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The huge hand opened, and Han sagged to the floor, gasping. The man stood with hands once again open and spread. Leia said, “Now back away from him. Slowly.”

The huge man took a step back, but only one.

“Keep going.”

The man dropped to one knee and slowly lowered his right hand to the floor, and in the instant his palm touched the luminescent lichen, the entire cavern went dark.

Han felt an inhumanly swift rush pass by him; he kicked blindly in the darkness but missed. All he could do was croak, “Leia, look out!”

“Han—” Whatever she’d hoped to say was smothered to snorts and gasping; then there were only muffled sounds of struggle. Han scrambled to his feet in the darkness and lunged toward the noise. Something hit him across the legs and he fell—

And the floor he fell on splashed.

This can’t be good, he thought. He managed to make it to his hands and knees … and the gooey floor hardened again, becoming stone that clamped solid around feet, calves, knees, and hands, and over his wrists to halfway up his forearms. “Let me go! Let me go, you freak! Don’t touch her. Don’t you dare touch her! Leia!”

The darkness gave back only empty echoes.

He knelt there, panting in pain and desperation. He tried to yank his hands free. He tried until his elbows creaked and his arms cramped. He couldn’t even wiggle his fingers. His toes he could wiggle—inside his boots—but his legs were entombed even more securely than his hands.

There was nothing he could do. Nothing at all.

And Leia was in the hands of the giant. Who was he? Han couldn’t guess. He couldn’t make any of this make sense.

And he was probably going to die without ever figuring it out.

Trust in the Force, she’d said. Well, if the Force had any plans to give him the occasional hand, he couldn’t think of a better time than right now.

“So?” he said out loud. “You there? Can you spare a little luck for your last Jedi’s best friend?”

From his vest pocket came a burst of static, and then a voice. “Han? Han, do you read? Han, come in! It’s Luke!”

Which would have been a real stroke of luck, practically an outright miracle, the kind of thing that would have made him a believer forever … if it weren’t for the fact that both his hands were encased in stone, so there was no way to fish the comlink out of his pocket and respond.

Han decided that the Force, if it actually did exist and work the way Luke and Leia always claimed it did, had a really, really nasty sense of humor.

THE FALCON ROCKETED THROUGH THE MAZE OF CAVERNS at incredible speed—speed that to Nick felt even faster owing to the tightening ridges of rock that threatened to take his head off, if not the entire turret, and the jagged outcroppings the ship had to dodge, and the constant bang and groan and screech of metal slamming into or rasping over stone—and behind it, the smaller, more nimble TIEs just kept coming. Only the twists and turns of the cavern maze sheltered them from the TIEs’ cannon fire; through the rare straightaways where the starfighters might have a shot, Nick pounded fire back into them from the dorsal turret. At close range and with no room to maneuver, no chance to even change the angle of their approach, TIE after TIE got an eyeballful of laser bolts and crashed or exploded.

His line about the Perthrillian nightwasp’s wings had been a boast—but it hadn’t been an empty boast.

Nick just kept shooting and tried not to think about the blur of rocky walls whipping past his turret so close that if he could open a window he could touch them … at the risk of having his arm torn off. “I hope you know where you’re going!”

“Just feeling my way.” Skywalker sounded almost cheerful. “How are we doing back there?”

Nick scowled at the twists and turns and sideways openings that so swiftly receded into the absolute darkness behind. “We’re in pretty good shape as long as they don’t come up with a way to shoot around corners!”

Then out of the darkness a matched pair of shining blue-white globes of energy swung into view and streaked straight toward