Third Chances

Chapter 1

Written by the Nar Shaddaa Knight

Gods, I'm a whore.

Race had been shaving for fifteen minutes and still hadn't finished. He didn't want to leave the refresher. He'd been boondoggled into staying the night with the girl he'd been with, and he wasn't particularly excited about having to face the glowy goodmornings and awkward goodbyes. He'd woken up as dawn spilled in through the window of her upper-level hotel room and had walled himself in the 'fresher before she'd followed suit. He'd showered, pulled on his pants from the night before, and begun to shave with the complimentary razor he'd found in the mirror-cabinet above the sink.

He didn't know when it had changed into something embarrassing and awkward. This was his life. But somehow it had, and to him, it was sneaking and insidious, catching up to him and twisting into something juvenile and embarrassing...

And the only reason he could think of for feeling that way was that he was getting old.

He scraped the last bit of stubble off of his face and rinsed the razor under the water, watching the tiny red-black specks swirl down the drain. He heard a few thumps through the wall and ran a brown-spotted hand through his hair; the girl was awake. He'd have to go out and face the music sooner or later. He shut the tap off, wiped his face on a towel, put on his best grin, and opened the door.

The girl was getting dressed, and he was blessed with a view of her topless from the side. He remembered why he'd tried to get back to her hotel in the first place. He shook his head and made his way over to his side of the bed, looking through the tousled sheets for his shirt.

She turned around and smiled at him. She was a Human woman, probably traveling through. She didn't seem soft enough to be an infrequent visitor, and Hutt Space hadn't exactly been a highlight of the galaxy for a few thousand years. He guessed she was probably a smuggler. "Hey."

"Hey," he said, turning the grin up a notch. "Hope I didn't wake you. I've gotta be leaving soon for work." At least sometimes I don't actually have to lie, he thought.

"Awww, too bad. I was hoping you might stay for a little while longer..." She strode over to him and helped him with his shirt, fastening the closures for him. She ran her hands over his chest, leaning close to his ear. "I bet they broke the mold when they made you." He felt her hand stick a piece of flimsi into his shirt pocket. He thought that she would definitely need a lot of work if she ever wanted to be a pickpocket, or even discreet. "Drop me a line if you're ever lonely. I come through here every once in a while."

"Will do, sweetheart." He nipped at her neck and planted a parting kiss there. He moved away from her and picked up his bantha hide jacket from the back of a chair. "Catch you later," he said with a wink.

He left the room and threw the scrap of flimsi into the nearest trash can, walking down the hall to the turbolift. No way, he thought. Never again.

Race walked through the dark streets of the lower levels of Nar Shaddaa. It was nothing like the girl's top-level hotel. The path to Dandy's garage was a narrow, winding canyon of filth. It was no different than any other side street on Nar Shaddaa - it was run by the Hutts, and the residents had long ago learned that if you wanted your street cleaned, you cleaned it yourself. The same rules applied to petty criminals, thugs, and psychopaths. If you wanted them taken care of, you took care of them yourself. Unless the offense had involved a crime lord being cheated out of his money, there were no consequences. It was anarchy in motion. It was home.

Race had met Dandy when he was twelve and living on the streets. Three members of the Razor Rens were hot on his heels after he had relieved them of their wallets. He had ducked into Dandy's garage a nanosecond before they had rounded the corner onto Maroj Way. The bright holographic sign that announced 'DANDY'S GARAGE DAMMIT!' shone like a heavenly beacon through the darkness. He'd dove into the garage, hid behind a stack of crates, and watched in awe as Dandy single-handedly drove the Rens off with a drunken, drugged hallucination about mynocks, cocktails, and free speech. Then, without missing a beat, he offered Race a job for three hundred credits a week. The only hitch was that Race had to bunk in the "mynock den" with the nonexistent mynocks. Race had more than earned his pay over the years: using his talent with numbers to balance the books (Dandy couldn't have cared less about the details of credit flow); drawing in hundreds of new customers (among them, scores of pretty young female spacers); and securing funding to expand when the garage became too cramped to handle the influx of new clients. His name was all but officially on the business title. Through all of his rising and falling fortunes, he still called the garage home, almost twenty years later.

Dandy once described his eventual vision of the garage as having a Corellian freighter made entirely out of candy wrappers (as a statement on corporations and commercialism, as he put it), a full restaurant serving traditional Nar Shaddaan fare, and a holographic fun park to top it all off. Race had hated to shoot down Dandy's plan, informing him that the garage, although busy, didn't nearly bring in enough credits to support that kind of endeavor. Dandy had been adamant that they could afford it and had Race calculate a full projection of their earnings for the next five years to prove it to him. When Race had finished and informed him that the project would put them in the red by almost four million credits, Dandy's response had been "Well, sithspit," and he'd started on another vial of ryll. The only remnant of Dandy's grand plan was the holographic marquee above the entry docks that advertised repair droids doing the Serrocan Shuffle.

Race walked past the boogying holograms into the garage -- right into Dandy, his mud-brown eyes wide with one of several possible illegal substances.

"Where've you been, boy?!" A deathstick bobbed precariously in the corner of Dandy's mouth as he spoke. "Got a Nubian cruiser in that's been from one end of the galaxy to the other. Bound to have picked up some demons along the way. It's making the mynocks restless -- time for you to suit up!"

Race shook his head. "Don't blow your thrusters! I just got in. I'll be out in a minute."

Race rounded the corner into his room -- an oversized cargo container refitted for what passed poorly as a living space -- and hit the switch for the ceiling glowpanels. The light flickered on, and a loud groan soon followed. Race looked at his bed and saw a large, humanoid shape underneath the sheets. He kicked back the sheet with the toe of his boot to reveal a dark-haired, overweight Kiffar. Race had known the man just as long as he had known Dandy, but only referred to him as "the lawyer". He had been told the man's name on several occasions, but Dandy only referred to him as variations on "the lawyer" and "my lawyer", so Race had learned to follow suit. Race had questioned a spaceship mechanic's need for a lawyer once, as a boy, but had soon realized it was all a part of the grand scheme of Dandy's own characteristic mix of genius and madness.

"Fraggin' light in my eyes, man, that's cruel. That's really cruel."

"I should've known you were in here. I thought I noticed a slime trail out on the floor." He crossed the room to a set of reclaimed storage shelves. "What's really cruel is that smell you always leave in my bed." He heard a crunch under his foot and looked down to find the crushed remnants of an empty ryll vial. Figures.

"I wash the blankets," The Lawyer mumbled.

"All the soap in the fraggin' galaxy couldn't get that Kiffy smell out of my sheets." He flipped through a pile of folded clothes on one of the lower shelves, looking for a jumpsuit. He looked back at The Lawyer. The Lawyer's eyes were closed, and he had fallen back into his ryll haze.

Race leaned up on his tiptoes, quickly taking inventory of the contents of the top shelf. His collection was undisturbed -- a battered metal box, pazaak cards, and a hide-bound book made out of actual flimsi. The book had seen better years. The title lettering was inlaid with Corellian glassglow which had been chipped in the hands of its various owners. What was left of it shone and glittered in intermittent spots under the light. As seemingly innocent as it was, on Nar Shaddaa, owning a book implied one owned a somewhat functional brain. Being suspected of possessing intelligence had made more than one person a target before.

Besides, he would have rathered it not be public knowledge that he owned an antique book of Corellian fairy tales.

Satisfied that nothing had been disturbed by The Lawyer, he stripped himself of his jacket and trousers, pulled on a jumpsuit, and headed out onto the garage floor.

The Spacers' Lane was one of the most well traveled bars in the Corellian Sector. Known for its potent drinks and its busy sabaac and pazaak tables, it was popular among locals and visitors alike. It was the perfect place to meet beings of all different makes and models...and as much as Race enjoyed meeting new and beautiful women, he couldn't stand the thought of having to be personable and charming that night.

He'd come here an hour after his shift at the garage had ended, hoping a few hands of sabaac would cheer him up. It didn't. His luck had escaped him that night and had set him back three hundred credits. Then he'd moved onto the bar, hunching over a drink while life moved around him. He liked the bartender here tonight...didn't ask questions, didn't try to make small talk...just kept supplying the drinks that would hopefully drown his awful mood. It wasn't a particularly busy night, and he was able to enjoy his drinks in solitude.

For a while, at least, until a clawed green hand slammed a down a drink in front of him. He turned to face the owner of the limb. "Lord Evvor sendssss hisss regardssss," the Trandoshan said, indulging himself in his species' own version of a chuckle - a twisted snarl. "He saysss you were a top draw. You made him lotssss of creditssss."

Evvor the Hutt, one of the many Lords of the Smugglers' Moon, had seemed to make Race his own personal experiment on the bruiseability of Human pride over the years. He had taken Race under his wing when he was an insignificant teenage boy, had gone out of his way to give Race and his business partner Bruck a loan when they went into the shipping business. And then, when Evvor decided he wanted his money sooner than the original agreement, Bruck had cut and run with their tiny fleet of ships, leaving Race to take the fall. Evvor offered Race two options to work off his debt: work as one of his mercenaries, like the Trandoshan and his buddies, or as a 'companion' working out of the Hutt-owned casinos on Ord Mantell.

Race had chosen Ord Mantell.

"You guys are real funny," he said. "Let's see how funny I still am when I kick your asses to Coruscant."

The Trandoshan hissed a laugh again and returned to his table. He wasn't alone: a Rodian, a few Humans, and a Twi'lek, all dressed in Evvor's colors were waiting for him. Race stared at the men as they rose to their feet. "Let's go," one of the Humans said. "It's time anyways." They headed for the door, passing into the shadows of the street through a narrow hallway. Race, ever curious, wondered what they were referring to... then one patron in particular walked past them, into the bar, and his spirits rose, if even slightly.

Someone once described Nalani Moh as jiggling sweetberry gelatin on stilettos, and Race didn't think it was too far off the mark. She was short for her species, and made up for the error by wearing fifteen centimetre heels nearly every hour of every day. Not that it mattered much...with Nalani's dewy pink skin and her petite, curvaceous figure, not many of her customers were dissatisfied on account of something so trivial as height. She was still wearing her work outfit: bikini top, tiny ruffled skirt, and thigh-high stockings, all in matching shades of white that matched her white hair, and a belted black jacket that brushed her blushing thighs. She had hastily pulled her hair back into short, bristling pigtails in her usual off-work hairstyle, emphasizing her youth even further. Nalani made her living off of her very youthful looks, indulging sentinents from across Nar Shaddaa in their illicit fantasies.

She spotted Race and made her way towards him, waving and smiling. "Hi!" she said, sliding onto the stool beside him and crossing her legs with a flourish of her tiny skirt. She was typical Nalani, all sunshine and positivity -- until she got close to him and saw the graveyard of empty glasses littering the bar in front of him.

"Oh, you're too Human. Cheer up, will you? You're making me nauseous just sitting here." Nalani and Race both shared Zeltron heritage, to varying degrees: the lightning-quick metabolisms, the empathic abilities, the pheromones. Nalani was full-blooded and was born and raised on Zeltron; while Race was, at the most, a half-breed, and had only visited the homeworld on "refueling stops" during his shipping days. One of the few doctors Race had ever visited had told him that he was mostly Human and Zeltron...with a few "interesting", unidentifiable racial gene sequences thrown in. Race suspected it was those unknown heritages he had to thank for the patterned gold-brown spots on his arms, his chest, and elsewhere.

"Cheer up?" he laughed. "Sweetheart, I'm an almost thirty year-old mutt with no home, no family, no money, and no luck."

"But you've got luck! It comes and goes, but you do have it."

He was starting to get upset. "You're not listening to me."

"Yes I am!" She was laughing now. "You're so overdramatic! You've got the garage. You've got me and Dandy and that lawyer guy he keeps around. You've got enough money to pay for this booze!"

"I'm a gutter baby, Nalani. Don't you understand?"

"I'd rather be a gutter baby than have my stupid family to deal with. Have you ever seen a family gathering on Zeltros?"

Somehow, he got the impression that she didn't understand. She had a good life here. She was well off and well known, doing something that was natural and native to her and brought her respect among her people.

He turned back to the bar and buried his face in his drink.

"Poor thing," she moaned, putting her hand on his leg and leaning into him. As immune to Nalani's pheromones as Race was, he found Nalani's advances hard to resist...and even more so when her hand wandered into his inner thigh, stroking the sensitive flesh there. "Why don't we head towards my place..." she purred, "and I'll do my best to cheer you up...?"

"Not tonight," he said, seizing her arm by the wrist. "I'm not in the mood."

"Race? Race Edinn? Are you in there?" She leaned closer, to put a hand on his forehead -- it was burning hot, but no more so than usual -- and got a whiff of his breath, which right then, smelled like it could melt durasteel. "What have you been DRINKING?"

He raised his drink to his mouth. "Tatooine Sunburns," he mumbled into the glass.

She looked around the graveyard of glasses and did a quick head count. "Ten?"

"I'm on a mission," he said, finishing off number eleven.

"I'll join you, then!" She gestured to the bartender. "Another Tatooine Sunburn over here, please!"

"Nalani," he said, turning his stool to face her, "I just kinda wanna be alone tonight-"

That was a mistake, giving her access. She climbed onto him and straddled his waist inside of a second, stroking the nape of his neck with glossed fingernails. "Racey-"

"I said cut it out!" He grabbed her by her waist and slammed her back down on her own seat. Her arm flew out in an attempt to catch herself and she knocked several of the glasses off the bar, shattering them all on the floor.

"What is wrong with you tonight?!" she gasped, straightening out her scant clothes.

"You wouldn't understand," he said, on his feet, digging through his pockets for money.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you think you're better than me? You always get like this. Race Edinn, up on his high tauntaun--"

"It's been nice, Nalani, but if I wanted verbal degradation and a tease, there's plenty of places I can pay for something like that-"

"You're ALWAYS going to be like this. Miserable Race! You're never going to be anything. You look down on everybody as if you've got something to be proud of. You're a piece of Nar Shaddaa gutter trash like the rest of us. Get over it!"

"Thanks for the pep talk." He slammed enough credits on the bar to cover his drinks and the broken glasses, took the Tatooine Sunburn meant for Nalani, and headed for the street. "See you around."

He didn't know where he was going. He didn't have a goal in mind, besides total functional oblivion. He finished Nalani's drink rather quickly and indulged his current need for violence by throwing it into the ground and watching it erupt into a smattering of shattered glass. The twelve sunburns did nothing for him, besides making him have to piss like an odupiendo after a particularly long race. He took care of that need by ducking into a back alley to relieve himself on a lonely trash heap, and then ducked into the nearest liquor store to take care of the intoxication need.

He emerged triumphant, five minutes later, with a liter of methanol. It was the only substance he knew of that could overtake his powerful metabolism. Sure, it could cause blindness, but he was willing to take that risk if it meant getting away from his life for a few hours.

Unbelievable, he thought, thinking back to Nalani. Unbelievable. He took a swig out of the bottle and tucked it away into his jacket as he passed a few citizens on the street.

He stumbled around the Corellian Sector of the city. He thought about going to another bar, but it was getting late, and he doubted they'd serve him anyway. He thought about taking the trip up to the surface to watch the ships fly in and out, but decided against that, too: the thought of watching other people make their escapes from the Smugglers' Moon was too depressing. And then, the inevitable: look for some company for the night -- but that would be admitting defeat to Nalani.

He checked his chrono. The morning shift at the garage began in only a few hours. He cursed himself and began the long trip back home. Nothing like working with heavy machinery on three hours sleep.

He rounded a corner and started down the long enclosed ramp down to the next level. He kept his unoccupied hand free in case he needed to go for the knife in his pocket. This was the Rens' territory, and a few of them still held exception to him. The Rens liked to take advantage of enclosed spaces.

And it sounded like several of them were doing right at that moment, further down the tunnel. He heard blaster fire and ducked behind a stack of discarded crates. The bottle of booze slipped out of his hand and shattered on the ground. He cursed.

There was laughter, and then silence, as the thugs moved further down the tunnel, away from him. Race slowly made his way down the rest of the deserted ramp, giving the Rens enough time to move on. He saw a pair of legs on the ground, and moved forward to help the downed being, careful to make sure he wasn't being trailed.

He knelt down next to the fallen form. It was a woman, collapsed on her side. She was wearing a strange outfit...a short gray skirt, thigh-high boots, a skimpy gray top, and a wide grey collar over her shoulders -- and lots of belts and straps. The outfit made Race wonder briefly if she was one of Nalani's colleagues. Her skin was chalk-white, and she was bald but for a stripe of black hair in a long mohawk.

"What happened?!" His eyes turned down to the cluster of blaster wounds in her stomach, and he shuddered. Whoever had done this had meant business. "Who did this to you?"

"Doesn't matter," she rasped, in accented Huttese. "What matters..."

Race looked down. She was pressing something into his hand. He took it and put it in his pocket to cease her struggling, and put his arms underneath her to lift her into his arms. "I'm taking you to a doctor. You're going to be fine-"

A wheezing, gurgling laugh came from her throat. She smiled through the mask of gore she wore on her face. Race couldn't understand why this was so funny. She pressed a bloody hand on his mouth, and whispered something in a language Race couldn't understand. It was strange. The whole gesture felt...religious to him, ritualized, like a blessing. He felt the need to say something to her, as silly as it seemed. "Oh...thanks," he said, mentally wincing at himself.

Her eyes slid closed and her head tilted to the side. "No thanks. I'm sorry," she whispered. And that was it. Her last breath crawled out of her chest, her windpipe collapsing the sound into something ghastly and gruesome.

He felt sick. The Zeltron empathic receptors in his patchwork brain made sure of that. He felt guilt from her: the horrible, heavy gut taste of guilt, assaulting him in smaller and smaller waves until it just...faded away. She was gone, dead. It wasn't the first time it had happened, someone dying in front of him...he'd experienced it too many times to be disturbed by it, or so he was told..but every time, without fail, he still was. He wondered if he was too idealistic, or just stupid. Nalani's words rung in his head. You're too Human.

He found a comlink on the woman's body and used it to call the police. "I found a body down on Ariva Street. You might want to check it out."

He didn't wait for the police. What was the point? The majority of what passed for police here were on one crime lord's payroll or another, and from the look of her body, it wasn't a random crime. There would be no justice for her. And if they thought he'd seen too much, they'd shut him up, too.

He hit his bed feeling more miserable than he had in a very long time.

Race woke the next morning with a pounding headache. The Lawyer performing a wake-up call didn't help. "Hey Race, Dandy's outside having a fit. Think he took too much spice. You better go outside and calm him down, he ain't listening to me and he's threatening to shoot some people on the street."

Race sighed and pulled on a jumpsuit to his waist. "I'm coming." He kicked off a sheet and padded barefoot out to the garage on his speckled feet, keeping his half-closed eyes peeled for anything sharp on the floor. Just like The Lawyer said, Dandy was having a fit. He was outside of the garage, around the corner of the main loading dock door, screaming. "You're upsetting the mynocks! Go home, you sithspitting bastards! If you still want free speech and cocktails, you'll go!"

"Dandy, take it easy," Race said. "Remember: your pills." He rounded the corner, rubbing sleep out of eyes--

--and walked into a veritable sea of people. If he had been half-asleep before, he wasn't anymore. There had to have been hundreds of people...some humanoid, some not; some dressed normally, others in strange robes that concealed their faces; some carrying strange, old-fashioned lanterns in the perpetual darkness of the lower levels. A murmur of languages both understandable and alien to Race's ears rippled through the crowd upon his appearance. "It's him," he heard over the din. "Our savior," whispered another.

"Ohhh...kayyyy," Race said. He took Dandy by the arm and led him back inside, hitting the garage door controls with his elbow. The door slid shut.

"What was that about, my boy?" Dandy asked. "Are those loud bastards your friends?!"

"I don't know," Race said, blinking. And then he remembered the night before: the dead woman, her desperate dying words...the strange alien phrase that sounded like a blessing, and the thing she had shoved into his pocket. He took a look out a peephole and saw the crowd dispersing. What the hell? he wondered. "Just uh, just go calm down," he said, patting Dandy's shoulder. "Sit down and have a cigarra. I'll be out in a few minutes."

He walked through the garage and into the storage rooms, stopping at his cot and his shelves. He picked up his discarded pants from the night before, reaching into the pockets. He pulled out a necklace and the woman's ID.

The necklace was nothing remarkable. It was hard to even call it a necklace...necklace implied fancy jewelry (in his mind, anyway) and this was not jewelry. 'A piece of rock on a cord' described it much better. The rock looked like it might be worth some money, if it was finished...right now, it was a shard of unfinished translucent stone, a few centimeters long, violet at the base and tapering down to a colorless point. The black cord was wrapped around the base several times and tied in a knot. He shrugged mentally and looked at the ID. Nothing special about it, either...it showed her picture (Kind of good looking, Race thought), her height, her species, her address. He furrowed his brow and put both into a hidden compartment in the underside of one of the bottom shelves. He didn't understand her logic in giving them to him, but the necklace at least might be worth a few credits at the pawnshop, depending on what the stone was made of. He would go see after work.

He walked into the dingy communal refresher and turned on the greasy faucet with the cleanest towel he could find. He splashed a handful of water on his face. He looked up at himself in the mirror, straightening out his hair with damp hands. Maybe the necklace meant something to her, and she wanted him to return it to her relatives at her address. Maybe she had kids. Maybe she thought he was her best shot at getting it back to them. After the crowd, he didn't think it could be something small. It seemed religious. He didn't know what to think. The hangover, its pounding headache, and the three hours of sleep weren't helping to facilitate abstract thinking.

He shrugged and shut the faucet off, walking back out onto the garage floor. I'll worry about it later. Dandy was arguing some people again: two men, wearing Evvor's colors. Race felt his protective instincts rise up in his chest, and he walked over to the two men. The condescending tone in his voice was unmistakable. "Can I help you gentlemen with something? I don't know if you missed the memo in this morning's goon patrol briefing, but this is private property."

"Race Edinn," one of the men said. "Lord Evvor requests your presence." The man's rock-hard fist hit Race square in the stomach. He keeled over, gasping for air. A thought floated to the forefront of his mind: I need to learn to keep my mouth shut, before a follow-up swing under his jaw turned his world black.

Race had been to Evvor's "palace" many times before. Evvor had taken a percentage of credits from Race's earnings when he was a pickpocket, had hosted him there when he and Bruck were first securing funding for their shipping business, and had him dragged in again by some Nagaian terrorists after the loan "defaulted". Evvor's kath hounds had been present in front of his dais on all occasions.

This was not the case today. That was a problem. The only other beings present besides himself and Evvor were the two mercenaries that had "escorted" him here today, a protocol droid, and a Theelin slave girl. Something was up.

Race was unceremoniously shoved in front of the dais. Evvor looked as bloated and disgusting as ever, his green-mottled skin glistening with a slime coating under the dim recessed lighting. "Evvor. What the hell do you want? Haven't you already squeezed me dry for every credit in my body?"

"Such hostility. Sit, boy. Have a drink." The hutt gestured with an undersized limb to chair half a meter to Race's right.

As Race eyed the chair, a Twi'lek girl in a tiny mesh bikini approached him, carrying a tray with a glass of green liquid and some tempting bluish fruit, cut into quarters. Race looked at the Twi'lek girl with sympathy. She couldn't have been older than twenty. He briefly wondered if the drink was poisoned, and thought of refusing it, but then took the drink and gulped down half of it. He took the plate from the girl and then sat in the chair. Whatever this newfound hospitality of Evvor's was all about, he was going to take it for all it was worth -- if only to cost him the credits.

"If you're trying to lube me up, try harder." He shoved a piece of the blue fruit into his mouth and dumped himself in the chair. He consciously held back a swoon. The flesh melted in his mouth, and tasted like something out of a dream -- creamy and sweet. "What is this?" he asked, awed.

"Moonglow," Evvor boomed.

Race almost choked. Moonglow was notoriously expensive -- it was found in a single grove of trees on a single planet hundreds of lightyears away from Coruscant, and had to go through a preparation process of ninety-seven steps to remove the poisons inside that were strong enough to kill a thousand beings in a minute. Race had transported moonglow to Coruscant once, during his shipping days, and a single fruit had a market value of a thousand credits or more. Whatever Evvor wanted, he wanted it badly.

"I have a business proposition, my boy."

Race dumped the remaining three quarters of moonglow into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit before Evvor could order the Twi'lek girl to take the plate away. "Oh yeah? Go space yourself."

The hutt's chest boomed with laughter. "Now, now. I haven't told you how much I'm prepared to pay you."

"No amount of credits could ever convince me to work for you."

"Fifty thousand credits up front, plus a hundred-thousand credit yearly salary."

Race choked again, this time on his saliva.

"All I want is your help. I want you to help me bring order to Nar Shaddaa. Droid! The hologram."

The lights in the room dimmed, and a life-size hologram burst into life in the air in front of Race. It was the Rattataki woman in the skirt from the day before, except this time she was on her feet, unfortunately wearing more and different clothes than she had been when he'd met her. She was fighting off a group of thugs with a piece of pipe Race guessed she'd found discarded on the street. The pipe collided with the side of a Trandoshan's head, sending him sprawling. The thugs learned better and paced backwards, drawing their blasters. The woman backed into a wall. She was trapped.

And then she pulled a necklace out of the collar of her shirt -- the same necklace she'd pressed into Race's hand as she heaved her last breath -- and shouted, "Nar Shaddaa Planet Power!"

A burst of static erupted on the recording. Light saturated the holograph, making it an indistinguishable blue fog in the center of the room. The woman slowly materialized again in the center of the hologram, dressed in the same streetwalker fetish costume Race had encountered her in the day before.

"You schuttas have been following me for days," the hologram said, in tinny Huttese. Race saw the flicker of a smirk across her lips. "I'm going to teach you not to mess with Sailor Nar Shaddaa." She raised an upturned palm to the sky, and the smirk broadened into a full-fledged grin. "Rolling Rubbish!"

As if the costume wasn't weird enough, now she was conjuring trash out of thin air and using it as projectiles at the goons. At first, it was simple Nar Shaddaan street trash: used hypodermic needles, paper boxes, nuts and bolts and pieces of piping like she'd wielded against her attackers. Soon, larger pieces of junk were mixed in. Race could have sworn he saw a dumpster and a rusted-out junk speeder crash towards them.

They fell like dominoes. There were two left, one on each side of her. The one behind her back had a military-grade blaster rifle.

Race's mouth went dry. He didn't need to see the rest of the recording to know where it was going. "Turn it off," he said, and it sounded much more like a plea than the command he had intended it to be. Evvor gestured to the droid, and the hologram faded into darkness.

"My boy, I want you to work for me. She gave you that trinket. I want you to use that power to help Nar Shaddaa. This planet has been in a state of civil war for centuries. Work with me, and help me bring order to this place."

Under any other circumstances, he would have thrown the offer back in Evvor's face. "I don't have it anymore," he lied. "I sold it. Guy down on Maroj Way bought it offa me for a hundred credits. Said it was an antique." His mind was racing. Liquid panic charged through his veins. He had to get back home to the garage before Evvor sent his goons there to turn the garage over looking for it...or worse. He could only imagine Dandy taking exception to the trespassers and shooting off a few rounds at them. That would be a very simple way to get killed, and Dandy was probably too high by this time of night to rationalize the dangers of firing a blaster at a gang of Evvor's bloodthirsty errand boys.

"That's a pity," Evvor said. "Assuming you inherited her abilities, I was going to offer you a job."

"Yeah." Race's heart had somehow found its way into his head, and was beating at the sides of his skull. "Too bad."

"If you happen to come across it, let me know. The offer still stands."

His feet pounded the pavement the entire way back to the garage.

"Dandy!" Race grabbed the skinny man by his collar. "Are you okay?! Was anyone here?!"

"Anyone? People?! There were people here?!"

Race heaved a sigh of relief.

"What's going on, boy?!"

"Nothing. Listen, I've gotta get out of here for while. If any of Evvor's goons come around looking for me, you don't know where I am."

He ran through the storage rooms, into his room, and grabbed a beat-up bag, shoving his belongings into it one-by-one: the pazaak cards, the beat-up tin box, the antique book, his blaster, and a few changes of clothes.

He reached up underneath the bottom shelf and opened up the hidden compartment in the thin belly of the shelf. The necklace and the woman's ID fell into his waiting palm. He shoved both into the bowels of the bag.

He ran back out onto the floor of the garage again. "Listen, Dandy, I don't know when I'm going to be back. Don't overdose. Don't give The Lawyer anything sharp. And don't screw up the books again. It took me a month to fix 'em last time I left." He began to move away again, but he found himself slowing, reluctant.

Dandy had given him a second chance. Hell, he'd given him a last name. He'd left a hundred times before, but this was the first time he ever felt guilty. He didn't know if it was another sentimental side affect of age, or the heavy, mournful feeling that this could be the last time he'd see him for a very long time...or maybe forever. He thought it silly and unneeded. Dandy would forget that he left soon, anyway. He shoved the feeling to the back of his head. He didn't need another emotion to cloud his already stormy, restless soul.

He set out onto the street, flipping up the high collar of his jacket. It didn't offer him much disguise, but it would have to do for now. He would head for the other side of Nar Shaddaa, out of Evvor's territory. He knew of a few dives off the beaten path he could stay while the dust settled.

He took the necklace out of his bag in mid step and looked it over. I've got a lot to figure out, he thought, closing his palm over the stone.

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