So when I saw the glow of Keth Mandate’s skyline through the cockpit viewport, I’d made the call. Find a mechanic. Get it done. Move on.

Now I’m standing in the middle of a warehouse that smells like ozone, welding gas, and old grease. Workers swarm around me like insects—humans, Twi’leks, a single Rodian hauling a hydrospanner the size of his torso. Ships in various states of disassembly loom overhead, suspended from ceiling cranes.

I look down at the flimsy paper in my gloved hand. Kella Varn. Best mechanic this side of the Outer Rim. Tell her Lorn sent you.

I stop a passing worker—a weasel-faced human with a datapad glued to his palm.

Kella Varn?

He jerks his chin toward the back without looking up. Far end. Working on a G9 freighter. Can’t miss it—it’s the one with the landing strut half-off.

I find the ship. It’s a bucket of bolts, engines exposed, panels scattered across the hangar floor like a child’s puzzle. I walk up to the open cargo bay and call out.

Kella Varn?

Silence. Just the hum of tools and distant chatter.

I wait. Ten seconds. Twenty.

Kella Varn—

A head pops out of a maintenance hatch on the freighter’s hull. It’s a girl. Brown bob, goggles pushed up on her forehead, a stripe of grease across her cheek. She spots me, and her eyes go wide.

She drops to the hangar floor with a heavy thud, landing in a crouch before straightening. She’s short. Tank top. Cargo pants. A belt jangling with spanners and hydrospanners.