Darren woke when a treatment door opened and stayed awake after it closed.
Across the waiting area, the receptionist was changing shifts.
He straightened slowly, one hand against the ache in his abdomen, and waited for someone to tell him whether Renn had slept.
A droid told him Renn was awake and receiving visitors.
Darren washed his face in the visitors’ sink, trying not to look at the bruises, then found Voran and Sira already in the room.
Renn sat up with one arm bandaged and transparent gel over the worst of the damage to his face.
Voran remained standing.
There was a chair beside the bed, but neither man seemed willing to acknowledge it.
“Show him,” Renn said.
He held out his account record.
Three thousand credits had arrived two hours before the first ambush.
Darren checked the time against the departure Voran gave him, then handed the display back.
“I make twelve hundred in a good month,” Renn said.
“That appears and suddenly I’m a traitor.”
“It wasn’t only the money.”
“No. It was also that I knew my own route.”
Voran looked toward the door.
Sira stood beside it without moving.
“How long have I worked for you?” Renn asked.
“Three years.”
“How many routes did I sell in those three years?”
“None I know about.”
“How many times did I come back when I could’ve walked?”
Voran tightened his hand on the unused chair.
Renn waited, holding the account display out of reach when Voran tried to take it again.
“You need to say it,” Darren told him.
“Stay out of it.”
“Happy to. He’s still waiting.”
Voran swore softly.
“I was wrong.”
Renn did not help him finish.
“I shouldn’t have pointed the weapon at you. I’m sorry.”
The room went quiet.
Renn looked down at the account record, then set it on the bed.
“All right. Still hate you.”
“Get in line.”
It almost became a joke.
Neither man managed the smile that would have made it one.
A droid interrupted to check Renn’s medication.
Voran stepped away from the bed while it worked.
Darren waited until it had gone before asking about the account.
“Who knew the number?”
“Voran. Accounting. Maybe Vesk.”
“Not me,” Sira said.
Voran used a clearing house for wages.
Route registration went through Kessar Freight Administration.
When Darren asked whether the companies shared anything, Voran stopped answering quickly.
“The cargo network,” he said at last.
“Payroll uses part of it too.”
“So there’s somewhere the two sets of information could meet.”
“Could,” Renn said.
Darren nodded.
“That’s what we have.”
Pell arrived while Voran was writing down the network details.
She greeted Renn, looked at the room and asked who was paying for her time.
Voran reached for the record.
“Tell me what happened first.”
“That is what you’re paying to find out,” Pell said.
Darren put a hand on the display before it could disappear into another argument.
“How much?”
“Forty to examine the transfer,” she said.
“For looking at a number?”
“You want analysis or company?”
“Analysis.”
“Then pay.”
Two hundred and forty-eight credits became two hundred and eight.
Renn authorized her to copy the transaction record.
She took Voran’s network details as well, telling him she wanted the names as they appeared on the accounts rather than the names he used when he complained about them.
“We’ll need my terminals,” she said.
Renn tried to swing his legs off the bed.
Pain stopped him before the droid could.
“Send me what you find.”
Pell agreed.
Sira waited until he settled back before following her out.
Darren stayed long enough to put the account display within reach of Renn’s good hand.
“He apologized,” Renn said.
“Yes.”
“Three years and I had to ask.”
Darren had no answer that would improve it.
He straightened the cable that had caught under the bed rail and left it where Renn could reach without pulling his shoulder.
“You going back to work for him?” he asked.
Renn looked toward the empty chair.
“Today I want to get to the sink without help.”
“All right.”
“Tomorrow, ask me tomorrow.”
Darren moved the chair clear of the bed.
Renn tested the distance to the floor with one foot, then drew it back beneath the blanket.
“Not yet,” he said.
“I’ll leave it here.”
Outside, Voran was speaking to reception about the bill.
Darren waited until he finished.
“Pell’s forty comes out of my money.”
“You hired her.”
“You pointed a gun at the man she’s trying to clear.”
Voran looked toward Renn’s room.
“Bring me something I can act on. Then we’ll talk about what I owe.”
Darren could stay and make him repeat it, or catch Pell before she left.
He went after her.
The forty would have bought sleep somewhere with a door; he wanted the answer badly enough to resent paying for it.
At Pell’s office, Darren sat in the chair where, two days earlier, he had paid to put his name on a record.
Pell had him move it away from the second terminal.
Sira took his place beside the display and began reading over her shoulder.
“Do you need to stand there?” Pell asked.
“Yes.”
Pell shifted the display so they could both see it.
Darren pulled his chair closer without blocking her work.
Using the transfer reference Renn had given her, Pell traced the sending account through a set of commercial records.
It had existed for nine hours.
Eight thousand credits had entered it; three thousand went to Renn, twenty-six hundred to another account, and the remainder had been withdrawn through an intermediary.
“Which other account?” Darren asked.
Pell enlarged the name.
KESSAR FREIGHT ADMINISTRATION.
Sira leaned closer.
“They register Voran’s routes.”
“And part of the payroll,” Pell said.
Darren looked from the recipient to Renn’s transaction.
“Enough access could provide both.”
“It could,” Pell said.
“That payment might also be an ordinary invoice. I have a recipient, not the reason.”
“Can you narrow it?”
“Seventy.”
“You said forty.”
“To follow the transfer. You have it.” Pell tapped the name on the screen.
“Now you want people.”
“Fifty.”
She drew the display back toward her.
Darren saw Sira preparing to speak and shook his head.
He had asked for this.
“Seventy,” he said.
“Tell me what it buys before you start.”
“The relevant access records I can obtain. I can’t promise you a culprit.”
He paid.
One hundred and thirty-eight credits remained.
Pell worked through the records against the shipment references Voran had supplied.
Two employees had accessed material connected with both routes.
She put their names side by side and left the other windows open behind them.
Hesan Vorr was a Duros dispatch supervisor with eight years at Kessar.
His wages were slightly above average; the file included warnings for lateness after sabacc games.
Milo Tesk, a human administrative assistant, had been there eleven months.
He was in his mid-twenties and had changed address twice.
A recent purchase was large enough beside his wages that Darren checked the figure again; the file said nothing about savings or help from someone else.
Sira pointed at a purchase on Milo’s file: an expensive communicator bought three weeks earlier.
“Start with him,” Sira said.
“Hesan leaves earlier. We can watch both.”
“If we keep moving.”
Pell closed the window.
“Watch them. If you confront anyone inside Kessar with my name attached to it, don’t come back here.”
“Your affection moves me.”
“My affection bills by the hour.”
Darren and Sira took copies of what they needed.
Before they left, Pell sent Renn the transaction trail.
His reply arrived while Darren was putting the communicator away: KEEP ME IN IT.
He showed Sira, who typed back before Pell could close the file.
Outside, Sira lent Darren the small blaster again.
He checked it before putting it away.
Neither of them suggested that the investigation had become safer because they had two names.
Hesan left work early in the afternoon.
Darren followed on the opposite side of the corridor while Sira stayed farther back, waiting for the crowd between them to thin.
The Duros bought food, tipped the vendor and took a call from someone who sounded like an elderly relative.
Darren passed close enough to hear him say he had already eaten, though the food packet was still unopened.
At a transit gate, a reader charged him twice.
He argued until the attendant corrected it, then apologized with visible reluctance.
Darren spent part of that time pretending to study advertisements.
His back hurt from the night in the clinic chair.
Whenever Hesan stopped, he had to find something ordinary to do with his hands.
“You disappointed?” Sira asked through the communicator.
“Why?”
“You want him to do something.”
“I want a problem small enough to solve before dinner.”
Hesan stopped beside a street musician and listened through a whole song.
Darren waited near a shuttered shop, then had to move when a worker came to open it.
Hesan glanced his way.
Darren kept walking, resisting the urge to look back until the curve of a shop window let him see behind him.
The Duros was still listening.
When he finally took the residential transit line, Sira came alongside Darren.
“We stay with him, we miss Milo.”
Darren watched the doors close.
“Back to Kessar.”
He removed nothing from Pell’s file.
All the afternoon had given them was an ordinary journey home.
They returned to Kessar before Milo’s later shift ended.
Sira changed jackets; Darren changed where he stood.
Milo emerged looking as though he hoped someone would notice the clothes and communicator he had bought.
They followed him to a gambling hall.
Low light hid most of the stains on the tables.
Milo sat near the back, ordered a drink and began losing money with the concentration of a man trying to make his next decision undo the last one.
“Chasing,” Sira said.
“I’ve seen it.”
“You gamble?”
“Sometimes cards.”
“Good?”
“Better at reading people than probabilities.”
“So bad.”
“Aggressively average.”
She almost smiled.
Across the room, Milo borrowed against future pay and lost that too.
When he asked for more, the attendant refused him.
Darren watched the irritation pass across his face before fear replaced it.
A message arrived.
Milo read it, sat very still and then cashed out what little remained.
He left his drink unfinished.
Darren moved first.
Sira waited long enough that they did not look like two people rising after the same man.
In a commercial corridor, Milo met someone Darren did not recognize.
A small device changed hands.
Credits came back the other way.
“Now we have something,” Darren said.
Sira’s hand went toward her weapon.
“We take both.”
“No. We know where Milo works. We don’t know the buyer.”
She looked at the man walking away, then at Milo disappearing in the other direction.
“Your choice.”
They followed the buyer into the next corridor.
He walked without hurrying, the small device gone into an inside pocket.
Darren let a family with a loaded cart pass between them.
When he could see the man again, he was near a transit junction.
A lift opened and people came out across Darren’s path.
He caught one glimpse of the buyer’s shoulder beyond them, moving to the right.
He took that passage, quickening his pace.
At the bend, a woman was closing a shop.
Two service workers stood over an open panel.
The buyer was nowhere in sight.
Darren went back.
Sira had reached the junction and was looking toward the lift.
Its doors were shut.
“In there?” she asked.
“I thought he took the passage.”
“Did you see him turn?”
He had seen a shoulder and filled in the rest.
The lift indicator changed; two more people came down the passage behind Sira.
He no longer knew which direction would bring them closer.
“We lost him.”
Sira looked down the other passage before answering.
“We lost him.”
Darren started toward the lift, then stopped.
Calling it back would tell him nothing about who had used it.
He opened Pell’s file instead.
“I chose him.”
“I heard you the first time.”
Sira was watching the other passage.
After a moment she put her communicator away and faced him.
“What now?”
“Back to Milo. If he’s still out, we don’t make a second chase out of the first.”
Sira nodded.
“We have his address.”
“Voran won’t like it.”
“He wasn’t here.”
“Neither was Del.”
She looked at him sharply.
Darren closed the file before he could make the dead man part of his excuse.
They went back to the information they could use: Milo’s name, work, address and the exchange both of them had seen.
Sira sent Voran a message.
Darren kept the part about losing the buyer in it.
By the following morning, Voran had agreed to provide a room and wait there.
Darren had slept badly in the clinic again, turning the missed corner over in his head until the cleaning droid made him move his feet.
They took Milo as he left home.
Sira pressed a blaster against his back while Darren told him to walk.
Milo began to call out, saw Darren’s face, and swallowed the sound.
Darren kept his hand on the young man’s arm until they reached the vehicle.
It was easy to guide someone who believed stopping would get him shot; he disliked how little effort it took.
The room Voran had rented was a clinic support room, with scratched walls and a table fixed to the floor.
Renn rested on a folding cot in the corner.
He had insisted on being present; the effort of coming down the corridor had left his face pale beneath the gel.
Milo stopped when he saw Renn.
Sira closed the door and put the communicator she had taken from him on the table.
His wrists were bound in front of him; he held them close to his stomach.
Darren put the transfer record and the two route records on the table.
Voran stood opposite Milo, weapon low but visible.
“Canto already talked,” Darren said.
Milo answered too quickly.
“I don’t know Canto.”
Darren waited.
Milo looked from the records to Renn and back again.
“I want to go home.”
“So did I,” Renn said.
Voran moved behind the empty chair.
Milo sat before anyone asked him to.
Darren drew one of the route records closer, leaving the other beside Renn’s transfer.
“Tell me what you sold.”
For several seconds Milo watched Voran’s hand on the chair.
Then his shoulders lowered.
“I sold lookups.”
Darren pulled out a chair and sat.
The word sounded small enough to fit in a routine report.
“What does a lookup mean?”
“Someone asks about a client. I check manifest, time, dock.”
“And send it.”
“Yes.”
“One fifty. Sometimes three hundred.”
“Del died for three hundred credits,” Voran said.
Milo looked at him.
“I didn’t know they were going to attack.”
“Routes,” Sira said.
“What else?”
“Crew. Manifests. Times. I thought it was competition, cargo theft, debt collection.”
“You thought cargo theft didn’t involve the people moving it?” Renn asked.
Milo could not hold his gaze.
“I didn’t ask.”
“Who bought?” Darren said.
“An intermediary. Kess. Just Kess.”
“Canto?”
“I heard the name once.”
“The transfer to Renn?”
Milo shook his head.
“Not me. They asked for the employee list. I sent payroll data. I didn’t know what they’d do with it.”
Sira swore.
Renn reached for the transfer record and turned it toward Milo.
“My name was on what you sent?”
“Yes.”
“My account?”
Milo nodded.
Renn kept the display in front of him until Milo looked at it.
Darren turned the route records so Milo could read them.
“These two.”
Milo stared at the first, then the second.
He touched the edge of the display without picking it up.
“Yes.”
“You sent both?”
“Yes.”
Renn shifted on the cot.
Sira moved closer to the table, watching Milo’s face while Darren asked when Kess had requested each lookup.
The young man stumbled over the order of the requests and corrected himself.
Darren wrote down both versions rather than quietly choose the one that fitted.
“Which one is it?” Voran demanded.
“Let him finish.”
“I need the messages,” Milo said.
“I can show you. I don’t remember every time.”
Darren asked where the messages were.
Milo indicated his communicator.
Sira picked it up, but he said some had been deleted and began explaining the account screens too quickly for Darren to follow.
“Pell can check it,” Darren said.
“Keep it.”
Sira set the device on her side of the table.
Milo followed it with his eyes.
Renn closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he was looking at Voran rather than Milo.
Voran brought the blaster higher.
Milo pushed back against the chair.
“Use him,” Darren said.
“He killed my man.”
“He sold the information. He can still tell you who bought it.”
“Does that matter to Del?”
“No,” Darren said.
“It matters to the next crew you send out.”
Renn spoke from the cot.
“Let him answer.”
Voran looked toward him.
Whatever he had intended to say changed before it reached his mouth.
He lowered the weapon.
Darren asked for a few minutes with Milo.
Voran objected until Renn told him he wanted water and help getting back to his room, not another argument beside his bed.
Sira went with them.
She left the door partly open and stayed in the corridor while Voran helped Renn back to his room.
Without Voran in front of him, Milo lowered his shoulders and tried to ease the binding away from one wrist.
Darren brought a cup of water from the dispenser and set it on the table.
“Why?”
Milo laughed without humor.
“Money.”
“You were still losing money last night.”
His face changed.
“We watched you.”
“Then you know.”
“I saw you lose. I didn’t see how you started.”
Milo stared at his bound hands.
“I owed people. Then different people. Kess paid enough that I thought I could get out.”
“Did you?”
“Does this look out?”
Darren sat back.
Milo glanced toward the doorway, where Sira’s shadow crossed the floor, and dropped his eyes to the cup.
When he tried to lift it, water spilled over his fingers.
Darren steadied the base without loosening the binding.
“Del is still dead.”
“I know.”
“Renn was tortured.”
“I know.”
“Next time Kess contacts you, what does he expect?”
Milo looked up.
For the first time since entering the room, the question offered him something he could do besides defend what he had already done.
“Another lookup. If he needs one.”
“Then don’t invent a reason he suddenly needs one.”
Milo nodded too quickly.
Darren made him stop and listen.
“If you remember something differently, say so. Don’t keep agreeing because you think it gets you out of here.”
“And after?”
Darren looked toward the open strip of doorway.
“I can’t promise you after.”
Voran returned before Milo could ask again.
He stood over the table, waiting until the young man faced him.
“Milo works for us until I say otherwise.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. You can still die at the end.”
Milo went pale.
He began to ask something, then stopped when Voran looked at him.
Darren left the water within reach of his bound hands before getting up.
Milo waited until the others had moved away from the table to take it.
Voran asked when they could use him.
Milo had the cup against his mouth and could not see Darren shake his head.
“After Pell checks the messages,” Darren said.
“Tomorrow.”
Voran disliked the delay.
He accepted it only after Sira repeated that she was keeping the communicator until the records had been compared.
Milo lowered the cup and asked where he would sleep.
Voran pointed to the cot Renn had left.
By the time they had arranged for Milo to remain under watch and sent Pell the request, the lower-level night cycle had begun.
Advertisements dimmed, but the streets remained busy.
Sira bought two cups of bitter caf and handed one to Darren.
“You think he deserves to live?”
Darren took a careful drink.
“I think killing him leaves Kess somewhere we can’t find.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“I know.”
She watched the passing traffic.
“Voran will call it settled.”
“He didn’t sound settled.”
“He has an order to give. That’s close enough for him.”
Darren turned the cup between his hands.
Milo had tried to hold his the same way, but the binding had stopped him.
He had left it on when he went outside.
“What would you do?” he asked.
“Find out whether he’ll tell us the truth before trusting him with a lie.”
Sira took his empty cup with hers.
She would return the borrowed weapon to its case when they separated; for now he kept it while they crossed the level together.
Darren checked the communicator.
The tracker still marked the processing center.
Farther down the display was the address they had used to find Milo, and beneath it the empty space where he had meant to put the buyer’s destination.
He opened a message to Pell and wrote that they needed the records checked before Voran sent anyone out again.
Sira waited while he sent it.
Then she took the turn toward the clinic, and Darren followed her back to the man he had persuaded them to keep.
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Thanks for reading — and for supporting Darren’s increasingly questionable life choices.