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them. A new target appeared, and he tracked it, fired while moving, scored the hit. The targets started coming faster, and he thought maybe that would take his mind off what had happened, but instead it was just the opposite and he couldn’t stop thinking about the miners.
    He couldn’t stop thinking about how Phasma had spoken to his fire-team evenas the negotiators’ bodies were cooling on the floor. How she’d moved to stand directly in front of Slip.
    “I was concerned about you, FN-2003,” she said. “I am glad you’ve proven me wrong.”
    “Thank you, Captain.”
    “You’re now stormtroopers,” she said. Her helmet had turned, moving from Slip to Zeroes to Nines, then finally to FN-2187. It seemed she’d held her gaze on him longer than the others.Then she’d addressed them all, tapping her breastplate to emphasize her words. “You’re now one of us.”
    Zeroes and Nines and especially Slip, they’d felt it, they
believed
her. All the way back up to the docking bay, into the shuttle, on the flight back to the Star Destroyer, they had been barely able to contain themselves, their excitement, their relief, their pride. Even the veterans had sensedit, had invited them to share a meal in the galley to celebrate.
    FN-2187 had begged off. He had training to do, he said. He needed to put in some range time.
    And because they’d already labeled him an outsider, nobody argued with him and asked him to come along. Not even Slip.
    The problem had to be with him, FN-2187 thought. That was the only explanation. It was what everyone had been sayingall along, after all. He was different. Maybe he was so different he was broken. So he would work to fix it, to be a real stormtrooper, to be one of them. That was, he thought, what he wanted most of all. Not to be alone.
    So he worked through the simulation, and it grew harder and harder, and still his shots were unerring. It wasn’t until the civilians began to enter the scenario that he raninto trouble. At first they appeared only as random bystanders, obstacles to be avoided. Then there were more of them, and more, and more. Men and women and children, and suddenly FN-2187 could see only them and not the enemy hiding among them. He could see only those innocents, and in that moment he could no longer pull the trigger.
    In that moment he understood it had never been a game.
    Heunderstood that he was never going to be one of them.

    Captain Phasma watched FN-2187 on the monitor in her quarters. He’d stopped firing, stopped even moving, and was just standing amid the ever-changing field of moving figures.
    She sighed. She’d had such hope for FN-2187. He had shown such remarkable promise. He had shown the capacity to be special.
    She picked up the orders on her desk andreviewed them once more. They’d already made the jump to hyperspace, and she knew it would be less than an hour before they reached their rendezvous point to take on their new passenger. Kylo Ren had already transmitted the coordinates for where they would be headed next.
    On the monitor, FN-2187 had turned away from the still-running simulation. Harmless blaster bolts from Republic enemies pepperedhis back, hit after hit. Over the speakers, she could hear the computer in the simulation room declaring the scenario a failure. FN-2187 didn’t seem to notice, didn’t seem to care. She watched as the holographic images faded, as the room emptied to one lone stormtrooper, and then as FN-2187 walked out.
    She switched off the monitor. He’d be part of the detail when they reached the landing pointon Jakku, she decided. Perhaps when someone was shooting back at him, he would understand what it meant to be a real stormtrooper, what it meant to serve the First Order, body and soul.
    She would give him one more chance, Phasma decided.
    One last chance for FN-2187 to decide his fate.



T HE TEEDOS called the storm
X’us’R’iia
. It had a name because the Teedos believed there was only the one, the same