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“Two days then,” Jabba said, finally, moving his hand back. “I look forward to it.”

Fortuna called two Gamorrean guards to lift Nat from the grille and drag him down to the dungeons. Fortuna followed. The guards stopped by the first cell, which was already crowded. “Not there!” Fortuna said. “I will not incarcerate Nat with others who might kill him or maim him to spoil Jabba’s fun. Follow me.”

He led them down the passageway to the farthest cell. It was unoccupied. “Put him in here,” he said.

The guards threw Nat into the cell, slammed and locked the door, and walked grumbling away. Fortuna stood looking through the bars in the door. Nat lay on the stone floor. He would not or could not sit up to look at Fortuna. It made communicating more difficult, since much of what Fortuna wanted to say he could sign with his lekku so no one else would understand. He did not want to speak aloud for others to overhear. But finally Fortuna did speak four words: “I will save you.”

He turned and walked away—not back to Jabba’s throne room, but down the passageway to the monks. He knew of just one way to save Nat.

Only then, while walking in the swept passageway of the monks, did Fortuna wonder how they had known that this would happen, when he had not.

Fortuna led the monks’ surgeons to Nat’s cell before dawn of the second day. He wanted the procedure completed well before Jabba ordered Nat thrown to the rancor. “Leave the brain stem so the body will still breathe,” Fortuna said.

“No!” Nat screamed. He realized what the surgeons had come to do. “Don’t let them take out my brain!”

Fortuna did not worry at all that the other prisoners could hear Nat. They would try to ignore him, if they could, and hope such horrors would not happen to them. But a Gamorrean guard was hurrying toward them. He did not ask what Fortuna and the surgeons were doing.

“I will tell Jabba that you tortured this prisoner and spoiled the sport,” he told Fortuna.

“Then I will tell Jabba that since you informed on me, you obviously cannot keep secrets and must be fed to the rancor with Nat.”

The guard snuffled and stepped back. So stupid—so easily manipulated, Fortuna thought. A mistake of Jabba’s, taking these beings as guards.

“Then I will not tell if you will not,” the guard said. “Be quick about your work.”

He walked away. Fortuna set his blaster to stun and looked at Nat. “This is the only way I know to save you,” Fortuna signed with his lekku, then he shot Nat through the bars of the door. Nat fell to the floor—but his arms twitched as if, though stunned, he were still trying to pull himself up to fight to save his body. Fortuna unlocked the cell door and swung it wide. The surgeons wheeled their squeaking cart in ahead of them.

Fortuna did not follow. He did not want to watch. The sight of gore did not bother him in the slightest, but Fortuna believed it would show a lack of respect for Nat if he stood behind the surgeons to watch them wash Nat’s head and cut into it.

So Fortuna paced in front of the cell, impatient for the surgeons to be done. He remembered finding Nat as a child in the smoking rubble of Nat’s family home on Ryloth. Fortuna had gone there, looking for jewels. But before he found any, he found Nat in the arms of his mother. She was conscious.

“You!” she said, from where she lay, unable to get up to defend herself or save her child. “Bib Fortuna—I should have recognized your corrupt hand behind this attack. Only you would bring slavers upon your own people.”

She said his name with such hatred, such loathing, that Fortuna stepped back. Fortuna had been among the first to sell the addictive ryll spice off-world, and thus attract the attention of the Empire to Ryloth. Twi’leks he thought his friends sat in judgment on him and condemned him to death for bringing slavers and pirates and renegades of all kinds upon them. He escaped. They confiscated his family’s holdings and put a price on his head. He came back for revenge.

He had had that revenge. Seven cities lay in ruin, their people sold into