In the previous chapter: The First Order and the Resistance battle for the upper hand in the political meeting they've painstakingly arranged through Roony, the negotiations broker. Ren and Rey are tasked with finalizing the details of the prisoner exchange through Roony, but he needs time to make the arrangements. Ren convinces Rey to meet his parts supplier for the Knights of Ren.

Chapter 11

More than one person recognized the masked First Order enforcer stalking through the corridors of the space station, but they wisely kept it to themselves. Their mental whispers, however, prickled and pressed against my mind. They wondered what business he had here, and why I was with him. It was unnerving to be under such scrutiny from strangers when I had been invisible to them my entire life on Jakku.

I'd objected to meeting the parts supplier if Ren insisted on wearing his awful helmet the whole time, and he'd agreed to remove it on the spiteful condition that I had to be the one to carry it around. We argued in circles as we traversed Skunkt, though I preferred the casual banter to awkward silence.

I recognized the next plaza we entered. It wasn't too far from the private hangar where I'd parked the Resistance transport. Several merchants had yet to close their shops, or sold wares targeted toward the tastes of the evening crowds. One vendor in particular caught my eye, and I pushed through the swirling crowds toward their stall.

"Problem solved," I announced to Ren a few minutes later, holding up a sturdy Gundark-hide satchel with a long, adjustable strap. I'd paid for it with a stipend of credits from Leia.

Ren tilted his head, considering my solution. His words skipped my ears and went straight to my brain: 'Not here.' We left the plaza through a maintenance corridor, passing banks of exposed cabling and power couplings. Behind a long row of oxygen scrubber pumps, a deserted, narrow corridor branched off to the left. It was lined on either side with several open doorways before dead-ending at a ventilation grate. The hallway had clearly not been swept – or possibly even used – in years, and discarded cups and other trash littered the floor.

Ren walked to the end of the hall, and gave a wary glance over his shoulder to ensure we weren't being followed before he ducked through a low doorway into a storage room. The door itself had been removed and probably sold for scrap by a particularly desperate scavenger. The light sensor mounted on the wall had also been stripped for parts, leaving the room in darkness. Weak light filtered in from the hallway, revealing metal racks full of crates which had likely been stored here years ago and promptly forgotten about.

The rumbling noise of Skunkt and its crowds had dropped away. I felt like I'd travelled deep into the wreckage of the great warship in the Graveyard of Giants: isolated, yet oddly insulated, in the countless layers of metal that separated me from the outside world.

Ren reached up and triggered the release mechanisms on his helmet. I could clearly hear the hiss and whirring gears in the silence of the storage room, and for a heart-wrenching moment I was back in the interrogation cell on Starkiller when he had removed his helmet for the very first time. Up until that instant I'd imagined him as some sort of creature; a decrepit, evil manifestation that was going to torture me and then kill me.

But Ren had turned into something infinitely more frightening: a man I would have considered handsome had I seen him at Niima Outpost, with his soft black hair and striking face, who had invaded my head and ruthlessly trampled through the worst memories of my existence. He'd seen the hopes and fears and weaknesses I would have never shared with anyone.

And then Ren had discovered my fondness for Han Solo – Han, who'd offered me a smile, a blaster, and a job in that order – and Ren had laughed at me and later shoved a lightsaber through his chest. I'd been petrified, almost violently ill knowing my gentle friendship with Han was forever lost to me, destroyed by his son who was already intimately familiar with my past in a way he had stolen instead of earned.

Was it any wonder I'd cleaved his face in two and left him to be consumed by a dying planet?

It hit me like a punch in the stomach how much everything had changed between us since then, and it was partly due to my own selfishness. Ren offered me temporary freedom from things I shouldn't have wanted to escape in the first place. Our relationship had been forged from power and control and intangible violence, yet had somehow morphed into times like this where we dropped our guard. Every calm moment spent with him felt like a quiet betrayal of the entire galaxy.

Ren solemnly regarded the battered helmet in his hands. I couldn't hold back my heartache, nor the soft question that escaped my lips: "When was the last time you were happy?"

Ren started to speak, like the answer was obvious. But he stopped and held back his words, as if my question confused him the more he thought about it.

"Too long," he finally decided. He held out his helmet, a mocking grin playing around his lips. "But making you carry this around all night is close."

I was ready to remove the satchel from where it hung on my shoulder and fling it at his face. Something made me stop and reconsider, and instead I reached out and took the helmet in two hands, surprised by its weight. I studied the silver metalwork around the visor, and then scavenger instincts kicked in and I started inspecting the servomotors that drove the interior gears and mechanisms.

Ren shifted his weight to the opposite foot. "You don't have to…" He trailed off, suddenly uncomfortable letting me control the embodiment of his identity as Kylo Ren. It unnerved me too, but I just shrugged and tucked the helmet down inside the satchel.

I felt guilty helping him conceal his presence from the people in Skunkt. Burying his helmet inside my satchel didn't excuse the atrocities he'd committed as Kylo Ren, and it didn't seem right to give in to Ren's stupid demands, either. But I thought of my secret mission, Leia's plea to turn her son away from Snoke and the Order, and knew that the less time he spent hiding under his mask, the better.

When I looked up, Ren had removed his hooded cloak and held that out toward me as well.

"It itches without the helmet," he explained. I took the cloak and busied myself with stuffing it down inside the satchel to hide my amused smile.

We left the storage room in silence. Ren's helmet rested heavy against my side, a constant reminder that I shared the burden of more than one of his secrets.

–

–

–

Ren took me to what was undoubtedly the most raucous bar in the entire space station.

Niima Outpost's cantina had always been busy since it was the only place to conduct business and have a drink in the shade – but it hadn't been anything like this. Rugs covered every inch of the floor and colorful tapestries hung from all four walls. Glowing red lanterns were suspended from the ceiling, illuminating rowdy patrons of all shapes and sizes crowded together on couches and benches scattered throughout the room. They laughed and argued over their drinks, while others danced to a live band playing in the corner.

The sights and sounds, accompanied by the uneven, chaotic energy generated by the drunk crowd, poured into my brain and threatened to overwhelm me like it had earlier that day when we'd first arrived on Skunkt. I started to retreat, packing more power against my shields to muffle out the cacophony of the bar. Ren sensed it, though, and he caught my arm just like Luke had and pulled me toward the smooth, metal bar that ran down the right side of the room.

He used a lightning-quick mind trick to force a Rodian to mindlessly walk away from the bar, and pushed me down into the newly vacated seat.

"Don't shut their emotions out. Take their energy and use it instead."

The concept was so wholly opposite from Luke's earlier instructions: Shields, Rey. There is no emotion, there is peace.

Ren caught a whiff of my thoughts through the bond and practically rolled his eyes at me. "Peace is a lie. You won't find it in a place like Skunkt, not with these people. Don't muffle them out and hope they leave you alone. Use their power to become stronger."

I thought of how much I hated the noise of the Resistance base, routinely shutting everything out through shields and meditation in the calm clearing underneath Skybreacher. Jedi were supposed to reject emotions, after all, so the practice made sense. Ren's suggestion was a complete reversal of this. Tapping into the power of others felt… so personal. Almost voyeuristic.

"You already know how to draw power from your own emotions," Ren explained. "Now, you're just using other people as a source."

"It feels like stealing." It feels like the dark side.

"Are you stealing the air in the room when you breathe? No. It's out there for everyone to use."

Though I wasn't entirely comfortable with the premise, I was curious all the same. Think of it as a Potentium mission, I told myself. A temporary experiment.

I tentatively scraped a handful of energy from the surplus in the crowded room. The power was… confusing. Willful. It was like I had inhaled the acrid scent of pipe smoke, but my brain insisted I was smelling a richly sensual perfume instead. My Force signature sparked into view, but the normally symmetrical, golden lines curved erratically around my body, gleaming in vibrant shades of gold and indigo. It's just an experiment, I reminded myself as panic rose in my chest. It's not permanent.

Despite the struggle to hold on to this strange, headstrong power that didn't wholly belong to me, it flowed through my mind and tied me closer to flashing currents of energy surging around the room. The power granted me a strange sort of insight, helping me identify who might be a friend or foe should the distinction suddenly become important.

I suddenly knew that the group on the dance floor was celebrating a birthday, that two humans further down the bar were on a miserably awkward first date, and violence lurked in a whispered conversation in the opposite corner of the room. Ren was curiously missing from my new sense, likely because his mental shields were strong enough to keep me out of his head.

I pushed the clairvoyant sense further outward and found a large crowd gathered far below me. They were all excited, some nearly desperate with anticipation. It was gambling, I realized. That sort of feeling only came from people who had little to lose but were determined to lose it anyway.

For a moment, the avarice of the bar overtook me. I greedily siphoned more energy from the crowd to expand my focus even further… and unexpectedly slammed into an immobile wall of ice that radiated raw evil. Surprise rumbled against my mind, immediately morphing into malicious excitement.

My concentration broke and I shuddered violently. Snoke. I had just unwittingly found Kylo Ren's master.

"Are you alright?" Ren asked, brown eyes searching my face as my Force signature started to fade. I was simultaneously thrilled and wary of their predatory intentness.

"I'm fine," I lied. "It just felt odd." It was the truth, in a way. There was a pleasant fizz in my head that reminded me there were no immediate threats here, just a crowd enthusiastically letting off steam after a long day.

Ren nodded his approval. "Time to meet Cue." He gripped my wrist and tried to tug me off the bar stool, but I held back.

"Your supplier? She's not here in the bar?" I asked, a twinge of unease poking my stomach. Snoke still lurked in the space station, and now Ren wanted to drag me somewhere new after I had just used the Force in a manner that would have made Luke's toes curl in disapproval.

Ren's hand slid up my arm as he leaned close, positioning his lips right next to my ear. "It's okay. Trust me." I nodded my consent but truthfully was a little too stunned by the feel of his breath against my ear and the tantalizing warmth of his hand on my skin to protest more.

Ren stepped through a doorway at the back of the bar. We twisted down a steep, spiraling staircase where the steps had been worn smooth by countless pairs of feet. I kept my Force power held tight around me as we descended toward the crowd of gamblers I'd sensed earlier, unsure of what exactly I was walking into.

The moment I stepped onto solid ground at the base of the staircase, the entire hallway rumbled around me. Vibrations shook the stone underneath my feet and echoed as tremors through the Force web. The crowd roared its approval of whatever entertainment awaited us in the room ahead.

I followed close behind Ren as we entered an arena. Tiers of benches lined the perimeter of an enormous underground room, surrounding an elevated, caged enclosure situated in the very center. The benches were packed, so a majority of the audience stood on the floor around the cage. Lights flashed from the ceiling and speckled the crowd with dizzying bursts of green and red spots. Several high-powered spotlights illuminated the cage. It was a clear geometric dome, over a dozen feet tall at its highest point, constructed of transparisteel supplemented and interwoven with force fields on all sides.

Inside the dome, two blurred shapes danced and circled around the cage. One was red, the other green. They looked like battle droids, but moved with impossibly fluid elegance, stepping purposefully toward each other and then spinning away. It wasn't until the red figure crashed violently into the green one that I realized they were actually fighting. The metallic impact echoed through the arena, rivalling the hoots and screams of excitement from the crowd.

The green fighter went sprawling to the ground, but quick as a flash it was back on its feet. The figure paused just long enough to get its bearings, and I gaped as I spotted a human face underneath its transparent visor.

'What is this?' I asked Ren through the bond to avoid yelling over the noise of the crowd.

'Welcome to mech-wrecking,' he replied in my head, a mischievous grin alighting on his lips.

He pushed me toward a staircase built into the stands. I kept twisting around to watch the action in the cage behind me until I accidentally stepped on a stray tentacle and got cussed at in a language I had never heard before. After that I focused on ascending the staircase much more carefully. Ren pointed at an empty space on the end of a bench, next to a hairless woman with glowing blue eyes and skin as dark as soot.

Her skin was covered in white, veiny patterns, and she sat with preternatural stillness as if she were carved from marble. A flowing floor-length black skirt covered her from the waist down, while a simple twist of fabric covered her chest. She reminded me of a sinking pit in the Goazon Badlands: calm and motionless on the surface, yet ready to destroy anyone who crossed her.

I sat down next to her, putting the leather satchel on the ground in between my feet. The woman's head smoothly twisted to look at us. "You're late, Ren. It wasn't easy saving your seats. At least three people wanted to fight me for them."

"That's disappointing. I expected at least ten," he replied. He squeezed next to me on the bench. I was highly conscious of every spot where his body touched mine, particularly the fabric of his black tunic pressed against my elbow.

"Rey, this is Cue'ar. Cue'ar, Rey."

Cue'ar's unnerving blue eyes inspected me from head to toe. She gave Ren a sly glance and then spoke in a garbled mixture of Basic and binary. "You didn't tell me she was a babe, Ren."

"Nor did he tell you I understand binary," I said to her.

Her eyes flicked back to me with new appreciation, and the marbled white streaks on her face stretched as her grin widened. Cue was one of the seemingly few people who knew what Kylo looked like under his imposing helmet, and she seemed to find it intriguing that I fell into this exclusive category as well.

"I should have expected Ren to have interesting friends," she purred.

Being referred to as Kylo Ren's 'friend' was beyond confusing, so I changed the subject: "How can you speak binary? Are you a droid?"

"No. I work on them often enough it's convenient to talk directly in binary. I had a synthesizer implanted last year."

The red mech in the arena below suddenly fired off a slew of blaster shots, but the green mech flipped out of the way at the last possible second. The shots were harmlessly absorbed by the force field embedded in the cage wall, directly in front of a young man's face. Instead of flinching away, he screamed in exhilaration, his face full of savage glee, despite – or perhaps because of – the promise of death inches away from him. The crowd on the floor seethed and rippled around the cage, pressing inward and outward as the energy of the fight ebbed and flowed.

"Who's fighting?" Ren asked.

"Zeekee is the green mech," Cue replied. "He's the crowd favorite, but Squalo, in red, is giving him a tough fight."

"What are the rules?" I asked.

Cue laughed at me. "Who wants rules in a mech fight?"

"There's only two enforced rules," Ren said. "Every fighter has to build their mechsuit from scratch. And each fighter wears something called a power pendant around their neck. The fight ends the instant one is torn off."

"Ren tells me you're good with machines," Cue said to me. "Is it a job or a hobby?"

"I was a scavenger until recently," I replied honestly. "It's how I survived. But it was a hobby, too. I enjoyed repairing starships and speeders much more than scavenging parts from them."

Cue's glowing blue eyes literally lit up in approval. "Most people think of mechsuits as nothing more than scraps of metal soldered together. But they're alive in their own ways. Electricity is their blood, and they share the soul of their driver. Fighting is freedom for both of them."

Cue's tone was almost reverent, and something clicked in my head. "Are you a fighter? Do you have a mechsuit?"

She laughed in delighted surprise. "You're sharp! Sourcing and selling parts nets enough cash to fund my fights. Building and upgrading a suit isn't cheap."

Though her tone was enthusiastic, her glowing eyes were narrowed in contempt. Before I could ask her more, she pointed at the cage. The red mech – Squalo – was advancing on Zeekee once more, wildly swinging a crackling electromace with every step. Zeekee crouched and then leapt sideways, armored boots landing against the wall of the cage. Amazingly, he didn't fall, but instead ran several steps while parallel to the floor. Then he jumped and spun in midair, using his momentum to fling a handful of miniature magnapulse bombs at his opponent. One of them caught Squalo's legs and his suit jerked to a halt as the power systems running throughout the suit overloaded and shut down. Zeekee darted forward, presumably to grab Squalo's power pendant, but Squalo managed to raise his shoulder to block Zeekee's hand.

"Zeekee should carry one larger magnapulse instead of the miniatures," I observed. "They don't last long enough to give him an advantage."

"That's his style," Cue explained. "He never stands still long enough to get good aim with them, anyway."

Cue and I dove into a deep conversation about the mechanical advantages and weaknesses of the mechs in the arena beneath us.

"The compressor increases Zeekee's acceleration," I said, "but puts too much strain on –"

"The fuel cells, right. It leaves his shields weak. Squalo has a heavy arsenal and he knows how to use it. But what he really needs to watch out for is Zeekee's magnetic tread. It lets him–"

"Stick to the side of the cage. Doesn't that burn out the stabilizer motors?"

"The shell of Zeekee's suit is just reinforced plastecene. Keeps him light weight. On the floor he's sacrificing armor and traction, but that won't matter as long as he can stay out of Squalo's reach."

Talking with Cue about the technology underlying the mechsuits was oddly cathartic. While I did routine maintenance on the ship I used for Potentium missions, it had been months since I'd worked on machines daily like I'd used to on Jakku. I missed tinkering with them, figuring out how the systems impacted and supported each other, and understanding why every part was necessary to keep the entire machine running smoothly as one complete, integrated piece.

Cue was clearly impressed by my expertise. Her hand settled on my knee as she leaned forward in her seat and said to Ren, "Your lady friend is wicked smart. If you don't watch out, I'm going to recruit her to build mechsuits."

I laughed at Cue's flirtatious gesture, ready to play along, when Ren casually laid his arm along the back of the bench. He wasn't putting his arm around me, not exactly, but I could feel it resting possessively against my back all the same.

"Leave her alone, Cue," he rumbled.

Cue arched her brow at the Knight's surly response, ready to fire off a snarky comment, when an explosion of fire from the cage caught our attention. Zeekee had set off another bomb, but Squalo barreled through the flame and smoke and launched himself at the green mech fighter.

The two of them collided in the center of the cage and grappled with each other, literally tearing each other's suits to pieces as they tried to grab the thin pendant cord around each other's necks. They wrenched off armored plates, sending shards of metal flying. Suddenly, Zeekee latched onto a piece of exposed wire in the neck of Squalo's red suit and ripped it free with a savage yank. Sparks exploded in all directions, bouncing chaotically off the force field. Squalo staggered backward as the crowd screamed bloody approval.

"Does anyone actually live through this?" I asked Ren.

"Most of the time. Watch."

Squalo sank to one knee, his form heaving as he labored to draw breath inside his heavy suit. He slowly looked up as Zeekee approached, baring his throat in submission.

It seemed clear Squalo was conceding the fight, his suit too damaged to continue, but just as Zeekee leaned forward to snatch his opponent's pendant, Squalo's leg suddenly shot out and knocked Zeekee to the floor. Squalo sprang forward and slammed his fist against Zeekee's throat. Zeekee shuddered as he fought to breathe, and Squalo nimbly wrapped the cord of Zeekee's power pendant around his hand and ripped it free.

All at once, every single light in the arena went dark. A split second later, they flared back to life, filling the room with blood red light – the same color as Squalo's suit. Simultaneous cheers and boos filled the arena, though the boos quickly drowned out all other noise.

"Squalo WINS!" an invisible announcer boomed. "If you had a winning bet, payouts are being deposited into your accounts now. Remember that these fighters work hard for your tips, so please show them your appreciation! Next up is Squalo versus Steelstun. Report to the prep deck to get suited."

Cue'ar immediately stood up, her blue eyes flashing in excitement.

My mouth dropped open. "You're Steelstun? You're fighting next?"

"Steelstun is my mechsuit's name," she corrected me, a trace of wistfulness in her tone. "My sponsors coughed up enough cash tonight to cover the entry fee and repairs." She eyed the two of us, and after a second seemed to reach a decision. "You two want to come down to the prep deck with me?"

This was apparently a rare invitation, because Ren shifted next to me and betrayed his surprise. "You wouldn't have offered if Rey wasn't here," he replied lightly, though his tone carried a hint of accusation.

Cue shrugged. "Probably not. Don't ever let her tinker with your Knights. They'll fall in love with her."

She gave me a saucy wink as she pushed past us to the stairs. Ren looked like his plan to introduce us had simultaneously gone better than expected and completely backfired.

'Hope you're having fun,' he grumbled in my head.

And it occurred to me that, for the first time in recent memory, I was.

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