CHAPTER ONE
The Daughter
I was lost.
Frustrated, I checked the directions on my datapad again, turning the minimap around to try to make sense of this maze. It kept freezing, the piece of junk. I’d spent way too long trying to navigate my way through the complicated layers of Coruscant, a planetwide city made like a thousand-tiered cake, to find Baelor’s Baubles and Bibelots. I was supposed to be back on the ship by now, before anyone noticed me missing. Kotti could hold off my dad only so long, and I’d already wasted all my time lost in Spindlehub Square, trying to find this place. I was so close—probably.
Kotti had warned me that my stubbornness was both endearing and exhausting. “You’re like a starving rancor when you’re after something,” she’d once commented, sore and tired after traipsing through an entire market in Mos Espa on Tatooine, searching for a stall selling the best dustcrepes. “You’re either going to get it, oryou’re going to die trying and bring everyone else down with you.”
I had decided to take that as a compliment then, but now I was second-guessing myself. And it made me nervous. On the ship, I knew everything. I knew the routines, I knew the itineraries, I knew every nook and cranny—
Out here, everything was new.
It’s good for you to get out and see things, I told myself to quell my anxiety.You’re being silly. What’s the worst that can happen?
My minimap told me I was very close to Baelor’s Baubles and Bibelots. It should be right down the next shady alleyway. (It wasalwaysa shady alleyway.) If Dad knew I wasthisdeep in Coruscant, he’d never let me leave the ship again.
A message pinged on my device. It was from Kotti.
Whereareyou??
I decided to call her instead on my comlink and took it out of my oversize leather jacket. “I’m almost there, Ko, no worries.”
Static came over the link, and then her voice punched through with sharp panic. “Almost there?You’ve got to be kriffin’kiddingme, Ardent,” she whined.
“The map is really confusing.”
She groaned. “Your dad’s getting suspicious, and if he finds out that I’m helping you, my job’s totallyskiffed. I said you were in the ’fresher, but I can’t keep him away for much longer.”
“I’ll be back soon, I promise,” I replied, squeezing between two large taupe beings and down the shady alleyway in question. As long as my dad didn’t notice me missing, everything would be perfectly fine. “I could be taking a long shower.”
“You’ve already been in there twenty minutes.”
I winced. “Then tell him I’m on my cycle.”
“Areyou?”
“I mean”—I thought about the timing—“soon?”
She gave another hard sigh through the comlink. “You owe me.”
“I’ll buy you a juja-cake from Gharnie’s,” I promised.
“Twoof them,” she replied, and I agreed because I had a feeling I wasn’t as close to the shop as I’d thought I was, judging by the dead end I had just encountered. “Just hurry back. Things feel weird.”
I rolled my eyes, because she said that about everything. Coruscant had one of the many ports we frequented, and Dad wouldn’t dock at any port in the galaxy that wasn’t 100 percent safe. He was allergic to danger. Had been since I was born.
I’d inherited some of that, I thought.
This level made me nervous. If I weren’t looking for the shop, I’dgladlyreturn to the ship immediately. Whoknew what sort of puddles I was stepping in, or people I was brushing up against, or smog I was inhaling—
I tucked my comlink into my jacket pocket again and retraced my steps, setting down the next dark alleyway. This one looked promising. “And once you get this, Ardent, you never have to leave the ship again,” I promised myself.
Neon lights blinked above me, their reflections bright in the puddles at my feet. I skipped over the deeper-looking wet spots and side-stepped trash as I followed the directions on my datapad. Was ruining my only good boots worth coming all the way out here to find a romance serial?
Yes—I had it on good authority that Baelor’s had the rare last installment ofUnder the Tan-Tan Sun, a serial I’d been looking for the past few years. It was almost impossible to find anymore because the series was close to twenty years old, but a guest last tour had suggested I look at Baelor’s.
So here I was.