“You should know,” Terries said, his actor’s voice coming from behind me and to my right, where the table and screens were, “that I have a direct link to the SSF, and they are on their way. The alarm was tripped when we entered the lab.”

I believed this. He was director of something or other, after all, someone who’d actually met Undersecretary Ruberto and probably the all-smiling, all-bullshitting avatar of Dick Marin. He’d had the juice to dispatch three psionics to the Library to gather me up; the cops probably did come when he called. At least, I was sure they did when there wasn’t a general emergency demanding their attention.

I’ve killed my share of System Pigs, I wanted to say back. If you mentioned my name I’m sure they’re fighting over who gets to respond. I concentrated on not breathing too loudly and covering ground. When the glowing buttons loomed up directly above me, I put my back against the doors, forcing my burning lungs to work slowly, and reached up, seeking the call button. When I found it I pressed it gently. It lit up softly, and I flinched; against System Cops or anyone with talent, that would have been enough to bring a hail of gunfire my way, and I cursed myself silently for being a rusty asshole.

Nothing happened and I relaxed, pretty sure Terries hadn’t noticed. Behind me, I felt the nearly silent humming operation of the elevator, and I held my gun firmly in my hand, aimed up at the ceiling, moving my eyes this way and that.

In the System-at least the parts of it that I lived in-all that mattered, all you really had, was your reputation. Two men went into a box, and one got killed and one climbed out, it doesn’t matter if you were bloodied and beaten. It doesn’t matter if you begged and bribed, wept and cursed inside that box-all that matters is that you lived and he died. That’s all anyone ever remembered. And it didn’t matter if you staggered home and climbed into a bottle, wept some more, and had the fucking shivers for a week straight-that shit didn’t matter. He was dead and you’d survived, and thus you had a rep.

So far, everyone who’d ever come up against me had died. Sometimes it had been pure luck-a stumble, a distraction, a lucky shot. Sometimes I’d been able to cheat, get some inside information. Usually it was just that I had taken some time to recon my surroundings and knew where the hiding spots were, the geography of the place. None of that mattered to the rep: on the streets I was just Avery Cates, who’d never been taken down, who’d left a long trail of dead bodies in his wake. And over time the space that formed around you on the street got bigger, and people got more spooked when you looked at them, and the number of people who wanted to kill you just to say they did it grew. And none of it meant a fucking thing, really, but it was all you ever had.

Sitting spread-eagled on the floor in the pitch darkness, I felt the crank air being pushed past me as the car descended and thought, Fuck the rep-it’s good to be lucky for a change.

Now it was patience time again; I sat and regulated my breathing and waited for the elevator to arrive. I felt the car settling behind me and braced myself, ready to stay upright when the doors split open, eyes in the general area that Terries’ voice had come from. Painful white light invaded the lab as the elevator doors opened, but I forced my eyes to search the glare for Terries, finding him hiding behind his bank of monitors, his face a ruddy moon, his eyes squinted against the brightness. I noted the form of Jabali, off to my right and crouched down, and ignored him.

My hand came up automatically, training the gun on the good doctor, and immediately there was a movement behind me, fast and efficient, and something cold and metallic was pressed against the back of my head.

“Don’t do it, shithead,” the cop said quietly. “Or I’ll tear off your legs and beat you over the head with them.”

His breath was all around me for a second, warm and sweet, and I imagined thousands, millions of those tiny drones being pulled from me like an invisible wind, burrowing into him, setting his death in motion. Across the room Terries opened his eyes and blinked at me in shock, frozen for a moment. I picked the spot. A gap between two monitors that showed me his belly-a gut shot wasn’t immediately lethal, but it was painful and incapacitating, useful when you wanted to put someone down without making a decision just yet. His head rose above the equipment like a red moon, coiffed and shaved, manicured, and I could kill him with a twitch if I wanted to.

My eyes found Jabali, who stood frozen in place, his gun half lowered. His eyes met mine and he extended two fingers from his grip on the automatic. Two cops behind me. Not much chance of putting them both on their asses with my smooth balletic moves. I put my eyes back on Terries. Everything had gone completely to shit so fast, I was still catching up. I knew I didn’t deserve anything. I knew I was a bad man. But this was getting ridiculous.

There was a certain freedom in being completely fucked, though. I thought, Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, and squeezed the trigger just as the cop behind me shoved the barrel of his gun viciously into the shallow skin on the back of my head, and my shot went wild. Terries dropped to the floor with a screech. I hadn’t killed him, though, because he proceeded to scream and thrash around.

“You,” the cop said, almost in my ear, “are a stupid little shit, huh?”

I closed my eyes and thought, yep. I heard the rustle of fabric and winced just before the butt of his gun.

Emerging from gauzy semiconsciousness, I found I was trapped in a room with assholes.

There were two of them, big guys with permanent scabs on their knuckles and nicotine stains on the tips of their fingers. One was older, maybe thirty, balding and running to fat. He wore a purple suit that had been skillfully cut to hide his paunch, the fabric shimmering as he moved. He made a big show of removing his hat and jacket when he stepped into the room, and every time he left the room, which he’d done a dozen times already, he made a big show of putting them both back on again. It would have been amusing to watch if he hadn’t spent all his time in the room beating the fucking tar out of me.

The other one was sitting on a table near the door of the Blank Room, eating cigarettes and watching. He looked like he was going to burst out of his suit, the shirt collar straining to contain the bulging veins and muscles of his neck. He had a stiff-looking shock of red hair that stood up from his head as if it hadn’t been washed in a long time and bright green eyes that might have been augments, the way they shone at me in an unbroken stare. He chewed his tobacco steadily, hands clasped in his lap, legs dangling forgotten. He was wearing a simple black suit with shiny black shoes, thick soled and sturdy.

“The only reason you’re still alive,” Purple Suit wheezed, wiping sweat from his brow, “is because we haven’t gotten permission to kill you yet.”

One of my eyes was swollen shut, and my lips were split and rubbery. I nodded my head at him.

“Don’t you fucking nod, you piece of shit-”

He was losing steam, so the kick he landed on my chest wasn’t enough to knock me over. The chair I was tied to-a battered gray metal one-just skidded backward a few inches, leaving me sitting there gasping and heaving, a thin trickle of blood dripping from my mouth. Purple Suit put his hands on his knees and bent over, breathing heavily. He didn’t look too good. Every ten or fifteen minutes he’d been leaving the room, leaving my sphere of influence, I thought, and each time he returned he looked worse. I imagined my little invisible drones eating away at him, a bit at a time, waking up each time he walked out the door and going to sleep again each time he returned.