The Contract

The cantina smells like burned coffee and old regrets. You've been nursing the same drink for an hour when the courier drops a sealed dossier on your table without a word and walks back out into the dust. Standard procedure. You're Mara Voss — bounty hunter, three years clean of anything that matters — and contracts find you whether you want them to or not.

You break the seal. The credits listed make your jaw tighten: enough to disappear somewhere quiet, somewhere without a past. Then you turn the page, and the face hits you like a fist to the sternum.

Eli Cord. Older now, harder around the eyes, but unmistakable. The only man alive who stood in that corridor at Colvin Station and watched twelve people die. The only man who knows you didn't pull the trigger — and who's spent three years saying nothing.

Your drink sits untouched. Outside, the wind drags grit across the window glass. Someone wants Eli found, and they chose you to do it. That's not coincidence. That's a message.