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Lando’s world was a forest of giant legs.

All around him, grown-ups on their private hurried errands jostled him, threatening to knock him down and trample him. There wasn’t anything he could do. He was only three years old.

And he had lost his mommy.

The frightening alien city streets were crowded for the holidays, wet and dirty, dark with early evening. The lighted windows of the giant stores along the sidewalk didn’t help. He stumbled in the slush and nearly fell, sagged instead against the wall below a window filled with toys, and fought back the tears rolling down his terrified little face.

“Mommy!” Where was she? Why didn’t she come and get him? She’d left him at one of the windows—he’d wanted to watch the animated display—when he’d promised he wouldn’t move. He was tired of the inside of the store; everything was up too high; there were too many people; and it hadn’t been an interesting department anyway, where the lady had given mommy too much money back.

“Mommy?”

“Your mommy isn’t here, Lando. You’re all alone, and always will be.”

“Who’s that talking?”

“I’m your fear, little Lando, I’m your terror. I’m an eternity of anguish and I’m going to get you!”

“Mommy!”

Somehow the voice sounded familiar. Somehow he knew the voice hated him and wanted to hurt him. He didn’t know what those big words were, terror, eternity, anguish, but they didn’t sound very nice. He wanted his mommy.

But he was lost forever in the forest of legs.

“Ahhh, that was a deep and fundamentally traumatic one, wasn’t it, little Lando? I could barely stand it myself.”

Gasping, Lando shook the tears from his eyes, tried to catch his breath. It felt like he’d been crying for a thousand years. He remembered the incident very well. It had lasted, in reality, all of ten minutes, but somehow, he had never quite trusted the universe afterward.

“What do you mean you could barely stand it?” shouted Lando, then: “You! You were the voice! What are you doing to me?”

“Only beginning, my dear boy, only beginning. We’ve been at this, what? Half an hour? It will go on for days, Captain Calrissian, with any luck for weeks! I may attempt to prolong it for—But I see that you are puzzled, Lando.”

Gepta had resumed pacing. Lando moved, tried to stretch, and discovered that he’d hurt himself. Where the force cuffs held him, where the marble table bore against his back, he was in pure, unadulterated physical agony.

It felt good by comparison.

“You see, the art of torture-by-chagrin requires that its practitioner experience what the subject experiences. He must guide the mind of the subject into always deeper, always more terrifying waters. He must suffer the experiences himself, in order to assure the quality, the depth, the texture of it.

“And in your case, Captain, and in mine, to make sure it is suitable as revenge!

“Yes, I have a way of living in your head, and yes, I am willing to suffer every bit of pain you suffer, so that I will know that I am torturing you enough!”

Overhead, the Flamewind sheeted the sky with a demented rainbow. Interplanetary lightning crackled across ionized paths. A hurricane of color whirled around the asteroid.

Gepta whispered, “The next little nostalgic digression will concern your business failures, Captain. But before we begin, I wish to tell you that they are not altogether the product of a malicious universe or your incompetence.”

Gepta had been pacing back and forth a couple of meters in front of the tilted table where Lando was restrained. Now, for the first time, the sorcerer stepped forward until his eyes burned into those of the gambler.

“I hounded you!”

Lando shook his head, too groggy from pain of several kinds to comprehend fully what Rokur Gepta was telling him.

“I dogged your footsteps! Everywhere you went, I saw to it that the prices were a little higher, the rates you could resell at were a little lower! I warned the authorities anonymously that you were a smuggler, increasing the number