“You don’t have a choice,” Dodson-Truck replies. “The Firm know perfectly well that you’ve come here. They’ll expect a full report from you now. Either voluntary or some other way.”

“But I wouldn’t… I’d never tell them—” The smiles they are putting on for him now are deliberately cruel, to help him through it a bit. “You don’t, you really don’t trust me?”

“Of course not,” Sammy sez. “Would you—really—trust any of us?”

“Oh, no,” Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else’s. But it’s still a passage They can touch quite as easily as that of any client. Without expecting to, it seems Pirate has begun to cry. Odd. He has never cried in public like this before. But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible to locate or to redeem.