Rogers was marched silently through the station for a short while, passing through corridors packed with people going about their daily business. Rogers couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a sort of tension in the air. Like the kind of tension that was generated by having two armed guards at your back—maybe that was it.

They passed a group of paper-pushers doing customer service drills in a small room off to the side; a group of fresh recruits was practicing looking busy while drill sergeants sat in chairs and looked at them expectantly.

One of the recruits, unable to take it any longer, broke and looked up. “Can I help you?”

“No, no, no!” a drill sergeant exploded, jumping out of his seat and bearing down on the unfortunate recruit. “How do you expect to inconvenience people if you’re asking them if you can help them all the time? Give me twenty pushups and then ignore me properly!”

Administration stations were always a little weird.

Only after the last turn in the hallways did Rogers notice that the almost-pleasant hum of people had died down to a whisper. An unsettling silence crept up from the polished metal of the walls, and for a moment, Rogers could only hear three sets of footsteps, the beating of his own heart, and, strangely, the clucking of a chicken. They came to a door, and, without saying anything, one of the sergeants opened it and roughly shoved him inside.

“Hey,” Rogers said. “You could have just told me to go in.”

“Shut up and sit down,” one of the sergeants said. “They’ll be with you shortly. And someone get this chicken back to the zoo deck!”

Without saying who “they” were, the grunts locked the door behind him, and Rogers was left alone in a small room that was clearly built for either interrogation or a very serious game of checkers. Some welcome for a guy who was only being charged with littering. A square, plain table in the center of the room was bolted to the floor, with a pair of chairs on either side. The room was devoid of decoration, but Rogers did notice the security cameras mounted on the ceilings in all four corners. Their unblinking eyes made him want to find a stick to poke them with.

Sitting down with a heavy sigh, Rogers stared at the surface of the table and ran his fingers through his short beard. He hadn’t had a chance to trim it since he’d been arrested. He wondered how it looked now. A fair-skinned man with a cherub face, he had taken quite some time to grow it, and taking good care of his beard was Priority Number One. Well, maybe Priority Number Fourteen; he had lost his list somewhere on the Awesome (and he rarely paid attention to it, anyway). Maybe he could get “them” to bring him a trimmer and a mirror, whoever “they” were. By god, he hated putting pronouns in imaginary quotes.