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FN-2187 wakes up: suffocating, shivering wet, inside a tube. He is no longer floating. The water rushes out beneath his feet. A gas hisses in above his head.
The voice, the constant voice, lances through his fragile ears from the speakers above his head. “Your first mission,” it says—female, filtered, commanding, the voice of Phasma, the voice that raised him, “is to escape your holding pod and come to me. Fail at your peril.”
FN-2187 pulls off the mask holding long tubes down his nose and throat, gagging them out as he crouches. He sucks in air like he’d been dying, glad he isn’t the man held suspended and twitching by his mask in the adjacent tube. FN-2187 observes the grating letting out the water at his calves, the gas pooling above him, the clear walls of the tube, the bright room outside it full of hulking and spidery machinery, the tubes around him where some crouch and others hang and others beat at the walls ineffectually. FN-2187 was grown and groomed for this. He will live.
He watches someone stand and then crouch, observes no immediate lesions, burns, or abrasions, sucks in a lungful of air and stands holding his breath. Eyes closed, he examines the ceiling of his tube with his hands. He stands on toes to reach, but there it is: a grate, a joint, a valve. He twists it; the gas hisses to a stop. He feels around, but there is no escape from above. The grate then. The tube has no hinges or joints to unlatch. He drops to a crouch, breathes again, feels along the grate. Balances his slippery feet on the walls of the tube, pulls the grate from the floor, follows the water. FN-2187 is out.
He follows the water. It’s a sewer of some kind, though he knows he has never seen a sewer and that this is his first day in the world. All his knowledge, all his muscle, all his shape, is from the voice, from the lessons it imparted into his mind. He has trained in mental simulations, his body shocked and worked mechanically until it is muscular, solid, reliable. FN-2187 is a soldier bred and grown, modified genetically to be faster, stronger, loyal unto death. Phasma tells him he is one of her best, can be the best if he succeeds in his missions outside the tube.
This is his first mission outside. He will not fail her.
He follows the water. He finds the door back into the compound. Follows the feeling of Phasma in his mind into the labyrinth. Battles the monsters he’d fought only in mental simulations, tears through them with energy beams he calls up from his hands. Improvises an energy barrier construct that doesn’t destroy, but is solid, allows him to climb the walls and see all of the maze. He walks above the other monsters, naked and wet with feet are smooth, un-calloused, and yet are strong.
He finds Phasma. She is tall, silvered in armor, caped in red, blocking a door, data pad in one hand. She is strong. A worthy teacher, a worthy leader.
FN-2187 kneels.
“Phasma,” he says. He hides surprise that his voice sounds more like it does in his head, is not mechanical like it sounds in simulations, in his mask.
“You have done well,” she tells him, “first to arrive, as expected.” FN-2187 feels a flush of pride, but doesn’t move. He has done well. Part of him, even now, is learning: he understands now that their masks change their voices. He wonders what his comrades from the tube sims (those who lived) sound like without masks. He would like to hear their voices, he thinks, even as he knows from his training that this should not be so. “Welcome to the First Order,” Phasma tells him, and types in the code to the door behind her with gloved fingers.
The door opens.
FN-2187 walks into his new life, a soldier for order, peace, and unity in a world too long divided, a Republic sullied by impurity. The First Order will make the world great again, as it was in days of old.
FN-2187 will help make it so.
*
Team: codenames Slip, Storm, Pilot; unit Trooper.
Team Leader: Slip
Mission Commander: Phasma
Mission: Rescue, snatch and grab
Target: Andrew Leis, only child of Senator Leis. Age: 12. Sex: male. Photo attached.
Location: Sector 12, northbound highway, 5pm. Traffic jam ensured.
Difficulty: Low
Threats: bodyguards (1, armed), driver (potentially armed)
Commander’s notes: Knight unit keeping Force Rangers occupied in sector 2; there will be no Force interference.
Additional note: FN-2187, this is your first mission in the field. Do not be distracted. Do not disappoint the Order.
*
“There’s a woman in the car,” FN-2187, codename Storm, informs his team when he’s removed the roof of the vehicle. Codename Slip shoots the bodyguard and driver and drops into the vehicle from the transport plane.
FN-2187 sees the child and the woman through the rear window. She is holding the child, and the child is crying and clinging to her. They have the same brown wavy hair, the same eyes, the same skin. FN-2187 thinks this woman is his mother.
“She’s not supposed to be here,” FN-2187 says. “Commander, have mission parameters changed? Are we rescuing them both?”
“Negative,” Phasma says over the comms in his helmet, white like the purity of their cause.
Slip wrenches the boy from the woman who seems like his family, closer to him than FN-2187 is even to Slip and his tubemates. Like if she loses this child she will have no cause to fight for.
Slip grasps the child roughly by his middle and grabs the cord, begins ascending back into the transport ship. FN-2187 starts pushing the roof down to block the woman from scrabbling onto the roof of the car. Around them there is screaming, faces pressed to windows, people exiting their vehicles and weaving through the cars clogging the highway as they flee. FN-2187 doesn’t understand why they run. He feels disgust that they would leave this boy to his kidnappers, pride in the First Order for being the only group in the Republic willing to do what’s right.
But the woman is screaming that he is a monster, and somehow, FN-2187 begins to doubt.
No. She is angry because they must leave her behind. That must be the reason.
FN-2187 ascends when Slip is safely aboard with the target. The boy looks disheveled and tearstained and weak. FN-2187 reaches out to him. “It’s okay now, you’re safe,” he says as the bay doors close behind him.
“Let me go! I’ll kill you!” the boy screams, jerking away from FN-2187’s white-gloved hand so hard his face mashes into the metal wall behind the seat he’s strapped into. His thrashing is cutting him where Slip’s garrote wires bind his wrists, arms, and legs. “You won’t get away with this,” he snarls. “The Force Rangers will take you down! They’ll rescue me and you’ll be sorry! You’ll all be sorry!”
“Shut up or I’ll shut you up,” says Slip from his seat beside the pilot.
FN-2187 startles, straps himself in near the boy. “Slip, he’s just scared, it’s not his fault,” he says. “When you’ve been brainwashed by the Republic, being rescued probably feels like being kidnapped.”
“Are you insane?” the kid screams at FN-2187. “I’m not brainwashed, you’re kidnapping me! If you were a good person you wouldn’t be stealing kids from their moms!” His face crumples and he lets out a sob. “If you hurt my mom—”
FN-2187 turns off the sound in his helmet. He can’t listen to this. He can’t hear himself think, and he needs to.
The people ran from his team. They all looked so scared. The woman in the car looked so scared and so angry when Slip took the child. The child is scared of him, angry at them for this rescue, determined to see his rescuers as the bad guys when the opposite is true. FN-2187 wants to question, but his place is not to question—not the mission, not the team, not Slip’s treatment of this scared and innocent, probably brainwashed, child.
The explosion snaps FN-2187 out of his thoughts. He turns his comms back on. Slip finishes confirming the lurch in FN-2187’s stomach: they’ve been shot down.
“We’re gonna crash,” the pilot says, opening the bay doors.
“‘Chute up and move out,” Slip says, “We reconvene at the safehouse in sector 7. I’ll take the target.”
“I’ll get him,” FN-2187 says, not trusting Slip to properly care for the the angry child. Not trusting Slip with the child at all, if he’s honest, but there is no time for honesty strapping on his parachute, gagging the child, and strapping him to FN-2187’s front. He jumps out of the plane.
He sees the Black Force Ranger jet as he leaps, squeezes the boy’s hand to comfort him as the child shrieks through the gag and the smell of urine hurtles up to FN-2187’s nose. FN2187 releases the chute and steers them away from the Force Ranger craft and down onto the rooftops of the mismatched buildings, seeking one long enough to land on, hands sure as he guides them to safety.
The whole time, the Black Force Ranger fighter hovers, watching.
It doesn’t shoot them down.
FN-2187 doesn’t understand. Why doesn’t it shoot?
*
FN-2187 makes it to the safehouse first. It’s a basement room accessible by a surprisingly clean dark alley that smells of its dumpster from the restaurant above them, and of the urine FN-2187 hears accumulates in such places through the Republic’s negligence of its citizens.
FN-2187 wonders how he arrived first when he had to sneak there, still dressed in his pristine white uniform—now with scuffed legs from the landing—under a stolen duster, and holding the child who fought in his arms every step until he finally cried himself into fitful sleep. Yet here FN-2187 is, first. Voice recognition allows him access. Inside, he un-gags the child and sets him on a cot, covers him with a blanket because it’s chilly down here and FN-2187 cares, he’s not a monster, not like she said. He prepares food for himself and the boy, with enough for the pilot and codename Slip when they arrive. It shouldn’t take them long.
Someone knocks on the door.
FN-2187 opens it with annoyance—if Slip would take off his helmet for voice recognition like a sensible person it would work just fine—but it’s not Slip, it’s a stranger, and he is…handsome. That is what handsome looks like.
FN-2187 is unprepared for the way his body reacts to this observation, to this civilian with an apologetic smile, a beaten leather jacket, and a bulky-looking black watch on his wrist. FN-2187 takes in the brown eyes, dark brown curls, square jaw and apologetic smile; the tan skin, the easy grace with which he carries himself; his strong and calloused hands gripping the doorframe; and FN-2187 feels a clench in his gut that he doesn’t understand personally, but knows intellectually: this is attraction. He wants this man.
His breath hitches and his mind goes blank. He stares and he blinks.
The handsome civilian talks first. “Hey, buddy, sorry to interrupt your dinner—which smells great, by the way, really sorry about that—but some guy’s been following me since 3rd Street and you’re the only one who’s answered the door—can you hide me? Just for a minute. Just until he’s gone. Please.”
The man appears nervous, eyes darting up and down the alley like he’s afraid of what’s coming.
FN-2187 looks back at the boy, un-gagged but asleep, notes the blanket covers his bindings, and finally nods. “You can stay for a little while,” he says. “But you need to go before my friends get here.”
Because FN-2187 was groomed to make the world great again, do for its citizens what the Republic fails to do. He will protect these people—that is his job. But FN-2187 is also starting to wonder if codename Slip can be trusted with these people the First Order protects. He is afraid for this stranger should Slip and the pilot prove less trustworthy than he wants them to be.
The stranger ducks inside and FN-2187 closes the door. The stranger looks around curiously, eyes the sleeping child on the cot. FN-2187 pulls a rolling screen between the stranger’s eyes and the sleeping boy, turns around to the scrape of a chair: the stranger’s pulled out one of the fold-out chairs at the collapsable square table near the open kitchenette. The safehouse is one large room, a basement turned into a dingy one-room apartment, its only closing door to the bathroom tucked in the back.
“I’m Poe,” the stranger says, holding out a hand.
FN-2187 shakes it. It is warm, and sends tingles up FN-2187’s wrists, makes him feel brave and foolish and like not letting go. “FN-2187,” he says, and makes himself let go. Only then does he realize his name might sound strange to a civilian, and perhaps he should have lied anyway, not given his real name to this man.
Poe’s friendly smile curls into a frown when he drops his hand to his hip, head cocked, his dark eyes shrewd. “That’s not a name, that’s a number,” he says. “You’re a person. I’m not calling you that.”
FN-2187 frowns back. “That’s the name I was given,” he says. He wonders if all Republic citizens are so tactless, but also wonders why his chest warms at Poe’s insistence: FN-2187 is not merely a number—no, he’s a person.
“F-N. Can I call you Finn?” Poe asks.
The coaxing look in his eyes, in his tentative smile—they do things to FN-2187’s body that feel like lightning, like heat coiling through him, and he suddenly doesn’t want to disappoint, even if Poe must leave soon, never to return. He misses Poe’s touch on his hand. “Finn,” he says, testing the name on his lips. Poe’s answering smile sends more heat through FN-2187’s body. “I like it,” he says then, to see Poe smile. FN-2187, codename Storm, civilian name Finn, is happy when it does.
“It’s good to meet you, Finn,” Poe says. If there’s a note of bafflement that flits across his face, FN—Finn, civilian name Finn, person name Finn—is prepared to ignore it. Republic citizens probably weren’t used to the kindness of strangers. The First Order will change that, Finn is sure.
Finn gives the stranger the food he’d prepared for the exhausted boy. He thinks it would be unkind to wake him, unkind to them both—the boy for his fearful rage and Finn for the extra effort needed to transport him to the safety of the First Order base, to the tubes where Phasma can recondition him, free him from the Republic’s thorough brainwashing.
Poe seems hesitant to eat, waits until Finn eats to do so himself. He doesn’t eat much. He’s worried again. Finn can see the agitation, the way his shoulders have tensed, the way his leg’s begun to jiggle, the restlessness of his hands, the tightness of his eyes.
“That guy can’t get in here,” Finn assures Poe.
Poe looks surprised. “You sure about that, buddy?” he says after a moment, like he’d forgotten for a moment why he’d come.
“Positive,” Finn tells him, proud that the Order can protect him in this, at least. Finn can’t accompany the man to his destination—home? it’s late—but can protect him in this small way. Unless the man he fears is from the First Order—which is ridiculous—the voice activation locks will keep Poe safe.
And Finn will keep Poe safe, if it comes to that. It’s what good people do, and Finn is a good person.
Finn hears Slip’s laughter outside and snaps to his feet, chair skidding out behind him. “You have to hide. Now.” He grabs Poe’s hand and pulls him behind the screen. Fear coiling in his gut blocks out any effect touching Poe, manhandling him into a corner behind the line of folding chairs where his boots will be hidden from view, might have had. Finn wonders: did the woman in the car feel this fear? “Stay quiet. Don’t move.”
Poe nods. He doesn’t look afraid, but seems to understand Finn is, for him.
Finn rolls the screen to cover Poe where he crouches behind the chairs, then steps back. Observe, assess. Poe is completely hidden. Good. The boy on the cot is plainly visible now, but he’s sleeping. No harm will come to him. Mission objective still reachable.
What’s still out of place? Poe’s dishes.
The door opens as Finn grabs Poe’s dishes and straightens to take them to the sink.
Slip strolls in, still in uniform. His helmet is settling back into place. The pilot strolls in behind Slip, sees the plate in Finn’s hands—in FN-2187’s hands, codename Storm’s hands—and says, “Oh, thank Ren! Tell me you saved some for me?” He holsters his blaster, pulls out a chair at the table, then sees the bathroom and goes there instead.
“Storm, you idiot,” snaps Slip, “where the hell is your helmet? I’ve been trying to reach you the past thirty minutes. You got the target?” He ignores the food and pulls out his blaster.
“Kid’s sleeping,” FN-2187, codename Storm, tells codename Slip, motioning to the bed with his chin before putting Poe’s plate in the sink. “Let him sleep. Is Ph—the commander sending a transport for us?” No names; a civilian can hear them.
Slip shakes his head and stares down at the kid. “We’re hoofing it back,” he says. “Phasma’s scrapping the mission. Force Rangers are looking for him. It’ll be too hard to get him back to base at this point.”
“Slip.” FN-2187 pulls him away from the boy, away from Poe’s hiding place. “We can’t abandon him. We rescued him. It’s our duty to take care of him now.”
“And we will. Phasma’s orders,” Slip says.
FN-2187 hears the bathroom door open, looks away briefly to the pilot, who seems intent on the food on the stove.
When FN-2187 looks back it’s to Slip aiming his blaster at the sleeping boy, the civilian, the child they rescued.
FN-2187 knocks Slip’s arm up and away. The blaster shot explodes through the room, chars the unfinished wall, leaves a black smoking burn by the window.
“What the hell are you doing?” FN-2187 shoves Slip away from their target, stands between them, ready to drop his energy shield construct, do his duty, protect—even from Slip, his team leader. “We rescued him, what the hell are you thinking?” he shouts.
The pilot looks up from spooning food onto a plate. “Mission parameters changed,” he says with a shrug.
“New mission parameters: terminate the target. A Force Ranger saw us go down. They will find us and kill us if they catch us with that boy.”
“So we’re supposed to give him back to the people who brainwashed him?” FN-2187 sputters. “That’s not right, Slip, that’s not what we do.”
“We do what Phasma says we do. She says the Order got what they wanted already. Mission successful. That boy is a liability now. Either we kill him or he gets us killed.”
“I’m not killing a kid,” FN-2187 snarls, “None of us are. We untie him and we leave him somewhere, we call it in to the police, and we go. Nobody has to die, Slip.” FN-2187 wills his comrade, his brother in arms, the man who vouched for him to Phasma, said FN-2187 was ready to go into the field, wills the face he can’t see behind Slip’s helmet to understand the truth of his words. “He’s a person, not just a target.” That alone should be enough to change Slip’s mind.
But it isn’t enough, and Slip remains unmoved.
“Stand down, Storm.” Slip raises his blaster at FN-2187. “That kid’s not worth your life.” He waits a moment. Says, “Stand down, FN-2187. That’s an order.”
FN-2187 feels something inside him break.
He sees a flash of light behind the screen.
Slip sees it too. So does the pilot.
FN-2187 feels the decision to protect, to make the world a better place, in his bones. It’s why he doesn’t hesitate even as his worldview crumbles.
He materializes his shield in the space between him and Slip as Slip swings the blaster toward the rolling screen. FN-2187’s shield materializes through Slip’s arm, severing it at the elbow. The blaster falls, useless, with Slip’s forearm. The stink of cooked flesh rises with Slip’s howl and the scream of the child and the pilot dropping his plate to fire at FN-2187.
The pilot never fires; a blaster shot from behind the screen hits him first. He drops.
The kid’s screams suddenly quiet. FN-2187 wonders if Poe has calmed him, one civilian to another. One civilian with a blaster, but FN-2187 has been told a thing or two about lawless Republic streets.
Slip’s left arm is a pungent stump, the uniform around it blackened at the edges but otherwise pristine. He crawls toward FN-2187 with his good arm and legs. FN-2187 backs toward the bed, his shield glowing between them. Protect the civilians, he thinks. This man was my friend, my brother, he thinks.
FN-2187 will get them all killed thinking like that. Assess.
Slip is trying to complete the new mission parameters.
Weapons: Blaster (still clenched in Slip’s hand, by the stump of his arm); garrote wire (left and right wrist, potential threat in right wrist), no Force projections like FN-2187, but—
“Phasma knows you’re a traitor, FN-2187.” Slip’s voice is roughened by pain and rage, even through his helmet’s filters. FN-2187 tenses, but won’t be distracted. “You can kill me—“
“Slip, stop,” FN-2187 pleads, “I don’t want to hurt you. Stay where you are.”
“—but the First Order will hunt you down! We will never stop hunting you, FN-2187! We kill traitors like you, you sick, defective piece of tube spawn!”
FN-2187 does not recognize his friend Slip in this feral, helmeted man. His world narrows to Slip’s arm, to Slip’s threats, to the certainty that the Order will find and kill him, do worse than kill him somehow, even worse than the Rangers. Reconditioning and death. FN-2187 distantly knows he’s not breathing properly, assesses his physical and mental state and recognizes panic, shock, deteriorating mental capability, diminishing capacity to protect.
Perhaps this is why Slip snaring his blaster with his garrote escapes him: FN-2187 feels darkness folding in around the edges of his vision. All he hears is blood in his ears and his own panting. It feels like death is squeezing his chest. He looks down in time to see Slip pick up his blaster, see his finger curl and find the trigger, start to pull—
See Force Ranger Black put a blast through Slip’s pristine white helmet, melting armor, tearing through the face inside. The blaster drops. Slip is silent and still.
FN-2187 vanishes his shield, drops his arms, nearly drops himself. Then he remembers: kid. He remembers: Force Ranger Black will kill him. He raises his hands in surrender. “Kid?” Target name: Andrew Leis. “Andrew. Are you hurt?” He glances over. The kid shakes his head, quick and furtive, then looks back at Force Ranger Black like his savior has arrived.
“Poe? You okay?” FN-2187—Finn. Civilian Finn. He is a traitor to the Order, he’ll be found if he goes by that name anymore. Finn peers around Force Ranger Black, sees only empty space.
Oh.
Oh.
“Did you come to kill me?” Finn asks Poe, Force Ranger Black, the man in the armored bodysuit and black helmet, the man with the same bulky black watch he saw on Poe’s wrist at the door.
Force Ranger Black powers down, and in a flash of color and light it’s Poe standing in front of him again. Poe looks so sad, and it twists something inside Finn, knowing that’s the last expression he’ll have put onto Poe’s face. “I’m not gonna kill you, Finn,” Poe says. “But I can help you, if you want.”
“I don’t understand.” Finn’s hands are shaking. He lets them fall, hang uselessly at his sides. His useless, shaking sides. He’s useless now, and his whole body’s shaking. His breath is still short. “I…” He looks at the boy, then back at Poe, swallows bile down his sandpaper throat, and tries again. “I…kidnapped a child? From his mom. I did that, Poe. I think…I’m one of the bad guys.” He says it and knows it is true. He’d thought he was good, had been trained by the Order to make the Republic better for everyone—that was all he ever wanted. But merely a glance around proves he’s only made things worse.
“You’re not like them,” Poe says gently. “You protected us. Hey,” he takes Finn by the shoulders, tugs his face until Finn meets his gaze. “Come with me, Finn. Talk to my commanding officer. We can make this right, I promise you. You and me, we can do this, together.”
Finn glances at Andrew, still bound, still without his mother. She’s probably scared and afraid for him, like Finn felt for him and for Poe, but much worse. Finn meets Poe’s eyes. “And he can go home? To his mom?”
Poe smiles. “Yeah, buddy.”
Two beams of light skitter through the wall and form into Rangers beside Poe. Poe drops his hand to Finn’s shoulder but doesn’t let go.
The Blue Ranger takes off his helmet, revealing a willowy Asian man with shorn hair and milky blue eyes. He exudes calm, and Finn thinks somehow breathing is easier around him. The man’s mouth curls into a moue of distaste as he sniffs the scorched air with a shake of his head, turning to take in the room but eyes never quite settling on anything. “Found more trouble, I see,” he tells Poe with an amused quirk of his lips. “I can’t wait to hear this one.”
“No more puns,” the Green Ranger groans as he takes off his helmet. Waves of black hair shot with gray spill onto his wide shoulders as he tucks it under his arm. He takes in the room, the child, the dead men who were Finn’s team, Finn himself in a matching uniform beneath his duster. “Prisoner?” he asks Poe.
The Blue Ranger hums merrily. “Something more, I think.” He smirks at the space between Finn and Poe—not a lot of space, Finn realizes, just as he realizes he’s holding Poe’s arms while Poe holds onto him.
Another beam jumps through the wall. Force Ranger Yellow. She looks between Finn, Poe, and the boy, and powers down. “You’ve made a mess, haven’t you?” she says, grinning at Poe. Her accent is like Phasma's, but her voice sounds kinder.
“Why does everyone assume that?” Poe grouses, releasing Finn with one hand to turn and glare down the group. His team. He seems to trust them. They must trust him, because no one is shooting Finn.
“You must be Andrew,” the Yellow Ranger says, crouching beside the boy.
“Finn rescued us,” Poe is telling Blue and Green. “He wants to defect.”
Finn hadn’t said it, not in so many words, but it’s true and Poe seems to understand what Finn wants even if Finn doesn’t know how to ask for it yet. Poe’s here to help. Here to help the boy, but also here to help Finn. He hasn’t let go, and Finn takes strength from his touch, his presence. Finn is safe here. Poe will make sure.
FN-2187 is Finn now. He is a person, not just a number. Poe recognized he could be more than what the Order made him, and Finn thinks, yeah, maybe he can be. Maybe together he and Poe really can make things right.
Maybe this is Finn finally waking up.