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was completely
unintelligible.
    My face hurt, because I must have fallen on it. My hair had
come loose from its clip; it was full of dirt and getting into my eyes. Every
nerve ending in my body was sparking like a live wire as the stunshock wore
off.
    But that wasn’t what was wrong with my mouth: They’d drugged
me with nephase—flypaper for freaks. I knew without feeling for one that there
was a drugderm on my neck, put there by the Corpses to short-circuit my psi, if
I’d still had any psi ability that I could use. I remembered the nausea, the
slurred speech: the simulated brain damage. I tried to reach up, to make sure
there really was a patch on my throat—
    I couldn’t move my arms. Either one. I looked down, saw my
body held prisoner in a hard metal seat, my arms strapped to the chair arms. I
stared at my hands, feeling panic abscess inside me.
    Don’t lose control .... Don’t. I took a long, slow
breath and made myself look up.
    Half a dozen Corpses were waiting there, as if they had all
the time, and patience, in the world.
    “Where is he?”
    I looked at the one who’d spoken. Borosage, his data-patches
read. He was a District Administrator, from the flash that showed on his helmet
and uniform sleeve. He looked like a real bottom-feeder. These were the Corpses
I knew, not the kind who wore dress uniforms to corporate receptions. These
Corpses were wearing riot gear: dressed for business, their real business==
which had always been making the existence of street rats like me even more
impossible than it already was.
    Borosage was massive and heavy; his body was starting to go
to fat, as if he’d been promoted to a level where he didn’t have to give a damn
anymore. But there was nothing soft in his eyes. They were bleak and
treacherous, like rotten ice. A gleaming artificial dome covered the left half
of his skull; blunt fingers of alloy circled his eye socket and disappeared
into his skull, as if some alien parasite had sunk neural taps into his brain.
    I couldn’t imagine what kind of injury would leave him alive
and leave him looking like that. Maybe he’d had it done on purpose, to scare
the living shit out of his prisoners. I looked down as he caught me staring;
looked at his hands. His knuckles had more scar tissue on them than mine did. I
knew how they’d gotten that way. They scared me a lot more than his face did.
    I looked away from his hands with an effort, down at the
data-band on my wrist, the undeniable proof that I was a citizen of the Human Federation,
and not some nameless piece of meat. “I want a legal advisory link,” I said.
    What came out of my mouth was more unintelligible sludge.
The Corpses laughed. I took another slow breath, my hands clenching. “Want. A.
Legal.”
    The laughter got louder. Borosage closed the space between
us in one step. He held his fist in front of my face. “You want advice, you
Hydran fuck? My advice to you is, answer the questions, because it’s going to
get harder to talk every time you don’t.”
    “Not Hydran! Regishurred ... ci’zen,” I said; spit
splattered his fist. “I. Got. Rights.”
    “You can inscribe your rights on the head of a pin this side
of the river, freak.’)
    “Databan’—!” My arm jerked against the restraint. Cold sweat
was soaking through my shirt.
    He took a step back; his hand dropped to his side. I let out
the breath I was holding as he looked down. His face twisted. He poked my databand,
and it beeped; pulled on it until I swore. “This is yours—?” he said finally,
looking hard at my face, at my eyes. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re human?”
    I nodded, my jaw muscles aching as I waited for his
expression to change.
    He looked at the others. His grin split open. “What do you
think, Fahd?” He jerked his head at the lieutenant leaning against the door. “This
prisoner claims he’s a registered citizen Got the databand to prove it.”
    Fahd peered at me. “You know, in this light he almost