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Dengar returned to Mos Eisley at sunrise, planning to move his ship to Jabba’s palace where it would be handy in case of a Rebel attack.

But he was confused when he entered the ship and found Manaroo gone. He made a perfunctory search, found that she’d never returned from the cantina. At the cantina, the bartender said that she’d danced for a few credits, then “disappeared.”

Dengar considered the news, then remembered the Attanni that Manaroo had given him. He went back to the ship, inserted the device into his cranial jack, then closed his eyes, trying to see what she saw, hear what she heard. But the Attanni gave off only a whisper of static.

Dengar left the device in, flew a quick grid low over the city, but never received her signal, so he headed back to Jabba’s palace, landed the Punishing One in Jabba’s secure hangars.

All through the trip back to the palace, he thought about Manaroo and wondered what had become of her. He found that he had become accustomed to her presence, even imagined that he felt comforted by it. Once, just a few nights before, she had demanded to know what other emotion the Empire had left him with besides his rage and his hope, and he had refused to tell her. Loneliness.

His loneliness served no purpose in the Empire’s designs, at least not that he could fathom. Dengar was not even certain that they had left him with that ability on purpose. Perhaps when they’d cut away the rest of his hypothalamus, they’d not even been aware of what they’d left him with.

But over the years, Dengar felt that it was not the rage or hope that had come to define him, but his loneliness, his knowledge that nowhere in the galaxy would he find someone who would love him, or approve of him.

It wasn’t until he was on his way back to Jabba’s throne room that Dengar suddenly felt a staggering wave of fear. He closed his eyes, listened with other ears.

“You got to dance your best for Jabba,” a fat woman was saying. “He gets his entertainment one way or another. If he don’t like how you dance, he’ll take great pleasure in watching you die.”

Dengar watched the fat woman through Manaroo’s eyes, saw three other dancers from various worlds all lounging about on dark benches. They were in a damp-smelling cell, with thick steel bars. The air felt fetid, and one of Jabba’s guards was pacing outside the window to the door, occasionally poking his snout through the bars to leer at the dancers.

“What if he likes how I dance?” Manaroo asked.

“Then he’ll keep you longer. Maybe even set you free.”

“Ah, don’t try to give her hope,” another woman said from a far bench. “That only happened once.”

The fat dancer turned. “But it happened!”

“Look, girl—” the other dancer said from the far end of the room. “You either dance good, or you die.”

“But I already danced for Jabba,” Manaroo said, “when the slaver brought me in.”

“So you passed the audition,” the fat woman said. “That’s something.”

Dengar took off the Attanni, placed it in the bottom of his holster, beneath his blaster.

Jabba was a demanding creature. Once he’d paid money for anything—whether it be a slave or a drug shipment—he deeply resented losing that thing. And the Hutt took great pleasure in tormenting others. While Dengar could not sense a difference between good and evil, the Hutt took pleasure in evil.

Dengar knew that he wouldn’t get Manaroo back without a fight.

He squinted and considered the Hutt, tried to picture Jabba with dark brown hair and a lanky frame. But even with the greatest stretch of imagination, he couldn’t find much in the way of similarities between Jabba the Hutt and Han Solo.

“Ah, well,” Dengar groaned. “I’ll just have to kill him anyway.”

Fortunately, Dengar soon found that many of Jabba’s henchmen had reason to plot against their master. Within three days Dengar was able to provide one of Jabba’s henchmen—the Quarren Tessek—with a bomb. Dengar made it from weapons stored in his ship, and he made it big enough to blow Jabba’s