Diana Fenton
She couldn’t stop crying. They’d set her down in a chair, but she’d crumpled out of it. Her face was pressed up against the cold leg of some table. She sobbed into it as her mind broke apart, second by second, memory by memory. Just when she thought she couldn’t take anymore, she felt Sampson. He might’ve been two doors down, but that didn’t matter. She felt the moment his consciousness blacked out as if someone had taken a firefly and stamped it underfoot.
“Sampson,” she screamed at the top of her lungs as she tried to jump to her feet.
The door was being guarded by two of the burly officers that had come in with Admiral Forest. Both of them stared at her compassionately but with the kinds of direct gazes that told her they would not move. She didn’t need to go by their stares, anyway. She could read their thoughts as if they were marching across her mind like the perfect sentences of a book.
They were shocked, devastated by what had happened on Academy grounds, but they were both soldiers, and they knew how to hold the fort. And right now their orders were to keep her here, safe and contained.
She shook her head, blubbering again as she called Sampson’s name.
He was injured. He’d taken a bullet right to the side of his holographic armor. There was every chance he wouldn’t make it.
She collapsed forward, clamped her hands over her temples, and dug her fingers in so hard, she could’ve removed her own skull. She rocked back and forth as if she didn’t care that her back kept slamming up against the desk beside her. She didn’t care about her pain. She didn’t care about anything. The whole world was falling apart. And this was just the start. This was just the goddamn beginning. A war was coming. A war Diana had been taught to fight every night in her dreams since the day her father and mother had been killed in front of her eyes.
A war with an enemy like no other. An enemy from beyond the reaches of time. An enemy that had always desired the Milky Way and would never stop until it had everything in its path. The Force.
As that word ricocheted through Diana’s skull with all the power of a bullet shattering someone’s bones, she whimpered. She kept her fingers tensed against her temples, turned in with so much force, she could literally have ripped her head off.
In between her desperate gasps, she realized something wasn’t just happening to her mind – it was happening to her body. When she’d thrown herself desperately across Academy grounds to get to Sparx in time, she’d run faster than she ever had in her life. It hadn’t counted ultimately, and her father had been shot regardless.
Because from this point on, nothing would count. The war would happen anyway.
She saw that now. Circumstances had been set in motion, and they would barrel on until the Force finally broke through.
Diana knew she would be left here, distraught but technically safe, while the rest of the Academy dealt with the disaster. Though all she wanted to do was get to Sampson to confirm that he was fine, she wasn’t given that privilege. She could hardly move, anyway. All she could do was clamp her fingers into her temples harder and harder until she finally drew blood. She heard one of the officers mutter something about sedation, and they called the med bay. It took minutes until a doctor rushed in, their face so awash with worry, it looked like the very emotion had been carved into their cheeks forevermore.
“It’s okay,” the man cooed. “Just let me sedate you.”
Diana got the urge to shove him off, but she appreciated this man had orders. At the back of her mind, she also understood she wasn’t helping. But she couldn’t stop crying, and she couldn’t stop rocking back and forth. What they couldn’t see, she could. For she saw further, right to the twisted, promised destiny awaiting the Coalition.
The war with the Force would start. And it would start now. For as Diana Fenton opened her eyes, she stared not at the doctor but right through him. She stared not at the floor behind him but right through that. She stared not at matter but at that which lay between. And there, she saw the Force waiting for their first attack.
As the powerful sedative washed through her system, Diana knew when she woke it would be to a new galaxy – one on the brink of destruction.