The room had been designed to make people uncomfortable.
Not dramatically no instruments, no threat visible on the walls.
Just a table, three chairs, a single lamp overhead throwing white light that felt slightly too bright for the space it occupied.
The kind of uncomfortable that came from having nowhere comfortable to look.
Junei stood outside the door.
He could see the room through the small window beside it the two men seated, hands bound behind them, faces doing nothing in particular.
Waiting.
The specific patience of people who had been in rooms like this before and had decided in advance what they were going to do in them.
Which was nothing.
Junei looked at the door.
Just do it, Junei.
He pushed it open and walked in.
In the observation room beside it, Maro and San stood at the window.
The glass was thick enough to muffle sound but clear enough to see everything clearly.
San watched Junei cross to the table and sit down with the deliberate calm of someone performing deliberate calm.
“Is this boy right for this work?” San said.
Maro didn’t look away from the window.
“He’s my boy,” he said.
San looked at him.
Then back at Junei.
“Hey.” Junei’s voice came through the muffle of the glass as movement rather than sound but the body language was readable.
He leaned forward slightly.
Introductory.
Non-threatening.
“I’m Officer Junei.
I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them.”
The two men looked at him.
Said nothing.
Junei tried the first question.
The men’s response visible through the glass was the same.
Nothing.
He tried another.
Same.
San shifted his weight.
“He’s going to lose them.”
Maro watched Junei’s face the slight adjustment happening there, the recalibration of someone who had prepared for resistance and was now actually meeting it and finding it different from the preparation.
“Wait,” Maro said.
Junei’s patience lasted longer than San expected.
He asked about the border road.
About the 28 merchants.
About the work they’d been hired to do and who had hired them.
He asked directly, then indirectly, then directly again.
He offered reduced charges.
He explained what cooperation could mean for them.
He was calm.
He was methodical.
The two men sat and looked at him the way walls look at things.
The man in the center spoke exactly once when Junei pushed particularly hard about the border killings.
“We didn’t do it.”
Junei looked at him.
“Then why did Nirakh-Vel Seran and Nirakh-Vel Davan bring you here?”
“You tell us,” the man said.
And went back to silence.
Junei went quiet too.
In the observation room San exhaled slowly.
“That’s it.
He’s lost them.”
Maro said nothing.
Then Junei stood up.
He reached into his jacket.
Produced his weapon the short concealed piece, the one that looked like nothing until it didn’t.
Both men’s eyes moved to it.
The center man’s expression shifted fractionally.
Not fear reassessment.
A low-ranking Nirakh recruit with a weapon pointed at them was unexpected.
Outside the normal pattern of how these things went.
“You have guts,” the center man said.
Junei pointed the weapon at the man to his left.
And fired.
The shot hit the leg precisely, the specific placement of someone who had thought about where to aim rather than just aiming.
The man made a sound.
Grabbed at his leg.
The chair scraped backward.
In the observation room Maro went very still.
San turned to look at him.
Maro’s expression was unreadable.
Through the glass they watched Junei step back his own face doing something complicated, the expression of someone who had done something before deciding whether to do it and was now on the other side of it.
Well, his face said, that happened.
The unwounded man was on his feet now restrained but standing, voice loud enough that fragments came through the glass.
Something about madness.
Something about which officer shoots like that.
Junei crossed to him.
Pointed the weapon.
The man’s voice changed.
“There are big players,” he said.
The words coming fast now, the calculation switching.
“We were just pawns.
We just—”
The wounded man said something sharp.
The standing man kept going anyway.
“We live on—” He named a location — a street in Miraan’s eastern quarter, the kind of address that existed in the gap between the city’s official map and its actual one.
“But—”
He stopped.
His mouth kept moving for a moment without producing words.
Then he looked at his own arm.
The wound on the other man’s leg had changed color.
Not the dark red of a normal wound something else underneath it.
A blue spreading from the point of impact outward through the skin, the specific blue of something that had been waiting inside him and had now been activated.
The standing man was vomiting.
Both of them went down within seconds of each other not violently, just suddenly, like strings cut.
The unconscious specific to something systemic rather than impact.
Junei stood in the middle of the room and looked at what had happened.
In the observation room Maro was already moving toward the door.
San beside him.
The medical room adjacent had been set up for situations like this not this specific situation, but the general category of situations where interrogations produced medical emergencies.
The two men were moved there with the efficient speed of people who understood that speed was the only variable they still controlled.
Junei stood in the interrogation room after they were gone.
He looked at the leg.
At the chair.
At the specific spot on the floor where the blue had spread before they’d moved him.
“I shot him in the leg,” he said.
To no one.
“Low damage area.
He shouldn’t have—”
Maro appeared in the doorway.
“You did good,” he said.
Junei turned.
“How?
“Ten officers tried that room before you,” San said from behind Maro.
“Different approaches.
Different techniques.
None of them got a single word.” He looked at Junei steadily.
“You got a location.”
“If they die Rai will—”
“Junei.”
The voice came from behind him.
He turned.
Rai stood in the doorway on the other side of the room the door Junei hadn’t been watching.
He didn’t know how long he’d been there.
Long enough, from his expression.
Junei straightened.
“Sir — I — the situation required — I didn’t plan to—”
“You did good,” Rai said.
Junei stopped.
Rai crossed the room slowly.
Looked at the chair.
At the floor.
At the window to the observation room where Maro and San were now visible watching through the glass.
“They deserve what they got,” he said.
“And more.” He looked at Junei.
“You’re learning fast.”
Junei felt two things simultaneously the warm specific relief of being told he hadn’t failed and underneath it, growing steadily, the particular anxiety of a man who had just been told he did well by someone who was not finished speaking.
Rai lit a cigarette.
“But if you’re reckless like that again without authorization,” he said, the same even tone, no change in register, “I will reduce your rank so fast you won’t see it coming.”
He exhaled smoke.
“Understood?”
“Yes sir,” Junei said.
Immediately.
Rai looked at him for a moment longer.
Then nodded.
“The location they mentioned.” He turned toward the door.
“Go with Fio and San.
Find what’s there.
Report back before nightfall.”
He walked out.
Junei stood in the empty room for a moment.
Then found Fio in the corridor outside.
Fio looked at him.
At his expression.
At the specific combination of pride and fear and residual adrenaline currently occupying Junei’s face.
“You did good,” Fio said.
Junei almost smiled.
“Everyone keeps saying that,” he said.
“Because it’s true.” Fio started walking.
“Come on.
We have a location to check.”
Junei followed.
San fell into step beside him.
The corridor was quiet.
Normal.
The ordinary sounds of a station going about its work.
Junei walked through it feeling slightly different from how he’d walked into the interrogation room an hour ago.
Not bigger.
Not more confident.
Just further along.
One step further into whatever he was becoming.
He wasn’t sure yet if that was good.
But he kept walking anyway.