“Convicts, eh?” Vik said. “Ah, putting ruffians to fine use.”

“Yes, we actually get paid by various governments to keep them. You see, you hire labor, and they have expectations, they agitate. You use convicts, and you can pretty much dictate the terms of their work to them, not to mention the local workers revise their salary expectations quite a bit. If we need a work order completed in thirty-six hours, convicts will complete it in thirty-six hours with no whining. They know better than to complain.” And sudddenly, her smile no longer looked so pretty to Tom.

He began thinking of Neil, Neil getting dragged off, clapped in prison. “But,” he said, “what happens when their sentences are up?”

Alana tittered, enjoying her rapt audience. “Let’s just say, once we’ve trained them for their jobs, we try to get a good return on that investment. There are always reasons to extend a prison sentence. It’s most cost-effective to maintain at least a ninety-percent occupancy rate, so we have to be creative.” She sipped her champagne.

Tom felt the blood buzzing up in his head, and he wasn’t even aware of Vik trying to catch his eye, frantically shaking his head. “So they’re your slaves.”

She lowered her glass. “Slaves? They’re criminals. Society doesn’t need people like them. We’re doing the world a favor, keeping them here.”

Tom gazed at the executive, champagne in her hand, a massive slave labor camp below her, and his thoughts were back on his dad, rage scorching him. Neil had brawled with those cops in the train station and gotten himself a month in jail. Epicenter could’ve rented him. He could’ve been flown over here and gotten his sentence extended and extended, and Tom never would’ve seen him again.

“You know what I think would be doing the world a favor?” Tom said to her, anger beating under his skin. “If you threw a big party in here, invited over everyone else who thinks there’s something okay with what you’re doing, and just blew yourselves up together. That is my idea of doing the world a favor.”

“IT WASN’T ACTUALLY a bomb threat,” Tom was still arguing to his friends later as the Interstice swept them toward Sacramento, California. He rubbed at his wrists, sore from the handcuffs he’d been stuck wearing for the interrogation by Epicenter security. He was so sick of wearing handcuffs. “I said that it would be nice if someone who wasn’t me blew them up, but that’s all. No one would’ve thought twice about it if I weren’t technically a known terrorist.”

His friends gaped at him. They’d done it most of the ride.

“I should’ve agreed to be Walton’s twin brother,” Tom lamented, slouching back in his seat.