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(I’m not even sure if you’re the girl I remember. Some days you have black hair and skin and you’re studying to be a minister, of all things, and other days it’s blond hair and green eyes and you pilot a starship, and darn if I can remember which of you I actually fell in love with, or if it was both of you and you were different people …

(I did love you. I remember that.)

A lot of memories floating around in here with me. The Sarlacc is a soup, and the ingredients are all the people she’s taken, over the centuries, over the millennia. Susejo’s never admitted it, but I suspect that’s all that he is; the oldest of the soup’s ingredients.

Kess, Susejo said.

I’ll answer to that, I replied. Why not? One name being as good as another.

Your name is Kess, he said firmly. You’re a Corellian gambler … the Sarlacc’s been eating you a little faster than I’d like, and I’m sorry about that. You’re good company, but the Sarlacc’s been hungry recently, and I can’t control her entirely. Tell me another story?

I thought about it, and I remembered the story you told me, little one, not long after we met, back in the old days, that one of you that wanted to be a minister, back when you thought there was nothing in me worth saving—too obsessed with the dice and all, you kept saying, too busy looking for the main chance. A man, I told Susejo, being chased by a logra, comes to the edge of a cliff He sees there is nowhere to flee, but beholds then a root, protruding from the edge of the cliff He grabs the root and scrambles over the edge of the cliff, hanging high above the ground. He looks down, and beholds then another logra, pacing below him. He hangs there, unable to go down, unable to climb back up; and along come a pair of tiny banda, one black and one white, and they begin nibbling at the root. The root begins to come apart … and suddenly the man sees a berry growing at the edge of the cliff, and he plucks it and pops it in his mouth.

How sweet it tasted.

Silence.

Finally Susejo said, I’m not sure I like that story.

I hung there on the wall, and with my good eye watched the dust motes dance in the sunlight; and I thought to myself how beautiful it was.

You’d be proud of me, love, whichever one you were.

Sometime later Susejo said, “The Sarlacc is hungry. I think I’ll have her eat your arm now.”

Fett felt the horror that the Corellian gambler, dead these many centuries, fought against as his limbs decayed, as the Sarlacc ate him from the outsides in. Fett floated in a long dreamtime moment, tied to the gambler’s last moments of real awareness down in the slime on the floor of the pit, blind, deaf, limbs dissolved, rib cage cracked apart with the tentacles massaging his organs, dreaming of a woman who loved him—

Boba Fett had been born to anger, and rage was his life. He struggled up out of the vision, fought it wildly, carried himself up out of the nightmare on the back of a wave of fury and abruptly was back, there in his body with the pain of the burning acid all around him, suffused with a clear, lucid, thinking hatred, an emotion so dark and deep and pure the Dark Lord himself might never have felt its equal.

He could hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears and he said, “I’m going to kill you very slowly,” and he had never meant anything more in his life.

He hung in the darkness with his hatred.

Sometime later Susejo said, “I suppose I’ll let the Sarlacc start on your leg.”

Blaster rifle, wrist lasers, rocket dart launcher; grappling hook, flame projector, concussion grenade launcher. Unfortunately almost all of them required the use of his hands, and his arms and legs were spread-eagled against the wall, held flat by an interwoven mesh of several hundred tentacles. Straining did no good; the tentacles merely gripped more tightly, and Fett barely moved.

The tentacles probed against him, seeking a way through his Mandalorian combat armor. A pair of large tentacles had taken hold of Fett’s right leg, and they tugged at it, pulling back and forth at the knee joint. The armor had held, and