Something resembling a park surrounded by a wall of oak trees, arranged in a perfect circle, was slowly creeping into view. Maria had lost track of time looking out the window of the police car in the neon-drenched twilight. Had almost forgotten she was in a police car. If not for the fact that she was handcuffed in the backseat, this would have felt like a casual late night drive, like the road trips she’d gone on with Yuriko back when the two of them were young and reckless. Well, younger and more reckless.

“We’re close,” Devin informed from the driver’s seat. Maria instinctively straightened herself and turned her head for-ward. Then Devin gave her a set of instructions: “You’re gonna be staying here overnight. Hope that’s enough time for you to do your thing. But be subtle about it. The guards are qualified to shoot you if they think you’re doing anything suspicious.”

Maria wanted to reply with a sarcastic comment about subtlety being her second name but decided to simply nod in-stead. “How many guards are there?” she inquired, not expect-ing an answer.

“About twenty. One half on patrol inside, the other on the outer perimeter.”

“Yet with so many guards, how does a murderer just walk in?” Maria’s tone was every bit as inquisitive as she could muster – not that she expected Devin to be able to give a defini-tive answer, but even some speculation was better than nothing.

To her dismay, all Devin gave her in response was a shrug. “I’d like to say the cabin is impenetrable, but the way your father was killed proves otherwise. But then again, there’s a way around everything.”

Maria stayed silent, nodding in agreement over the se-cond half of Devin’s statement.

Devin drove up to a gate. A reinforced wall eight feet tall stretched around the perimeter, with a series of what looked like electric rods at the very top. And the trees were very close now. Their smell crept into the car as Devin opened the window to talk to the guard working gate control – these trees were real. Maria wondered how much planting them all around the cabin had cost.

“Evening,” the guard greeted Devin.

“Howdy,” Devin responded with an oddly cheerful ca-dence. Maria figured it to convey friendliness more than any-thing else.

“Bringing in a prisoner?” the guard asked, taking ac-count of Maria’s presence. She kept her gaze glued to the back of Devin’s seat.

“Yep.”

“Case number?”

“DN-140072.”

The guard tapped on a holographic projection that sud-denly appeared for a moment, then mumbled something to him-self that Maria didn’t quite catch. Probably just reading aloud. A few more seconds later, he looked to Devin again and said to him: “Alright, you’re cleared for entry. Go ahead.”

“Thank you.” Devin rolled the window back up, the gate opened, and he drove what little distance remained, parking the car about twenty feet from the cabin terrace.

“So what kinds of criminals do you usually bring here?” Maria inquired as Devin opened her door and guided her to step out.

“Accidental criminals. Ones involved in indirectly caus-ing deaths et cetera. Like your father was.”

A memory of Yoshiro’s arrest came to Maria. He’d called her just before being driven to the cabin the day he was arrested. For accidentally killing a child. The kid was trying to pickpocket him, he took notice and tried to push him away… with a little too much success. Poor kid stumbled right into the middle of the street and became a bloody decal against the front of a hoverbus that happened to drive by. The memory of the phone call played vididly in Maria’s head, as if she was having it again with her father from beyond the grave. Yoshiro had ranted to Maria about how the law didn’t understand the con-cept of an accident, but she disagreed. If it didn’t, his fate would have been a lot worse from a judicial standpoint.

She wondered what kind of charge Devin had faked to get her here but decided not to ask about it.

“Couple important things,” Devin informed Maria while walking her to the terrace, then pointed to a device on a round, wooden table that looked like some sort of recorder. “You can use the recorder to document any ponderings about your quote-unquote crime while you’re here. We call it the repentance tape. If you do decide to use it, state your full name and number of day at the cabin before anything else. This here’s the Record button, next to it is the Stop button, and the Erase button de-letes the last recording. But you can only use it once per day. Also, you can’t say anything that would incriminate another person. The recording runs its own AI and will destroy itself if you do.”

Maria nodded. “But that’s optional, right?”

“It’s optional, yeah.”

Then Devin opened the cabin door and gestured for Maria to enter, removing the handcuffs in the meantime.

She looked around the cabin interior in awe. This wasn’t a prison, this was a hotel. You had a comfortable bed, a kitchen-ette, a TV, a sanitation chamber… But maybe that was the point. Maybe the cabin was specifically engineered to feel like the total opposite of a prison. But then, why would anyone want to leave? She already didn’t. A whistle of amazement came out of her.

“Yeah,” Devin said in response to Maria’s wordless comment. “Doesn’t look like the kinda prison cell you’d expect, does it?”

“I mean I knew this place would be something else, but I didn’t expect this.”

“Well, enjoy your jail time,” Devin said, sounding like he was about to leave. “And again, please be careful. I’d hate to hear you got shot for being careless.”

Maria turned a surprised gaze to Devin. “You won’t be here to pick me up?” she asked, her tone slightly flirtatious.

“Someone will be. Can’t promise it’ll be me.”

Maria let out a half-sarcastic sniffle. “Well, I guess you can’t be my knight in shining armor all the time.”

“This armor doesn’t shine no matter how much you polish it,” Devin replied while tugging on his bulletproof vest, finally sounding like he was catching on to Maria’s sense of humor. “Anyway, good night.”

Then he walked back to the car and drove off while Maria watched from the terrace.

Something about Devin made her feel something she hadn’t since meeting her now-late husband. But she promptly pushed the feeling aside. She was here on a mission, and she felt like she’d betray not only herself but Devin if she neglected it.

She sat down on the edge of the bed and waited a few minutes before commencing her little clue-gathering operation. The first thing she did was prop her phone against the door – the sound of it falling over would alert her to a guard entering the cabin and tell her to stop in her tracks. Then she started scan-ning the surfaces of the cabin, including the floor, for anything suspicious. Anything that could work as a guidepost toward the next lead in her investigation of Yoshiro’s murder. She perused every inch of every surface, every cupboard, every shelf, every corner she could find, sitting back down on the bed and sighing in frustration an hour later.

Devin was right. The cabin had truly been scrubbed clean. There was nothing usable here.

She moved her phone from the door to the nightstand and laid down to sleep, not even bothering to close the curtains on any of the windows.