“No; Jabba called me that. I don’t know why. But I knew …” Her brow furrowed with concentration. “I knew it wasn’t my real name. My true name. Somebody took that from me … and I couldn’t get it back. No matter how hard I tried …”
What
she
told Dengar coincided with
his
own suspicions. Neelah was a slave name-it didn’t fit her. The aristocratic bearing she possessed was too obvious, even in the ill-fitting, scavenged outfit she wore now. She wouldn’t be alive now-the Dune Sea’s loping predators would be cracking her bones-if there weren’t some tough fighting spirit inside her. Things would have gone differently if Jabba had tried to throw her, instead of the other girl, Oola, to his pet rancor. It would’ve been Neelah rather than Princess Leia wrapping the chain around Jabba’s immense throat and choking the life out of him.
Dengar had more suspicions, which he didn’t feel like voicing right at the moment. Fett must’ve done it. The other bounty hunter must’ve brought her to Jabba’s palace; he’d probably also been the one who’d performed the memory wipe on her. The big question was why. Dengar couldn’t believe it had been done on Jabba’s orders; the Hutt had enjoyed young and beautiful objects, but he’d also been too tight with his credits to have commissioned the kidnapping of the daughter of one of the galaxy’s noble houses. The only reason Leia Organa had wound up on the end of one of Jabba’s chains was that she had come into Jabba’s lair of her own accord, seeking to rescue the carbonite-encased Han Solo. A captured noblewoman, with a blanked-out memory, wasn’t exactly the same kind of a bargain.
So Fett must have been working for someone else while he had ostensibly been in Jabba’s employ. That wouldn’t have been unusual; Dengar knew from his own experience that bounty hunters nearly always had more than one gig going on at a time, with no particular loyalty to any creature whose payroll they might be on. Or-the other possibility-Boba Fett might have had his own reasons for wiping the memory of this female, whoever she really was, and bringing her to Jabba’s palace, disguised as a simple dancing girl.
The puzzle rotated inside Dengar’s mind. Maybe Fett had been stashing her away, in some place where she wouldn’t be likely to be found. That was one of the sleazier bounty-hunter tricks: finding someone with a price on his or her or its head, then keeping the merchandise hidden until the price for it was raised higher. Dengar had never done it, and he hadn’t heard of Boba Fett doing it, either. Fett didn’t have to; he already commanded astronomical prices for his services.
“Is there anything else you remember?” Dengar rubbed the coarse stubble on his chin as he studied the female. “Even the littlest thing.”
“No-” Neelah shook her head. “There’s nothing. It’s all gone. Except …”
“Except what?”
“Another name. I mean … another name besides his.” She tilted her head to one side, as though trying to catch the whisper of a distant voice. “I think it’s a name that belongs to a man.”
“Yeah?” Dengar unfolded his arms and hooked his thumbs into his belt. “What’s the name?”
“Nil something. Wait a minute.” She rubbed the corner of her brow. “Now I remember … it was Nil Posondum. Or something like that.” Neelah’s expression turned hopeful. “Is that somebody important? Somebody I should know about?”
Dengar shook his head. “Never heard of anybody like that.”
“Still …” Neelah looked a little crestfallen. “It’s something to go on.”
“Maybe.” He had his doubts about whether it was anything useful. He had even bigger doubts about Neelah herself. Or whatever her real name is, thought Dengar. Keeping one’s contacts primed for information was an essential part of the bounty-hunter trade; he had been in and out of Mos Eisley and other scumholes on a regular basis, listening and asking the right questions, and he hadn’t heard anything fitting her description. If anybody was looking for her, they were doing it on the quiet. That might make getting paid for finding her somewhat difficult.
Or
else-another
possibility
rose
in
Dengar’s thoughts-somebody doesn’t want her to be found. Boba Fett might have been working for someone who had wanted this Neelah to be disposed of, maybe in some way that left her still alive. What better way than to strip out her memory and stick her on a backwater planet like Tatooine? Though how long she would’ve stayed alive in Jabba’s palace was debatable, given the Hutt’s murderous amusements. Whoever had sent her there couldn’t have been too concerned about her survival. Then why not just kill her quick and fast, for whatever reasons they had, rather than leave her where any number of the galaxy’s hustling scoundrels, the criminal dregs that had found employment with Jabba, might have spotted her?