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screw?”
    “Ex-Magistrate,” Kane corrected smoothly. “Lot of water under the bridge since then, Mr. Pellerito.”
    As he spoke, Kane surreptitiously surveyed the rest of the room. Although the large table that dominated the room held fourteen seats, there was only one other individual there besides Pellerito himself: a bald man in a neatly tailored suit wearing dark glasses that completely obscured his eyes. The bald man had a pale complexion and a facial expression that gave so little away that he seemed almost drained of any personality. His suit was tight, clinging to his narrow-shouldered frame in an unflattering way that made him seem almost rodentlike in proportion, its high collar tightly cinched about his throat. The bald man had a large book before him, open at a handwritten page.
    Pellerito eyed Kane warily for a moment, his acne-scarred face distorting as he tried to second-guess the man standing before him. Then his eyes flicked across to Kane’s companions and his calm facade seemed to return, in control once more. “Well, you’re not hanging around with Magistrates, anyway,” he decided. “These two know what you used to do for a living?”
    Brigid voiced her assent, while Grant just nodded, putting a hand up self-consciously as if to adjust his glasses.
    “You left Cobaltville when it started to crumble, I take it?” Pellerito suggested.
    “Little before that,” Kane corrected. “Difference of opinion with some of my other Mags. Seemed they didn’t like the laws I was enforcing.”
    Pellerito nodded. “Probably for the best,” he lamented. “Cobaltville’s like the rest of them now. Pesthole with benefits.” He shrugged. “So, Robert here tells me you’re in the investment game these days. That right?”
    Kane nodded, and Pellerito offered him a place to sit opposite him across the vast boardroom table. He introduced the bald man at its far end as his accountant. “A necessary evil, I’m afraid.”
    Kane took his seat while Brigid and Grant took up positions to either side of him. As they did so, Pellerito swiveled back to a small octagonal unit that rested on a window ledge behind him. Made of unmarked plastic, the unit was no bigger than a hardcover book. Despite its blank appearance, Kane saw three diode strips running across the side, and he watched these come to life as Pellerito flipped a button at the top of the box. For a moment, Kane felt a strange vibration inside his ear, and he realized that the hidden Commtact there had been triggered.
    Surgically embedded beneath the skin of the Cerberus field personnel, the Commtact was a radio communications unit that defied conventional detection. Each subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communication unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in a subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were funneled directly to the wearer’s auditory canals through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal to create sound. In theory, even a deaf user would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.
    Kane twitched momentarily as he felt the Commtact snap. Something was playing up and down its frequencies, dispersing any signal it might broadcast or receive. Grant and Brigid felt the same effect as Kane, and were careful to give no outward indication as the radio spectrum buzzed through their ear canals. After a moment, the disorienting effect passed.
    “Little something for our protection,” Pellerito explained as he took his seat. “Ensure no one’s listening in.”
    Before him, Jerod Pellerito had spread a sheaf of paperwork, which included spreadsheets, tables of figures and a series of three-dimensional construction drawings. Brigid’s emerald eyes glanced across the