Finn felt the Millennium Falcon make the jump into hyperspace with a ship encompassing rattle. The Wookiee’s eyes darted towards the exposed ducts and conduits with a concerned moan. Or at least Finn thought he sounded concerned. He was really trying to understand Chewie, but it wasn’t clicking for him the way it seemed to with Rey.

  Their lack of communication seemed to run in two directions as the furry alien once again tried to get out of the couch where Finn was treating him.

  “Chewie, hold still! I need to get the kolto in!”

  Finn attempted to wrestle Chewie back into a relaxed position, but more ended up hanging on as the Wookiee struggled to rise. Inevitably, the grapple led to the pulling apart of fresh burn tissue and the howl of pain from Chewie.

  Finn could hear yelling from the cockpit as Rey and Solo seemed to be plugging critical issues in the ship with tape and string. Chewie’s deep-set blue eyes glared down at Finn as he growled and tried to push him away.

  “Hey!” Finn called, “I need help with this giant hairy thing! Stop moving! Chewie.”

  Chewie gave a moan that sounded distinctly indignant just as Han threw his head around the lounge doorway.

  “You hurt Chewie, you're gonna deal with me!”

  “Hurt him?! He almost killed me six times!”

  Chewie moved like an avalanche, easily picking up Finn with a single arm and pressing him against the wall. Finn realised that the wrestling they had been doing earlier had been the Wookiee being extraordinarily gentle with him. The furry alien could have easily crushed him into a smear if he truly wanted to break free.

  “Yep! Ok, your cooperation is appreciated!” gasped Finn from against the wall. “I still need you to lie down so I can help your shoulder.”

  Chewie huffed. He let Finn drop and looked forlornly at the mess of alarms and whines ringing through the ship. He barked rapidly in the direction of the cockpit.

  “Yes, Chewie!” yelled an exasperated and annoyed Solo. ”I can hear the hyperdrive preparing to shred itself, too! Me and the girl are working on it! You need to get fixed up before you jump back into it.”

  “Hyperdrive shred?”

  Finn felt his voice was a bit higher than it usually was.

  “Great way to travel kid! Scatters pieces of you in three systems at once if you are lucky.”

  Finn had a second to think that maybe it would be more worth Chewie to repair the ship rather than being ministered to by him before all the alarms in the ship suddenly cut out. Solo paused from dragging out lengths of thick ribbed conduit at the strange silence.

  A bang sounded as an access panel was kicked open from the inside, and Rey emerged. Finn hadn’t even seen her enter the service hull. He had thought she was still in the cockpit. Solo looked at her quizzically as she emerged. Rey seemed sheepish in response to all the attention.

  “I bypassed the compressor.”

  Solo’s grey and bushy eyebrows flew up.

  “In a plasma hot conduit?”

  “I found a line pump with a side… shunty thing and pulled the flow that way.”

  Finn could see that her confidence was flagging as she was forced to explain herself.

  “I could show you.” She tried.

  Solo paused for a second. Then his scowl came back as if it had never left.

  “Alarms are off, aren’t they? I’m sure there is plenty left to fix without the committee meeting.”

  Rey’s face split into a grin. He waved her back to the access hull and strode towards Chewie, shooing BB-8 out of his way as he went.

  “Move ball.”

  With the alarms silenced, the manic need for motion had left Chewie. The big alien seemed to have sagged once the crisis had passed. Finn was cracking kolto packs with practised fingers to administer to the large plasma burn that lanced almost an inch deep into the muscle.

  Chewie luffed lowly at Solo, who responded in a close voice.

  “Nah, don’t say that. We got out fine. Like we always do.”

  There was a strain in his voice. He sounded more tired than he had seemed before.

  Chewie huffed a response and raised one massive paw to Solo’s face before lying down properly for rest. Solo took another second to look at the big figure, making sure he had settled down properly. His eyes flickered to Finn.

  “You did alright kid, and thanks.”

  Finn felt tension drain from his body. The events of the day were finally catching up with him.

  “You’re welcome,” he breathed tiredly

  A silence of chirps and hums was interrupted by the loud growl of Finn’s stomach.

  Solo cocked an eyebrow.

  “You eaten?”

  Finn couldn’t muster the strength to feel embarrassed.

  “I think the last time I ate was before I walked across the desert.”

  “Huh, maybe take a transport next time.”

  Solo slapped his legs to stand up and began running his eyes across the lounge.

  “Alright then kid. They can’t have found all of the stashes Chewie and I hid around this place. I remember at least some things we smuggled were edible.”

  Solo picked up a spare span tool, which had been discarded. He started to indiscriminately tap away at panels and struts, listening to the sounds.

  “I’ll direct, you get to the grunt work.”

  Finn closed his eyes for one tempting second before throwing his legs up and forward to force himself into standing. They needed food. Sleep could be put off. He was used to that.

  *****

  The search didn’t take very long. The smuggler captain seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the freighter. Solo spent more time bemoaning the alterations which had been made in his absence than struggling to recall any of the numerous hidden compartments.

  They struck gold early on with a larger cache stuffed to the brim with strange greenish ration packs, over a hundred at least. They looked like out-of-date military rations to Finn, but Rey couldn’t stop staring at them like they were going to bite her.

  Solo had a small moment of triumph when he found a bottle of aged Corellian whiskey. Yet only a sip of the amber fluid had reminded him that he had drunk the actual whiskey over a decade ago and had refilled the bottle with cheap swill to try and scam a mark at a later date.

  They found a couple of Mon-Cal luxury spices and sauces miraculously sustained in a stasis pack suspiciously stamped with what looked like a royal seal. They gathered the haul at one of the main tables of the lounge. Soon, the table was covered in scattered ration wrappers and unstoppered bottles dressed in filigree.

  Rey and Finn had been competing to create interesting combinations of the assembled flavours while Solo derided them for having no sense of taste. Chewie propped himself up at the table with them and easily won every trial to create a tasty combination whenever he joined in. BB-8 rolled around their ankles beeping suggestions to the table, which everyone but Finn could understand.

  Fully satiated, Finn leaned back into his chair. He felt content in a way he didn’t understand. The table was messy, and his fingers were sticky in a way he couldn’t get rid of. But there was an odd feeling of safety that he couldn’t identify. Nothing he had experienced was like this. Even when he had been with Zeros and Oh-Three. Their comfort had always been a hidden secret. One that gave him strength in the constant storm. This felt like all of his problems were distant. Like they couldn't reach him even if they tried.

  He wondered if he would have felt this way with Poe if he had still been alive. Would he be joking with Rey and grinning his easy grin at BB-8?

  The melancholy didn’t hurt as much with the room full of motion and chatter.

  “We’ll stay in hyper for the next few hours just to get ourselves some distance. Then jump down at a mass point to reposition and make the next steps.”

  Chewie gave a short moan from where he was resting on the lounge.

  “No need to give me the list, Chewie. I know we need to restock and repair if we wanna keep mobile for the next week.”

  Solo pursed his lips as he considered his options. He pushed a couple of rations around his plate with his fingers, mopping up sauce.

  “Have you looked at it?”

  “Hmm?”

  Solo nodded at BB-8.

  “The map, I wanna see what I’m getting shot at for.”

  “Oh,” Finn looked towards BB-8, who tilted his head slightly in response. “I haven’t seen it. The whole thing has been a bit of a rush.”

  The three of them began to stare at the little droid. The little servos in his neck whirred lightly as he glanced between them.

  “Could you show us BB?” asked Rey gently.

  BB-8 gave a trill and rolled to the centre of the room. His main lens flared with light as he projected a bright holo into the centre of the room. Solo grabbed the at light switch by the wall to dim out the lounge.

  The holo began as red, lined with bright white borders. Fuzzes of data blur and tactile readout rapidly spooled across the space. Finn leaned forward as the holo broke into not a mere map, but a series of diagrams and files. The projection had a low opacity imperial seal cast over the collection of information. In the informational descriptor, an image of a pyramidal object with black and silver elegant corners was slowly rotating.

  “That’s… That’s an entire Imperial Data Reliquary,” gasped Finn.

  One of Finn’s first assignments, after the bone treatments had settled, had been to take part in the coercion of an imperial warlord. All the officers had been given briefs on any operational secondary targets.

  Both Rey and Solo were looking at him quizically. Finn felt his heart hammer and cold rush to his fingers.

  “Poe only managed to tell me about the map.” Finn blustered a little. ”I didn’t realise what the map was a part of.”

  BB-8 gave a small series of beeps, which Finn couldn’t understand. Whatever it was, Rey nodded and turned away. Solo held the stare at Finn for another beat. Solo tapped his fingers across his lap before turning back to the projection.

  “Importantly, the Empire was paranoid about its dirty pictures getting out. This thing is going to self-purge its data.”

  BB-8 began an excited trill before he was trampled over by Solo.

  “What the ball needs to do is direct the purge to the files you don’t care about. It's an old trick I came up with back in the rebellion.”

  Chewie moaned at him.

  “Yes, I did! Whatever. Ball show us the map, and be careful with that data.”

  BB-8 squawked impudently, but the projection obligingly flickered through a series of warping and jittering files. Finn could see schematics, journals, digsites, and a whole glut of valuable old imperial secrets. His mind started to tick with each half-grasp of a file. The red faded into the more standard blue-grey as a partially dimensionalised map crashed into the sudden stillness of the projection.

  Holo-maps were always beautiful. Abstractions of systems, nebula and stellar phenomena. This one was a work of art. Stylised dragons and deep void creatures swam in motion amongst glimmering stars that seemed to burn from inside the holo. Static crept around the edges in a way that could have only emerged from damage to the physical medium. It felt like a glimpse into a section of the galaxy that only happened to have a use as a map.

  “It’s not complete,” grumbled Solo.

  While Finn had been entranced, Solo was leaning back into his couch and picking at something in his teeth. Finn looked at him askance and then back at the map.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “The stars at the edges are markers. It's the void pattern you would see at that point looking out. That's not a coordinate that ships can use without a lot of astro-math.”

  “Wait, so it’s useless?”

  Solo looked at him.

  “People can do the math, kid. Just not us. The New Republic will have a pile of astrogators on Hosnian Prime who can sink their overeducated claws into this.”

  “Which planet is Skywalker on?” Rey asked, tone distant.

  Her dark eyes were full of the reflected stars of the holo.

  Chewie barked a few times and raised a huge arm to point at the centre left of the map. Solo gave him a side eye but said nothing.

  “Ahch-to…” murmured Rey.

  The planet was unobtrusive in the holo until it had been pointed out. Then Finn noticed how the ever-burning phoenix always drew its flame from that point. The void dragon snapping and curling held one baleful eye permanently on the little sphere. Even a curling mass storm flickered with the same lightning as the holo static of the planet.

  That was where the Butcher of Yavin was right now. On a planet that Finn could have pinched between his fingers. The lounge felt colder now. The memory of Lord Ren’s horrible presence cast a shadow over Finn’s mind.

  “Why did he leave?” questioned Rey.

  Solo froze, then slumped further into the lounge, idly picking at a loose thread. A note of something darker had entered his tone.

  “He was training a new generation of Jedi. One boy, an apprentice, couldn’t… He turned against Luke, destroyed everything. Luke said he felt guilty, said it was the will of the Force, said a lot of things. He ran away from everything, everyone.”

  “The Force?” questioned Rey.

  Solo’s age-wrinkled brow furrowed with suspicion.

  “You’re not Resistance, are you?”

  Finn’s heart dropped. Solo knew the Resistance. Knew of their zealotry. Finn needed to be careful that he didn’t attract too much attention. Perhaps it would be better not to claim to be Resistance at all.

  “Finn is with the Resistance. I’m just a scavenger,” said Rey.

  “Uh-huh, just a scavenger, and you ended up escorting the map to an ancient Jedi through coincidence?”

  Solo’s voice was full of casual doubt. Finn couldn’t figure out where the suspicion came from. This wasn’t some holo-drama. Rey looked back at Solo with narrowed eyes.

  “Yeah, I met BB-8 on the way back from a site. He followed me home.”

  The dismissal seemed to make Solo angry, a sharper edge bleeding into his tone.

  “Mmm, and who taught you to speak Shyriiwook on Jakku?”

  There was a bit of venom dripping into Solo’s words now. A hidden bitterness.

  “What’s Shyriiwook?”

  Chewie gave an insulted huff.

  “What?!” exclaimed Rey in response, leaning forward. ”You’re not speaking a different language. You just have an accent.”

  Finn reeled. Rey didn’t seem to be trying to mislead them. She looked genuinely shocked to learn that she had been fluently understanding an entirely alien language. Had Rey been implanted with a translator droid brain without her knowledge?

  “Rey,” Finn began, trying for a gentle tone in comparison to the cruelty dripping from Solo. “Wookiees can’t speak basic, their vocal chords don’t have the shape for it.”

  Solo piled on over Rey’s aborted protests.

  “You ever met anyone you couldn’t understand? Ever needed to find a translator? Or chith-spit, I’ve seen you working on the ship. You ever had any training? Or does it just make sense to you?”

  “I…”

  “That’s the Force kid. Ben was-”

  Solo caught himself. He was standing now. BB-8 had shut down the projector, and his head was swivelling. The lounge was lit by the glow cast up from the floor. It loomed across Solo’s eyes and hard-set jaw.

  “You’ve got it, and it’s got you. No more such thing as coincidence or being lucky. Droid-puppet protocols written by the galaxy itself. Constant whispers and movements from ships, objects, other people's minds.”

  The growl in Solo’s voice was hurt and bitter. It felt like he was repeating someone else’s words or phrases that had been rattling in his head for years.

  “That’s you. That’s what you’ve been dragged into. That is what you’ve dragged me back into.”

  Rey was pushed back in her seat. At some point, her quarterstaff had made its way into her hand. She held it with a white-knuckle grip. Finn could see how the words were hurting her.

  “Hey! You need to back off.” Finn was standing now, holding his hands out to try to bring some calm back in. ”I’ve felt the Force and Rey doesn’t-”

  Suddenly, the dark room was engulfed in a red glow. From one of the viewports, the usual blur of lines of stars in hyperspace had been replaced by red static. BB-8 gave a scared series of tones.

  Finn could still see the warped movement of stars blurring into lines, but now they were flecks on a crimson background. The false blue light of hyperspace had turned red.

  Solo slammed on the light switch on the way to the cockpit. Rey, still tensed like a spring, hesitated to follow him. Finn threw an agonised glance at her, loath to leave her while she was in pain. Chewie tried to pull himself up but fell back down under the numbness that would be covering half his body.

  Durasteel fell over Rey’s deep brown eyes. Her quarterstaff clattered to the ground as she sprang up to follow Solo to the cockpit. Chewie moaned and flicked his good arm in a gesture for Finn to go after them.

  In the cockpit, Solo was trawling over displays and flicking a switch to alter readouts.

  “Are we reading any damage?” said Rey as she marched in and firmly pulled herself into the co-pilot's chair.

  “Are we under attack?” called Finn.

  Solo glanced sideways at Rey. For a second, it seemed he was going to continue what he had started.

  “Its just energy radiation readouts.” He said instead. ”Anything on contaminant systems?”

  “Tiny bit of heat, flickers of foreign energy, but it's dissipating as fast as it's appearing in the mass bubble.”

  Solo gritted his jaw.

  “I don’t like it, we’re near a mass point anyway. Prep for real drop.”

  Finn could only watch as Rey and Solo worked the control board. The Falcon gave a whining crash as they bloomed into realspace. Ahead of them, a massive gas giant was stamped across the vista. A thin line of nebula painted the far distance.

  Both of the pilots had eyes dancing across the ship displays.

  “Nothing on sensors, nothing damaging shields, water systems are still reporting clean.”

  Rey was rattling off information she found. Finn was looking out the transparasteel viewport.

  “What about that?” he said, pointing.

  Burning like a wound upon reality was a streak of crimson, the same colour as the light they had seen in hyperspace. It was distant, but something about it defied spatial awareness. Finn could almost convince himself that it was a tiny blaze carved onto his very eye.

  Both Rey and Solo looked up and fell silent, looking at the little inferno.

  “What is it?” asked Rey.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not hurting the Falcon, and it looks like we didn’t suffer any damage in hyperspace either.”

  Solo was flickering his gaze between displays and the burn.

  “Still, it doesn’t fill me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. I’ve got a friend close by who we can resupply at. She also has contacts with the Resistance, so with any luck, I can palm you all off to her.”

  Finn felt the coldness grip around his heart again, but the strange light felt somehow worse. Solo gave another wary stare at the burn, as if it would bite him.

  “Either way, it gets us further away from that thing. Warm us up for the jump, careful on the upskimmers in case we need to jump back down in a hurry.”

  The Falcon turned away from the burn towards an empty void. Finn felt like he could point directly to the thing even through the durasteel hull of the freighter.

  “Jumping to hyperspace.”

  Space blurred like sheared metal. The cockpit held its breath as the red static bloomed around them again.

  “Still no damage,” cautioned Rey, half an eye on the console. “I think the rad output is decreasing.”

  Solo pursed his lips.

  “Clamp down on environmental shields where you can, just in case. It’s a couple of days with a few pivots tomorrow until we get to Maz’s.”

  He leaned back, draping himself across the chair. Finn could see the tensed tendons not quite hidden by the pose.

  “We can set up shifts to keep an eye out.” His eyes almost brushed towards Rey before lounging back to look at the ceiling. “I reckon you all could do with some shut-eye. And I refuse to miss out on my beauty sleep.”

  Finn nodded. He could feel a crash coming on. He could push through if need be, but he would never shake his head at an opportunity to sleep.

  Back in the lounge, Chewie moan-talked a question at him. Finn did his best to explain all the information they didn’t have, and the wookiee seemed to be satisfied.

  He found a spare room with a cot, which didn’t seem too dusty. He was just emerging from the shared refresher with a towel wrapped around his waist when there was a knock at the door.

  “Uhh.”

  Finn glanced down at his undersuit piled on the floor. He hadn’t managed to wash it yet.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me kid, open up.”

  Finn felt relieved it wasn’t Rey. He palmed the door release to see Solo leaning against the portal frame.

  “I’m headed down, Chewie is on shift, and yours is set for a couple of hours from now.”

  Solo blinked a little at Finn’s shirtless form, eyes flickering between scars, blaster puckers and numerous metal dermal strips. Finn realised that the drug ports on his shoulders would be visible. Surely that wasn’t too strange, right? It would make sense that lots of people would be set up for easy medical access. Perhaps not as much as a true-born, but the majority of his ports were on his back and spine. Left over from the growth tank.

  “So you’re Resistance then?”

  Finn shuffled and felt his throat dry up. He did not want to have this conversation in just a towel.

  “Yeah, that's me. Fighting the good fight against those fascist scum.”

  Solo blinked.

  “Weird, usually anyone I am unfortunate enough to run into from the Resistance can’t resist trying to pry about my private life.”

  Finn stared blankly before he put together what Solo was saying.

  “Oh! With General Organa!” said Finn, thinking far too outloud.

  Solo’s nose wrinkled, and Finn quickly went on.

  “I uh… have too much respect to impugn on the General’s private life. Not my place really. Um, and I guess that extends to you.”

  “Hmm.”

  Finn tried a smile. He felt far too aware of his body.

  “Anyway, kid. I gave the ball access to the Falcon’s data banks. There are primers for Binary and Shyriiwook on there.”

  A bubbling glow spilt forth in Finn’s chest.

  “I ah.. Wow, thank you!”

  “Don’t kid. I’m sick of you disrespecting my copilot. I earned that right, you haven’t.”

  Finn tried to muster his face to look serious, but couldn't keep the real smile off his face. Solo raised an eyebrow at him. The captain sighed and started to leave, much to Finn’s relief.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. You mentioned that Poe was the one who got you the map. Was that Poe Dameron?”

  Finn’s smile dropped easily.

  “Yeah, yeah, he was.”

  Finn hesitated. He was playing under plasma bolts. He wanted to know.

  “You knew him?”

  “Not really,” mused Solo, “I knew his parents better, Shara and… what was his father’s name again?”

  Finn’s brain stuttered like a corrupted holo.

  “I don’t know,” he faltered, looking for an answer, “Poe didn’t really talk about his parents to me.”

  “Really? They were war heroes.”

  Finn was suddenly aware that Solo had a blaster slung at his hip. How much of this interaction had been a coincidence? Did he engineer this at the refresher, just in case Finn had a holdout blaster? How long had he already been under suspicion?

  Finn kept his face still, he was aiming for pleasantly interested, but he was worried he was landing at feeling ill. Solo held his gaze for a beat longer before going on.

  “Well, maybe that boy was smarter than he looked. Rest up.”

  With that, Solo spun to head back into the belly of the freighter. Finn stuck his head out and saw the captain pause to have a word with Chewie, then move on. Chewie didn’t move, tapping away at a data pad.

  Finn pulled back behind the closed door. He could suddenly feel his heart thundering like a speeder engine. His back was slick with sweat and steam. The world tilted as Finn’s legs gave way underneath him. He was pressed against the cool of the door.

  Finn was a fool for thinking he could find a place here. He was a liar and a traitor. He needed to give up on this fantasy and start planning for a future. A future without the Resistance, without Solo and Chewie, without BB-8. Without Rey.

  At their next stop. If this Maz made deals with Solo, she would know someone who could get him out of here. He would flee to the Corporate Sector. He had heard rumours that there were respected mercenary companies on New Kamino. He could do that. Fight for money. If he needed to.

  He cleaned up and made his way back to his room. BB-8 was whirling away at a data port by the foot of his bed when he arrived. The little droid beeped happily when he came in, rolling up to his bare feet.

  “Hey BB, Solo mentioned that you got access.”

  Finn tried to recapture the happiness he had felt at the gesture. Tried to bring that smile back onto his face.

  BB-8 rolled back and projected two figures onto the floor of the little space. A man and an astromech droid. The man started giving an introduction to the course in Basic.

  Finn decided that he might as well take advantage of the lessons while he could. He was realising how many languages real people in the galaxy spoke. He settled down into the cross-legged learning position he had been drilled in.

  The primer was simple well put together. Finn rarely needed to ask BB to rewind or pause on a piece of information.

  Finn had always been good at learning and retaining information. The administrators said the neurostimulants had taken well in his grey matter. He was certainly glad that the main treatment was over by the time he was chronologically 10 years old. It felt longer than six years ago. The boosters were a regular dread in Finn’s life, but he had borne them without complaint. It was one of the things that had put him on the officer track.

  There was no way he was going to become proficient in the limited amount of time he had left on the Falcon, but at least he could memorise enough to not be an obvious outsider.

  Then he would need to find someone to take him in. When he had nothing to offer. Finn’s eyes drifted from the projection to the little droid.

  “BB-8, how fast are you purging the extra files in the Data Reliquary?”

  BB-8 gave a triptych of beeps. Regular descending tones, which could mean negative. The beeps could mean that it was linear, but also possibly that it was coming to an end. Binary was a little imprecise, and the course emphasised that getting to know the individual droid was as important as understanding convention.

  “That extra information might be useful to us. I know you can’t copy the information until we know it won’t be corrupted by transfer. Maybe you could show me the files so I can try to memorise any bits we might find useful.”

  BB-8’s head cocked to the side.

  “Y’know, like untapped supply caches or activation codes that might be buried in there.”

  The droid swivelled a grapnel to gesture at the currently paused educational holo. Finn grinned in what he hoped was a reassuring way.

  “Between lessons, give it a bit of variety.”

  BB-8 considered it for a beat before squawking happily. The projection danced to the image of the reliquary data. Projects and files rotated slowly in front of them.

  “Let's start there, some kind of mega forge. Why do they all have ‘star’ in the name?”

  Sleep would have to wait.

  Finn had to look out for himself.