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Yet it was not what he had wanted, after all. The demand for ryll spice was greater than he or anyone could have predicted, and it would suck his world dry and destroy it. Fortuna did not hate his own people so utterly. He tried promoting trade in the cheaper, less effective—less lucrative—glitterstim spice from Kessel to divert attention from ryll and Ryloth to no avail: the demand for spice of any kind would tear apart both planets. He had thought the Twi’leks would adapt to life in the wider Empire—Twi’leks always adapted—but events had happened too quickly. They had to be shown the way. Fortuna realized that, and his responsibility to show it to them, when Nat’s mother spoke to him in the rubble of her home. He drew his blaster and stepped back up to her, pointed the blaster at her head.

“Coward,” she said.

He shot her, and she died at once. Shooting her had not been an act of cowardice, he told himself. It had been an act of kindness. He had saved her from the horrors of slavery.

Then Nat moaned.

The child was alive. Fortuna did not shoot him or give him to the slavers. He carried him back to his ship and medical help. He later explained to Jabba that since this was the last son of a great Twi’lek family, it would amuse him to keep Nat for a time. In the years that followed, Fortuna never told Nat he had killed his mother. They planned together how best to save Ryloth from the hell the spice trade and the Empire were turning Ryloth into.

The cell door opened. A surgeon hurried out. He held a brain jar with a brain in it. All the indicator lights at the base of the jar glowed bright red: not a good sign. The lights should have blinked green or blue.

“The brain is screaming,” another surgeon told Fortuna. “If it does not gain control of itself soon, it will go insane and die. That is the way of things.”

Nat was not enlightened. He was not ready to give up the body. The monks had explained all this to Fortuna, and he had forced them to operate anyway. There had been no other way to save him. It was done now.

“We will do all we can to help your friend,” another surgeon said. They left, wheeling their cart ahead of them, its squeaks loud in the dungeons.

Fortuna walked into the cell. Nat’s body lay on the floor. He knelt to examine it. The surgeons had done excellent work: the sutures that closed the skull back up were undetectable except to the closest examination. The brain stem kept the lungs breathing. The heart still beat. Fortuna’s own heart raced in his chest. He would die for this, if Jabba found out before Fortuna could kill Jabba. Fortuna straightened Nat’s robes. He tied a bright red scarf around Nat’s disfigured lekku. He turned the body onto its back and gently brushed the sand from its face. The face was so scarred, tortured.

Then, with a sudden clarity, Fortuna realized why the universe had ordered events this way. Nat had to lose this body. No one on Ryloth would have recognized him. Soon, Fortuna would control Jabba’s vast fortune. He could locate and employ the services of those who practiced the illegal arts of cloning and clone Nat a new and perfect body to put his brain in. When they returned to Ryloth, Nat would be able to communicate more effectively—if he survived the next few days. Fortuna resolved to go to him later to give him the hope of cloning to hold on to.

• • •

Later that morning, when Jabba ordered Nat thrown to the rancor, Fortuna dispatched two guards to drag Nat’s body to the trapdoor in front of Jabba’s throne. “Nat has fainted from fear,” he told them quietly. “But he will surely awake on his descent to the rancor.” They believed him. Much depended on the events of the next few minutes and whether Jabba would accept them.

The guards flung Nat’s body onto the trapdoor and Jabba hit the button at once—as Fortuna had hoped he would. The trapdoor dropped open, and the body plunged down to the rancor’s pit. Jabba’s sycophants crowded around the grille to watch the rancor eat Nat. Jabba