain. "State your business."
"Well, someday I'd like to open a small antique shop, but I wouldn't really call it a 'business' in the usual sense," Poe called back to them as he approached. "More of a hobby that pays for itself…"
"Open fire!" shouted the captain at his troops, raising his own weapon.
Simeon deftly ignited his lightsaber and began deflecting the blaster bolts away from them. The chaingun clicked on, but too late, as Rey whipped at it with the Force, spinning it around to lay waste to the four stormtroopers standing to the left of it, ripping them to pieces. Poe shot the gunner, as Finn opened up on the remaining troops. The fight lasted less than eight seconds.
Simeon Ren stepped up to a hidden panel next to the door and, opening it, input the access code that would unseal the entrance. "Whenever we're ready," he remarked.
Rey nodded, and Simeon tapped the panel, flinging the door wide. As they crossed the threshold into the large chamber, they were instantly greeted.
"Really, Simeon?" It was Prarathi Ren. The echo of her footfalls preceded her from out from behind a row of incubation pods. "You're with them now? My god, you're weak. And stupid. I mean, what, you think you picked the winning team? This is just too sad…"
"My interests go well beyond those of the First Order, Prarathi," Simeon replied. "The Force is eternal. This petty band of thugs is not."
Prarathi sighed. From behind the blackness of her mask, she appraised her opponents—all four of them. "'Petty band', indeed. I don't have time for this." She threw up her hand, calling out to the shadows, "Open fire!"
Blaster fire erupted from every corner of the room, as an entire company of stormtroopers opened up on them. The hail of fire drove Finn and Poe back into the hallway struggling to find cover. Simeon and Rey, lightsabers ignited, pressed on. Simeon stepped forward into the fire, a whirlwind of fluid motion, his lightsaber blade whipping about faster than the eye could follow, as blaster bolts ricocheted off of it, back into the troops firing at them from around the room. His accuracy was phenomenal, as stormtrooper after stormtrooper fell, shot down by their own blasts deflected back at them.
Rey stood behind Simeon, knocking the bolts into the floor. She was amazed by her new ally's accuracy, as he managed to fell the horde of troops without hitting any of the incubation pods. Rey took a deep breath—she could feel the life within those pods, the children who had been taken from their families. Missed shots could be a disaster, and she knew it was only a matter of time before an innocent was killed. She thought of Ben, steeling herself, before using Simeon's cover to sprint out ahead of the firing range, straight toward Prarathi.
There was a clash loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of blaster shots as the yellow blade of Rey's staff cracked into the deep red of Prarathi's lightsaber. The blow was enough to knock Prarathi back, forcing her into a console, sparking electricity into the air. Rey's strength had surprised her, but Prarathi improvised as she fell, reaching out with the Force to hurl a block of debris at Rey, catching her in the hip.
Rey was momentarily thrown off balance, but had control enough to spin away from the lunging strike Prarathi Ren had followed up with. She rolled past the Dark Enforcer's backslash, and struck out at her legs with her staff. Prarathi saw the attack coming and parried, but too late, as the yellow light of Rey's staff tore off a chunk of her calf. Shouting in pain, Prarathi staggered back, falling up against an incubation pod. She looked up just in time to see Rey's staff swinging towards her. She rolled along the pod and clenched her eyes shut, waiting for the end, but it didn't come—Rey had pulled out of the attack at the last moment. Had Rey followed through, it would have ripped apart one of the tubes, hurting or killing the child inside.
Prarathi suffered no such equivocations, and grinned within her mask as she realized her opponent's weakness. To Prarathi, the children were an asset, but not an irreplaceable one. To her enemy, the children were much more. Buoyed by this knowledge, Prarathi renewed her own attack with a wild new savagery, slashing and hacking at both Rey and her surroundings with complete abandon, forcing Rey to not only defend herself, but to also expend precious energy struggling to protect the pods from harm. Rey fought passionately, but was severely handicapped by her fear for the children.
They traded blow after blow as the chaos ensued around them. Rey had completely lost track of Finn and Poe, and she feared for their safety. The stormtroopers couldn't dare open up on Rey and Prarathi, for fear of hitting their own leader, but that hardly mattered, as Simeon's balletic assaults were giving the company more than they could handle as it was. In spite of having just met him, Rey had tremendous confidence in Simeon Ren, and she felt sure that he would make it out of this alive. She was beginning to wonder if the same could be said for herself.
Prarathi Ren wasn't suffering from an overabundance of confidence either. Despite Rey's handicap, Prarathi knew that she had little chance in this battle. Rey was too skilled, too determined. Beyond that, she was shocked at the combat prowess Simeon displayed—she had never known him to be a fighter. Soon, he would finish with her stormtroopers, and she had no hope of fighting both Simeon and Rey together. It was time to switch tactics. Prarathi swung up into Rey's next attack, and the sortie knocked them both back from each other. In that moment of space, Prarathi used the Force to pull a ventilation shaft free from the ceiling where it had criss-crossed above them, and sent it screeching down towards a bay of incubation units.
Rey shouted in dismay, and, in turn, reached out with the Force to stop the falling metal cylinder, momentarily dropping her guard. Prarathi charged in, attacking with a series of swift strikes, which Rey tried to parry with one hand, while holding the shaft back from the incubation tubes with the other. Multitasking split her focus too much, and Prarathi sprung her trap, using the Force to swing the heavy metal away from the incubation tube and crashing back into Rey's chest, knocking her onto her back. Rey's saberstaff was thrown from her hand and sent skittering across the floor as her head spun circles around her body. Rey had to shake herself to clear the stars from her vision.
As Rey lay on the ground with Prarathi Ren towering over her, poised to strike, Rey knew she was about to die. This was not the first time she had felt the cold shadow of death closing in on her, but it was the only time she could recall feeling this terrified. Too many people needed her, and she wanted desperately not to fail them.
In what she assumed were her last moments, her consciousness seemed to pass from her mind. She drifted out of time, out of body—she felt ethereal, energy without form. The galaxy itself swirled past her, a spinning maelstrom; stars were born, planets ate themselves. A universe lost in time.
For a moment, she feared the blow had already come, that she was already dead. Her body coalesced back into something she could feel, and she was able to move. Looking around her, the landscape was a sea of endless sand. The incubation facility was an eternity from here, a distant memory. She was frantic to get back to where she'd been and reunite with Ben. Her friends needed her. Those children needed her. How and why she was in this place, Rey could not fathom.
"You're being consumed by your fear. You need to refocus."
At first, the voice seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once. It was only as the seconds ticked by that the words seemed to ground themselves to this world, and she could trace their echo back to the source. Her heart leapt in her throat, and she turned around.
It was Luke.
"You amaze me. Such raw strength. Such fierce determination. And such boundless, redemptive love."
"Luke! What are you doing here? Am I dead?"
"No, Rey, you're not dead," he said, smiling. "But you looked like you needed a pep talk. We Force ghosts don't like to be rushed, so I thought I'd pull you into this plane of existence for a bit so we could talk." He approached her and took her hand. He felt solid.
"What's happening?"
"Don't worry, you're not missing anything back there. When you return, it will be just as you left it. I wanted to send you back with a bit of wisdom, that's all."
"I don't understand." She had to choke out the words. Her throat felt tight. Her whole body, in fact, felt like a rope stretched near to its breaking point.
"Your fear. You're afraid of abandoning them. You're afraid that if you fail, you're letting them all down. This fear is hamstringing you, and if you're not careful, it will turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy."
"I just don't want… what happened to Finn to be what happens to those kids. Or…" A tear rolled down her cheek, and she didn't finish that thought. "I have to save them from that."
"I know you do, Rey." He knew that her fear had as much to do with her own past as it did with Finn's, but forcing her to admit that out loud wouldn't change anything. Besides, regardless of whether or not she could bring herself to say it, she felt the truth of it in her bones, and that was enough. He let go of her hand. "I know you do, but you can't expect to save them if you're too preoccupied with fearing what will happen to them if you fail. In that facility right now, you're being swallowed by that fear. You have to remember: Why must you succeed? Don't think about the awful thing you're trying to prevent—what else is there?"
She thought about this. She had been haunted by the specter of abandonment, and this was what she was running from. She had forgotten what she needed to run toward.
"For the love of their families. And for my love of my friends… and of Ben."
"Ah, Ben. Yes. He needed this little pep talk too. He fell to the darkness because he felt failed by those who should have loved him. When you got captured, he feared he had failed you. That fear nearly made him run in the wrong direction, away from hope. So I went to him. We argued back and forth for a bit. Finally, I asked him: 'What would have saved you from succumbing to Snoke? What would have kept you in the light?'"
Rey was entranced. When Luke didn't keep going right away, she had to ask, "What did he say?"
"He said…" Luke swallowed, pausing momentarily. "He said, 'If you had fought harder for me.'" The pain of the memory paled him. "I didn't fight hard enough to keep my nephew. And he fell. That was my failure. I needed him to learn from my mistake."
Rey sniffled. She wanted terribly for Luke to continue. She tried to beg him, but her voice wouldn't come. With her eyes alone, she pleaded her query.
Luke laughed, anticipating her question. "He went to Poe for help, didn't he? If that's not fighting for you, then I don't know what is."
Rey smiled.
"You saved my nephew. He saved you. It wasn't fear that did that, it was hope, and love. Find your balance. You don't need to abandon fear entirely, but you can't allow it to make you forget what you're fighting for." With a gleam in his eye, he looked at her. "Do you understand?"
Rey nodded. "Yes."
"Good, now get back there. My nephew needs you. Free those kids, and live to tell about it."
"Thank you," she said warmly.
"Thank you."
As they regarded each other one last time, the sands around her seemed to melt away. Once again, she felt disconnected yet inextricably bound to the whole of the universe. Her mind was an open sieve, through which everything filtered. Whatever words had passed between her and Luke were lost, but the ideas seemed to crystalize into something she could feel deep in her soul. Without understanding how, she suddenly understood so much. She would never be able to describe how it had happened, but she knew she was changed.
Her body and spirit coalesced back into the present, and she found herself undaunted. No time appeared to have passed since she last stared up at Prarathi Ren, about to cleave her in half with an arcing strike from above. Time no longer stood still, but it felt slowed, and Rey calmly stretched her hand out in front of her. Instantly, her nerves were alive with an energy that seemed to come from out of nowhere. As though a wellspring had been tapped and her fingers were the outlet, bolts flew from Rey's hands like she was a live wire.
Prarathi Ren was struck, frozen rigid as her body absorbed the energy. Her red lightsaber hovered above her head, flickering in her grasp as the muscles in her hands clenched it almost to bursting.
From where these boundless energies came, Rey did not know, but she found her feet. Willing herself to persist, a new shockwave surged from her fingers, and Prarathi Ren was thrown backward. Her body struck the wall, and with a dull thud, she found the floor. Prarathi Ren did not stir again. Her Force signature had been muted.
Rey was heaving, her outstretched arms trembling with the memory of what had passed through them.
She looked back to the others. She did not see Simeon, only a trail of felled stormtroopers leading further into the chamber. Presumably, he had gone ahead to face Lorim Ren. Finn had advanced in that direction and could be seen firing at far-off threats, working his way into the next room. She couldn't see Poe, and wasn't sure where he was. Praying they were all still okay, she ran through the chamber, anxious to put her newly acquired wisdom to greatest effect.
She was a conduit for the Cosmic Force, and she would do as it commanded.
—
When the air-raid sirens had begun blaring, Hux headed to lower ground. There was virtually nowhere on Kamino that was safe for him anymore, and without the benefit of troops he could confidently order around, he doubted he could secure transport back to the Finalizer. Even if he could find a shuttle, he'd be an easy target if Resistance fighters were inbound. Hux ventured away from the hangar, following the hallway deeper into the facility. His best play was to lay low until Sharna's forces had dealt with the intruders, allowing him to contemplate his options in safety.
If Sharna Ren triumphed, she might yet see fit to keep him alive long enough for him to organize a new strategy—alive, he could still be of some use to her. However, if she believed he was causing too much trouble, or if any of her tailor-made clones caught even a whiff of treachery from him, he would be finished.
Sharna had been quite effective in her clumsy underhandedness. At the moment, Hux found himself well and truly screwed.
As much as he didn't like it, Sharna successfully fighting off the Resistance attack on the facility was probably the best-case scenario for him. If Sharna were defeated, things would go quickly downhill. Escape via shuttlecraft would become impossible, and the instability of the stormtrooper army made it a terrifying risk to rely on them. If the Resistance won, he would have to hope they saw fit to keep him alive (probably to put him on trial, or some other such nonsense), and then he would just have to improvise from there.
He briefly wondered if the clones' loyalty to the First Order, and to Hux by extension, would win out if Sharna were already dead. He lamented that there was no good way to test that theory without risking his own demise.
At the moment, the safest place for him was someplace out of the way, someplace empty. Chamber Eleven was one such location, having been the first emptied. After the initial alert, Sharna would have triggered the release of the clones in Chambers Eight, Ten, and Twelve, ready or not. They would be woefully underdeveloped, mentally speaking, and would be a danger to him even in the absence of Sharna's sabotage. Best not to risk it. Chamber Eleven was the safest choice for now. Sooner or later, a victor would emerge, and Hux would know whom to beg for his life.
This was not his best day ever.
The sound of a single set of footsteps came from the long hallway connecting this chamber back to the docking bay. If the noise foretold a blessing or a curse, he didn't know, but at least it was something—he had paced nearly the whole length of the chamber, and his thoughts were going in circles. Hux stood at attention, waiting to greet the source of the footfalls.
The pace of the footsteps slowed as the shadow of a man stretched across the floor into the chamber.
"Kylo Ren. Good of you to drop by." Hux wore a smirk, his eyes narrowed. "Do you like what we've done with the place?" He paused, becoming more doleful. "That Sharna has really made her mark around here…"
Ben entered the facility and stopped walking, meeting Hux's eyes.
Hux surveyed the man in front of him, his hand gingerly resting on the blaster at his hip, though he knew it would be useless against his former ruler. "Well, look at you, all patched up," he remarked, noting the state of Ben's attire. He was wearing the repaired First Order-issue Dark Enforcer's uniform he'd been wearing when Hux tortured him on that remote moon, what felt like an eternity ago. "I guess they've taken good care of you, haven't they? That Resistance rabble… did she make it all better?"
Kylo Ren looked back at Hux intently, but made no further move toward him. Feeling he had been granted a moment to reassess things, Hux looked, but did not stir. There was something different about the man in front of him.
Hux was not Force sensitive, a fact he actually drew a sense of pride from. However, in this moment, he could feel something, a terrifying sort of dark energy, emanating from Kylo Ren, penetrating Hux to his very bones. It was so strong that he thought he could almost see it, like a shroud hanging around Kylo Ren, drawing in all the light around him. It gave Hux the sensation that if he stared too long, he may be drawn in as well. It made it hard to breathe.
Once upon a time, there had been almost nothing Hux wanted more than he wanted to end Kylo Ren, but as he contemplated the hellish vision before him, he knew it was hopeless. Drawing the blaster from his waist, he tossed it unceremoniously to the floor.
"I give up," he proclaimed.
Kylo Ren did nothing.
"Do you hear? I said I give up. I am tired…" Hux looked utterly deflated. The proud arch to his back was gone, and careworn lines settled into his face as though they'd been there for decades already. "I'm tired of battling the endless disorder in this galaxy. Tired of having my efforts thwarted by the likes of you, of Sharna Ren, and all the rest. The incompetence," he spat this word out like it had been leaving a bad taste in his mouth, "the stupidity, the short-sightedness, all of it. The galaxy needs order. It's desperate for it—but I can see that it doesn't want order. I grow weary of trying to save what doesn't want to be saved." Hux paused, taking a steady breath. "I'm done."
Kylo hadn't budged. Hux stood there, taking in Kylo's rigid form. The dark mien continued to work its way into the fiber of Hux's being despite Kylo's inaction, infecting him with its poison.
Every second, Hux grew more and more rattled. "Well? Are you going to kill me or not!?" he shouted, shaking his fist in impotent rage. His words echoed in the empty chamber, but before they could fade to nothing, they were overwhelmed by the sound of a distant explosion and the groaning of metal. Seconds later, Hux registered that the door behind him, that which led into Chamber Ten, was being battered by dozens of crazed fists and hand-to-hand weapons. Soon, it would be breached.
Suddenly, and apropos of nothing, Kylo Ren finally spoke. "You killed those children. Why?"
Hux was taken aback, and furrowed his brow in confusion. "You have a knack for asking questions that seem to come from out of nowhere."
"Just answer the question. Why did you kill them?"
"You mean those clones?"
"They were children."
"No, they were clones, and I didn't kill them, you did," Hux spat. "It was because of what you did that they could no longer be used. We couldn't restart the acceleration or conditioning protocols without rebooting the system, and that came with the risk of overloading their nervous systems. If we hadn't had to reboot, those clones would still be alive today." Hux didn't mention that, had they lived, those children would probably be mindless savages adding to the cacophony at the chamber doors right now.
Ben shook his head. The alternative to rebooting would have been to let them live as relatively normal ten year old girls, and of course the First Order would have no use for that. "This is the problem with the First Order. You make difficult decisions, but rather than own it when you make a bad one, you rationalize and justify that decision by pinning the responsibility for it on others. All in the name of 'order'. You killed those children, and you use me as an excuse for it. This is why the galaxy resists the First Order's rule. It always will. Until you change."
The pounding at the end of the chamber redoubled in its intensity. Hux turned around to face the protesting, vibrating doors. With a burst of sparks, they flew open, and a throng of simple-minded Phasmas in gleaming metallic armor burst through, wielding Force pikes and vibroblades. Hux looked over his shoulder, back at Kylo Ren, but he was gone, the doors to Chamber Twelve sliding shut behind him.
On the other side, stood Ben. He felt odd—empty, almost. It was not like him to walk away from a confrontation. That certainly wasn't what he thought he'd been going in there to do when he parted from Rey. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined that in a situation like that the first words out of his mouth would have been about children—he hadn't envisioned he would be speaking at all. With the massive doors dividing the two chambers standing shut behind him, he paused to consider the wisdom of his decision to leave Hux behind. Ben wanted to slaughter him—he wanted vengeance. To beat him until he was as broken and bloodied as Hux had made Rey, then to carve him into pieces. He had felt the darkness of his desires in his very bones. That he hadn't succumbed to it struck him as… unusual.
Before he could fully reconsider what he'd done, the sounds of humming vibroblades and agonized screams assured him that whatever vengeance he might have delivered was being meted out by Hux's legion of clones. He couldn't place the emotion he felt at this knowledge: Was it regret? Or relief? In either case, this grim chapter was finally drawing to a close, and for that, Ben felt lighter.
Lifting his heavy feet, he continued his march out of the facility. From the sound of the explosion moments ago, Ben guessed that the thermal detonators in the hangar had gone up. Hopefully, Rey and the others were in the relative safety of the first three chambers—unfortunately, exiting out the way he had come was no longer possible. Luckily for Ben, the twelve chambers wrapped around the docking bay in an interconnected circle, so Ben could go directly from Chamber Twelve to Chamber One. He could find Rey, then they could exit out the long white staircase through which they had first entered during their rescue of the kids from Lothal.
All he had to do was follow the pristine ivory staircase, back toward the open air, and to whatever lay beyond.
