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// Koboh
Canyon Run was nowhere. A nowhere on the backside of hell itself. Water was scarce, the moisture vaporators were noisy, and the people were of that delicate disposition known as ornery.
It was a hard place. A place you did not live because you had options. This was the place you came when you didn't ever want to be found, or perhaps you had never been known in the first place.
For Brandyn, it was now the only place he would allow himself to visit besides the homestead.
"You said it would be in on Zhellday?" the fallen Jedi muttered from beneath his wide-brimmed hat.
He never showed his face more than he needed to. The town mocked him for it, said no one would care how ugly he was. Apparently, a fellow named Fink had long held the dubious distinction of being Canyon Run's ugliest resident, and nobody had ever managed to out-ugly him. Brandyn had no particular desire to contest the title.
"And you weren't here on Zhellday..." came the dismissive reply.
"That was only two days ago," Brandyn said, the words escaping in a breathy, irritated grunt.
"Then you should've come two days ago." There was a sense of finality in the storekeeper's tone, made abundantly clear when the butt of his blaster rifle came into view beneath the brim of Brandyn's hat.
For a moment, the fallen Jedi considered the weapon. Not because it frightened him. Quite the opposite. The thought came unbidden, an almost casual consideration of how little effort it would take to wrench the rifle from the man's hands. How easily he could reach into that small, spiteful mind and make the fellow regret having ever raised his voice.
The temptation passed. Though not quite as quickly as it should have.
Pushing off from the counter, Sal-Soren glanced up at the portly man's mangled countenance and offered him a slight nod of acceptance. He swallowed the indignity, though it settled bitterly in his stomach. There had been a time when men considerably more powerful than this one had treated him with deference. Now, apparently, he could not even convince a backwater merchant to hold on to a shipment for two days.
As he stepped out of the wooden building, he found himself looking back to see if the storekeeper's attitude had fixed itself. It had only worsened. The man stood snarling in the doorway, brandishing his rifle as though Brandyn were about to cause trouble.
It would not come. Trouble brought attention. Attention brought questions. And questions, when left unanswered, had a particularly unpleasant habit of bringing hunters. He could not afford hunters.
Nor, for that matter, could he afford another wasted journey into town. The supplies back at the homestead was dwindling, and while Ariadne had assured him there were alternatives that might sustain Gianna in an emergency, he had no intention of discovering just how desperate that emergency needed to become.
The thought of returning empty-handed troubled him considerably more than the rifle had.
He adjusted the brim of his hat and looked along the dusty thoroughfare of Canyon Run. Somewhere among these miserable buildings, there had to be someone who had his supplies. Or someone with a shipment to spare, a trader passing through, or perhaps a mother whose child had recently outgrown the stuff.
He would pay. He would barter. He would even beg, if it came to that. Though he rather hoped it wouldn't.
While there were limits to how much humiliation a man could endure in a single afternoon, he would stoop as far as he needed to. Babies, after all, needed to eat.
