In the previous chapter: Rey and Ren spend some time together in the Gryl's temple after a Potentium mission. Ren reveals that he doubts Snoke can answer his questions about the Force. Finn tracks Rey to Gryl and is angry to find her there with Ren.

Chapter 9

"They came out of nowhere," Poe explained miserably. We were standing by the main entrance to the Resistance command center. "One minute we're on the ground refueling at a starport in the Nazzareem capital, the next there's Stormtroopers piling out of a transport and the whole place is getting lit up by blaster fire. We don't know if the Order knew we were there or just got lucky with a random patrol."

"How did they end up with Fariya?" I asked.

Poe grimaced and gestured to his bandaged leg. "I got clipped and went down hard behind a cruiser. Fariya ran out to distract the bucketheads. Kid's got a lot of spirit. She sounded like she was handling herself. That's the last time anyone saw her."

I made a mental note to tell Fariya about Poe's compliment, when – not if – we got her back.

"Luke took down Phasma – now that was one hell of a fight – and was telling her to order the Stormtroopers to surrender. But instead, they retreated. We didn't know they'd taken Fariya until we regrouped."

"Are you sure they have her? She could be hiding somewhere on Nazzareem."

BB-8 rolled back and forth in agitation as he beeped and blooped from his spot at Poe's feet.

"They sent us proof?" Dread curdled in my stomach.

BB-8 projected a blue hologram of Fariya. Dried blood streaked across her temple, and she was furiously screaming straight at the camera. Though no audio accompanied the short clip, it was clear that the fury in her eyes barely overrode her terror.

"The ambush happened around noon base time. That showed up two hours later," Poe said, averting his eyes from the hologram.

I knew I had to help. Fariya was like the little sister I'd often wished for, even though I hadn't realized how annoying sisters could be.

Leia sat at a cluttered desk in the command center, reviewing reports in a rare moment of solitude. I dropped into a crouch next to her.

"I'm sorry I wasn't here sooner," I spoke in a low voice. "Is there a plan to get Fariya back?"

"We sent a message to the First Order after they sent that horrible holo clip. We want to negotiate terms for a prisoner exchange. Among other things." Leia glanced at the chrono on her desk. "That was an hour ago. If Snoke doesn't agree to it soon, we're going to plan a rescue. We'll be faced with some hard choices about what to do with Phasma."

I understood her meaning perfectly: the Resistance would interrogate Phasma for knowledge of the First Order. Kylo Ren had done it to me, after all, and the Order was certainly ruthless enough to do it to Fariya.

"What would it take to convince Phasma to tell us anything useful?" I wondered aloud.

"I hope we aren't forced to find out."

An awful thought occurred to me: would Luke and I be asked to use the Force to interrogate Phasma? There had to be another way to resolve this stalemate.

"I could talk to… you know…"

Leia's eyes widened in realization. She nodded in consent.

I leaned against the wall in a corner of the command center and sank into the Force, seeking out Ren at the far end of our bond.

'Are you with Fariya?'

'No. She is Hux's prisoner, not mine.'

'Is she hurt? I saw the holo clip.'

'She's unconscious right now. Induced by a med droid. I'm scheduled to interrogate her once she wakes up.'

'If you interrogate Fariya the same way you did me, you'll violate the treatment protocols that protect prisoners of war.'

'That doesn't concern me.'

'Kylo, don't. She's just a girl.'

Agitation flashed through the bond. 'You mistake your influence on me,' he replied in a low, threatening tone. 'Potentium is the only exception I make for you.'

Ren was better than this. My fists clenched and I decided to try a different tactic. 'So is Snoke ignoring General Organa's message?'

'Message?'

'The one she sent an hour ago! We want to exchange prisoners. Fariya for Phasma.'

My head was empty for a long moment, and then Kylo said in a stiff tone: 'No one has informed me. Yet, I mean. I've only just now returned to the Finalizer.'

'Why didn't Snoke accept the terms immediately? Isn't Phasma valuable to the Order?'

Kylo's mirthless chuckle echoed through our bond. 'Snoke considers Phasma's loss an inconvenient setback. Hux thinks differently, though.'

'What do you mean? Are she and Hux…?'

'I don't understand their relationship any better than I do ours. But yes, in some twisted sense, they are together.'

'Then you and Hux need to convince Snoke to meet with the Resistance so we can negotiate the exchange.'

'Nothing good will come from this, Rey. Are you sure you're that desperate to have her back?'

'Yes.'

He scoffed in my head. 'You owe me.'

I pulled back from the connection and returned to Leia's side. I put my hand on her shoulder and leaned down to speak quietly in her ear.

"Kylo is speaking to Snoke about the exchange."

Leia's hand settled on my own and squeezed. "Thank you," she whispered.

An hour later, Leia called a meeting in the command center. "I received word from Snoke. The Order has agreed to meet to negotiate a prisoner exchange. Along with terms for the future of the planet of Nazzareem, and rules of engagement for future discord." She spoke the last word with no small amount of sarcasm. "Snoke's term, not mine."

"I'll ask the obvious question," Poe said. "What do they have to gain from this? Could it be a trap?"

Finn spoke up: "It would cause days, if not weeks of delays to replace Captain Phasma. She leads the entire Stormtrooper army as their Captain of the Guard. No one in the First Order is considered irreplaceable, but she's the closest thing to it. And she's important to Hux."

I already knew what Finn meant. It took the others longer to read between the lines.

"You mean to say we have Hux's girlfriend?" Poe asked.

Finn grimaced at the mental image. "There were rumors. That's all I know. But it might be enough to get the Order to play by the rules."

Leia glanced down at notes scrawled on her datapad. "The meeting will take place in neutral territory, with only a few representatives from each side. Snoke will be accompanied by Hux and Kylo Ren. Who should represent the Resistance?"

The group called out several names.

"Poe and Finn should go with you. They won't let Snoke bully you around," Snap Wexley said.

"Major Ematt is a veteran of the Galactic Civil War. He has the most experience with negotiations," Admiral Statura said.

Leia nodded at the assembled group as she considered their suggestions. "Finn, I'd appreciate your insight."

Finn looked around at the gathered faces. "If the First Order is bringing Force users, then we absolutely must match that. Luke should go."

Several heads nodded in agreement.

"Luke is more than a match for Snoke," Poe agreed. "And Rey has handled Kylo Ren on her own, multiple times. None of the rest of us can say that. She should go, too."

More people nodded and a few people verbally expressed their support for the idea. Finn shot a miffed look at Poe, no doubt disturbed at the idea of me being anywhere near Ren.

"Luke and Rey will accompany me, then," Leia decided, entering notes into her datapad. "Along with Phasma and some guards to watch her."

Luke had been quiet throughout the meeting, but he cleared his throat now and stated, "I hope you're planning for us to make it out of the meeting alive."

Leia sighed and lowered the datapad. "An old acquaintance of Han's is a professional broker for political negotiations. Snoke agreed to make arrangements through him."

Luke's eye started to twitch. "You don't mean… you can't be thinking…"

"We're going to Skunkt."

–

–

–

According to Finn and Poe, Skunkt was the most wretched place in the entire galaxy.

It was a space station in the Outer Rim, which allowed it to exist without pesky things like planetary oversight or safety regulations. Members of the galaxy's underworld congregated on Skunkt to engage in illegal business ventures, pursue entertainment banned on a majority of planets in the galaxy, or simply vanish from existence. Criminal syndicates from a dozen different systems shared ownership of the space station. While they happily fought amongst themselves to enforce their turf, none of them put the same amount of effort into maintenance.

We left Emmett II the next morning as the sun poked around the peak of Skybreacher. It took a few hours of travel to reach Skunkt. The space station was located far away from official hyperspace lanes, requiring me to drop out of hyperspace several times during the trip to manually orient the ship for the next jump.

We left the swirling blue light speed tunnel one final time and emerged in front of an enormous space station that blotted out half the stars in the sky. Skunkt was shaped like several discs of decreasing size stacked on top of one another, all held together by a central core trunk.

Leia directed me to a privately owned hangar situated on the underside of the largest disc. After we paid the exorbitant docking fee, I maneuvered our transport into a spot close to the hangar exit and killed the engines.

Whispered voices started pressing against the inside of my skull. The space station was an electrified pit of greed and despair, and they seeped through my mental shields like an irksome leak I couldn't plug.

"I'm keeping the ship's shields up," I said over my shoulder to Luke and Leia. "It's just a precaution. A lot of ships did it on Jakku. It'll drain the fuel cells faster, but the protection is worth the cost."

Leia nodded in agreement at me, and left the cockpit to give final instructions to the four guards who would be watching Phasma in our absence. The three of us donned hooded robes, exited the transport and approached a door set in the wall of the hangar.

"Follow me," Leia ordered, "and don't get separated."

We pulled our hoods low over our faces and stepped out of the hangar into complete and absolute chaos.

No one with an ounce of common sense, a shred of respectability, or a functioning sense of smell should have been caught dead at Skunkt. But those criteria clearly ruled out only a small portion of the galaxy, because Skunkt was packed. I thought I'd seen a fair share of the galaxy's races at Niima Outpost, but every step down the corridor proved me more and more wrong.

As we pushed through the crowded corridor, I saw flashes of glowing, neon feathers, fur clipped into geometric patterns, and smooth, transparent skin stretched like plastic over organs – all of this belonging to races I'd never dreamed lived in the same galaxy as I did. Nearly everyone spoke in their native language instead of Basic, which only added to the waves of stimuli battering all of my senses. Stars above, the emotions running through this place were almost torturous in their intensity: brash and insistent and coarse, screaming at me from all sides.

I didn't realize I'd stumbled to a halt, lost inside my own head, until Luke looped his arm through my own and dragged me forward.

"Shields, Rey. Now."

I gulped and sucked energy into my head, rebuilding my mental shields so they were thick and dense enough to muffle everything outside of my own thoughts.

"There is no emotion, there is peace," he prompted as we continued down the corridor after Leia. The torrent of voices faded, like I was hearing a boisterous gathering from several rooms away instead of being right in its midst.

"Thank you," I whispered to him, grateful that he didn't release my arm. There were more people stuffed inside this space station than the entire population of Jakku, I was sure of it.

We walked through several large, open areas set aside for vendors to operate stalls, though just as many merchants chose to set up makeshift storefronts along the edges of already crowded hallways. There were racks of viciously styled weaponry and ammunition, tiny sentient pebbles that squeaked when touched, and even souvenirs from the days of the Empire and Republic. Half of the food stalls we passed smelled delicious, while I suspected the food from the other half would kill me.

I started to recognize pieces of Jakku amongst the confusion: the uneasy relationship between masters and slaves, the desperate edge to someone's eyes who hadn't eaten properly in days, the people who had slumped down into corners and gutters and sat wondering if Skunkt would be their grave.

I even spotted scavengers. Their watchful eyes scanned the floors and crowds for a discarded scrap of food, or a carelessly misplaced item that could be whisked away and bartered before the owner realized it was gone. But unlike Jakku, the scavengers here didn't pick through the skeletons of dead machines; they viewed the crowd as a living entity, a meal to be consumed. And life on Skunkt had made them ravenous.

I thanked my lucky stars that my parents had not left me in a place like this.

We walked for a long time, crossing plazas, ducking through low doorways, and once riding a repulsorlift to a higher level. The crowds receded and I realized we were in a residential area of the space station. The hallways were lined with doors, and the occasional merchant stall sold food and other subsistence items instead of gaudy trinkets or weapons.

Finally, when I was beginning to wonder if Leia was actually lost, she stopped and knocked on a door labelled "761-QTO."

"Code?" a voice demanded from a comm mounted on the wall.

"Twelve parsecs," Leia replied with a quiet smile.

The door slid open and the three of us entered a small chamber. It was spartan at best, reminding me of my meager home in the AT-AT on Jakku. It was furnished with two benches, which were positioned to act as both seating and a table interchangeably. A single overhead light illuminated a few drab banners on the walls.

The negotiations broker we'd come to meet, by contrast, was much more interesting. I didn't recognize his race, though he was humanoid in appearance. He stood about five feet tall, with a mohawk of colorful spines protruding from his otherwise bald head. He had a second pair of eyes that seemed to move independently of the first set, and they swivelled to look at Luke and Leia separately.

We pulled back our hoods to reveal our faces. All four of the creature's eyes widened.

"Sherberut's left tit. Princess Organa. Luke Skywalker. I didn't expect to meet you in person." He held his talon-tipped hand against his heart. "The name's Roony Ilsonway."

Luke gestured to me. "My apprentice, Rey."

Roony politely tipped his head toward me, though I sensed his disappointment that I wasn't as famous as the twins.

"I got your message," he told Leia. "You're trying to arrange a meeting with some very dangerous people. Luckily for you, I specialize in doing just that, and keeping everyone alive along the way. Here's how I work. Everyone involved in the meeting, from both sides, is gonna give me something valuable. Well, two things. First, credits. Half a pack of 'em, each."

I didn't know what a pack of credits was worth, but Leia's eyes bulged. "That's a fortune."

"C'mon, you know me. I'm not a thief. You get it back, you'll get it all back." He coughed and hurriedly added, "Minus the three-percent transaction fee and a mandatory donation to Skunkt's security commissioner."

Luke and Leia exchanged a glance.

"But!" Roony continued, with an empathetic wave of his arms. "Credits only get you so far. I also need something personal. From all three of ya. I need a memory. More specifically, a secret. Somethin' you don't want other people knowin'. Something that would ruin you if it got out."

Luke looked legitimately spooked. "We're supposed to give you our own blackmail?"

"I just take a copy. I like to call it insurance. Both for me, you, and the guys you're meeting up with."

"What's the point of giving it to you?" I asked.

"It's collateral. A promise that everyone's gonna behave and get out of the meeting alive. After that, I destroy the copy. It's gone. Poof. But if anyone screws up, I convert your memories – all of 'em – into holos and donate them to every news channel on the HoloNet."

Luke's eyes narrowed into slits. "What stops you from doing that anyway?"

"Because then nobody comes back to give me more business. Or worse, I get killed. Reputation is what makes me money. But it ain't no use bein' rich if you ain't alive to enjoy it."

"Do you watch the memories?" Leia asked.

"Only if someone screws up, so, good news for you, I've never had the chance. Hope I never do. I don't like mucking around in people's private business. I just want to keep you alive and get rich doin' it."

I still wasn't convinced. "If you never see the memories, how do you know people give you legitimate secrets? They could make something up."

Roony winked his two left eyes. "Trade secret. Trust me, I know."

He studied our grim expressions and grinned cheerfully. "You all ready to get started?"

Leia volunteered to go first. "I've already had my greatest secret revealed to the entire galaxy," she said with a regretful smile, referencing the incident years prior when a rival politician had publicly disclosed the true identity of her father. "But I'm sure I can come up with something."

She and Roony walked into a separate room and closed the door. Luke and I waited in silence. I wondered what secret he was considering handing over. Something about his Jedi apprentices, or Kylo Ren? He had a lifetime of memories to draw from, the majority of which had occurred before I was even born.

I cleared my musings from my head, pondering which memory I should hand over as collateral. I had to come up with something that would satisfy Roony's requirements, but not endanger the Resistance. Luke had never pried into my head before, but nonetheless, I made sure my shields were still thick enough to block a casual brush against my mind.

Several minutes later, Leia came out of the room looking a little shaken. She nodded to Luke, who stood and entered the room.

"Are you alright?" I asked Leia. "Did it hurt?"

"No, but it was… unpleasant," she said carefully.

Luke took much less time than Leia had. He stomped out of the room after only minute and slammed the door behind him. "Barbaric," he growled.

Leia laid her hand on his arm and bent to speak to him privately. I slipped into the room where Roony waited for me.

"Rey, right? Sit there. Hold this up to your head, just like that."

He pressed a glass vial against my forehead, right above my nose. My chair was positioned in front of a machine fitted with a miniature satellite dish.

"Here's what you're gonna do. You think of your deepest secret. A memory buried in your heart. Then you imagine that memory pushing against your skin, right here where the glass is. This machine extracts a copy of the memory and stores it in this vial. I'm not going to lie and say this is easy. If it is, you ain't doin' it right. You ready?"

I nodded and pulled up the memory I'd decided to use: the moment on Starkiller when the dark side had begged me to end Kylo Ren's life, and the split-second where I'd been tempted to oblige it. It didn't give away my current missions with Ren, but my moment of weakness would still be embarrassing if made public.

Roony placed one hand on the glass vial and flicked a switch on his machine. Without warning, the Force web jerked to the side and shivered, like it had been punched. The memory slid out of my head like stitches being pulled from a wound. A cloud of thick, gray-blue smoke churned inside the vial.

"You're a Force user!" I exclaimed, shocked. "That machine is a decoy."

Roony pulled the glass away from my head and swiftly capped it, inspecting the cloud inside. "All three of you figured me out," he griped. "Runs in my family. We're kinda like empaths who can read emotions and thoughts. Except all I can read are memories. Lucky for me, everything but this very moment exists in the past, so that still leaves me a lot to work with."

Something about his words bugged me, but I couldn't figure out why. I filed the thought away as Roony continued: "I can only see a memory when I touch it, but I can sense its intensity through the glass. That's how I know if people have given me a worthwhile secret. And yours isn't good enough."

He tossed the vial into a small trash bin and crushed it with a long-handled mallet sitting nearby. The memory-smoke evaporated almost instantly.

"What? You asked for a secret. I gave you one."

"You gotta do better. It barely registers for me."

I frowned, wondering what else I should give him, and thought of my conversation with Kylo Ren where I'd agreed to work with him on Potentium. Though I loathed giving away Resistance secrets, surely that would be enough for Roony. He handed me another vial which I placed against my forehead.

The Force web jerked and shivered again as he pulled the memory through my skin and into the vial, where it bloomed into an inky gray-green fog. He immediately yanked the glass vial out of my grip and threw it into the garbage bin so hard it shattered on impact.

"Still not good enough," he said, growing impatient. "I told you this was gonna be hard. You gotta dig deep. Your friends were able to. Remember, I can't see your memory. But you still gotta hand it over as proof of your cooperation."

Frustrated and flustered, I dove deep into my head and drew forth a memory I knew Roony wouldn't turn down: when Ren had held me close in the temple pool the day before. Reliving every moment of that memory was like exquisite torture. I savored the traitorous burn of pleasure that had shivered down my spine, his solid, muscled body pressed up against mine, skin separated by mere wisps of fabric, and the way his hand had possessively settled around my waist after brushing water from my face.

I had never worked up the courage to fully admit it to myself, but now, tearing the secret out of the depths of my heart, the truth was stunning in its intensity: I was disastrously, hopelessly, irrevocably attracted to Kylo Ren.

The secret scraped through my mind like shards of glass as I dragged it from its hiding spot and furiously funneled it into the glass vial. The memory manifested as rich, glossy oil that curled around the interior of the vial and gleamed a vivid shade of blood red.

Roony's satisfied grin stretched his face into macabre proportions. "This will do," he purred.

–

–

–

A few hours later, Leia and I sat in the lounge of the transport we'd flown to Skunkt. Luke napped in a nearby bunk. Roony had ushered us out of his apartment as soon as the credits finished transferring to his account, but instructed us not to go far.

"Watch for a message from me," he'd said to Leia. "I'll give you a rendezvous point. From there, my associate will escort you to the meeting location. Then you guys do the galaxy a favor and have yourselves a nice long talk. Get some stuff sorted out, yeah? Save killing each other for the battlefield."

I didn't like the way he'd phrased those final words. The urge to kill was not something that should be saved. All of a sudden, I realized what had bothered me about Roony's earlier explanation about his Force powers.

"Leia, Roony said something earlier that confused me. I felt him use the Force when he was taking our memories. He said that all three of us had figured out he was a Force user. But how did you know?"

Leia looked away from her datapad and her face lit up in a mischievous smile. "The same way you and Luke did."

My mouth fell open. Leia Organa was Force sensitive?

"Is it that surprising?" she asked, clearly holding back from laughing at my expression. "My father and brother are gifted in the Force. There's no reason it should have passed over me."

"Why didn't you become a Jedi?"

She sighed a little, as if she'd asked herself this same question many times and had yet to come up with an acceptable answer. "When Luke was around, he offered to train me. Several times, in fact. But whenever I seriously considered it, something else always got in the way. A political fiasco that I couldn't walk away from. Han and I were raising Ben, who was always a handful. So every time Luke brought it up, I told him I'd think about it. Eventually, he stopped asking. For a long time I thought I'd made the right choice. But now I wonder if I'd accepted his offer, and been a better role model for Ben in the Force, perhaps…"

Regret filled her face, like a tangible ache wrapped around her heart.

"Are you prepared for the meeting?" I asked gently.

"Of course I am," she replied briskly, thinking I was changing the subject. "Don't forget that I've been a politician longer than you've been alive."

My lips twitched in a small, sad smile. "I'm not worried about Princess Organa, the fearless General of the Resistance. I was asking about Leia Organa, the mother."

Her mask slipped a notch and she looked away at an unseen horizon. "I haven't seen Ben in years. He's already a stranger to me."

"Kylo Ren and Ben are not the same person. Please don't forget that when you see him." Ben Solo shattered into pieces a long time ago, and I'm rebuilding him with the few parts I can find. I can't fix people the same way I fix machines. Please don't expect that of me.

Grief drowned out all of the other emotions on Leia's face, but then her eyes met mine and I wanted to weep at the quiet, determined strength living deep in her gaze. Leia Organa would never give up hope on her son.

When her datapad hummed a moment later, her face became stoic once more as she glanced at the screen.

"It's time."

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