NAVIGATING D’Qar’s asteroid belt felt like a pleasant pastime after the perils Poe had faced on Jakku. He steered his X-wing around the orbiting rocks with ease, then descended through the verdant planet’s atmosphere and forest canopy to touch down before Resistance headquarters. The base was as he had left it before striking out on his mission. Creeper vines weaved patterns around duracrete buildings and bunkers, camouflaging them from view overhead. Unlike the shifting sands of Jakku, the ground remained firm under Poe’s feet.

It was good to be home.

An overenthusiastic BB-8 bulleted across the landing area and deluged him with beeps. Poe turned his head to see the stormtrooper he had named Finn approaching.

“Poe, Poe Dameron,” Finn said with a big grin, “you’re alive!”

“So are you,” Poe observed, returning the smile.

“What happened?”

“I regained consciousness after you ejected from the TIE and managed to avoid a complete crash—but not a miserable trek through the desert. If a scavenger hadn’t given me a ride and helped me off Jakku, I’d be buried in a sand dune. But that’s nothing compared to what you’ve done. I heard you completed my mission, and best of all, you saved my jacket.”

Finn started to pull it off. “Sorry—here.”

Poe motioned him to stop. “Keep it. It suits you. I’ve got a new one.” He grinned. The galaxy sure worked in mysterious ways. Both of them had been trained to be enemies, yet above all odds, there they were as friends. “You’re a good man, Finn. The Resistance needs the help of more like you.”

“Poe, I need your help.”

When Poe heard the specific nature of Finn’s request, he took the former stormtrooper into the base to meet the one person who could help.

“General, sorry to interrupt, but this is Finn and he needs to talk to you.”

General Leia Organa excused herself from a conference with senior command staff and turned to Poe and his companion. “And I need to talk to him,” she said. “That was incredibly brave, what you did.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Finn said, “but I’m here to talk about a friend of mine who was taken prisoner during the clash on Takodana.”

She sighed. “Han told me about the girl. I’m sorry.”

“Finn’s familiar with the weapon that destroyed the Hosnian system,” Poe said. “He worked on the planet where it was built.”

Leia took Finn’s hand. “We’re desperate for anything you can tell us.”

“It’s located on the world that serves as the First Order’s main base,” Finn said. “I’m sure that’s where they’ve taken my friend. I need to get there, fast.”

“The girl. What’s her name?” Leia asked.

“Rey,” Finn said softly.

Rey woke to find herself bound to an interrogation bench, tilted almost to a standing position. The interrogator himself lurked nearby, watching her through his metal mask.

“Where am I?” she asked him.

“You’re my guest,” he said, not the least bit invitingly.

He gestured. Her shackles popped loose. She massaged the areas where her arms had been compressed. “Where are the others? The ones who were fighting with me?”

He snorted. “You mean the traitors, murderers, and thieves you call friends? You will be relieved to hear that I have no idea.”

Relief was the last emotion Rey could’ve felt. How could she believe anything he said? She seethed with anger at him, desperate to tear the man’s mask off and hammer it into his skull. He regarded her with the same cold metallic expression. “You still want to kill me.”

“That happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask.”

He held her stare, and then his gloved hands touched the sides of his mask and took it off.

He had a young man’s face, with an old man’s eyes. His lips and dark hair stood out against the pale complexion of one who shirked the sun. He looked like a student who took no joy in his studies. One who perceived only the great problems of the galaxy and not its simple pleasures.

“Tell me about the droid,” he said.

“It’s a BB unit with a selenium drive and a thermal hyperscan vindicator, internal self-correcting gyroscopic propulsion system, optics corrected to—”

His eyes pinched. “The map. It’s what I need.”

She kept her mouth shut and tried to forget what she had seen. Yet the harder she tried to forget, the more she saw the map in her mind. This was one of his tricks, she realized. She had to start thinking of something else.

“I can take whatever I want,” he said to her.

“Then you don’t need me to tell you anything.”

“True,” he said. His fingers stroked her face.

Released from her restraints, she could have pushed him away, which was probably what he wanted. But that would have broken her concentration. And she needed all of it to block him from probing deeper.

She built her barrier out of the very emotion that had sustained her since ever she could remember.

“You’ve been so lonely. So afraid to leave.” His tendrils crept around her memories, her dreams. “At night, desperate to sleep, you imagine an ocean. I can see it. I can see the island.”

Focusing on her loneliness, recalling the sadness that plagued her life, brought tears to Rey’s eyes. They streamed down her face, droplets that would have been precious on Jakku.

“And Han Solo,” he said. “He feels like the father you never had.”

His tone softened, as if he cared. “Let it go. He would disappoint you.”

Rey knew this was a ploy. The man did not care about anything other than himself and his goals. “Get…out…of my…head!” she fumed.

“Rey,” he said, pulling out her name from the echoes of her thoughts, “you’ve seen the map. It’s in there. And I’m going to take it. Don’t be afraid.”

Fear. That’s not what she felt. She wasn’t afraid of him. She knew what he could do and was trying to fight him. No. He was talking about himself. What he felt. His weakness. Fear was the portal into his mind.

She turned his tendrils back at him. His feelings and memories were easy to read. His mind was a turbulent ocean of fear. “You, you’re afraid. That you will never be as strong as—” She hesitated. An image of another man in a black cloak and mask dominated the maelstrom. A silhouette she had seen in the vision below Maz’s castle. He had a name. “Darth Vader.”

The gloved hand jerked away from her face. Her interrogator staggered, as if hammered by an invisible blow.

He waved and the shackles clamped her wrists, much tighter this time. The pain they inflicted did not diminish her gratification at watching him stumble out of the cell, humbled and defeated.

Han sat in the situation room with the senior Resistance commanders. He drummed his fingers, waiting for C-3PO to remove an odd object from BB-8. Han had already told everyone that the map was incomplete, but Leia insisted that she and her staff have a look for themselves.

Having carefully removed the object, C-3PO slipped it into a round table in the center of the room. Above the table, the star map materialized at a larger magnification than Han had first seen in the Falcon. Leia and her people studied the map while Han studied their faces. No one seemed happy about what they saw.

C-3PO voiced their disappointment. “General, unfortunately this map contains insufficient data from which to match any system in our records.”

“Told you,” Han couldn’t help but add.

Leia shook her head. “What a fool I was to think we could just find Luke and bring him back.”

Han softened, seeing his wife so distressed. “Leia—”

“Don’t do that,” she snapped.

“Do what?”

“Be nice to me.” She marched out of the room.

Han went after her. “Hey, I’m here to help.”

She kept walking down the corridor. “When did that ever help? And don’t say the Death Star.”

He got in front of her. “Will you just stop and listen to me for a minute? Please?”

She huffed. She still had the patience of a princess, which was little. But she stopped and looked up at him. “I’m listening, Han.”

Han didn’t sugarcoat his words. She was immune to such charms. So he went straight to the root of the conflict—their son. “I didn’t plan on coming here. I know whenever you look at me, you’re reminded of him. So I stayed away.”

“That’s what you think? That I don’t want to be reminded of him? That I want to forget him?” She shook her head. “I want him back.”

“He’s gone, Leia. He was always drawn to the dark side. There was nothing we could have done to stop it, no matter how hard we tried. There was too much…Vader in him.”

“That’s why I wanted him to train with Luke,” Leia said. “I just never should have sent him away. That’s when I lost him. Lost you both.”

“We both had to deal with it in our own way,” Han said. “I went back to the only thing I was ever good at.”

“We both did,” Leia said sadly.

“We’ve lost our son forever.”

“No,” Leia said. “It was Snoke.”

“Snoke?”

“He knew our child would be strong with the Force,” Leia said. “That he was born with equal potential for good or evil.”

“You knew this from the beginning? Why didn’t you tell me?” Han asked.

Leia said nothing in her defense. Han didn’t push. “So Snoke was watching our son.”

“Always. From the shadows,” Leia explained. “Even before I realized what was happening, he was manipulating everything, pulling our son toward the dark side.”

Han sighed. There were many days he wished he’d never heard about such things. The Force perplexed him. He would’ve given everything for his son to be ordinary—like him. It was easier to make the Kessel Run in eleven parsecs than to turn someone back from the dark side.

“But nothing’s impossible, Han. I have this feeling if anyone can save him, it’s you.”

“Me?” Han frowned. “No. If Luke couldn’t reach him, with all his skills and training, how can I?”

“Luke is a Jedi. But you’re his father. There’s still light in him, I know it.”