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i.
Rose is used to sharing a bed.
Hays Minor is a cold planet, covered in ice sheets and shrouded in twilight year-round, but the artificial light in the Tico family’s living pod glows soft and warm. When Rose is four, she is still small enough to steal from the mattress she shares with Paige and wriggle between their parents instead. Ever the light sleeper, Paige wakes up in Rose’s absence.
It doesn’t take long for her older sister to decide that she wants to be part of the family cuddle pile, too.
“Move over,” Paige says, digging her elbow into Rose’s side as she slots herself into place. Their rearrangement of limbs wakes their parents; Mom stirs and reaches over to adjust the blankets, which have been kicked down.
“There are my girls,” she says, blowing a raspberry against Rose’s shoulder. It tickles so much that Rose snorts, right in sync with the trumpeting, moan-like sound that their dad emits. She and Paige are facing each other on the mattress, foreheads nearly touching; they share a conspiratorial look.
“Dad snores like a bantha,” whispers Paige, making both of them giggle. They’ve been working through a holobook detailing the creatures of the galaxy; Paige got it for her birthday. Rose’s most recent favorite animal is the sand bat, but before that it was the stunfinn. Tomorrow, she’ll probably have a new favorite.
“And I’m going to eat you two up like a krayt dragon, if you don’t go to sleep,” their mom threatens.
Under the covers, Paige nudges Rose’s foot three times. Part of the secret code they’ve developed. Rose closes her eyes and smiles, nudging back.
ii.
When Paige is eighteen, she gets a job piloting a stripped down bomber, blasting away polar ice for the Central Ridge Mining Company. She uses her first paycheck on a new pair of gloves for Mom, welding tools for Dad.
“What about me?” Rose pouts.
“I’m saving up for your birthday, you spoiled brat!”
“Fine.” After a beat: “What’s work like?”
“Repetitive,” shrugs Paige, resting her hands on her stomach. They’ve grown bigger now but still share a mattress, and Rose can feel, rather than see, every gesture her sister makes. “But I like flying, and firing the cannon. It makes me feel—I don’t know, powerful. Can you imagine what piloting a fighter would be like?”
“Too topsy-turvy for me,” shudders Rose. “I would like to fly, though. Just to explore, see other worlds.”
They’re both staring at the ceiling, imagining it opens up into the sky.
“One day,” Paige says. It’s in the same voice she uses when she’s about to win at cards: decisive, full of change. “We’ll do it, Rose. You, me, and hyperspace.”
iii.
The First Order arrives two years later, when Rose is seventeen. Rose is used to the darkness of Hays Minor, but this is something else. It’s not just perpetual twilight that obscures the sky now—oily smoke leaks from the pockmarks on their planet, thick enough to choke on. Paige loses her job at the mining company. The First Order has little interest in cooperation; it takes the ore it wants by force. People, too. Chip, the boy with the gap-toothed smile who Rose went to grade school with, goes missing. She hugs her dad a little tighter each day, fearing a time when he’ll leave for work and disappear.
When the first bomb hits, it’s instinctual, to scramble into her parents’ bed. To hold close the things she loves dearest as, around them, the world falls apart. The walls of their living pod rattle. Paige’s fingernails dig crescents into her arm. A tremor travels through her bones, and Rose pretends the shaking is just that of a takeoff. They’re blasting away from the surface of her home world. Aiming for the sky.
iv.
They get their own beds once they join the Resistance.
It’s all wrong. Rose climbs onto her mattress—she’s claimed the top bunk—and is immediately barraged by an image of her parents as she saw them last. Dad and the wrinkles by his eyes, his hands rough around hers as he pressed the medallion into her palm. Mom’s voice, lost over the wind: look out for each other. The cramped underbelly of the ship they’d been smuggled aboard.
When they’d first reached the Resistance, Rose hadn’t cried, either in sorrow or relief. Crying would mean she’d have to lift her filtered goggles to wipe the tears, and her eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the light of an inner planet.
But it’s dark now. No rays to protect her eyes from. Nobody to put up a front for.
Below her, Paige offers: “Rose? Do you want to come down here?”
Rose doesn’t need to be asked twice. Foot, hand, foot. She maneuvers gingerly down the ladder, cheeks wet. Paige shifts aside to make room, and Rose feels immediately lighter for it, as if her sister siphons off some of her grief just by being there.
“General Leia’s going to do whatever she can,” Paige says.
“It might not be in time,” says Rose. The medallion burns hot against her skin, an imprint of loss. “These were goodbye gifts that Dad made us, Paige.” And then the tears are flowing faster: “We might be orphans by tomorrow and we’ll never know. Orphans with—without a home—”
“Rose,” Paige repeats. If Rose squeezes her eyes shut, she can almost pretend it’s Mom.
Fingers tug at her necklace. Rose opens her eyes to find Paige leaning over her, fitting their pendants together, the two leaves forming a circle, one with all the dips and valleys of—
Home. Rose rubs a thumb over it, wonderingly. Two halves of a heart. Hays Minor.
“There,” says Paige. There’s a slight wobble in her voice, but she masks it well. “We have a piece of home with us. And we have each other.”
Rubbing her cheeks, Rose presses herself back against the wall to give Paige more space on the bed and says, shakily: “What do you think the General will have us do tomorrow?”
“Who knows? We should get some rest, though, so that we’re alert. You’d better not push me off in your sleep—if I end up on the floor—”
Rose smiles despite the tears. Paige is so slim and bony, all hard angles where Rose is soft. She tucks herself under her sister’s chin.
“I’ll hold on tight, I promise.”
v.
After the evacuation of D’Qar, she will hate herself for being soft. She will look in a mirror and wonder: if my cheekbones were sharper, my face thinner, would I be able to find Paige in it?
Moon cheeks, Mom had always called Rose, pinching their roundness. Rose had loved it then. The recollection aches, now.
When she can no longer endure staring in the mirror, she goes back to their shared room. Paige’s bunk still carries her scent, and somehow that hurts the worst: the promise of a warmth that will never return.
She lies on the mattress—alone—and cries herself to sleep.
vi.
On Canto Bight she gives away her ring. It’s the only piece of jewelry she treasures beside her necklace. The stableboy she gifts it to cradles it close to his chest.
There are two others, another boy and girl. Silent, watchful. They are young and have seen too much already, how the world continues to shake apart no matter how tightly you hold. Rose wants arms big enough to scoop them up and spirit them away from here. She wants to tell them to hide. To crawl into the hay bales and not emerge for the next hundred years, however long it takes to resolve this war.
Instead, she smiles and beckons them closer. Reaches out and adjusts the strap of the girl’s overalls, the brim of the boy’s cap. What Paige would do, if she were here.
(The medallion sings warm against Rose's chest. I'm still with you, Rose, I still am.)
Finn stands off to the side, waiting.
“Now let’s set these fathiers free, huh?” Rose says.
vii.
“Pae-Pae, what’s that?”
“It says here that it’s a fathier,” Paige reads slowly. Her eyes brighten. “Wow, can you believe people ride them? I bet it feels great to go so fast, to feel the wind in your hair.” She claps her hands together. “I have an idea.”
“What?”
“Here, get on your hands and knees. You pretend to be the fathier, I’ll be the herder, and I’ll chase you around, see?”
“Why do I have to be the fathier? Why can’t I be the herder?”
“Oh come on, Rose, we’ll take turns. Now hurry up. If I catch you… If I catch you I get to tickle you!”
“No!” Rose shrieks. Paige makes a move toward her and Rose jerks away. The game is real, now. She’s thundering down a racetrack, an open plain, her sister chasing after her, and the world is only as big as their living pod, safe and warm and bright.
Their laughter spirals upwards like sonar swallows, chasing the light.