She started to get up but he motioned against it. “Just relax,” he urged in a voice low and rough and yet somehow clinically detached, like a doctor’s. “You are Juna Rhae 137 Decorator?”

She nodded, growing more and more curious.

He nodded, more to himself than to her. “Okay, then, you’re the right one.”

“The right one for what?” she wanted to know, feeling much better now. “Who are you? And where is this?”

“I’m Hurl Bogen, although that means nothing to you. As to where you are, you’re in a space station in the Warden Diamond.”

She sat up and frowned. “The Warden Diamond? Isn’t that some sort of… penal colony or something for frontier folk?”

He grinned. “Sort of, you might say. In which case you know what that makes me.”

She stared at him. “How did I get here?”

“We kidnapped you,” he responded matter-of-factly. “You’d be surprised how handy it is to have an agent in the resort service union. Everybody goes to a resort sooner or later. We drugged your food and our agent smuggled you out and offworld to a waiting ship, which brought you here. You’ve been here almost a day.”

She had to chuckle. “This is some sort of resort game, right? A live-in thriller show? Things like this don’t happen in real life.”

The grin widened. “Oh, they happen, all right. We just make sure nobody much knows about it, and even if the Confederacy does find out, they make sure you never hear about it, either. No use panicking everybody.”

“But why?”

“A fair question,” he admitted. “Think of it this way. The Warden planets are a good prison because when you go there you catch a kind of disease that won’t live outside the system. If you leave, you die.