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“Don’t worry,” Kyp said again. “It’s the best way down.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

Then he heard Chewbacca laughing, a nasal, chuffing sound. That made up Han’s mind for him. He sat down on the metal rail and wrapped his legs around it, placing his hands behind his hips and gripping the rail as best he could. The slippery fabric of the thermal suit immediately started him sliding. The darkness grabbed at him as he picked up speed. Han imagined sharp stalactites just centimeters above his head, waiting to take off the top of his skull if he sat up at the wrong moment. He continued to accelerate. “I don’t like this!” he said.

Suddenly the rail disappeared beneath him, and he tumbled onto a mound of powdery sand. Another two workers scrambled forward to yank him clear of the end of the rail. He brushed dust off his thermal suit, though he couldn’t see the dirt anyway.

A few moments later Chewbacca came down with a long, echoing howl, and shortly after that came Kyp Durron and the guard. “Line up again!” the guard said.

Chewbacca grunted and huffed a few words. Han snorted. “Don’t tell me it was fun!”

The guard marched them ahead. When the ground dropped out from under them, they splashed into a shallow lake. The pressure of the water pushed against the legs of Han’s suit. The captive miners sloshed ahead, holding on to each other in their blindness.

The water had a sour, brackish smell, and Han’s stomach clenched, anticipating a drop-off that would plunge him in over his head. Chewbacca whined but kept his comments to himself.

Under the water something soft and fingerlike poked against Han’s legs. Other contacts nudged at his feet, prodding and coiling around his calves. “Hey!” He thrashed about with his feet. The ghostly, touching things swarmed about him. Han pictured soft blind grubs, hungry in the darkness; their mouths would be filled with fangs, waiting for something to eat, something helpless in the dark—as he was. He splashed again to drive them away.

“Don’t call attention to yourself,” Kyp Durron said in a low voice. “That will only bring more of them.”

Han forced himself not to overreact, to walk with gliding, even strides. None of the other prisoners cried out; apparently, no one had been eaten alive yet, though the small probing fingers or suckers or mouths continued to play around his legs. His throat felt very dry.

He wanted to drop to his knees when they finally reached the tunnel on the other side of the subterranean lake. Behind them dripping water and tiny splashing sounds echoed in the grotto.

An unknown time later they arrived at the actual spice-mining area. The guard withdrew an apparatus from his pack, making shuffling and clinking noises as he did so. Unseen, he set it up along the walls of the tunnel.

“We have to go deep to get the good spice deposits,” Kyp said. “Down here the glitterstim is fresh and fibrous, instead of old and powdery like in the higher mines. The spice veins are laid in crisscross patterns along the walls of the tunnel, never going much below the surface of the rock.”

Before Han could say anything else, a high-pitched, teeth-jarring hum pounded against the tunnel. Chewbacca roared in pain. Then a skin of rock along the inner tunnel sloughed off. The guard had used an acoustic disruptor that penetrated only a few inches into the rock, crumbling it down. “Get to it!” he said.

Kneeling on the rubble-strewn floor, Kyp showed Han and Chewbacca how to sort through the crushed rock, feeling with cold-numbed fingers through the broken pebbles and debris to pluck out strands of glitterstim, like tufts of hair or asbestos fiber.

Han’s hands felt raw from the work and the biting cold, but none of the other prisoners complained. They all seemed beaten. He could hear them breathing and gasping as they continued to exert themselves. Han stuffed fragments of glitterstim into the gathering pouch at his hip. He felt a sinking feeling, like a knife twisting inside him. He could be at this job for a long, long time.

After the team finished