Brave New Worlds

its balanced hinges, letting light into the room and giving him the squints.
    "I wondered about your friends," Lawrence said. "All those people at the restaurant. "
    "Oh," Randy said. He was a black silhouette in the doorway. "Well, you know. Honor among thieves. Rank hath its privileges. "
    "They were caught," he said.
    "Everyone gets caught," Randy said.
    "I suppose it's easy when everybody is guilty. " He thought of Posy. "You just pick a skillset, find someone with those skills, and then figure out what that person is guilty of. Recruiting made simple. "
    "Not so simple as all that," Randy said. "You'd be amazed at the difficulties we face. "
    "Zbigniew Krotoski was one of yours. "
    Randy's silhouette—now resolving into features, clothes (another sweater, this one with a high collar and squared-off shoulders)—made a little movement that Lawrence knew meant yes. Randy was all tells, no matter how suave and collected he seemed. He must have been really up to something when they caught him.
    "Come along," Randy said again, and extended a hand to him. He allowed himself to be lifted. The scabs at his knees made crackling noises and there was the hot wet feeling of fresh blood on his calves.
    "Do you withhold medical attention until I give you what you want? Is that it?"
    Randy put an affectionate hand on his shoulder. "You seem to have it all figured out, don't you?"
    "Not all of it. I don't know why you haven't told me what it is you want yet. That would have been simpler, I think. "
    "I guess you could say that we're just looking for the right way to ask you. "
    "The way to ask me a question that I can't say no to. Was it the sister? Is that what you had on him?"
    "He was useful because he was so eager to prove that he was smarter than everyone else. "
    "You needed him to edit your own data-streams?"
    Randy just looked at him calmly. Why would the Securitat need to change its own streams? Why couldn't they just arrest whomever they wanted on whatever pretext they wanted? Who'd be immune to—
    Then he realized who'd be immune to the Securitat: the Securitat would be.
    "You used him to nail other Securitat officers?"
    Randy's blank look didn't change.
    Lawrence realized that he would never leave this building. Even if his body left, now he would be tied to it forever. He breathed. He tried for that oceanic quality of breath, the susurration of the blue silk ribbons inscribed with his worries. It wouldn't come.
    "Come along now," Randy said, and pulled him down the corridor to the main door. It hissed as it opened and behind it was an old Securitat man, legs crossed painfully. Weak bladder, Lawrence knew.

    "Here's the thing," Randy said. "the system isn't going to go away, no matter what we do. The Securitat's here forever. We've treated everyone like a criminal for too long now—everyone's really a criminal now. If we dismantled tomorrow, there'd be chaos, bombings, murder sprees. We're not going anywhere. "
    Randy's office was comfortable. He had some beautiful vintage circus post-ers—the bearded lady, the sword swallower, the hoochie-coochie girl—framed on the wall, and a cracked leather sofa that made amiable exhalations of good tobacco smell mixed with years of saddle soap when he settled into it. Randy reached onto a tall mahogany bookcase and handed him down a first-aid kit. There was a bottle of alcohol in it and a lot of gauze pads. Gingerly, Lawrence began to clean out the wounds on his legs and hands, then started in on his face. The blood ran down and dripped onto the slate tiled floor, almost invisible. Randy handed him a waste-paper bin and it slowly filled with the bloody gauze.
    "Looks painful," Randy said.
    "Just skinned. I have a vicious headache, though. "
    "That's the taser hangover. It goes away. There's some codeine tablets in the pill-case. Take it easy on them, they'll put you to sleep. "
    While Lawrence taped large pieces of gauze over the cleaned-out corrugations in his skin, Randy tapped idly at a screen on his desk. It felt almost as though he'd dropped in on someone's hot-desk back at the Order. Lawrence felt a sharp knife of homesickness and wondered if Gerta was OK.
    "Do you really have a sister?"
    "I do. In Oregon, in the Order. "
    "Does she work for you?"
    Randy snorted. "Of course not. I wouldn't do that to her. But the people who run me, they know that they can get to me through her. So in a sense, we both work for them. "
    "And I work for you?"
    "That's the general idea.