The ship is demonically quick and she almost screams at its sheer speed and volatility.
It takes all her Force-heightened ability to rein it in, but when she does, she has a nanosecond of strange, combat-ready awe and gratitude.
The artillery on this is magnificent, but it's only a prototype – the engine is half full, so is the weaponry. But she is a scavenger – she is used to living on a bare minimum.
And this is not a bare minimum.
Rey fires at the Stormtroopers and the officers. The white dust of demolished marble plunges in the air and for a moment, she sees nothing save the confusion. Rey lands the ship on the landing dock.
He's alive. He is caught in the middle of nothingness, in a halo created by the bodies.
Blaster shots, dozens of them, stopped midway in the air – he did this before.
His eyes are now ablaze with something that almost resembles hope, and disbelief, as he sees her.
„Come with me", she yells. „Come with me – I can't hold them for much longer".
He hesitates, only for a split second, but the blast shot that grazes his shoulder snaps him out of this hypnosis. She fires back with her blaster gun, and he deflects the remaining shots with his saber, but the barrage is growing strong.
The barrage is so strong, in fact, that she has to go back to the ship, reinforce the energy shields and fire back at them with one discharge at the time. She still has to preserve the energy, and if this goes on for too long, she'll have no fuel to escape the landing pod.
It takes forever, and she loses sight of him.
Cold sweat goes down her spine – she isn't afraid to die. She is afraid of dying with the notion that this was all completely wrong, her utter failure, her stupid stubbornness that got them all killed or captured. There is a struggle in the streets: the rebels are running away with the horrified masses. Poe tries to reach her, but the communication is broken. Finn is separated from the rest of the group and is tossed around in the formed stampede. Nobody noticed their presence in the chaos that ensued – and that is the only good thing.
The door to the fighter is open – but act as a frame to nothing save for a few corpses of Stormtroopers and the rubbles of the marble fence.
Rey's heart sinks.
„Ben! "
She cries out some more, but it is in vain.
The barrage subsidies and she sees her weapon is on that bare minimum. Stormtrooper's blasters are now strangely silent.
And soon enough, she sees why: there is a new weapon in sight. They slowly pull the cannon from beneath the arcades.
The First Order banner, monstrously long, sways languidly back and forth in the low wind as she is faced with yet another modification of the battering ram from Crait.
They'll sacrifice their wounded men, wailing on the floor in dozens. They would even sacrifice half of the city just to see them both dead.
Rey freezes. That sort of malice makes her freeze. The stench of death makes her freeze.
But as her mind scrambles to break the codes and prime the ship for hyper-jump, hoping she'll avoid the deadly beam from the miniaturized death star, a Stormtrooper hits hard against the broken fence. Another one is thrown away with a choking sound.
Kylo Ren.
Kylo Ren barges in, eyes bloodied, multiple wounds on him. Blood. Blood and horrifying, desperate determination.
Panting. His saber crackling in his hand like a rattle-snake.
For a moment, she thinks this is just an elaborate scheme, an operatic interlude played to make her come here and to obliterate her from the face of the planet. A spectacle for the Imperial Day, and she is the main attraction.
She remembers her Master and she remembers Crait – same thing coming at her again.
But as she gazes back at him, eyes wide with shock, he pushes her to the side. With the speed of the hawk, he instigates the ship. He doesn't lose his time, like she does, to figure out which panel does what and what are the priming codes. He knows it all – he helped the First Order build it. She is a fierce pilot, but he is trained and above all, he has that mad determination in the face of death. He is used to death. He is the harbinger of death.
Take the guns. Go.
The ship is lethally quick and versatile. It soars in the matter of seconds to the sky.
She has no time to think. TIE fighters come rushing in with that terrifying engine sound, engineered specifically to instigate deadly fear. The last sound of many dying throughout the galaxy.
This is something she can do, something she mastered. She takes 4 of them in an impressive time, and even in that darkest hour, she finds herself wild with joy.
I can't hyper-jump if they'll at our tail. Brace yourself.
He makes an impossible, spinning maneuver between the two narrow sets of towers. It's so close that she loses her breath, thinking they'll crash into one of the mirrors cast in metal and glass.
But they don't. He is a terrific pilot and she almost admires him for it.
They manage to escape that squadron, but almost immediately another one practically crushes directly against them.
Rey almost feels the ventilation in that TIE fighter when a thundering blast sends the enemy craft swirling and ablaze to the ground.
„Falcon", the glass mirror of the skyscrapper reflecting it like a ghost, like a mirrage. They haven't abandoned her.
But their energy is on the very last minimum.
„I have only one chance to hyper-jump", he shouts in his own voice and for the first time, she detects he is genuinely panicking.
She takes another TIE fighter and that is their last chance for a shot. Anything beyond that will just pull them irreparably to the impulse speed.
Master Skywalker, help us.
The ship jumps.