"I wish to hell we had some kind of proof," Conch was saying.

"So do I, Conch," Stephanie typed back. "But we don't. All we have is another piece of anecdotal evidence, and it's evidence that wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone if my boss were to have those larceny charges against me reinstated."

"And we sure as hell don't want that to happen," Cochise typed in rapidly.

She smiled at the screen, a little sadly. In the days that had passed since she told the group about the conversation in Jackson's office concerning the circumstances behind Tracy Leightner's arrest and execution, it had been the "hot topic" at #injustice. For the first time, as Cochise was quick to point out, they had at least hearsay evidence of high-level officials confessing to a frame-up. But Conch and Prof had just as quickly thrown cold water on it. It was hearsay, and as Stephanie herself kept reiterating, hearsay coming from someone who could herself by that time be a convicted felon on death row.

"They're usually very careful," Cochise observed. "They do this all the time--correct me if I'm wrong, Insider, but I'd bet that they never have, even in so many words, admitted that the charges against you are bogus."

"No," she answered. "They haven't. To be honest it hasn't been talked about much since the first few days. I guess in part that's because I do what I'm told; when I'm told to suck or fuck, I suck and fuck. Just recently, though..."

"Yes?" Cochise pressed.

She hesitated, her fingertips poised over the keys. She had been very circumspect, so far, in what she'd been saying on #injustice about her relationship with Mindy Moore and the other gladiators. Her performance at RFK had been shown repeatedly on TV, she'd been interviewed, she'd been on the talk show with Mindy. In all cases her real name, and her position at the Justice Department, had been mentioned. To say very much about it would be to shatter her anonymity at #injustice. Doing so with respect to people like Cochise did not bother her. But it was impossible to say that one of the denizens of the channel might be a government informant, even though they felt that their system of admittance only by recommendation made that unlikely.

"Well," she began, "recently I've been I guess maybe just a little more assertive," she said, thinking about the fact that she now spent most of her time at the games in the women's locker. "Not refusing to do what I'm told, but doing things on my own. I didn't do that before. So far I haven't had any problem with it, not really, but it came back up, at least in terms of Jackson telling me that I had better watch myself because those charges are still there." Mindlessly, she hit "enter" and started another line, planning on telling them how Jackson always framed things in terms of the charges being perfectly valid and having been suspended because the "victim" had her property back and because Stephanie was "a valued government employee."

But she stopped, staring at the screen, staring at the word "Jackson." She could not believe she had done that, that she had, without thinking, typed his name. She wished that there was someway she could leap into the machine and snatch it back, but she knew it had already gone out on the Net, world-wide.

And worse, those in the chatroom with her at that moment--which were only Cochise, Conch, and Prof--had probably not missed it, since the channel was completely silent.

"Jackson?" Conch asked at last. "William Jackson, Justice Department?"

Shit, Stephanie said silently. Shit.

"Insider, you've mentioned the gladiators and how some of them were framed or forced into the games--you've said you know some of them--" Prof noted.

Shit shit shit, Stephanie thought. Here it comes.

"There isn't any chance," Prof went on, "that you could be that woman we saw on the TV--the one who ran out into the arena and got a thumbs-up for Mindy Moore, the tennis star--what was her name?"

She sighed deeply. "Her name," she typed, "is Stephanie Wilson. And yes, Prof, there's no problem with your logic. That's me. Screwed up, didn't I?"

"This," Cochise said rapidly, "should absolutely go no further than the four of us. We're lucky that few people are here right now. Agreed?" Both Prof and Conch chimed in immediately, agreeing completely.

"Thanks, guys," she typed back.

"That was an incredible thing you did that night," Conch told her. "Just incredible." There was a brief pause. "And BTW, you are an absolute knockout!"

She laughed. "Thanks, Conch. Told you I was Class-A. I have to be, now. My life depends on it."

"Her life," Cochise noted, "could also depend on our silence. You know what would happen to her if her boss ever found out she was talking about department business on this channel. This should never be mentioned in public. If anyone else comes in here, no matter who it is, we drop this subject. Okay?"

"Okay," Prof and Conch answered in rapid-fire succession.

"And you, Stephanie, have to be more careful," Cochise typed. "You made a serious mistake today. Mistakes like that can easily be fatal. Please believe me, I should know."

"I know, Cochise," she typed back. "Call me an idiot, call me a dumb whore. I deserve it all." She sighed. "Maybe having friends again--friends whose faces I can see--is affecting me..."

"You mean the gladiators?"

"Yes. Mindy especially. I've gotten very close to a number of them. And I'll tell you something else if you promise that this'll be our secret too."

"You sure have my word," Cochise replied, and the other two agreed.

"I don't know if you saw Mindy's match or not," she told them. "But you saw the replays of the end of it, me running out and screaming like a maniac and all that. Not that I'm in any way sorry, with the results it got I'd do it a hundred times over. But do you remember the other gladiator, the man who won the match was going to have to kill Mindy if she got a thumbs-down?"

"Vaguely," Conch said. He typed in a smiley-face icon. "With Mindy kneeling there naked and you jumping around, I have to admit I wasn't paying much attention to him."

"Well, he's a nice guy," she said. Even though her finger was hovering, as always, over the "tab" key, she glanced at Jackson's door to be sure. "His name is Raoul. My secret is that I've had sex with him twice since that night." No one responded immediately; she went on. "You probably can't understand. Jackson would send me off to death row if he found out. But this is the first time in years I've had sex with a man because I wanted to, not because I had to."

"Does he know what you have to do to stay alive?" Prof asked.

"Yes, he does. I've been very up-front with the gladiators about that, they all know."

"That's got to be hard, Insider," Cochise put in. "Being friends with the gladiators--you never know when they're going to lose, and practically all the losers die. And Raoul--he's in the inter-divisional championships coming up, isn't he? I don't follow the games, so..."

"Yes," she answered. "Yes to all questions." She told them about her first night at the Gladiator's Club, how she had sat at a table with Mindy and Raoul, knowing that they'd be fighting each other to the death the following Sunday, and about Mindy and Elaine. "It's a very hard life for them. You try not to form deep attachments. And yes, Raoul is in the championships. Las Vegas makes him a long shot to win, 35-1 odds. He probably doesn't have much longer to live. To be blunt that's part of the reason I had sex with him."

"I can understand that," Conch said. "Even if I am jealous." He followed this with another smiley-face.

"Try to be ready for it," Cochise advised. "I've lost a lot of my girls, I've lost a lot of them who've been close to me. It never is easy."

Stephanie cocked her head and gazed at the screen for several seconds. "I do wish," she typed in, "that you could tell us what you do, Cochise. What you do and who 'your girls' are."

"I do too," he answered. "And maybe someday."

"Maybe sooner than you think," Conch said. "I feel like things are moving a little. We've been making lots of contacts from here with other people around the country. One of our group, a lawyer, got the idea of looking up the friends and relatives of the girls who're being executed on TV. It's amazing how many of them believe the women were framed for whatever crime they were executed for."

"Well, they were, Conch," Cochise said. "As I see it, real crime--armed robberies and murders and rapes--is way down. I'm not sure why but I expect it has to do with the fact that America is a police state now. Every other person is a cop or a fed or an informant for them."

"You're right," Conch replied. "All the money the government has been pouring in to police departments and federal agencies--they all used it to expand beyond all reason."

"Stopping crime like robbery and rape and murder isn't unreasonable," Stephanie noted.

"No," Cochise agreed. "It isn't. But those agencies have to have something to do to justify their own existence. So we have the 'explosion' of drug use, and petty larceny, and illegal prostitution, all of which feed the coffers that pay the cops. It just keeps expanding, and anyone with any slight connection with law enforcement knows it isn't real."

"I wish we could prove that," Conch said.

"Even if we could," Cochise told him, "it wouldn't matter. You'd have a hell of a hard time getting the word out to people in general. All of the big media companies--even including the one that owns the Post, Insider--are lined up at the feeding trough, making money hand-over-fist off all these killings."

"It won't stop until it starts to hit them personally," Prof commented.

"And it never will," Cochise shot back. "Ever hear of a Senator's daughter, or a daughter of an exec for Time-Warner-AOL-Putnam-Viking-Universal-Fox-Turner being convicted of a crime and sent to death row? No, and you won't, either."

"But eventually the supply of attractive women is going to run out," Prof insisted. "There are just too many killings."

"They won't dip into that pool. Not ever. Mark my words. You'll get a restructuring of the classes. Anyway, you work on a college campus; how many of the female students there could be classed as an A or a B if the standards were relaxed a little?"

There was a pause. "Probably a third."

"And that's true of any college. Let's take any state university. What's the student population? 15,000?"

"Easily."

"And let's say half female. 7,500 females. You said a third could be classed as A or B if you relax the standard a bit. That's 2,500 per campus. Just talk about two universities per state and you have a pool of a quarter million. Even at the rate 'Slaughterhouse!' goes through them, even with them being sent to the hunting preserve and forced into the games, that's a hell of a lot. They aren't going to run out for a hell of a long time."

"But they will! Sooner or later, they will! The effect on the genetics of the population cannot be denied!"

"Years away," Cochise shot back. "Decades away."

"I know," Prof typed in There was a pause. "It just seems to be so hopeless sometimes... what we do so ineffective..."

"I know," Conch said. "But we have to push on. We've all agreed, we're in this for the long haul. Nothing is going to change overnight."

"I just hope," Cochise answered back, "that we can expect it to change in our lifetimes."