Nal Hutta announced itself before the hauler entered atmosphere. The freighter’s sensors caught the planet’s gravitational profile a full minute earlier than they should have. The readings were disrupted by the same low, persistent Force-noise that had soaked the system for as long as Hutts had owned it. Cognus felt it in her teeth as the hauler slowed for descent. She had been here before, more times than was sensible to recall. She had killed here, and she had been hired here, and she had walked away from contracts that paid better than most lives and would have paid for hers had she stayed another hour. Returning as someone else’s associate was an unfamiliar shape.
The bay’s viewport showed the surface. Wet green and umber, broken by the dark scars of industrial sprawl that radiated from the cities like rot from old wounds. A thick yellow haze sat over the lowlands. The atmosphere was breathable only in the technical sense.
Zannah stood at the workbench in her trader’s greys, fastening the clasps of an outer coat that read as expensive but not ostentatious. The saber-staff had returned to her hip beneath the coat, hidden by the cut. The leather case from the cabin was nowhere visible.
“Nal Hutta does not respect cover identities,” Zannah said. She did not look up from the clasps. “It respects payment, position, and demonstrated willingness to inflict harm. The Omek name will get us through customs without inquiry. After that, the cover is decoration. Operate accordingly.”
“Yes, Master.”
“You will keep your hood up at all times in any populated district. Half the operators on this planet have either tried to hire the Huntress or have been hired against her. The other half know the name. We will not give them confirmation that the rumors of you in Allia Omek’s company are anything but rumors.”
Cognus inclined her head. The instruction did not surprise her. She had factored the visibility before they left Ambria and assumed the Master would say something close to this. That Zannah had said it anyway was itself information. The Master had decided this part of the operation required explicit instruction.
“I have brought a hood,” Cognus said.
“Wear it. Do not remove it indoors unless I tell you. Pelu will recognize you regardless. He will not say.”
So Pelu was the contact. Cognus had used the Sullustan twice, years apart, on contracts neither of them had spoken about afterward. He had been competent and discreet and expensive. That Allia Omek’s broker on this planet was the same broker Cognus had used was either coincidence or the kind of overlap that suggested Allia’s network and the Huntress’s had been quietly intersecting for years before anyone alive on either side had noticed.
“Yes, Master.”
The hauler’s descent angle steepened. Cognus drew the dark hood from the inside of her cloak and arranged it so the horns of her cranial points sat clean beneath the fabric. The shape was wrong for true concealment. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Iktotchi physiology would still read her. The casual eye would not register her species at a glance, and casual eyes were the eyes that mattered in places where attention itself was a transaction.
The hauler set down at a freight pad on the outskirts of Bilbousa. Customs cleared the manifest in four minutes, three credits passing under a counter the inspector pretended not to see. Allia Omek and her named associate were granted a fourteen-day visit and the standard list of warnings about which districts a sensible visitor avoided. Zannah accepted the warnings with polite distraction. Cognus said nothing.
They walked into the city.
Bilbousa rose around them in layers. Hutt residential up top, sealed against the haze by tinted environmental domes. Commercial middle, raucous and pungent, thick with vendors and operators of a hundred species speaking eight different trade pidgins. Below that, industrial works and the lower districts.
Zannah moved through the middle level the way a moderately wealthy trader on a long route would move. Cognus walked half a step behind and to her left, which was the position the cover assigned her and also the position from which she could best read the crowd. The crowd produced what she had expected. Two stalls she suspected of watching them. Three faces she recognized and did not acknowledge. A Devaronian fixer she had once turned down for a job she had been right to turn down, who now ran a successful protection arrangement two streets east. None of them recognized her under the hood.
Zannah did not ask directions. She did not need them. Cognus did not need them either. They walked in the silence of two professionals navigating the same city by independent memory, arriving by minute adjustments at the same destination.
After perhaps twenty minutes she stopped at a recessed doorway between a spice merchant and a shop that sold chained processors of indeterminate provenance. Cognus had used the door twice. The contact plate had been replaced once in the years between her last visit and this one; she registered the upgrade and said nothing.
Zannah pressed her palm against the contact plate, waited, and the door slid open.
The room beyond was quieter than the street and smelled faintly of damp paper. A Sullustan sat behind a desk made from the casing of a decommissioned cargo lifter, his fingers working at three datapads simultaneously. He did not look up as they entered.
“Allia.”
“Pelu.”
“Three years, four months.”
“Three years, five.”
The Sullustan’s fingers stilled. He looked up for the first time, took both women in with a single sweep of his large dark eyes, and produced an expression that was not quite a smile.
“My calendar is generous to old clients. Sit.”
Zannah sat in the single chair that faced the desk. Cognus remained standing at her Master’s shoulder, hood drawn close, in the position the room expected of an associate whose status had not been declared. Pelu’s gaze flicked to her once, held a beat longer than necessary, and returned to Zannah without comment. The recognition had occurred. The acknowledgment had not.
Allia Omek’s associate was the Huntress. Pelu had just learned it, would not be told, and would not under any circumstance ever speak of it. He returned to his work.
“I require what you have on a Dark Jedi named Set Harth,” Zannah said. “He has been in the lower city for some period. His arrangements would be private but not invisible. I do not require approach paths. I require last known address.”
“Set Harth.”
“Set Harth.”
Pelu’s fingers resumed their work, on a different datapad now, slower. He searched without comment for nearly a minute. The hum of his desk’s small cooling fan was the only sound in the room.
“I have him on a residence in the Cesko sector. A property leased through three intermediaries to an alias I have correlated with him on two earlier occasions. The lease has been current for fourteen months. He has not been seen at the property for nine days.”
“Nine days.”
“He travels. Or he has been preparing to travel. The window is ambiguous.”
Zannah considered this in silence. Cognus watched the Master’s hands. They rested on the arms of the chair without tension. Whatever calculation the silence carried, it did not show in her body.
“The address,” Zannah said.
Pelu transferred a coordinate string to a small chip and slid it across the desk. Zannah collected it without examining it.
“Payment is the standard arrangement.”
“Doubled, given the subject.”
Pelu nodded once. His fingers were already moving again before Zannah had risen from the chair.
They were back on the street within four minutes of entering. Pelu had recognized Allia at the door. He had recognized the Huntress at her shoulder. He had doubled the price for Set Harth without negotiation, which meant the name was unwelcome to him. He had not asked Cognus’s name, which meant Allia had told him not to.
The middle level had thickened in the time they had spent inside. Cognus pulled the hood lower against a passing cluster of Trandoshans whose attention drifted toward her, paused, and moved on. Two of the four had hired her on separate occasions. Neither had paid in full. She did not look back.
“Cesko sector is on the lower platforms,” Zannah said as they walked. “Three transfer lifts down from this level. I will not approach the property directly. I do not yet know what he has installed at it, and I do not intend to learn through the front door.”
“You wish me to look.”
“I wish you to walk past it. Once. In the manner of someone who has business in Cesko and is passing through on the way to that business. You will not stop. You will not turn your head. You will tell me what you see and what you sense, and I will decide from there.”
“Yes, Master.”
Zannah named a small cantina at the edge of Cesko where she would wait. She gave Cognus the coordinate string, a route around two checkpoints she did not wish recorded, and a window of time within which the walk should be completed. Then she turned and moved off toward a different lift, and Cognus, after a measured count of thirty seconds, moved toward her own.
The change came on her in the lift.
She had not expected it. She had not, in fact, registered the absence of it across the months since Ambria as an absence at all. But the lift descended, the platforms above slid out of sight, and as the distance grew between her and the Master her foresight cleared.
It cleared the way a window cleared in rain when the wipers caught the right rhythm. The rolling, layered uncertainty that had attended every reading she had attempted on the hauler simply resolved. She reached out, lightly, toward the next several minutes of her own life, and the reading came back the way readings had always come back before Ambria. One thread. One arc of likely event. The cantina, the walk, the residence, a turn at a specific intersection where two factory workers would stand in her path and step aside without looking at her. Clean.
She stepped off the lift on the lower platform with the reading still resolving forward.
Cesko sector was as she remembered it, only wetter. Drainage from the upper platforms collected here in long streams that ran down the central avenue. The lighting was sodium-yellow and too dim for comfort. Workers moved through the streets in the heavy, deliberate way of people who had been on shift too long. The smell was processed effluent and old grease and a third thing she had a name for and chose not to use it.
She walked the route Zannah had given her.
The residence was a four-story block midway down a side avenue, faced in dark plascrete and shuttered against the haze. It had no signage. The windows were the small, recessed kind that suggested someone inside cared more about angle of fire than about light. A narrow service alley ran along the north wall. The two factory workers Cognus had foreseen were exactly where she had foreseen them. They stepped aside without looking at her.
She did not slow as she passed. She catalogued what her eyes and her senses gave her in the seconds she had. Four security points she could identify from the street. Two she could not but suspected. A faint Force-pressure at the second-floor windows that suggested either an artifact of significance or a practitioner currently in residence. The stillness of a building that had not been entered or exited in days. She did not extend her senses further. The instruction had been to walk past. She walked past.
At the corner she turned right, descended two more blocks at a steady pace, and circled back to the cantina by a different route.
Zannah was at a table in the back, untouched cup of caf in front of her, watching the door without watching the door.
Cognus sat across from her.
“The residence shows nine days of disuse on the surface, consistent with what Pelu reported. A practitioner-grade Force signature at the second floor that did not appear stale. Either he left an artifact behind, or he is inside and chose not to register on my approach.”
Zannah’s mouth moved into something that was not quite the expression from the hauler.
“Then we have what we needed. He is there.”
“You are certain.”
“He left an artifact at his front window for me to find. He did not assume I would send my apprentice to walk past.”
Cognus considered the implication. Set Harth had not run. He had set a marker — a Force-presence calibrated for someone reading at Zannah’s level. It would register as the practitioner’s continued residence to a casual sweep. To anyone who looked carefully it would register as something else, perhaps an invitation, perhaps a challenge. He had assumed Zannah would come, and he had assumed she would come herself.
“He is waiting for you.”
“He is waiting for the version of me that walked off Ambria.” Zannah set the cup down without drinking from it. “He will discover that the version that arrived is not the one he prepared for.”
She rose. Cognus rose with her.
“We do not approach tonight. I want the residence watched for a full standard day before we move. Pelu will arrange it. After that, we go.”
“Yes, Master.”
They walked out of the cantina into Cesko’s yellow light, and the lower city absorbed them as it absorbed everything that did not insist on being seen.