ANGLANG LEHET STOOD AT THE northwest corner of Piazza Canto Bight, towering over most other beings around him and soaking in the heat of Cantonica’s late sun through the leathery crest of his oblong head. Unlike the furred and feathered beings of the galaxy, Caskadags like Anglang needed heat. Anglang had been a company man for a century. He had learned to adapt when, over his 102 years of grim work for the Syndicate, professional requirements had called for him to travel to some near-sunless world or some ice-sheathed moon to steal or kill. But Anglang had been born on a desert world, and, whatever the planet, few things made him happier than basking in the desert sun.

The delicious sunlight aside, however, credit-grubbing despoilers had mostly ruined this desert. Over the decades, Cantonica had been warped and twisted. Once it had been a quiet, dusty world dotted with ancient, half-buried cities. A world of sand mynocks and smugglers’ hideouts. A desert with desperate people living among the ruins of some civilization no one remembered. Once Cantonica had been the sort of place the Right Kind of People could use to lie low or ply a quiet side hustle—a place where the hard and the clever survived. Now the planet had become home to Canto Bight, the most glamorous casino city in the galaxy. Quiet crooks’ bars gave way to luxury stim-mist parlors. Impossibly expensive yachts full of the galaxy’s most important people sailed an ocean that had appeared out of nowhere. Cantonica had become an embroidered pillow beneath which the wealthy hid from conflict as they got even richer off it. A playground for spoiled beings whose crimes were above even the Syndicate’s scale. So the Syndicate had moved on to other worlds.

But none of that was Anglang’s problem. He no longer worked for the Syndicate. New operatives, of course, were told Once you’re in, you’re in for life. But as with everything involving the Syndicate, it was just a matter of money and turf and seniority. There were rules to this thing, and Anglang followed them. After 102 years of work, he paid the appropriate fee to the appropriate people and bought his freedom. The agreement was simple, unstated, and sacred: Anglang would stay out of his former employers’ way, and they wouldn’t kill him. He just needed a score big enough to hit the stars with and live on for a while. Open war between the First Order and the Resistance was coming, even if few had seen it so far. Anglang had decades of life before him, and he intended to live it out as far as possible from guerrillas and stormtroopers shooting at each other. But for that he needed money. And that meant doing a job, freelance.

Anglang found that job on Cantonica. A good old-fashioned send-a-message hit job courtesy of Canto Bight’s once notorious Old City Boys. The gang had been there before the Syndicate and remained after the Syndicate had moved on, plying petty crimes away from the lights of the casinos, and dodging the cops. Recently they’d lost one too many members to the notorious brutalities of the Canto Bight Police Department’s Officer Brawg, a notoriously corrupt and vicious beast who ran the night desk at CBPD. Anglang had dealt with a lot of different cops on a lot of different worlds. In general the CBPD was better than most. Not savages bent on breaking limbs, but agents of the orderly spending of money. Nonlethal force was the order of the day on Cantonica. Cooperative policing, they called it. Hospitality training. There were still a few old-school head-crackers in the CBPD. But nowadays the cops here mostly ferried belligerent drunks off the strip to sober up, then turned them around so they could start spending money again.

At least that’s how it was for the visitors with money. The scammers and hustlers who made their livings off visitors got different treatment. And, the Old City Boys had told Anglang, they got the worst treatment from Officer Brawg. Two and a half meters tall and covered in purple fur, Brawg was the dirty cop who specialized in brutalizing Canto Bight’s out-of-view and rarely discussed street criminals. A torturer, extortioner, and bully. He was hated enough by the Canto Bight underworld that they wanted him dead, and hated enough by his fellow CBPD officers that they probably wouldn’t put too much effort into avenging him. Anglang had never met Brawg, but he knew the type of cop intimately. He’d had his bones broken more than once by said type. Anglang had killed dozens of beings over the decades. He rarely took pleasure in it. In some cases taking out a target had even made him feel bad. But none of that mattered. Contracts weren’t about his feelings. They were work. Still, Anglang couldn’t help but make an exception and take pleasure in the thought of killing a bully cop like this Brawg.

Sunlight hit the Alderaanian chinar trees that lined the piazza, and they exploded with their distinctive scent of spice and fire. Anglang had smelled sun-sensitive chinar trees like this once before—fifty-odd years ago, as a young miscreant pursuing the Syndicate’s interests among the irksomely incorruptible citizens of Alderaan. The trees before him now had been grown exclusively for Canto Bight from a private, incalculably valuable, seed bank. The last green remnant of a dead world, in turn bringing life to a dead desert. It was a gesture intended to inspire, but something about it made Anglang uneasy. Things had their place, and these trees’ place was not here. It all came at a cost, Anglang knew. He thought of his old friend Stinky Qal, the crooked contractor who had drowned all these years ago. How many beings died building their artificial ocean?

Pedestrians stepped respectfully around him as they passed. Anglang was taller than nearly all the other species here, and he knew he cut an imposing figure in his severe black cloak. He paid the tourists and the rich idiots little mind as they peered up at him then looked hurriedly away, seeing something dangerous in his eyes. He set his mind back on the job.

The Old City Boys’ contract had very specific requirements—this was no simple home ambush, and the money reflected that. It had to be done at the isolated night desk that Brawg worked from—the detox chamber far away from the rest of the station where Brawg was allowed free rein on the natives and the visitors who fell too far below Canto Bight’s Standards for Quality of Life. It had to be tonight—Anglang didn’t know why, but they were paying extra for the tight time window. And it had to be an explosion. Vicious and flashy, but contained enough that Brawg would be the only cop hit.

Anglang had settled on an ingested remote-operated nano detonator, complete with audio monitor, as the tool for the job. Expensive and hard to acquire, but perfect for the task. To be effective, though, the device would have to be implanted in someone who could get into CBPD and next to Brawg without warranting a Level 2 internal organ scan. That meant someone with no criminal record and no connection to Canto Bight’s underworld elements.

Anglang needed a mark. Someone new to Canto Bight, stupid enough to be turned into a living bomb and hoodwinked into jail for the night. Someone fresh-faced enough not to warrant the sort of attention from Brawg that would reveal the device. Fortunately, his contacts had just delivered.

Anglang had a name and a description: a little pink one-eyed Wermal named Kedpin Shoklop was headed his way in a gold limospeeder. An offplanet rube, the winner of some sort of ridiculous sweepstakes, vacationing above his pay grade. He sounded perfect. Now Anglang just needed to find him.

Elegant beings from dozens of different systems milled about the Canto Bight city center. Wealthy younglings, bloated politicians, career gamblers, feted artists. Most were species Anglang had encountered before. Some were species he had killed before.

At last a gold limospeeder—the gaudy kind the transit guild used to make clueless tourists feel important—slid to a halt not ten meters away. Filled with sudden anticipation, Anglang watched the door of the vehicle hiss slowly open. A pink, soft little alien with a big single eye wide with dopey wonder emerged, fumbling with his currency and fretting about his luggage. Kedpin Shoklop. A mark if Anglang had ever seen one.

The job was a go.