The ceiling pancaked lazily above her head. Miriam felt sick and a little bit drowsy. Her head was splitting. Migraine or anesthesia hangover? she wondered. The well-dressed man with the sword sticking incongruously out from under his suit coat was back, with a wheelchair and another man wearing a green medical smock. Together they picked her up and planted her in the chair, loose as a sack of potatoes. “Oww,” she moaned softly.

“That was a nasty bash,” said her visitor. He walked beside the chair. Lighting strips rolled by overhead, closed doorways to either side. “How do you feel?”

“Lousy,” she managed. Her right arm had come out in sympathy with her skull. “Who’re you?”

“You don’t give up, do you?” he observed. The chair turned a corner: More corridor stretched ahead. “I’m Roland, Earl Lofstrom. Your welfare is my responsibility for now.” The chair stopped in front of burnished stainless-steel panels—an elevator. Mechanisms grumbled behind the door. “You shouldn’t have awakened in that isolation cell. You were only there due to an administrative error. The individual responsible has been disciplined.”

A cold chill washed down Miriam’s spine, cutting through the haze of pain. “Don’t want your name,” she muttered. “Want to know who you people are. My rights, dammit.”

The elevator doors opened and the attendant pushed her inside. Roland stepped in beside her, then waved the attendant away. Then he pushed a button out of sight behind her head. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise, but stopped only a few seconds later. “You appear to be under a misapprehension,” he repeated. “You’re asking for your rights. The, uh, Miranda declaration, yes?”

She tried to look up at him. “Huh?”

“That doesn’t apply here. Different jurisdiction, you know.” His accompanying smile left Miriam deeply unnerved.

The elevator doors opened and he wheeled her into a silent, carpeted corridor with no windows—just widely spaced doors to either side, like an expensive hotel. He stopped at the third door along on the left and pushed it open, then turned her chair and rolled it forward into the room within. “There. Isn’t this an improvement over the other room?”

Miriam pushed down on the wheelchair arms with both hands, wincing at a stab of pain in her right forearm. “Shit.” She looked around. “This isn’t federal.”