Bring her to me. And I will show you the dark side.

Kylo Ren jammed his helmet on. Most First Order personnel had never seen him without it, and that was how he wanted it. They had no right to see his face and think they knew him. The thought made him clench his teeth.

Bring her to me. And I will show you the dark side.

The Supreme Leader was the only one who saw his face. It stung that Hux, that miserable prick, had been there to see both his face and his humiliating reprimand. To hear that the girl had resisted him, that the Supreme Leader now mistrusted him with her. That he planned to use her as a lesson, as if Kylo were a mere novice instead of an apprentice on the brink of mastering the dark side. As if he'd not been handling Snoke's dirty work for years while the Supreme Leader floated above it all, smug and distant, maneuvering Kylo on his chessboard and never letting him see more than a move or two ahead.

Perhaps Kylo should have expected it. He was merely a knight, after all. An expendable piece, not even worthy of regular training.

And the girl was less even than he. A mere pawn. Snoke would rip the map from her mind and leave her broken on the holochamber floor from systems away. He would kill her—this unimaginably gifted girl—without ever breathing the same air.

Kylo began to walk faster, his hands clenching at his sides.

Snoke had given orders for Hux to train his beloved death ray on Hosnian Prime, knowing Kylo had grown up there, knowing he would feel the death of those millions echoing through the Force. And now one of Hux's worker bees had located the Resistance, and Snoke had ordered him to destroy the entire Ileenium system to ensure no speck of the Resistance remained. The way would be left clear for the First Order. Leia Organa and everything she'd fought for would be gone, and the galaxy would slide into Snoke's grasp without a whimper.

And if it destroyed one of Kylo's tethers to the light side, so much the better.

Bring her to me. And I will show you the dark side.

Kylo stalked down the hallways, his strides lengthening, his teeth grinding.

Standing outside the interrogation chamber was the guard he'd left with strict orders not to enter the chamber. If the girl could force her way into Kylo's mind, she'd have the guard's mind open to her persuasion before he'd cleared the hallway. He dismissed the trooper with a curt nod and instructed him to close off the hallway when he left.

Kylo wanted privacy for this.

The girl glared fire when he entered, looking even more furious than when he'd left. He recalled how offended she was by his helmet and he thought, insanely, of removing it to soothe her again. Absolutely not. Ridiculous.

He found himself removing it anyway.

She did not appear grateful. Her whole face screwed up, ready to spit defiance at him.

With a wave of his hand her restraints sprang open, and her expression slackened. Before she could spring forward he slapped his hand over her wrists, holding her in place. He leaned down, face close to hers, his voice low. "Keep quiet. I'm getting you out of here."

The message was in Bartok, an old Rebel Alliance code. The Resistance had never used Bartok. Nobody had in years; it was so well known there was no point.

RECONNAISSANCE SHIP TRACKED TO ILEENIUM SYSTEM REPEAT RECONNAISSANCE SHIP TRACKED TO ILEENIUM SYSTEM ATTACK IMMINENT ABANDON SYSTEM

But the message wasn't straight Bartok.

It was laced with Xaczik.

Leia was well acquainted with Xaczik, an obscure language used on the fringes of Kashyyyk. Almost no one else was, though. As far as the galaxy at large was concerned, Wookiees spoke only Shyriiwook and the closely related Thykarann.

But when your husband's closest friend and partner in crime was a Wookiee, you received an unusual education. She and Han had used this mixture of Bartok and Xaczik during Ben's childhood, when they didn't want him to know what they were saying.

There were some things children should never hear.

Han was, she thought, current on Resistance codes. But this one, rooted in the few joyous years they'd had with their son, would never leave either of them. Her heart leapt despite the gravity of the message.

The rest of the control room was buzzing. "Does anyone recognize the code? It's a variant of Bartok, but it's mixed with something that sounds like Shyriiwook. But none of the vocalizations are quite right."

Leia raised an authoritative hand, and the furor mostly subsided. She braced herself; announcing the base needed to evacuate would be like throwing a bomb into the control room. And it required immediate action, not prolonged discussion, something she'd hoped she'd be free of after leaving the senate.

She'd been bemused to discover she could still be naïve.

"General? Do you understand the message?" the comm officer asked.

"It's from Han. The First Order has discovered our location and ordered an attack. We have to abandon the system immediately."

The control room fell silent, and for a moment everyone just absorbed the announcement.

"But shouldn't we wait until we see if the strike team succeeds?" General Morellan protested. "It may not be necessary to abandon the base."

"Starkiller Base isn't the First Order's only weapon," Leia reminded him. "Even if it's wiped out, they still have star destroyers and other bases and troops all over the galaxy. And all we'd have is a brief reprieve. What do we have? A dozen X-wings and a couple crates of blasters? This won't be like Takodana. They'll throw everything they've got at us to wipe us out. We're no match for them right now. Do you really want to stake an all-or-nothing claim over this base?"

"She's right," barked Admiral Ackbar. "We have no chance if our location is known. We've only lasted this long because we've kept hidden. All they'd have to do is send in a couple of stormtrooper transports and a few waves of fighters and we'd be wiped out. Transmit the order."

"What about the fighters? Should we alert them now?"

Leia shook her head. "We need them focused on destroying that base. When they report back after the attack we'll alert them that we've initiated Protocol Evergreen. They'll know where to go."

Parnassus was colder than D'Qar, but lushly covered in trees. It had been home, decades before, to an Imperial base. Most Resistance evac plans involved abandoned bases, both Rebel and Imperial; those were the most convenient options. Their more desperate schemes involved abandoned industrial complexes, but those were for dire circumstances indeed. There were more likely to be people in those areas, which meant potential loose tongues, or even First Order sympathizers. And even the most unimpeachably discreet local populace was undesirable because of the risk to civilians. The First Order, like the Empire before it, thought nothing of killing innocents.

Leia winced at her own understatement. The First Order had destroyed an entire system, the center of power in the galaxy. Even the Empire had displayed more restraint.

The unfaded memory of Alderaan shattering into debris flashed to her mind. The power of the Galactic Empire had been at its height then, cultivated over the course of decades. But the attack against the Hosnian system was a stunning salvo by what not long before had been little more than a fringe group. A repugnant—and successful—bid for dominance from a movement of lunatics, hard-liners, and the amorally ambitious.

But it had been relevant to her for years, for reasons more personal and painful than the destruction of any planet.

Which of those categories does Ben fit in? Leia wondered. He wasn't amoral; she couldn't bring herself to believe that, even after all these years and all the things she knew he'd done. Knew because sometimes it felt personal, the things he did. Like he'd specifically chosen the things that would hurt her most. They weren't cold and calculated; they were the actions of an agitated child slapping out in the ways that would hurt most.

And yet she remembered him as a sweet, sensitive boy. Prone to sadness and sudden bursts of incandescent anger, but a loving boy who would cry if she got hurt and hang onto her as long as she let him.

She had no idea how they'd gotten from there to here, only that it hurt beyond measure.

No, she corrected herself harshly. She knew. She'd thought she could handle it, but she was wrong, and she was paying the price for her naiveté. Everyone was paying the price, Ben most of all. She couldn't believe she'd been so stupid. She'd done it, allowed a monster to take her son. She'd lost her own baby, and the creature who'd taken him had twisted her sweet boy into a caricature of the man who'd hurt her more than any other, a man she hated so much she still gave thanks on the anniversary of his death.

"General Organa, they're preparing to turn off the scramblers," piped C-3PO behind her. "If you would like to convene with the other officials in the control room?"

Leia pulled herself back from the past; she could get lost there if she wasn't careful. She turned to the building they'd settled on as most appropriate for headquarters. On her way she passed a couple of scramblers, each with a tech beside it waiting for the signal to switch it off.

At every new base the Resistance settled on, the first thing set up were the scramblers, crude, old-fashioned, highly effective relics from the struggle against the Empire. Just like me, Leia thought. They disrupted the planet's electrical field, preventing the First Order from conducting an accurate scan of the planet. They were strictly a stopgap measure; scramblers interfered with the use of the Resistance's more sophisticated technology, but provided some breathing room to unpack and set the equipment up. The moments between turning off the scramblers and booting the standard defense system were always tense.

Techs swarmed over the control room, many still setting up equipment. They launched the systems in phases, because the scramblers' battery life was very limited; they'd fail long before most of the systems had been brought online. But with the scramblers down, the returning fighters could approach the planet, so it should work out. This time.

C-3PO toddled in behind Leia. "Oh, I say! Thank the stars for Captain Solo! If it weren't for him we'd surely be dead. I do hope this means he'll be around more often. It's been so long, I believe he hardly recognized me on Takodana. He seemed quite disconcerted."

Leia winced and ignored him. How long Han was around anywhere, ever, was a mystery known only to him. He was the breeze, and nothing could anchor him in one place.

She couldn't, at least. That much had been clear for years.

Leia was setting up her office when Poe's squadron returned. Word had already arrived that the strike on Starkiller Base had succeeded; after the initial flush of joy, they'd returned to the business of transforming the abandoned outpost into a functional base. There'd be time to celebrate later, after they'd fortified their new home.

When word came that the Millennium Falcon had landed, Leia left the control room and headed out, trying to tamp down her expectations. Han and Chewie had survived—and maybe they had a passenger with them. The one she had asked Han to retrieve. The one who had been on her mind nonstop for 15 years.

If he wasn't with Han, then he was on Starkiller during the attack. If he was on Starkiller during the attack, he had likely never left Starkiller.

She would have felt it, surely. Felt if her son's precious life had been snuffed out before she could see him or touch his face or even find out if he'd grown into his ears. Wouldn't she?

She was seized, by an almost overwhelming impulse to turn around and return to her office. If she didn't see Han disembark without Ben, she wouldn't have to face the fact that her son was likely dead, killed in an attack she'd ordered. That every decision she'd made, starting back when she'd sent him to study with Luke, had pushed her son away from her and into the exact place where he'd die. That of all the places in this endless universe, out of all the people who'd ever been born, she'd killed the person she loved most in the galaxy from systems away.

She'd been born a princess and grown up in splendor, then watched everything she loved destroyed. She'd fought for years, not to avenge her family and her home, but for the basic right of worlds to govern themselves. She'd endured torture and enslavement and had killed with her bare hands when necessary, but she somehow couldn't accept that the galaxy could be so cruel as to end things this way.

But Leia had never allowed herself the comfort of cowardice, so she squared her shoulders and marched out to the landing field. Then she saw them: Han, with Chewie by his side. And trailing them—just after—was a man, a young one, slim, head down—

It was Finn. And then for a long moment Leia stopped moving, stopped thinking. For the first time in her life she surrendered, and let her mind float in nothingness. Because nothingness didn't hurt.

When Han approached she saw her own grief reflected in his face. It was a shadow to what she was feeling, but Han had never been comfortable sharing emotions other than joy or anger. She knew him as she knew herself, and she knew that he was still struggling against his feelings. It would take weeks or more before he allowed the totality of their loss to hit him, and by then he would be in another system, without her gaze to reproach him.

She spoke first. "He wouldn't come."

He stopped a couple of feet from her and shook his head. "I never even saw him."

"Then he's…"

"He might not have been on the base, Leia. We couldn't find the girl, either. He might have taken her someplace else. Some other base, a star destroyer. He could be anywhere."

Her eyes were steady. "Do you believe that?"

For a terrible moment his eyes welled up. Then he set his jaw and refused the tears, and for once she was glad, pathetically, inexpressibly glad, of his inability to deal with sadness.

To deal with Ben.

Poe Dameron collected Finn, who was distraught over his inability to find his friend, Rey. At Leia's request Poe asked him a few questions about where Rey—and Ben—might have been other than the destroyed weapon-planet. All he could suggest was the Finalizer, the First Order's massive battlecruiser; Ben apparently often made use of it.

That was where he'd interrogated Poe.

But the Finalizer was last known to be orbiting Starkiller, and Leia couldn't see why Ben would bother with it rather than electing for the comparative comfort of the base. Even the most luxurious warship could not compare to a base, particularly one as carefully planned as Starkiller. It was meant to be the pride of the First Order.

Others could take comfort in fiction. Her son was not on board the Finalizer.

It began to grow dark in the quarters that had been designated as hers. She should be in the control room, really. She was a general, and that was her place. Or at least in her office, signaling her availability, her devotion to the duty she'd never shirked.

But the Resistance could do without her for once. She didn't turn on the lights, or even check to see if the power had been restored to the living quarters.

She was content to stay in the dark, and the hell with the rest of them.

It didn't register when the door opened and softly closed. It wasn't until the cot dipped that she realized Han had entered the room, sitting in the growing dark with her. He wrapped his hands around hers and squeezed jerkily, then tightly, painfully tight. She pretended the tears in her eyes were from the pain.

"He's been gone for a long time." Han's voice was tentative.

Han Solo was never tentative.

"This is—it's not different. Not really. This time we just won't wonder anymore. We've been wondering for 15 years. Fifteen years is—" his voice began to crack. He gasped a little, seemed to steel himself before continuing. "Fifteen years is a long time to wonder. It's like being dangled from a cliff every day of your life. We can say goodbye to him, Leia. We can mourn the boy he was and move on, finally."

At that her grief overflowed and she began sobbing. Her boy, her sweet beautiful boy. He'd loved dogs and sunfruit and when she sang to him at bedtime, and he was gone because she hadn't protected him. The only thing in her life that had really mattered, and that monster Snoke had smothered that sweetness until Ben couldn't even wear his own name because he thought there was no Ben left in him. Snoke had stolen her son, tried to hollow him out and fill the shell with his own evil.

She remembered how tightly Ben would hold her, bony arms almost bruising her in their intensity, and wished she could die with that memory in her mind. Within a year or two of joining Luke his hugs had become perfunctory. She'd thought her boy was growing up.

He'd never grown up. He'd never even had the chance.

She leaned against Han's shoulder, allowing herself the rare private luxury of comfort. He wrapped his arm around her, holding her to him tightly, taking his own.

It was several minutes before either of them spoke.

Eventually she thought of the message he'd sent, and finally she stirred. "Did you use the code as a way to … feel close to him?"

"What do you mean?"

It was another long moment before she could continue. "There was a part of me that half-hoped you might have used the code as a signal. Just a little sign that he was with you. But it was the opposite, wasn't it? A warning. You were trying to prepare me."

"What code? Leia, I don't know what you're talking about."

She stared at him for only a moment before the sad realization struck. Han's grief was affecting him even as he remained outwardly stoic.

She touched his face. If her heart still lived it would break for him. "The evacuation warning, Han. You sent it in that mixture of Bartok and Xaczik that we used when Ben was a boy. When we were a family."

Han pulled her hand from his face, brow creasing. "I didn't send any warning, sweetheart. I didn't know anything was wrong until we approached D'Qar and picked up the beacon signal."

She was not at her best right now, was so far from it it was a speck in the distance, so it took a moment for the implications of Han's words to sink in. Her breathing, even her heartbeat seemed to cease while she examined the idea, then stuttered as joy flooded her, a candle fighting back the night.

"This doesn't mean he's alive," Han cautioned. "Did you receive the message before the base collapsed or after?"

She searched her memory, fighting through the twin hazards of hope and grief. It was so close—right there—

Her memory cleared, and her heart cracked.

The candle flickered out, and darkness enveloped her once more.

The command meeting that evening wasn't voluntary, even for Leia. Emergency base installations could not be taken lightly, and plans needed to be made to capitalize on the destruction of the First Order's costly weapon.

The meeting was just underway when the comm officer entered apologetically. He quickly made his way to Leia and bent down to murmur in her ear. He kept glancing at Han, who'd been given a courtesy seat at her side. Han might not be an active member of the Resistance, but he was a great hero of the Rebellion as well as Leia's husband.

"General, we've received an incoming transmission. It seems to be in the same code as the message we received prior to the evacuation."

For a moment Leia froze. Beside her, Han stood so abruptly his chair fell over.

"What is it?" General Morellan asked, alarmed.

Leia didn't answer. She rushed to the control room, Han close on her heels. At her nod the comm officer played the message again.

ARRANGE A PRIVATE LINE. I NEED TO TALK TO YOU, MOTHER.