I LIVED UNDER THE GLORIOUS reign of Emperor Palpatine. I lived to see the New Republic’s petty leaders squabble over the ashes of a once-great galaxy. I lived, but my comrades died.

The Battle of Jakku is celebrated today as the final defeat of the Galactic Empire, but for me, it was both my first and last tour of duty as a gunner aboard a Star Destroyer in the Imperial Navy. I was a young man of twenty, dedicated to the Emperor’s cause of bringing order to the galaxy.

The life of a gunner is one of endless waiting punctuated by flashes of terror.

Waiting…waiting…waiting…my fingers tense over the console, heart pounding, sweat dripping…there, flashing streaks over the starboard bow! Target, track, fire! Waiting…waiting…waiting…the voice of the computer echoing around the vast bridge as banks of consoles blinked in the semidarkness under the stars, illuminating terrified faces, each as young as mine.

Green as I was, even I knew the battle wasn’t going well.

The Empire had gathered practically every capital ship into orbit around Jakku, and the rebels, bent on chaos and disruption, had converged to the same corner of space with their ragtag fleet. This was to be a textbook grand battle, a confrontation between the good of order and the evil of anarchy.

True to our commitment to discipline, the Imperial ships fell into neat ranks and tight formations. True to their despicable worship of chaos, the rebels followed no code of tactics or rules of engagement. They swept around our flanks, skimmed over our blind spots, refused to engage us head-on.

A series of explosions against the bridge. Bright lights blinded us momentarily. We were hit. Hard.

The deck lurched, men and women spilled out of their chairs, the viewscreens and windows tilted and jumped crazily, showing glimpses of wildly spinning stars and the long glowing arc of the desert planet below us.

“Losing altitude,” intoned the computer. Klaxons blared. “Velocity vectors incompatible with stable orbit.”

We were falling toward the planet, unable to climb out of the deadly trap of its gravity well.

My crewmates and I struggled up as the deck stabilized and officers barked orders. Outside the windows, we could see the massive bow start to glow orange from friction against the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The deck buckled again, and we screamed and tumbled back down.

My head struck a console as I fell, and blood streamed down my face, blurring my vision. Through the haze of blood and sweat and terror, I saw a glowing hologram rotating over the console.

MOST WANTED: LUKE SKYWALKER, JEDI WAR CRIMINAL, EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

The internal channel broadcasting the holo was dedicated to showing the likenesses and crimes of the most dangerous rebels. In regular operation, the channel had the effect of raising our alertness against rebel infiltration. But now, as I lay on the ground, it was terrifying to see the image of this hooded Jedi terrorist slowly spinning against the stars, looming over me like a sneering monster.

My heart skipped a beat as the deck lurched again. Amid the screams and a shower of sparks, peering through the hologram, I focused on the main windows of the bridge. A powerful bolt of energy arced across space to strike an Imperial Star Destroyer. The angle of the spinning Skywalker made it seem as if the hologram were floating in space, and the dazzling bolt had shot out of his fingertips.

I was not a superstitious man, but I shuddered at that horrid image.

Instantly, glowing cracks appeared in the dark gray hull, and the struck destroyer seemed to groan in pain in the silence of space.

Like an ancient ocean-going vessel taking on water, the dagger-shaped ship dipped and fell toward the surface of Jakku. Faster and faster it fell, and the gray vessel glowed red, then orange, and finally bright white as it plunged into the thick atmosphere toward its death far below.

My heart convulsed as I imagined the voices howling for mercy in that doomed ship.

Like some angry and capricious god, the hologram of the Jedi spun as two more bright streaks seemed to shoot out of him. The bolts crossed the span of bridge windows and struck two more Imperial Star Destroyers. Slowly disintegrating, the ships dove into the roiling ocean of air below like fallen Corosian phoenixes, their TIE squadrons swerving aimlessly in space, as helpless as orphaned hatchlings.

It was a sign. It was a nightmare. It had to mean something.

Beams of lightning crisscrossed the windows and ensnared more Imperial Star Destroyers. Like lassoed beasts, the graceful, dark metallic hulks buckled and strained against the tractor beams. But their struggles were useless. One by one, the ships lost their momentum, dipped, and were hurled down toward Jakku.

I did not see any rebel star cruisers that could have launched the beams. In fact, the shots all seemed to terminate in the steadily spinning hologram of the Jedi, his machine of death, that red-striped X-wing, hovering over him like a trained bird of prey or a magician’s familiar.

Carelessly, almost lazily, the hologram turned to face me, and stopped moving.

I gasped. Instead of a face I saw only a bright, featureless oval under the glowing hood. The holographic circuits sputtered and hissed, and an acrid smell filled my nostrils. Interference artifacts appeared in the projection. The hologram’s hands reached toward me, as though intent on grabbing my throat.

Before I could scream, the holographic projector failed, and the Jedi winked out of existence in a bright electronic explosion.

Behind where the hologram had been, I saw that the bridge windows were rapidly filling with expanding columns of energy.

“Shields collapsing,” intoned the computer. “Hull breach imminent. Brace for impact. Brace. Brace—”

A jolt, as though the entire Star Destroyer had been picked up by a giant hand and slammed against the ground. My teeth and bones rattled. My vision swam. My ears filled with a high-pitched, incessant drone.

The bridge went dark: the overhead lights, the viewscreens, the blinking lights on the banks of consoles, even the emergency lighting strips in the floor. All around us was the darkness of space; the faint, heartless glow of distant stars; and the dim radiance of heated, thin upper-atmosphere air against the bridge windows.

My ears popped. Then I heard the inhuman, deafening metallic roar and screech of a ship dying in space.

The gravity generators failed, and we experienced the sensation of free fall as our bodies lifted off the deck.

My crewmates and I screamed until we could not catch our breaths. The noise no longer sounded like living screams but an eerie replacement for the throbbing of the engines, which had suddenly been silenced.

The ship slowed, drifted, stopped, and then the stark, lifeless surface of Jakku swung into view, filling the windows, and we fell.

We fell.

Scrambling, shoving, kicking, somehow I made my way to one of the escape pods and strapped myself in. The only thought in my mind before I lost consciousness amid the screeching and groaning of struts and bulkheads strained to their limits was this:

We couldn’t have lost; we shouldn’t have lost; this was not a fair fight.

The heat of a thousand suns. Unbearable thirst. Pain like I had never endured.

My eyes opened to the grimace of a woman wearing the black uniform cap of the Imperial Navy. I didn’t recognize her. I tried to speak but only a croak emerged from my parched throat. I stared into her eyes, willing her to respond.

I took in her cracked lips, her bloodied chin, her—

My mind wanted to flee from the sight, but my body would not respond.

The face belonged to a head that was not attached to a body. It sat on the glittering desert sand like a cactus. The sand under the head was a dark crimson.

All around me were scattered pieces from the wreckage of the escape pod and bodies twisted into impossible positions. Acrid smoke. Waves of heat from still burning debris. Corpses and more corpses.

I tried to scream but could not catch my breath. I blacked out again.

We couldn’t have lost; we shouldn’t have lost.

I was back in space, a disembodied consciousness observing the battle from somewhere in high orbit, the all-powerful Imperial fleet drifting beneath me, an army of giants being nipped at by underpowered rebel star cruisers and their swarming fighters.

And the hologram Jedi was there, too.

No, not a hologram. He was real, a glowing figure of sorcery and magic. He floated in space, his feet astride the stars, his cape billowing with an arcane power that could not be understood by mere mortals.

He leapt from rebel star cruiser to rebel star cruiser, his flaming sword at the ready. A Star Destroyer focused all its cannons on him, and carelessly, he deflected the shots with graceful swings. He launched himself from a cruiser, tucked his legs under him, and tumbled through space, shooting bolts of energy from his sword in every direction. Star Destroyer after Star Destroyer disintegrated under this unnatural assault.

It was impossible. It was unbelievable. Yet it was true. The Jedi was dispatching capital ships with his sword of magic alone.

Tired of his game, the Jedi suddenly put away his shining sword. He swung his arms and reached for the Imperial fleet with his bare hands, and thin strands of crackling energy emerged from his palms like a fishing net cast into the ocean that was the galaxy. The glowing strands reached the ships and ensnared them, and the Jedi laughed like a child playing by the sea. Hauling the ships in like so many flopping fish, he cast them down toward Jakku. He was a god playing with toys, except that the toys were city-sized structures of steel and held tens of thousands of lives.

This is why we lost.

He has come, the avenging Jedi who can cast starships down from the heavens with a sword of light.

I opened my eyes and shivered. I was lying down, and it was cold, very cold.

And dark.

Overhead the stars twinkled mercilessly, like the eyes of a universe that didn’t care that hundreds of thousands had just died. The galaxy had been there long before we were born, and it would be there long after we were gone.

I realized that I was moving, drifting through the sea of stars.

Have I died? Is this the afterlife?

Against the dim moonlight and starglow, a massive edifice loomed into my view on the left. It was lit here and there, offices or suites occupied by those who had not gone to sleep.

What city am I in? On what planet?

I noticed that the lights didn’t hold the steady glow of electricity, but flickered and sparked. Fire. Parts of the building were on fire. A passing breeze brought the odor of burning plastoid and insulation. The shape of the building grew more familiar….

The edifice was the wreck of a fallen Star Destroyer, now resembling some giant’s sword left behind, plunged into the sands of an abandoned battlefield.

I struggled to lift my head, to look around.

Three or four more Star Destroyers and star cruisers filled the view, mountains of steel and despair, a graveyard of Imperial glory. Pieces of smaller broken spacecraft and ground vehicles littered the landscape. It was a nightmarish vision drawn from fairy tales, a dark, burning forest through which I crawled like a tiny ant.

No, not crawled. I’m being dragged.

I was lying on a litter made from the thin terminal struts and broken partitions of a starship, lashed together. Cushions from an escape pod, still smelling of melted plastoid and smoke, provided a bit of padding. My legs were tied to splints, and the waves of pain as the litter jerked unevenly across the desert sand told me that they were broken. Heavy bandages wrapped around my thighs and waist hid injuries I did not want to see. My arms were tied to the sides of the litter, and more strips of cloth secured my waist against the frame. Near my feet lay a few sacks, and I could see broken circuit boards, sensor heads, computer modules sticking out of the openings. Also lashed to the litter next to my thighs were a few water canteens and bundles of rations.

Ahead of me, a human figure wrapped in flowing robes strained to pull me forward with the cables looped over his shoulders.

“Who are you?” I croaked.

He stopped and turned around. There wasn’t enough light for me to see his face. His hair was cut in a short, efficient style, and I could tell that he was quite thin under those billowing robes.

“I found you,” he said. “You were the only one who was alive in that pod.”

“There will be a reward if you bring me back to an Imperial Navy outpost.”

He chuckled. “I have no love for the Empire.”

A rebel then. Just my luck.

“What do you want with me?” I asked.

“Want with you?” he seemed to find this question funny. “What does one living being want with another in the desert? There are only a few answers. It isn’t hard to figure out.”

He turned around and leaned into the hauling cables. The litter jerked forward.

“Let me go,” I whispered hoarsely.

Either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t care. He simply plodded on. One step. Then another.

A wave of dizziness and nausea washed over me. I was his prisoner, and there was nothing I could do.

His robe looks just like the glowing garment worn by that Jedi.

I stopped straining, fell back, and let myself drift back to sleep.

When I was a child, my mother told me dark tales of ancient wizards who wielded magic to bring the fire of the stars to sentient species, and of villains who cast spells to twist living worlds into dry husks. In those stories, merely escaping from the clutches of the powerful magicians made you a hero.

I took a sip from the canteen. My arms were no longer tied to the sides of the litter. I ached all over and some infection had taken hold in my blood, making me feverish and tired. I needed a clinic, or a medical droid. No functioning version of either existed as far as I could see.

But my legs felt better, or at least numb, and I believed that if I had to I could get up and stumble a few steps.

“You can grab on to the litter yourself now,” he had said when he first untied my arms, perhaps trying to make me think he had shackled me only so I wouldn’t fall off. Villains, of course, never told you their true intentions.

At least my captor wasn’t trying to deny me the basic necessities of life, though I had no idea what his plans for me were. “Where are you from?” I asked, as innocuously as I could manage.

“The same place all of us are from,” he said. He swept his arm across the horizon. I didn’t know what he meant. The sky? The desert? The looming hulks of starships?

“Where are we going?”

“The same place all of us are going.” He pointed to the distance, and I didn’t know if he meant some mystical realm or a concrete destination.

We had been hiking through that valley in the shadows of dead starships for days. From time to time, the man would leave my litter in the shade of some wreck while he went to investigate the metallic mountains, still full of burning craters and holes smoking like active volcanoes. I would watch him, climbing along sheer deck cliffs and traipsing across precariously balanced struts like some flea bouncing on the body of a giant luggabeast.

I learned to appreciate the beauty of the desert. Contrary to my initial impression, it wasn’t a place devoid of life. Patches of flowering plants stubbornly poked out of the sand dunes, as did twisty, spiny trees. Wild steelpeckers hopped or skimmed across the dunes, their metallic beaks glinting in the sun as they headed for the carcasses of the Star Destroyers, a feast of carrion to them.

Or maybe these were just hallucinations conjured by my feverish brain. Reality seemed indistinguishable from nightmare in this world.

After an hour or two, he would return, sometimes empty-handed but often carrying pieces of machinery or electronics he had salvaged.

“Didn’t see other survivors,” he said. “If there were any, I hope they were as lucky as you.”

So he was looking for other prisoners.

What does one living being want with another in the desert?

To eat them, to use them, to sustain one’s own life at their expense. To take pleasure in their suffering.

I recalled the words in the training holos we had been shown back on the Star Destroyer. Rebels create chaos and pain. They would torture me even if I was only a lowly gunner who knew nothing about grand Imperial battle plans or any other secrets they wanted.

He stuffed the latest prizes from his excursion into the bags at my feet.

“More scavengers will come soon,” he said, surveying the starships. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the steelpeckers or people like himself.

“What do you look for?” I asked, trying to draw him into conversation that would lower his guard.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he gazed at the wreckage of an AT-AT some distance to the south, off to the side of our course. Besides the massive mountains formed by the fallen starships, the desert was full of wrecked skiffs, TIE fighters, AT-ATs, bombers, and every other kind of vehicle the Empire or the Rebel Alliance had thrown into the fighting around Jakku. The battle seemed so long before and so far away now that my life had been reduced to pining for the next sip of water or bite of rations in an endless sea of sand.

“Those things have more independent systems,” he muttered to himself. “Better salvage…Ah, there’s a nice hole blasted in the leg.” He turned to me. “Might as well take a nap. I’ll be gone a little longer than usual.”

I watched him make his way slowly through the shimmering hot air to the AT-AT. He disappeared from view. I waited a few moments longer.

This was my chance.

I grabbed all the canteens and looped the straps around my neck. I stuffed all the remaining ration bars down the waistband of my tattered uniform. After a moment of hesitation, I took out one ration bar and put it back into my captor’s sack, and dropped one canteen back onto the litter.

I heaved myself off the litter and began to crawl away. No point in putting my weight on my legs unless I had to. I was in very bad shape from the infection. My head throbbed; my body was racked by chills. I wasn’t sure I could stand up without blacking out.

About four hundred meters away, the hull of an Imperial Interdictor stood up from the desert. If I could get to it and climb inside, I was certain that I could find someplace to hide where my captor would never find me. After all, I was a trained Imperial naval gunner, and I knew where all the access conduits and crawl spaces were on a ship. I practically grew up in the military after my parents died in a rebel raid. An Imperial ship was the closest thing to a home for me.

After an arduous crawl of a hundred meters or so, I stopped to catch my breath. Normally, I could have covered the distance in less than fifteen seconds at an easy run, but the crawl had taken at least ten minutes and all my strength. I risked a look back. There was still no sign of my captor. A large, dark cloud swirled on the horizon like a living wall. The steelpeckers stopped their feeding and froze on the highest points of the hull like so many sailors standing on the deck of a starship in dock, ready for an admiral’s inspection. They gazed at the dark cloud silently.

The sight was eerie, but I wasn’t scared. If a storm was coming, that could only help me. Not only would the rain provide me more water, the most precious resource on a desert planet, but it would erase the tracks I’d made in the sand as I crawled to freedom.

The sun beat down on the back of my neck. I was already sunburnt, my skin blistering in places. I focused on the Interdictor and forced my arms to pull my body forward, one centimeter at a time. I had to get away from that devious man who spoke in riddles. The Imperial holos had made it clear what happened to loyal soldiers of the Empire in the hands of the merciless rebels. Especially that rebel, if he was who I thought he was. I shuddered at the thought of the kind of mental probes and tortures a Jedi could put me through before he was satisfied that I had no valuable intelligence.

Only a few meters more now.

I looked back again. The clouds were bigger, darker, more menacing. The last of the steelpeckers scrambled inside the wrecks like maggots burrowing into carcasses. They avoided the parts of the ships where smoke still billowed. It wasn’t clear how long the fires would continue to burn. The ships were massive.

A sense of dread seized my throat. I tried to swallow and couldn’t.

Hurry, hurry! I told myself. I tossed away the heavy, sloshing canteens. They were weighing me down, and the storm would bring me water. The ration bars had been pulverized during my strenuous crawl and the crumbs scattered to the wind and the sand.

Not the best-planned escape. My Imperial survival trainer would have been ashamed.

Desperately summoning all my strength, I scrambled across the last few meters between myself and the Imperial cruiser. It loomed over me like one of those magnificent towers on Coruscant, and I longed for the refuge I would find within.

With my legs basically useless, I couldn’t climb too high. Instead, I made my way to one of the small thruster nozzles midship. It was over five meters across, giving me more than enough room to hide from the coming storm. I pulled myself up inside the cone-shaped nozzle as if crawling into the ear of a giant. I was soaked in sweat. Panting, my tongue parched, I wished I had kept one of the canteens with me.

But at least I was feeling safe for the first time in days. Relief flooded through me, relaxing my taut nerves and tensed muscles. The security of solitude was as sweet as blue milk, and I wanted nothing more than to fall asleep.

Imagining the refreshing rain that would soon come, I smiled.

The space inside the nozzle darkened. My heart leapt into my throat. The man’s figure blocked all light.

“You’ll be dead in another ten minutes if you stay here,” he said. “Come on. Enough fooling around.”

Throwing me over his shoulder, he dropped down from the nozzle. Then he secured me to his back with a sling and climbed slowly up the hull until he found a jagged opening. Struggling with my weight, he stumbled into the ship. We were inside a utility cabin intended for miscellaneous supplies. Unceremoniously, he dumped me onto a storage ledge.

“Are you going to behave or do I have to tie you down again?” he asked, breathing heavily.

I shook my head; I was done running.

He left and returned sometime later with the litter. As I lay recovering on the ledge, he maneuvered the litter to block the hole we had climbed through. He lashed the makeshift door to the frame of the cruiser with the hauling cables. Aided by the light of a salvaged emergency lamp, he piled pieces of debris on the litter to weigh it down, sealing the seams between it and the hull with pieces of melted plastoid and bundles of cloth.

It was almost completely dark inside the cabin. Only a few thin rays of light fell through some holes made by the steelpeckers high above us. They penetrated the murk feebly, like forlorn hope scattered by a dark sea of despair.

Outside, an otherworldly moan grew steadily until it turned into a screeching howl, followed by the staccato pit-pat-pat of rain lashing against the steel hull. The tiny explosions blended into a constant, resonant clang in our dark sanctuary.

It no longer sounded like rain. It sounded like a regiment of stormtroopers firing their blasters against the wrecked ship.

“A sandstorm,” the man said.

I imagined myself in the nozzle outside, pounded by the suffocating sand. I imagined my skin being scoured away by a thousand wind-whipped grains. I imagined myself as a skeleton reclining in the nozzle, my bones picked clean by animals and bleached by the sun.

“How did you find me?” I croaked.

“You’ve been in those clothes for more than a week now,” he said. “I could smell you from half a kilometer away. At least I managed to recover the water you stole.”

Not magic then. Maybe this planet robbed him of magic just as it drained the life out of the starships that crashed into it.

“Did you grow up around here?” I asked. “Was that how you knew about sandstorms?”

“I grew up in a desert,” he said. “One very much like this one. You need to eat. And drink.”

I guzzled greedily from the canteen he held to my mouth. He pulled the last ration bar out of his sack, handed it to me, and dropped the empty sack on the floor. Lying down on the other ledge in the storage cabin, he turned his back to me and went to sleep.

In the dark tales told by my mother, the heroes needed to understand the villains to defeat them. Knowledge was the first step to control, to power, to order.

I needed to know this man who had taken me prisoner, and who had also rescued me from a sandstorm and handed me the last of his food. I needed to know this man who terrified me, but who also intrigued me.

I had seen the wanted posters, the shaky holo footage. I recalled the shiny figure on the deck of the rebel cruiser, pulling Imperial starships out of the sky with his bare hands. I remembered the way he had struggled up the wreckage with me tied to his back, refusing to abandon me to certain death. Maybe he just wanted to save me for some dark purpose later—or maybe not. I thought I knew all there was to know about this man, but in fact, I knew nothing.

After the sandstorm, we resumed our journey.

I lost count of how many starships we passed, their funeral pyres still burning. Since we had no more rations, we ate bitter roots he dug from the dunes and tiny voles he trapped with a net woven from delicate Imperial ion-conducting wires. Sometimes he cooked the meat; other times, we tore the flesh from the bones with our bare teeth. My stomach cramped from this barbaric diet.

We began to climb a hill, and the man had to stop every few steps to catch his breath.

It was hard to reconcile the figure of this man—mortal, weak, ordinary—with the glimpse of the powerful Jedi I had caught on the bridge of my ship. Had I imagined it all? Before the endless, unyielding sand dunes, everyone was equal, whether you were a magician or just a common soldier.

He stopped again, but this time, instead of resting, he turned to me, uncapped a canteen, and pushed the spigot against my lips.

I shook my head and moved my face away. The water, after baking in the heat of the sun for so many days, tasted bitter and metallic. Drinking it made me want to throw up.

“You haven’t drunk for more than an hour now,” he said. “I know you feel terrible, but dehydration is going to make it worse.”

In truth, I was feeling close to death. My vision blurred and swam. The fever was so intense that I imagined myself not too different from the burning wrecks we passed. I closed my eyes so the world would stay still.

I couldn’t breathe.

My eyes snapped open. He had pinched my nostrils shut. What manner of torture was this?

Panicking, I opened my mouth to gulp some air. He waited until I had taken a breath before forcing the spigot of the canteen between my teeth. I bit down but it was impossible to keep it out. He had pushed it in too far.

“Drink,” he growled. “Or I’ll start pouring and you can drown for all I care.”

I nodded. He let go. I swallowed the bitter, foul liquid. I had no doubt that he was willing to carry out his threat. A rebel, especially a Jedi, was capable of any act of cruelty.

After I drank, he resumed pulling me up the steep side of the dune again.

“I need a doctor,” I gasped. It was shameful for an Imperial soldier to beg, but I was beyond shame now.

“I know.”

I swayed back and forth as he dragged me toward the bright sky. I looked back at the graveyard of starships. They shimmered in the heat. Maybe soon I was going to join them, and all my dead comrades.

“There is a place surrounded by walls beyond the dune,” he said. In my semicomatose state, his voice sounded far away, unreal. “It’s guarded by stormtroopers, and I’ve heard rumors that masked soldiers in crimson robes patrol there from time to time. I’m taking you there.”

I couldn’t speak. So he was planning an assault on an Imperial stronghold. Was he hoping to use me as a hostage? Surely he knew that would be useless. In the Imperial Navy, we were trained to treat hostages exactly the same as hostage takers because they were weak and allowed themselves to be used as shields. I wanted to tell him that he would gain no advantage by dragging me along.

But my slow mind finally caught the import of his words. If the compound he spoke of was guarded by stormtroopers and the Emperor’s Royal Guard, then it was likely an important fortress—the fact that I hadn’t heard of it probably meant it was secret. Even a Jedi would not have an easy time breaching the defenses of such a place.

I could still redeem myself by sabotaging his attack. And if I should somehow survive, there would be doctors, medical droids, fresh water, safety.

Hope, which I thought was already dead, flickered to life deep in my mind.

With a final lurch, we crested the dune and gazed down the other side.

He had not lied. The walled compound sat in the desert like a black crown. The walls were interrupted at regular intervals by watchtowers. I strained to catch a glimpse of the imposing stormtroopers, but we were too far away.

The man sat down on the litter next to my feet. He untied a pair of long poles that ended in flat paddles. I knew what they were: blades from an air-circulating pump installed on starships. He placed the poles over his knees like the oars of a rowboat and stuck the flat paddles into the sand.

“Let’s go,” he said, and shoved hard.

We slid down the great sand wave on the litter raft, and he wielded the oars nimbly, giving us more speed when he thought we needed it, and steering us out of the way of protruding animal skeletons and clumps of vegetation when they got close.

Faster and faster we sailed. It was the most exhilarating and strange ride of my life.

I readied myself for a desperate burst of exertion as soon as Imperial guards came into view. I would push him off the litter and scream for help, to let the stormtroopers know that I was loyal, that I had not been rendered helpless by this dangerous war criminal, that they could still rescue me.

But no hopeful white armor showed on the walls as we approached. The doors to the compound were wide open, and a few men and women, pulling litters much like the one I was on, emerged with heaps of stolen goods.

The last of my pride and resistance left me; I wept helplessly.

Another burnt-out room. Smashed electronics, fragments of memory cores, the smoking wreckage left behind by explosive charges designed to erase all traces of the work that had been done in the laboratory.

From time to time, I heard the voices of men and women raised in anger somewhere in the compound. Scavengers fighting over scraps.

The man returned. One look at his face told me all I needed to know.

Then he picked up the hauling cables and dragged me through the maze of tiled corridors and empty laboratories again.

There were no stormtroopers, no Imperial Royal Guards, no doctors or functioning medical droids. Whatever this facility had been, the occupants had abandoned it earlier in the battle and destroyed everything that couldn’t be taken with them.

From time to time, we passed other scavengers hoping to find objects of value in this ghost compound. They looked at us warily, and some bared their teeth or flared their neck flaps or raised their horns intimidatingly. They belonged to a hodgepodge of species, some humanoid, some avian, a few aquatic or amphibian, most unknown to me. All dressed in rags. Jakku was not a rich planet, and these were people who had never scraped together enough to leave.

The man managed to negotiate with them and exchange some of his salvage for rations. He devoured a few portions and handed the rest to me.

I shook my head. The pain was so intense that staying conscious was torture. I wanted something, anything, to put me out of my misery.

“Leave me,” I muttered. “Let me die.”

The man said nothing. He simply went on, pulling the litter. He stopped to look in every ruined room, searching for what I knew wouldn’t be there.

We were passing one of the rooms with a narrow slit-like window when it happened. First, a bright flash that made both of us turn away. Then a deep rumbling that we felt through our bones, as well as heard. The ground heaved as though we were at sea or on the deck of a struck starship. The man fell, and anything still sitting on benches or hanging on walls crashed to the ground.

A groundquake? A volcanic eruption?

The man crawled over and dragged me into the doorway, where the frame offered some shelter. We huddled tightly, hoping that the building would not collapse on top of us.

Later, after things had calmed down, we made our way outside. The other scavengers, a few dozen in all, had gathered silently on the elevated balcony overlooking the entrance to the compound. The sight that greeted us took all words away.

The wreckage of the massive Star Destroyer that had stood a few kilometers away was gone, and in its place was a bubbling, bright-orange lake of fire. The red-hot liquid, lava-like, had spread to fill the depression among the dunes in which the compound stood. The low walls of the compound held the turbulent waves of the lake of fire back. But the sandblasted walls would not last much longer.

We were stranded in the middle of a burning lake, and the dikes were failing.

Half-asleep, I listened to the voices of the scavengers.

“The reactor cores in the ship must have suffered a meltdown….”

“Lucky that no one was anywhere near it…”

“…not lava. That’s melted sand….”

“…a sea of liquid glass…”

“There are cracks in the walls already….”

It was night, and the cold desert air was made more tolerable by the heat emanating from the glass lake. The fiery liquid cast a dim red glow against the faces of all the scavengers. The strong wind, the result of the drastic change in temperature between the desert day and night, drove powerful ripples and waves across the surface. Surrounded by a lake of tempestuous glass and dozens of misfit creatures from all over the galaxy, I again had the sensation that I was living in a dark fairy tale spun by my mother.

“We can’t stay here,” said the man who had taken me there. “When the walls collapse, we’ll drown in fire.”

“What do you suggest we do, then?” asked one of the other scavengers. He wore a simple vest made of woven wires over his furry body, and all his prized salvage—small electronics, tools, power supplies, gleaming crystal fragments—was attached to the net vest like the haul from a strange sea.

The man had no answer. There were no functioning vehicles left in the compound, and even if there were, how could mere wheels or treads be useful in a lake of scorching liquid glass? Only an AT-AT might have a chance, but there was none to be found.

I fell asleep. I was going to die, but the great villain of the Rebellion, trapped with me, would not escape, either. That was some comfort.

When I woke up, the man was gone.

I struggled to sit up and frantically looked around.

The dejected scavengers, seeing no way to escape their fate, huddled in small groups around the balcony. They played games of chance, shared stories, or simply stared into nothing at all.

A small figure down below, on top of the walls, caught my attention.

He was strapping something flat and large to his feet. I squinted against the hot breeze coming off the surface of the lake.

They were the paddles from the air-circulating pumps.

With no warning, the figure jumped into the lake. I was too shocked to cry out.

But instead of sinking into the deadly waves, he stayed afloat. Just like the wide boots issued to Imperial soldiers in snowy terrain, the paddles acted like miniature boats that distributed his weight across a wide area. Tentatively, he took a step forward, like a long-limbed water strider floating on a puddle.

Step by step, he gained confidence. As I watched his billowing robe float over the fiery lake like a blooming lotus, I imagined the hot liquid cooling into pure, crystalline glass. I imagined him stepping across the surface as easily as a boy loping across a sheet of ice. I imagined the stars reflected in the glass, an upside-down sky over which he strode.

He was the sky walker. I almost laughed aloud at the thought. Of course he was.

“That’s a ridiculous suggestion!”

“Absolutely not!”

“One slip and we’ll be dead.”

“You must be trying to kill us so you can steal our possessions.”

“The walls are holding, I think—”

“Maybe we should try to pile up the rubble here and build a tower. Even if the walls fall—”

“Stop it!” the man shouted. The cacophony of voices died. “I know you’re terrified. I am, too. But there is no other solution. You’ve seen the walls. They won’t last much longer. Even if you try to pile up all the rubble here and build a tower high enough to survive the flood, will your rations last until the glass cools? We have to walk out of here.”

The other scavengers looked skeptically at the paddles strapped to his feet. The very idea of trusting their lives to such flimsy contraptions on a burning lake was absurd.

They drifted away from the man, alone or in twos and threes to continue their hopeless games and useless fantasies. They refused to acknowledge the reality of our shared fate.

I beckoned to the man. Surprised, he leaned down to hear what I had to say.

“Tell them who you are,” I whispered.

He pulled back and looked at me warily. I beckoned to him again.

“I know the truth,” I said. “I saw you up there”—I pointed to the stars—“and also down here. I thought you’d lost your powers. But then I saw you stride across the lake, so I know you’ve gotten your powers back. You’re still Luke Skywalker, the Jedi. They will follow you, but you have to tell them the truth.”

He sat up and looked at me with an expression I could not name. A few seconds later, the corners of his mouth curled up in a smile.

I was drifting under the stars again. Just like how I had arrived on that planet.

“Stay close to me,” called Luke Skywalker. Dozens of voices acknowledged him from behind.

I strained to look back. Over the molten lake of glass, a long, serpentine caravan wound its way. In the lead was Luke Skywalker, magnificent in his glowing Jedi robes and hauling me on a litter. The paddles strapped to his feet allowed him to step high and pull me with confidence, and the shiny metallic foil—scavenged from the Imperial compound—he wore instead of the thick shawl kept him cool by reflecting the heat of the molten sand away from his body.

Behind us, the bravest souls wore paddles fashioned after those on Luke’s feet. Molten glass was so dense that it was possible to float without making the paddles too bulky. They pulled small boats and rafts made from other insulating material, and those who were too fearful to walk on their own huddled inside the temporary vessels, covering themselves with more reflective foil to stay cool.

“I’m using the Force to guide you,” Luke said into the darkness. “As long as you stay close to me, no harm will come to you. The Force is with us. We’re one with the Force.”

The others behind me repeated the mantra. They didn’t trust the contraptions that kept them afloat so much as they believed in the mystical power of the man leading them.

They had a point. After all, the same faith had allowed a group of ragtag rebels to defeat a galaxy-spanning empire.

The blazing waves from the molten glass lake lapped the shore behind us. The makeshift boats, rafts, and paddle shoes lay scattered on the sandy beach. We were safe.

It had been amazing to see the Jedi at work. He had convinced a group of timid men and women who distrusted each other to walk across a lake of fire. Maybe it was an example of those dark Jedi mind tricks. But it didn’t feel dark. It felt like…hope.

One by one, the scavengers came to say good-bye. They each left Luke Skywalker the most precious piece of salvage they had. Some had been recovered from the abandoned Imperial compound, others not. It wasn’t exactly a payment. Closer to a token, a tribute to something grander than any of us.

“This power cell will fetch at least ten full portions….”

“I had never seen these crystals before. The self-destruct charge must have missed them. If you can figure out the encryption…”

“This droid hand is the most intricate I’ve ever seen. Probably meant for the Emperor’s own servants…”

“I don’t know what this is. A compass, maybe? Found it in a case labeled ‘Pillio.’ Who knows where it will lead? Maybe to a place where you won’t ever be hungry or worry about starships falling from the sky….”

Skywalker thanked each and every one of them. When the last scavenger had left, he knelt next to the litter and handed me two pills.

“Take these,” he said. “They won’t do anything for the infection, but they’ll take away the pain for a while. I found them in the compound commander’s quarters.”

I took the pills. The Jedi had not killed me so far, but maybe this was the moment. It was at least merciful of him not to want me to suffer.

Then he handed me something else. It was egg-shaped, and a tiny crystal display showed a scrolling series of numbers. There was a large orange button on the side. I knew what I was holding: an Imperial homing beacon.

I looked up at him, not understanding.

“I’m going to leave now,” he said. “Like I said, I’m not real friendly with the Empire. Push the button when I’m gone, and an Imperial patrol will come to get you. Don’t worry, the lake will keep the gnaw-jaws and nightwatchers away. Nothing will bother you until the rescuers come.”

What does one living being want with another in the desert?

To drag him across a sea of sand for days and keep him alive. To ferry him over a lake of molten glass. To hand him a beacon of hope.

There were only a few answers, but it hadn’t been easy to figure out. Not when you’d been told certain things all your life…and they turned out to be lies.

He was already some distance away before I called out, “Are you really Luke Skywalker?”

He stopped but did not turn around. “We’re all Luke Skywalker.”

Then he disappeared into the darkness.

I pushed the button.

They picked me up, took me back to a hospital ship, and fixed me up.

Then they interrogated me as a deserter, possibly a traitor.

I told them everything I knew.

“Liar!” my interrogator screamed in my face. “The war criminal Luke Skywalker was not anywhere near Jakku! Why are you hiding what really happened on the surface? Confess that you’ve become a rebel agent!”

They tortured me. They drugged me.

Images and memories blended in my mind. I could not tell what was dream and what was real. But I held on to my story as well as I could.

Sometimes the home you yearn for turns out to be a dark forest. Sometimes the people you trust the most turn out to be monsters. Sometimes the villains are really the heroes.

We’re all Luke Skywalker.

I imagined myself as Luke Skywalker. I imagined myself as a luminous being.

I survived. Barely.

Tossed out of the Imperial Navy, I returned to Jakku as a scavenger, one of many who had flocked to the planet to make a living in the graveyard of starships.

My home is in the wreck of a TIE fighter. The wings offer good shelter against sandstorms, and I use pieces of black glass collected from the frozen lake to make additional walls and a ceiling through which I can look at the stars.

I know he’s out there, still striding across the galaxy, still fighting for all of us.