Palpatine regards him. Rax cannot see the Emperor’s eyes, but he can certainly feel them. Sticking him like pins. Dissecting him to see what he’s made of. “My boy. My precious boy. Are you ready to be the Outcast? Are you prepared to become the Contingency should it come to that? There will be others you must call to your side.”
“I know. And I am ready.” I am ready to go home. Because that’s what this means, does it not? It means one day soon returning to the sands of Jakku. To the Observatory. To everything he hates, and yet to the place that harbors his destiny—and the destiny of the galaxy as a whole.
“Then go. Time is precious. A battle will soon be upon us.”
“You will win it, most assuredly.”
Another vicious smile. “One way or another, I will.”
This part of Taris is a wasteland, and Mercurial Swift moves through it like a rat slipping through bolt-holes. The bounty hunter clambers through the wreckage of an old habitation building, its apartments long shattered, the walls torn open to expose the mess of collapsed urban sprawl. Through the broken world, life tries to grow: creeping three-fingered vines and twisting spirals of slime-slick fungus. And though the ruination conceals it, people live here: They dwell, huddled up together in shipping containers and through crumbling hallways, hidden under the fractured streets and atop buildings so weakened they sway like sleepy drunks in even the softest wind.
His prey is here. Somewhere.
Vazeen Mordraw, a wilder girl who stole a caseload of ID cards from the Gindar Gang—cards that were themselves stolen from New Republic dignitaries. Cards that would allow anyone easy passage through the known worlds without triggering a closer look. The Gindar want the cards back. And as a special bonus, they want the girl, too.
Preferably alive. Dead if necessary.
Mercurial plans on the former. If only because it’ll be a lot easier to extract someone who can move around on her own two feet—carting a corpse over the wreckage of Taris sounds like a damn fine way to snap an ankle. And that would make this job unnecessarily harder.
There. Up ahead. Some scum-farmer kid stands in the shadow of a shattered wall, scraping sponge-moss off the stone, maybe to feed his family, maybe to sell. The boy—head shaved, dirt on his cheeks, his lower lip split as a scarmark indicating that he is an owned boy—startles and turns to run. But Swift calls after.
“Hey! Slow down, kid.” He shakes a small satchel at him. Credits tink as they jostle together. “I’m looking for someone.”
The kid doesn’t say anything, but he stops running, at least. Wary, he arches an eyebrow, and Mercurial takes that as a sign of interest. The bounty hunter taps the gauntlet at his wrist, and a hologram glimmers suddenly in the air above his arm. It’s an image of the girl, Vazeen.
“Seen her?”
“Maybe.”
“Don’t be cagey.” Again he shakes the credit bag. “Yes or no.”
The boy hesitates. “Yes.”
“Where?”
“Close.”
Yes. Mercurial knew she had to be here. The old Ithorian at the spaceport crawled out of his spice-sodden haze long enough to confirm that he knew the girl and that she would go to ground near her family. Her uncle lives here in the remains of the old Talinn district. (Swift is suddenly glad she doesn’t have family on the far side of the planet—there the wealthy live in massive towers, hypersecure, guarded by armies of private security.)
“How close?”
The boy’s eyes flit left and right. Like he’s not sure how to answer. Which leads Mercurial to suspect that the boy actually knows her. “I…”
“Kid. I’m going to either give you these credits, or I’m going to throw you out the hole in that wall over there. You can leave here with some extra currency in your pocket, or with two broken legs. Maybe even two broken arms.” Mercurial flashes his teeth in a sharp grin. “It’s a long way down.”
And still the boy hesitates. He’s chewing over his options. A heady, swamp-stink wind whips and whistles through the shattered hallway.
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Mercurial assures him. It’s mostly true. In his experience, people want to be selfish, but they need to feel like they’re being selfless while doing it. They want an excuse. He’s happy to help the boy feel good about doing bad if that’s what it takes. “Better I find her than someone else, trust me.”
There it is. The moment of acquiescence. The boy closes his eyes gently, a decision having been made. Finally he says: “She’s one building over. The old Palmyra foundry. Vazeen has a little…cubbyhole up there. A hiding place.”
“Congrats,” Mercurial says, flipping the satchel into the kid’s open palm. The boy stares down at it, greedy and eager. Too bad he doesn’t realize that the credits are barely worth their metal. Imperial currency has crashed hard, cratering with meteoric impact. Everyone knows that soon the Empire will be stardust—and then what?
That is a worry for another time.
The boy runs off.
Mercurial hunts.