THE ISLAND was haunted. Rey was sure of it.

She stood outside Luke’s hut and watched the fog roll across the village. The haze was thick and held an eerie predawn glow. She had the vague impression that something lurked within those mists. Specters whispering secrets from a long-lost time.

Stay here. I’ll come back for you, sweetheart. I promise.

The voice startled her. Those words were the same she had heard so many times in her dreams on Jakku. Yet this was not Jakku. And looking around, she saw she stood alone.

Shortly before sunrise, the fog dissipated and Luke emerged from his hut. He strode past Rey as if she weren’t there. Strapped to his back was a rucksack, a staff, netting, and an assortment of other items. She didn’t ask where he was going. She just followed.

She trailed him up the mountain, then down the other side to the shore where a blubbery, bovine creature lounged on the rocks. Luke climbed up to it and untied an empty bottle from his back. He then took the two teats that hung beneath the creature’s stomach and milked them. A green fluid oozed into the bottle.

The creature turned its leathery neck to Rey. Above a tubular snout, two tiny black eyes peered at her. The milking seemed to comfort it.

After filling the bottle, Luke put it to his lips and drank. Green liquid dribbled from the bottle into his beard. He didn’t wipe the slime away, nor did he offer a sip of the milk to Rey. She wouldn’t have accepted anyway.

Once refreshed, he capped the bottle and returned to his hut, closing the door behind him. Rey sat on a bench outside. She reached into her satchel, shifting aside the beacon Leia had given her to take out a ration packet. It was a leftover quarter portion she’d traded with the disgusting Unkar Plutt for scrap metal on Jakku. The food tasted bland, but at least it was better than green milk. After she was finished, she put on her cloak and slept.

Before dawn the next day, Luke came out, again outfitted for travel. Rey followed him to the edge of a cliff. The bay below was calm, though on the horizon loomed a storm.

Luke grabbed a wooden pole that rested against the ledge. Long and thin, it extended all the way down into the water. Luke tested its strength, then to Rey’s astonishment, used it as a lever to vault himself over the bay. After landing atop the cliff on the other side, he pulled the pole out of the shallows. Its end bore a sharp metal hook.

Rey watched as Luke surveyed the waters. Without warning, he shoved the spear back into the sea. When he lifted the pole again, a fish bigger than Rey was hooked on its end.

Luke shifted the pole to the rocky beach, where the fish flapped, its mouth tendrils wiggling. He leaned the pole against the ledge and walked down a path to the beach. Rey found a similar trail on her side of the cliff.

By the time she reached the fish, the storm had hit. Rain pummeled her and the wind shrilled. It was so harsh she threw on the hood of her cloak. She’d worn the garment only for Jakku’s sandstorms, never once thinking she’d don it for rain.

The inclement weather appeared to refresh Luke. He hoisted the giant fish over his shoulders and hiked up the path Rey had taken down. As he had before, he ignored Rey. But she trudged after him through the driving rain, hood up, staff in hand.

Rey stayed outside the hut that night. She was drenched, her teeth chattering from the cold. She got barely a wink of sleep. When Luke emerged from his hut that morning, she stayed on the log. Her tired body wanted to keep resting.

As he walked past her, he paused. It wasn’t for long, but it was enough. She found the strength to get up and stumbled after him.

Her strength flagged as they climbed a crumbling staircase. Slick stone made the going treacherous. One slip, and she’d fall off the cliff to smash on the rocks below.

When they neared the top of the staircase, the whispers began to speak to her again.

The morning haze had lifted, revealing the shrubbery and moss that greened the cliffside. No wind blew. Yet the whispers grew louder. They said nothing comprehensible, no promise as before, perhaps nothing at all. Was she hearing voices in her head?

She climbed a few more steps before she saw the tree.

It was a fortress of nature. Three pulpy offshoots stood guard around a gigantic central trunk. All had tops splintered like jagged crowns, and none bore foliage or branches. Only moss grew on the ashen bark. A wide gap in the trunk looked to be a portal into the tree.

Rey moved toward the gap. The whispers rose in volume, clearly emanating from the tree. She had seen the tree before, somewhere. Had it been in her dreams? Or in the vision that had come to her when she’d touched Luke’s lightsaber in Maz Kanata’s castle? She couldn’t be sure. Those memories were muddled in her mind. It was hard to remember what was real and what wasn’t.

She heard Luke stop behind her, but she did not glance back at him. She ducked through the gap and entered the tree.

The interior of the trunk had been hollowed out into a chamber. Strips of bark plastered the walls in intricate designs. There was no sign of rot, despite the damp conditions outside.

A strange illumination drew her focus. In an alcove surrounded by a sunburst pattern of bark rested a shelf of dusty books. They seemed to shine with a light of their own.

The whispers became a hum—not of voices but of energy. The books called to her.

She stepped closer to them. They weren’t everyday datapads or electronic binders, but leather-bound tomes of flimsy and paper, like the journals she had kept on Jakku. She reached for one.

“Who are you?”

She turned at the sound of Luke’s voice. He stood in the doorway, regarding her as if for the first time.

Fleeting memories guided her words. “I know this place,” she said. “This is a…library.”

Luke came forward. “Built a thousand generations ago, to keep the original Jedi texts, the foundation of the ancient faith.” He removed a book from the shelf and opened it. “They were the first—and now, just like me—they are the last of the Jedi religion.”

The elaborate runes that decorated the book’s pages captivated Rey. They were mysterious and yet familiar at the same time.

“You know this place,” Luke said. “You’ve seen these books. You’ve seen this island.”

“Only in dreams,” Rey said.

Luke narrowed his eyes at her. “Who are you?”

It was the question she’d often asked herself. All she could say for certain was the purpose for her visit to Ahch-To. “The Resistance sent me.”

“If they sent you, what’s special about you? Jedi lineage? Royalty?”

She wished she was special or a Jedi or royalty. Maybe then he would listen to her. But she didn’t dare reveal what she actually was.

“An orphan,” Luke said, reading into her silence. “Where are you from?”

“Nowhere.”

“No one’s from nowhere.”

She sighed. “Jakku.”

A hint of a smile tugged the corners of his mouth. “All right, that is pretty much nowhere. Why are you here, Rey from nowhere?”

“The Resistance sent me. We need your help. The First Order—”

Luke’s smile vanished. “Why are you here?”

Rey diverted her eyes. She knew what he meant. There was a reason Leia had sent her and not Poe Dameron or someone more qualified for secret missions. Leia had recognized Rey’s extraordinary gifts.

“Something inside me has always been there, but now it’s”—she paused, grasping for the right word—“awake. And I’m—I’m afraid. I don’t know what it is or what to do, and I need help. I need someone to show me my place in all of this.”

“You want a teacher.”

For a moment, her hopes returned—but like a spark, they fizzled out when Luke spoke again. “I can’t teach you.”

“Why not? I’ve seen your daily routine. You’re not busy.”

“I’ll never teach another generation of Jedi,” he said.

She shook her head. This was Luke Skywalker, the icon of the Rebellion, who had defeated Death Stars and the Emperor and had single-handedly resurrected the Jedi Order from its ashes. How could he give up on what he had spent the greater part of his life building?

Luke stepped back to the doorway and leaned a hand against the trunk. “You asked why I came here? I came to this island to die, and to make sure the Jedi Order dies with me.”

He stared out at the island, then looked back at her. “I know only one truth,” he said. Conviction knit his brow. “It’s time for all of this to end.”

His defeatism startled her. “Why?”

“You can’t understand.”

“Make me. Leia sent me here with the hope you’d return. If she was wrong, she deserves to know why. We all do.”

Luke responded by walking out of the library, leaving her alone. Sadly, she had been right. The island was haunted. The great Luke Skywalker, Master of the Jedi, was but a ghost of the hero he once had been.

Finn slumped down in a corridor on the Raddus. Crew rushed past, occasionally glancing at him as if he should be doing something. But what could he do? The cruiser had lost its starfighters, so there was no need for his rather poor gunnery skills. And he knew nothing about repairing starships. The First Order had trained him to excel on the battlefield, not in engineering.

The beacon he held continued to emit its warm glow. Did the light mean that Rey was still alive? General Organa hadn’t explained the details. All Finn knew was that the beacon would lead Rey back to the cruiser—and right now, that was too risky with the First Order on their tail. She’d likely be captured or killed. Even if Skywalker returned with her, Finn doubted that anyone—Jedi or not—could survive an attack from thirty Star Destroyers.

Everything seemed doomed. And all he could do was stare at the floor.

BB-8 roamed the hallway, halting before Finn. The droid bobbed his dome to the right and left, looking at Finn and beeping in concern, but Finn didn’t lift his head. He wasn’t in the mood for a pep talk, especially from this particular astromech. He was about to tell BB-8 to scram when the droid’s projector switched on and a holographic recording flickered before him.

In the Resistance’s medical center on D’Qar, Rey stood over Finn as he lay in a coma. She looked at him for some time, then leaned over his recovery pod and kissed his forehead. “We’ll see each other again. I believe that,” she said. “Thank you, my friend.”

The hologram vanished. Dust motes floated in Rey’s place. A few moments passed before Finn’s heart settled down. “Kinda weird you recorded that, but…”

His gaze fell to the beacon in his grasp. It seemed to shine brighter than before. “Thank you,” he told BB-8. “I know what I’ve got to do.”

The droid burbled, then rolled away. Finn didn’t putter around either. He got to his feet and rushed down the corridor.

If it was too dangerous for Rey to come to them, he would find a way to go to her.

Luke’s meditation that evening took him into his memories, to a time prior to his attempt to restore the Jedi Order. He had been a young man, little more than twenty years old, when on Dagobah he happened upon another tree that held secrets. It emanated an energy that Luke had not felt before, like a chill in the Force. A domain of evil it was, or so said his master at the time.

“What’s in there?” Luke asked.

“Only what you take with you,” his master said.

As Luke stepped toward the tree, his master remarked that his weapons weren’t needed. Luke took them anyway.

The bole of the tree led him down into a cave, cold and slimy and smelling of death. Snakes, lizards, and other scaly creatures slithered between the branches and vines. He trod past them, carefully going deeper into the cave. And then out of the darkness emerged a figure armored all in black, the killer of both his first teacher, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and allegedly his father, Anakin Skywalker: the villain known as Darth Vader.

Luke ignited his lightsaber first. Vader followed with his, red against Luke’s blue. The Dark Lord spared no words in that fight, and Luke never forgot the sound of Vader’s mechanical respiration. Luke won the duel by landing a furious blow to Vader’s helmet. When the helmet fell from Vader’s body and rolled in the muck, its mask exploded, revealing a face underneath—a face that was none other than Luke’s.

Soon after their encounter in the cave, Luke had fought Vader again, not as a phantom but in the flesh in Cloud City. There the Dark Lord had uttered words behind his rasping breaths, providing an answer to the mystery of the cave. He revealed he had not murdered Luke’s father as Obi-Wan had told Luke.

He was Luke’s father.

Luke had screamed in denial. No, no, it couldn’t be true. It was impossible.

Yet it was possible. And it was true. It was a secret he had taken with him into the cave. A secret that had revealed itself when he saw his own face in Vader’s helmet. A secret about his father that he had somehow always known, even if it had been withheld from him growing up.

Kids know.

Rey also knew the secret of her parents, if she would admit it. But she had buried her secrets deep and walled herself against them. It was as if she feared such secrets could destroy her.

Luke could not teach someone as guarded as her. He had tried to do so before, and he had failed.