“I will.” Nodding good-bye as he left, she took a seat, outwardly calm. But the truth was, she should’ve never, ever been left alone. As she’d told the A.D.A., it wasn’t because her physical position put her at risk. There were at least four double-keyed electronic security doors, full of bars and steel, between her and the first inmate.

It wasn’t even because she might get scared sitting alone in such a cold, gray place.

She had witnessed thousands of moments of the most depraved violence and pain, but she herself didn’t feel fear. She didn’t feel anything. The Silence Protocol, the conditioning that chilled Psy madnesses as it chilled their emotions, ensured that. However, in Sophia’s case, Silence didn’t work as well as it should. And everybody knew it. Most Psy would have been summarily rehabilitated, but Sophia was a Justice Psy. And Js were rare enough and necessary enough that they were allowed their little . . . peculiarities.

Of course, Js were also never to be left alone in “suggestive” locations.

Evil is hard to define, but it’s sitting in that room.

The reminder of Max Shannon’s grim words stayed her hand for a second. Would he consider this evil? Perhaps. But as her path was unlikely to ever again cross with that of a man who’d made her, for a fleeting instant, wish to be something better, she couldn’t let him guide her actions. Because though what she was about to do wasn’t in any official manual, like all Js, she considered it part of her job description.

The first scream came four minutes later. In spite of its shrill, piercing nature, no one heard it. Because the man who was screaming was doing so soundlessly, his mind locked in a telepathic prison far more invidious than the plascrete and mortar one that surrounded him on every side.

Even as he screamed, he was moving, unzipping his pants, pushing them down to his ankles, shuffling over to pick up a tool he’d hidden in the hollow leg of the desk his attorney had won for him. The inmate was a learned man, his attorney had argued; it constituted cruel and unusual punishment to put him in a place where he couldn’t write, couldn’t keep his research notes. The attorney had never mentioned the tiny, helpless victim his learned client had put in a dog cage devoid of the most basic of human necessities.