Wind and sand stung Finn's cheeks, and without protective goggles he could hardly keep his eyes open. He had no idea how Poe was piloting this thing—it was like no speeder he'd encountered before. Come to think of it, he had no idea how Poe did a lot of things.
"Ripping speeders, lightspeed skipping," he yelled to Poe. "How do you know how to do shifty stuff like that?"
"Just stuff I picked up," Poe said.
"Where?" Finn pressed. Not in the Resistance, surely. Leia and Poe tried to keep their operations above board as much as possible. Poe had been Finn's very first friend outside the First Order. But it turned out there was plenty he still didn't know about the pilot.
Before Poe could respond, the skimmer jerked sideways with an impact. Finn smelled blaster scorching as more laser bolts missed, sailing past them. The First Order had found them. Stealing the speeders had probably triggered alarms and informant networks all across the valley—which was still better than getting caught and arrested at the festival. But now two treadspeeders pursued them, each one carrying two troopers. Their treads kicked up sand in their wakes as they closed fast.
Finn and C-3PO clung to the steering vane as Poe began evasive maneuvers, swerving back and forth to make them as difficult a target as possible. Off to their right, running parallel, Rey was doing the same. Netted bundles of goods swung around in the cargo basket, threatening to spill. Finn yanked out his blaster and started firing, but Poe's veering made his shots go wide.
Behind Rey, Chewie's luck with his bowcaster was just as terrible. Still, their shots were making it dangerous for the First Order speeders to close the distance, so Finn kept at it. Gradually, he sensed a rhythm to Poe's maneuvering, and he timed his shots accordingly, getting closer and closer to his target.
Almost there…just a little to the left. He lined up the shot, anticipated Poe's swerve…
Right before he pulled the trigger, the rear passengers of each treadspeeder, launched into the air with jetpacks.
"They fly now?!" Finn yelled.
Poe gripped the tiller. "They fly now," he echoed, because of course they did.
Finn got off a few experimental shots with his blaster, but hitting a flying object from the back of a swerving skimmer was harder than impossible.
"Rey!" Poe yelled. "We should split—"
"Split up," she yelled back.
"Yeah!"
They peeled off, Rey angling right with Chewie and BB-8 toward a dust grain farm. Poe steered Finn and C-3PO leftward into a narrow rocky canyon. Their pursuing treadspeeders split up just as Finn had hoped. But his breath caught when he realized both of the flying jet troopers had disappeared, as though Rey were their true quarry. The canyon closed in around them. Poe's driving took them so close to the walls that Finn could have reached out and scraped them with the tip of his blaster.
The treadspeeder was gaining on them. "Hold on!" Poe yelled, aiming directly for the canyon's wall.
"Oh, my!" said C-3PO as Poe lifted the skimmer's nose, and suddenly they were racing up the cliff's edge. Goods shifted to the back of the speeder. C-3PO's golden grip on the steering vane slipped, filling the air with a horrible metal-on-metal screeching.
Finn had completed minimum stormtrooper training with speeders, but even he knew that repulsorlift technology wasn't robust enough for them to continue skimming a cliff wall for long. And in an outdated junker like this, things were probably even worse than he knew.
"Did we lose them?" Poe hollered, bumping the speeder back down to the canyon floor.
Finn searched their surroundings. Just sand and outcroppings and walls as far as the eye could see. "Looks like it."
"Excellent job, sir!" C-3PO shouted. But he spoke too soon because the prow of a treadspeeder cornered a butte and came screaming toward them.
"Nope, still there!" Finn said.
"Terrible job, sir," said the droid.
Poe laid into the throttle, but the skimmer didn't have any more to give. Finn resumed firing with his blaster—calmer now, letting his instincts guide him—a shot landed! The treadspeeder jerked sideways but resumed the chase in the blink of an eye. Finn hadn't damaged it at all.
The treadspeeder had shields. Emboldened, the trooper lifted his blaster and fired. Finn hit the deck just in time as the trooper's shot impacted a bundle of dried goods, which blackened to smoke. He was about to jump to his feet and fire back, but right at his nose was a long coiled rope with large metal hooks on each end. They stuck to the magnetized floor—a nice feature for holding down cargo, but not exactly helpful now. He muscled one away from the floor, lifted it, threw it toward the speeder.
The hook landed on the ground. Just as he'd hoped, the speeder drove right over it. The hook punctured the rubberized tread, caught, and held. The rope at Finn's feet uncoiled at an alarming rate as it wound around the trooper's tread. Maybe he should have thought this through better…Their skimmer was slower than the treadspeeder, but it was also heavier. That gave him an idea. The vane C-3PO clung to was solid metal, sturdy enough to provide additional steering and stability, just like a mast. Finn grabbed the second hook and secured it to the pole, making sure it held tight.
"Poe," he warned.
The pilot turned, saw the hook wrapped around the vane. "I gotcha!"
The treadspeeder was eating up their rope. It went taut; the skimmer jerked, and Finn nearly lost his footing. Poe angled the rudder sharply left, pushing them into an impossible right turn. They cornered so hard it felt as though Finn's cheeks were struggling to stay on his face.
The rope remained taut between them. The treadspeeder skidded in an arc around the fulcrum of Poe's hairpin turn, skidded, skidded, sand flying everywhere…and finally slammed into the side of the canyon, where it exploded into a ball of fire and dust.
"Wooo!" Finn yelled. He couldn't believe that had worked.
—
Even though they'd split up, Rey was left to deal with three pursuers. At least Poe and Finn would have a chance. Chewbacca fired doggedly at the treadspeeder with his bowcaster, but he paused when the jet troopers suddenly hit the throttle and pulled even with them—and then confusingly moved ahead. Their strategy quickly became clear when they started firing charges to the ground in front of their skimmer. Rey yanked the tiller, turning the skimmer at the last moment, barely dodging an explosion. She ducked away from the ensuing debris cloud even as she dodged again, turning away from the treadspeeder. Good thing the controls on this skimmer were sensitive, but she still found it necessary to anticipate, reacting a split second sooner than should be humanly possible. It was taking all her concentration. The speeder and jet troopers were still in pursuit. Rey knew she couldn't keep this up forever. She'd eventually make a mistake.
"Get them!" she yelled to Chewie. "I'll go for the speeder."
It was possible to dodge obstacles ahead of them while shooting at something behind them, right? Well, she was about to find out. Chewie kept the jet troopers busy with his bowcaster, but Rey found herself slaloming through grain-processing pipes that jutted from the ground, like an orchard of metal. She yanked up the blaster Han had given her, let the Force fill her, fired several times in quick succession at the treadspeeder.
Her shots hit, but they did no damage.
"The front shields are up," Rey said.
BB-8 began to beep excitedly about something he'd found.
"Not now, Beebee-Ate!" Rey hollered.
Chewie yelled, pointing.
Rey saw a lump in the distance. No, a ship. Ochi's freighter?! It hunkered atop a sandstone bluff, overlooking a vast, windswept valley interspersed with dark sand like blots of spilled ink. The ship's hull was blasted by sand and wind, its landing struts drowning in small dunes. "I see it!"
She ducked instinctively as a laser blast heated the air by her ear. One of Chewie's shots landed square on a jet trooper, who bulleted to the ground. The Wookiee roared.
Two to go. The treadspeeder continued to fire at them, and the remaining jet trooper seemed inspired by the death of his comrade to double his efforts, lobbing charge after charge. Between evasions, Rey managed to get a few shots off with her blaster. Many of them hit the treadspeeder. None did any damage.
"Their shields are too strong," she yelled, ducking another cloud of stinging grit.
BB-8 had lodged himself behind Rey's tiller, taking advantage of the mag plates to keep himself from rolling off the skiff. One of his compartments opened, and his welding arm shot out toward one of the many containers in the cargo area. Rey didn't bother to ask or admonish; she focused on dodging charges and grain pipes, letting the little droid do whatever he was going to do.
BB-8 reached toward a metal canister with his welding arm and pecked at it, opening up a dark hole. Before anything could escape the now-compromised canister, BB-8 body-bumped it, hard enough to disengage the maglocks and send it flying into the air behind them.
It released a cloud of smoke as it fell—bright, sunshiny yellow, just like the colored smoke at the festival. Opaque as a wall.
The stormtrooper driving the speeder couldn't react fast enough to avoid it. The cloud blinded him, and he panicked, swerving left and launching up the slope of a rock. The speeder shot high, exposing a fuel tank that was unprotected by its forward shields. Rey aimed her blaster and pulled the trigger. The treadspeeder exploded.
BB-8 beeped smugly.
"Never underestimate a droid!" Rey said.
One to go. But neither Rey nor Chewie could spot him anywhere. The remaining jet trooper had disappeared.
Rey's senses were on high alert as she steered the skiff toward the abandoned freighter. Poe's skimmer appeared over the rise. Everyone seemed haggard and windblown, but were otherwise fine.
"You get them all?" Finn called.
"There's one left," she called back, searching the wide blue sky. Nothing in sight.
No help for it but to continue on. Together, the skimmers raced for the ship. Rey steered toward the on-ramp. A ship like this would never survive long on Jakku. It would be stripped for parts within days. Maybe the Forbidden Valley really was forbidden, only used once every forty-two years during the Festival of Ancestors. There had to be an explanation for why this ship remained untouched.
As she and her friends were about to jump out of their skimmers, something roared overhead. Charges exploded all around them, throwing them to the sand and blowing their speeders to smithereens.
Everyone whipped up their weapons and fired; Rey wasn't sure which of them hit, but the jet trooper spiraled out of the sky and slammed into a cliff. His jetpack detonated, shooting him into yet another bluff and out of sight.
Rey had just enough time to register that the sand around her was a different color—more black than ocher—and that she'd seen this kind of sand before…
She sank up to her hips.
Her friends were descending around her, especially Poe. "…the hell is this?" he said, trying to extricate himself, but his movement only made him sink farther and faster.
"Sinking fields!" Rey said. The Sinking Fields of Jakku had taken many an unwary soul. She should have recognized the sand right away. "Grab onto something!"
But there was nothing to grab onto. Chewie called out, panicked.
C-3PO dropped all the way to his recharge coupling. "Oh, what an ignoble end!" he exclaimed.
BB-8's round body spun wildly in the mire, to no avail. Within the space of a breath, the little droid disappeared beneath the surface.
"Beebee-Ate!" Rey yelled.
Tears filled her eyes as she panic-thrashed against the sand. Rey was going to lose them all. Not to a dark and powerful enemy, but to a natural phenomenon she should have recognized. Jakku was going to have its last word after all.
She locked eyes with Finn. Her friend's face was stricken. "Rey!" he yelled. He dropped, the sand reaching his shoulders.
She reached her hand out in his direction, but he was too far, "Finn!"
Finn slid down to his chin. "Rey!"
No! "Finn!"
Finn disappeared beneath the surface. C-3PO and Poe followed. She reached for Chewie as if in apology, and he reached back. She held her breath as sand covered her mouth, her nose, her eyes. Grit filled her ears, scraped her skin. The world went dark.
—
General Leia was in the command center, getting briefed by Rose Tico on the status of their tiny-but-growing fleet. "Everyone who can hold a wrench or pilex driver is repairing and upgrading ships," Rose said. "We're working as fast as we can."
Leia nodded. Just outside, sparks were flying everywhere, and she was about to ask for status updates on a few specific ships, but Snap Wexley hurried toward her, interrupting them.
"General, we're getting reports of a raid at the Festival of Ancestors."
Of course they were. Of course the First Order had found her people. "This mission is everything," Leia said. "It cannot fail." Then, her voice a little plaintive, she asked, "Any word from Rey?"
He shook his head. "The Falcon's not responding."
At the look on Leia's face, Rose said to Snap, "Do you have to say it like that?"
"Like…what?" he said.
"Do me a personal favor," Leia said to him. "Be optimistic."
"Yes, ma'am," said Snap, forcing his features into bland pleasantness. "This is…this is terrific. You're not gonna believe how well…This is gonna turn out great."
Leia resisted rolling her eyes. But she said, "Major Wexley, requiring optimism doesn't mean hiding the truth."
"Yeah, what aren't you telling us?" Rose demanded.
Snap shuffled his feet. "The raid at the Festival…General Leia…Our eyes on the ground say it's the Knights of Ren."
—
Sand was scraping Poe's eyelids, shoving into his ears, up his nostrils. Any moment now, he'd lose control and inhale a mouthful of grit. The sand would scrape away at his lungs in the painful seconds it would take to choke to death. Just when he thought he couldn't hold his breath a moment more, his feet met air. His torso broke through a layer of packed sand, and he dropped, hitting the ground hard.
BB-8 dropped after him, plunking down just a few meters away. Poe gasped to replenish his lungs, shaking sand out of his hair, blinking rapidly to clear the grit from his eyes. He looked around; BB-8 was right beside him. It was too dark to see well, but they had fallen into some kind of tunnel made of hard-packed sand. A gaping dark maw marked what might be an adjoining tunnel. Hopefully, he'd find the rest of his friends there. He got to his feet, dusted himself off, and stepped toward the maw. "Rey? Finn?" he called out.
"You didn't say my name, sir, but I'm all right," C-3PO responded from a few meters away.
A squelching noise made Poe turn; it was Rey, her legs dangling from the ceiling. He hurried over to keep her from dropping as hard as he had. After he lowered her to the ground, she bent over, coughing.
"Rey? You all right?"
She nodded. Her face was covered in sand. "Where's Finn?"
"And where's Chewie?" Poe said.
Chewbacca dropped through the ceiling and thunked to the ground. Poe winced at the impact, but Chewie shook himself off, seemingly unscathed.
"Finn?" Rey repeated.
He appeared in the entrance to the adjoining tunnel. Sand peppered his black hair. "Yeah, I'm good," he said. "What is this place?"
C-3PO doddered toward them. "This isn't the afterlife, is it?" he asked. "Are droids allowed here?"
Poe felt like he could truly breathe again, now that everyone was accounted for. He'd had it with people dying on his watch. "Thought we were goners," he said.
"We might still be, sir," C-3PO reminded him helpfully.
"Which way out?" Finn asked, looking around.
Rey unhooked her lightsaber and turned it on. Its blade lit the walls around them in soft yellow, and Poe could feel its hum in the back of his throat as she waved it around, studying the walls. Poe reached for his glow rod and turned it on. Its glow compared with the lightsaber's was like that of a moon to a sun. He shrugged and aimed it forward anyway, seeking an exit.
"This way," Rey said, and headed off.
He thought of protesting, of asking how Rey could possibly know which equally unremarkable direction was the right one. But Poe had learned that when Rey said things that way, her face determined, her voice unwavering, a fellow ought to just follow.
—
Lando Calrissian crouched on a rock outcropping, making himself as small as possible. Directly below and within spitting distance was the Millennium Falcon, surrounded by stormtroopers. Behind them was a high rock cliff, and Lando could make out several dark figures. His helmet zoomed in on the image until he could identify them: the Knights of Ren. They eyed his ship like vultures.
His ship. He hadn't been prepared for the sting of nostalgia that overcame him when he laid eyes on the Falcon again. Lando had re-donned his mask and crept to this viewing perch, hoping he could grab the Falcon and return it to Chewie before the First Order found it. But he hadn't been fast enough.
A desert trooper wearing a colored pauldron strode forward. "Confiscate, scan, and destroy that ship," the stormtrooper commander ordered. "By order of the Supreme Leader."
Lando's breath grew tight with rage, and his helmet hummed to keep up with the task of filtration. The First Order always destroyed what you loved. He'd been spending a lot of time on Pasaana to get away from all that. The Aki-Aki were joyful and nonviolent, and they'd welcomed him without question or reservation. He'd had to don the helmet, sure, because an old Rebellion general was nothing if not recognizable. A small price to pay for a little peace and quiet. But maybe scoundrels like him didn't get to have peace. Maybe trouble always came looking, no matter what.
He watched, his determination growing, as the desert troopers broke the locks and forced the Falcon open. Then the best ship in the whole galaxy lifted off and screamed out of the atmosphere, its fusion engines glowing blue, no doubt heading for an incineration hangar.
Lando knew what he had to do.