In a corridor in the depths of the Raddus, Finn sat by himself on an equipment crate, looking down at the glowing beacon in his hand.
General Organa had been clutching it when the hatch to the bridge air lock opened. As crewers and medics frantically worked on the badly injured Resistance leader, the beacon had rolled across the deck, unnoticed, and come to a halt at Finn’s feet. He’d picked it up and then stood back, allowing the medical droids to attend to the general and bear her away on a stretcher.
He rolled the device back and forth in his hands. Rey was out there somewhere—and when she returned, it would be to the beacon’s location.
Finn got to his feet. He knew what he had to do, even though Poe and his other friends in the Resistance would never understand.
He just hoped he wouldn’t regret it for the rest of his life.
Rose Tico was also sitting by herself in one of the Raddus’s corridors, tears rolling down her cheeks and falling into her lap. Occasionally her hand crept up to the collar of her jumpsuit, feeling for the teardrop-shaped Otomok medallion around her neck.
She had spent the journey to D’Qar showing the Ninka’s techs the jury-rigged system she’d developed to cloak the energy signatures of bombers’ ion engines. Once that work was complete, she’d transferred to the Raddus. After that, she and Paige had little time together—Rose had watched from a ready room aboard the Ninka as Cobalt Hammer released its payload above the First Order’s Siege Dreadnought and then vanished into the mighty ship’s funeral pyre.
Paige had told Rose that they were connected to each other, and to home—and that they didn’t have to be in the same place for that to be true. But now Rose’s connection with her sister had been brutally severed. After rarely spending more than a couple of days away from Paige, Rose was looking at the endless, yawning expanse of a lifetime without her.
She had no idea how she was going to survive that—or if she even wanted to.
The technicians aboard the Raddus hadn’t known what to do with her, and they were too busy keeping the cruiser running to figure it out. They’d handed her a spare jumpsuit from the Ground Logistics Division and sent her out doing droidwork—checking bulkhead doors and data conduits down on the lower levels.
Rose supposed she should have been insulted—she’d been a flight engineer aboard a bomber, after all. Paige, she knew, would have pitched a fit on her behalf—when they’d joined the Resistance, she’d refused to fly without Rose as part of her bomber crew.
But the Resistance had no more bombers, and Paige was dead.
The droidwork had turned out to be a blessing in disguise, allowing her to be mostly alone down here in the guts of the Raddus. She had been briefly reunited with Fossil, who was also left adrift as surplus personnel, the commander of a squadron that no longer existed. Fossil had given her a ring engraved with the logo of the old Rebel Alliance—in memory, she said, of Paige’s sacrifice for the Resistance.
The hulking Martigrade’s sorrow had only deepened Rose’s misery; it was better to sleepwalk through her duty shifts with no company except the thrum of the Raddus’s air exchangers.
Then the heavy cruiser had been attacked—Rose had felt the torpedo impact on the bridge as a shudder and shimmy, followed by a deep, eerie moan that seemed to ripple through the hull. Rumors had begun flying, reaching her when she stopped in the mess or returned to the barracks. That General Organa was dead. That the Resistance and the First Order were negotiating a surrender. That the First Order had another superweapon, and more leading New Republic worlds had been targeted.
And then, for her morning shift, Rose had been handed an electro-stun prod and grim orders: Stun anyone accessing the Raddus’s escape pods.
She’d agreed without hesitation. Her sister had died to save this ship—to save the entire Resistance fleet—and deserters were dishonoring that sacrifice.
Rose heard something moving down the corridor and looked up from her gloomy appraisal of the ring Fossil had given her. A man was creeping down the corridor, with a canvas bag on his shoulder. He was so intent on his objective that he didn’t see her.
Curious, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and followed him. He was tall and dark-skinned—handsome, she thought idly. He was wearing a Resistance jacket with a rip in the back. The damage had been repaired by a malfunctioning droid or someone whose understanding of a needle and thread would be best described as theoretical.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
She was only a couple of meters away, and the sound of her voice startled the man, who bumped his head on the hatch of an escape pod.
“Hi!” he said, then began stammering. Rose couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell her.
Then she realized it was him.
“You’re Finn! The Finn!” she said.
He looked perplexed. “The Finn?”
This wasn’t going well. She forced herself to stop.
“Sorry, I work behind pipes all day,” she said, trying to get her bearings. But somehow that just made her feel more discombobulated.
“Doing talking with Resistance heroes is not my forte,” she said, then cringed at how that had come out. “Doing talking. I’m Rose.”
“Breathe,” Finn told her, and she did. It helped, a little.
“I’m not a Resistance hero,” Finn said. “But it was nice talking to you, Rose. May the Force be with you.”
“Wow,” Rose managed. “You, too.”
She understood—he had things to do. Everyone aboard the Raddus had things to do except her, it seemed. What were they not telling her now that was so important? Was there a radiation leak? Saboteurs aboard?
Rose had gone several paces down the corridor when she decided she couldn’t leave it like that. She didn’t know Finn, but whatever was wrong, maybe she could help. And Finn seemed like he could use a little help.
“Okay, but you are a hero,” she said, finding him back at the open hatch of the escape pod where she had left him. “You left the First Order, and what you did on the Starkiller Base—”
“Listen—” Finn tried to say, but Rose kept on talking, hoping to make him understand.
“When we heard about it, Paige—my sister—said, ‘Rose, that’s a real hero. Knows right from wrong and don’t run away when it gets hard,’ she said.”
“Sure.”
“You know, just this morning I’ve had to stun three people trying to jump ship in these escape pods,” Rose said. “Running away.”
Thinking about it made her angry all over again.
“That’s disgraceful,” Finn said.
“I know. Anyway.”
“Well, I should get back to what I was doing,” Finn said, smiling broadly.
“What were you doing?” asked Rose.
“Checking. Just checking the…uh, doing a check.”
Rose’s eyes jumped from his face to the bag on the deck to the open escape pod.
I am the biggest idiot in the history of big idiots.
“Checking the escape pods,” she said quietly.
“Routine check,” Finn said.
“By boarding one. With a packed bag.”
“Okay, listen—” Finn began, but she had heard enough. She reached down, the motion practiced by now, unclipped the prod from her belt, raised it, and stunned him.
The summons came as Poe was arguing with Vober Dand about how to best reshuffle the fleet’s remaining starfighters to protect the Raddus. Poe knew the disagreement would have been minor if both their nerves weren’t so badly frayed, but he and Vober still wound up profoundly irritated with each other. They rode the turbolift in fuming silence, ignoring BB-8’s querulous beeps, and found positions at different places in the crowd of officers that had gathered in the briefing room on the Raddus’s emergency bridge.
Taking the seat next to C’ai Threnalli, Poe spotted D’Acy and Connix—two of the few officers who hadn’t been on the main bridge during the First Order attack.
D’Acy stepped forward, and the hubbub of conversation ebbed.
“General Organa—Leia—is unconscious but recovering,” she said. “That’s the only good news I have. Admiral Ackbar, all our leadership—they’re gone. Leia was the sole survivor on the bridge.”
Poe knew that, but it still felt like a punch in the gut.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” said C-3PO.
D’Acy continued: “If she were here she’d say, Save your sorrow for after the fight. To that end, she left clear instructions as to who should take her place. Someone she’s always trusted, and who has her full confidence.”
Poe considered the likely line of succession. Undoubtedly Ackbar would have been next in line, but the old Alliance veteran was dead.
So who…
No, it couldn’t be.
But he thought it could. A promotion from the starfighter corps was unconventional, but hadn’t Leia always valued personalities over military hierarchies?
For a moment Poe was certain that D’Acy was looking at him. But it was Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo who stepped forward to stand next to D’Acy, leaving Poe unsure if what he was feeling was relief or disappointment.
If Holdo was aware of the scrutiny, she didn’t show it.
“Thank you, Commander,” she said, a mercurial half smile on her face. Her hair was washed in purple, and she wore a dress of the same color. “Look around you. Four hundred of us on three ships. We are the last of the Resistance, but we’re not alone. In every corner of the galaxy, the downtrodden and oppressed know our symbol and they put their hope in it.”
As she spoke, Poe studied the other officers. They looked skeptical, he thought. Or perhaps they were all just in shock.
“We are the spark that will light the fire that will restore the Republic,” Holdo said. “That spark—this Resistance—must survive. That is our mission. Now to your stations, and may the Force be with us.”
“That’s Admiral Holdo?” Poe asked C’ai. “Battle of Chyron Belt Admiral Holdo?”
The Abednedo pilot shrugged and muttered something in his own language.
“Not what I expected,” Poe said.
As the crowd broke up, Poe approached Holdo. Her speech had been long on rhetoric but short on specifics. And she had a reputation for being unconventional—eccentric, some would say. But he also knew she was one of Leia’s oldest confidantes—and one of the closest things the general had to a friend. That alone was enough for Poe to offer whatever her help he could.
“Vice Admiral?” he asked, trying to remember if they’d been formally introduced. “Commander Dameron.”
Holdo studied him. Her eyes struck him as shrewd.
“Admiral, with our current fuel consumption there’s a very limited amount of time we can stay out of range of those Star Destroyers,” Poe said.
“Very kind of you to make me aware,” Holdo said.
“And we need to shake them before we find another base. What’s our plan?”
“Our plan…Captain? Not Commander, yes? Wasn’t it Leia’s last official act to demote you? For your Dreadnought plan? Where we lost our entire bomber fleet?”
Poe, astonished, found himself at a loss for how to defend himself. “Captain, Commander, fine. I just want to know what we’re doing.”
But Holdo wasn’t finished. Her eyes bored into his.
“Of course you do. I understand—I’ve dealt with plenty of trigger-happy flyboys like you. You’re impulsive. Dangerous. And the last thing we need right now. So stick to your post, and follow my orders.”
And with that the new commander of the Resistance stalked off, leaving a stunned starfighter ace in her wake.