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“Don’t be cowardly,” she whispered, but she couldn’t put any strength into her voice.

“He threatened to flush my memory. That would be even worse,” the droid whined.

“Nothing is final,” Oola murmured, trying to echo things she’d thought she believed in, before fear nibbled holes in her faith. “Not even death. It only frees your spirit from the confines of gravity, to dance—”

“You don’t understand.” Threepio lowered himself with a metallic squeak onto the chamber’s sandy floor. “Even a partial memory wipe would be disastrous for a droid of my programming. I might have to start from basic imitative body movements. I’m not even certain I would retain my primary communications function.”

Whatever that means, she signed with her lekku. No non-Twi’lek could read lek gestures.

Surprising her again, he spread his metal hands. “It would mean doom,” he explained. Then he spoke again, almost shyly. “Might I offer condolences for your unhappy position, Miss Oola?”

Those were the first genteel words she’d heard in two days. Regretting her bravado back at the town, when she could have escaped Master Fortuna, and then her obvious lack of courage in this place, she curled up into a tight little ball and cradled both lekku between her knees. “Thank you, See Pio,” she murmured. “Do you have any idea what’s happening?” She indicated the other side of Jabba’s throne with a quick jerk of her head.

“Threepio,” he corrected, but he tried to be gallant. “As I understand, His High Exaltedness is punishing a Jawa. Someone he caught plotting against him, I suppose. Everyone here hopes to kill everyone else, so far as I can ascertain. I—oh!”

Another shriek cut him off. His head turned.

Oola nudged his hard, cool side with a bare elbow. “Tell me about that … picture that the other droid projected this morning,” she said urgently. She needed to know now. She’d learned not to hope for second chances.

“What?” Threepio swiveled his head toward her.

“The … human.” Humans looked almost Twi’leki, but pitiably maimed … just as Jabba looked horribly mutated, one lek bloated to obscene proportions. “Who was it?”

Threepio’s tone brightened. “Oh! That is my—” He halted before saying “owner,” or “master”—he belonged to Jabba now—but his speech had clearly started to imply ownership.

She touched her collar in unexpected empathy. Ignoring his faltering, she said, “I’ve seen him.”

He drew up with a grandiose sweep of both arms. “I am afraid that’s impossible.”

“Is his name Luke?” Oola asked.

Threepio’s eyes glimmered in the dark, smoky air. “My goodness. Yes. Yes, it is. Where was he?”

Mournfully, Oola explained.

Oola relaxed on her deceleration chair, relieved that her first spaceflight had ended smoothly. Jerris Rudd, Bib Fortuna’s employee and their pilot-escort on the short trip from Ryloth to Tatooine, had warned her that unexpected sandstorms or hostiles might agitate their landing. Oola flexed her legs, eager to spring from this cramped cabin. At her twilit home on Ryloth, deep in underground warrens where eight hundred people acknowledged her father as clan chief, she’d been known as an exquisite dancer. The height of her kicks and the sensuous swing of her lekku had won dozens of admirers.

Four months ago, Bib Fortuna had coaxed her aboveground. He’d abducted her, instead of paying her father as custom dictated. He’d enslaved her—and another Twi’lek girl, even younger and more petite—at a complex on Ryloth where he’d once conducted a lucrative smuggling business. He’d bought them the most expensive training on six worlds: four months with Ryloth’s most elegant, experienced court dancers.

The older dancers disdained her clan’s quaint, primitive ways. To Oola’s way of thinking, her clan preserved faith and dignity that the rest of the world had lost in its rush to accommodate slavers and smugglers. Expediency was a deadly god to serve.

Still, Oola rose to her training. She couldn’t escape, and she did love to dance. The twin temptations of power and fame set