But most of the condemned went quickly. There were nearly two hundred loyalists to execute, and a limited number of torturers. Most of the torments were perfunctory, followed by the garotte, a death merciful compared to what the state could inflict when it had more time and leisure.

 From the bedroom came the amped sounds of saccharine music, mixed with murmurs and moans. One of Sula’s two teammates, Engineer First Class Shawna Spence, lay wounded on the bed watching a romantic melodrama, with the sound turned up so she wouldn’t hear her comrades dying.

 Sula didn’t blame her.

 The apartment was close and hot and smelled of dust and gun oil, disinfectant and sadness. Sula felt the walls pressing in, the dead weight of dead air. She couldn’t stand it any longer and opened a window. Fresh air flooded in, and the scent of onions frying on a stone griddle just below her window, and the sounds of the street, the music and laughter and shouts of the close-packed neighborhood called Riverside.

 Sula took a few welcome breaths as she scanned the slow-moving crowds below. Her nerves hummed as she saw a pair of uniforms, the gray jackets and white peaked caps of the Urban Patrol. Her lip curled, an old instinct. Her upbringing, on faraway Spannan, had not been such as to instill in her the greatest respect for law enforcement.

 The police traveled in pairs in a place like Riverside. These two were Terran, but Sula didn’t know if she could trust that fact to help her. They might not care who their orders came from, so long as their own position remained intact. They’d subjected people to the arbitrary justice that was a feature of the old regime, and the Naxids’ orders might not seem any different.