"K. C. and Kelly caught him, and the little fucker sliced at them with a knife. What you gonna do about it?"

I knew what Blaise wanted me to do. The image was very clear. His justice is very black and white. Simple.

I glanced at Slimeball. He'd been radiating wordless chattering fear since the incident, all shot through with unresolved hatred toward Blaise. His salamanderlike skin was gleaming with sticky oil, the flat pads on the ends of his fingers crushed into his palms. His bulbous eyes, vertically slit and golden, were momentarily lost under thick translucent lids as he blinked. His mouth opened; a forked snake's tongue wriggled out briefly from between snaggled incisors, and then retreated.

"You lied to me," I said to Slimeball. "That's very, very bad." I tsked and shook my head. "You promised you'd leave the food alone. I ordered you to stay away, and I warned you about bothering them again. Remember? We're all one big happy family on the Rox."

K.C. guffawed at that, but no one else laughed. "What happened, Slimeball?"

That's a mind reader's trick: just ask a direct question. It jars them away from the stream-of-consciousness images and forces them to focus. I hardly listened to Slimeball's words; I was watching his mind. I could sense his hunger all the while he was talking. The words didn't matter-he'd gotten hungry, a common enough thing on the Rox. A simple thing. He'd thought he could get away with stealing from the jumpers. He'd been wrong. That's all.

Blaise broke in then. "Bloat, I want the problem taken care of. Permanently. You do it, or I will," he said. "Make the fucker an example to everyone else."

He stared at me. I'll kill him, Blaise told me then in his mind, deliberately and consciously pushing the words forward. Like he thought I might be hard of hearing in my mind. You make sure Slimeball gets fed to the sewerage system, or I'll do it myself. Either way, you eventually eat the mother. Your choice= "Governor."