IT WAS the motivator.

Finn stood over the hole in the lounge floor and supplied Rey with hydrospanners, Harris wrenches, and other tools he couldn’t name that she needed to make the repairs. She had sealed most of the gas leaks, but she was still working.

“How bad is it?” he shouted down.

“If we want to live—not good!” she yelled back.

“They’re hunting for us. We gotta get out of this system—now!” Finn said.

She popped her head out of the deck hole. “Beebee-Ate said the location of the Resistance base is on a ‘need to know’ basis. If I’m going to take you two, I need to know.” She went back down to continue banging away at the motivator.

Finn needed to know, too. He pressed the droid to tell him, because the Resistance base was perhaps the only place where the First Order wouldn’t be able to kill him.

Unfortunately, what Finn understood from the astromech’s tones was that BB-8 didn’t trust him—in a big way.

“You just accused me of not being with the Resistance, didn’t you?” Finn asked.

The droid tilted up and down in an approximation of a nod.

Finn regarded the odd round droid. Poe had been willing to risk his life to go back for BB-8, a sign that he probably could be trusted with what Finn was about to reveal. “Okay, between us, no I’m not. I’m just trying to get away from the First Order,” he whispered so Rey wouldn’t overhear. “But tell us where your base is, and I’ll help you get there first. Deal?”

BB-8’s radar eye stared at Finn, but his loudspeaker remained silent.

Rey appeared again. “Pilex driver, hurry!” While Finn went over to the storage container, she addressed the droid. “So where’s your base?”

The droid stayed quiet. Finn scrounged for the tool. “Go on, Beebee, tell her.”

The droid shifted his eye back and forth, then finally murmured something short.

“The Ileenium system?” Rey asked.

Finn found the pilex driver and handed it to her. “The Ileenium system, that’s the one.” He tried to sound as if he’d known it all along. “Let’s get there as fast as we can, huh?”

“If I get the ship working again, I’ll drop you two off at Ponemah Terminal, but that’s as far as I can go.”

“What about you?”

Rey looked at him as if he’d asked a stupid question. “I gotta get back to Jakku.”

“Back to Jakku? Why does everyone always want to go back to Jakku?”

The flicker of the freighter’s interior lights made discussion about Jakku moot.

It wasn’t the motivator.

Rey discovered that what was causing their present problem was worse. Much worse.

The cockpit console was dead. All controls were overridden. The engines had gone cold, the lights dimmed, the ship’s weaponry was frozen. Someone had taken remote control of the freighter and paralyzed it.

Rey sat in the pilot’s seat, feeling paralyzed herself. She stared out the canopy and saw nothing but space. An unshakable tractor beam emitted from a massive spacecraft was pulling them from the rear.

Returning from the observation port, Finn sank into the copilot’s chair. “It’s the First Order.”

The First Order. It hadn’t been anything other than a rumor and a name to Rey until that day. “What do we do? There must be something—”

“Die,” Finn said.

Rey tried the console again, without luck. “There have to be other options besides die!”

The freighter creaked as the tractor beam dragged it into its captor’s hangar. Everything seemed lost until Finn proposed an idea. Since she couldn’t think of anything better, she agreed.

They grabbed breath masks from the lockers, then stowed themselves and BB-8 under the deck in the lounge. Finn slid the plate back over them where it had popped loose. Rey began to pry off the seal she had used to plug the gas leak. “You sure this will work on the stormtroopers?”

“Their masks filter out smoke, not toxins,” Finn said.

“You Resistance guys really know your stuff.”

Finn grimaced, which struck her as odd. She had intended that to be a compliment.

The freighter’s lights suddenly brightened. A clank echoed as the boarding ramp extended. “They’re coming!” Finn said.

Rey could hear the stormtroopers boarding. She didn’t have enough time to break the seal she’d tightened moments before not to leak. Which meant she wouldn’t be able to release the gas to pacify the stormtroopers.

All they could do now was keep quiet and hope the troopers forgot to check for hidden compartments.

The pair who came aboard the Millennium Falcon were not stormtroopers but smugglers. One was old, human, and somewhat scruffy-looking. The other was almost a half-meter taller and much hairier. They entered the freighter with a measure of fondness and caution, as it had been a long time since they’d walked down her corridors.

The wall paint was chipped in more places than they remembered. Sand had scoured the floors, and many conduits were exposed. The ship had aged, but so had they. And given all that had happened in between, the freighter in which they’d traversed the galaxy didn’t look much different from the day they’d last seen her.

“Chewie,” the old man said, “we’re home.”

His first mate—more a term of affection than any distinction of rank—gave a jubilant roar. Chewbacca was a Wookiee, a tall, shaggy-haired species who had the strength to pull arms out of sockets but also the intelligence to engineer the most advanced technologies. Years before, Han Solo had saved Chewbacca’s life, and from then on Wookiee custom had bonded Chewbacca to his rescuer, whether the young man liked it or not.

That young man wasn’t so young anymore. His hair had grayed. The wrinkles on his face matched the creases in his flight jacket. But Han Solo was far from ready to give up his ghost anytime soon—especially when, after years of searching, he’d finally reunited with the only starship he had ever loved, the Millennium Falcon.

Her current operators weren’t hard to find. A deck plate in the lounge wasn’t flush with the floor. Chewbacca tore it free and Han pointed his blaster at two youths—a male and female, both human—and a newfangled round-modeled droid. The youths raised their hands in surrender.

“Where are the others?” Han asked “Where’s your pilot?”

“I’m…the pilot,” the girl stammered.

“You?” Han could scarcely believe that someone so young could fly a freighter as highly modified—and uniquely temperamental—as the Falcon.

“It’s just us. Finn, Beebee-Ate, and me,” the girl said.

Chewbacca stomped up next to Han and growled a question. “No, it’s true,” the girl replied. “We’re the only ones on board.”

Finn’s eyes widened at her. “You can understand that thing?”

“And ‘that thing’ can understand you, so watch it,” Han retorted. “Get outta there.”

The two climbed out of the hole with the droid. Han gave the girl another curious look. “Where’d you find the ship?”

“Niima Outpost,” she said.

“Jakku? That junkyard?”

“Thank you!” Finn glanced at the girl, as if to prove a point. “Junkyard!”

“Told ya we should’ve double-checked the Western Reaches,” Han said to Chewbacca. They’d been passing through the system in their cargo hauler, with scant interest in Jakku, when the hauler’s sensors had detected a familiar beacon—that of the Falcon. “Who had it? Ducain?”

“I stole it from Unkar Plutt,” the girl said.

“Who?”

She lowered her hands. “He stole it from the Irving Boys, who stole it from Ducain.”

“Who stole it from me!” snapped Han. “You tell him Han Solo just stole back the Millennium Falcon for good.”

Both youths dropped their jaws in awe. Han holstered his sidearm and went with Chewbacca to visit the cockpit he hadn’t seen in far too long.