Coruscant did not have a horizon.
Darren waited for the city to end as Peregrine Venture descended.
On Earth there had always been something beyond the buildings: fields, a coast, mountains that forced the streets to turn.
Here the towers continued beneath cloud and emerged on the other side.
Traffic moved between them at heights he could not reconcile with the idea of a street.
He had returned Tessa’s timepiece before boarding, caught her between two loaders and received a brief, grease-marked handshake.
That already felt a long way away.
His bag waited in the courier’s locked luggage compartment.
Sel Karda sat three seats behind him with the validation case secured at his feet.
Halden came to the window carrying the arrival notice.
“There is a planet under all that,” Darren said.
“So I’m told.”
“Have you checked?”
“Not my field.”
The ship banked.
A white dome appeared between towers, and Darren recognized the Senate before he had time to prepare himself.
Farther away stood another shape he knew, massive and unmistakable above the surrounding district.
The Jedi Temple.
He put his hand against the window frame.
For a moment the buildings outside were overlaid with images that had no business belonging to this morning: smoke, soldiers, children running from someone they trusted.
He could go there.
Once the delivery was finished, he could find the entrance and ask for somebody who would listen.
Then what?
Palpatine was a Sith Lord.
There was an army.
The men who would one day wear its armor were being made somewhere beyond the bright lanes outside.
Those convictions sat in him with a force no document had yet earned.
Some details were vivid; others depended on scenes he had watched years ago, stories that did not always agree with one another.
He could give the Jedi names.
He could also tell the wrong person exactly which names frightened him.
Halden touched his elbow.
“We need to sit down.”
Darren released the frame.
His fingers had gone pale around it.
“Are you ill?”
“No. Distracted.”
“The case is still here.”
He looked back.
Sel had unfastened one strap to check the case and was tightening it again.
Darren returned to the seat from which he could watch both the case and the aisle.
He had a delivery to finish.
He kept his attention on the aisle as the ship descended through the last layer of cloud.
At Westport immigration, the clerk read his identichip twice.
Yellow appeared on the display.
Darren kept his hands on the counter while the Duros compared the origin chain with the courier authorization.
Behind him, Sel waited with the case; Halden had already passed through the neighboring gate.
“Purpose?”
“Security escort. Delivery to Asteron Fiduciary Group.”
“Employer?”
Darren gave the name on the contract.
Sel stepped forward to confirm it and placed the delivery reference beside the chip.
The clerk read the permitted duties.
“This covers the declared assignment. It isn’t a general work authorization.”
“Understood.”
“Entry expires tomorrow at nine. If you’re staying, regularize it before then.”
He pushed a confirmation toward Darren.
The time was displayed in local hours, with the departure obligation beneath it.
Darren read both before signing.
His blaster was recorded under the escort’s carry conditions.
His remaining luggage would stay in the courier’s guarded compartment until he returned from the delivery; for once he was grateful not to be carrying everything he owned.
Outside the barrier, Sel booked the authorized ground transfer.
Darren checked the exit time on his communicator, then the route to Asteron.
The Temple lay in a different direction.
He closed that view when their vehicle arrived.
Asteron occupied thirty-four floors of a tower that seemed to contain its own weather.
Darren entered beneath a ceiling high enough to swallow the sound of their footsteps.
A droid directed them toward a gate while a human attendant checked Sel’s appointment.
Nobody needed to raise a voice.
When the attendant asked Darren to secure his blaster, she pointed to a numbered locker and waited.
He unloaded the weapon as instructed, retained the receipt and followed the case through the gate.
His forearm stung where the sleeve rubbed yesterday’s burn.
Celya Venn met them on the forty-first floor.
Her dark hair ended at her jaw; she wore a plain jacket whose fit probably cost more than Darren’s entire journey.
She shook Sel’s hand, acknowledged Halden and read Darren’s credential.
“You recovered the case?”
“Helped get it out.”
“Then I may need you for the condition record.”
It was a better reason to remain in the room than looking dangerous without a weapon.
She led them into a conference room with a view across traffic and rooftops.
Sel put the case on the table but kept his hand on the handle while Celya opened the delivery record.
Her first question concerned the seals.
“These aren’t the depot numbers.”
“The packets were opened under a preservation order,” Sel said.
“The insurer resealed them after certified copying. The opening record is attached.”
Celya read it.
She examined the dent in the outer case, compared the photographs and stopped at the entry recording damage to the disposal machinery.
“A disputed destruction instruction.”
“A rejected hold,” Halden said.
“Followed by armed interference with recovery.”
“Your report alleges the latter.”
“I was there,” Darren said.
She looked at him.
“I don’t dispute that you reported an attack. I won’t certify its connection to an Asteron authorization because you arrived carrying both.”
Sel tightened his hand on the case handle.
“Nobody asked you to. Receipt of the material, condition as recorded. That’s the transfer.”
“I can acknowledge provisional receipt pending internal review.”
“That leaves me responsible for something I no longer control.”
Darren glanced at the contract on his communicator.
His own duty ended at acknowledgment.
Sel’s hand stayed on the handle, and the case remained between two people neither of whom wanted to be the last owner of its trouble.
Celya read the proposed receipt again.
“The present form implies acceptance of the originating validation.”
“Then change that sentence,” Sel said.
“Don’t make the whole delivery provisional.”
She began to edit.
Halden leaned forward when she removed a reference to the Corellian incident, but Darren touched the table beside his hand.
Celya had moved it into an attachment, not deleted it.
“Leave the incident number visible in the receipt,” Darren said.
“Otherwise the next person opening this won’t know to ask for the attachment.”
Celya considered him, then restored the number beside the custody record.
“That records its existence. It does not adopt its conclusions.”
Sel read the revised form twice before taking his hand off the handle.
Celya signed for three packets, their present seals and the outer damage.
The receipt reached all three visitors while an assistant took the case into an adjoining secure room.
Darren watched it go.
On Corellia he had nearly been shot keeping it within reach.
Here the end of his responsibility was a door closing behind somebody else.
Sel authorized the payment.
Two hundred and fifty credits reached Darren’s account, bringing the total to two hundred and eighty-five.
He checked once, saved the receipt and put the communicator away.
Celya stood.
“If that completes the delivery—”
“It does,” Halden said.
“It doesn’t complete my inquiry.”
He laid a separate reference on the table.
Celya remained standing long enough for Darren to wonder whether she would end the meeting there.
“What do you need?”
“Identification of the authorization behind the Rothana-linked support policies. Meridian acted as intermediary. Its closure precipitated destruction of validations your office administers.”
“You’ve preserved copies.”
“With Risk Records and the insurer. The originals won’t be the only record if something happens here.”
“I read the custody statement.” She sat down.
“That still doesn’t entitle you to our clients’ accounts.”
“I’m asking you to reconcile your authorization with the instruction to destroy its supporting records.”
For the first time, Celya did not answer immediately.
She drew the reference toward her and compared it with the transfer receipt.
Sel had been preparing to leave.
Now he set his coat back over the chair.
“If the authorization is being used outside its terms, my employer needs to know.”
“It would,” Celya said.
She called up the internal compliance history.
Darren watched her expression without pretending he could read every movement of it.
Her hand stopped above the display.
She scrolled back, checked a date and opened another entry.
“What?” Halden asked.
“A prior inquiry.”
“Internal?”
“No. Coruscant Security Force. Economic Crimes. Six months ago.”
The noise from the room’s ventilation became briefly distinct.
Darren had spent the morning wondering how to make a stranger take his suspicion seriously.
Someone had already asked a question close enough to leave a mark in this file.
“What happened to it?”
Celya looked at him.
“It closed.”
“Because they cleared the transactions?”
“Because they lacked sufficient evidence to proceed.”
“That isn’t the same answer.”
“No,” she said.
“It isn’t.”
She rotated the display enough to show Halden the closure reference, keeping the adjoining client fields out of view.
An accountant had copied freight and insurance material from one of the intermediary firms.
Tarin Voss.
Forty-three.
He had died before formal testimony.
Darren waited for her to continue.
She did not.
“How?” he asked.
“Overdose. The finding was accidental.”
He felt the temptation to put a murder where the record contained a death.
It would have fitted too neatly beside the men in gray armor.
He asked who had investigated instead.
“Detective Ralo Venn.”
Halden glanced at her name on the receipt.
“Related?”
“No.”
“Still Economic Crimes?”
“Lower-level assignment. Precinct Forty-Seven. The transfer appears in the correspondence.”
Darren wrote the name and precinct.
He put Voss’s name above it, leaving space for something other than the way the man had died.
“Did Voss contact your office himself?”
“I have a police request and our response to it. That doesn’t tell me every person he spoke to.”
“Can we have the response?” Halden asked.
“Not today. You can have the case reference and the public closure disposition. I won’t export protected correspondence under a delivery appointment.”
“Then open the request properly.”
Celya’s expression hardened.
“I decide whether this office opens an internal review.”
Sel intervened before Halden could answer.
“Our request is to establish whether the recovered validations remain in force. You can decline the police correspondence. You still need to answer that.”
Celya looked from him to the reference on her screen.
Then she entered a new item beneath it.
“Review requested. Receipt of the Corellian incident attached. That is what I can give you now.”
Halden accepted the number.
Darren watched him resist asking another question that would only produce the same refusal.
“Your names stay attached to the request,” Celya said.
“I won’t circulate an allegation inside this company without recording who brought it.”
Darren looked at his name beside the others.
He had signed the Corellian statement; pretending to be only the man who carried the case would not undo that.
“Keep mine with the incident report,” he said.
“If someone needs to ask what happened, they can ask me.”
Celya confirmed his contact before closing the entry.
Before they left, Celya asked for a contact who could confirm the preservation order.
Halden gave her Nira’s official details, not her private number.
The inquiry now had people attached to it on both worlds.
Whether that made any of them safer remained to be seen.
Two hours after entering the tower, Darren collected his blaster and stepped back into the concourse.
Sel took the delivery receipt to his employer’s local office, leaving Halden and Darren beneath a departures board whose destinations mostly meant nothing to Darren.
He had finished the escort.
He could have asked for directions to the Temple then.
Halden stopped beside a column instead of joining the queue.
“What did Rothana mean to you before I explained the records?”
Darren turned toward him.
The question had been coming since Corellia.
He had hoped to meet it with something better than the answer he had.
“A possibility.”
“Which one?”
“The sort of operation that needs people housed and fed somewhere other people aren’t meant to look.”
“That’s what we discussed. I’m asking what you brought into the room.”
A family passed between them.
Darren waited until the children had caught up with their parents before speaking.
“Fragments. Names, places. Things that might fit together.”
“From a former employer?”
“No.”
“A source?”
He could say yes and let Halden invent an intelligence career that belonged to this galaxy.
“I can’t give you a source you can check.”
Halden looked toward the traffic beyond the glass.
“Are you expecting me to risk my work on it?”
“No. I want to follow what we can verify.”
“You wanted something from those records yesterday. Today you wanted something from Celya.”
“I wanted a destination. I still do.”
“And if Venn tells us it leads nowhere?”
Darren thought of the Temple, then of a dead accountant whose name he had learned less than an hour ago.
“I’ll want to know why. I won’t ask you to call it evidence because I dislike the answer.”
“If another name means something to you, tell me before I spend the night searching it.”
“I can do that.”
“Even if you can’t explain why.”
Darren nodded.
That was a condition he could meet without inventing a source.
Halden rubbed at the bridge of his nose.
He looked older in the concourse light than he had at the window aboard the courier.
“I can ask for a meeting tomorrow.”
“I’m coming.”
“Your contract ended upstairs.”
“Yes.”
He let the word stand.
Halden studied him, then opened his communicator and sent a request to Precinct Forty-Seven.
They ate at a food court beneath the archive district.
Darren bought a flatbread for six credits while Halden argued with the Sullustan at the counter about whether he had been away long enough to count as a stranger.
The man added sauce to Halden’s portion and charged him without answering.
“Efficient location?” Darren asked when they sat down.
“Very.”
At the next table, a child flew a model Jedi starfighter between a cup and his mother’s elbow.
She moved the cup out of range without looking up from her reading.
Darren watched the toy make another circuit and found himself imagining the child old enough to remember this afternoon.
He wanted him to get that chance.
Halden’s communicator chimed.
The precinct had acknowledged the request, without promising an interview.
They could attend in the morning.
Darren brought up his entry authorization beside it.
“Nine,” Halden said.
“I noticed.”
“You’ll need a basis to stay.”
“Field security for an auditor who attracts gunfire?”
“When they shot at us, you hadn’t been hired yet.”
“I can start being offended now if that improves the paperwork.”
Halden almost smiled.
“Meet me at six twenty. We’ll see what my registration permits. Don’t mistake that for approval already granted.”
Darren saved the meeting place.
He had food, a person expecting him in the morning and a problem whose deadline could be read on a screen.
For a few minutes he ate without looking at the skyline.
On the walk back to the transit interchange, a stalled sanitation vehicle blocked two lanes.
A Besalisk mechanic lay beneath it while the driver argued with someone on a communicator.
Pedestrians squeezed past the rear wheels; the cart’s handler tried to hold the traffic back with one hand and stop a loose container rolling downhill with the other.
Darren put a foot against the container.
Its weight settled into the pavement instead of his abdomen, and the handler gave him a grateful nod before returning to the drivers who were shouting at her.
Halden waited beside him.
Under the vehicle, the mechanic struck something with a tool and demanded a restart.
The engine caught.
The driver began discussing payment before the mechanic had crawled out.
“Civilization,” Darren said.
“Move your foot before it runs you over.”
He did.
The handler took the container, and they went on.
A small memorial occupied a recess in the next wall.
Fresh flowers stood beneath three photographs and eight names.
Someone had cleaned the plaque around the lettering, leaving darker dust along its edges.
Darren slowed long enough to read that the dead had been killed in a transit accident two years earlier.
The woman beside the stalled cart had a place in this city.
So did whoever came here to replace the flowers.
He could not turn either of them into a reason to wait forever while he tried to understand Coruscant.
At the interchange, Halden left for his lodging.
Darren paid four credits for the journey back to Westport and onward to the district Halden had recommended.
He collected his bag from Peregrine Venture, signed it out and checked the case inside before closing it again.
Nineteen cartridges.
Nothing missing.
The courier crew were already preparing another departure.
He thanked the attendant and left them to it.
The room cost thirty-six credits for the night.
Darren looked at two cheaper listings before accepting it: one had no available rooms, the other required a deposit larger than the balance he wanted to risk.
Two hundred and thirty-nine credits remained after the meal, transport and rent.
He could pay for tomorrow.
He could not buy indefinite permission to be here.
The room’s window faced another building across a narrow gap.
A woman was preparing dinner behind the opposite glass while two children disputed possession of a chair.
One tried to pull it away just as the other sat.
The mother caught the back without turning from the table.
Darren set his bag down and laughed quietly.
Then he closed the curtain before he became a stranger watching their evening.
He checked the latch, put the identichip beside his communicator and opened his notes.
Tarin Voss had been forty-three.
Detective Ralo Venn had been transferred.
An inquiry had closed; another had acquired a reference that afternoon because Halden and Sel had refused to leave with the receipt alone.
Darren added the Corellian incident number.
Whatever they asked Ralo, they could begin with something the detective could inspect.
After that he looked up the publicly listed approach to the Jedi Temple.
The map gave him a route, not an audience.
He saved it anyway.
Tomorrow he would meet Halden, settle his entry status and ask Ralo about Voss.
Then he would decide how to approach the Jedi with what he actually had.
He could not make “more evidence” a condition that moved away every time he reached it.
He sat on the edge of the bed until the ache in his shoulder eased.
The scale frightened him.
It had frightened him above the city, and seeing a street full of ordinary people had not made the danger smaller.
It had made leaving it alone harder.
Before sleeping he sent Tessa confirmation of the delivery and payment, with no client records attached.
Then he opened Sira’s contact.
MADE IT TO CORUSCANT.
TOO MANY GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS.
Her reply arrived nine minutes later.
THEN TRY NOT TO SHOOT ONE.
He laughed alone in the room.
He could picture the impatience with which she might have typed it, though she could just as easily have been smiling.
He began an answer, deleted it and sent a short promise to keep in touch.
The alarm was set for the meeting with Halden.
He left the communicator beside the notes, within reach when morning came.