Heart of the Void

The training yard had been carved out of the jungles of Ajan Kloss, a rectangle of hard-packed earth rimmed by canvas shelters and humming generators. Morning light bled through the canopy in thin shafts, catching dust motes and sweat. The recruits stood in two uneven lines, ten of them, fingers fidgeting against the unfamiliar weight of training sabers and practice staves. Their eyes kept finding her. Some with hope. Some with awe. One or two with open doubt.

“Again,” Rey said, and moved through the sequence, her own practice blade humming as it cut the air in clean arcs. “Feet steady. Elbows in. The blade is an extension of your arm, not a separate thing.”

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. The crackle of power that woke in any room she walked into did that for her. It made her itch, like a current running beneath her skin. The recruits mirrored her, some clumsy, some decent. A tall girl named Mora had natural balance. A nervous boy, Deren, couldn’t stop glancing at his feet. The Force rippled around them, open and jittery. Young. Raw.

She corrected stances, nudged shoulders, rotated wrists. “Breath,” she told them when the line of bodies tightened in unison. “Relax your jaw, Deren. You’ll crack a tooth before you cut anything.”

They laughed. The sound was thin in the humid air.

Rey showed them the block once more, then called for pairs. Staves clacked. The hum of training sabers rose and fell. She circled. She should have felt full here—this should have been nourishment. Ten sparks in the field of the Force, all of them flickering, seeking. Instead, the lack pressed at her. Her steps fell into a rhythm to drown it out.

A tug at the edge of her thoughts, dull and insistent, like a call she refused to answer. Not the bond, she told herself. Not him. The sensation didn’t have the sharp, violating clarity of those moments when he stepped into her mind like it was a room they shared. This was something planted and growing, delicate roots threading into the cracks she thought she had sealed.

Mora took a hard strike and stumbled. Rey moved before she thought, catching the girl under the elbow, steadying her. Sweat dampened Mora’s curls where they plastered to her forehead. “Breathe,” Rey said, low. She adjusted Mora’s grip, thumbs aligned, fingers loose enough to read the blade. “Don’t fight it. Feel where it wants to go and guide it there.”

Mora nodded, lip caught in her teeth. “Yes, Master—”

“Not that,” Rey said, sharper than she intended. The girl’s eyes widened. Rey softened her voice. “Just Rey.”

“Yes, Rey.”

When the sun climbed higher and the humidity turned the air to something you could drink, she gave them a break. The recruits collapsed gratefully under the shade of the canvas. An aide brought water canisters. Rey didn’t sit. She moved beyond the ring of shelters, into the trees, the constant thrum of insects and the distant hiss of the base’s shields filling her ears. She closed her eyes and reached, fingers splayed against the rough bark of a tree, and tried to pretend that reaching wasn’t the same as searching for him.

The pull met her halfway. Familiar. Unwelcome. Not a voice, not a thought. A presence she knew too well, a heat in her chest that did not belong to the sun. She cut it off with the practiced motion of dropping a shield. Her breath left her in a rush. The emptiness it left was worse.

Back at the yard, the recruits watched her. Deren tried to hide his stare and failed. “You okay?” Mora asked, hesitant.

“Fine,” Rey said. She clapped her hands once. The sound cracked like a blaster shot. “Form a circle. We’re going to work on sensing without sight.”

They put on visors. She walked the ring, laying a palm on each shoulder, a grounding touch. Her own hands were steady. Good. She held onto that. “Listen,” she said. “Not with your ears. Let the world reach you. Don’t pull. If you pull, you’ll miss it.”

They did as she asked, some faces smoothing into focus, others creasing in frustration. Rey moved into the center. She picked up a smooth training sphere the size of a fist and sent it rolling with the Force, slow at first, then faster. When it approached, Mora turned her blade in time and deflected it with a startled gasp. Deren missed one, caught the next. The sphere zipped, ricocheted, tested them.

When the exercise ended, she was the one who was breathless. Not from the work. From the effort of staying closed where she knew she was supposed to be open. She dismissed them for food, ignoring the headache that had started to bloom.

“Rey,” a voice called as the group broke up. Poe, striding across the yard, hands on hips, face framed by the afternoon glare. He was all easy stride and honest concern, which she didn’t deserve and didn’t know how to bear. “They look good,” he said, nodding toward the recruits. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

“I have,” she lied. “Enough.”

He stopped beside her, close enough that she could see the small scar above his left eyebrow, a souvenir from a raid on a supply depot. “You don’t have to do all of it yourself,” he said, quieter. “Leia thinks—”

“I know what Leia thinks,” she said, too quickly. The name in her mouth made something in her chest pull tight. Poe’s mouth pressed into a line. He didn’t push. He never did, not like Finn. She loved him for it and wished he would for once, just once, force her to drop it all.

“Dinner’s in an hour,” he said instead. “Try to be a person and eat with us.”

“I will,” she said. He squeezed her shoulder, warm, grounding, and left.

She didn’t go to the mess. She stayed on the training field until the light turned gold and long shadows stretched off the staves like a second set of limbs. She set the recruits to spar again and joined them this time, taking standards and breaking them, pushing their balance, forcing them to find the line between strength and desperation. Sweat ran down between her shoulder blades, dampened the neck of her shirt. Her arms ached. It felt good to be alone in motion, even surrounded by bodies.

By the last drill, Mora’s cheeks were flushed, Deren’s arms shook, and three of the recruits had switched to the simpler practice staves without complaint. Rey used the ache in her lungs like a shield. The tug at the edge of her mind persisted. It stayed steady, patient, intolerable. She set her jaw and ignored it. She thought of Jakku and the way the sun beat without mercy. She thought of the years she had spent waiting and decided she could wait again.

When she finally dismissed them, night had settled. The jungle sang. Rey remained in the yard as the recruits drifted away in twos and threes, their chatter faint and ordinary. She picked up her saber and ignited it, the blue steady and familiar. She moved through forms that no longer needed names, her body a map of lines she had worn into herself. Strike, pivot, parry. Thrust. The blade lit the space around her and cast everything beyond in deeper black.

Her muscles went from ache to tremor. She pushed, breath ragged. Her chest felt tight. The shield in her mind thinned and wavered. The familiar presence pressed again, closer now, aware, if not intrusive. She could refuse him. She could not refuse the way it felt like something missing returning to its rightful place. She lashed out with the blade and felt the tip bite into the training dummy. Its synthetic skin hissed and curled.

“Enough,” she told herself aloud. The word didn’t ease anything. She powered down the saber and stood breathing in the dark, slick with sweat and shaking, the sound of the generators a dull pulse in her skull. From the treeline, a breeze carried the smell of wet earth. The pull stayed. She didn’t answer it. She steadied her breath and forced her feet to carry her off the field and into the shadows toward the showers, pretending she wasn’t counting each step as an act of resistance.

The bridge of the Finalizer was a study in practiced obedience, but the air was wrong. Officers snapped to attention a beat too late, heads bent a fraction too long over consoles. The hum of the engines had a nervous edge, or maybe that was only his own pulse in his ears.

“Report.” Ben’s voice carried easily across the command pit, lower than normal, the familiar weight of the mask absent and yet somehow there. He wore black from throat to boots, the tunic plain, the gloves folded in his hands like a restraint he chose not to use.

Commander Mitn at the nav console cleared his throat. “Outer Rim cells have disrupted patrols along the Spine, Supreme Leader. Supply lines are holding, but… strained.”

General Hux stood a careful two steps behind Ben’s right shoulder, close enough to be seen in any reflection, far enough to maintain a fiction of deference. “We anticipated as much,” Hux said, smooth and mild. “The Resistance is desperate. They’ll gnaw at the edges and call it a victory.”

Ben didn’t turn. “And here?”

Hux’s hands folded at his back. “There have been… discussions among the senior staff about reallocations. Nothing of concern.”

The words were nothing. The emphasis was everything. Ben’s jaw tightened. The bond pressed at the seam of his consciousness like a hand against glass. He ignored it. He was not going to let her inside here.

A communications officer risked a glance up, flinched when Ben’s eyes met his, and bent back to his board. Hux let a beat pass, then took it. “Your presence inspires, Supreme Leader,” he said, voice pitched to carry. “A tour of the lower decks would bolster morale. The crews have questions. It would be… useful if you addressed them.”

He meant: They’re whispering. They’re wondering if you can hold the line. He meant: I can.

Ben set the gloves on the edge of the console, precise. “Questions about what?”

Hux’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “About strategy. About vision. The men like to know the hand on the helm is steady.”

It would be so easy to ignite his saber and end it. To take the bridge and paint it in absolutes. He could see it; the way Hux’s eyes would go wide, the little rise of his chin before a final, useless speech. Ben felt the phantom pressure of the hilt against his palm and let it go with effort.

“Schedule it,” he said. “Not today.”

“Of course.” Hux’s bow was a blade held flat. “We are at your disposal.”

They went through the motions—reports, projections, the tidy language of war. Ben dismissed them at last, allowing the bridge to empty around him in orderly streams of black and gray. Hux lingered, as he always did, the last to leave. His gaze flicked to the viewport where stars smeared in lines. “We all need rest,” he said, sympathetic. “Even leaders.”

He left without waiting for an answer. Ben watched the doors slide shut behind him, their meeting edges clean, precise. He breathed out slowly and felt the restraint in it.

His quarters were quiet in the way only space could be: insulated silence, the hum of life support steady and intimate. The door sealed behind him. He stood in the middle of the stark room and waited for the anger to drain. It didn’t.

He poured water at the small console by the wall and drank, the cool of it a brief relief that vanished as soon as it hit his stomach. His hands were steady, his reflection in the black viewport glass a tall, dark shape cut against the streak of hyperspace. He didn’t turn on the lights. The darkness was truer.

His father’s voice did not speak, not exactly, but memory had its own sound. The scent of engine grease and leather and something sweet he could never name lived in the edges of his mind. “You always wanted the biggest ship,” Han had said once, grinning, a hand ruffling a boy’s hair that had refused to lie flat. “Doesn’t mean you know where to take it.”

Ben set the glass down too hard. It slid a fraction and stopped with a soft click. “You’re dead,” he told the room. “You don’t get to have the last word.”

The last word belonged to Snoke in the throne room’s echo: Failed, failed, failed. The old wound lit, hot and familiar. He had killed that voice. He had cut him open and watched him fall. And yet Snoke’s presence lingered in the habits he couldn’t shake, the instinct to lower his head and reach for permission he didn’t need.

The pull came again, softer now, the familiar heat at the edge of his mind, the presence he knew as well as his own hand. He didn’t open to it. He could have. The glass between them was thinner in the dark, in the hush, in the way his breath sounded too loud in the room where no one could see him. He stood very still and felt all the ways she was not here.

He stripped off the tunic and dropped it over the back of the chair. The scars along his ribs pulled as he stretched, a faint twinge, a map of pain that had once been identity. He had been a blade. He was supposed to be a crown. He was both and neither. The weight of the title sat on his shoulders like something a size too big, sliding, awkward, demanding he grow to fill it.

When he closed his eyes, he saw the small triangle of light that had been his father standing in front of him on a narrow bridge. The way Han had looked at him like there was still a boy in there worth saving. Ben had driven a blade through that belief. The memory should have been clean by now, edges worn smooth by restless revisiting. It never was. It met him fresh every time—the heat of the wound, the way his father’s hand had touched his face even as he fell.

Snoke’s pale fingers tightened on the arm of a throne in another memory, mouth pulled in disappointment that felt like drowning. “You are no Vader,” he had said. “You are a child in a mask.”

The mask was gone. The child remained.

Ben pressed his palms to the cool metal of the table at the center of the room and leaned into it until his arms trembled. He breathed, slow and measured, like the old teachings he had mocked taught him. The ship’s heartbeat filled him: engines, air, the faint pulsing of power through conduits. It should have grounded him. Instead, his own skin felt wrong, too tight and too loose all at once.

He thought of Hux’s eyes, the gleam there that said he was already counting votes, already whispering in corners, already measuring Ben for failure. He could feel the First Order shifting under his feet like unstable ground, loyal to the uniform and not the man in it. Control was a performance. He had been trained for war, not politics. He could crush a man’s trachea with a lazy flex of his fingers and still he could not make officers stop glancing at one another when he spoke.

He sat on the edge of the narrow bunk and folded forward, elbows on his knees, hands interlaced. The Force pooled, restless and full of teeth, and he let it brush the edges of his thoughts. The bond pressed again, more insistent, and for a heartbeat he almost let it in, if only to feel something like balance. He didn’t. He closed himself the way Rey had slammed the door between them earlier, the way she always did when he reached uninvited.

The emptiness that followed was a familiar fall. He held himself in it, jaw tight, eyes fixed on the dark floor. The weight of the throne rested not on his head but against his sternum, heavy and cold, making every breath a small defiance. He had wanted this—had clawed toward it through blood and noise and the cold of space. He had it. It was not the same as victory.

In the corridor beyond his door, footsteps passed, a murmur of voices, the mutter of the ship existing without him. Ben straightened and set his shoulders back, spine ironed straight by will. He reached for the gloves, for the small armor of habit. His hands slid into them, familiar, contained. He stood in the dark until the urge to open himself to her faded to a bearable ache.

When he moved to leave, the viewport threw his reflection back at him one last time. Ben met his own eyes and didn’t look away. The ghost of Snoke’s smile curled at the edges of memory, and his father’s absence felt like a pressure at his back.

He palmed the door and stepped into the lightless hall, the ship swallowing him whole.

The command room on Ajan Kloss was crowded with bodies and heat and the restless buzz of overlapping voices. Screens lined the walls, tracking blue and red markers like blinking constellations, while a projection of the Mid Rim hovered in the air above the table. Rey stood near the edge, palms flat against cool metal, trying to fix her attention on the shape of their defenses instead of the persistent tug of distance that lived beneath her sternum.

Poe’s voice cut through the hum. “We don’t have the fuel to keep playing cat and mouse along the Spine. We pick three supply lanes and we hold them,” he said, tapping the map with the back of his knuckles. “We can’t protect everything.”

“Picking battles the First Order wants us to pick is not the same as winning them,” another commander said, frustration sharp.

Rey took a breath. The air tasted of recycled oxygen, metal, sweat, and something bitter from the caf steaming in a forgotten cup. She tried to fold her focus into the present, into the specifics of legions and jumps and timing. The Force settled around her in the way it did when she was tired—thin and stretched, a film over her skin rather than a current she could sink into. She could feel Finn’s presence at her back, grounded and steady. Poe’s impatience cut like a blade, bright and quick, but his eyes kept flicking to her, a silent question: Are you with me?

“I’m listening,” she told him when he caught her gaze, and she was, but there was a faint pressure at the base of her skull that made the room feel both too tight and too far away.

Poe exhaled hard. “Then, we rotate the small wings here and here,” he went on, drawing a semicircle. “We make them think we’re thinner than we are. Chewie can—”

The projector flickered. Rey’s hand tightened on the table. The world tilted, then snapped.

It hit like falling into open space. A star, massive and a deep, pulsing orange, filled her vision, its surface churning with waves of fire. It was dying. Not in any way she had seen before, not with the indifferent majesty of time, but with a drawn-out shudder, as if something were wrapped around its heart and squeezing. The light dimmed. The corona sagged. A cold rushed at her through the heat, a cold that wasn’t temperature but an absence. It ran over her skin and into her bones. The sound of the room vanished; there was only the high, thin wail of something being emptied.

She couldn’t breathe.

The star collapsed inward on itself and then seemed to stretch, pulled toward a dark point she couldn’t see. Rey felt the Force recoil like a living thing. It tore through her chest, icy and breathless, and she heard her own mouth open, sharp and helpless.

“Rey?” Poe’s voice came from very far away.

She blinked and the room slammed back around her—voices, the murmur of the projector, the scrape of a chair. She was on her knees. She didn’t remember falling. Her fingers had slid off the table and hit the floor, hard. The cold hadn’t left. It pooled under her sternum, heavy and wrong, a weight pressing in and in.

Poe was already moving, his boots squeaking against the concrete floor. He dropped down beside her, one hand hovering, not quite touching. Finn was there too, a step behind, his breath audible, controlled and thick with worry.

“Rey. Hey.” Poe’s face was a warm, worried blur that came into focus piece by piece. Sweat beaded along his hairline. His eyes searched hers like he could anchor her there. “Talk to me.”

She dragged air into her lungs. It scraped. “I’m fine,” she managed. The words tasted like a lie.

“You’re not.” Poe’s tone was flat, stubborn. He lowered his voice. “What happened?”

Rey pushed her palms against the floor and sat back, the room still too bright, too loud. The star was burned on the inside of her eyelids, the way a glare left a mark even when you looked away. Except this didn’t fade. The cold didn’t either. It wasn’t the bond. It wasn’t him. She would have known his presence, the way it shimmered a different color through everything. This was blank. This was a hole where something should have been.

She swallowed. “A vision,” she said, because that was the closest word. “A star. Dying.” Her throat felt raw. She tried to explain the part that made no sense, the part that terrified her. “It wasn’t… natural.”

A murmur spread through the room. She felt it like a brush against her skin, curiosity and unease and the familiar wariness people had when the Force did something they couldn’t see. Finn cut it off with a glare that would have silenced a squad. He lowered himself beside her without hesitation, solid presence at her shoulder. “You’re okay,” he said, not a question, a promise. His hand found the back of her arm, warm, steady.

Poe shifted to block her from the others’ line of sight, kneeling in the space between her and the table. “Is it the bond?” he asked, very low. He didn’t say his name. He didn’t have to.

Rey shook her head. The motion made the room tilt. “No.” The certainty surprised her with its strength. Whatever this was had reached past everything and touched the part of her that listened without asking. “It was… empty,” she said, and her voice shook. She breathed again, slower, trying to calm the wild pulse under her skin. “Like something was taking it. The light. The… everything.”

Poe’s jaw tightened, his eyes flicking for a second to the map, as if expecting the star to flicker red there. He looked back at her, face softer now, worry pulling the edges of his mouth down. “Can you stand?”

She nodded, because she could, because she had to. Finn and Poe got their hands under her arms without making a show of it. She rose, legs unsteady but holding. The cold settled deeper, an unwelcome tenant. It reminded her of the colony. It reminded her of nothing she had a name for. Her gaze caught the wash of stars on the projection again, and a sliver of panic slid up her spine—somewhere out there, a light had gone out, and not by itself.

“Take five,” Poe said over his shoulder to the room, not turning his attention from her. He didn’t ask permission. “We’ll reconvene.”

There were a few confused protests, cut off by Finn’s look. Chairs scraped. Footsteps receded. The hum of equipment filled the space left by voices.

Poe guided her to the edge of the room, to where a crate served as a makeshift bench. He settled beside her but kept a little space, his hand close enough that she could bridge it if she needed to. “You don’t have to explain anything right now,” he said, gentler than before. “But if there’s something we need to prepare for—”

Rey caught his hand anyway. She didn’t realize what she was doing until her fingers were wrapped around his, grounding herself in the heat of his skin. The simplicity of it steadied her. She licked dry lips. “I don’t know what it was,” she said. “Only that it wasn’t him. And it’s coming closer.”

Poe squeezed back, brief, firm. “Then we’ll be ready,” he said. It was bravado and belief in equal parts. He searched her face again, and his voice dropped to a whisper only she could hear. “Don’t disappear into it. Stay with me.”

She nodded and made herself breathe slow until the air didn’t scrape. The cold didn’t leave, but it settled into a shape she could hold. She let go of his hand and set both of hers on her knees to stop the tremor. The map cast pale light across her fingers, the skin there still tingling.

“We should check the Outer Rim networks,” she said, voice rough but steadying. “If there was a flare… any anomaly. Anything.”

Poe stood, offering his hand again to pull her up. “We’ll get on it.” He hesitated, eyes on hers. “You sure you want to keep going?”

Rey glanced at the room, at Finn watching from across the table, at the swirl of starfields. The vision pulsed once, a ghost behind her eyes. She swallowed it down. “Yes,” she said. “We don’t have time to stop.”

Ben folded himself to the floor of his private chamber, knees sinking into the woven mat. The room was sparse, dark, the hum of the Finalizer’s engines a steady pressure under his skin. He closed his eyes and pulled the Force in, not to wield it, not to break anything with it, but to find the quiet center that remained elusive since dawn. Hux had planted knives in every corridor, and the day had left him raw. He let his breath even out, counting the seconds between.

He was just falling into it when the bond snapped open.

It wasn’t soft or gradual. It hit like a battered door kicked off its hinges, a rush of sound and light and someone else’s breath mingling with his. He flinched, palms pressing harder to his thighs, head tipping back with the impact.

Rey.

The name drifted up without permission, the shape of her presence threading into his mind before he could push it away. He saw the room around her in dizzy fragments—harsh lights, a projection of scattered starfields, the drag of shadows under her eyes. She was seated on a crate, posture too straight, fighting tremors in her hands. Her face was colorless, lips pressed tight as if holding something down.

His breath stalled. He didn’t reach for her. He never reached first. He could feel her become aware of him in the same instant, the bond brightening in a way that made the hairs rise along his forearms. They froze together in that space, not quite looking at each other but unable to look away, a held breath stretched across a gulf of light-years.

She didn’t speak. Neither did he. Silence grew, layered with memory and irritation and the ache of recognition he despised. He could feel her inimical wariness, the set of her shoulders like armor. He let it settle over the sharpened edges of himself.

The Force between them thrummed low, almost audible. Through her eyes, he caught a sideways glare from Finn, a hand landing near Rey’s knee and then withdrawing when she straightened. It struck him in a strange place, that small, human touch. His jaw clenched.

He made himself look at her instead. The angle of her mouth, the tightness in it. The faint sheen along her skin from a cold sweat. He could feel a chill clinging to her like frost, not his doing, a wrongness pooling beneath her sternum that echoed through the bond, whispering of absence, of an empty room in a house that should be full. He’d felt nothing like it. It didn’t belong to darkness or light. It was not hunger the way he understood hunger. It was a blotting out.

His fingers curled into the fabric of his pants. The urge to ask what had happened pressed against his teeth, hard enough to hurt. He didn’t. He held the line and let the question hang unsaid. She wouldn’t answer. She’d throw it in his face. He knew the shape of her anger like he knew the weight of his own.

Her eyes cut toward him then, sharp, unguarded for a half second. The heat in them had something desperate threaded through it, the thin edge that came after a threat you couldn’t meet with a blade. She swallowed, and he felt it. He felt the rough drag in her throat like it was his.

He focused, deliberately, drawing a slow breath she could feel if she wanted to. Steady. He didn’t send comfort. He wouldn’t insult her with it. He let steadiness bleed into the space instead, a single clean line through the noise. The engines’ hum fell away. The pulse under her skin faltered, hitched, then evened out by degrees. She didn’t acknowledge it. He didn’t expect her to.

The projection near her threw shifting light over her profile. For a heartbeat, it gave her cheekbones a green cast and cut shadows under her eyes. She looked fragile and stubborn all at once. The corner of his mouth twitched without humor. He had learned both sides of that in her the hard way.

She must have felt him looking because her mouth flattened. Animus rolled through, brittle and familiar, the kind that insisted on distance. He held it without pushing back. It felt strange, this slight change in stance. He had spent so long trying to pull her closer or drive her away. Pausing here felt like standing on a knife’s edge and choosing not to tip.

A flash of that cold rose in her, unguarded, and for a moment he saw not the command room but the shape of a star collapsing in on itself, light dimming not with time but because something was wrapped around it and squeezing. He didn’t see it with his eyes. He felt the Force recoil in her memory, the high, thin keen she couldn’t forget. The bond burned with it, and he drew a breath too sharp, involuntary. His shoulders went rigid. He knew pain. He knew fear. This was neither. It was evacuation.

She flinched when she realized she had let it through. His name hit the space between them like an accusation and a plea both, unsaid but ringing all the same. Ben. He hated how it sounded there.

He didn’t shield. He didn’t crowd her, either. He simply watched, eyes half open in his dark room, the lines of his hands stark against black. The weight of the throne, of officers’ eyes and Hux’s derision, receded to a faint pressure at the edge of his awareness. The bond filled everything. It had never felt like this, not even on Ahch-To or Snoke’s ship: raw, bright, unsought, as if the galaxy itself had torn a seam and shoved them back together.

She breathed in, and her lungs stung again. He followed her breath without thinking. His chest loosened. He exhaled slowly, letting it carry across the thread connecting them. For a few beats, they were only breath and the steadying hum of two ships far apart.

Somewhere behind her, Poe’s voice said something low. Rey’s mouth softened and then tightened in the same breath. The war lived in her face. He wondered what lived in his.

The bond pulsed once, strong, like a heartbeat. Confusion flickered between them, honest and unguarded—the shared recognition that whatever had reached for her wasn’t him, that the intensity of the connection had shifted without their consent. He met her eyes fully then, despite the uselessness of it. She didn’t look away.

He felt the decision gather in her like a fist closing. The animosity sharpened; the edges came back. She pulled herself tall, fingers flexing on her knees. He watched the wall go up plank by plank, not sloppy, not cruel, just necessary. He could have pushed. He didn’t.

The door slammed shut. The bond snapped closed on his tongue like a bitter taste, leaving the ghost of her cold in its wake. He sat very still in the quiet, hands open now, palms burning where he had pressed them down. The hum of the ship came back into focus, the door a flat, unyielding plane to his left, the distant footsteps of troopers passing like a current he could step into anytime he wanted and drown.

He lowered his head and stared at the floor until the black stopped swimming. He had her fear seared in his mind, not for him, not from him. It sat heavy and new, a weight he couldn’t shake. He let his hands fall to the mat, spreading his fingers wide, grounding himself in fabric and friction and the hard edge of the present.

He didn’t move for a long time.

The room was too bright. The moment the bond shut, Rey’s vision pricked with static, like she’d stared at a sun and burned her retinas. She blinked hard until the holographic starfield snapped back into coherence. Her chest rose too fast, then stuttered, then found a rhythm that didn’t hurt. She kept her hands on her knees because if she flexed her fingers she would remember the way her palms had warmed when he matched her breath.

Poe leaned in, cautious. “Rey?”

“I’m fine,” she said, too quickly. The word scraped, and she heard it. She forced her shoulders down and let the chill settle like a scarf she could arrange, not a flood she had to outrun. She lifted her chin at the map, at trajectories and data streams and the safe math of possible futures. “We should focus on the Rim. The comm buoys near Praxilin went dark for three minutes last week. That’s a start.”

Poe glanced between her and Finn. Finn’s jaw worked, but he nodded and tapped at the console, throwing up a cluster of red markers. “We can send a probe. If this is First Order—”

“It isn’t,” Rey said, and the certainty in her own voice startled her. The room turned to look. She swallowed the rest, refusing to say because I felt it, because he felt it too. “It doesn’t fit their pattern.”

Finn’s eyes softened, concern pushing out the wariness. “Then what did you see?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Not until we have proof.” She rose too fast and had to catch herself on the edge of the table, the metal cold under her fingerprints. She kept her expression neutral while the ghost of absence moved through her marrow and then retreated. “Start with those buoys. And the colony reports from the Outer Rim—anything flagged as psychological.”

“Rey,” Poe said, quieter. “You don’t have to carry all of it right now.”

“I know,” she lied, because saying she didn’t know would let something else out and she didn’t have time to bleed. “I’m going to check the eastern antenna. It’s been dropping packets.” It hadn’t, but the lie tasted small and survivable. She needed air that didn’t smell like recycled fear and the faint, clean trace of steadiness she still hated him for giving.

She left before either of them could stop her, boots loud in the corridor. The base hummed with the familiar rhythm of bodies and circuits and ordinary tasks. She walked until the tightness below her ribs eased by a fraction. She found a ladder and climbed toward daylight, pushing through a hatch onto the platform above the hangar. The evening wind carried grit and the distant call of some nocturnal creature hidden in the cliffs. The sky was a deepening blue. She breathed it in and let the raw edge in her throat dull.

Ben had not felt like a threat in that moment. He had been a mirror without smudges, showing her pallor and the tremor she’d tried to still. He had held a line instead of pushing. It would have been easier if he’d been cruel, if he’d demanded and pressed and made it simple to hate. She stared at the horizon until the wind made her eyes water and told herself that was why they stung.

She tried to recall the vision of the collapsing star without recalling him feeling it. It was impossible to separate. The cold she’d carried back clung to the seam where the bond had been, an ache that made her feel both emptied and invaded. She wrapped her arms around herself and watched the first bright speck of a satellite cut across the sky. When she finally went back down, she made sure her face looked the way command wanted it to—set, determined, unbreakable. No one stopped her this time.

Across the galaxy, the engines of the Finalizer pulsed like a sleeping beast under Ben’s feet. He sat on the floor until the sensation in his hands changed from pins to heat, then pushed himself up, bones registering each motion as a decision. The room smelled like metal and the faint oil on his saber’s hilt. He stared at the mask where it lay on a shelf, its fractured surface throwing back the barest suggestion of a face he sometimes wore to make other men small.

He didn’t reach for it. He paced once, twice, and then stopped, because pacing felt too loud. The image of a star being strangled went with him anyway, imprinting itself on the underside of his eyelids. The fear in her hadn’t been for him. He knew the contour of fear aimed at him—the way it sharpened, the way it always came with anger and defiance. This had been the fear of absence. The fear of a cliff where a floor should be. It had touched something he’d never had language for, and he hated it for that as much as he couldn’t look away from it.

He reached outward with his senses on instinct, and the ship answered: the steady march of stormtroopers’ footfalls three decks below, the clipped annoyance of a junior officer trying to calibrate a sensor array without the right protocols, the sour, triumphant curl of Hux’s mind somewhere near the bridge. Beneath all of it a draft of cold, not from space, not from any temperature gauge he could manipulate—this was in the Force, a current running crosswise, ignored by those who couldn’t feel it, unmistakable to the ones who could.

He followed that thread and found nothing at the end of it, only more of the same wrongness. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t a hand reaching for him. It felt like the space between two magnets held too close together, a pressure that existed only because of the things on either side. Between him and Rey, that pressure had swelled, then broken something open.

His mouth flattened. He had spent years learning to read currents, to bend them, to submerge himself until he either drowned or came up holding power in his teeth. This… it didn’t answer to any of his tricks. It didn’t even acknowledge them. He thought of Snoke’s voice, the way it had tried to make his power feel less like a gift and more like a leash. He thought of his father’s hands, large and warm around a hydrospanner, the weight of the Falcon’s ramp under his bare feet as a child. He thought of Rey’s breathing aligning with his because he’d offered steadiness and she’d taken it without asking.

“You look unwell.”

Hux’s voice, deferent at the edges and poisonous at the center, filtered through the door panel before the general stepped in without being invited. Ben didn’t move. He let the irritation hiss through him and burn out.

“We have a briefing in fifteen minutes,” Hux said. “The Outer patrols have flagged three resistant cells near—”

“Move it to twenty,” Ben said, quiet. “I need more time.”

Hux’s eyes flicked to the meditative mat, to Ben’s open hands, and something like contempt smoothed his face. “Of course, Supreme Leader.” He turned on his heel with military precision and left the door open long enough to let the corridor’s colder air touch Ben’s skin before it slid shut again.

Ben stood alone. He curled his fingers and saw her hands on her knees, trying to stop the shake. He tried to force the image away and couldn’t. It stayed, persistent as the low, steady pull of the wrongness threaded through space. It did not feel like the First Order. It did not feel like the Resistance. It did not feel like anything he had been trained to fight.

Disquiet was too soft a word for the prickle along his spine, for the way the threat seemed to sit not out there but in the narrow strip of air that had just been between their bodies in the bond. He felt himself make a choice without the satisfaction of naming it. He would not send for her. He would not call. But he would stop assuming the shape of the war had only two sides.

He picked up his saber and clipped it to his belt. He straightened his tunic and left the room without the mask, the open door swallowing the last of the quiet as boots fell into step with him. The hum of the engines vibrated in his bones. He walked toward the briefing Hux had arranged, the star collapsing and Rey’s pallor stitched into the back of his eyes. The sense of something gathering, faceless and patient, hung just behind his left shoulder like a shadow that belonged to neither of them and both. He did not shake it off. He could not. He carried it down the corridor like a secret, like a warning, like a weight that would only grow heavier in the hours to come.