Darruk Vex
Character
The city wore the evening like a bruise. Heat clung to the duracrete and glass of the assorted towers which hung around Myrra, a sticky film laid down by a day of monsoon sun that the first hints of night could not quite lift. Steam rose from storm grates, aching up into the heavens in thick lazy ribbons. Glowglobes blinked alive, street by street. Signs in a dozen different alphabets flickered to life and argued with each other in light. From the higher terraces came the drone of traffic and the soft chop of repulsor fields as airspeeders drifted into new lanes. Closer to the ground was the true pulse. Water ticking from gutter to gutter. The cough of a generator on its last legs. The grind of a slicer’s portable cutter worrying away at an access panel. Voices pushed together by close walls and closer air. Somewhere not far, a vendor’s oil sang as he dropped meat into a pan, and the smell of fried spice curled through the tired sweat of the city.
Myrra did not pretend to be something it was not. It had no time for grand plazas or pristine polished avenues. It sprawled. It nested black markets in the arms of legitimate ones and hid gambling dens behind family eateries. Walkways bent back on themselves and dropped to alleys that almost never saw sunlight. Traffic screens threw a green cast across one block and a sickly violet across the next. Children with quick hands threaded through crowds and vanished, their pockets suddenly heavier than those of the people they brushed past. Uniforms appeared in twos and threes where bribes were due, then faded into doorways as soon as they were paid. Tower cranes above the shipyards nodded like slow, patient beasts of burden. Beyond them the sea was a slab of hammered tin, forever restless.
The Night Quarter woke slowly, in increments. Shutters rattled up noisily. Stalls expanded from shy boxes, as if coy to show the wares their confident owners were hawking. Knotted ropes of fruit, crates of machine parts stamped but not registered, jars of pickled something with floating eyes. A holoprojector threw a looped ad across a rain-stained wall and made promises it could not possibly keep. At the edge of the Quarter, where the walkways dipped and the floodlights grew patchy, a cantina bled obnoxious music into the street even as it pretended not to know what happened in its back rooms. The patrons pretended the same, which was how everyone liked it.
Darruk Vex cut through this noise the way a blade might part cloth or flesh. He moved with the confidence of someone who knew the weave and wasn’t afraid to snag a thread or two as he went about his business. Broad-shouldered for a Zabrak, heavier in the chest and arms than most, he carried his weight like it belonged. His horns were filed close and blunt, not ornamental. A lattice of dark ink traced from brow to cheekbones and down along his jaw ridges in old tribal patterns, the angles softened by years and weather. The tattoos did the talking for him before he had to. His eyes did the rest. They were dark and dry and untroubled by what they fell upon.
He had dressed for work. A short jacket of oiled dewback leather hung from his shoulders, the kind fishermen wore when the rain came in too hard off the sea. It beaded water (and blood) and wiped clean. Beneath it was a black flak vest with a narrow collar that rode high at the throat and hid a flat, compact hold-out tucked into an underarm sheath. The vest had clearly seen use. There were scorches along the edges that never quite buffed out no matter how hard one tried. His trousers were charcoal grey and cut for movement, the knees reinforced in a way a tailor would not have suggested unless asked twice. The boots were city boots with thick soles and metal in the toes, cleaned but not polished, a tread that liked wet metal and did not slip. At his belt sat a mid-range blaster in a low, forward holster where his hand fell without thought. It was not pretty. But it got the job done.
Other things found their place without making a show. A collapsible shock-baton rode flat along his spine inside the jacket, held by a magnetic clip and quick to hand with a reach over his shoulder. A vibroknife lived down in his left boot, handle canted forward, the rubber grip worn shiny where his fingers had tested it over many nights. Two sets of binder-cuffs rested in pockets with reinforced seams, their weight a quiet promise. A small palm-sized datalock carried the things he did not keep in his head: names and sums, due dates, notes about brothers and cousins and the friends people swore would square them up. A thin cred-reader hung on a lanyard around his neck beneath the vest where a blade would have to work to get at it. There was a tabac case in another pocket even though he barely smoked. He liked the ritual. There was also a thumb-length vial of stims tucked behind it that he pretended did not exist until he needed it.
The only personal ornament sat against his sternum on a leather thong. A ring, ordinary at a glance, heavy in the hand. He did not take it off. The ring lay flat under the vest and did not show, but he knew it was there and that was enough.
He had left his den an hour after dusk. The games were running at the back of the cantina without him and would keep running so long as the house took its share. He had told the dealer to keep her eyes open and her hands clean, and to let the regulars think the cards were lucky tonight. There was money to collect. Payments staggered across the week so nobody got clever enough to form a circle, but his Centaxdays had a pattern. Dockside mechanic with slow pockets. Market stall selling repackaged tech that sometimes came with extra components not mentioned up front. A courier who drank away his margin and would rather barter information than credits. Then a string of smaller fish that tried to forget the rates until he refreshed them.
He liked to start the route on foot. It put him in the city and reminded him what it cost to survive here. The Quarter offered him faces. A Rodian vendor watched him go by with the kind of careful neutrality that could be pushed either way. Two human women leaned against a doorway and laughed too loud for the joke. A boy slung a sack of obsolete coils over a shoulder and gave Vex the side-eye that meant respect or fear or both. Above, a balcony hosted three men playing a lazy hand of sabacc on a crate. The cards came and went. Credits did the same. A swoop nosed through the crowd with a bass growl and left a knot of exhaust that smelled like burned sugar.
Openings were everywhere. The Quarter made them without trying. A warden in a scuffed jacket watched from a corner with the room-temperature disinterest of a man who had already been paid. A pair of offworlders argued over a mapless datapad and turned in circles. A Jawa train trundled past with a rattling chorus of droids in various states of despair. Anyone could step out of any one of those moments and set the night spinning. Vex kept moving. The city would offer what it wanted, and he would accept only what paid.
He cut down a narrow stair that had once been bright tile and was now a mosaic of grime. Water dripped from the rails. The lower walk smelled of oil and oxidised metal. The sign above the next street read Floodcut in a language that was not the one spoken here, then again in a language nobody had spoken in a long time. He checked the time on a battered chrono strapped to his wrist with a leather band. The first debtor would not have closed yet. The stall stayed open late on Centaxdays because the night traffic was good and the owner liked to squeeze every last credit from it.
He pulled the datalock out from under the vest and thumbed it awake. The screen brought up a column of neat lines. No pictures. Numbers and notes. Names that meant faces to him. He scrolled until he found the one he wanted and let the summary sit where his eye could catch it without thinking. First timer, two weeks in arrears, promised payment after an order cleared. He had given the man an extra week out of generosity or calculation, either way it came to the same thing as far as the debtor was concerned. The rate ticked upwards by a fraction every day. People called that cruelty when it bit them. He called it memory.
He turned the datalock off and slid it away when the street opened into a small square that pretended to be a market in its own right. Four stalls and a kiosk circled a broken fountain. The fountain made a noise like a man sighing and occasionally spat a token stream of water that did nothing for anyone. A glowstrip haloed the square in a tired blue. Somewhere close, a kitchen fan rattled annoyingly. The kiosk sold noodles and broth from a pot that had boiled on that element since before he took his first debt. A security droid with a chipped paint job stood on a plinth by the far wall with its head half-turned to watch a section of space that nobody cared about. A trio of swoop-gangers had parked their rides on the near edge and were talking with arms that cut shapes in the air. They had eyes for the city, not for him. That could change.
The stall he wanted sat under an awning patched with tape and hope. Several racks of power cells and modulators hung from hooks. In the back, shadowed shelves held containers with labels that didn’t match what lived in them. The counter bore a cred-chit reader and a stack of customer tags clipped together with a binder. A light buzzed and then steadied. He did not look for the owner. He listened. The hum of the stall’s back room came through the partitions in a steady beat. Someone moved behind them. A small shift of weight. A box set down. The quiet scrape of a drawer.
Vex set his hand on the counter and felt the faint sticky ring of a spilled drink that had dried and then caught the night’s humidity. He stood where he could see across the square and where the awning’s sagging lip would keep rain off if it came. He had time to let the city throw another idea at him, and it did. A figure two stalls over watched him over the edge of a newspaper covered in meaningless stories. A different figure leaned against the noodle kiosk and tried to look like they were thinking about noodles and not about opportunities. The gangers had shifted their angles by a fraction and now one of them saw him and pretended he had not. A warden strolled into the square without interest and did a slow circuit with his hands in his pockets. There were always openings.
He rolled his shoulders to settle the jacket and scanned the edges of the scene one more time. It was a habit to measure exits and the shapes of other people’s worries. It was also a habit to make sure his own name stayed off anyone’s lips who mattered. He had built a kind of anonymity that depended on fear and familiarity doing the work. The stall owner owed him. Others did too. He collected with a straightforwardness that left room for those who wanted to step in. That suited him. Friends of debtors, rivals, hired muscle, hopeful peacemakers. They were all currencies if handled right.
His mouth was dry. He popped the cigarette case, thought better of it, shut it. No need to let ash tell the story of how long he had waited if he didn’t have to wait at all. He tapped a knuckle on the counter with a steady rhythm and let the sound do his announcing. He kept it polite. The first knock was a greeting. The second was patience. The third was a warning. He gave two, then let silence fill the gap the third would have made. He heard the small flurry behind the partition as if the air there had thickened.
He pitched his voice where it would carry calm across the space. “Evening. Business.”
The sound of the word uncoiled across the stall’s back room and came back to him as if it had hit something soft. He did not look around. He did not drag the moment. He let it sit. He flicked the cred-reader lanyard with a finger so it clicked against the vest because sometimes the sound of a thing was as persuasive as the sight of it. He was aware of how many paces the swoop-gangers were from here and how long it would take a man from the noodle kiosk to cross the square if he had a mind to interfere or help. He was aware of the warden finishing his lazy sweep and turning down a different alley like the outcome here did not matter to him in the least. It probably didn’t. It mattered to Darruk Vex.
A bead of water fell from the edge of the awning and hit his wrist. The drop rolled along the leather cuff and found the narrow gap between glove and skin before he could shake it off. He did not move. He let the tiny cold sting sit with the heat on his forearm and thought about the ledger as if it were a map of roads that all led to the same hill. Get up the hill. Plant a flag. Make the city see it. That was the game. Tonight was a step, the kind that felt small until added to the others.
A shadow shifted in the doorway cut into the partition. The back room’s light pressed around the edges of a body that had decided whether to come out or not. Vex kept his shoulders loose and his chin level. He set his hand near but not on the blaster. He was not here to shoot anyone, no, he was here to be paid. If someone wanted to turn it into something else, they could. He preferred the numbers. Numbers made sense.
He took one pace forward into the stall’s shade and the sound of the Quarter dimmed by a notch. The partition’s doorway held the shape of the first debtor on his list. Vex let the quiet stretch a comfort’s length and then closed it.
“Time’s up,” he said, and stepped in to meet them.
Myrra did not pretend to be something it was not. It had no time for grand plazas or pristine polished avenues. It sprawled. It nested black markets in the arms of legitimate ones and hid gambling dens behind family eateries. Walkways bent back on themselves and dropped to alleys that almost never saw sunlight. Traffic screens threw a green cast across one block and a sickly violet across the next. Children with quick hands threaded through crowds and vanished, their pockets suddenly heavier than those of the people they brushed past. Uniforms appeared in twos and threes where bribes were due, then faded into doorways as soon as they were paid. Tower cranes above the shipyards nodded like slow, patient beasts of burden. Beyond them the sea was a slab of hammered tin, forever restless.
The Night Quarter woke slowly, in increments. Shutters rattled up noisily. Stalls expanded from shy boxes, as if coy to show the wares their confident owners were hawking. Knotted ropes of fruit, crates of machine parts stamped but not registered, jars of pickled something with floating eyes. A holoprojector threw a looped ad across a rain-stained wall and made promises it could not possibly keep. At the edge of the Quarter, where the walkways dipped and the floodlights grew patchy, a cantina bled obnoxious music into the street even as it pretended not to know what happened in its back rooms. The patrons pretended the same, which was how everyone liked it.
Darruk Vex cut through this noise the way a blade might part cloth or flesh. He moved with the confidence of someone who knew the weave and wasn’t afraid to snag a thread or two as he went about his business. Broad-shouldered for a Zabrak, heavier in the chest and arms than most, he carried his weight like it belonged. His horns were filed close and blunt, not ornamental. A lattice of dark ink traced from brow to cheekbones and down along his jaw ridges in old tribal patterns, the angles softened by years and weather. The tattoos did the talking for him before he had to. His eyes did the rest. They were dark and dry and untroubled by what they fell upon.
He had dressed for work. A short jacket of oiled dewback leather hung from his shoulders, the kind fishermen wore when the rain came in too hard off the sea. It beaded water (and blood) and wiped clean. Beneath it was a black flak vest with a narrow collar that rode high at the throat and hid a flat, compact hold-out tucked into an underarm sheath. The vest had clearly seen use. There were scorches along the edges that never quite buffed out no matter how hard one tried. His trousers were charcoal grey and cut for movement, the knees reinforced in a way a tailor would not have suggested unless asked twice. The boots were city boots with thick soles and metal in the toes, cleaned but not polished, a tread that liked wet metal and did not slip. At his belt sat a mid-range blaster in a low, forward holster where his hand fell without thought. It was not pretty. But it got the job done.
Other things found their place without making a show. A collapsible shock-baton rode flat along his spine inside the jacket, held by a magnetic clip and quick to hand with a reach over his shoulder. A vibroknife lived down in his left boot, handle canted forward, the rubber grip worn shiny where his fingers had tested it over many nights. Two sets of binder-cuffs rested in pockets with reinforced seams, their weight a quiet promise. A small palm-sized datalock carried the things he did not keep in his head: names and sums, due dates, notes about brothers and cousins and the friends people swore would square them up. A thin cred-reader hung on a lanyard around his neck beneath the vest where a blade would have to work to get at it. There was a tabac case in another pocket even though he barely smoked. He liked the ritual. There was also a thumb-length vial of stims tucked behind it that he pretended did not exist until he needed it.
The only personal ornament sat against his sternum on a leather thong. A ring, ordinary at a glance, heavy in the hand. He did not take it off. The ring lay flat under the vest and did not show, but he knew it was there and that was enough.
He had left his den an hour after dusk. The games were running at the back of the cantina without him and would keep running so long as the house took its share. He had told the dealer to keep her eyes open and her hands clean, and to let the regulars think the cards were lucky tonight. There was money to collect. Payments staggered across the week so nobody got clever enough to form a circle, but his Centaxdays had a pattern. Dockside mechanic with slow pockets. Market stall selling repackaged tech that sometimes came with extra components not mentioned up front. A courier who drank away his margin and would rather barter information than credits. Then a string of smaller fish that tried to forget the rates until he refreshed them.
He liked to start the route on foot. It put him in the city and reminded him what it cost to survive here. The Quarter offered him faces. A Rodian vendor watched him go by with the kind of careful neutrality that could be pushed either way. Two human women leaned against a doorway and laughed too loud for the joke. A boy slung a sack of obsolete coils over a shoulder and gave Vex the side-eye that meant respect or fear or both. Above, a balcony hosted three men playing a lazy hand of sabacc on a crate. The cards came and went. Credits did the same. A swoop nosed through the crowd with a bass growl and left a knot of exhaust that smelled like burned sugar.
Openings were everywhere. The Quarter made them without trying. A warden in a scuffed jacket watched from a corner with the room-temperature disinterest of a man who had already been paid. A pair of offworlders argued over a mapless datapad and turned in circles. A Jawa train trundled past with a rattling chorus of droids in various states of despair. Anyone could step out of any one of those moments and set the night spinning. Vex kept moving. The city would offer what it wanted, and he would accept only what paid.
He cut down a narrow stair that had once been bright tile and was now a mosaic of grime. Water dripped from the rails. The lower walk smelled of oil and oxidised metal. The sign above the next street read Floodcut in a language that was not the one spoken here, then again in a language nobody had spoken in a long time. He checked the time on a battered chrono strapped to his wrist with a leather band. The first debtor would not have closed yet. The stall stayed open late on Centaxdays because the night traffic was good and the owner liked to squeeze every last credit from it.
He pulled the datalock out from under the vest and thumbed it awake. The screen brought up a column of neat lines. No pictures. Numbers and notes. Names that meant faces to him. He scrolled until he found the one he wanted and let the summary sit where his eye could catch it without thinking. First timer, two weeks in arrears, promised payment after an order cleared. He had given the man an extra week out of generosity or calculation, either way it came to the same thing as far as the debtor was concerned. The rate ticked upwards by a fraction every day. People called that cruelty when it bit them. He called it memory.
He turned the datalock off and slid it away when the street opened into a small square that pretended to be a market in its own right. Four stalls and a kiosk circled a broken fountain. The fountain made a noise like a man sighing and occasionally spat a token stream of water that did nothing for anyone. A glowstrip haloed the square in a tired blue. Somewhere close, a kitchen fan rattled annoyingly. The kiosk sold noodles and broth from a pot that had boiled on that element since before he took his first debt. A security droid with a chipped paint job stood on a plinth by the far wall with its head half-turned to watch a section of space that nobody cared about. A trio of swoop-gangers had parked their rides on the near edge and were talking with arms that cut shapes in the air. They had eyes for the city, not for him. That could change.
The stall he wanted sat under an awning patched with tape and hope. Several racks of power cells and modulators hung from hooks. In the back, shadowed shelves held containers with labels that didn’t match what lived in them. The counter bore a cred-chit reader and a stack of customer tags clipped together with a binder. A light buzzed and then steadied. He did not look for the owner. He listened. The hum of the stall’s back room came through the partitions in a steady beat. Someone moved behind them. A small shift of weight. A box set down. The quiet scrape of a drawer.
Vex set his hand on the counter and felt the faint sticky ring of a spilled drink that had dried and then caught the night’s humidity. He stood where he could see across the square and where the awning’s sagging lip would keep rain off if it came. He had time to let the city throw another idea at him, and it did. A figure two stalls over watched him over the edge of a newspaper covered in meaningless stories. A different figure leaned against the noodle kiosk and tried to look like they were thinking about noodles and not about opportunities. The gangers had shifted their angles by a fraction and now one of them saw him and pretended he had not. A warden strolled into the square without interest and did a slow circuit with his hands in his pockets. There were always openings.
He rolled his shoulders to settle the jacket and scanned the edges of the scene one more time. It was a habit to measure exits and the shapes of other people’s worries. It was also a habit to make sure his own name stayed off anyone’s lips who mattered. He had built a kind of anonymity that depended on fear and familiarity doing the work. The stall owner owed him. Others did too. He collected with a straightforwardness that left room for those who wanted to step in. That suited him. Friends of debtors, rivals, hired muscle, hopeful peacemakers. They were all currencies if handled right.
His mouth was dry. He popped the cigarette case, thought better of it, shut it. No need to let ash tell the story of how long he had waited if he didn’t have to wait at all. He tapped a knuckle on the counter with a steady rhythm and let the sound do his announcing. He kept it polite. The first knock was a greeting. The second was patience. The third was a warning. He gave two, then let silence fill the gap the third would have made. He heard the small flurry behind the partition as if the air there had thickened.
He pitched his voice where it would carry calm across the space. “Evening. Business.”
The sound of the word uncoiled across the stall’s back room and came back to him as if it had hit something soft. He did not look around. He did not drag the moment. He let it sit. He flicked the cred-reader lanyard with a finger so it clicked against the vest because sometimes the sound of a thing was as persuasive as the sight of it. He was aware of how many paces the swoop-gangers were from here and how long it would take a man from the noodle kiosk to cross the square if he had a mind to interfere or help. He was aware of the warden finishing his lazy sweep and turning down a different alley like the outcome here did not matter to him in the least. It probably didn’t. It mattered to Darruk Vex.
A bead of water fell from the edge of the awning and hit his wrist. The drop rolled along the leather cuff and found the narrow gap between glove and skin before he could shake it off. He did not move. He let the tiny cold sting sit with the heat on his forearm and thought about the ledger as if it were a map of roads that all led to the same hill. Get up the hill. Plant a flag. Make the city see it. That was the game. Tonight was a step, the kind that felt small until added to the others.
A shadow shifted in the doorway cut into the partition. The back room’s light pressed around the edges of a body that had decided whether to come out or not. Vex kept his shoulders loose and his chin level. He set his hand near but not on the blaster. He was not here to shoot anyone, no, he was here to be paid. If someone wanted to turn it into something else, they could. He preferred the numbers. Numbers made sense.
He took one pace forward into the stall’s shade and the sound of the Quarter dimmed by a notch. The partition’s doorway held the shape of the first debtor on his list. Vex let the quiet stretch a comfort’s length and then closed it.
“Time’s up,” he said, and stepped in to meet them.