He returned to Renna's shopfront two days later, the refined vector saved carefully to his data slate, and found her exactly where he'd left her, cataloguing a fresh shipment of data cores with the same brisk efficiency she seemed to apply to everything.
"Back already," she observed, not looking up. "Either you found what you were looking for faster than I expected, or you're about to ask me for something considerably more expensive than a star chart."
"Little of both," Rohan admitted. "I've narrowed the search. Not to a single system, but to a region — a handful of systems clustered together near the edge of what your survey actually covers. I need to know what it takes to get out there, and what I should expect to find once I do."
Renna set down the data core she'd been handling and gave him her full attention for the first time since he'd walked in.
