Chapter 1

She rattled the restraints violently. The secruity droids turned their heads to inspect her, but returned to their forward facing postures when they observed she was still firmly locked in place. The imposing, humanoid droids held long staffs with pulsating electrical energy on both ends. They took little notice of her except when she attempted to break free.

Rey found herself once again strapped to a grungy metal slab. Luke had warned her that the First Order was suspicious of the trail of chaos she had left behind when he sent her offworld for these training missions. She had thought she was taking every precaution, but somehow someone had followed and ambushed her inside her ship. Where she was now, she had no idea; only that the assassin droids had First Order insignia painted on them.

She heard the thudding of heavy boots before the doors ever slid open. She hadn't felt his presence the entire time. Luke had said some force users were so powerful that they could cloak themselves from others. He suspected that was how Emperor Palpatine decieved the Jedi in the days before the Empire. Now, though, she felt him wash over her in a sea of tormented rage. He filled her senses with a sickness that felt like disgust mingled with a tiny bit of sympathy.

Kylo Ren, as the monster liked to call himself, strode through the doors triumphant in his conquest. The mask he wore was meant to be intimidating. To strike fear and take away his humanity. But she had seen the face behind it. He was a monster, yes, but she called him that because of the atrocities he had committed. If his face was the only part of him she had ever known, then she would have thought of him as a fierce but brooding stranger. It might have been a face preteen Rey dreamed of in her hovel back on Jakku.

"You can struggle all you like," he announced. "But you won't break free. And your mind tricks won't work on droids either. I underestimated you once before, but I won't make the same mistake twice."

"I expect you'll make a different mistake," Rey spat at his feet. The assassin droids' heads tilted toward the floor, deciding if her saliva might be a threat. It was only for a second, before they turned their gaze straight ahead again.

"Take care of how you speak to a Knight of Ren, Jedi. You are a Jedi now, aren't you? You're wearing those robes." He looked at her, in the tan and brown robes that weren't drastically different from her attire she had worn in the desert. "Supreme Leader Snoke wants you alive, you should know, but I can make you suffer a thousand different ways without killing you." The hooded figure put a hand to his face. "You're thinking about my face. You can't remember every detail, but you're trying to piece together the memories from our last meeting. I should never have shown you that face. It belongs to a dead man. This mask is Kylo Ren's face. My face."

He was inside her head again. She needed to shut him out. She had reluctantly told the story to Luke when she recounted the events leading up to their meeting. Violation had been the strongest word she could muster. She did not want him seeing her innermost thoughts. Feeling her emotions as she experienced them. Luke had told her that his master, Obiwan Kenobi, had been strong in the ways of mind tricks and sensing through the force. Luke told her to embrace the talent she had, but it felt so wrong. She could not do that to another person as he was Kylo Ren was doing it to her now.

Rey pushed back.

Kylo Ren pushed harder.

And harder.

Not hard enough.

He couldn't hold on. He had been trained, but he lacked focus. He was like a child yelling, "Mine, mine, mine," as he stumbled into her head. He had no restraint. Just blind, jealous emotion. Suddenly, against her better judgement, she envied those emotions. She could feel how free they made him. All of her restraint made her feel tied down. Grounded, yes, but trapped. Whereas he knew how to fly. He could soar, untethered and unchained, like she had been all her life. To survive the harsh scavenger life, she needed to be vigilant and cunning. Reckless selfishness was something she could not afford. However, when she had given into those emotions and refused to sell BB-8 for a fortune's worth of rations, it had been the best choice of her life.

No, she was weakening. She had gotten into his head for an instant, but he threatened to pull her in with her. That would have been no better than him being in her head. Certainly worse. The Jedi-in-training regained her composure and at last separated their tangled minds. The black figure fell to his knees with labored breaths. She could not see his skin, but he must have been perspiring as she was. The Force flowed through all living things and a Jedi could tap into it, sometimes to extend their own life. A Jedi might also kill himself if he could not handle the power.

Kylo Ren pushed himself to his feet. He studied her for a moment, his chest still rising and falling unsteadily. She didn't see the blow coming, but all at once she couldn't breathe. It was as if he had punched her in the stomach. Rey couldn't bend over in the restraints. She just lay there, tears welling up in her eyes. How could she protect herself from him when he could use the force to hit her without warning? The last time she had been so helpless she was just an abandoned little girl. She had promised herself that she would never be on the other end of a bully's wrath, as she had been growing up on Jakku.

Rey heard the doors slide open and closed again. The crying didn't last very long. Without Kylo Ren in the room, she did not feel as vulnerable. Something in his presence weakened her when she knew she needed to be stronger than normal. It was only her and the pair of assassin droids at that point.

It was acceptable to be weak. It was acceptable to stumble and fall. "When I learned that Darth Vader was my father," Rey recalled Luke's words. "I almost gave up on everything. My whole galaxy had been turned upside down. If my friends hadn't needed my help I might have disappeared then, just as I did when I lost Ben. I don't think I was ever serious about turning to the dark side, but I did imagine doing it just to be with my father," he confessed to her by the cookfire. "Rey, it is okay to feel as though you have fallen at times, but you must overcome it in the end and stand stronger than ever."

The droids stood like statues. As long as Rey did not move, they would not. The best way to beat them would be to take them unaware. Rey closed her eyes. Moving objects with the Force was not yet something she had mastered. Releasing the restraints through all the intricate mechanical devices that kept them in place would be nearly impossible.

She felt for the restraints anyway. It did no good. Maybe a fully fledged Jedi could feel objects with the Force as if touching them with bare fingertips, but she could not. At best, it was like being blind with hands that were asleep while trying to type on a keyboard two sizes too small.

The frustration was building in her. She could not use the force to manually open the restraints on her wrists and ankles, nor could she access the control panel just to the left of her guards. Rey slammed her palms against the metal slab beneath her. There was a whirring of gears as mechanical heads with gray faces and red eyes inspected the prisoner. They still held onto the electrically charged staffs.

The answer had been staring her in the face the whole time. The prisoner furrowed her brow in concentration. Sweat dripped into her eyes, but she needed to endure the stinging if everything were to go just right. She felt out for the droid. There.

All at once, the droid lurched forward, pulled by an invisible hand on the metal rod in its hands. The droid's iron grip held tightly, but Rey did not need the weapon out of its grasp. She swung the lit end of the staff at the control panel at the wall and a surge of sparks gushed from the box. A loud click followed and the restraints opened up on their hinges.

The second droid moved forward as its partner struggled to free its weapon from the wall. With split second timing, Rey dodged the stabbing motion of the droids staff as she rolled from the table. She hit the floor face first and felt herself lose lungs full of air for a second time that day. There was no time to think about pain or weariness, though. Rey moved to her feet just in time for the droid's next attack. This time, she ducked beneath the arc of its swing and placed herself against its chest, with her own against the metal rod. She took hold of it and pushed away from the droid until it let go of the weapon and stumbled backward.

For months, she had honed her skill with a lightsaber, but a staff, that was like an extension of her own body. On Jakku, metal rods weren't hard to come by while scavenging. They could be weapons, or walking sticks, or levers to push aside heavy debris. A decade of practice made her much deadlier with this sort of weapon than she expected she would ever be with a lightsaber.

Metal against metal clanked behind her. It was the footsteps of the other droid. It had wrenched its weapon free from the control panel and was moving toward her. She turned just in time to see it swinging the blue, sparking end of of its staff. Gracefully, she stepped aside and lunged with the end of her own staff at the droid's abdomen. The thing convulsed momentarily and fell toe the floor.

Her other opponent came at her full force, hands groping for her throat. Rey beat at him. One. Two. Three swings. Every one made contact, driving the mechanical man backward until finally she threw her shoulders into a powerful swing at the thing's head. The blow left the bucket of a head hanging be a wire as its red glowing eyes faded.

Rey bent over, holding her knees. She needed to catch her breath, but there was no telling if or when her captor would return. He might already know she had freed herself.

The doors slid open, but luckily there were no more guards. If Kylo Ren had truly learned from his past mistakes, he would have posted more guards. Rey looked at the passageway. It was small, cluttered with pipes and vents. The lighting was dim at best. This was no Star Destroyer. It must have been no bigger than the Falcon. Perhaps, she could defeat Kylo Ren and take control of the ship before it reached its destination.

She did not have her lightsaber, she considered. And a fight between the two of them could easily result in important life support systems for the ship being damaged. All she needed was a stray lightsaber slash at her creating a leak in the ventilation system, in hyperspace, no less! But if she couldn't pilot the ship, what were her other options?

Rey looked overhead and found what looked like the hyperdrive conduit line and began following it. It lead to a rusty rectangle jutting out of the ceiling. Carefully, she removed the cover and found an array of blinking lights in red and greens and blues. It wasn't any model Rey had encountered during scavenging or on the Falcon, but she could figure it out given a minute or two.

"YOU!" She turned to see the black clad, would-be Vader down the passageway. Steam from pipes lining the walls partially hid his form. It made him appear to glide as he marched forward.

There would be no minute or two. Time and planning were not luxuries she had. Instinct and luck would be her allies from that point. The blinking green button was next to the reactor indicator, just like on Lambda-class T-4a shuttles. If the Force truly was with her, then maybe her next action would get her closer to freedom. She threw her hand at the green button with absolute commitment.

Nothing happened. Kylo Ren was feet from her. Rey positioned herself for the oncoming brawl. But before either of them could move to attack the floor moved beneath them. Rey found herself falling forward, her feet lifting from the deck as the incline became steeper. Kylo Ren's arms shot out to his sides and waved comically as he attempted to stay balanced, but he was falling backward as she fell forward toward him.

Then, they were falling. The passageway was vertical and the two fell downward. The bodies fell at the same rate, meaning Rey could never reach Kylo Ren, not unless some other force acted on her. Of course, another force could. He reached upward with a gloved hand and she felt the Force pulling her closer to him. She didn't have time to fight it. He had his arms around her, a hand holding the back of her head as it lay against his chest.

The deck of the ship moved again. This time, it corrected itself. The bitter enemies hit the metal grating of the ship's floor hard before rolling several feet. Rey felt the impact, but she was mostly unharmed, save a few scratches. Kylo Ren's helmet had large gashes of silver from the tumble against the floor. Rey pushed herself up from Kylo Ren who lay on his back. The index finger from the hand that had cradled her head bent backward. He gasped as he tried to prop himself up.

"Are you okay?" He asked. Red lights flashed and a purple R4 unit beeped at them as it tried to get around Kylo Ren who was by then sitting up. There was no time for Rey to consider responding or for the little R4 unit to get to whatever needed repairs. The ship once again began swaying. There were loud bangs and flashes of light and what sounded like an explosion, then everything went black.

The next time Rey opened her eyes, she was blanketed in white powder. And she was cold. Unbelievably cold. Just ahead of her, the smuldering wreckage of the black transport ship lay with a tower of smoke rising from it. Cut and bruised, Rey limped toward it. Yes, Kylo Ren may have survived the crash. Yes, he could take her easily in her injured state. But as she looked around, all she saw was white plains, full of snow and cold. If she were going to survive and get help, she needed supplies from the ship. At the very least she needed warmer clothing to put over her tan Jedi robes.

Rey found a monstrous hole in the side of the vessel and kept her head low, beneath smoke and other unknown fumes as she searched desperately for any sort of supplies. Left, right, another left. She must remember which way she came or she might die in there if she didn't find her way back out. Then, without truly knowing where she was headed, she found the cockpit. Inside, near tattered droid pilots, strapped to the wall, was an emergency pack. The bundle was nearly as tall as she was, but that could only mean there would be lots of supplies within.

Retracing her path, Rey was nearly out of the wreckage, when she came across him. He was dragging himself across the metal grating with his left hand and his right arm was motionless at his side. He had discarded his helmet at some point as he tried to make his escape. All she could see was his mussy, jet black hair, but that was enough. Without wanting to, she felt a great deal of sympathy for him. He had killed Han Solo and who knew how many others; she should have let him die there. She couldn't do it. Luke might have told her that compassion for an enemy symbolized strength and the light side. Rey knew that it was weakness. She knew it would be better to leave him to die. Better for her and better for the galaxy. But she could not bring herself to do it.

It took her another trip to retrieve the emergency kit after she had pulled Kylo Ren to safety. He didn't speak as she took his and her lightsabers from his hip. He only looked at her with those sad brown eyes. It unsettled her to have him watch her put the stakes in the ground for the tent. Nor did she like the way his eyes followed her as she pulled of the wet, bloody Jedi robes to huddle under the blanket.

She wasn't worried about him for the time being. She could sense the weakness in his body. He needed her to keep him alive. He wouldn't hurt her for now. But how long until she needed to worry? She had two lightsabers, but she couldn't stay awake to guard him day and night.

Rey fidgeted with the portable navigator. It was searching for their current location in the galaxy. As soon as she knew what system they were on, she could decide her next move. Luke had been teacher her about several systems and if she were lucky he would have taught her something useful about whatever chunk of ice she had crashed into. A beep from the handheld device told her it had determined their location.

The planet's name was Hoth.