In the previous chapter: Rey tells Luke, Leia and Finn about her failure to turn Kylo Ren away from the Order. They're upset after learning that Rey gave Snoke's memory to Ren. Rey ends her Jedi apprenticeship and asks to be reassigned as a mechanic.

Chapter 19

Kylo was dreaming again.

Black sky, red earth.

Despite the barriers between our minds during the day, his dream leaked through the bond while we slept.

Pounding steps, piercing screams.

It was always the same dream, repeated over and over again. It was impossible to break out of once I'd been dragged into it. I'd tried countless times over the past week.

Billowing clouds of smoke. Blood-soaked ground. Blaster fire zipping past.

Ren dreamt of battle – or more specifically, slaughter.

An ocean of wretched humanity stretched away from him on all sides. Stormtroopers and Resistance soldiers fought each other with batons, blasters or even their own two fists. Ren cut straight through the masses, swinging at anyone who got in his way. He hacked tirelessly with his saber while he marched toward a horizon that never drew closer.

Sometimes Finn or Poe or Luke would appear among his opponents. Even General Hux and Phasma had showed up once. They were all cut down with no more effort or consideration than anyone else he encountered.

If he was searching for me in these dreams, he had yet to find me. I dreaded what would happen when he did.

After interminable hours had passed, this particular dream dissolved into a shroud of darkness. I woke up feeling as though I'd walked the length of Jakku's deserts. Staring at the jagged rock ceiling of my room, I wondered how much longer I could stand this. Would I always be bound to Ren's darkness? Would it always remind me of my own?

Yet no matter how much I wished to be free of his shadowed nightmares, they were also proof that Ren was still alive. I feared the morning where I woke up and realized I hadn't dreamed at all.

–

–

–

"What's the damage?" Cue asked one evening. She was leaning against the side of the battered transport I was working on, an oil rag in one hand.

I grunted as I wrestled with a rusty bolt on the engine casing. "The shield generator was trashed. It's going to need a complete re-build. You up for a late night?"

"Again? You patched three hyperdrives by yourself last week. Come eat with me and Poe. Do something normal."

"Working on machinery is perfectly normal for a scavenger."

I expected her to throw back a flippant comment, having grown accustomed to her wry sense of humor since we'd started working together. However, the only sounds were her boots squeaking as she shifted her weight. I extracted my arm from the depths of the engine block and peered up at her.

"Cue?"

She tilted her head and spoke with care. "I know we aren't close, Rey, and you don't want to talk about what happened… But whatever Kylo Ren did to upset you, please know that my allegiance is to you and the Resistance now, not him."

I stared, at a loss for words. I didn't often think about Cue's past on Skunkt, when she'd supplied parts for Kylo and his Knights.

"It's not that. I trust you, Cue, completely. I just–"

"Rey!" Fariya was striding through the hanger, her dark hair whipping past her shoulders. She stopped in front of us and unleashed her special brand of teenaged attitude. "Have you changed your mind yet? When are you coming back to lessons with me and Luke?"

Fariya hadn't taken the news about my reassignment very well – "Master Luke told me you're not his apprentice anymore. Is he battier than I thought?" – and ritually hounded me for updates.

"I'm not coming back, Fariya," I explained. "It wasn't the right path for me."

"But what about Ky–" Fariya glanced at Cue and amended, "I mean, you-know-who?"

I sighed. "You both know about Kylo Ren. You can talk about him. Just not in front of anyone else."

"We could talk about him all day," Fariya said, her hands stuck on her hips. "The problem is, you won't."

"We don't mean to pry. We're worried," Cue explained softly.

I looked at the two women in front of me. Cue stood as motionless as a statue, her unearthly eyes pulsing between neon blue and dim indigo. Next to her, Fariya bounced impatiently on her toes, eager to help whether or not I wanted her to.

Friends, my brain whispered. They're your friends. You can let them in. You can trust them.

"Come with me," I said, heading to a dark section of the hanger where my courier ship was parked. Leia hadn't revoked my pilot rights even though I no longer used it for Potentium missions.

The three of us crammed into the cockpit, Cue in the co-pilot chair and Fariya scrunched against the bulkhead behind her. The Resistance officer working the control tower wished me a safe flight despite my unscheduled departure.

Silence coated the cockpit as we popped out of hyperspace into the night sky above Gryl, and it remained unbroken until we entered the Ramarode temple some time later. The carnage created by Snoke and the Victive was worse than I remembered. The murdered Grylix tribe lay rotting in the heat. Fariya covered her face with both hands, while Cue groped for a wall to steady herself.

"What ungodly horror took place here?" she murmured, her midnight skin now paled into ash gray.

"Was this… did Kylo Ren do this?" Fariya asked, her voice nasally as she plugged her nose with two fingers.

"No," I said. "This was Snoke. Kylo didn't know anything about it." I explained in broken sentences what had occurred on Jakku a week prior.

The temple – now a tomb – reeked of death that seared my eyes. My nose stung and tears threatened to spill down my cheeks. I blinked them away as best I could. I had to stay calm. I had to stay strong. I repeated this mantra until Fariya squeezed me into a crushing hug.

"I'm so sorry, Rey. You're so brave to handle something like this on your own."

Cue laid her hand on my temple. "The First Order murdered them. The Resistance will avenge them. Right now, we can honor them."

With that solemn promise, the three of us set to work. We found a few tarps used for collecting rainwater and used them to start transporting the Gryl's bodies to the sandy plain at the base of the village. Though I was no expert on Grylix customs, I knew that the tribe did not bury its dead. Instead, they laid them out in the open for the desert to slowly reclaim.

I lost count of the number of trips we made between the temple and the graveyard. Fariya used the Force to move a tarp on her own, while Cue and I carried the other by hand. After a few hours, our legs had gone numb and our spirits had sagged into the dust at our feet. I was about to suggest we take a break when I spotted lights overhead in the night sky. A small starship was descending toward our location. I almost choked from the way my heart jumped into my throat, but then I recognized the particular pattern of lights on the ship.

"It's a Resistance ship," I said. Was I the tiniest bit disappointed that it wasn't a sleek First Order command shuttle landing before us? That it wasn't Ren's tall form swathed in black emerging from inside?

The person who did step out of the ship made my heart lurch for a different reason altogether – it was Finn. His back was stiff and his hand cradled a blaster strapped to his side.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him.

He spotted Cue and Fariya next to me and his hand dropped away from his holster. He sheepishly dragged his fingers across his cropped hair. "I saw your departure on the flight log. I thought you were meeting him."

I drew back my shoulders and prepared for an ugly argument. Finn backed away and flared his fingers in a wide, placating gesture.

"No no no. Please don't be mad. I didn't come to start a fight. I wanted to make sure that you were…" He trailed off as his attention focused on the rows of bodies behind us, their small forms glowing in the moonlight.

Finn's eyes met mine again, but instead of alarm they were filled with the most earnest and tender concern that I'd ever seen. An entire conversation swept silently over our hearts, and I knew all was right between us when he said, "I'm so sorry, Rey. How can I help?"

Our strength renewed, the four of us carried the remains of the Grylix tribe out of the Ramarode temple and laid them out under the softening sky. The work was gruesome and bloody, especially when we realized we couldn't match up the heads that had been separated from their bodies. The disheartening thought threatened to make me give up entirely, until Finn touched my shoulder and said, "Nothing in life is perfect. Nothing in death has to be either."

Finally, with dawn edging across the horizon, we laid the Gryl's leader to rest alongside her tribe and arranged her hands across her heart. I offered a soft prayer we'd used on Jakku: May the sun strip your flesh, the sand bury your bones, and the winds lift your spirit.

As the sun rose over me, Finn, Cue and Fariya, I hoped with every last piece of my soul that it was a long, long time before I repeated that prayer.

–

–

–

Life settled into a dull rhythm. I passed through my days like a ghost, living in the twilight between one world and the next.

Skirmishes between the Resistance the First Order grew more frequent, and more intense. Ships would depart on risky missions and never return. Others would get towed into the hangar in shambles, with parts missing and the hull covered in scorch marks.

I threw myself into my new assignment as a mechanic. I liked the concrete nature of my tasks: something showed up broken, and by the end of the day it either worked or it didn't. It was better than nebulous, open-ended exercises with the Force. I was finally making a difference with the Resistance. It wasn't anything like tinkering with salvage on Jakku. I repeated this to myself often, hoping it would feel more convincing over time.

While the other mechanics were professional toward me, they were more frightened by my past than awed. A failed Jedi apprentice? they whispered. Was she not strong enough with the Force? Or was something more sinister wrong with her?

The Force occasionally trembled against my skin, seeking attention like something sentient and neglected. I'd remember Ren's throat being crushed in my invisible grip and scrub at my flesh until the sensation subsided. Perhaps one day I'd trust myself enough to use my powers again, but the safest thing to do right now was ignore them.

The bond still dragged me into Ren's blood-soaked dreams, though not as often as before. He might have adapted to a different day-night cycle, which wasn't uncommon when living on a ship instead of planetside. However, I suspected he was avoiding sleep in much the same way he seemed to avoid the truth.

I replayed our final, awful argument in my AT-AT over and over, imagining what I could have said or done differently to change his mind. The what-if's, the I-should-have's, the if-only's – they all piled up in my head and threatened to crush my already meager self-esteem into a pile of dust. I had to let it go. Let him go. He'd turned his back on me like he had on his family.

And yet…

Memories of other times we'd spent together leaked into my thoughts constantly. Those first cautious, uneasy moments when we'd been stranded together in his ship on Gryl. Cooperating on Potentium missions, teaching me to swim in the Ramarode temple, talking through the bond from opposite ends of the galaxy. The moment he'd pressed me into a wall and kissed me senseless on Skunkt. Holding hands as we'd fallen asleep, the way he'd electrified my body with his phantom fingers through the Force bond.

Sometimes, I simply missed being near him. Although I'd escaped the burdens of Jedi training and my mission from Leia, along the way I'd also lost a friend.

–

–

–

Black sky, red earth.

Ren stalked through the battlefield like a towering column of death, downing Resistance soldiers with every step.

Pounding heart, pouring blood.

His gleaming red lightsaber flashed relentlessly against a smoking black sky. Poe and Finn succumbed to his blade. Luke Skywalker crumpled to the ground.

Ren apathetically lifted his saber to strike his next opponent. As the blade descended toward the figure, they turned to look up at him. Shock tore through me at the sight of my own tear-stricken face. Ren only had time to cry out – no, not her! – before his lightsaber vanished into my dream-twin's neck. Her head tumbled to the bloody ground.

A scream strangled my throat as Ren tore us both out of his nightmare. I bolted upright in bed. Ren's presence was like a thunderstorm in the back of my brain. The bond hummed between us, alive and electric after being suppressed for weeks. Our heartbeats crashed in unison as haggard intakes of air rattled down both our throats. For a long moment neither of us spoke.

'I wouldn't...' Ren stopped and I felt the pressure of his tongue running over chapped lips. 'I wouldn't do that to you.'

My eyes slipped closed and I didn't respond.

Ren shifted in my mind, agitated at my silence. 'I never feel you in the Force anymore.'

'I'm no longer Luke's apprentice.'

I expected Ren to react to my quiet confession with a smirking wave of satisfaction, or perhaps crow at my failure – you're no better than I was, scavenger.

What I didn't expect in the slightest was for him to slink out of my head, leaving behind only lingering regret and a deeply profound sense of shame.

–

–

–

"You still think about him, don't you?"

Finn's voice startled me out of my thoughts. We were relaxing in the officer's lounge on a rare quiet evening, watching a holovid about a family of tauntauns. Cue and Poe were sprawled on a couch, holding a conversation through murmured words and soft giggles.

Finn and I sat in two creaky armchairs that had likely been around since the Clone Wars. We had been on much better terms since he helped me bury the Grylix tribe – and also since I'd accidentally caught him making out with a maintenance worker late one night in a side corridor.

I started to protest, but Finn tilted his head and patiently raised an eyebrow.

I grimaced and shrugged instead. "I feel like I gave up on him. On a lot of things."

How many times on Jakku had I looked skyward and wished to be anywhere else – anyone else? That dream had come true yet here I was, turning my back on the Force and retreating into my old life as a scavenger.

"It's not always bad to abandon something," Finn said, no doubt thinking of the Order. "Especially if it makes you happier. Has it?"

I was silent.

Finn shook his head. "Find what makes you happy, Rey. And never let it go."

–

–

–

A week later, the dream changed.

Kylo and I stood in a dim chamber that I'd never seen before. The floor and walls were made of polished black stone. Snoke stood against the far wall, his hands loosely clasped behind his back. He was staring out a wide, rectangular viewport into a dark, sterile landscape lit by streams of lava.

I felt a trickle of resentment that Kylo was fighting to hide. Why was I so intimately nestled inside his thoughts this time? How did this dream seem so clear?

Snoke's rumbling voice filled the room like thunder. "The Resistance's meddling will be stopped. To kill a weed, you must pull it out by the roots."

Anxiety crept across the back of Ren's neck. It hit me then, the difference between this dream and the others I'd experienced. Unlike the way Ren marched across a never-ending battlefield or slaughtered the same enemies night after night, there was nothing imaginary about this scene. This was something that had happened – an actual conversation that had occurred between him and Snoke – and Kylo was reliving it while he slept.

Snoke turned away from the window and approached Kylo. His glittering eyes moved back and forth in his crushed skull, evaluating his Knight with a certain measure of contempt.

"Find the girl. Bring her to me."

The barest tremor ran through Ren's form.

Snoke lifted his chin in disapproval. "I have done all I can to rid you of that weakling boy," he spat. "You must be the one to cut out your heart and replace your blood with darkness. You have faced this trial before, my Knight of Ren. Do you lack the strength to overcome it now?"

Ren sank to one knee and spoke fervently. The words were garbled and strange as if Ren himself didn't remember what he'd said, and had simply let words pour out on instinct alone.

Whatever was said seemed to satisfy Snoke.

"Purge all memories of your past, Kylo Ren. There is nothing left for you there. Your absolution will only be granted through the power of my grace. Give me your faith, and your surrender shall manifest as strength. As our victory."

The room squeezed around Kylo as the dream moved him to another place – a different memory.

He was inside a smaller, monochrome room that was presumably his personal quarters. The emotions he'd suppressed in Snoke's presence flooded from his chest. He sat there silently and burned.

Everything had changed now that the Supreme Leader wanted Rey. He'd known that Leader Snoke would eventually give him this order. He'd had months to prepare for it. Why wasn't he stronger than this? Why did the thought of handing Rey over to his master make him sick to his stomach? He felt the boundaries of his allegiances crawling and shifting inside him, unsettled and ravenous for change.

Kylo's eyes flicked to a table on the opposite side of the room, where he'd left the memory disk after his return from Jakku. Its smooth surface had taunted him for weeks. Had refusing to watch it been a sign of strength or weakness?

He retrieved a holoplayer from a metal cabinet and stuck the memory disk inside the device. The disk clicked a few times as the device started to play the scene with Snoke, Daamith and the Victive. Ren sat still, unmoved by the horrific slaughter unfolding before him, though he stiffened as General Hux entered the holoprojection.

"Your most successful test yet, I assume?" the General drawled, his voice grating through the speakers. "Considering this apprentice was the first to live through it."

"Only the strongest minds can survive the price the Victive demands," Snoke's voice replied. "Its power will render the Order unstoppable once Lord Ren takes Daamith's place. Together, he and I shall gut the Resistance and smear their entrails through the galaxy."

Ren dropped the holoplayer on the floor and strode across his chambers to a narrow door. Inside was a smaller room with just two pieces of furniture: a low bench placed in front of a short pillar. And on top of the pillar… my blood went cold at the hideous sight of Darth Vader's grotesquely melted helmet.

Ren knelt in front of the Sith artifact. He breathed rapidly through his nose. His skin was bleached white where his fingers clenched against the floor. Though his body was still, his mind was a mess. I'd predicted that he'd be angry after watching the memory, but he was scared and there was nothing predictable about that.

The memory proved nothing besides Supreme Leader concealing his plans with the Victive. He intended for both of them to use its power to destroy the Resistance and the Jedi.

His father's final warning swirled through his head: Snoke is using you for your power. When he gets what he wants, he'll crush you.

Impossible. Leader Snoke had been his teacher, his mentor, for years. Their goals were aligned. Snoke had given him purpose, refined him into the deadliest of weapons, and in turn, had earned his lifelong devotion.

My own words cut through his thoughts: It's easier to stay with the Order and swallow Snoke's lies than face the truth. Snoke wants to kill you, and you'd let him do it.

But if Snoke had been using him all this time, that meant Ren was faced with something that terrified him beyond words: that he was wrong. That the black-hearted deeds Snoke had talked him into committing were evil. That he was a monster, rotten to the core.

The thought hit him like a slug to the gut and he surged to his feet.

"I was meant to succeed where you failed!" he bellowed at his grandfather's mask. "I've ruined myself by following your path."

Ren pulled his lightsaber free from his belt and unleashed an uncontrolled barrage of fury against the walls of the mediation room. He pummeled the blade against the bare metal over and over again, until the walls bled molten gold from jagged, crisscrossed rips. Scraps of twisted durasteel littered the floor. The room flickered and shook around the edges, as if Ren's fury made the walls tremble and shift.

Ren turned to face the pillar in the center of the room, the only thing left untouched by his violent frenzy. The saber's unstable red blade crackled against the cool, dark air of his meditation room.

With an abrupt, ferocious cry, Ren whipped his lightsaber high over his head and brought it straight down on Vader's helmet. But instead of parting the helmet effortlessly, the serrated blade dragged through the fused metal like a dull knife through clay.

Incredulous, Ren strained to push the blade the rest of the way through material that should have offered no resistance whatsoever. This Sith artifact was more than a lump of metal: it embodied the Force powers of one of the strongest darksiders to ever live. It held Vader's oppression and twisted hatred compressed into physical form.

Ren's growl escalated into an all-out roar as he fought to cleave the helmet in half. It was like watching a gory, barbaric execution. His lightsaber spat and vibrated as it sank through the helmet inch by inch. The metal bubbled and melted where it touched the plasma blade. Sparks vaulted into the air and sizzled against the floor. Black smoke billowed from the helmet like blood into water, hissing and sinuously curling through the air. It flashed red and dissolved into the floor.

Finally, Ren's lightsaber cut through the last thin tendon of metal joining the two halves. There was a crackling explosion that sent his saber flying. The room filled with a desperate, bloodcurdling wail, as if Vader's pain and sorrow and regret bottled up over a lifetime was released in a single heartrending torrent.

Ren stared in disbelief at the sundered pieces of his grandfather's helmet. Next to it lay the smoking remains of his lightsaber. The hilt was melted and misshapen beyond repair. The kyber crystal was completely shattered.

Ren's hands shook. Darth Vader was still stronger than him, even decades after his death.

Ren sank to his knees in the ruined chamber. The anger that Snoke had carefully curated in him for years had finally burned out. He had nothing left – no fear, no rage, no shame – only a strange, numbing, desolate calm.

For months I'd worried that Kylo harbored nothing in his soul but sunless shadows. That the core of his being was so dark and decayed and rotten that it was simply impossible for light to exist there.

Now, with the wrath of the dark side stripped away, I looked straight into his heart and saw the one thing he refused to give up: a tiny, hidden ember of hope. Hope that he could still save himself. Hope that he could one day forgive himself. Hope that a future existed where he hadn't lost me and his family forever.

Ren had never fully suppressed his natural revulsion toward the cruelty that Snoke demanded of him. Despite his spiraling descent into darkness – madness – and years of committing atrocities in the name of his master, Ren had not given up his battle against the dark side.

I realized, with bone-chilling clarity, that I had.

That moment on Jakku when I'd used the dark side had scared me, to be sure, but instead of holding my ground I'd fled like a coward. I'd let the result of a single fight dictate the outcome of an entire war. However, there were still more wars to come – against the First Order, Kylo's darkness, and my own inner demons. I couldn't give up and run away from this moment.

Abandoning Kylo and the Force hadn't solved my problems. I knew what I had to do.

The bond trembled as I pulled it closer, reaching out to the weary mind on the other end.

'Kylo.'

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