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The lightsaber Padmé gripped in her hands was heavy and cold. It felt like every dead thing. It was hard to believe that the crystal in it still lived, but Leia had assured her mother that she could feel it, that it had spoken to her. Luke had left it behind when he’d last gone out into the snow, promising to be only a little while. Padmé had heard shouts from outside for a long time afterwards, and had often gone to investigate. But it was more than 40 degrees below freezing with the wind shear, and when she’d ventured out of the main hangar doors there’d been nothing the perfect glare of the sun on untouched drifts and an horizon that inched ever closer. She sat on the floor in what had been the command room, the emergency lights flickering a sickly yellow. Her hands, stiff with cold, slipped over what she thought was the latch that kept the ancient weapon together. She cursed and shook the pain out of her hand. Her gloves had borne the brunt of it, but there was a small tear through which she could see a line of slowly welling blood. It wouldn’t matter soon enough and she turned her attention back to the stubborn latch. She didn’t fully understand the plans her daughter had left behind. She didn’t even half understand them, in fact, but towards the end Leia had seemed to sense that she would not be present for the final preparations and had drawn tiny, detailed diagrams instead of her usual pages of indecipherable script. Anakin would have understood the branching design. He would have looked at it in wonder, reaching out to lay a reverent hand over the most complex of the equations, as if pulling the knowledge into himself. Perhaps in another universe he had. The casing finally came loose, spilling out its assortment of parts in an untidy mess across her heavy skirts: a few wires, twisted and fraying; a tiny circuit board, half its components blackened; a lock of hair tied with a strip of leather that she tried not to look at too closely; and a kyber crystal, glowing softly with an inner light. It was warm when she touched it, and for a moment she felt the weight of two tiny bodies in her lap, their hands growing into her hair. The feeling vanished and she bent double on the icy floor. There was no comfort to be had here—no comfort to be had anywhere—so she pushed herself to her feet, the crystal pulsing gently in her hand. She thought of going back up to the main hanger, of looking outside one last time. But the sun hadn’t risen for months, and the holonet was dark and silent. There was no-one to wish her luck, maybe no-one left but her. The thing her daughter had built took up most of the lower floor of the control room. In some places it had been welded to the ceiling with thick cables that reached back beyond the pool of the emergency lights. Leia’s final drawings were on actual paper, written on pages torn from a set of priceless bound books they had found in one of the storerooms. The edges of the paper had worn soft under Padmé’s endless handling of them, and the diagrams were worn into her mind. Two steps forward under the overhung arch of metal and gears, then there was just about room for her to edge into the central chamber, where hanging wires writhed and shifted in the light of the crystal. A sliver of deeper darkness ahead of her. The place where she was to put the crystal. And then… nothing. With any luck there would be no and then. This universe would fold in on itself, like a collapsing star, but perhaps life would go on elsewhere, safe from the horrors that were destroying her own. She pushed her finger into the tear of her glove and swept a few smears of blood onto her face. They were only half-familiar gestures as she had never put on her own face-paints. A tear under her left eye for mourning and a tiny cross under the other for hope. Padmé slotted the crystal into place, and the last light went out.