The stars stretched onward. For one breathless second. Two. Three.
Ten minutes. Thirty. An hour—I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell.Thiswas why Mom had liked to have someone she trusted in the cockpit while she astrogated. Because while I did, I wasn’t in the cockpit. I wasn’t in my body.
I was the product of time and motion.
All I knew was when it was time to disembark. It felt like delicately extracting myself from a tapestry, knitting myself back into my body. I pushed the hyperspace lever back up.
TheStarfarercame out of lightspeed with a pop.
Through the viewport, Endor’s forest moon sat peacefully in a pocket of safe space. No ships were waiting for us. No firefight. A few moments later, the three chrome ships that had helped us left hyperspace at our side. We had made it. We had escaped—somehow.
And the First Order didn’t follow.
ENDOR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Resistance
Everything was quiet.
I sat back in the pilot’s chair. My fingers shook. My chest hurt every time I breathed. And it was only after a few breaths that I realized my cheeks were wet. That my eyes were blurred—
That I was crying.
I felt like I’d cried enough in the past day to last a lifetime.
Without hesitation, Sian pulled me against him and pressed my head into his shoulder and held on so tight I didn’t fear coming apart, because even if I did he was there to keep me together. At least for the most part. There was a piece of me still in hyperspace. A piece of me I’d never get back, forever lost wandering the lanes between time.
There was the me from before.
And there was the person I was now.
The tears helped ground me, and the circles Sianrubbed on my back gave me something to think about, and finally, finally, I settled again. If this was how stories felt, being in the middle of them, I had told them all wrong since the beginning. I’d told only about the wonder, the exhilaration, the elegance of it all—even the bad things, even the moments that changed people forever.
There was nothing elegant about any of this. Nothing wonderful. Nothing exhilarating.
It was raw and painful and frightening. It made me want to bury my head in fiction and never come out again. This was horrid. This was disappointing.
And yet Sian’s embrace was warm, and the words he muttered—“We’re safe, we’re safe now, we’re okay”—felt true even if I knew they had never been true and would never be true. Veebee was gone, and my brother was a traitor.
But for the moment, his arms around me were nice. I burrowed my face into his shoulder and inhaled his scent of dusty otherwhere and complimentary shampoo.
It was a comfort.
There was a knock on the door to the flight deck, and then it opened for my father. He had an arm slung around Daaric to stay upright, his other clutching his side. When they saw me, relief washed over both their faces.
“Daughter,” he sighed as I lurched out of the pilot’schair. He abandoned Daaric and stumbled toward me, and we wrapped each other in a hug. He smelled like blaster emissions, pungent and tart. “Daughter, Daughter,” he murmured into my hair.
Sian slipped off the flight deck with Daaric, who wanted to treat Sian’s wounds from his tumble in the lander. They closed the door behind them.
“I was so worried,” I said, hot tears still spilling down my cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, hey, none of that, love,” he replied, kissing my cheek. His beard, rough and familiar, scratched my skin. “You did good. I’m so proud of you.”
“Is e-everyone okay?” I asked, sobbing.
“Yeah,” he replied, also sobbing. “We’re alive. We’re alive because of you.”
