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Manaroo leapt from the speeder. Dengar opened his eyes. She wore a helmet and thick protective clothes, and Dengar would never have recognized her on the streets, but they stood for a long time holding one another as Manaroo cried, and he felt her burning love for him, and her sense of relief, two people sharing one heart.

“How? How did you escape?” Dengar managed to ask. “I thought they would kill you last night?”

“I danced for you,” she whispered. “I danced my best, and they let me live for another day.

“Jabba and his men are dead,” Manaroo said. “The palace is in chaos—looting, celebrations. A guard set us free.”

“Oh,” Dengar said dumbly.

“Will you marry me?” Manaroo asked.

“Yes. Of course,” Dengar muttered, and he wanted to ask if she would save him, but instead he collapsed from fatigue.

Dengar spent the following weeks recovering in a medic chamber in Mos Eisley, and on the day he was released, he set about preparing for his marriage to Manaroo. Among her people, making the formal covenants of marriage was considered a small thing, something two people might do in private. But the more important part of the ceremony, the “melding,” which occurred when two people exchanged Attannis and officially began sharing the same mind would have to be witnessed and celebrated by her friends and parents. Which meant that Dengar and Manaroo would have to go find them on whichever world the Rebel Alliance had secreted them.

During those weeks of recovery, Dengar wore the Attanni that Manaroo had given him, and for the first time in decades he felt free of the creature he had become, free of the creature that the Empire had made him, until he found that he wanted to be that creature no more. The cage of anger and hope and loneliness that they had made for him was smashed.

The two of them were broke but not broken, and with looming medical bills Dengar had to find some way to make money. Dengar considered going back to loot Jabba’s Palace, but dark rumors were circulating in Mos Eisley. Several people had gone to loot the palace already, and they found the palace doors bolted from inside. Strange spiderlike creatures were seen on the walls. Only two or three palace residents had escaped alive after Jabba’s demise, and most of those got off Tatooine quickly.

So it wasn’t until a few days after Dengar got out of the medic chambers that he realized that, apparently, no one knew that Jabba had died at the Great Pit of Carkoon. Dengar decided he might be able to make a few credits in the desert, salvaging any weapons lost during Jabba’s final battle, scavenging the bodies of Jabba’s henchmen.

So it was that he took Manaroo and flew the Punishing One out over the desert, until he found the wreckage of Jabba’s ships, unmolested.

The bodies of Jabba’s henchmen littered the ground, their corpses desiccated, almost mummified by the heat, among scattered debris—a few broken weapons, the odd credit chip, parts to droids.

When Dengar reached the Great Pit of Carkoon itself, there was a terrible stench of burned flesh and rotting meat. It looked as if the “All-powerful Sarlacc” would have to be renamed the “All-dead Sarlacc.” Someone had dropped a bomb down its gullet.

On the edge of the pit was a dead man, naked, his flesh burned and bruised, as if he’d been placed alive in acid. Dengar turned the corpse over with a foot, to have a look at its face.

The man was burned, covered with boils. Dengar had never seen the pitiful fellow before.

“Help,” the man whispered. Dengar was astonished to find him alive.

“What happened?” Dengar asked.

“Sarlacc … swallowed me. I killed it. Blew it up,” the man said. Dengar wondered. It was said that the mighty Sarlacc took a thousand years to digest someone. Dengar had supposed that it was only exaggeration, but obviously this man could not have been lying here for more than a day or two. Which meant that he’d been in Sarlacc’s belly for some weeks.

Manaroo had been only a dozen meters away, and she rushed