“CHEWIE, get her ready for launch. We’re leaving.”

Rey spoke into her comlink as she backtracked along the same path that had taken her to Luke the day of her arrival. Now it would return her to the Millennium Falcon and the Resistance. She was done trying to persuade the stubborn Skywalker. He was a lost cause.

A dark presence pinched the back of her mind, as it had twice before. She gritted her teeth. “I’d rather not do this now.”

“Me too,” Kylo Ren said.

She spun around at the sound of his voice. “Why did you hate your father?”

“Because he was a weak-minded fool,” Ren snarled. She saw him standing in his lair on a Star Destroyer, shirtless, his torso as pale as bleached bone.

Rey momentarily looked away in embarrassment, even though the vision came to her through the Force. “Give me an honest answer. You had a father who loved you.”

“I didn’t hate him.”

His lie incensed her. “Then why did you kill him? I don’t understand.”

“No?” Ren said with a laugh. “Your own parents threw you away like garbage—”

“No, they didn’t,” Rey objected.

“Oh, they did, and you still can’t stop needing them. It’s your greatest weakness. You look for them everywhere. In Han Solo, and now in Skywalker.”

Rey wanted to protest, but she had nothing to say. For once, Kylo Ren told the truth. After meeting Finn, Han Solo, and Chewbacca, she hadn’t returned to Jakku to wait for her parents as she kept asserting she would. She’d stayed with Han because he’d taken her under his wing. Even after Kylo Ren had murdered him, she didn’t go back. She went to Ahch-To, leaving friends like Finn behind, to find someone else to mentor her.

She was selfish, she realized—for what she sought was more than a mentor.

She wanted a parent.

Ren’s lips curled into a smile. He turned the conversation back to Luke. “Did he tell you what happened that night?”

“Yes,” she said. But she doubted Luke had told her every detail—and she knew Ren could sense her doubt.

“No he didn’t,” Ren said.

A new vision came to Rey, showing Kylo Ren’s personal quarters in the Jedi temple. Ren slept on a pallet, visible in a crackling green glow.

Luke Skywalker, robed in black, hovered over him, holding his lightsaber. The Jedi Master’s face was not the aged and tired one Rey knew, but a twisted and tormented face. The face of a monster.

Luke lowered his saber to kill the youth.

But Ren was already awake and called his own lightsaber to him. His blue blade parried Luke’s green one. The swords sizzled. Energy sparked. Ren stretched out with his other hand to the ceiling. It quaked, fractured, and then caved in on Luke Skywalker.

“Liar,” Rey said, cutting off the vision. Luke may not have told her all the truth, but he could never be a murderer.

Could he?

“Let the past die,” Kylo Ren said. “Kill it if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.”

His image and presence disappeared from her mind. Yet his words remained, like salt in a wound.

She felt another nudge in the Force, down the cliff but in the opposite direction of the Falcon. She didn’t resist the pull. She proceeded toward it. While she was still on this world, she was determined to learn all the secrets Luke wouldn’t teach her.

She reached a large hole in the ground. Dark moss grew around the edge. It was the same hole she’d seen in her vision when training with Luke. A place of darkness.

She bent down and touched the moss. It was spongy and moist, yet offered no clues to what lay below. She looked around her. Little else thrived on this plane of rock.

Her foot slipped. She couldn’t right her balance. The moss under her split and she fell, into the darkness, into the hole.

She landed with a splash in a pool of water. Gasping, she paddled to an outcropping of stone. She was lucky she didn’t drown. Swimming lessons had not been a priority on Jakku.

She heaved herself onto the ledge, discovering she was in a cavern, probably beneath the ocean. And standing before her, dripping wet, her hair undone from the plunge, was none other than herself.

It took her a moment to realize her double was but a reflection. The obsidian in the cavern wall, scoured smooth by centuries of erosion, acted like a curved mirror. On its glassy surface, she could see not only a single image of herself but infinite reflections funneling to a point in the center.

When she turned her head, a moment later the reflections also turned their heads, as if following her lead. She snapped her fingers, and the reflections did the same, one after the other. Every movement she made was exactly reproduced, though slightly delayed. Inside the mirror, in all her images, Rey appeared to be the same as her physical self. It was as if she was made of an uncountable number of pieces, yet was also a singular whole.

Perhaps that was what Luke had meant when he had spoken about the Force. It was like a mirror, reflecting outward and inward, connecting everything with itself in the paradox of life.

But there was something else here. Somewhere in that chain of reflections lay the secret of her past, the secret of her parents. She had seen it in her nightmares. Now she had to look inside herself to pull it out.

“Show me,” she said. “Show me who they are. Please.”

She extended a hand to the dark glass. A fog spread across the surface, dissipating to present one reflection instead of thousands. The hand of Rey’s reflection followed Rey’s physical hand. Their fingers neared yet could never completely touch, stymied by stone.

Rey dropped her hand. The thousand other reflections returned to haunt the obsidian, dropping their hands as she did. The only secret the mirror revealed was that despite her infinite reflections, she was most definitely alone.

She closed her eyes. Though she couldn’t see them, she imagined the other reflections did the same.

At least her tears were real.