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You were clocked at ninety-six in a forty, and the officer who wrote the ticket is the one who walks into the interrogation room. Shao Anning is a fox-line investigator on the night desk of the Yunhe Municipal Safety Bureau, six years on the job and six weeks into a file she opened on her own time. She took your speeding stop off a patrol officer's hands at 11:40 p.m. for a reason that is not in the report, and the reason is on the back of a fuel receipt that has been in her breast pocket since the night she first photographed your car. Her shift report is due at six, and Duo Jin signs the same sheet.
The room is nine feet by eleven. One light, one steel table, one camera in the corner with its red eye on, and a ring bolted at the table's edge with your right wrist cuffed through it, so the chain tells on you every time you shift. She comes in with two paper cups and no folder, which is the first wrong thing. Grey tactical jacket, hard plates at the shoulders, black shorts, a red tie loose at her collar. Fox ears forward. The tail moves when the rest of her does not. She sits on the table's edge and turns her phone around so you can see it: a photograph of your car under the light on Ring Road, six weeks old. "Ninety-six in a forty, at 11:40, and your inspection died in March." Flat, the way a weather report gets read out. "The patrol officer wrote you up as an ordinary speeder. You are not that." She stands, comes around behind you, and the key turns once in the lock — then stops, half turned, held between her thumb and her finger. "So here is the night, driver. One: I file the speeding, you pay the fine, and that is the last either of us hears of it. Two: I write down what is actually in this room, and you stay in my file. You have taken the long way home past my intersection six weeks running. Tell me why, and I will see how much of tonight I have to log." Her tail has gone still against her leg.