The moment the door closed and the locks clicked into place, he flipped the switch in his brain. Zeerid the father fled before Z-man the soldier and smuggler.

The man at the park had been all wrong, from his hair, to his clothes, to the coldness in his eyes. He could have been nobody. Or he could have been somebody.

Zeerid decided that he would linger in the apartment building for a while, out of sight, just to be sure Nat and Arra were safe.

He took station on their floor and settled in. He hadn’t done sentry duty since he was a new recruit. Felt good, though.

VRATH SAT in the aircar taxi on the street outside the decrepit apartment building. The smell of rotten fish and dirty lake filled the air. He watched for a long time, monitoring Zeerid’s movements with the tracker. Zeerid had stopped moving. Perhaps he shared an apartment there with Nat and Arra.

He gave it a while longer, then decided to take a look. He paid the droid driver, hopped out of the aircar, dodged the few ramshackle speeders and the public speeder bus that flew low through the street, and headed across to the apartment building.

ZEERID’S EYES ADJUSTED to the dim lights that flickered intermittently in the hallway. The door to Nat and Arra’s flat was about halfway down the corridor. There was no other way in or out of the apartment. All he needed to do was take a boresighting down the hall.

The far end of the hallway ended in a cracked glass window. The near side ended in the lift and a door to the stairs. Other than scaling the building from the outside, the lift and the stairs were the only way onto the fourth floor. He could cover both.

He thought about just lingering in the hallway and putting the muzzle of his blaster into the belly of anyone who looked at him sideways. But that wouldn’t do. He did not want to draw too much attention to himself and he did not want to cause a scene unnecessarily. He finally decided to take station on the emergency stairwell to the side of the lift. He propped the door open so he could see the lift, the hall, and the stairs.

A good field of fire, he decided.

He took the E-9 blaster pistol—small, compact, but with decent power—held it in his front jacket pocket, and waited.

Minutes passed, turned to half an hour, to an hour, and he began to think his paranoia had ill served him. The building did not see a lot of foot traffic. A near-obsolete utility droid came up the creaky lift and vacuumed the floor, ignoring Zeerid altogether. When it completed its sweep, it retired to a utility closet next to the lift.