Hi Readers,

Many, many apologies for the very long hiatus from this story. Too many life changes put this story on the backburner, and I was having trouble figuring out how to end it! Well, thanks to all who have reviewed and kept asking for more. I've not ignored your requests! All the best, A.

Killing Ascii was as instinctual as breathing. She didn't even remember planning it out, only that the moment she wanted him dead, he was already lying in a pool of his own blood, his hands strewn across the room in a smear. But it wasn't him. Though she'd never seen Boba Fett's face, she knew the man she had killed and unmasked was the imposter. She remembered Fett's scent keenly. This was a clean jumpsuit, lacking the acrid musk of blasterfire, the rot of the palace, Tatooine, dust.

Her victory over her tormentor, however, was short. The lab doors opened and a flood of stormtroopers charged through. Still charged on adrenaline and her previous kill, she took them down easily enough. Six of them, down in a few seconds. But she wasn't ready for what came next, the strangling force that crippled her. She fell, awake, watching as Vader's Crimson Guard took her down with a wave of their hands.

Greta woke to utter darkness and pain. Her head was pounding, every muscle felt like they had been snapped in two. And the smell – it smothered her senses, this heavy blanket of rot and waste. Groggily, she probed the floor, then the walls feeling nothing but long, deep grooves in both. Feeling around the corners, she found no cracks, no joints – nothing that could tell her where she was, no light to help her see. "How do I get out of this one?" she wondered aloud.

A voice, heckling, startled her. "You don't." She spun around, her body ready to defend herself. The voice coughed, and she realized it wasn't coming from in her own cell. She followed the noise to the far end of the cell, finding a small grate. Kneeling down to it, she asked, "Where am I?"

"Place to die," the voice answered, with a rasping cough. "Can't you smell it?"

"Who are you?"

"Was personal cook to Colonel Zaruk. Tried to poison him."

"Are you with the Alliance?"

"Gods, no," the voice replied with a hoarse laugh. "Just didn't like him."

Greta leaned up against the wall as she sat on the cold ground. "You people who serve the Empire – you're all crazy. I'm surprised it's survived for so long."

"It'll tear itself to pieces one day. Guess I won't be around to find out."

Greta put her head in her hands, trying to soothe the throbbing in her skull. "When do they come? I mean, to kill us?"

The voice was silent at first, only wheezing. "They don't."

"What do you mean? How long have you been here?"

The voice was silent, only wheezing. "Dunno. Long time. No one comes. We get no food, no water. You get the picture."

Greta felt the dread in her gut grow as she understood his meaning: the grooves – the scratches – on the wall, the smell of decay.

"Not how you thought you'd die, eh?"

"No," Greta answered quietly. She fingered the empty space between her throat and her collarbone, thinking of her missing holocube of her father. Its absence only made her angry, only made her think of the one who had stolen everything from her.

How long she had been in the cell, Greta didn't know. It felt like weeks had passed. In the darkness, she kept groping along the walls, trying to find some kind of weakness in the cell. But there was none.

It wasn't entirely true that no one ever came. Footsteps came through the corridor beyond her cell, the occasional clang of a metal door, a heavy rustling. "The dead ones," the voice next door whispered. "Come to collect."

She tried not to lose resolve, but after each long, dark day, Greta began to give up. She spent her days counting the grooves in the walls, then after she had counted them all a hundred times, she began to make her own.

And now, in the eternal darkness, Greta lay starving and shivering on the cold cell floor. She drifted in and out of semi-consciousness, from dream to dream. One moment, she was with her father, the next burning in the sand under Tatooine's twin suns. Lethia had come to give her water, but disappeared. Then, it was night among blue-cast dunes. Boba Fett, with Vader's dark voice, offering her a knife, telling her to kill him. On and on the dreams went until her stomach would gnaw hard enough to jolt her momentarily into consciousness.

It was in these brief moments of wakefulness that she would despair that she had not yet died. Even the voice next door had stopped talking. The footsteps had come for him, too.

She fell asleep again under the haze of deep hunger and thirst, wondering what they did with her eye, if they kept it in a glass jar or had just thrown it out like a scrap of meat. The thought twisted into a dream, picturing Jabba the Hutt popping the eye into his mouth, crunching it like a piece of candy. His usual palace retinue was there, the dancing girls fearfully executing their moves across the floor, the roar of the Rancor beneath. Lethia was there, pouring water for wealthy clientele, but no sign of the one she used to look for. The weight of a hand landed on her shoulder and she turned, finding herself face to visor with Boba Fett. She backed up, taking a step away but he took her hand, told her to stay. Reaching up with his other hand, he unlatched the helmet but stopped. He looked up. She followed his gaze. The cave was shaking, small bits of ceiling rained down on the palace. Then, large chunks of rock began to fall. Fett grabbed her hand and was pulling her to safety. But it was too late. A loud groan, and the mountain above the cave split in two and the ceiling caved. Somewhere, in the distance, she heard Fett call her name. But she couldn't see him. All she could see was blinding light.