WHEN the Mega-Destroyer obliterated the Anodyne and the Ninka, Poe reached a quick and necessary conclusion.

He had to save the Resistance—from itself.

He stepped up his pace to the cruiser’s secondary bridge. Flares lit the corridor, since most power for unessential systems had been redirected to the engines. The Raddus was burning through its last reserves of fuel, and once the tanks were empty, it would slow down and the First Order armada would destroy the cruiser just as it had the other two ships. Vice Admiral Holdo’s plan, if she even had a plan, wasn’t working.

Commander D’Acy blocked Poe at the doorway. “The admiral has banned you from the bridge. Let’s not have a scene.”

“Let’s.” Poe pushed past her onto the bridge.

Holdo looked up from a monitor. “Flyboy.”

Poe did not salute. “Cut it. We had a fleet, now we’re down to one ship and you’ve told us nothing. Tell us that we have a plan, that we have hope. Please.”

Holdo stood tall. “When I served under Leia, she’d say hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it—”

“You’ll never make it through the night,” Poe finished. General Organa had offered him the same proverb when he had joined the Resistance.

An image of an ovoid loadlifter ship appeared on a screen near him, and Poe realized what she had in mind. “You’re fueling up the transports. All of them.”

Holdo neither confirmed nor denied.

“We’re abandoning ship? That’s what you’ve got?” Poe asked. “That’s what you’ve brought us to? Coward! The transports are unshielded, unarmed. We abandon this cruiser, we don’t stand a chance!”

“Captain—”

Poe didn’t let her talk. “This will destroy the Resistance. You’re not just a coward. You’re a traitor!”

Holdo turned to her security officers. “Get this man off my bridge.”

The officers pulled Poe out the door. He didn’t put up a fight. In the corridor, he held up his hands and told the security officers he would go with them peacefully. Out of respect, they didn’t cuff him, and he walked with them to the hangar. Some transports had a brig for prisoners. He’d probably spend the last minutes of his life in a cell.

As they turned a corner, Lieutenant Connix and a group of six starfighter pilots, one of them Poe’s squadron mate C’ai Threnalli, stepped out before them. “We’ll take Dameron from here,” Connix said.

The security officers backed away. No blasters were pulled. Connix and her contingent directed Poe into a maintenance room, where he was handed a comlink.

“What’s going on?” Poe asked.

A female voice crackled over the comlink. “Captain Dameron, is that you?”

It took Poe a second to identify the speaker. “Rose?”

“Hold on.” The volume of her voice lowered, as if she was turning her head. “Finn, get up here! I got through to the fleet. Poe’s on the line!”

Moments later, Finn spoke over the comm. “Poe, we’re on our way back!”

“Holdo’s loading the crew into shuttles. She’s going to abandon ship,” Poe said. “Where are you?”

“We’re on our way back to the fleet. We’re so close.”

“Did you find the Master Codebreaker?” Poe asked.

“We found…ah…a…codebreaker,” Finn said, without much confidence. “But I promise we can shut the tracker down. Just buy us a little more time!

Poe looked at Threnalli and the others. They were on his side, willing to do whatever was necessary to save the Resistance.

“All right,” Poe said to Finn. “Hurry!”

Rey opened the locker under the medbed in the Millennium Falcon’s lounge. Before they had departed Ahch-To, she had taken a few things from the world she deemed important, and these she stowed inside the locker. She thought they might be of use in the future to her or someone like her in case she didn’t make it back from where she was going. Because the more she thought about where she was going, the more she feared she wouldn’t make it back.

On the journey away from Ahch-To, she had R2-D2 input the coordinates from her binary beacon into the navicomputer. The droid had beeped that it could be dangerous to go there. There were reports of the First Order fleet in that region of space. That only strengthened her resolve. She needed to go wherever Kylo Ren could be.

Maybe she was delusional to be doing this. Maybe the goodness she’d felt when she had touched Ren’s hand was nothing more than wishful thinking.

She tried to hide her apprehension from Chewbacca and R2-D2 as they gathered in the Falcon’s escape pod bay. That proved even harder when she saw the pods resembled funeral caskets. She could be sentencing herself to death.

“As soon as I launch, you jump back out of range and stay there till you get my signal,” she said to Chewie.

The Wookiee yowled, disapproving of her plan. But she was grateful he didn’t try to stop her. He helped her get into the pod. “If you see Finn before I do, tell him…” She faltered, unable to find the words she wanted to say.

Chewbacca nodded and ruffed.

“Yeah, perfect. Tell him that.” She conformed her body to the interior of the pod, then raised a thumb. Chewbacca closed the hatch.

The Wookiee shambled off to the cockpit, but R2-D2 stayed in the bay. Through the pod’s window, she saw his big red photoreceptor focused on her. She grinned a good-bye.

When the Falcon exited hyperspace, Rey’s pod was jettisoned toward the First Order armada and its Mega-Destroyer. The Falcon did not tarry and shot back to lightspeed.

It was now Rey all alone against the mighty First Order.

Seated in the pilot’s chair of the space yacht Libertine, Rose pulled the lightspeed lever to exit hyperspace. Huddled around her were Finn, BB-8, and the fast-talking jack-of-all-trades who called himself DJ, after the initials of his cap’s slogan, “Don’t join.” Rose doubted this nickname was anywhere close to his real name, if he still remembered it. But he had rescued them, so she didn’t ask any probing questions.

She did ask about the yacht, however, and BB-8 revealed that DJ had stolen it. The ball droid beeped that he had met the thief while looking for Rose and Finn in the jail. DJ had been so impressed by how BB-8 had stopped the prison guards by shooting credit chips at them that he told the droid he’d been in the same cell as BB-8’s friends. The two then went off to the Canto Bight spaceport to obtain a ship and find Finn and Rose.

Normally, Rose would have ordered that they return the craft, but the Libertine’s database indicated the previous owner had trafficked in weapons to profit off the war, so she didn’t feel guilty about putting the ship to better use.

As the blue streaks of hyperspace resolved into a fleet of First Order Star Destroyers, Rose realized that this probably wasn’t better use.

“Four parsecs to go. This thing really cooks,” Finn said.

Rose centered the ship’s approach trajectory on the Mega-Destroyer. “I just hope we’re in time. You can actually do this, right?” she asked DJ.

“Yeah, about that. Guys, I can do it. But there exists a pre-‘do it’ conversation about price.”

“Once we’re done, the Resistance will give you whatever you want.” Rose wasn’t sure if that would be the case, or if the Resistance had any credits to dole out. But just as Captain Dameron had transmitted them the current coordinates of the Destroyers, she knew he’d make a strong argument to the Resistance leadership to pay the thief—if they all survived.

DJ wasn’t having any of it. “What’cha got deposit-wise?” His gaze strayed to the medallion on her necklace. “Is that Haysian smelt? That’s something.”

Rose’s hand went to cover her medallion. It was her last link to her sister, not something she could barter away. Finn spoke up for her. “No. You’ve got our word that you’re gonna get paid. That should be enough.”

“Guys, I want to keep helping,” DJ said. “But no something, n-no doing.”

Sizing up the Destroyers in the armada, Rose thought of her sister. Paige would have been upset if Rose held on to the medallion when she might have saved the Resistance. Paige had died for more than a piece of jewelry.

Rose yanked the medallion off the chain and threw it to the thief. “Do it,” she said.