"Which one's your office, Hanz?"

When he refused to answer, staring down at the floor, I pricked him on the neck with the blade. "All right, all right! This way." He waved his hand to the left, and I pushed him ahead of me.

Inside his office, there was a couch against one wall, and a desk with his console on the other side. I shoved him towards the couch.

"Don't you want me to unlock the computer for you?" he managed to ask, his words mumbled as he tried to fight off the effects of his own drug.

"Hmm. No, I don't need your help with that, Hanz. And your keenness to be a part of that process tells me you think there's something on that desk which is going to help you. A panic button, perhaps? So you will definitely not be going over there." I yanked a power cord out of a lamp and tied his hands together behind his back, taking off his wristband In case he used it to signal someone. Then I forced him to sit on the couch. "Be a good boy, and I won't have to tie your feet up."

It was odd, staring at him as he sat there. Clearly his adrenaline was up, fighting against the soporific effects of the drug he'd tried to use on me, but his eyelids kept drooping more and more as time went on.

I left him there, but checked on him every now and again as I broke into his console. As soon as the data connector burst from the folds of my palm, he whinged, "That's illegal. That's an illegal mod. You're not allowed to have that."

"Wah-wah, that's illegal. Sure, Hanz, and I'm sure I'm not going to find anything problematic on your device here, hmm?"

He paled and shut up after that. I held a bunch of tissues from his desk against my palm so I didn't drop any blood as evidence of my having been here, while I waited for the data to transfer. I took in more of the room as I waited. Above his couch was another one of the root-stem weavings, in the same Araucaria pattern.

Lisia... He'd mentioned her as Mona. Had he done something to her?

I should have been focussing solely on helping Black Rose with this financial data, but I needed to find out about Lisia too.

The financial files were fairly slim, quick to transfer. But then there were a bunch of image files that responded to my summons to sift through everything on his device. I slammed the connection shut before any of them finished coming over.

"Oh Hanz, you disgusting old pervert. Oh Hanz, Hanz, Hanz. It is so over for you. You have no idea."

I wasn't going to sully my brain with those images, so instead, I cut open his console's housing and pulled the entire hard drive out."

"What are you doing?" he shrieked.

"Quiet, Hanz. Let's not make things worse for you than they already are."

"I'll scream -"

I aimed my fist at him and showed him the barrel of my gun mod. That shut him up nicely. "Now, Hanz, while we're here, tell me about Mona. The Gerondian woman you met, once upon a time."

"Why? Don't shoot me!"

"I won't, if you tell me all about what you did."

"But it's going to piss you off. I don't want you to shoot me!"

I approached him slowly, spinning the blade in the air. "Hanz, you don't know that. What you do know, however, is that if you don't tell me, I'm definitely going to do something to you. So you might as well take your chances with the truth. Tell me about Mona."

So he did. The room stank of his piss as he cried and told me what he'd done to her, and what his friends had done to her, when she had come to the station and tried to muscle in on the business scene here without their permission.

And I hated him for it, but I especially hated how he made me feel sympathy for Lisia for the first time in my life. The things she must have gone through. She was a murderer and a traitor on a global scale, but I never would have wished what had happened to her on anyone. Death, maybe. Prison, definitely. But not that.

As he spun his tale, cajoled by my knife at his throat, it made me wonder: how had Lisia felt? Forever unable to go home, humiliated and degraded by her business rivals here; what came next? Did she want revenge? Did she want to vanish forever? DId she want to make herself unassailable to attack ever again? Whatever the answer, perhaps that would help me find her. Not that I knew how to find that out.

Perhaps you're thinking right now: what an idiot. Perhaps you've figured it all out already. I've said it once, and I'll say it again: yes, I am a dumbass. But unlike you, I was too close to see the answer, no matter how obvious it was. Because why in the world would it be connected? Despite all the connections which should have been like the blaring light of a nova, despite the fact that there was someone who fit all of those criteria I’d just laid out, I refused to see it staring me in the face.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

My hands hurt from clenching to contain my rage, by the time he reached the end of his story. I didn't have it as hard as Lisia had, at her lowest point. But for looking in my mirror earlier, I would have been in the same position. I had come that close. But still, short of that, I had been kicked around by too many people in the last month or so. No, scratch that. The last several years. I was dangerously short of bandwidth for taking more punishment.

So it felt like it was time for me to do a bit of the kicking for once.

"All right, Hanz. I'm going to make this easy for you." I undid his hands, keeping my blade to his neck. "Lick the inside of your trick ring."

"What?"

"I want you to get a good dose of that drug again, so you're unconscious for the next part."

"What? But -"

"Or would you rather be conscious, and I start cutting you up?"

"They'll find you," he insisted, trying to spit in my face, but struggling to get a decent wad up.

I sneered down at him. "Nobody cares about you, Hanz. I watched how they were, when you were running about between tables, making a fool of yourself. None of those so-called friends of yours actually likes you. I bet they didn’t even notice you leaving the ball with me. They just keep you close because you know all their secrets. And now that I'm about to spill them, it's all over for you, sunshine. Now, the ring."

He whimpered, and slowly raised his hand to his mouth. Like a cartoon, he telegraphed his punch way early. I stabbed at his hand. He shrieked, and as he reeled from the pain, I grabbed his hand and shoved the ring onto his tongue. "Lick it, you sick bastard." He did, tears streaming down his face, and within half a minute, he went limp.

I worked fast. I lifted his wet and heavy body, and tied him to his swivel chair. I wrote a note on paper from his desk outlining exactly what stat sec forensics would find on his hard drive, then tied that to his chest with another power cord.

And then I considered: lipstick, or blood?

I was angry. Blood.

It was quick and dirty work, but I carved exactly what his crime was across his forehead. That would make a neat little scar for our friend Hanz.

I wheeled him out through the deserted office, and checked the Atrium from the windows beside the sliding doors. This level was empty of people, but that was no reason to be overconfident. I would have to work fast. I flicked on my speed mod and let it store kinetic energy while I took Hanz out into the wide open of the balcony.

No one met us on the way to the elevator. It was a risk. Someone could easily see us on the busy base level of the Atrium. Ships were always coming in at all hours. But it had to be done.

The doors opened at the bottom level, and it was beautifully, blissfully quiet. Every business that was still open had their doors shut, but their open lights on. I hurried out towards stat sec. Just because my luck was good now didn't mean it would hold.

But it did. I reached the stat sec doors, then pushed the chair hard away from me towards the doors. Before the sensors even saw the new arrival coming, I was twenty metres away. Hanz sailed through the open portal of stat sec's public entrance, and I just had to hope justice was done, given the preponderance of evidence.

I walked up the stairs to my office so that I could gather myself. Of course the station cameras would have caught most of that. Kidnapping, bodily harm, corporate espionage... Well, I was in for trouble eventually, but right now I felt cold and purified. I opened my office door to find Nadir waiting for me.

"I see I timed my visit right," he intoned in his grave, distorted voice. He handed me a digipad. "Would you like to transmit all that data over to me now? And then I will convey it to our benefactor."

"Sure," I grunted, and winced as I brought the connector to the surface again. It clicked in place and the data transfer began. My legs ached and my hand was bleeding again, but I had finally made a difference, perhaps. Though whether Black Rose was better than her enemies, I had no idea. All I knew was, she was in my corner. So I might as well be in hers.

Again, I know.

"We will, of course, erase all footage station-wide of you and Hanzel Gibb together."

"Huh. Thanks. I was almost looking forward to the consequences. It felt good." It felt terrible to admit it, but it did. The violence had been cathartic for me. "Tell me, you're a slippery guy. Why couldn't you have done all this years ago?"

"I used to do things against them. But I was caught, and I was marked by the Wilt. It's hard for me to move against them now. One wrong move and they could torture me using the nanobots in my blood."

"Oof. Harsh. Well, thanks for all the times you've helped me."

"I do what I can, Amaryllis."

"Marys. No one calls me Amaryllis." No one who I liked, anyway.

"Marys." There was no expression on that shiny black faceplate, but I felt like he was smiling over me.

"Can you tell me why Black Rose has been helping me all this time?"

He tilted his head. "She wouldn't say. I did ask. I was just as mystified as you are. I came to your aid per her request initially, but now that I have seen how far you will go for good ends, my admiration for you has been earned. You have a friend in me, Ama... Marys."

It was nice of him to say, but I wasn't sure I admired my own justifications of means versus ends. The data transfer completed, and I disconnected. "I hope this helps Black Rose to shut those bastards down once and for all."

"I hope so too. Goodnight."

"Goodnight, Nadir, and thank you."

He inclined his head, then loped out of my room. I turned back to the desk. He'd brought in the synthaskin package and put it on my desk. A sound of metal scrapping and metal hitting the floor signalled to me that Xen was coming out of the air duct again.

"Marys?" Xen's eyes flashed wide. "You smell of blood."

I scratched my nose, and looked down at the palms of my hands. "You should see the other guy."

"You all right?"

"As can be."

"Oh, did Nadir bring this for me?"

I appreciated the chance to obfuscate my involvement. "Yeah."

I went to walk past Xen, when Xen said, "Don't lie, Marys. It's got your name on the order. You bought this for me. Thank you." Xen waited until I turned to Xen to say, "You're a good person, Marys."

Was I? I turned from Xen with a wan smile, and went to get myself clean.