In time, shipping had polluted the lake’s water, the wealthy had mostly fled, and the city had begun a slow spiral into decrepitude. The once grand mansions on the shore of the lake had been sold off to developers and converted to cheap housing. The wealth belt had become slums and loading docks.

Zeerid had grown up in the slums, smelling the acrid, rotting odor of the lake every day of his childhood. He had provided better for his daughter, but not by much.

The deep, bass boom of a horn carried across the city, the call of one of the enormous flatbed cargo ships that moved goods and people across the lake and up and down the river that fed it. Zeerid smiled when he heard it. He’d awakened to that sound almost every day of his childhood.

He stepped into the tumult, feeling oddly at home and very much looking forward to seeing his daughter.

FROM THE HAIRCUT, muscular build, and upright posture, Vrath made the pilot as former military. Vrath, too, was ex-military, having served in the Imperial infantry.

The man smiled as he walked and Vrath found that he liked the man immediately.

Too bad he’d probably have to kill him.

Holding the nanodroid solution dispenser in a slack arm, Vrath knifed through the crowd toward the pilot. He cut in front of him, slowing him, just another body in the press, and squeezed a dollop of the suspension on the ground at their feet.

Vrath pasted on a fake grin and held up his other hand in a frantic wave to no one.

“Rober! Rober, over here!”

He hurried off as if to meet someone but watched the pilot sidelong throughout.

The pilot never even looked down, did not seem to notice Vrath at all. Suspecting nothing, the man stepped in the oily suspension Vrath had left on the floor before him. Others stepped in it afterward, but that would not matter. In moments all traces of it were gone.

Vrath fell in behind the pilot and took the targeted nano-activator from his pack.

ZEERID SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SMILING, and certainly should not have been at ease. He knew, as he always did, that he was one mistake, one unlucky break away from someone discovering Arra and using her against him. Or worse, harming her. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

He could not let himself get sloppy.

He hopped on the back of a droid-driven cargo cart and rode it until he neared one of the port’s exits. The spaceport and all the vehicles in it rusted in the moisture-rich air of Yinta Lake; the brown smears on walls and in corners looked like bloodstains.