"...I beg your pardon?"

"I told you I met alts of yours. Including my girlfriend. I bet she'd become a contractor, if she were here."

"Yes," he sighs, "I expect she would. For future reference, anyone with a ^0 code is a contractor or a torturer or both."

"Some people are both?"

"Well, one person."

"Who?"

"Tea," agrees Shell Bell, and she wraps both hands around her teacup and sips. She hasn't actually eaten or drunk anything since she arrived. Usually she'd have noticed earlier than this, but it's not yet to the point where it can bother her. She did grow up in a District. "I don't have the - the capacity to be a contractor but I think it's a really good thing you do," she adds. "I would be very unhappy sometime in the next month if it weren't for Eights."

"Many people would be very unhappy if it weren't for Eights," he agrees. "Which, ultimately, is why we do it."

"I have the impression that my sentence was unusually severe, too."

"What was it?"

"Nine hours with someone called Chainsaw," she says. "I put a city on the moon and apparently this counts as kidnapping the way things are counted around here."

"Yes," he says. "That is unusually severe."

"It was a large city. I guess no one was checking to see if I had any better options, though."

"Judges are not frequently concerned with extenuating circumstances."

"So I suppose I'd have gotten off very light if I'd gone on harvesting clams for a living and did nothing whatever about the crushing dictatorship that killed a couple dozen teenagers annually." She sighs.

"Let no one deceive you into thinking anything about this place is fair."

"No one has tried to convince me that it is, but if they start, I'll bear that in mind. You mentioned that that Dice character's not into politics? To what extent is there politics to be interested in, here?"

"There largely isn't, of any kind you would be familiar with. 'Power struggles between torturers' would be a more accurate term."

"Eights warned me about going on people's turf. So it amounts to - turf wars, I guess? Maybe jockeying for the support of various cohorts of friends?"

"Less geographical, more hierarchical."

"What is the best way to stay far away from that while it happens?"

"You mostly don't have to worry about stumbling into it," he says. "Unless you become a torturer. Which I assume you are not going to do."

"I can't think of anything less likely than for me to decide to hurt unwilling victims as an occupation."

"Yes," he says. "Hence, you will mostly not need to worry. Most of the scuffling takes place via control challenge, which is not hazardous to bystanders."