LUKE flipped up the hood of his cloak and slipped out of his hut. It was the dead of night.

Rey snored on an outdoor bench, too deep in sleep to notice him. He ascended the hill, then crossed the island in the moonlight. Wookiee growls led him to the landing site of the Millennium Falcon.

Chewbacca roasted his dinner outside the ship. He grabbed a spit from the campfire and brought the blackened slab on it to his lips. Before he bit into the meat, an uncooked member of its species, one of Ahch-To’s little avians, waddled up from a group and stared at him innocently. Chewbacca snarled, showing fangs, and the other avians around him shot in all directions, much faster than they appeared capable of moving.

The Wookiee returned to eat his meal, but then dropped it with a guilty whine. Luke smiled as he walked up the Falcon’s boarding ramp. Chewbacca’s heart always won out over his hunger.

The interior of the ship hadn’t changed much since Luke’s first trip off Tatooine in it. Grease stained the bulkheads. Loose plates rattled on the floor. Rust ate at the rungs of the turret ladder. Frayed wires spilled out of a wall socket. None of it concerned Luke. The Falcon wouldn’t be the Falcon if it wasn’t in a perpetual state of disrepair.

In the cockpit, the pilot’s seat still showed Han’s contours, worn in from decades of use. Luke gripped its edge and looked out the canopy at the night sky. Gold six-sided chance cubes dangled from the canopy near Chewbacca’s chair. Luke held them with his metal fingers, detecting an almost imperceptible weight on one side of the cubes that most certainly favored landing on the sixes.

He entered the lounge where Obi-Wan Kenobi had trained him how to wield a lightsaber. The blast helmet he’d worn to cover his eyes while fighting the remote rested on a shelf, probably untouched since that test. The holographic chessboard, however, had seen much more recent use. Its console lights blinked for a saved game to be resumed.

Luke sat down on the couch, remembering the moments he’d had on this ship. A series of gentle electronic beeps—more familiar to him than any other sound in the universe—told him he wasn’t alone. “Artoo?”

The silver-domed astromech unit wheeled out of a corner. Though the droid had a little rust around the edges, none of that stopped him from squealing at seeing Luke and venting disappointment that his old master had left him behind.

“Yes, yes, I know.” But Luke’s concession didn’t stop the droid from blurting out binary Luke knew he had never programmed. “Hey—sacred island. Watch the language.”

R2-D2 switched his vocabulary, but not the forceful tone of his beeps. The droid wanted Luke to return and help the Resistance.

“Old friend, I’m doing what’s best. Nothing can change my mind.” Luke touched the astromech’s dome, as he had so many times in the past. It was a human gesture, but it usually had the effect of calming down the short-fused droid.

R2-D2 quieted, as Luke had hoped he would. Yet in place of beeps, the droid projected a hologram—the same hologram he’d projected when Luke had first encountered the droid more than forty years before on Tatooine.

Luke’s twin sister, Leia, leaned before him in miniature, making a silent plea. She was young in the image, barely nineteen, and wore the flowing robes of her status as princess of Alderaan. Her mouth moved to words that Luke could never forget. Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.

Her words—and her beauty—had motivated his younger self to find the crazy old wizard in the deserts of Tatooine. As a consequence, that quest had saved him from the Imperial stormtroopers who burned his uncle and aunt to the bone.

Luke frowned at R2-D2. The astromech knew him too well. He was trying to make Luke feel guilty for abandoning his friends. “That’s a cheap move.”

Cheap though it might be, it was working. For as Leia’s image flickered before him, Luke remembered he was more than the last of the Jedi.

He was also a brother.

Finn lay on a repulsorlift cart, being pulled in fits and starts down the corridor. He tried to kick, but nothing happened. His leg wouldn’t respond and his wrists were in binders. “I…can’t move…” he said. “You…stunned me….Help!”

Rose glared down at him. “I’m taking you to the brig and turning you in for desertion.”

“No!” he said. She had it all wrong. He had to make her understand he wasn’t a deserter. He was just trying to warn Rey. “This fleet is doomed. If my friend comes back to it, she’s doomed, too.”

Rose let go of the cart and crouched down to his level. “You’re a selfish traitor.”

“Look,” Finn said, his tongue able to move more freely now, “if I could save Rey by saving the Resistance fleet, I would, but I can’t. Nobody can. We can’t outrun the First Order fleet.”

“We can jump to lightspeed,” she said.

“They can track us through lightspeed.”

Her suspicion turned into alarm. “They can track us through lightspeed?”

“Yes! They’ll just show up seconds later and we’d have blown a ton of fuel, which we’re dangerously short on.” Finn started to wiggle his limbs. His paralysis was wearing off, but his jaw remained numb. “I can’t feel my teeth. What did you shoot me with?”

Rose ignored his question, lost in thought. “Active tracking,” she said. “Hyperspace tracking is new tech, but the principle must be the same as any active tracker. I’ve done maintenance on active trackers. They’re single source, to avoid interference. So—”

Finn got the gist of what she was saying. If the First Order could operate only a single hyperspace tracker at a time, it would be installed on the most powerful vessel in the armada, the Mega-Destroyer.

“They’re only tracking us from the lead ship!” they said at the same time.

He held up his bound wrists and gave her a beggar’s smile. For a tense moment her suspicion seemed to return, but then she keyed the code and unlocked the binders.

Immediately the pair went to work hatching a plan. Rose believed she could shut the tracker down if she could gain access to the power breaker room on the Mega-Destroyer. Finn could lead her there. He knew the layout of the Supremacy by heart, having spent an entire training cycle with his trooper team mopping its floors. But they’d need a ship to transport them to the Mega-Destroyer. Since Rose was only a maintenance tech, she couldn’t fly a Resistance shuttle for her own use.

Poe, however, would be able to get one for them.

They found the pilot in General Organa’s quarters, by her bedside with C-3PO and BB-8. The general lay in a coma as medical droids fussed about her, caring for her every need.

Finn introduced Poe to Rose and pitched him their plan to sneak aboard the Supremacy and disable the tracker. Even a temporary pause in the tracker’s operation would give the Resistance enough time to jump to lightspeed without being followed.

BB-8 beeped his approval, but Poe was less persuaded. “Poe,” Finn pleaded, “this’ll save the fleet and save Rey. We have to do it.”

Poe went over to General Organa on her bunk. He looked at her, touching her hand, as if to discern what she would advise.

“If I must be the sole voice of reason,” interjected C-3PO, “Vice Admiral Holdo will never approve of this plan.”

Poe’s attitude suddenly changed. “You’re right, Threepio. This plan is need-to-know. And she doesn’t.”

“Oh dear,” said the protocol droid.

Poe looked at Finn and Rose. “So. How do we sneak you onto a Star Destroyer?”

“We steal a First Order shuttle,” Rose suggested.

“No good,” Poe said. “We need clearance codes.”

“So we steal clearance codes,” Rose said.

Finn shook his head. “They’re bio-hexacrypt and rescrambled every hour. It’s impossible. Their security shields are airtight. We can’t get through them undetected. Nobody can.”

“I’m sure somebody can, if there’s money to be made,” Poe said. “Threepio, reach out to your droid contacts on Takodana and see if you can get ahold of Maz Kanata.”

The droid scolded Poe that he shouldn’t be unmasking a top-secret spy network among present low-ranking company, but complied with the request. Not long after, the three-dimensional form of the tiny smuggler with big goggles appeared on the room’s holotransceiver. Armed with a blaster, Maz appeared to be engaged in a firefight, shooting at unseen enemies.

Poe cut to the chase and asked her if she could get them clearance codes.

“Of course I could do it,” Maz said, “but I’m a little tied down right now. Union dispute—you don’t want to hear about it. But lucky for you there’s exactly one guy I trust who can get you past that kind of security. A ‘Master Codebreaker.’ A soldier, freedom fighter, an ace pilot, a poet with a blaster, and the second-best smuggler I’ve ever met.”

“Oh!” C-3PO exclaimed. “It sounds like this fellow can do everything.”

“Oh, yes, he can.” The way Maz said it, grinning and blinking her large eyes, reminded Finn of how she had flirted with Chewbacca when Han had taken them all to Takodana. It made Finn uncomfortable, and apparently Rose, too, from the grimace on her face.

A blaster bolt zinged past Maz. “And he’s sympathetic to the Resistance,” she added. “You’ll find him at a high stakes table in the casino in Canto Bight.”

“Canto Bight? But that’s—” Poe stopped himself from elaborating further. “Maz, is there any way we can do this ourselves?”

Maz fired back at her foes. “Sorry, kiddo. You want on that Destroyer, you got one option: find the Master Codebreaker. You’ll know who he is by the red plom bloom he wears on his lapel—”

“Red plom what?” Finn asked. But the transmission cut out.

Their mission settled, Finn reluctantly gave Poe the wrist beacon for safekeeping. He realized that rather than seeking Rey out, the best thing he could do to save her life—to save all their lives—was disable that tracker so the Resistance could escape the Destroyers. Then Rey could follow the beacon back to the cruiser, without the threat of being killed or captured.

At least that was what Finn hoped.

The sun had not yet risen on Ahch-To when Luke returned to the village. But he did not go into his hut. He walked to the bench where Rey slept and waited. When her eyes opened, he spoke.

“Tomorrow. At dawn. Three lessons. I will teach you the ways of the Jedi—and why they need to end. And when you understand, you will leave me alone on this island to die.”

He turned away from her and entered his hut, closing the door. Now it was time for him to rest so he could maintain the strength not to change his mind any more than he already had.