Someone knocked on the cubicle door.
“Time.”
Darren came awake reaching for the pistol beneath his folded jacket.
His abdomen seized before his hand found the grip.
He lay still, listening to the attendant move on to the next door.
Twelve credits had bought six hours.
He could not remember using all of them.
Another knock, farther down the corridor.
Darren swung his feet to the floor and waited for the pain to settle before standing.
The cubicle held a narrow bed, a sink and a shower compartment too small to turn in without touching both walls.
Darren washed the dried blood from his neck and studied his reflection in the metal panel above the sink.
Thirty-one.
Short beard.
A scar through one eyebrow.
The swelling on his cheek made the familiar face look borrowed.
He lifted his shirt.
The old wound beneath his ribs was gone; the new bruise across his abdomen had darkened.
Whatever agreement he had made in the temple, it had not included a second repair.
He checked his equipment.
Pistol.
Nineteen rounds.
Knife.
Medical kit.
No radio.
No watch.
No identification.
No blaster.
One hundred and eighteen credits after the room.
Five disappeared at a food stall on the way.
One hundred and thirteen.
Pell Varo operated behind a company with a deliberately boring name: VARO LOGISTICS SERVICES—cargo documentation, commercial records, and customs representation.
It took Darren almost an hour to find the place, long enough for the city to teach him that a map and a route were not the same thing.
The route on Marel’s card crossed two levels.
Darren checked the numbers against his notes from the escort, found that neither junction helped him, and chose the lift marked for the commercial street.
It carried him to a maintenance entrance.
He asked a delivery droid before trying another.
“Passengers use the other bank,” it said, pointing across a gap large enough to swallow a building.
“Of course they do.”
The droid indicated a bridge.
He thanked it and started walking.
When he finally arrived, he wrote the route down so he would not need to ask twice.
Pell Varo was human, perhaps a little over fifty, with gray hair tied at the back of her head and dark clothes devoid of anything memorable.
The office looked suspiciously legitimate: clean desk, two terminals, orderly files, white lighting.
A violet-leafed plant stood beside an air purifier.
Pell was picking a dead leaf from it when he entered.
She finished before taking the card he offered.
“Marel said you might come.”
“He’s all right?”
“He sent the message himself.” She set the leaf in a waste tray.
“Sit.”
Darren counted two exits.
A recessed control beneath the desk might have been an alarm; he could not tell what the wall panel behind Pell concealed.
Pell saw him looking.
“If you’re calculating how to run out of here, the door is faster.”
“Habit.”
“Expensive habit in someone else’s office.”
He sat down.
Pell read Marel’s card, then looked at his bruised face.
“Deckard?”
“For that job.”
“What name are we keeping?”
He had been ready to defend the alias.
Instead she waited, offering him an empty field.
The name he had insisted on keeping in the temple suddenly seemed harder to say here, where someone could attach it to a record and sell the record onward.
“Darren Vale.”
“That one real?”
“No.”
Pell began typing.
He had protected the truth by giving her the answer she expected, and disliked how easy it had been.
“Thirty-one,” he said when she asked his age.
“Birthplace?”
“Earth.”
“System?”
“You won’t find it.”
She looked up.
He waited for another question, wondering how much he could say without breaking the condition imposed in the temple.
Pell merely turned the display toward him.
UNVERIFIED EXTRASYSTEM BIRTH.
NO PROVEN REPUBLIC CITIZENSHIP.
“That’s what I can do with that answer.”
“All right.”
“Hands on the plate.”
The scanner was cold.
He let it read his hands and eyes, then drew back when a sampling needle rose from the plate.
Pell waited.
“A face and a name aren’t enough?”
“For something you can use once. Is that what you want?”
He looked at Marel’s card.
Yesterday one shot had left a man bleeding in an unfamiliar street.
Today he was considering giving someone a permanent way to connect his own body to a name.
“What happens to the sample?”
“Disposed of. The scan goes into your record.”
“And yours?”
“I keep the work I need to support what I sell. You want no trace, leave with no chip.”
He put his hand back.
Without the chip, he would still need Voran to show a document at every door.
Pell watched him settle his palm, then took the sample.
The sting was slight.
He disliked how much more difficult the decision had been than the pain.
Her search took several minutes.
Darren listened to the air purifier and tried not to read the changing display upside down.
“Nothing in the local records I can reach,” she said finally.
“No Republic citizenship returned against those biometrics.”
“Good or bad?”
“Common. Lost records, shipborn workers, refugees. I don’t need you to be unusual.”
He almost laughed.
That was the most useful requirement anyone had given him since he arrived.
She offered Corellia as a prior residence.
Darren stopped her before she entered it as anything more.
“I can’t describe a street there.”
“Then don’t. Adult work history. No childhood.”
“And when someone checks?”
“They find an incomplete record. You’re paying to begin filling it.”
He had used cover identities backed by people who answered telephones.
Here, Pell would be the person answering.
He watched her mark the birthplace unverified and resisted the urge to make the story more convincing by adding things he could not defend.
“Freight support,” he suggested when she asked about work.
“Contract protection. Nothing that claims a local military qualification.”
Pell nodded and entered it.
“References?”
He put a finger on Marel’s card.
“One.”
“For now,” she said.
It was a small concession.
He wanted it badly enough to notice.
“Family?”
“None local.”
“Emergency contact.”
He looked at the plant beside the purifier.
One violet leaf had browned at the edge.
There were people on Earth whose numbers he could still recite, but none of those numbers could summon anyone into this office.
“None available.”
Pell left the field blank.
She did not ask him whether they were dead.
There were a few more questions.
He answered what he could and let her mark the rest incomplete.
Each omission was easier than the first.
When she offered him the draft to check, the name stood at the top of a life with most of its pages missing.
“Eighty credits.”
“Fifty.”
“Marel’s message already brought it down from a hundred.”
“Sixty.”
“Seventy.”
“Sixty-five.”
Pell stared at him.
“Do you negotiate everything?”
“When I’m poor, yes.”
“Sixty-five.”
Darren paid.
Forty-eight credits remained.
The chip took forty minutes to finish.
Pell used the time for other work, answering two brief calls without lowering her voice.
Cargo records, a delayed clearance, a client who had sent the wrong reference.
Darren could not tell how much of her business was legitimate.
He suspected the distinction mattered less to her than being paid.
When she brought the chip over, he expected something that justified how much of his money it had taken.
It was small and unremarkable.
Pell made him place it on the reader, then put his hand where the terminal instructed.
His name appeared beside his face.
“Local identity,” she said.
“Lodging, work, clinics, ordinary private checks. Not citizenship.”
“And a serious Republic check?”
“You don’t want one.”
“How much for a document that survives it?”
“More than this one. And I’d need a history I could support.”
He pocketed the chip.
Coruscant remained farther away than the price of a ticket.
He would need something a Republic official could look at without finding a man assembled yesterday.
For now, the name on Pell’s screen was his.
He checked its spelling once more before she closed it.
Pell opened another screen.
“Marel said you were on Voran’s escort.”
“I was.”
“The missing crate appeared on a private resale listing twenty-two minutes after the attack.”
Darren stopped.
“Same mark?”
“Same transport identification.”
“That’s fast.”
“That’s a buyer waiting, or an operation prepared very well.”
“Who sold it?”
“Fifty credits.”
He had forty-eight.
Pell had watched him count them.
“Forty now. The rest after my next job.”
“No.”
“You trust my reference enough to make a record.”
“I don’t extend credit against it.”
She closed the screen.
He could sell the knife, or return to the employer whose cargo had appeared for sale before its surviving guards had finished bleeding.
Neither possibility made the information cheaper.
Pell kept her hand on the terminal.
“There’s something else you should hear before you leave.”
“A man showed up at a clinic with a solid projectile through his thigh. The doctor thought the design was unusual.”
Darren felt the weight of the pistol at his hip.
“Slugthrowers exist.”
“They do. This projectile drew attention.”
“Did they recover a casing?”
Pell shrugged.
“I don’t know. The doctor sells information. And now he knows someone on the moon is using unusual ammunition.”
Darren thought of the shot.
The ejected casing.
The floor at the ambush site.
Possible.
Not confirmed.
“Buy a blaster,” Pell said.
“Is that advice included?”
“It’s cheaper than having my new client identified by his ammunition.”
There it was: a reason to warn him that did not require her to like him.
Darren found it easier to accept.
Before Darren left, Pell slid another chip across the desk.
“Message.”
“From who?”
“Bad-tempered Zabrak.”
He opened it.
DECKARD.
MAREL SAID YOU’D FIND PELL.
IF YOU’RE STILL ON THE MOON, MALKOR’S, 18.
DON’T TALK TO VORAN FIRST.
Darren looked at Pell.
“She seems bad-tempered to you?”
“She pays on time. I don’t need to like her.”
Malkor’s was on a higher commercial level.
Darren wrote down Pell’s directions before leaving, including the number of the lift.
He checked them at each junction instead of trusting the downward-looking map to tell him which way was up.
At the restricted commercial lift, a gate asked for local identity verification.
Darren stopped short of the reader.
A guard beside the next lane was checking a driver’s papers; here there was only a scanner and a closed barrier.
He pressed the chip to it.
His name appeared.
For an instant he wanted to take the chip back, as though leaving it there too long might expose the gaps beneath the name.
Then the light turned green and the barrier opened.
He stood in front of the open lift until a Bothan worker behind him coughed impatiently.
Darren stepped inside.
He kept his thumb against the chip during the ascent.
The gate had not asked who had made it or where he had been yesterday.
Someone else’s world had let him through an ordinary door.
At the upper stop, the Bothan brushed past him and disappeared into the crowd.
Darren put the chip away before stepping out.
He wanted to try it again somewhere, just to make sure, and recognized the urge as a poor reason to invite another check.
Malkor’s occupied half a broad walkway above an urban shaft.
Traffic crossed below at several heights.
Inside, music made the tables vibrate; off-shift workers crowded the bar, and a Devaronian argued over cards with a shaved-headed human woman.
Darren took a moment to find the exits before he looked for Sira.
Sira had chosen the back, with a real wall behind her and a clear view of the door.
Darren approved silently.
She was alone.
He sat and placed the identichip on the table.
“Darren Vale.”
She read it.
“Which one’s real?”
“You’d be disappointed.”
“I already am.”
Darren pocketed the chip.
“Why not talk to Voran?”
Sira rested her forearms on the table.
“Five crates arrived.”
“Yes.”
“Voran told the contractor six arrived.”
Darren went quiet.
“You saw that?”
“I heard him report it.”
“He could have replaced the crate.”
“Could have.”
“Insurance fraud?”
“Maybe. A replacement shipment. Someone paying him to lose it. I heard the number, Darren. I didn’t hear the reason.”
She had used the name without looking at the chip again.
He almost missed the distinction she was asking him to keep.
“Then we find the reason.”
Sira studied him before continuing.
“Voran wants to hire you again tomorrow.”
“And you want me to take it.”
“I want you to put a tracker on his vehicle.”
Darren leaned back.
“You trust me fast.”
“I don’t trust you.”
The answer came dry and immediate.
“The first team was attacked before you appeared. On the second, you went back for Marel after Voran ordered you to abandon him. That only makes you less likely.”
“Comforting.”
Sira took a small disk from her pocket.
“If Voran is skimming cargo, I’m out. If he’s selling his own guards with the route, I want Marel out before he takes another shift.”
Darren looked at her.
“You think that’s what he’s doing?”
“I think I want to know.”
Darren kept his hands off the disk.
“Pell says the missing crate was listed for sale twenty-two minutes after the attack.”
Sira’s eyes moved from his face to the table.
“Did you see who listed it?”
“No. She wants fifty. I have forty-eight.”
“Then we still don’t know.”
“No. But that’s something we can check against where he goes.”
Sira stopped turning the disk.
“Where he goes,” she said.
“That’s all this tells us. I’m not paying you to confront him.”
“And if it shows nothing?”
“Then it shows nothing.”
“You could pay Pell for the seller’s name.”
“And I might buy a name that never goes near Voran. I want to know who he meets when he says the shift is over.”
Darren looked at the disk again.
“A meeting won’t prove he arranged the attack.”
“No. It gives us somewhere to look.”
He believed that more than he would have believed a promise that Voran was guilty.
She was angry enough to want an answer and controlled enough to leave room for one she disliked.
“Pay?”
“Two hundred.”
“One hundred up front.”
“Fifty.”
“Eighty.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Deal.”
She transferred the money.
Forty-eight plus seventy-five.
One hundred and twenty-three credits.
Sira handed him the tracker.
“Tomorrow.”
Darren picked up the disk.
It was smaller than he had expected.
He put it in an inside pocket and looked at Sira’s holster.
“You teaching me to shoot before or after I spy on my employer?”
She looked at his bruised cheek.
“You planning to need it tomorrow?”
“I’d rather the answer wasn’t decided by my aim.”
Her mouth moved at one corner.
She stood.
“Come on.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere you can miss without making tomorrow harder.”
The service bay was two levels down, with old scoring across its target wall.
Darren stopped beside the entrance while an attendant finished clearing the lane.
She paid the attendant before Darren could ask the price.
He left the seventy-five-credit advance in his pocket.
The attendant brought a battered practice blaster and greeted Sira by name.
He asked about the burn on her armor.
She told him the plate needed replacing, then asked whether the lane on the left was clear.
Neither of them looked at Darren’s new chip.
He followed her in, carrying the weapon muzzle-down.
Sira set three palm-sized targets along the wall.
At five meters Darren could hit them if he concentrated.
At ten, his old instincts interfered.
He kept anticipating recoil, dipping the muzzle just enough to send bolts low.
Sira stayed behind the firing line, watching the muzzle instead of his face.
“Again,” she said.
He lowered the blaster.
His abdomen hurt when he held the stance too long.
He had steadied himself against a crate during the escape; standing here without support, he kept adding tension where he needed control.
“Give me a moment.”
Sira waited.
That helped more than another correction.
He loosened his grip, found his balance, and raised the weapon.
The next bolt clipped the target’s lower edge.
“Nineteen rounds left for the other one,” he said.
“I remember.”
“Pell says the doctor remembers one of them.”
Sira’s eyes moved to his holster, then back to the target.
“Then we stop giving him more.”
After another string of shots she changed the exercise.
No careful stance.
No time to settle.
Draw, move two steps, fire, lower, scan.
Darren improved because the sequence resembled something his body already knew even when the weapon did not.
The first attempt went wide when his ribs pulled.
On the next, he shortened the movement and hit.
It was a small improvement, and it did not survive every repetition, but he could reproduce it.
Sira stopped him before fatigue made the results worse.
“Keep that. We’ll do more another day.”
He lowered the weapon.
“That’s almost encouraging.”
“Don’t spread it around.”
They collected spent power cells and sat for a few minutes on an equipment crate while the attendant reset the bay.
Darren’s hands smelled faintly of ozone.
“Why are you following Voran?” he asked.
“I told you.”
“You told me conditions that make you leave. Not why you care enough to check.”
Sira rolled the empty cell between her fingers.
“Marel’s stupid.”
“Agreed.”
“He’s also twenty-two and thinks Voran gave him a chance. He’ll go where Voran sends him.”
“Have you told him what you heard?”
“He’d ask Voran. Tonight.” She stopped rolling the cell.
“Renn didn’t answer yesterday. Still hasn’t.”
“And you?”
“I get to decide what work I do.”
The answer was simple and more personal than most things Sira had told him.
Darren nodded.
He held out his hand for the spent cell.
She passed it over.
It was still warm.
“Your arm?” he asked.
“Bruised. The plate’s finished.”
“I saw.”
“I know.”
He turned the cell once in his fingers.
“Thank you. For getting him off me.”
She looked toward the cleared lane.
For a moment he thought she would make a joke, or remind him that she had needed someone to carry Marel.
“You kept moving,” she said.
“Not very fast.”
“Fast enough.”
He set the cell beside the others.
She did not ask him to explain the silence that followed, and he let it stay.
She stood.
“Tomorrow, don’t improvise with the tracker.”
“You worry too much.”
“I met you yesterday.”
“Fair.”
Sira shook her head and walked toward the exit.
She stopped at the entrance long enough to give him the meeting place for the morning.
Darren wrote it down, then checked the level number with her.
This time she did not comment on the notes.
When she had gone, he stood outside the bay until the attendant asked whether he was coming back in.
His shoulders hurt from practice.
His stomach hurt where the armored man had driven a knee into it.
The chip and the tracker made two small, separate weights in his pockets.
Forty-eight credits of his own.
Seventy-five advanced for work he had not done yet.
At the nearest lodging counter, the overnight rate would take most of what belonged to him.
He stood in the queue long enough to feel his abdomen tighten again, then stepped out.
He could spend the advance.
If he failed tomorrow, he would owe Sira money as well as an explanation.
He kept it separate and turned toward the public transit concourse.
A bench would hurt.
For one night, he chose to keep the money.
It was bright, noisy and full of people who looked as though they were waiting for connections.
Darren chose a bench against a wall.
When the crowd thinned, he changed benches rather than follow the last travelers into a quieter passage.
He had slept in worse places.
He had usually known where the next meal was coming from.
He took out a scrap of packaging and wrote the name beside the meeting details.
DARREN VALE.
Pell had put it on a record.
Sira had read it.
Tomorrow Voran might still call him Deckard, and Darren would answer because the alias had work attached to it.
He could hold both names for a while.
What unsettled him was how quickly he had acquired people who could ask where he had been.
He turned the paper over and tried to reconstruct the ambush.
Two vehicles.
The barrier.
Marel helping move the second crate before he fell.
Voran’s order.
Nothing he remembered proved that the employer had arranged any of it.
Nothing made the report of six delivered crates fit what Darren had seen.
He stopped before he could turn uncertainty into a conclusion he wanted.
Across the concourse a cleaner pushed a cart between the benches.
Darren moved his boots out of her way.
She cleaned the patch of floor in front of him without looking up, then went on toward the next row.
He checked that the chip and tracker were still in his pockets and settled against the wall, keeping the paper on his knee.
In the morning he would have to find the parking level.
For now, he watched the departure board change.
A route toward the upper docks appeared, then slid off the screen.
He could read it.
He could pass a local gate.
Tomorrow he would have to decide how far to follow the man who had given him his first job.
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Thanks for reading — and for supporting Darren’s increasingly questionable life choices.