I just hoped I had the courage to do it.
“The lightsaber’s not here,” I said, my voice strangely calm to my ears. Was this how I sounded before I died? Unafraid of death?
The general narrowed his eyes.
Val spun to me as if I’d just betrayed him. Well, probably so.“What?”
“The saber. It’s not here with me. How did you think I got the droids back,Brother?” I asked him sarcastically. “That I stole them? That I killed the Jawas for them?” I met his gaze in a challenge. “I didn’t know how important it was. I’m just a poor naive girl on a ship, after all.”
He turned back to his superiors. This timehelooked panicked. “She’s lying about something, sir. She has to be.”
The lander was getting closer, moving faster and faster, but they’d notice it soon if I didn’t do something.
I wished I could tell Dad how much I loved him.
I took a deep breath and faced the terrible tall man in black armor. He really did look like a nightmare—somewarped version of pictures I’d seen of Darth Vader. “And I’m sorry to tell you this, sir,” I said to him, “but that mask is ugly, and probably so are y—”
The warlord snapped out his hand, fingers splayed.
I felt an invisible force grab me by the throat. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t—I couldn’t—
His power was so overwhelming, it was crushing. It hurt. Everything hurt. He dragged me closer, my feet brushing the ground. The planet around me grew faint—like a holo playing in another room. All I could do was stare into that terrible mask. Beneath his helmet was nothing but seething hatred. I could feel it—thorns spiking off of him like lacerations in the galaxy.
“Then I’ll just look in your mind to see where it went,”he said—
Or I thought he said. I wasn’t sure. His voice was everywhere; it was in my ears, in my head, in mybones. A sharp stab of pain cut through my thoughts, a dull knife splitting apart flesh as it burrowed through my head. It hurt—it hurt so much I forgot to breathe.
He pulled away memories of Mom. Memories of sitting with Dad in the cockpit. Memories of playing pretend with Val. Fixing up Veebee. Laughing around the table in the mess hall with the crew. Guests—countless guests, so many guests, faces that bobbed in and out of the darkness, half remembered.
How unremarkable, I heard.
My life. He was referring to my life.
Itineraries and places and star charts and finding Mom’s copies ofUnder the Tan-Tan Sunin a crate in the storage room, kicking my feet as I read them secretly late at night, finding the last installment in a shop on Coruscant—
No, I thought, trying to shove him away, but I was helpless. Powerless.
He really was a monster.
He saw the firefight. He saw Sian and me hiding in the alley. The lightsaber. Sian stowing away. The night we talked on the flight deck. Personal things—privatethings. Tatooine. Bartering with the lightsaber. Keeping it.
There was a thread of satisfaction when he saw that.
Geonosis. Alakor.Kissing.He lingered on that. Strange. Revolting. Then Sian taking the lander to leave. TheStarfarerarriving. Val killing Veebee. The agony in that moment. He paused there. Relished it. Then he inspected my memory of seeing him for the first time, this awful monster, this warlord of nightmares, this—
Kylo Ren, he said.
I would remember that.
And then he saw the glint of metal in my memory. The lander—
Suddenly, there was a noise, so loud it made my head ring. He wrenched out of my thoughts, dropped me to the ground. I puddled there. If I had bones and skinand blood, I didn’t know it anymore. He turned, raising both hands—
The lander, meters away, came to a dead halt.
I gasped for air, curling into myself on the ground, the feeling coming back like a needle of pain in my spine. My eyes were blurry. My throat burned.
With a cry, Kylo Ren threw the lander away like it was a children’s toy. The ship flipped over and rolled to a stop against the facility. Smoke sighed from the engines. No—Sian.Sian!I clawed at the ground. It was spinning too much.
