In which the hounds catch the scent, and Kylo and Rey face the morning after a very bad night.
Rumor is a curious thing. It might circulate furiously among interested parties only to drown in indifference when spread further afield. It might acquire legs that let it run a few days until some more interesting tidbit appears to push it aside. And sometimes, most rarely, it ignites some long-smoldering fear, spreading from mouth to ear across an entire planet, its spark to be carried outward on starships, there to leap from world to world.
Few would credit a story about the Force, of mystical powers of dark and light, good and evil. A tale of a strange alliance between a dark sorcerer and a warrior of light makes a good children’s story, but as rumor, it’s fit only for ridicule.
The tale of two fugitives who arrived in a small town at the hour between day and night might make the gossips buzz for a while—a man gravely wounded and the girl who forced a healer to treat him at knifepoint. If some insist that the knife was actually a wicked sword of red light, and that an ill-omened beast accompanied the man as his familiar, well, we all know how fantastic stories can become when spread from person to person.
But when more concrete elements are involved, the story takes on new gravity. Surely it’s worth noting that when the fugitives arrived, a siege began on the town sheltering them. That a mortal enemy long contained suddenly rose to terrorize not only a remote plains town, but the entire countryside as well.
To those who know who and what and just how dangerous that enemy is, the story becomes worrisome. If the enemy rose there, it can rise here just as easily. The mutters of rural folk prick the ears of their more cosmopolitan fellows, making them pass along fear like a contagion while they hurry home even more quickly at the day’s end.
To those more ignorant, traders and travelers and transients, such a tale requires one more ingredient to make it worth repeating. An ingredient that carries a dash of danger or excitement or simple outrageousness—
The ship the fugitives arrived in was a First Order starfighter.
Now that becomes a tale that spreads faster and farther than the wildest imaginings of the town gossips.
* * *
Hux looked up from the data pad in his hands. He was dressed in a shimmering robe of midnight blue, his pale, freckled feet encased in embroidered slippers. The pungent smell of the liniment meant to soothe and heal his wounds wafted around him. The physicians attending him had withdrawn when an Intelligence Section senior attaché arrived. Hux’s personal attendant remained, a hulking shadow standing against the wall behind him.
“How reliable is this information?” Hux said.
“Questionable,” the attaché admitted. “But it’s the first decent lead we’ve had. We sent two operatives to the planet. Neither returned. In fact, communications ceased after several hours. We’re attempting to ascertain why. Drone scanners didn’t turn up any evidence of the ship itself. We request permission to deploy a force to investigate the report more thoroughly. Our considered opinion is that too many elements line up for this to be mere traders’ chatter.”
Hux tapped the data pad with a manicured nail, his lips turning down in displeasure. “The might of the entire First Order, and we’re reduced to chasing rumors.”
“With all due deference, Supreme Leader, it’s been our experience that rumors often yield promising returns.”
Hux gave a disgusted sigh. “And rumors, it seems, are what I must content myself with. Very well. Deploy your task force. Ensure it has adequate backup.” He set the pad aside and reclined once more on the treatment table. “If it is Ren, I don’t want him slipping away again.”
* * *
Rey woke with a gasp, wrenching upright. Every muscle screamed. Groaning, she sagged back, fleeces giving under her. Kylo sat on a bale nearby, elbows on knees, watching. He looked more somber than she’d seen in a while, the way he’d looked when they first started talking through the Force.
The slash down the back of her arm was throbbing. Her throat was one, massive ache from ear to ear. And her hands—
She looked down at them. They were wrapped with torn strips of bandaging. She rolled onto one elbow and lifted one, peering at it.
“You injured your hands,” Kylo explained.
He’d spoken quietly, but she tensed and shrank back. “How? I don’t remember—”
“What do you remember?”
The Nightfolk in the wadi. Kylo taking away his lightsaber then taunting her. The hassash, then—
She rolled to her feet, ignoring every one of her body’s protests. “The Nightfolk—they were here!”
She backed away from Kylo, glancing around frantically for her staff. Spotting it at his feet, she reached for the Force. The staff flew into her hands. Pain shot all the way to her elbows, but she hung on.
“You were with them!” she said, still backing away. “You tried to take away my staff!”
He stood slowly but didn’t move toward her. “I did. You were hurting yourself. There were no Nightfolk here, Rey.”
“You think I don’t know what I saw? What did you do? Let them in so they could teach me a lesson?”
“I want you to see something,” he said. “In the barn.”
He took a step toward her. She raised her staff and backed a step, snatched a look over her shoulder for anyone behind her, then back at Kylo again. He paused as if to make sure she wouldn’t bolt, then took another step. He backed her out of the shelter that way, one slow step after another.
She should run. If he drew his lightsaber, her staff would be useless. She glanced toward the barn doors, calculating if she could make it outside before he caught up with her.
“Look at the animal pens,” he said. “To your right. I’ll stay where I am.”
Of course he could sense her intention through the bond. She tried to shut her mind to him, glancing to the left first. Nothing there but the wall, dim and harmless in the shadowless early light. She darted a look to the right, keeping him in her peripheral vision.
No Nightfolk. No bodies. Not even blood.
“The third pen over,” he said. “Look at the corner post.”
She meant only to glance again, but there, there was something, the barn’s dirt floor scuffed and disturbed.
She sidled toward the pen, keeping Kylo in sight. The mallik inside snorted and backed away, raking its claws threateningly.
She looked up from the floor to the post. It was battered and splintered. Rey took a step closer, staring at it now, the deep indentations, the way the wood looked almost pulverized from the force of blows. She remembered one of the Nightfolk that just wouldn’t go down, no matter how many times she hit it…
Kylo had moved out of the shelter but didn’t approach any closer. “That post, too.” He nodded toward it.
The second post was cracked about an arm’s length from the top. She looked down at her staff. The solid metal rod was bent at one end.
“It’s good you weren’t using the Force at the time,” he said. “If you had been, you’d have to explain the destruction of our host’s barn and animals.”
She slowly turned to him, noticing for the first time the cool dirt under her feet—they were bare. She let one end of the staff fall to the ground. “I— there were no Nightfolk?”
“There were no Nightfolk. Only me,” he added with a hint of bitterness.
A bad thought occurred to her. She scanned up and down his body. “Did I hit…you?”
Something in his look lightened. “No.”
“Okay. Good.”
She gazed across at him in his too-small shirt, his hands loose at his sides. He looked back at her. She couldn’t read that look, couldn’t sense his state of mind even through the bond. He was guarded, subdued—a long way from his behavior last night.
She guessed she must look much the same. Things had gone very crosswise somehow, and she didn’t know what to do about it—or if she even wanted to do anything about it.
A sudden, powerful desire to see Finn and Chewie swept her. People who were steady and understandable. She raised a hand to rub her face, smelled blood and metal and lowered it again.
The sound of voices came from outside, indistinct but approaching. Verrannallu’s was clearest, and she didn’t sound happy. Rey tensed and looked toward the doors. Kylo did the same. She felt a shift in the Force. A sudden pressure pushed her attention away from the broken posts, and she knew what he’d done.
Verrannallu’s voice resolved into words. “…killed, I’ll go out and face them myself.”
Rey hesitated, then crossed to stand by Kylo. It wouldn’t help his Force persuasion if she was standing right in front of the damaged posts. She felt his startled attention then the barn doors swung open.
Jaegar stood, one hand on the door. Verrannallu peered past him. Letting out a relieved breath, she stepped inside. Her gaze flicked unerringly to the battered posts, then to Rey’s bandaged hands.
“Yes,” she said. “I can see it was a bad night. Not as bad as I expected.” She gestured to the shelter. “Let’s take a look at you.”
Jaegar’s gaze went between Rey and Kylo. Rey felt how she could have gravitated to his fatherly concern if she’d been on her own. How strange that all she felt now was gratitude.
“I’m almost finished fixing the speeder,” she said by way of setting his mind at ease. “I just have to check it out.”
His smile seemed somehow forced and genuine at the same time, as if he meant it, but smiling didn’t seem quite appropriate. “That’ll be a treat, missy. Thank you.”
Coming in behind him, Tam grinned and waggled his eyebrows in excited anticipation. The two went to their morning chores.
Verrannallu chivvied Rey and Kylo into the shelter. Rey tried not to be entertained by the sight of Kylo being chivvied. He must’ve felt it—he shot her a dark look then stood, arms folded and looking forbidding as she sat on the bale he had earlier. Her boots sat nearby, where he must’ve put them after he pulled them off her. She laid her staff down next to them.
The healer unwrapped her hands. Rey looked down at them in horror. The skin of her palms and fingers was torn and raw.
Verrannallu turned them this way and that. “What did you do?”
“I—” she began then faltered. What had she done?
“She thought she was under attack,” Kylo said. “She was fighting for her life.”
The healer eyed him. “And you let her?”
His mouth tightened and his eyes blazed, but he didn’t answer.
“Mmm,” Verrannallu said. “This is your work?” She waved a blood-spotted strip of bandage she’d unwound from Rey’s hand.
Kylo’s chin dipped in a nod.
Rey thought of him cleaning and bandaging her hands while she slept, pulling off her boots. A lump in her throat and a tightness in her chest made it suddenly hard to breathe. She looked up and he met her eyes with another of those looks of his, one that said more than she could read.
Verrannallu unwound the bloodied bandage on Rey’s arm. She hissed as it parted company with the long slash down the back.
“The stitches I placed have torn,” was the healer’s only comment.
Rey made a face. That, she remembered. Or rather, she remembered Kylo telling her she was bleeding again. Besides ignoring the fire running down her arm, she’d also ignored him.
Verrannallu dug salve out of her kit and slathered it on Rey’s arm. Rey bit her lip at the sting before the numbing took effect.
Kylo crouched down beside her, took her hand and gripped it hard. “Hold on. She’ll have to re-stitch you.”
Two of the healer’s hands were busy readying a needle. “Yes, I hear he impressed upon you the foolhardiness of your adventure yesterday.”
Rey hunched her shoulders and broke from Kylo’s gaze. “No one said Nightfolk could go out in the daytime.”
Verrannallu gave one of her dry chuckles. “You think they burst into flames in sunlight? Any night beast can go out during daylight. Just as a day creature can roam the night. They only have their preferences.”
Rey gave a squeak as the needle went in, squeezing hard on Kylo’s hand. After the second stitch, there was only an uncomfortable pulling sensation she could somehow feel in the pit of her stomach.
“So now you know,” Verrannallu said, plying her needle. “No hunting Nightfolk alone.”
“She won’t,” Kylo said, gripping harder, “be alone.”
Rey shot him an annoyed look “Now who’s being stupid?”
He met her look evenly. “Don’t hunt them, and neither of us will have to be stupid.”
“Things have gone beyond that now,” Verrannallu said. “You’ll have decisions to make soon.”
“Do I?” he said. “Maybe I only need to show the Nightfolk they’ve made an unfortunate enemy.”
A warning prickle brushed Rey’s neck.
Verrannallu leaned back, considering him. “I’ve done you an injustice,” she finally said. “I persuaded myself that your intentions toward her were bad.” She lifted a hand to indicate Rey. “I see I was wrong.”
“My intentions…” Rey felt his attention on her, but he didn’t look at her. “…are honorable.”
The bond was still muted—she couldn’t sense him clearly. But something about the way he said “honorable,” as if the word meant more than what it sounded like, raised a breath of goosebumps on her arms.
“Can honor walk the Night path?” Verrannallu said.
“I’ll find out,” he said.
* * *
This is ridiculous, Kylo thought. That Rey should reduce herself to wheedling the farmer for the use of the speeder she had repaired. The speeder that had been collecting dust under a tarp for what looked like years, and probably would have for years more if not for her. Even worse, she was doing it out of consideration for his weakness—she hadn’t needed the bike for her previous excursions.
He clenched his jaw to keep silent, pretending to concentrate on pulling on his boots. There was the usual exodus of animals for the day. The last lumbered out, leaving a coppery haze of dust and a trail of fresh dung.
Over by one wall, Rey bent over the speeder bike, apparently doing some last-minute tinkering. Her staff lay on the ground within reach. She straightened as he approached, wariness clear both on her face and through the bond. The fresh bandages on her hands were already creased and dirty. She must’ve noticed his glance—she put her hands behind her.
Kylo nodded at the bike. “It’ll be easier if I drive.”
He could see her parsing that for insult. Experimentally curling and uncurling her hands, she finally said, “It might be.”
He didn’t like this stilted caution, so unlike her. “What’s wrong?”
She looked like he’d set a trap in front of her. “You were mad at me.”
Her voice still rasped. He clenched his fists to keep from getting angry all over again. “Yes.”
“You—” She broke from his gaze, held her hands out in front of her. “You took care of my hands.”
“Yes.” What did one have to do with the other?
“You could’ve just…” She made a vague gesture.
Understanding glimmered—and disbelief. “Left you raving? Let you batter yourself to death? Is that what you think I’d do?”
“I don’t understand you!” she flared. “First you’re yelling and throwing things at me, then you do this.” She waved her bandaged hands.
“Rey, didn’t anyone ever care what happened to you? No,” he answered himself. “Of course they didn’t.”
“Finn cared,” she shot back. “Chewie cared.”
Those were not names designed to pacify him. “Maybe I do, too,” he growled.
She looked bewildered. “So you threw things at me?”
When she put it that way, her confusion made more sense. “I was trying to teach you something.”
“What were you trying to teach me? Because if you were, I don’t know what it was.”
“Caution. Judgement. Your limitations”
“While that—that thing, that hassash was attacking me?”
“I wanted to use my lightsaber.”
Her confusion turned to disgust. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
She turned to the speeder and swung a leg over, wincing as she did. He was amazed she could move at all this morning.
She flipped switches, touched the activator and the engine gurgled to life. It blut-blut-blutted a moment then settled into a low, steady whine, rising off the ground as the repulsors powered up. She took another moment to test it. It lurched forward, backward, swung left and then right in place. Nodding once in satisfaction, she slid off to grab her staff. She’d made a sort of carry-strap for it out of strips of mallik fleece. With a practiced move and an unreadable glance at him, she flipped the staff over her shoulder and settled onto the rear seat.
Kylo swung on. The speeder dipped as the repulsors compensated for his weight. He tested the controls, too, intensely aware of Rey on the seat behind him. He swung the bike around abruptly and she pitched sideways.
“Hold on to me,” he said. “I don’t want you falling off.”
“I won’t—” she began
He opened the throttle and shot through the barn doors. She clawed at his shirt, caught herself then slid her arms around him.
If he was aware of her before, it was like every nerve fired wherever she touched—down his back, around his middle, along the backs of his thighs. He was suddenly grateful she wasn’t sitting in front of him.
Why it should be so different from the nights he’d held her, he didn’t know. Maybe because he’d been too weak then. Or because he’d convinced himself that was for her protection. This—wasn’t.
He forced himself to pay attention to his surroundings—the small houses and rambling buildings, the crooked streets, a Jannessi child playing with a toy hover, the sweet smell of something baking that wafted from an open window, two old men turning to watch as they whizzed past.
I passed through all this a few days ago. It was disturbing, not remembering any of it.
The street made a Y ahead. Rey pointed past his shoulder. “Take the left-hand branch.”
He swung onto the street she indicated. Behind a row of buildings, massive walls stretched away on either side, two huge, metal gates folded open. He thought of his vision last night through the Force. The walls, the island of light in a sea of grass. They zipped through the gates, the speeder’s engine echoing, and he looked back at walls the same as in his vision, the lights, quenched now, perched on top.
His Silencer rested on a little knoll within sight of the walls. He squinted at it. Even from this distance, he could see something was wrong…
Kylo clamped the throttle open, barely noticing the clench of Rey’s arms around him, the press of her slim body against his back. The bike whined over the grass and up the knoll’s slope. He brought it to a banking stop.
The Silencer was artfully draped with trash. Shreds of fabric and bits of cord or cable held pieces of plastic, metal sheets, bottles and crushed boxes. Withered vegetation adorned the weapons vanes. Several lumpy bags sat on top of the cockpit, and lengths of bent and rusty metal leaned against the viewport. The wind merrily tossed empty bottles and boxes, tapping them against the ship’s hull.
Kylo stared in shock, then had to choke back an equally shocking impulse to laugh.
Rey had deconstructed his life more thoroughly than Snoke ever had. No, that wasn’t true. But what had taken Snoke years, she’d managed in a few days.
He made himself look more closely at what she’d done, see camouflage, not garbage. “You left the solar panels exposed,” he said evenly.
“I don’t know the specs for your ship,” she explained. “I know a line TIE needs close to a thousand terajoules of capacity to keep systems in standby mode. I guess yours needs more, so I left as much of the upper surfaces exposed as I dared. I found some power cells and capacitors and scattered them around to try to baffle the energy signature.”
The scene in front of him was quickly shifting from an affront to clever improvisation. “That’s…impressive.” He turned his head to look at her. “You learned all this scavenging?
She hitched a shoulder and let him go, resting her hands on her knees. “I liked to study engineering manuals when I could find them. It helped to know what things were and how they could be used, so I knew what would feed me the longest.”
He ground his teeth, quickly shutting himself off. She already didn’t understand why he’d been angry about her injuries. She certainly wouldn’t understand why he was angry hearing how she’d been forced to live.
“Where did you confront the Nightfolk?” he said, pleased with the calmness of his voice.
“There’s a wadi over there.” She pointed. “You can see it from the top of the boarding ladder.”
* * *
They had to backtrack far up the drainage to find a place the speeder could negotiate to the bottom. The trip up the Silencer’s boarding ladder had shown how weak he still was—he was light-headed and out of breath by the top. Light-side healing and whatever the hassash had done apparently only went so far in recovering from blood loss.
The ceaseless wind fell as the banks rose, the whine of the speeder’s engine echoing between them. Kylo sent the bike curving around one bend after another, his senses open for kliks around.
He knew when they came to the place without Rey telling him to stop. The sand at the bottom of the drainage was churned. Blood splashed there, and there, and the Force shivered with recent conflict.
“No bodies,” Rey said at his shoulder. “I thought there’d be bodies.” He couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or relieved.
He thought about asking how many, then decided his uncertain temper wouldn’t take knowing. “Which direction did they come from?”
“Both. Upstream and down.”
“They were hunting you.”
She was suddenly very still behind him. “I—” She stopped, then said slowly, “It seems like it.”
He sensed around him again, stretching out as far as he could reach. He stiffened. “Hold on. Whatever happens, stay with me.”
Kylo opened the throttle and sent the bike speeding forward.
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