All The Stars | 𝐋𝐔𝐊𝐄 𝐒𝐊𝐘𝐖𝐀𝐋𝐊𝐄𝐑

chapter five

Suddenly, the entrance to Boba's ship popped open with a hiss, revealing the man in the Mandalorian armor. Indirys leaped inside the fallacious solace of his attack craft, grateful for the relief from the whirlwinds of sand that the outside environment had provided. She lifted a shoulder and brushed her face against it. The winds had blown with a vengeance while she'd collected credits for Boba - grains of sand had embedded themselves in Indirys' pores with every gust of wind she encountered, and she'd had to blink ceaselessly to avoid getting sand lodged in her eyes. The cool, still air of the slave ship was a refreshment, to say the least.

"You know," Indirys quipped once Boba began to drag her back to her cell. "That dark lord you serve probably won't be too happy if you keep his cargo from him any longer."

Of course, Indirys didn't really want Fett to turn her in to Vader. That was the worst case scenario for her current predicament. Yet, if she was ever going to escape the clutches of the irksome bounty hunter she resided under, something was going to have to change. She couldn't keep swallowing the trackers Boba fed her and expect to find an opportunity to escape. If her chance to slip past the reach of the Empire meant surviving a near miss of meeting Darth Vader, then so be it.

Alas, Boba Fett was silent. Rather than answering Indirys' banter with a comment of his own, he swung the door to her cell open and slammed the bars shut once he'd shoved her in.

Indirys swallowed a yelp. She stumbled into the nearest wall, unable to stop the momentum from Boba's rough jostling as her cheeks scraped against the concrete barrier. She held a hand to her face, wincing when she felt the abrasion of her freshly-filleted skin instead of the soft, smooth integument that usually lined her facial bones.

The bastard hadn't needed to push that hard.

The shredded skin on her cheek was, at this point, little more than just another injury to add to her list of wounds. Fett hadn't been gentle with her while she'd played the role of a prisoner, subject to his every whim as he tossed her into gambling rings for his gain, and she had a catalog of injuries to show for it.

"Smart remarks won't get you anywhere," a voice sounded from the inky shadows to Indirys' left, and the young girl rolled her eyes. At first, Tilar Mateecu had been a godsend. A precious piece of company that would give Indirys something to hold on to while she was locked away in a musty, grimy holding quarter. But now...now, Tilar either clamped her mouth shut or scolded Indirys for the words she let slip from her mouth. She had the personality of a flea.

Indirys slid to her rear, laying down on the paper-thin mattress she'd been provided with. "I didn't ask."

Over the course of a week, her melodious, soprano voice had dwindled down to a meager rasp. A rasp. Every time she managed to push her larynx past the pain it suffered with every word she spoke, every time she willed it to sing notes of defiance and congeniality, nothing escaped her chapped and bleeding lips but a chalky ghost of what her voice once was. She sounded like she was speaking with beads wedged in her throat.

Was that really what she was now? A vessel for beads that would one day clack against her teeth and bounce as they fell out of her mouth and onto the ground beneath her?

That, like all other matters of the fate that awaited her, remained to be seen.

Indirys let herself fall into a deep stupor, a sleep like she hadn't basked within in months, her only consolation the soft jingle in her pocket as she realized, Boba forgot to ask me for his credits.

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Indirys awoke to the sound of metal clanging against metal. To the feeling of rust flakes floating down to settle on the tip of her nose, to a pestilent itching sensation as Boba turned a key in the lock on her cage and even more flakes fell from the corroded cage bars.