There were very few Rank One architects on the planet. The legislator had scrambled one to get him.

The mental light of the command battered Tennal with the impulse to stay where he was; Tennal winced against the glare, like an industrial flashlight shining a foot from his face, and couldn’t move his feet at all. He had techniques to deflect that kind of threat, but he couldn’t concentrate on them under the pulsing headache. “I’ll take that as a no on the drink,” he said. “You don’t think you could turn that down, could—”

“That’s him,” the architect said. “Secure the exits.” He jabbed a finger at the doors to the corridor and the bathroom. The rankers were already moving, one to cover each door. They pointed their incapacitator guns outward, against intruders, rather than in, but this was only a slight improvement.

“No? No, I suppose not,” Tennal said. He’d finished his glass. He set it down, leaned on the edge of the table, and picked up the bottle. “How about—”

The architect turned his entire attention on him, and Tennal’s vocal cords locked up.

“No,” the architect said. The command filled Tennal’s mind with an unbearable white heat. His headache worsened. Tennal had played around with being written for fun, but he’d forgotten what a Rank One could do to him. He’d forgotten what it was like to be written by someone with no positive intent, no attempt to be considerate, just a searing pain as the command coruscated across the pathways of his brain and stripped them clean. The edges of Tennal’s vision blurred. The only thing he could hear was the architect’s voice, thin and scratchy, filling his whole mind. “Put that down and step away from the desk, Sen Tennalhin.”

Tennal’s arm moved before he’d even consciously registered the instruction. His muscles made him step jerkily into the middle of the room. Shut him out, he thought desperately. It’s not real. You don’t have to do it. But to convince himself of that, he had to use defensive tricks, which meant holding several thoughts in his head at the same time, and he had no hope of doing that with a hangover and the lingering effects of last night’s enhancers.

“All right, now what?” he made himself say. It was a struggle to speak—the full glare of the architect’s attention made him want to stay very still and hope to pass unnoticed—but that was just the architect mutation trying to hijack his reactions. But if Tennal had one talent, it was sliding out of things. No architect he’d met could put a compulsion on him that lasted more than a few minutes, and even this Rank One would have to stop paying attention at some point. “Can’t you just give my aunt my regards?”