Dosadi is sick, she thought.  And not for the first time, she wondered:  Is this really Hell?

Many believed it.

We're being punished.

But no one knew what they'd done to deserve punishment.

Jedrik leaned back, looked across her doorless office to the sound barrier and milky light of the hall.  A strange Gowachin shambled past her doorway.  He was a frog figure on some official errand, a packet of brown paper clutched in his knobby hands.  His green skin shimmered as though he'd recently come from water.

The Gowachin reminded her of Bahrank, he who was bringing McKie into her net, Bahrank who did her bidding because she controlled the substance to which he was addicted.  More fool he to let himself become an addict to anything, even to living.  One day soon Bahrank would sell what he knew about her to the Elector's spies; by then it would be too late and the Elector would learn only what she wanted him to learn when she wanted him to learn it.  She'd chosen Bahrank with the same care she'd used at her computer terminal, the same care which had made her wait for someone precisely like McKie.  And Bahrank was Gowachin.  Once committed to a project, the frog people were notorious for carrying out their orders in a precise way.  They possessed an inbred sense of order but understood the limits of law.

As her gaze traversed the office, the sparse and functional efficiency of the space filled her with quiet amusement.  This office presented an image of her which she had constructed with meticulous care.  It pleased her that she would be leaving here soon never to return, like an insect shedding its skin.  The office was four paces wide, eight long.  Twelve black metal rotofiles lined the wall on her left, dark sentinels of her methodical ways.  She had reset their locking codes and armed them to destroy their contents when the Elector's toads pried into them.  The Elector's people would attribute this to outrage, a last angry sabotage.  It would be some time before accumulating doubts would lead them to reassessment and to frustrated questions.  Even then they might not suspect her hand in the elimination of fifty Humans.  She, after all, was one of the fifty.