Red just turned his head to spit and stared at me.

“Goin’ out, Happ,” Purple Suit said, wheezing and coughing.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just need a break. Watch him, okay?”

As Purple Suit went through his laborious dressing routine, coughing wetly the whole time until his round bald head was a fiery shade that was starting to resemble his suit, the other cop just stared at me. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, thick angry veins. He hadn’t left the room in two hours and looked healthy as a horse.

“I’ll make sure no harm comes to him,” he said tonelessly.

They’d scanned my face, of course, me and Jabali, and figured they’d hit the jackpot: Avery Cates, cop killer. Officially, I had no record, but every cop in New York-maybe the whole System-knew me. I’d come to in the Blank Room and it had been just these two ever since, Purple Suit tuning me up with standard SSF dedication to his job, Big Red sitting there and staring. I couldn’t tell if he was enjoying it or not; he just stared. The room was featureless and silent, just me, a table, a chair, and two System Pigs who didn’t even ask me any questions. They weren’t beating information out of me, they were just beating me. I’d killed a lot of cops. Not as many as they thought I had, but enough.

I let my head drop onto my chest. They hadn’t logged me in officially; they’d wanted me all to themselves for a while, and if my name had popped up on everyone’s screen they’d have been forced to kick me upstairs. I would have floated above their level pretty quickly. So, I wasn’t officially there. Anything might happen. Shit, I might even survive.

Big Red suddenly spoke. “How’s it feel to have every single person within a mile of you want you dead?” he asked cheerfully, his face suddenly animating. His smile was terrible, too wide and too strong.

I moved my dry tongue over what was left of my lips, making them sting. “Normal,” I croaked back, blowing bloody snot everywhere.

He nodded. “Don’t worry. We won’t kill you. We’re going to beat you half to death, then nurse you tenderly back to health and well-being. Then we’ll get two more guys in here to beat you half to death. We’re going to start a club.”

I struggled to breathe. My throat felt tight and flooded.

Big Red slid off the table and produced a single unfiltered cigarette from a pocket. He crushed it in his big hands and extracted a wad of tobacco from his palm and stuck it between his gums and cheek. “There’s a new policy, you see, sent down from the fucking Mountain. The King Worm says, here’s a list of people you can’t kill, on pain of my wormy fucking boot up your quivering ass. So even though you’re not really here, we hesitate: you can’t take a shit without Dick Marin knowing what color it was and how often you grunted.” He rubbed his hands clean, paper and tobacco dust falling to the floor. “Your friend, the haircut, isn’t on any list, though. You can stop worrying about him.”

I tried to close my eyes. My left one was already swollen shut, so there was no change, and my right one wouldn’t close all the way. I hadn’t known Jabali well, or for long. I added him to the list.

Big Red knelt down until his face was even with mine. His bright eyes bulged from their sockets, his angular face skeletal. His jacket hung open and I saw the glint of his holographic gold badge sizzling coldly in its little metal wallet and the black, lightless form of his gun in its holster, low under his shoulder.

“I’m Captain Nathan Happling, Mr. Cates,” he said softly. “And I’ll be your personal tour guide through this expe-rience.”

I started to laugh, swallowed some blood, and began coughing, each spasm making me feel like my eyes were going to just pop out of my head and roll across the floor. I liked this guy.

I didn’t know how long I’d been in the Blank Room; consciousness came and went. I’d been tuned up by System Pigs before, but never like this. Before, there’d been a point to it, information to be extracted, a lesson to be learned. This was just an endless beating. They didn’t want anything from me, they didn’t need me to do anything for them. I was a cop killer and they were happy to have me, unofficially, in their grasp.

I faded back as Purple Suit returned to the room, pale and glistening with a cold-looking sweat. He walked in stiffly, grimacing. Happling was back on the table, chewing away, his buggy eyes tracking his partner as he staggered toward me, leaving his coat on for a change.

“It’s fucking pandemonium out there,” he said, panting.

“Peace and quiet in here,” Happling said. “You okay, Bob-O? You’re looking a little under the weather.”

“Fuck you, Happ,” Purple Suit growled, standing in front of me. “I think-” he started to say, and then collapsed into a wave of heavy, thick coughs that kept him bent over double for a minute, his face filling with dark color. When he got himself back under control, he grunted and spat a glob of reddish, spongy phlegm onto the floor. We all stared at it for a moment.

“Bob-O,” Happling said quietly. “Maybe you oughta take a break.”

Purple Suit half turned toward Happling, then stiffened, his head bending to the side in an unnatural way as a choking noise hissed out of him. Then he collapsed, falling in a heap onto the floor. For a second both Happling and I just stared down at him.

“Uh-oh,” Happling said softly, sliding off the table. “Bob-O’s down.” He crouched down near the other cop and glanced at me, one eyebrow up, his mouth twitching into an almost smile. “You didn’t kill him… with your mind, did you?” he asked, and then exploded into raucous laughter, feeling up Bob-O for a pulse.

I revised my earlier impression: I was trapped in a room with an asshole and a fucking psycho. I concentrated on breathing through the rapidly narrowing aperture that had once been my mouth. When the door to the Blank Room flashed open again, I was almost happy-anything would be better than being trapped in this tiny, shielded space with Big Red Happling, guffawing over the soon-to-be-corpse of his partner.

For a moment she was framed in the doorway, a tiny, tiny black woman with skin so dark she looked burned, her hair a curly mass of reddish brown in a cloud around her face. Maybe my age, maybe younger, it was impossible to tell. I had the quick, confusing impression I’d seen her before, but fuck, I’d seen hundreds of cops and tried to forget each one as quickly as possible. She was pretty. Or would have been if the eyes set in that round, symmetrical face weren’t the hardest eyes I think I’d ever seen.

“Captain,” she bit off, sounding like the picture you’d find under unamused if you looked it up.

To my amazement Happling leaped to his feet. “Sir,” he said, taking a step back.

“Oh, at ease, you jackass,” she snapped. “What’s wrong with him?”

Happling backed away from Purple Suit as if escaping something invisible. “He just collapsed, sir.”

The woman’s eyes were dark brown, giving the impression of dark holes in her face. They jumped from the body on the floor to me, and then to Happling, the expression on her face never changing. “Is he dead?”

Happling glanced down at Purple Suit and then back up at the wall across from him. “Not yet,” he said, with just the barest hint of his spastic smile.

I ran my swollen tongue over my lips. “Who the hell are you?” It felt good to sass the cops; I had nothing much to lose on the deal. It wasn’t as if they were going to give me credit for taking this shit like a man, after all, let me walk out of there alive.

She flicked those empty eyes at me and held them there for a moment, her whole body so perfectly still it made me nervous all over again-it was the sort of stillness that usually preceded violence. “Colonel Janet Hense,” she finally said, stepping into the room and letting the door flash shut behind her. She was carrying a small, thin leather briefcase and was dressed in all black: smartly cut pants that looked good on her, a thick black turtleneck shirt, and a sumptuous-looking black leather jacket. Tossing the briefcase onto the table, she stared at Happling for a second or two, seconds he spent studying the far wall as if his life depended on figuring out what it was made of. Then she turned to me, reaching inside her jacket.