I’d talked a big game to Vader about my lifestyle, how I knew I was lucky to be alive. How the longer I worked for him, the more likely I was to get a lightsaber through the neck.

How I’d claimed I didn’t care, as long as it was quick.

But there was a truth I kept coming back to as my mother’s anguished face flashed before my eyes…

Yes, Chelli Lona Aphra—rogue archaeologist, proud daredevil, secret attaché to Darth Vader—loved taking the kind of risks that meant she was more likely to die before her time was up.

But after feeling the Dark Lord’s grip tighten around my neck, the breath start to leach from my body, I couldn’t help but think…

Maybe she’d rather not.

And…there was something else. Something I was trying extra hard not to think about.

But as the knot in my chest tightened and tightened, making me feel as if Vader was stealing the breath from my body all over again…I couldn’t stop going back to the moment when he’d ordered me to be silent. To not struggle. To accept my fate.

The way the soulless pits of his mask had looked right through me—

unflinching, uncaring…he didn’t even have to think twice about killing me. I was…a cog. A thing. A disposable bug to be squashed once I no longer served him.

I thought Vader truly saw me.

And I guess…I guess I thought if he were going to kill me, lightsaber or no, it would have been after an epic betrayal. Not because I’d made a tiny little bungle.

But no, he’d been more than ready to kill me over that bungle, no matter how tiny.

All he saw was another bit of trash to be thrown away and never thought of again.

To him, I was like dust on a chatterplant.

And he would have tossed me away—if I hadn’t withheld a bit of information he desperately wanted.

I suppose I was foolish to even entertain the idea that I could matter to someone like that. And I don’t know why the realization that I didn’t… bothered me so much. I mean, I guess the easiest answer was because gaining his trust and impressing him so much—as I thought I’d been doing—made him easier to manipulate. And who’s impressed by an inconsequential bug? Who even thinks about that bug? Who…

Aphra’s voice catches as she gets a bit emotional. She quickly composes herself.

APHRA (narration):

I needed to… strategize about some aspects of my relationship with the Dark Lord.

It was like Sana said all those years ago: I had to make myself safe.

And I was the only person I could count on for that.

SCENE 33

INT. CAVE. ANTHAN MOON. LATER.