13. Chapter 13

It’s not as cold in the grey hall as it is in the higher reaches of the facility and the air changes as Kylo Ren leads Rey deeper into the complex. Everything about this place feels different from both the sterile white modernity of the Knight’s accommodations  and the black stone malevolence of Snoke’s cavern. The hall grows, arches up high above her head, though Rey would swear they haven’t descended half that depth. The stones are worn smooth and the pull of the Force is strong here. She slows as the hall opens into a grand room, echoingly empty, and turns in a slow circle. “What is this place?”

Kylo lingers behind her, gauging her reactions, though she suspects he feels something of it too. “Vestibule of the Knights.”

“The Knights of Ren?”

“Our predecessors.” Kylo moves deliberately around the edge of the circular room.

“They were just called the Knights? That’s not very descriptive.” Rey positions herself in the middle of the circle and tilts her head back to stare up at the distant dome covering them. She thinks she can pick out the obscured source of illumination that casts long shadows underfoot, but she can’t be certain. “Are we really that far underground?”

“It’s built into a mountain,” he shrugs. “The Knights were the first order of their kind; they didn’t need any other distinction. The new facility was built on top of it when Lord Snoke reinstated them as the Knights of Ren.”

“Why didn’t they use the old facility?” Rey’s only half listening to the conversation, spinning slowly on the spot.  This place, it feels like power as strong as anything she’s felt on Master Luke’s island or in Snoke’s cavern. A hand on her shoulder stops the twirling and she scowls, halfheartedly, up at Kylo.

“It’s not a place to live if you’re not Force-sensitive.” There’s that damn smirk again, his amusement coloring her mood, the conflicting signals short-circuiting her brain. “Here, I’ll show you.”

She doesn’t want to leave the hall. She wants to spend eternity studying the faint carvings on the granite walls, trying to pick out details in the high ceiling, but there are three doors of polished grey stone at each cardinal point, plus the hall that had led them here, so there must be more to this place. A professional scavenger would never dream of leaving them unexplored. Kylo Ren leads her to the one on their right, surface polished to a mirror-like sheen and stops a few feet away.

He raises a black-gloved fist and she can feel the power that gathers around his hand as surely as she knows the feel of the Force when she touches it herself.  She feels the way he commands it, molds it, changes it, and then releases it at the barrier. The door shimmers when touched by that power and vanishes. “See?”

It’s utterly mystifying. Rey examines the new hole in the wall. There had been no explosion, there’s no rubble left in it’s place, but the slab of stone was gone as thoroughly as though it had never existed. “How did you do that?” She demands, prodding the doorframe, but she finds no special cracks or crevices that might indicate a hidden compartment. “Some kind of trick?”

“I’ll show you on the way out.” He brushes past her and the movement distracts Rey from her investigations and she jogs to catch up with him.

Down another short hallway paved in the same grey granite and into an even larger room at the end, this one somehow older than the outer room. Though, how would that make sense? It has to have been made about the same time, right? But the outer room, the Vestibule, Kylo Ren had called it, had felt ageless, eternal. This room, tiered with galleries and filled with shelves, cabinets, and containers, feels ancient, almost dusty. A small area in the front and center of the room is uncluttered, tables and chairs lit by warmly glowing crystal lamps. Beyond that,  just…. stuff as far as the eye can see.

For a moment she’s overwhelmed, shocked and awed, processing power working overtime to just try and observe everything all at once. Light gleams along baffling machinery, metal that looks like it’s never been within 100 clicks of a junkyard; she’s obligated to take it apart and fit it back together to see what it does. A pile of dusty looking bins in a shadowy corner; anything could be in them until she opens it up and catalogues their contents. Rey wraps her arms around herself to keep from running over and just start touching things.

The sheer potential of it all takes her breath away; she had never imagined that a place like this existed outside of old pirates’ tales. This is a scavenger’s nirvana and even if she’s not allowed to remove any of the more interesting looking things from this room, just getting to learn all the nooks and crannies, all the secret spaces and treasures of this place, would be reward enough.

Swallowing, she struggles to remind herself that it’s Kylo Ren, Galactic Evil Number Two, here with her. He can’t be doing this out of any sort of intrinsic goodness. He has an angle, there must be an ulterior motive for showing her this. “Why are you doing this?” Her voice is small in this giant space, dampened by all the shelves and books and dust and mysteries.

His eyes tell her he’s not fooled by her query; that he can see right through her walls of suspicion to the eager little girl inside, but she refuses to look away, refuses to be soothed by the gentle brush of… is that supposed to be empathy? “I like it here,” Kylo shrugs as he crosses to the closest table with books stacked high on it. “I thought you might, too.” The legs of the chair rasp on the stones as he pulls it out and settles down.  He kicks back and puts his feet up on the scarred wooden surface of the table before plopping an enormous tome in his lap.

She can feel the sincerity behind the words and that makes it worse somehow. Rey understands the Kylo Ren who rages and threatens, who wears a mask to terrify those around him, who violates her mind because it is convenient. She despises him and it’s easy , it’s right . This young man, sitting here in the worn chair, tilting on the back legs at a crazy angle, lost in thought and verging on relaxed? She has no idea who this person is; if this is even a real facet of his personality or just a mask to lull her into a false sense of comfort, even intimacy. She’s not sure which of those options would be worse and that indecision scares her half to death.

“Stop that.” The front legs of the chair thump down as he twists the top half of his body to turn and face her without having to upset his book. “Just go… do something. Whatever you want. You’re distracting.” His spine clicks as he turns back and resumes reading.

Her nails dig into her arms as Rey fights a dozen competing instincts and then gives in to the allure of exploration. “This doesn’t change anything,” she grumbles. “I still hate you.” Turning tail, she zigzags through the towering shelves until she’s thoroughly disoriented.

“Don’t get lost!” His voice drifts back over the high shelves.

Rey snorts at that. She doesn’t get lost, not while exploring decrepit old battle stations half buried in sand, not in the shifting desert dunes, and certainly not in a sealed room like this. Then she puts Kylo Ren’s entire existence from her mind because otherwise this whole moment is really just too weird , and instead focuses on the contents of the shelves she’s passing.

There are books, first and foremost. Great heavy things that should have been converted to data or holos years ago, bound with cloth or leather with titles engraved on the spines. Some of the inscriptions are in Basic but many are not, and thus are not interesting to her. She strolls past the books to the end of the shelf and pauses to study the high enclosed case at the end. This is more up her alley - twisted metal widgets and dusky cracked crystals, faded hand crafted images, ink on paper, a crude figure captured mid-swing with a sword, and underneath each a small card, dark with complicated-looking text identifying each item. She doesn’t understand the significance but clearly someone had, and had gone through great pains to ensure that the knowledge would be preserved.

Drifting onwards, Rey moves through the endless ranks of shelving units, all jammed to capacity. Nothing about them calls to her. The territory feels picked over, catalogued by the thousands who walked these aisles before her. It’s not barren in the same way that the first ten decks of the half buried Dreadnought Ravager had been on Jakku, but the feeling is similar. Nothing new to discover in these shelves, but then again, the really good stuff is always hidden, always worth the effort of acquisition.

Her thoughts drift as her feet wander aimlessly. The Force is strong here. It’s not quite the perfect point of balance she had wanted to subsume herself in in the grey stone chamber, but close. There’s so much fluctuation around this area, strong and weak or lighter and darker, without any particular rhyme or reason that she can see. Is it internally or externally caused? Does Kylo sense it the same way? Sometimes she thinks he does. There’s always that half-stutter of hesitation before entering Snoke’s cavern, and Rey knows she’s felt a variance in the vileness there. She recoils from thinking further about that specific area; that misery doesn’t belong in a place like this. And perhaps buried under all of that is the reason why she can’t feel beyond the limits of the current system through the Force to Master Luke. It’s an unsettling new limitation to her abilities. She doesn’t care for it one bit.

A few more aimless turns and she’s at the edge of the room, her gaze landing upon another high shelf that extends high against the rough stone wall and, above it, the railing separating the upper floor from empty space. Her fingers drift over the wall as she stares up at the elegant iron curls high above her, searching for handholds and feeling out the sturdiness before she’s fully able to articulate the thought, the need , to climb. The cobbles lend themselves to her use, rough and uneven, mortar holding strong as she hops up, her soft boots finding purchase in the cracks of the stone and begins her ascent. It’s a meditative process, and it strips reality to the bare bones of stone, flesh, and gravity as she hauls herself upward. The struggle feels good, her muscles remembering their use after too much idleness, the sudden smoothing of the stones a challenge to be overcome. With a quick switch of her feet, she hooks two fingers into a crack in the stone and twists, straining for a distant protrusion integral to her climb.

“What are you doing?”

“What you told me to.” She doesn’t need their connection to interpret the tone of exasperation coming from Ren. It takes a little bit of contortion to turn and face him without risking any slippage, but Rey manages and finds his poleaxed expression a suitable reward for her efforts.

The legs of his chair bang down again and Kylo Ren puts his book down with a sigh as he stands to face her from the center of the room. “I told you to do no such thing.”  His eyebrows knit together as he watches her balance precariously on an almost invisible jut of stone. “Get down from there.”

“Whatever I wanted, you said.” As much fun as it is to look down on him from this angle, her senses itch to get moving again, so Rey reorients herself to the wall and goes on, snickering quietly to the stone as he protests her interpretation of that statement.

“If you fall on your head I’m not carrying you back,”  he manages after a moment.

“If I fall on my head there won’t be anything to carry back,” Rey retorts and then feels just the tiniest flicker of guilt. This high up, falling is a real possibility and though the general rule of climbing is don’t think about the fall, it’s an awareness that never really goes away. But he’s quiet after that and she appreciates it for the final stretch.  She’s feeling the fatigue of her efforts by the time she draws abreast with the metal railing and her palms sweat, just a little, as the iron bites into her flesh and she wriggles over it. It feels good to lie on the smooth wood floor and stare up at the ceiling; lets her heart calm and she smiles, just a little.

It’s not freedom. It’s nothing of the kind.  But it is an escape of some sort, albeit a fleeting one. For all his protesting, she’s fairly certain Kylo Ren could come up here if he wanted to. The thought propels her to feet and she paces the short length of hall, poking her head through the doors she finds at regular intervals along the wall.

Books in one. Data banks in another. Piles of old dusty crates that completely fail to capture her attention in a third. Peripherally, she’s aware of Kylo pacing the floor below her, keeping more or less in line with her progress. “What are you doing?” He asks ominously as she disappears and reappears for the fourth time in yet another fruitless exploration.

“I’m not going to give you a different answer just because you asked twice.” She tosses the retort over the balcony, letting him do with that what he will, and heads to the next door. This one sticks a little, until she puts her weight behind it and drags it open before popping into the dark interior.

“Rey!” The growled exclamation sounds like it’s coming from very far away as she wades through the tangled sea of scrap metal, any art or order long since lost to rummaging hands. Assuming there was any to begin with.

“Shush! There’s something here,” she calls over her shoulder as she forges on, brushing off the pokes and scrapes, easing herself around a particularly high pile of detritus. It calls to her, in the shadowed half-light from the distant door. Funny how the room hadn’t looked half this size from back there. The feeling is palpable, she can taste it on her tongue, sharp and metallic, an overwhelming need to be discovered. The long whispering halls of Maz Kanata’s castle come to mind, something too long forgotten demanding to be used. Sharp bits of metal prick her shins as she kneels on the shifting pile, rolls up the sleeves of the too long tunic and begins to dig.

It’s as careful an extraction as she’s ever done and Rey thinks that she’d trade several full portions for her toolkit, or at least for her goggles with their little lantern, to help with this. It’s worth it in the end. There are no visions this time, no whispers, but her skin hums when she brushes the thing calling her for the first time. It sings up her arm in welcome, a recognition that she doesn't understand but feels so happy and warm that Rey can’t help but respond in kind. Whatever this thing is, it is unquestionably hers.

Digging her fingers around the edges, she pulls until it comes free all at once. Rey topples backward on the heap, sharp bits jabbing into her back as she studies the glossy metal bar snug in her hand. It’s too dark to make out the raised patterns on the surface, so she stands, her balance precarious on the shifting heap, and shuffles back into the light in the main room.

The box isn’t quite metal and isn’t quite glass. It’s dinged, dented, and scratched; there’s some weird oxide crusted to most of the surface. Absolutely everything about it makes her want to take it to a scouring station and give it a good hard scrub.

It’s a wrench to let the device go, but she can’t climb down with it in her hand so Rey strips off the tunic and cocoons the little enigma in the cloth, cinching the long sleeves around her waist and checking the sling before sticking her head over the railing to where Kylo Ren sits in rigid meditating. “I found it; coming down now.”

“Don’t fall.” Some of the tension diffuses from her awareness of his mental state, but then she has no attention to waste on him and his useless advice.  

“I’m not going to.” Easing back over the balcony to the wall is a tricky bit of business - her fingers are slippery, dozens of small nicks pebbling with blood that force her to use utmost caution. She doesn’t fall. She’s never fallen before, and it would be an awful habit to start now, especially in front of her audience.  His attention is distracting. He’s staring and it makes her exposed back itch. “Stop looking at me like that,” Rey grumbles, pausing her descent to scrub her hands dry on her trousers before stretching for the next ledge, testing her grip and letting the momentum of the swing carry her to the next toe hold.

“Like what?”

He’s being intentionally obtuse and she doesn’t have the capacity to enlighten him. “You know what I mean.” The climb gets easier when she reaches the rough cobbles again, they are practically a ladder after traversing the solid stone. Rey skims down the last fifteen feet, jumping back to the floor and turning to face him as she unknots the shirt-turned-sling and shakes the artifact free.

Kylo Ren draws closer, the appearance of the block stealing his attention from her bare skin. It takes him an instant to fixate on the device. “Let me see that.”

Rey keeps her fingers tight around the item, offering it up for inspection as she pulls the shirt back over her head and tries not to protest as he plucks it from her grip and holds it up to the light, turning it between his hands. “What is it?”

“A puzzle box of some kind?” He doesn’t sound certain. “You’d need to solve it to see what’s inside.” He tosses it back to Rey.

She catches it out of the air, testing the mucked up grooves with her fingers. “Could you cut it open?” It seems a shame, but if the box is just a container…

“Not without destroying whatever’s inside,” Kylo Ren seems sure of this and she’s content to take his word as fact. Things never work out that easily, anyway. He returns to the table with his book and she follows, mulling over the device in her hands.