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to show for his feeble attempt at heroism except a throbbing monster of pain in his gut. Probably he would not even have a bruise there. The man was an expert.
    “Who the hell are you?” Cedric rasped.
    “Thought you’d never ask. Name’s Bagshaw. I’m with the Institute.”
    That was much too good to be credible. “How’d you find me?”
    Bagshaw snorted in derision. “You think it was hard? Still, that’s the best defense you’ve got—if you were up to something, you’d never be so stupid. But I’ve heard it before.”
    “Me? Up to what?”
    “That’s what we want to find out. You came to meet someone. Who?”
    “No one!” Cedric said, and hoped desperately that he had managed to sound convincing. “I’ve got no secrets to spill, nothing to sell. What—”
    “Why did you come a day early?”
    “I’m a free agent.”
    Bagshaw snorted. “You’ve never been a free agent in your life. You were livestock in an organage.”
    “Foster home! Not all of us are orphans. Wong Gavin’s father’s president of—”
    The man looked so contemptuous that Cedric half expected him to spit. “All right, a maximum-security kindergarten. For rich kids—although by the look of you, fatso, someone hasn’t been paying the food bills. Have you ever been out in the real world before?”
    “Sure! Lots of times. I took first in the Pacurb junior skeet lasering two years ago. I didn’t do that in Madge’s kitchen. Cities—”
    “Skeet lasering!” Bagshaw chuckled. “Who took you there?”
    “Cheaver Ben.”
    “Have you ever been outside unsupervised?”
    “Yes! I took younger kids on camping trips and—”
    “And of course you couldn’t abandon them when they were in your care?”
    “Of course not.”
    Bagshaw’s hairless head shook gently in massive contempt. “So? Ever been out in the real world by yourself? Ever once?”
    “Yes.”
    “The times you went over the wall?” He smirked.
    “If you know the answers, why ask?”
    The gun’s icy muzzle nudged his belly threateningly. “I’ll ask what I like, sonny, and you’ll answer. Why did you try to break out, anyway?”
    Pride! “It was illegal incarceration.” Cedric could still feel the old resentment. Keeping kids locked up might be permissible, but he had been eighteen by then. All the guys his age had been called back to their families, yet Gran had kept insisting that he must stay on at Meadowdale.
    “Illegal bullshit,” Bagshaw said. “You got picked up for vagrancy?”
    Cedric nodded miserably. Three times he had skipped. Three times the cops had brought him back like a strayed puppy.
    “And you never thought that you were in Meadowdale for a reason? You never thought about kidnapping and extortion?”
    “Well…no.”
    The man shook his bull head pityingly. “So now you’re on your way legally. Did the old bag say she had a job for you?”
    Cedric hesitated again, and the pressure increased nauseatingly, as though he were about to be impaled. “Yes, sir.”
    Bagshaw’s eyes slitted even more, and his face seemed to sink lower inside his suit. He was barely human, a mechanical construct fueled by anger. “So you got hired on by the Institute! Your academic standing must have been remarkable.”
    Cedric’s father had been a ranger, his mother a medical doctor. They had died exploring a Class Two world for the Institute, so there was a fallen torch to be picked up. That argument would not likely carry much weight at the moment. Cedric said nothing.
    “Most men would peel off their skins to land a job with the Institute, you know? They’d sell it in strips. I worked myself crazy to get mine—eighteen hours a day like a machine for a whole year. They took fifty of us, out of five thousand.” Bagshaw’s plasticized face was turning even redder, little nauseating jabs of the gun barrel emphasizing his words. “I came in forty-eighth—and I’ve had combat experience. I’ve got postdoc degrees in urban survival. But you get