Chapter 1: Betrayal in the Cantina
The air didn’t so much part as rip, with a sound like tearing canvas and screaming feedback from a blown amplifier. One second there was empty space between a dented gaming terminal and a foul-smelling Troig, the next there she was: Alissa White-Gluz, sprawled on the sticky permacrete floor.
Her ears rang. The transition wasn’t gentle. It felt like being yanked through a keyhole by a runaway train. For a dizzying moment, the world was a smear of color and noise—the deep guttural growl of her own dying scream on stage, the chemical bite of dry ice, the crushing weight of ten thousand voices—all overlaid with the new, overwhelming reality of cheap ale, stale sweat, and ozone.
She pushed herself up, palms slipping on something unidentifiable. Her heart jackhammered against her ribs. The familiar weight of her in-ear monitors was gone. The comforting pressure of her stage corset was gone. Instead, she felt… fabric. Rough, simple, like burlap. A dress. A fucking dress.
“What the hell?” she muttered, her own voice a dry rasp in her throat.
The cantina noise, which had dipped for a split second in surprise, swelled back to its familiar roar. A few nearby patrons—a Rodian with one milky eye, a Gran with three—glanced over with mild curiosity before returning to their drinks. Weirder things than a blue-haired woman appearing out of thin air happened in Mos Eisley every hour.
Alissa’s vision cleared. The place was a dungeon. Low ceilings trapped a haze of smoke from a dozen different chemistries. The light was a sickly yellow, glinting off puddles and the edges of battered armor. A band in the corner plucked out a jangling, arrhythmic tune on stringed instruments she didn’t recognize. Every instinct screamed danger. This wasn’t a festival pit. This was a predator’s den.
“Easy there, sister. Lost your way?”
The voice came from her left, smooth as oil on water. She turned, and the man leaning against the gaming terminal was all angles and hungry shadows. Gaunt face. Eyes that didn’t settle on one thing but calculated the value of everything. He pushed off the wall with a casual grace that set her teeth on edge.
“Who are you?” Alissa demanded, getting to her feet. The dress was an insult, but her stance was pure fighter. She squared her shoulders, lifted her chin. The defiant sweep of her blue hair over the drab fabric was a banner.
“Name’s Lux. Lux Bonteri.” He offered a smile that didn’t touch those shifty eyes. He was looking her over, but not like a fan. Like a butcher assessing a cut. “You seem a little… displaced.”
“You could say that.” She scanned the room again, looking for an exit, a familiar face, anything. “Where is this? Some kind of themed bar? The PR team’s idea of a joke?”
Lux chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. “Something like that. Mos Eisley. Tatooine. You’re a long way from home, songbird.” His gaze flickered to her throat, to the cords of muscle there. “I could hear you, you know. From clear across the room. Even over this din. A voice like that… it cuts.”
A sliver of cold traced her spine. He’d heard her scream. Not her sing. Her scream of terror as the world dissolved.
“I need to get back,” she said, the command in her voice automatic, the one she used with venue managers and sound engineers. “Now.”
“Back’s a tricky direction,” Lux said, taking a half-step closer. He smelled of blaster grease and cheap spice. “Portal dropped you here, didn’t it? Felt like getting your atoms scrambled and badly reassembled?”
She gave a tight nod, refusing to show how accurately he’d described it.
“Yeah. Those things are one-way tickets unless you’ve got the exact cosmic address. And a ship with a crystal matrix that can punch a new hole.” He scratched his chin, pretending to think. “Lucky for you, I’ve got a ship.”
Hope, treacherous and sharp, stabbed through her. “You can take me?”
“For a fare, sure. I’m a businessman.” His smile widened, showing teeth. “But we can work something out. Your… skills could be valuable. Come with me. Let’s discuss terms somewhere less crowded.”
He reached out, his hand closing not roughly, but with firm, inescapable finality, around her bare forearm. His fingers were cool. His touch was wrong.
Alissa tried to pull back. “Get your hand off me.”
“Just ensuring you don’t get lost again,” he murmured, his voice dropping. He leaned in, his breath hot against her ear. The predator’s grin was gone, replaced by a look of pure, avaricious intensity. “I know a way home. I really do. But you have to trust me.”
For a split second, she almost did. The words were a lifeline in the chaotic, horrifying sea of this place. Home. The bus, the stage, the roar of a crowd chanting her name. Vegan catering. Her weights. Home.
Then she saw his other hand. It wasn’t resting at his side. It was moving, dipping into a pouch on his belt. His shifty eyes darted past her shoulder, checking the room, ensuring no one else was watching this particular transaction.
“Trust you?” she hissed, the rage cutting through the disorientation. It was a familiar friend, this fury. It fueled the screams, the growls, the hours of punishing practice. “I don’t even know you.”
“You will,” Lux said, and the sympathy evaporated like a drop of water on a desert skillet. His eyes went flat and businesslike. “You really will.”
The thing he pulled from his pouch was small, metallic, and silent. It wasn’t a weapon, not exactly. It was two linked rings, dormant and dark.
He moved faster than she anticipated. The hope had made her slow. The wrist with his grip twisted, forcing her palm up and out. The other hand snapped forward.
Click-hiss.
A band of cold energy encircled her wrist. Then the other. The cuffs glowed with a soft blue hum, and a wave of debilitating numbness shot up her arms, into her shoulders, locking her joints. Her muscles, honed from years of relentless fitness, meant nothing. They were suddenly inert, disconnected flesh.
Her legs gave out. She didn’t fall hard; he caught her, his arm hooking under her shoulders in a grotesque parody of support. The world telescoped, the cantina noise fading to a dull roar. She couldn’t turn her head. She could only stare up at the smoke-stained ceiling, the rotating fan blade cutting through the haze.
Lux’s face moved into her narrowing field of view. He wasn’t smirking anymore. He was working. His gaze was already looking past her, toward the dank hallway that led to the docking bays, mentally tallying distances, obstacles, bribes.
“Vocal cords like spun cortosis,” he mused to himself, adjusting his grip on her. “Jabba’s been wanting a new main event for his little palace concerts. Something fresh. Something that really screams.”
He began to drag her. Her boots scraped twin trails in the grime. The last thing she saw clearly was his free hand coming up, fingers rubbing together in the universal gesture of commerce. Counting credits that weren’t yet in his pocket, but soon would be.
The blue hum of the cuffs was the last thing she heard, a frequency that vibrated in her teeth, before the blackness at the edges of her vision rushed in and swallowed everything.
The blue hum of the cuffs was the last thing she heard, a frequency that vibrated in her teeth, before the blackness at the edges of her vision rushed in and swallowed everything.
Consciousness returned in jagged pieces.
First was the smell. It had changed. Not cantina stink. This was thicker, heavier. Incense, yes, but undercut by a pervasive, sweet-sour rot and the hot, dry scent of scaly flesh. Then came sound. The cantina’s clamor was gone, replaced by a low, constant drone of muttered conversations, chittering laughter, and the distant, melancholic wail of a flute.
Then, the pain. Her head throbbed, a deep ache behind her eyes. The numbness in her limbs had receded, replaced by a prickling, painful tingling, as if her arms were bundles of needles. She tried to move them and felt resistance. The cuffs were still on, but the energy field was dormant. They were just cold, heavy metal now, connected by a short, stout chain. Slave cuffs.
Her eyes flew open.
She was on her knees on a hard, grimy dais. The dress was a rough, tawny sack against her skin. She drew a sharp breath, the air coating her tongue with the taste of dust and decay.
“Ah. The artifact awakens.”
The voice was a wet, guttural rumble, slurred as if spoken through a mouthful of oil. It didn’t just enter her ears; it seemed to vibrate up from the floor through her knees. It was a voice that had never asked for anything in its life, only demanded.
Alissa’s gaze tracked toward the sound, and her world, already shattered, seemed to shrink further, growing dark at the edges again with a new, profound horror.
The chamber was vast, a haze-filled pit of depravity. Aliens and humans of every description lounged on grubby cushions, their attention leering toward her. But they were just scenery, background noise. The center of the universe, the malignant sun around which this entire wretched system orbited, was a massive, quivering mound of blubber draped in filthy silks.
Jabba the Hutt.
He filled a wide stone platform, his tail-tip twitching lazily. One giant, three-fingered hand clutched the stem of an ornate hookah pipe. His face was a nightmare of folds and jowls, dominated by a wide, lipless mouth. A deep, rumbling chuckle shook his enormous body.
Lux stood off to the Hutt’s left side, looking small and insidious. He was accepting a heavy, clinking pouch from a Twi’lek majordomo. He tossed it once, catching it with a satisfied smirk, and finally met Alissa’s eyes. He gave her a small, mock-sentimental shrug.
The betrayal was a physical burn in her throat.
“My estimable associate, Lux Bonteri, claims you possess a unique talent,” Jabba rumbled, Basic words forming with effort. “Something beyond the screeching of my usual court musicians.”
Alissa’s jaw tightened. She remained silent, scanning, assessing. The room was full of guards—Gamorreans with dull, porcine eyes and rusting axes, a masked humanoid with a sinister calm. The exit was a distant archway, up a short flight of steps. Miles away.
“He says you can sing,” Jabba continued, his enormous eyes, dark and glistening like oil-slicks, boring into her. “But not like a bird. Like a… creature. A demon of sound.” He took a long draw from his hookah and exhaled a plume of sickly-sweet smoke. “Demonstrate.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a command that carried the weight of immediate violence. A Gamorrean grunted, hefting his axe.
Alissa didn’t move. The silence stretched, becoming its own kind of defiance. The court’s murmur died down. Lux shifted, his smirk fading into nervous calculation. He hadn’t sold a compliant songbird. He’d sold a lit fuse.
“I don’t perform on command,” Alissa said, her voice rough from disuse but clear, cutting through the thick air. “I take the stage when I’m ready.”
A startled gasp rippled through the court. Someone snickered, then choked it back.
Jabba’s laughter boomed out, a sound of genuine, foul amusement. “Spirit! Lux did not exaggerate.” The laughter cut off as suddenly as it began. The lipless mouth flattened. “I did not ask for your readiness. I commanded your performance. You are on my stage. The only command that matters is mine.”
He nodded his gigantic head. The Twi’lek majordomo, Bib Fortuna, stepped forward, a cruel-looking electro-prod in his hand. “You will sing for the mighty Jabba,” he hissed, his tentacle head-tails twitching.
The prod crackled to life, its tip buzzing with blue-white energy. The Gamorrean took a step closer.
Every instinct roared. The part of her that was a performer, that understood audience control, warred with the part that was a fighter, that had spent years building a body and a will to be unbreakable. To start singing now, to open her mouth and give them what they wanted, felt like severing something essential. It was the ultimate violation.
But to be shocked, beaten, dragged… that was a violation too, just a more familiar one. She could bide her time. She needed to understand the cage before she could break it.
She looked from the prod, to Jabba, to Lux. She held Lux’s gaze, letting him see the promise there. It was a promise with teeth.
Slowly, ignoring the ache in her joints, she pushed herself from her knees to her feet. The chain between the cuffs clinked. She straightened her spine within the ridiculous dress, tossed her head, and swept the blue hair over her shoulder. A tiny, defiant gesture.
“Fine,” she said, her voice dropping low. “You want a demon? I’ll give you a demon.”
She closed her eyes for a second, not in submission, but in focus. She blocked out the stink, the leering faces, the metallic fear in her mouth. She reached for the engine of her rage—the portal’s violation, the cold cuffs, Lux’s betraying smirk, the weight of the chains on her wrists. She funneled it all into a single point in her diaphragm.
She opened her eyes, fixed them on the laughing, oblivious Lux, and opened her mouth.
It wasn’t a note. It was an event.
It started low, a subterranean growl that rattled the glasses on nearby tables. It had texture—the sound of grinding stones and shredding metal. It built from her core, a seismic ripple traveling up through her chest, gaining power and razor-edged agony as it hit her vocal cords. Then it erupted.
A scream. A guttural, towering, articulate scream that tore through the hazy air. It wasn’t mindless noise. It was a melody of pure, distilled fury. It held the visceral punch of a gutteral death metal roar, but it shifted, morphing into a piercing, operatic shriek that seemed to crystalize the very air before shattering it. The glassy shriek climbed, impossibly high, clean and horrific as broken crystal, before plunging back down into a raw, ragged snarl that promised violence.
The effect was instantaneous. The court flinched as one body. A Gamorrean dropped his tankard. The flute player’s note wheezed into silence. Lux’s face went pale, his calculating eyes wide with a dawning, primal fear. He hadn’t understood what he’d caught. Not really.
Jabba’s tail stopped twitching.
The massive Hutt leaned forward, the platform groaning subtly under the shift of his weight. The hookah pipe was forgotten in his hand. His great, bulbous eyes were locked on her. All pretense of amused detachment was gone. In its place was a pure, voracious fascination. Here was no ordinary toy. This was a phenomenon. A weapon of sound. A unique treasure for his court.
The scream ended, not fading, but being severed. The sudden silence that followed was louder than the noise had been. Alissa stood panting, chest heaving, the echoes of her own voice ringing in her ears. The air felt charged, combustive.
Jabba’s gaze fixed. It was absolute, all-consuming. She was no longer a person, or even a slave. She was a prized asset, fascinating, dangerous, and now, irrevocably his.
The silence stretched, thick and charged like the air before a lightning strike. Jabba’s monumental gaze held her, picking apart the echo of her scream as if tasting a rare wine. The court waited, breathless.
Finally, a wet, rumbling chuckle started deep in the Hutt’s gullet and rolled out into the chamber. “Marvelous,” he slurred, the single word dripping with gluttonous pleasure. “A sound to shake the stars. Lux, your price was too low.”
Lux, still pale, managed a stiff bow, his eyes darting between Jabba and Alissa with new wariness.
Jabba’s tail gave a lazy, definitive thump against the stone. “Such a rare artifact cannot be left… unpackaged. It must be displayed. Properly.” He gestured with a bloated hand. “Take her. Remove that peasant sack. Bring her to the wardrobe masters. She will wear the Bespin silica-weave. And the Durasteel accents. The chain will be decorative, but… functional.”
His words parsed slowly in Alissa’s ringing ears. Wardrobe masters. Decorative. Functional.
“No,” she said. The word was quiet, flat, a stone dropped in a pond.
Bib Fortuna snarled and gestured. The Gamorreans moved in, their thick hands grabbing her arms before she could pivot. She fought, instinct and training igniting her muscles. A sharp elbow caught a snout with a wet crunch. A guttural squeal. But another clamped onto her from behind, pinning her arms. The numb ache from the stun cuffs flared back into life, a vicious handicap.
“You will,” Jabba boomed, amusement gone, replaced by bedrock authority. “Or I will have your vocal cords removed and preserved in a jar, and you will spend your days scrubbing the droid pools with a toothbrush. The performance is optional. The decoration is not.”
She was dragged, struggling every step, through a archway and down a filthy corridor that stank of grease and mildew. The “wardrobe masters” were a pair of ancient Twi’lek females with dead eyes and swift, impersonal hands. They worked in a closet-sized room stacked with gaudy fabrics and cheap metal.
The rough dress was torn away. Alissa stopped fighting then, going rigid, her breath coming in sharp, controlled huffs through her nose. The humiliation was a cold fire on her skin, worse than any punch. They were efficient. They dressed her as they would a mannequin, their knobby fingers fastening cold, polished metal over a bikini crafted from a fabric that felt like frozen sand.
The silica-weave was a shimmering, opalescent bronze, barely there. The durasteel accents were a broad collar around her neck, meticulously shaped plates over her breasts, and a segmented girdle around her hips. It was absurd. It was architectural. It turned her body into a decorative column.
One of the Twi’leks produced a long, fine chain, its links shimmering with a subtle oil-slick sheen. She fastened one end with a click to a heavy ring on Alissa’s collar. The other end, she held out to a waiting Gamorrean guard.
They marched her back to the throne room. The court’s eyes were like physical touches, scalding and greedy. Lux was gone, already fled with his credits. Jabba watched, his great mouth curled in satisfaction, as she was led up the short steps of the dais.
The Gamorrean knelt, his rough hands fumbling for a moment before he secured the free end of her chain to a massive, rusted iron loop bolted directly into the stone at the base of Jabba’s bulk. The click of the lock was a tiny, final sound.
He tested it with a tug. The chain pulled taut, a meter and a half of slack. Enough to stand, to take a single step. Not enough to reach the edge of the dais.
The guard shuffled back. The music started again, tinny and weak. Conversation resumed, though eyes kept flicking to her. She was part of the scenery now. A fascinating, dangerous pet, leashed to the monster’s footrest.
Alissa stood perfectly still. The metal was cold against her skin, then slowly warmed to the ambient heat. The collar pressed on her clavicles. The chain’s weight was a constant, nagging pull on her neck. She looked out over the court, her face a mask of icy calm, but her mind was a screaming, calculating furnace.
This was the stage. Smaller than any she’d ever known. More degrading than she could have imagined. But it was a stage. And she now knew the exact length of her leash. She felt the vibration of Jabba’s contented breathing through the stone. She saw the inattention of the guards, already bored with their new fixture. She noted the edge of a food platter, left within her reach by a inattentive serving droid. A polished, greasy bone with a jagged end.
Her fingers, hidden by the angle of her body, flexed once. The chain rattled softly.
The scream had been a demonstration. The silence now was the real performance. And she was just beginning to learn her part.